Content area
Full Text
Secession Winter: When the Union Fell Apart. By Robert J. Cook, William L. Barney, and Elizabeth R. Varón. Marcus Cunliffe Lecture Series. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013. Pp. [x], 119. Paper, $19.95, ISBN 978-1-4214-0896-5; cloth, $40.00, ISBN 978-1-4214-0895-8.)
With Secession Winter: When the Union Fell Apart, authors Robert J. Cook, William L. Barney, and Elizabeth R. Varón eschew the "hoary issue of whether the civil war was inevitable" and instead probe the complex political divisions that wracked Americans during the five fraught months that followed Abraham Lincoln's election as president (p. 2).
Barney's "Rush to Disaster: Secession and the Slaves' Revenge" examines why fire-eaters in the lower South remained such enthusiastic proponents of secession despite the stubborn doubts raised by critics in the upper South. The answer, he argues, lay with white anxiety and guilt about owning slaves, which heightened...