The Road to Disunion, Volume I [1]: Secessionists at Bay, 1776-1854 by Freehling, William W - 1990

Oxford University Press, 1990. Book Club (BCE/BOMC). Hard Cover. Very Good/Very Good. Book club edition. Top edge foxed. 1990 Hard Cover. xii, [2], 640 pp. 8vo. Far from a monolithic block of diehard slave states, the South in the eight decades before the Civil War was, in William Freehling's words, "a world so lushly various as to be a storyteller's dream." It was a world where Deep South cotton planters clashed with South Carolina rice growers, where the egalitarian spirit sweeping the North seeped down through border states already uncertain about slavery, where even sections of the same state (for instance, coastal and mountain Virginia) divided bitterly on key issues. It was the world of Jefferson Davis, John C. Calhoun, Andrew Jackson, and Thomas Jefferson, and also of Gullah Jack, Nat Turner, and Frederick Douglass.