The Road to Disunion, Volume II: Secessionists Triumphant 1854-1861 | William W. Freehling

The Road to Disunion, Volume II: Secessionists Triumphant 1854-1861 | William W. Freehling | Professor's Prose Style Makes "Road" a Difficult Journey

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The Road to Disuni...

	The Road to Disunion, Volume II: Secessionists Triumphant 1854-1861 William W. Freehling Oxford University Press, USA, 2007 - 624 pages average customer review:based on 7 reviews view larger image
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It is one of the great questions of American history--why did the Southern states bolt from the Union and help precipitate the Civil War? Now, acclaimed historian William W. Freehling offers a new answer, in the final volume of his monumental history The Road to Disunion.
Here is history in the grand manner, a powerful narrative peopled with dozens of memorable portraits, telling this important story with skill and relish. Freehling highlights all the key moments on the road to war, including the violence in Bleeding Kansas, Preston Brooks's beating of Charles Sumner in the Senate chambers, the Dred Scott Decision, John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry, and much more. As Freehling shows, the election of Abraham Lincoln sparked a political crisis, but at first most Southerners took a cautious approach, willing to wait and see what Lincoln would do--especially, whether he would take any antagonistic measures against the South. But at this moment, the extreme fringe in the South took charge, first in South Carolina and Mississippi, but then throughout the lower South, sounding the drum roll for secession. Indeed, The Road to Disunion is the first book to fully document how this decided minority of Southern hotspurs took hold of the secessionist issue and, aided by a series of fortuitous events, drove the South out of the Union. Freehling provides compelling profiles of the leaders of this movement--many of them members of the South Carolina elite. Throughout the narrative, he evokes a world of fascinating characters and places as he captures the drama of one of America's most important--and least understood--stories.
The long-awaited sequel to the award-winning Secessionists at Bay, which was hailed as "the most important history of the Old South ever published," this volume concludes a major contribution to our understanding of the Civil War. A compelling, vivid portrait of the final years of the antebellum South, The Road to Disunion will stand as an important history of its subject.

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Even better than the 1st volume

I was a big fan of Freehling's first volume, but I believe the second volume is even better than its predecessor. Perhaps this is because Freehling devotes so many pages to a shorter time period so you get a fuller picture of what was going on. Or perhaps it is because of the fact that Freehling did so much research and uncovered interesting stories that had previously been skipped over. Whatever the reason, if you are interested in the causes of the Civil War or 19th century American history, pick this up. Freehling's writing style is unique, but I didn't find it detrimental at all.

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Professor's Prose Style Makes "Road" a Difficult Journey

I have read both volumes of Professor Freehling's "Road to Disunion" and this review is intended to apply to both volumes. I consider his work to be of the highest scholarship, impeccably researched, and very informative. Unfortunately, Professor Freehling's writing style seems to indicate that his work was prepared more for the perusal of his fellow Ph.D's than for the reading public. It is lamentable for those having an interest in this period of our history that he did not take a cue from writers and historians of this era such as Shelby Foote, Douglas Southall Freeman, Carl Sandburg, Allan Nevins, and Bruce Catton whose works are highly informative but at the same time very readable, flowing, actually entertaining.

One has to actually experience Professor Freehling's sentences and paragraphs to appreciate the difficulty of grasping some of them. He seems never to have met a suffix--and few prefixes--which he did not like. Social and political factions, groups, and sub-groups are inevitably named and labelled resulting in an exponential proliferation of nouns such as Secessionists, Unionists, Dis-unionists, Separatists, Cooperationists, Abolitionists, Borderites, Paternalists, Egalitarianists, Nativists, ex-Whigs, anti-slavery Democrats, Calhounism, Van Burenites, etc., ad infinitum. More than a few casual readers will likely find that a glossary, however sophomoric it might seem to Professor Freehling, would be helpful. I found myself reading many sentences two, three, even four times before feeling satisfied that I had grasped the intended meaning. Several entire paragraphs, after being subjected to similar scrutiny, were simply abandoned as I moved on through the work, resigned that, if I should ever be able to digest them, it simply would not be worth the effort.

On a substantive note, Professor Freehling, especially in Volume II, appears to conclude that the proponents of slavery, in their efforts to defend and protect their "peculiar institution" infringed and trampled upon the "Republicanism" of other whites, and tended thereby even to enslave such whites. He seems to offer this conclusion as an explanation for the fervor which opponents of slavery brought to the struggle against it. The primary example offered of such infringement of "Republican" rights is that for a number of years, the Democratic Party was controlled by a minority centered in the lower south, and that through the Democratic Party, then the major party in the nation, this southern minority in effect exercised control over a nationwide majority, thereby infringing upon the "Republican" right of majority rule. Other more concrete examples of infringement of "rights" were southern efforts to "gag" and censor abolitionist communication designed to agitate and incite resistance to slavery in the south, and actual violence offered to those inclined to go in person among slaves and non-slaveholding whites for such purposes. Southerners felt justified in such action by the basic necessity of self-preservation due to the omnipresent threat of slave violence, a threat which would be exacerbated if violent tendencies should be inflamed by agitation.

It is unimaginable to me that any Yankee soldier--indeed anyone opposed to the South and/or slavery--in the Civil War ever said or thought that his (or her) "Republicanism" was threatened by the South or that any white person was in danger of enslavement by the South. Even if Professor Freehling's conclusion is considered as merely an articulation of some unspoken visceral reaction to slaveholders, what purpose is served by such a contrived articulation? Is it the result of academic pressure to forever derive and construct some new insight or theory upon one of the most studied and exposed eras of history? If the people who lived in that era did not articulate their views in such terms, and if nobody else in modern society considers the matter in such terms, what is the value of expounding upon history in such contrived fashion?

My conclusion is that Professor Freehling's somewhat strained efforts to bring new insights to an old story have rendered his telling of the story unnecessarily difficult to follow. I do recommend reading his work, but I would not recommend that the casual reader plunge into it without some prior familiarization with the history of the era. Potter's "The Impending Crisis, 1848-1861" may be considered one of the leading works on the subject prior to the publication of "Road to Disunion", and the casual reader might be well-advised to take them in chronological order of publication.

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Good, but flawed

Freehling's research is quite good, but his analysis often seems flawed. Like so many Civil War researchers, Freehling generally seems to blur the distinction between what issues caused the conflict and what issues motivated Southerners to actually join the army and risk their lives in the fight. While slavery was certainly a prominent, but hardly exclusive, cause of the war, it seems to have played a relatively minor role in motivating the bulk of the Southerners who actually died fighting. Freehling's error is a common one, but it detracts from an otherwise interesting book. Still, the book is worth reading for people interested in the period -- just be sure to complement your reading with other books to get a more complete set of perspectives.

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NOT for the casual Civil War reader

I appreciate Dr. Freehling's comments (in the Preface) that this is not just an academic history, but a readable book. I feel that he is right (and wrong) on both counts. This is a DEFINITIVE academic history of 1854-1861, but there is no context of Southern (or Southron) culture as in the first Road to Disunion book, and so this book does not stand well on its own, independent of the first volume.
It is also not a "readable" book. There is no narrative flow. It is simply a series of dissertations on minor persons and incidents chopped up chronologically or by theme (Four men named John?(!)). There is no sense of a cascade of events here. John G. Fee (who?) gets as many pages as John Brown. It is impressive that Dr. Freehling is able to immerse himself in the minutia of proslavery (or religious, or economic, or political, etc) arguments of the 1850s, but not terribly interesting or enlightening.
I teach a college class, Why We Fight: American Civil War, so I feel qualified in saying that if you are a Civil War fanatic, you will find some undiscovered jewels here, the evolution and change of proslavery tracts being but one example. If however, you are a more casual reader of American history, there is little here to draw your attention or sustain it. Freehling is, in every sense, exhaustive.

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Mixed Feelings

I was a little bit disappointed because the book lacked a fair bit of context. For example, I know that a Senator from South Carolina preferred his slave concubine to his wife, but otherwise I would have to read another book to really understand what was going on. So, I appreciated the mini-biographies of the players leading up to the war, but I felt that there was a huge hole in my understanding of 1854 - 1861.

reviews: page 1, 2

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