Reviewed by: Rebels in the Making: The Secession Crisis and the Birth of the Confederacy by William L. Barney Michael D. Robinson (bio) Rebels in the Making: The Secession Crisis and the Birth of the Confederacy. By William L. Barney. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020. Pp. 392. Cloth, $34.95.) Over the past five decades, William L. Barney has written extensively on secession, the Old South, and the Confederate experience, richly enhancing our understanding of how and why the nation plunged headlong into civil war in 1861. Barney's unparalleled expertise in the movement for disunion in the fifteen slaveholding states sparkles throughout Rebels in the Making. Primarily focusing on the period between the presidential campaign of 1860 and the summer of 1861, when the Middle South states of Virginia, Arkansas, North Carolina, and Tennessee exited the Union and joined the seven Lower South states in the nascent Confederacy, Rebels in the Making offers a fast-paced yet carefully argued narrative of the secession crisis. Familiar themes from Barney's earlier scholarship resonate in this book. Categorizing the push for secession as "a slaveholder-driven movement from the top" (4), the author emphasizes the anxieties, fears, and suspicions that increasingly worried white southerners in the 1850s and allowed an often-marginalized cadre of fire-eaters to make inroads in several slaveholding states after the election of Abraham Lincoln in November 1860. Economic strains drove white southern angst: the price of land and enslaved persons steadily increased over the decade, distressing aspiring planters and limiting the opportunities for the South's landless population to achieve economic independence through the acquisition of real property. The frustrations of white workers in southern cities grew during the 1850s as free Black people and European immigrants offered business owners alternative labor options. Elites worried that the bubbling economic discontent from the lower classes in towns and cities might upset their carefully ordered society and used the pulpit, the press, and their own political power to channel the ire of the white populace toward meddling outsiders, such as abolitionists and Republicans. Barney scrupulously delineates the various opinions in the South about how to respond to these growing anxieties. Older, established planters who enjoyed greater economic stability normally stressed moderation, praised the safeguards for slavery within the Union, and, after Lincoln's election, preferred cooperation among the southern states to rectify the South's grievances. Outside of South Carolina—where depleted soil and soaring out-migration had produced nearly unanimous support for disunion among white elites—younger, aspiring slaveholders who came of age during the 1850s and confronted dwindling economic opportunities provided the vanguard for immediate, separate state secession. The younger [End Page 118] radicals calling for immediate secession may have been stymied were it not for a major drought that ravaged the South during the campaign of 1860. The failure of much of the South's corn crop caused food prices to soar and, along with the caustic presidential contest, placed the white southern populace on edge. Paranoia prevailed by the end of 1860: rumors of slave insurrections abounded, unknown strangers were branded as dangerous abolitionists, and pro-secession militias mobilized. "With the economy at a standstill, food shortages, unprecedented unemployment, insurrection scares, and continued reports of slave resistance," Barney writes, "conditions could not have been more favorable for secession" (135). With these circumstances converging toward the end of 1860, secessionists still had their work cut out for them, even in the Lower South. Barney chronicles how fire-eaters utilized propaganda, spectacle, and coercion to push the seven states of the Cotton South out of the Union between December 1860 and February 1861. The author credits South Carolinians Robert and Henry Gourdin, rather than such firebrands as Robert Barnwell Rhett, with charting a path forward for the disunion movement in the heady days following Lincoln's election. Through their 1860 Association, the Gourdins mobilized public support for secession and eased the concerns of southerners who dreaded following the South Carolina agitators who had led their state to disunionist dead-ends in 1833 and 1850. "The whole approach of the 1860 Association centered on structuring secession as a peaceful, law-abiding movement that would regain the...