Volume 48, Number 6 · April 12, 2001
Southern Comfort
By James M. McPherson
The Myth of the Lost Cause and Civil War History
edited by Gary W. Gallagher and Alan T. Nolan
Indiana University Press, 231 pp., $29.95
Apostles of Disunion: Southern Secession Commissioners and the Causes of the Civil War
Charles B. Dew
University Press of Virginia, 124 pp., $22.95
The Slave Power: The Free North and Southern Domination, 1780–1860
Leonard L. Richards
Louisiana State University Press,228 pp., $39.95; $19.95 (paper)
When Abraham Lincoln delivered his second inaugural address on March 4, 1865, at the end of four years of civil war, few people in either the North or the South would have dissented from his statement that slavery 'was, somehow, the cause of the war.'[1] At the war's outset in 1861 Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy, had justified secession as an act of self-defense against the incoming Lincoln administration, whose policy of excluding slavery from the territories would make 'property in slaves so insecure as to be comparatively worthless,...thereby annihilating in effect property worth thousands of millions of dollars.'[2]
Review, 3875 words
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