Rebels in the Making: The Secession Crisis and the Birth of the Confederacy by William L. Barney (review)

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• Rebels in the Making: The Secession Crisis and the Birth of the Confederacy by William L. Barney
• Lawrence T. McDonnell (bio)

Rebels in the Making: The Secession Crisis and the Birth of the Confederacy. William L. Barney. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020. 392 pp. ISBN: 978-0190076085, cloth, $34.95.

Publication of Rebels in the Making is a cause for celebration among historians of the Civil War era. It is the most valuable single-volume study of the secession crisis, crafted by a master scholar at the apex of his career. Deeply researched and powerfully synthetic, it promises to spark debate and generate further explorations of this crucial subject.

To say that William Barney's book has been long anticipated would be an understatement—but that has become almost par for the course for those who study disunion. The available sources are vast, the historiography so extensive, complex, and high-caliber, the problems to resolve so knotted and subtle. Making sense of the fateful choice to break up the Union and establish a slaveholders' Confederacy requires mastering the cultural, economic, and political contexts of the national crisis—an Everest that many sensibly shy away from. Others tackle just a portion of the problem—secession in a state or city, the role of an individual or a revolutionary network, the influence of gender, honor, or some other inspiring force. That alone can consume a professional lifetime. The hardiest, like Allan Nevins or William Freehling, have told their seemingly all-encompassing tales over multiple volumes, produced across decades. What hero can hope or dare to do that now?

Rebels in the Making reframes the task: to explain comprehensively a vast national tragedy in human terms on a reasonable scale. Against great odds, it succeeds splendidly. Meshing voluminous research in manuscripts, newspapers, and other contemporary sources with deep understanding of historiographical debates, Barney's book, with its brevity and flow, will astonish careful readers. Tightly focused on the crisis of 1860–61, Rebels makes its "kaleidoscope of events and emotions" abundantly comprehensible precisely by arguing its central thesis: that disunion was not inevitable or structurally foreordained (4). Rather, Barney [End Page 74] shows how contingency ruled everywhere, how the intersection of bad ideas and drastic decisions by specific people in distant locations combined to destroy the United States. For what? Slavery, not state rights or any other reason, he shows. Whodunit? Anxious, self-interested slaveholders, specifically, thwarted younger men of property who worried about the decay of debt, the fracture of class alliances, Republican scheming, and turncoats in their own ranks. Some of this fretting was paranoia or guilt, Barney explains, but much owed to an outraged sense that the walls were closing in. More than this, he shows, the political conditions that brought crisis to fruition were markedly different in Virginia and Mississippi; the puzzle facing Alexander Stephens in rural Georgia was nothing like that confronting Henry Gourdin in hotheaded Charleston; and even marginal or disfranchised Southerners, male and female, white and black, shaped events powerfully. The Rhetts and Yanceys and Davises of a hundred other studies are still centerstage here, but they are prodded and cheered on by vocal elite white women and troubled by enslaved arsonists and shadowy abolitionists looking to do harm in a hundred places across the South—or so locals thought. There are many movers in this book, and its chief mover, Barney, coordinates ideas, actors, events, and implications with remarkable ease. This is quite a sprightly and engaging national catastrophe.

That attention to specific detail, locality, contingency, and personality is one of the book's chief strengths. Barney deploys his vast knowledge with judicious efficiency, resolving thorny questions with almost ruthless dispatch and keeping the narrative moving forward. Early on, he pauses deftly to discuss the uneven prosperity of the 1850s, problems of drought and heat, soil exhaustion and indebtedness. Later, he lingers in Texas, Arkansas, and North Carolina to show how narrowing options moved those states into the Confederate column. Every intervention here is useful, if only to prompt debate. Religion in Rebels receives far more space than honor; how self-interest trumped paternalism more consideration than whether slavery was capitalist or...