Apostles of Disunion

Southern Secession Commissioners and the Causes of the Civil War: Fifteenth Anniversary Edition

By: Charles B. Dew

Narrated by: Mitchell Dorian

Charles Dew’s Apostles of Disunion has established itself as a modern classic and an indispensable account of the Southern states’ secession from the Union. Addressing topics still hotly debated among historians and the public at large more than a century and a half after the Civil War, the book offers a compelling and clearly substantiated argument that slavery and race were at the heart of our great national crisis. The 15 years since the original publication of Apostles of Disunion have seen an intensification of debates surrounding the Confederate flag and Civil War monuments. In a powerful new afterword to this anniversary edition, Dew situates the book in relation to these recent controversies and factors in the role of vast financial interests tied to the internal slave trade in pushing Virginia and other upper South states toward secession and war.

©2016 The Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia (P)2020 Upfront Books

Brutal yet clear

This book does a great job at illustrating the causes of the Civil War and shows details that are often overlooked in education.

Easy to listen to

I found myself in the middle of the conversation. I felt the anger of the people who lost.

Exceptional Authorship and Performance!

Not only is this book well-written, the reader is the best I've heard on Audible so far.

Sugarcoating is weakness

By the time I finished Charles Dew’s Apostles of Disunion I had a number of thoughts and questions. My first thought, considering the book’s climax in the new afterword, is how the morality of equality has eroded previous generational commitments to academic objectivity. Of course we know that objectivity was always a lie and that every word spoken or written by any of us is but a symptom; my thought, then, was how normal it is for Mr. Dew to believe, without a shred of doubt, in racial equality, when, unlike the secession commissioners’ mountain of evidence to the contrary, he has nothing on which to base this late-modern religious tenant besides morality.

My second thought was that his book is still a fantastic listen, helped in its cause by Mitchell Dorian’s impassioned narration (Man, why is it that we suffer so many listless narrations, except for those of books seeking to delegitimize the white South? Get a white liberal talking about whites guilty of disobedience to their religion and man oh man the passion flows forth!) Dew has done us all a service by surveying the secession ambassadors’ speeches, for they offer nowhere to hide and no way for one to apologize for their content.

Which leads me to my questions. Yes the commissioners were racist, and deeply so. In fact, it is the depth of their racism that made the civil war a civilizational conflict and a question of the survival of a form of life and it’s attendant norms of thought and comportment. The depth of their racial feeling is also what allows the causes of the war to include states’ rights. Are we allowed to live locally by our own set of values, even if those values are offensive to those living elsewhere and have the nerve to harm the Federal government’s sacred cows?

Yes secession was driven by fears and assumptions of the wretched future that awaited the post-slavery South. Although the speeches that form the basis of this book were delivered to representational bodies and not to the general public, their racial and cultural, more than political or economic, content shows that they were addressed to the public at large. The planters had much to lose, but the speakers seem to be aware that the culture and well-being of Southern men and women was more at stake than the multinational profits of the slave labor system.

But in 2023 we can certainly ask, “Were they wrong?” because Reconstruction certainly manifested most of their fears and assumptions. But what would’ve become of the South without the war? Taking a cue from Dew’s afterword, and in light of the Left’s love of reconstructions, it’s safe to say the war was just an excuse to remake the South in the North’s image.

The Death of the “States Rights” euphemism.

I’ve often debated Southern apologists, adherents to the “Lost Cause Myth”. These folks firmly commit to the idea that the reason for Southern secession was the issue of “states’ rights”, not slavery.

This work slams that fallacy fast first into the dust.

It does so with overwhelming documentation provided by the letters and speeches of members of the state secession commissions, those responsible for disunion. Their words are hyperbolic, incendiary, and deeply racist. In no uncertain terms it clearly points out that secession was based on one issue, and one issue only, and that was perceived threats to the institution of slavery in slave states.

Of course there are other documents attesting to this//the articles of secession of various states, sermons, letters, diaries, and news articles. Yet this book alone carries the day.

The book is powerful and disturbing. It should be compulsory reading in every high school history class.