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A comprehensive study of secession in all fifteen slave states, Rebels in the Making is a political, social, and economic history of the late antebellum South that examines the appeal of secession to a variety of actors in these states and reveals it to be not a mass democratic movement but a revolution led from above.
List of contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 Uneasy Rests the Masters: Strains from Below in the 1850s
- Chapter 2 Getting Right with Slavery: The Drive for Unity
- Chapter 3 Waiting for Lincoln: The Election of 1860
- Chapter 4 Verdict Rendered: Lincoln is Elected
- Chapter 5 South Carolina Takes the Lead
- Chapter 6 Deadlock and a Deepening Crisis
- Chapter 7 Secessionist Surge: The Lower South Leaves
- Chapter 8 The Upper South: Straddling the Divide
- Chapter 9 The Confederacy: A Slaveholder's Republic
- Chapter 10 From Waiting Game to War: Lincoln Takes Command
- Conclusion
- Notes
- Index
About the author
William L. Barney is Professor of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is the author of The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Civil War (OUP, 2011); The Making of a Confederate: Walter Lenoir's Civil War (OUP, 2007); and The Secessionist Impulse: Alabama and Mississippi in 1860, among other titles.
Summary
A comprehensive study of secession in all fifteen slave states, Rebels in the Making is a political, social, and economic history of the late antebellum South that examines the appeal of secession to a variety of actors in these states and reveals it to be not a mass democratic movement but a revolution led from above.
Additional text
A fitting capstone to five decades of research and writing about secession, William A. Barney's Rebels in the Making shows us how cadres of radical proslavery ideologues manipulated other Southern whites into supporting secession. But the joke was on those all-too-familiar propagandists of anti-egalitarian amorality. They convinced themselves and other enslavers to do the one simple thing that no slaveholding elite could afford to do: invite an army of invaders onto the doorstep of their police state.
