M ichael D. R obinson . A Union Indivisible

In A Union Indivisible: Secession and the Politics of Slavery in the Border South, Michael D. Robinson examines the secession crisis in Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri. Robinson has produced a clearly argued and tightly focused work, and he contends that “the comparative frailty of the peculiar institution produced among white border Southerners anything but a willingness to relinquish control over the fate of their bondspersons” (4). Living under the Constitution within the United States, proslavery Unionists argued, was the surest way to protect slavery, white hegemony, and social order. Kentucky’s John J. Crittenden, a central character in the book, led efforts to forge sectional compromises, and Unionist hopes for a settlement persisted long after the cotton states had seceded. When the clash at Fort Sumter, President Lincoln’s call for troops, the secession of Upper South states, and the beginning of the war in earnest ended prospects for any negotiated resolution in the near term, Unionists pivoted. They proclaimed that the Republican administration and the northern people were waging war to preserve the Union, not to destroy slavery. A combination of the Unionist “offensive” (a word Robinson uses countless times) and force applied by the Union Army thwarted secessionists and kept the border states in the Union through the close of 1861, when Robinson’s story ends.

Constitution · Economic history · Economics · Hegemony · Offensive · Political science · Politics · Secession · Settlement (finance) · Sociology · Spanish Civil War · White (mutation) · Communism, Protests, Social Movements · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies