Rebels in the Making: The Secession Crisis and the Birth of the Confederacy

Abstract

Throughout his distinguished career, William L. Barney has taught us much about the context, character, and consequence of secession, a process, he has shown, that by the late 1850s seemed almost inexorable but never inevitable. In this tour de force, Barney brings together his vast knowledge of the dynamics and directions of secession and fresh, deep research into the public and private writings of many and diverse southerners to reveal the complex, sometimes contradictory, and often contested process whereby the idea of secession became fact. Barney shows with great skill and insight that whatever the consensus there may have been among white southerners on the right of secession, they were not in agreement on the exact circumstance, means, and timing for it. In tracking a secession momentum, Barney underscores the anxieties, fears, and sense of urgency that gripped slaveholders during the 1850s. Slavery in upper South states was declining, drought and soil depletion threatened agricultural sustainability, the generation coming of age by the 1850s chafed at their diminishing prospects, the people who were enslaved were ever restive, criticism of slavery was rising in the Atlantic world, disparities in wealth strained relations between slaveholders and nonslaveholders, the old party system that protected slavery was fracturing over it, and the need for slavery to expand was increasing as the possibilities for it doing so in the Union were shrinking. Especially important, as Barney shows, was the anger many white southern leaders felt in having to defend slavery and themselves: they ardently believed that their kind of slavery and the agrarian proslavery republic they wanted were on the right side of God and history.