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The University of North Carolina Press
472 pp., 6.125 x 9.25, 12 illus., notes, bibl., index
The Littlefield History of the Civil War Era
The Coming of the American Civil War, 1789-1859
In the decades before the Civil War, Americans debating the fate of slavery often invoked the specter of disunion to frighten or discredit their opponents. According to Elizabeth Varon, "disunion" was a startling and provocative keyword in Americans' political vocabulary: it connoted the failure of the founders' singular effort to establish a lasting representative government. For many Americans in both the North and the South, disunion was a nightmare, the image of a cataclysm that would reduce them to misery and fratricidal war. For many others, however, threats, accusations, and intimations of disunion were instruments they could wield to achieve their partisan and sectional goals.
In this bracing reinterpretation of the origins of the Civil War, Varon blends political history with intellectual and cultural history to show how Americans, as far back as the earliest days of the republic, agonized and strategized over disunion. She focuses not only on politicians but also on a wide range of reformers, editors, writers, and commentators. Included here are the voices of fugitive slaves, white Southern dissenters, free black activists, abolitionist women, and other outsiders to the halls of power. In a new and expanding nation still learning how to meld disparate and powerful interests, the rhetoric of disunion proved pervasive--and volatile. As the word was marshaled by competing sectional interests in the tumultuous 1840s and 1850s, the politics of compromise grew more remote and an epic collision between the free North and slaveholding South seemed the only way to resolve, once and for all, whether the struggling republic would survive.
"Varon fulfills her goal of distinguishing disunion from secession and exploring the multifaceted meanings of the term. . . . She eminently succeeds in showing how disunion evolved from a 'prophecy' that no one wanted fulfilled to the fire-eaters' 'program.'"
--American Historical Association
"A compelling argument about the political significance of language. . . Speaks to specialists and remains approachable for undergraduates, scholars in other fields, and general readers."
--Common-Place
"A cogently reasoned intellectual history of a frequently misunderstood historical term. . . . Varon successfully weaves together political debates, contemporary journalism, literary fiction and nonfiction, sermons from pulpits of the nation's leading churches and other sources of popular culture."
--Civil War Times
"Varon's success in setting her analysis of disunion rhetoric against a comprehensive historiographical backdrop is exceptional. Meticulously researched and beautifully assembled, Disunion will become a standard text for students and scholars interested in this tumultuous chapter in American history."
--North & South
"[A] very important book. . . . Well-written and carefully documented and will be imminently useful to undergraduate and graduate classrooms alike."
--The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography
"Installs [the premise of disunion] by weaving the country's beginnings with the immediate, and profound, philosophical differences that existed between the agrarian, slaveholding South and the industrialized North."
--The Anniston Star
Cloth: $30.00
Paper: $21.00
Large Print: $35.00
© 2009 The University of North Carolina Press
116 South Boundary Street, Chapel Hill, NC 27514-3808
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