Rebels In The Making: The Secession Crisis And The Birth Of The Confederacy, by William L. Barney

For those of us who have read about the causes of the American Civil War–and numerous other conflicts–there is a strong air of the Greek tragedy about the way that sleepwalking statesmen stumble into a blind conflict that ends up destroying all of their hopes and ambitions. There is something infuriating about the way one sees people act in such a way that they destroy their civilization in the grip of foolish justifications and unrealistic expectations of quick and easy victory. This particular book focuses on the behavior of the people of the South, with occasional glimpses and the look of the behavior of people in the North–most notably Lincoln and congressional Republicans–though among the greatest strengths of this book is the way it weaves an impressive array of documentary sources from a diverse group of people into a coherent narrative history about a complex time where fear and pride drove secessionists into a fatal error that could have been and was recognized by some at the time but which ultimately proved irresistible to people who were determined to rule or ruin the United States.

Structurally speaking, this book is straightforward enough, consisting of an introduction, ten chapters, and a conclusion that take up a bit more than 300 pages of text. The author begins with a discussion of the uneasy position of planters in the South in the 1850s, with a discussion of the strains that increasing indebtedness and political pressure from the non-slaveowning class below put on those who considered themselves by wealth and divine providence fit for rulership over the South and indeed over the United States as a whole (1). This is followed by a chapter on the quest of the South to encourage others within and outside of the South to get right with slavery (2), a task which involved the work of Southern preachers. After that, the author examines the dangerous mood of the South as they waited for Lincoln to win in a complex four-candidate race that followed the breakup of the Democratic Party into sectional wings (3). After that, the author examines the economic and political crisis that followed the election of Lincoln (4), which put secessionists in a panicky mood as they feared increasing Yankee inroads into a vulnerable society. This was followed by South Carolina’s precipitous drive towards rebellion (5), as well as a deadlocked state where on the state and national level there were struggles over the right approach to the crisis and efforts to find ways out of the divide (6). The failure of efforts on the part of Congress to provide meaningful guarantees to the deep South led deep South states to rebel one after one (7), a process that the author discusses now. This is followed by a discussion of the Upper South’s refusal to leave (8), despite the fragility of their conditional Unionism. After this the author discusses the creation of the Confederacy by the conservative and moderate secessionists who sought to maintain social power against radicals (9), after which the author closes the book with the end of the waiting game with Lincoln’s presidency and the move to war which took place at and after Fort Sumter (10), where the book concludes.

While this book is a very good one, it is by no means a perfect one. The faults of the book consist not so much in the sources that the author draws upon but in the sense of balance of the book. There is a marked bias towards writing about the south, but the author is not really in sympathy with the people of the South, and so at times the author’s bias creeps into comments and editorializing that the author makes about those whose words she is quoting, but without really getting in their skin. The author presents the end of slavery as being something that was preordained and inevitable, and fails to grasp the nature of the biblical debate over the meaning of slavery in the Bible and how it is that the South could have been confronted with the implications of slavery in the Bible for their own society which were both different from the preaching of their own divines as well as antislavery ones. Similarly, the author presents a view of racial justice at the end that suggests that the horrors of the Civil War were only a down payment on what is owed to slaves (and possibly their descendants), which is several bridges too far when it comes to matters of justice. If this book can be read profitably by a historian on the Civil War, it is by no means a balanced or reasonable enough book to be the basis of one’s view of the causes or the outbreak of the Civil War.