Response to Apostles of Disunion

I find it interesting that southern cotton states proactively lobbied for other southern states to join the confederacy on the basis of slavery but insist in hindsight that the war was fought over states rights and interpretations of the constitution. Charles Dew did a great job emphasizing the major role that race and slavery played in the decision making for southern states as they decided to secede one by one. Dew explains, "Alabamians described the same nightmare world that Commissioner Harris had painted for the Georgia legislature: a South humbled, abolitionized degraded, and threatened with destruction by a brutal Republican majority. Emancipation, race war, miscegenation - one apocalyptic vision after another. The death throes of white supremacy would be so horrific that no self-respecting Southerner could fail to rally to the ccessionist cause, they argued. Only through disunion could the South preserve the purity and ensure the survival of the white race."