Secession Winter: When the Union Fell Apart by Robert J. Cook, William L. Barney, and Elizabeth R. Varon (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Secession Winter: When the Union Fell Apart by Robert J. Cook, William L. Barney, and Elizabeth R. Varon John C. Inscoe Secession Winter: When the Union Fell Apart. Robert J. Cook, William L. Barney, and Elizabeth R. Varon. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013. ISBN 1-4214-0896-5, 136 pp., paper, $19.95. Like that on the Civil War itself, new scholarship on secession shows no signs of saturation or abatement. The decision to leave the Union was made eleven different times by eleven different states over five months, which in itself provides a vast range of variables and contingencies subject to scholarly scrutiny. The authors of the three essays here—drawn from a series of lectures at the University of Sussex—contend that their collective purpose is to explore “the multiplicity of inner conflicts that wracked Americans during this crisis and the disparate actions that those same divided Americans took to resolve them” (3). They have each pulled from that cacophony of voices new issues and fresh insights into the multidimensional dynamics that drove the political debates over the winter—and, despite the book’s title, well into the spring—of 1861. William Barney, long one of our more astute chroniclers of how the Deep South states made their exoduses from the Union, argues that far more so than [End Page 467] those of the upper South, the impulses of lower South slaveholders to secede were driven by slave behavior, real and suspected, and by a growing fear that Lincoln’s election had encouraged their own bondsmen to think that emancipation would soon follow. The realization that slaves wanted—and even expected—their freedom led to planters’ discomfort over their very ownership of those oppressed, Barney contends. “So deeply buried was their guilt that whites in the Lower South could imagine the black quest for freedom only in terms of a bloodbath directed against themselves”; thus, their seemingly irrational and reckless determination to take the step that many recognized as a “Rush to Disaster,” as he titles his essay (33). “This was the slaves’ revenge,” Barney concludes in the most original of the cases made here (10). Elizabeth Varon, who has produced Disunion! (2011), the best comprehensive treatment of the sectional crisis in recent years, provides the most tightly focused of the three essays by revisiting more familiar ground—the implications of Robert E. Lee’s decision to cast his lot with the Confederacy. She walks us through the two months of deliberations by what she terms Virginia’s supercharged secession convention and how its debates shaped Lee’s own shifting sentiments, noting that his very personal decision was made in a very public forum and was driven far more by political calculations than his biographers have acknowledged. In assessing the factors at play in both his and his state’s road to disunion, Varon reminds us that to understand what turned them into “reluctant rebels,” one can’t overlook those convictions and values that “had held them back in the first place” and that the value they placed on the Union stemmed in large part from the fact that their forefathers had been such crucial players in its creation (56). Robert Cook tackles a far more expansive set of issues by examining the sense of history and role of collective memory on the part of all factions with stakes in the crisis at hand. As with Lee and other Virginians, the American Revolution was the most common reference point and offered “a capacious memory lode [that] was as pliable as any other such trove” (70). From southern unionists and fire-eaters to northern moderates and more radical Republicans, many Americans drew lessons and parallels from the War of Independence that played into their own ideas for resolving the crisis at hand. The more recent past, Cook shows, was equally relevant in their efforts to sway opinions, North and South. During the showdown over Fort Sumter, Lincoln’s advisors urged him to act like the stalwart Andrew Jackson in dealing with his own South Carolina showdown in 1832; southern extremists exaggerated while moderates minimized various sectional slights over the course of the 1850s; and (echoing...