Description: Here is history in the grand manner, a powerful narrative peopled with dozens of memorable portraits, telling this important story with skill and relish. Freehling highlights all the key moments on the road to war. He shows in particular how the election of Abraham Lincoln sparked a political crisis and that, at this moment, the extreme fringe in the South took charge, first in South Carolina and Mississippi, but then throughout the lower South, sounding the drum roll for secession. Indeed, this is the first book to fully document how this decided minority of Southern hotspurs, aided by a series of fortuitous events, drove the South out of the Union.
Review Quotes: "This book by one of the major names in southern history is an important study that anyone interested in the Civil War era must read and consider carefully....A major new interpretation of how this war came upon the county....Freehling makes it clear that he is in the business of providing analysis and retelling an epic."--Nicholas Evan Sarantakes, The North Carolina Historical Review
"A hard-nosed and dramatic account of how the nation split in 1861."--David Waldstreicher, The Boston Globe"Secessionists Triumphant is outstanding, history at its best, illuminating one of the most crucial moments in our national experience, and at the same time showing how sane men and women who thought they had their own best interests at heart, could willingly indeed for some gleefully race to their destruction."--William C. Davis, History Book Club"In richer detail than any previous study, William Freehling explains how a secessionist minority, even in the lower South before 1860, exploited sectional tensions to forge a majority for disunion. Fearful that slavery might erode and eventually crumble, they went on the offensive to force wavering moderates into the secessionist fold and then to provoke a showdown at Fort Sumter. Freehling makes clear that it was indeed a war of Southern aggression."--James M. McPherson, author of Battle Cry of Freedom"The adjective 'magisterial' has been badly overused and devalued of late, but if it properly describes anyone's work, it certainly does Freehling's. The completion of this project is a genuinely monumental achievement."--Bruce Levine, Civil War Book Review"William Freehling's long-awaited second volume of The Road to Disunion is a brilliant and indispensable reinterpretation of the causes of the Civil War. With much original insight, Freehling skillfully fuses impersonal economic and political forces with the crucial contingencies that help to explain what can still be seen as the central event in American history."--David Brion Davis, author of Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World