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Apostles of Disunion
- Southern Secession Commissioners and the Causes of the Civil War: Fifteenth Anniversary Edition
- Narrated by: Mitchell Dorian
- Length: 4 hrs and 4 mins
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Publisher's summary
Charles Dew’s Apostles of Disunion has established itself as a modern classic and an indispensable account of the Southern states’ secession from the Union. Addressing topics still hotly debated among historians and the public at large more than a century and a half after the Civil War, the book offers a compelling and clearly substantiated argument that slavery and race were at the heart of our great national crisis. The 15 years since the original publication of Apostles of Disunion have seen an intensification of debates surrounding the Confederate flag and Civil War monuments. In a powerful new afterword to this anniversary edition, Dew situates the book in relation to these recent controversies and factors in the role of vast financial interests tied to the internal slave trade in pushing Virginia and other upper South states toward secession and war.
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A deeply private man, shut off even to those who worked closely with him, Abraham Lincoln often captured “his best thoughts", as he called them, in short notes to himself. He would work out his personal stances on the biggest issues of the day, never expecting anyone to see these pieces of writing, which he’d then keep close at hand, in desk drawers and even in his top hat. The profound importance of these notes has been overlooked, because the originals are scattered across several different archives and have never before been brought together and examined as a coherent whole.
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A Good One--Highly Recommend
- By Jeffy on 04-18-23
By: Ronald C. White
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The Fiery Trial
- Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery
- By: Eric Foner
- Narrated by: Norman Dietz
- Length: 18 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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Eric Foner gives us the definitive history of Abraham Lincoln and the end of slavery in America. Foner's Lincoln emerges as a leader, one whose greatness lies in his capacity for moral and political growth through real engagement with allies and critics alike. This powerful work will transform our understanding of the nation's greatest president and the issue that mattered most.
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Great Book about a Monstrous Injustice
- By Cynthia on 07-29-13
By: Eric Foner
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The Road to Disunion Volume II
- Secessionists Triumphant, 1854-1861
- By: William W. Freehling
- Narrated by: Charles Constant
- Length: 25 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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The extreme fringe in the South took charge, first in South Carolina and Mississippi, but then throughout the lower South, sounding the drum roll for secession. This is the first book to fully document how this decided minority of Southern hotspurs took hold of the secessionist issue and drove the South out of the Union. William Freehling provides compelling profiles of the leaders of this movement. Throughout the narrative, he evokes a world of fascinating characters and places as he captures the drama of one of America's most important - and least understood - stories.
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Very Informative
- By Paul D. Stancil on 09-13-19
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Reconstruction
- A Concise History
- By: Allen C. Guelzo
- Narrated by: Bob Souer
- Length: 4 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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The era known as Reconstruction is one of the unhappiest times in American history. It succeeded in reuniting the nation politically after the Civil War but in little else. Conflict shifted from the battlefield to the Capitol as Congress warred with President Andrew Johnson over just what to do with the South. Johnson's plan of Presidential Reconstruction, which was sympathetic to the former Confederacy, would ultimately lead to his impeachment and the institution of Radical Reconstruction.
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Very Well Done
- By Rob Welch on 08-20-21
By: Allen C. Guelzo
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Fears of a Setting Sun
- The Disillusionment of America's Founders
- By: Dennis C. Rasmussen
- Narrated by: Keith Sellon-Wright
- Length: 9 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
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Americans seldom deify their Founding Fathers any longer, but they do still tend to venerate the Constitution and the republican government that the founders created. Strikingly, the founders themselves were far less confident in what they had wrought, particularly by the end of their lives. In fact, most of them - including George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson - came to deem America's constitutional experiment an utter failure that was unlikely to last beyond their own generation.
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A different perspective on the founders
- By kpa on 03-04-24
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The Soul of America
- The Battle for Our Better Angels
- By: Jon Meacham
- Narrated by: Fred Sanders, Jon Meacham
- Length: 10 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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Our current climate of partisan fury is not new, and in The Soul of America Meacham shows us how what Abraham Lincoln called the “better angels of our nature” have repeatedly won the day. Painting surprising portraits of Lincoln and other presidents, including Ulysses S. Grant, Theodore Roosevelt, and LBJ, and illuminating the courage of influential citizen activists and civil rights pioneers, Meacham brings vividly to life turning points in American history. Each of these dramatic hours have been shaped by the contest to lead the country to look forward rather than back.
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Thanks! I needed this!
- By Kindle Customer on 05-29-18
By: Jon Meacham
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The Zealot and the Emancipator
- John Brown, Abraham Lincoln, and the Struggle for American Freedom
- By: H. W. Brands
- Narrated by: Robert Fass
- Length: 16 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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Master storyteller and best-selling historian H. W. Brands narrates the epic struggle over slavery as embodied by John Brown and Abraham Lincoln - two men moved to radically different acts to confront our nation’s gravest sin. The Zealot and the Emancipator is acclaimed historian H. W. Brands' thrilling account of how two American giants shaped the war for freedom.
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I Never Knew That!
- By William G. Stuart on 10-19-20
By: H. W. Brands
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America's Great Debate
- Henry Clay, Stephen A. Douglas, and the Compromise that Preserved the Union
- By: Fergus M. Bordewich
- Narrated by: Norman Dietz
- Length: 17 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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The Mexican War introduced vast new territories into the United States, among them California and the present-day Southwest. When gold was discovered in California in the great Gold Rush of 1849, the population swelled, and settlers petitioned for admission to the Union. But the U.S. Senate was precariously balanced with 15 free states and 15 slave states. Up to this point, states had been admitted in pairs, one free and one slave, to preserve that tenuous balance in the Senate.
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Excellent. Very detailed. Entertaining.
- By Douglas on 03-03-18
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Give Me Liberty
- A History of America's Exceptional Idea
- By: Richard Brookhiser
- Narrated by: Tony Messano
- Length: 7 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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Nationalism is inevitable: It supplies feelings of belonging, identity, and recognition. It binds us to our neighbors and tells us who we are. But increasingly - from the United States to India, from Russia to Burma - nationalism is being invoked for unworthy ends: to disdain minorities or to support despots. As a result, nationalism has become to many a dirty word.
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Extraordinary!
- By Cynthia M. Suprenant on 12-23-19
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The Birth of Modern Politics
- Andrew Jackson, John Quincy Adams, and the Election of 1828
- By: Lynn Hudson Parson
- Narrated by: Milton Bagby
- Length: 10 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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The 1828 presidential election, which pitted Major General Andrew Jackson against incumbent John Quincy Adams, has long been hailed as a watershed moment in American political history. It was the contest in which an unlettered, hot-tempered southwestern frontiersman, trumpeted by his supporters as a genuine man of the people, soundly defeated a New England "aristocrat" whose education and political resume were as impressive as any ever seen in American public life.
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a very good popular history book
- By D. Littman on 01-29-10
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The story of the Confederate States of America, the proslavery, antidemocratic nation created by white Southern slaveholders to protect their property, has been told many times in heroic and martial narratives. Now, however, Stephanie McCurry tells a very different tale of the Confederate experience. Confederate Reckoning is the startling story of this epic political battle in which women and slaves helped to decide the fate of the Confederacy and the outcome of the Civil War.
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Was the Civil War really about slavery? Or was it a war fought over money? Civil War historian Samuel W. Mitcham Jr., (Vicksburg, Bust Hell Wide Open) opens his fascinating new book, It Wasn't About Slavery, with Dr. Grady McWhiney's claim that "what passes as standard American history is really Yankee history written by New Englanders or their puppets to glorify Yankee heroes and ideals".
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An award-winning scholar uncovers the guiding principles of Lincoln's antislavery strategies.
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Lincoln’s Transformation
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Soul by Soul tells the story of slavery in antebellum America by moving away from the cotton plantations and into the slave market itself, the heart of the domestic slave trade. Taking us inside the New Orleans slave market, the largest in the nation, where 100,000 men, women, and children were packaged, priced, and sold, Walter Johnson transforms the statistics of this chilling trade into the human drama of traders, buyers, and slaves, negotiating sales that would alter the life of each.
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Heartbreaking
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James McPherson shows that, contrary to what many scholars believe, the soldiers of the Civil War remained powerfully convinced of the ideals for which they fought throughout the conflict. Motivated by duty and honor, and often by religious faith, these men wrote frequently of their firm belief in the cause for which they fought: the principles of liberty, freedom, justice, and patriotism. For Cause and Comrades lets these soldiers tell their own stories in their own words to create an account that is both deeply moving and far truer than most books on war.
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Ambitious idea but falls short
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In this magisterial work, Sean Wilentz traces a historical arc from the earliest days of the republic to the opening shots of the Civil War. One of our finest writers of history, Wilentz brings to life the era after the American Revolution, when the idea of democracy remained contentious, and Jeffersonians and Federalists clashed over the role of ordinary citizens in government of, by, and for the people. The triumph of Andrew Jackson soon defined this role on the national level, while city democrats, Anti-Masons, fugitive slaves, and a host of others hewed their own local definitions.
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If you need to sleep...
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The story of the Confederate States of America, the proslavery, antidemocratic nation created by white Southern slaveholders to protect their property, has been told many times in heroic and martial narratives. Now, however, Stephanie McCurry tells a very different tale of the Confederate experience. Confederate Reckoning is the startling story of this epic political battle in which women and slaves helped to decide the fate of the Confederacy and the outcome of the Civil War.
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Good view of the confederate inner workings.
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Abbeville Condensed
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An award-winning scholar uncovers the guiding principles of Lincoln's antislavery strategies.
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Lincoln’s Transformation
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Race and Reunion is a history of how the unity of white America was purchased through the increasing segregation of black and white memory of the Civil War. Blight delves deeply into the shifting meanings of death and sacrifice, Reconstruction, the romanticized South of literature, soldiers' reminiscences of battle, the idea of the Lost Cause, and the ritual of Memorial Day. He resurrects the variety of African-American voices and memories of the war and the efforts to preserve the emancipationist legacy in the midst of a culture built on its denial.
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How we remember matters
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This audiobook is the classic one-volume history of the American Civil War by Pulitzer Prize winner Bruce Catton. Covering events from the prelude of the conflict to the death of Lincoln, Catton blends a gripping narrative with deep, yet unassuming, scholarship to bring the war alive in an almost novelistic way. It is this gift for narrative that led contemporary critics to compare this book to War and Peace, and call it a "modern Iliad." Now over 50 years old, This Hallowed Ground remains one of the best-loved and admired general Civil War books.
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Still one of the best!
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The Second Founding
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From the Pulitzer Prize-winning scholar, a timely history of the constitutional changes that built equality into the nation's foundation and how those guarantees have been shaken over time.
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Excellent book - problematic narrator
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The Approaching Fury
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Straight From The Horse's Mouth
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War on the Waters
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Although previously undervalued for their strategic impact because they represented only a small percentage of total forces, the Union and Confederate navies were crucial to the outcome of the Civil War. In War on the Waters, James M. McPherson has crafted an enlightening, at times harrowing, and ultimately thrilling account of the war’s naval campaigns and their military leaders. McPherson recounts how the Union navy’s blockade of the Confederate coast, leaky as a sieve in the war’s early months, became increasingly effective as it choked off vital imports and exports.
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From Offshore, This War Looks Completely Different
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A former editor of American Heritage, Stephen W. Sears has collected a wealth of new sources for this definitive portrait of one of the most dramatic battles of the Civil War. Using scores of letters and diaries written by soldiers from both Union and Confederate armies, Sears’ narrative history seeks to strip away the gloss of later commentary and restore the battle of Chancellorsville to its original voices.
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It's a Wonderful Tool
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Defending Dixie’s Land
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Are you interested in knowing the actual history of your country, or are you content with the propagandized version the winners of wars conjure up to feed schoolchildren? When it comes to the story and tradition of the U.S. South, and especially the events surrounding the Civil War (1861–1865), you may need to brace yourself. What you think you know about it is likely untrue – and not just by a little. Isaac C Bishop is a lifelong New-Englander who happened to become interested in southern culture. But when he began to earnestly study its history and folklore, he was shocked by what he ...
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Thorough dismantling of the commonly-held opinion regarding slavery being the primary cause of the Civil War.
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No Property in Man
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Americans revere the Constitution even as they argue fiercely over its original toleration of slavery. Some historians have charged that slaveholders actually enshrined human bondage at the nation's founding. The acclaimed political historian Sean Wilentz shares the dismay but sees the Constitution and slavery differently. Although the proslavery side won important concessions, he asserts, antislavery impulses also influenced the framers' work. Far from covering up a crime against humanity, the Constitution restricted slavery's legitimacy under the new national government.
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Excellent review of Slavery and the Constitution
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The Coming Fury
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> The New York Times hailed this trilogy as “one of the greatest historical accomplishments of our time”. With stunning detail and insights, America’s foremost Civil War historian recreates the war from its opening months to its final, bloody end. Each volume delivers a complete listening experience. The Coming Fury (Volume 1) covers the split Democratic Convention in the spring of 1860 to the first battle of Bull Run.
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History As It Should Be
- By Bryan on 07-19-11
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Battle Cry of Freedom
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Battle Cry of Freedom vividly traces how a new nation was forged when a war both sides were sure would amount to little dragged for four years and cost more American lives than all other wars combined. Narrator Jonathan Davis powerful reading brings to life the many voices of the Civil War.
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Excellent Book
- By J. Weston on 12-11-20
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The Fall of the House of Dixie
- The Civil War and the Social Revolution That Transformed the South
- By: Bruce Levine
- Narrated by: Peter Jay Fernandez
- Length: 13 hrs and 57 mins
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The J. G. Randall Distinguished Professor of History at the University of Illinois and associate editor of North and South magazine, Bruce Levine presents a gripping chronicle of the cultural and economic upheaval the South experienced during and after the Civil War. Drawing upon a treasure trove of diaries, letters, newspaper articles, and government documents, Levine offers a unique perspective on the old South's demise through the voices of those who lived through the conflict.
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Merely ok. . .
- By Steve E. on 03-19-13
By: Bruce Levine
What listeners say about Apostles of Disunion
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Linda S.
- 04-12-24
The Death of the “States Rights” euphemism.
I’ve often debated Southern apologists, adherents to the “Lost Cause Myth”. These folks firmly commit to the idea that the reason for Southern secession was the issue of “states’ rights”, not slavery.
This work slams that fallacy fast first into the dust.
It does so with overwhelming documentation provided by the letters and speeches of members of the state secession commissions, those responsible for disunion. Their words are hyperbolic, incendiary, and deeply racist. In no uncertain terms it clearly points out that secession was based on one issue, and one issue only, and that was perceived threats to the institution of slavery in slave states.
Of course there are other documents attesting to this//the articles of secession of various states, sermons, letters, diaries, and news articles. Yet this book alone carries the day.
The book is powerful and disturbing. It should be compulsory reading in every high school history class.
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- Anonymous User
- 09-16-24
Brutal yet clear
This book does a great job at illustrating the causes of the Civil War and shows details that are often overlooked in education.
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- Theresa
- 09-04-22
Easy to listen to
I found myself in the middle of the conversation. I felt the anger of the people who lost.
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- Cthulhu's slobber
- 02-17-21
Powerful debunking of Lost Cause nonsense
Excellent research and documentation of the real causes of the Civil War. This book thoroughly debunks neoconfederate Lost Cause myths that somehow the antebellum South was noble or fought for states rights. Slavery and white supremacy caused the Civil War.
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- Pen Name
- 11-19-21
Educational
It's a phenomenal book! Based on facts and actual recorded events. Very educational. It should be required reading in highschool.
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- Kyle B.
- 03-30-24
Southerners Thought the Civil War was about Slavery
From the start, secessionist leaders defined their struggle as one to preserve the institution of slavery.
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- Mark Dyal
- 08-02-23
Sugarcoating is weakness
By the time I finished Charles Dew’s Apostles of Disunion I had a number of thoughts and questions. My first thought, considering the book’s climax in the new afterword, is how the morality of equality has eroded previous generational commitments to academic objectivity. Of course we know that objectivity was always a lie and that every word spoken or written by any of us is but a symptom; my thought, then, was how normal it is for Mr. Dew to believe, without a shred of doubt, in racial equality, when, unlike the secession commissioners’ mountain of evidence to the contrary, he has nothing on which to base this late-modern religious tenant besides morality.
My second thought was that his book is still a fantastic listen, helped in its cause by Mitchell Dorian’s impassioned narration (Man, why is it that we suffer so many listless narrations, except for those of books seeking to delegitimize the white South? Get a white liberal talking about whites guilty of disobedience to their religion and man oh man the passion flows forth!) Dew has done us all a service by surveying the secession ambassadors’ speeches, for they offer nowhere to hide and no way for one to apologize for their content.
Which leads me to my questions. Yes the commissioners were racist, and deeply so. In fact, it is the depth of their racism that made the civil war a civilizational conflict and a question of the survival of a form of life and it’s attendant norms of thought and comportment. The depth of their racial feeling is also what allows the causes of the war to include states’ rights. Are we allowed to live locally by our own set of values, even if those values are offensive to those living elsewhere and have the nerve to harm the Federal government’s sacred cows?
Yes secession was driven by fears and assumptions of the wretched future that awaited the post-slavery South. Although the speeches that form the basis of this book were delivered to representational bodies and not to the general public, their racial and cultural, more than political or economic, content shows that they were addressed to the public at large. The planters had much to lose, but the speakers seem to be aware that the culture and well-being of Southern men and women was more at stake than the multinational profits of the slave labor system.
But in 2023 we can certainly ask, “Were they wrong?” because Reconstruction certainly manifested most of their fears and assumptions. But what would’ve become of the South without the war? Taking a cue from Dew’s afterword, and in light of the Left’s love of reconstructions, it’s safe to say the war was just an excuse to remake the South in the North’s image.
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- AJC
- 06-27-21
Yes, it was about slavery in America
Over the last 25 years in histories of the events and people leading up to the US Civil War a good effort to set the record straight. Despite, post-Reconstruction narratives put forth by such organizations as the Daughters of the Confederacy, the Sons of Confederate Veterans, and the KKK historians are shining light on slavery in America and the real cause of the US Civil War. It was not "States Rights (unless it was the State's right to continue legalized slavery,") nor was it "Northern Aggression. Simply, it was slavery that was the cause of the US Civil War. Charles B. Dew clearly shows that the states that joined the Confederate States of America did so not because they were forced, but because they were propagandized by those, in the South, who had a vested economic interest in the use and trade of slaves, and racism. By recitation of speeches given by Secession Commissioners from states like Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina the message was clear enough, if a state did not succeed that state would see the end of slavery, economic collapse, and mixing of the races, with possible subjugation of whites by African-Americans. This is a work of history and while I understand the need to recite the speeches, by the narrator Mitchell Dorian the use of reciting the whole speech in that voice, and not just the key elements made the narrator, at times, sound like Foghorn Leghorn. The book is a work of history and not drama. That said, the author does clearly show that the issues and attitudes of pre-Civil War America certainly play to a segment of the US population even today.
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- naw74
- 04-15-21
Racist Take - Leaves our a lot of information
Absolutely disgusted by this incredibly racist take on the Civil War. Of the Civil War information, nothing was patently false, but lies of omission are rampant. The same goes for current headlines used to make divisive racist points. I can’t believe this is required reading for college students. The voiceover actor used a caricature southern accent to make his racist points. I could not be more disgusted. If we are ever going to bridge the racial divide and truly understand the causes behind the Civil War, this is not the way to do it, through lies and hatred.
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4 people found this helpful