[ml/nj]

I sincerely doubt that Holt said that.

From the dust jacket of Holt's book (which you could have looked at if you had followed the link I gave):

"In its short life the Whig party helped shape the political and economic institutions of the antebellum Unitied States. And the party's death in the mid-1850s was both the effect and cause of the political breakdown that led to secession and Civil War. Michael Holt tells this in more detail and with deeper insight than any other historian. ..."

James M. McPherson, Princeton

Other pull quotes are supplied from Howe (Oxford), Cooper (LSU), Gienapp (Harvard) and Freehling (Kentucky).

In an anthology edited by Stamp (Berkeley), The Causes of the Civil War, the selection by Holt from his The Political Crisis of the 1850s is introduced thusly:

Michael F. Holt, in The Political Crisis of the 1850s (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1978), rejects the interpretations of the "fundamentalists" who stressed slavery and cultural differences as Civil War causes. Rather, responsibility rested with the politicians, North and South, who politcized and exploited sectional differences and ultimately caused the collapse of the political process.

As always, it helps to know what you are talking about.

ML/NJ

[Ditto]

Try this on for size.

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Book Reviews

These are some reviews from a recent issue of The Civil War News:

 

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

by Charles B. Dew.

Index, notes, 128 pp., 2001. University Press of Virginia, P.O. Box 400318, Charlottesville, VA 22904-4318, $22.95 plus shipping.

In late 1860 and early 1861, five Deep South states (Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Caro-lina) appointed "commissioners" to other slave states to spread the word about secession and explain why existing circumstances made such action necessary. Over the next several weeks these 52 men visited the other slave states, speaking at public gatherings, to legislatures, and to state conventions and writing letters to public officials to ex-plain why the Deep South states were either going to secede or had already done so.

In this important little book, Charles Dew describes the activities of these men and details the message they spread across the South. By examining their letters and speeches, Dew maintains, "we can get inside the secessionists’ mind-set" and, thereby, come to understand the motives that led to the establishment of the Confederacy.

The commissioners’ utterances leave no doubt that their mission was to convince the other slave states that the Republican victory in the 1860 election would lead inevitably to the abolition of slavery in the United States and then to the end of white supremacy in the South.

Faced with such a threat, white Southerners could take only one action — the creation of a new nation in which the existing Southern racial order could be preserved. As Judge William L. Harris, a commissioner from Mississippi, told Georgians, his state would "never submit to the principles and policy of this Black Republican Administration. She had rather see the last of her race, men, women, and children, immolated in one common funeral pile [pyre] than see them subjected to the degradation of civil, political[,] and social equality with the negro race."

In later years — especially after 1865 — the men who had created and led the Confederacy maintained that they had acted from other motives. Most often they insisted that their struggle had been one undertaken in defense of state rights (erroneously called "states’ rights" by Dew). Their 1860-1861 utterances, however, leave no doubt that the threat to the South’s racial order was the primary motive behind secession and the establishment of the Confederacy.

In the "Introduction" to this book Dew observes that, as a white Southerner, he found this "in many ways a diffi-cult and painful book to write" and that he was "hit with a profound sadness when…[he] read over the material on which this study is based."

Only those of us who, like Dew, grew up "in the South on the white side of the color line" can know fully the meaning of this observation. As a nation, however, all of us must face the truth. This book — small size and all — is a huge step in that direction. Everyone who wants to understand why secession came about must read it.

Richard McMurry

Richard McMurry is the au-thor of John Bell Hood And The War For Southern Independence and Two Great Rebel Armies: An Essay In Confederate Military History.

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ml/nj,

Holt's theory seems to be that if the Whigs had stayed together they would have done what they always did, caved to the radical slave forces of the Deep South and made another compromise with evil and slavery would have been extended from sea to shining sea. Maybe he's right. Maybe the US would have ended up looking like South Africa.

But Dew's book shows exactly, in their own words, how the radical slavers used the slave issue to break the Union and start the war. The South has been in denial about this for 130 years, but as Dew, a son of Confederate soldiers himself, says it can no longer be denied. Facts are stubborn things.