Apostles of Disunion: Southern Secession Commissioners and the Causes of the Civil War

Dew’s primary goal in Apostles of Disunion is to assert the undeniable causal relationship between slavery and the secession movement. In his Introduction, Dew articulates the questions that occurred to him during his first encounter with the racist rhetoric of the secessionists:

Could secession and racism be so intimately interconnected, I asked myself? […] did white supremacy also form a critical element in the secessionist cause, a cause my ancestors fought for and revered? The present volume […] attempts to answer these questions (2-3).

Though his book argues unequivocally that slavery was a central cause of secession, Dew acknowledges the tendency—in his younger self, as well as in others with Southern roots—to avoid associations between the institution of slavery and the formation of the Confederacy. He names instances of Confederate and Neo-Confederate revisionism that deemphasize slavery and offer states’ rights as the war’s true cause. Confederate Vice President Alexander H. Stephens made such an argument after the end of the war: Dew quotes him saying that while “the war ‘had its origin in opposing principles,’ […] The institution of slavery was but the question’” that brought these principles into violent conflict (16). Dew himself does not spill much ink considering the states’ rights counterargument in depth; he touches on it briefly in Chapter 1 and then moves to thorough analysis of the timeline and documented rhetoric of the secessionists’ speeches in Chapters 2-5.