Historian William W. Freehling, professor emeritus at the University of Kentucky, opens his monumental study of the South’s road to secession by rejecting the idea of the antebellum South as a single, unified slave society.
Instead he shows Deep South cotton planters clashing with South Carolina rice growers, border states wavering on slavery, and even regions within the same state, like coastal and mountain Virginia, divided over the Missouri Compromise, Nullification, the Gag Rule, and the Kansas-Nebraska Act.
The first of two volumes, it traces the political and social fractures that pushed the South toward disunion between 1776 and 1854.
Published 1991
656 pages
$18.83