It is one of the great questions of American history-why did the Southern states bolt from the Union and help precipitate the Civil War? Now, acclaimed historian William W. Freehling offers a new answer, in the final volume of his monumental history The Road to Disunion.
Chapter 1: Democracy and Despotism, 1776–1854: Road, Volume I, Revisited
Chapter 2: Economic Bonanza, 1850–1860
Chapter 3: James Henry Hammond and the Unsolvable Proslavery Puzzle
Chapter 4: The Three Imperfect Solutions
Chapter 5: The Puzzling Future and the Infuriating Scapegoats
Chapter 6: Bleeding Kansas and Bloody Sumner
Chapter 7: The Scattering of the Ex-Whigs
Chapter 8: James Buchanan’s Precarious Election
Chapter 9: The President-Elect as the Dred Scotts’ Judge
Chapter 10: The Climactic Kansas Crisis
Chapter 11: Caribbean Delusions
Chapter 12: Reopening the African Slave Trade
Chapter 13: Reenslaving Free Blacks
Chapter 14: John Brown and Violent Invasion
Chapter 15: John G. Fee and Religious Invasion
Chapter 16: John Underwood and Economic Invasion
Chapter 17: John Clark and Political Invasion
Chapter 18: Yancey’s Lethal Abstraction
Chapter 19: The Democracy’s Charleston Convention
Chapter 20: The Democracy’s Baltimore Convention
Chapter 21: Suspicious Southerners and Lincoln’s Election
Chapter 22: The State’s Rights Justification
Chapter 24: The Tactics and the Tacticians
Coda: Did the Coincidence Change History?
Chapter 26: Alexander Stephens’s Fleeting Moment
Coda: Did Stephens’s and Hammond’s Personalities Change History?
Chapter 27: Southwestern Separatists’ Tactics and Messages
Chapter 28: Compromise Rejected
Chapter 29: Military Explosions
Chapter 31: Upper South Stalemate
Chapter 32: Stalemate—and the South—Shattered
Coda: How Did Slavery Cause the Civil War?