William W. Freehling is one of the most distinguished American
historians of the Civil War era. He is Singletary Professor of the
Humanities Emeritus at the University of Kentucky and Senior Fellow
at the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities. He is the author of
Prelude to Civil War, which won a Bancroft Prize, The Road to
Disunion, Volume I: Secessionists at Bay, and The South vs. the
South: How Anti-Confederate Southerners
Shaped the Course of the Civil War.
"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
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