This first volume of William Freehling's long-awaited, monumental study of the south's road to disunion offers a sweeping social history of the antebellum South from 1776 to 1854. All the dramatic events leading to secession are here from the Missouri Compromise to the Kansas-Nebraska Act, as are t[...]

The Road to Disunion, Vol. II completes William W. Freehlings monumental study of how the South came to begin the Civil War. Perhaps, as William Freehling surmises, the war was inevitable, because the issue of slavery sharply divided the South from the rest of the nation in the 1850s. Certainly the [...]