Book Review: Decade of Disunion: How Massachusetts and South Carolina Led the Way to Civil War, 1849-1861
Decade of Disunion: How Massachusetts and South Carolina Led the Way to Civil War, 1849-1861. By Robert W. Merry. New York, NY: Simon and Schuster, 2024. Hardcover, 528 pp. $20.99.
Reviewed by Robin Friedman
Historians often have the two-fold goal of increasing understanding about the past, and showing the relevance of aspects of the past to the present. Robert W. Merry’s recent book, Decade of Disunion: How Massachusetts and South Carolina Led the Way to Civil War, 1849-1861, fulfills both these objectives. Merry, the author of five earlier books on American history, worked for many years as a journalist in Washington D.C. and is a political commentator from a conservative perspective.
In Decade of Disunion, Merry tells the complex history of a complicated era in an engaging and thorough manner. With the broad events and movements of the 1850s, his book focuses on individuals, familiar and unfamiliar, who played critical roles. Merry introduces each of the many characters in the book with succinct, telling descriptions while following their activities through the course of the momentous decade. A short Epilogue takes the story of some of the profiled individuals to the years beyond the 1850s.
The book has three inter-related themes. First, the book studies the 1850s, the “Decade of Disunion,” and shows how the events of those ten years cascaded into civil war. The book begins, where an earlier book by Merry, A Country of Vast Designs[1], left off, with the acquisition of large amounts of territory in the war with Mexico during President James K. Polk’s administration. Issues arose immediately about whether the territory would allow slavery or not. The United States teetered on the brink of disunion until the Compromise of 1850, brokered by Henry Clay and Stephen A. Douglas, seemed saved the day. However, the Fugitive Slave Act proved unpopular in the North, and Southerners despised the end of the slave trade in Washington DC. No one was satisfied. Then, with the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, the hoped for compromise began to unravel. The Kansas-Nebraska Act, based on the idea of popular sovereignty, led to violence in Kansas between pro and anti-slavery factions, including violence and voter fraud by the pro-slavery faction and a massacre committed by militant abolitionist John Brown and his followers. Subsequent events included the caning of Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner by South Carolina congressman Preston Brooks on May 22, 1856; the notorious March 6, 1857, Dred Scott Decision by the Supreme Court; John Brown’s October 16-18, 1859, raid on Harpers Ferry, and others. The traditional political alignments of the day broke down and the sectional Republican Party emerged leading to the election of Abraham Lincoln as president with a minority of the popular vote and Electoral College votes only from Northern states. This history has certainly been told before, but Merry tells it convincingly and well.
Merry’s book adds to the historical account of this period by his focus on the prominent roles that Massachusetts and South Carolina played in the drama. The two states differed from the earliest days of settlement, with Massachusetts founded by Puritans and South Carolina by aristocratic Cavaliers. They were similar, Merry finds, in fostering extremism, meaning a willingness to dissolve the Union and the Constitution for an end rather than working within the system and toward true compromise. He discusses the strong secessionist movement in South Carolina from the early 1850s exemplified in figures such as Robert Barnwell Rhett. He also points to voices of moderation and union which struggled to prevail in South Carolina politics until near the end of the decade. In Massachusetts, Merry discusses the abolitionist movement of William Lloyd Garrison. Garrison believed the Constitution was “a covenant with death and agreement with Hell” for countenancing slavery and advocated for disunion from the slave states. Garrison was well outside the political mainstream in Massachusetts even for strong opponents of slavery such as Charles Sumner, who battled against the institution within American constitutionalism. Other radical elements in Massachusetts included the “Secret Six,” a group of intellectuals and industrialists who surreptitiously financed and assisted John Brown’s Harpers Ferry raid. Merry takes the reader through the intricacies of state politics and works to tie the South Carolina and Massachusetts histories to the broader history of the decade.
The third theme of Merry’s book combines the earlier themes and is the most provocative. Merry is critical of those, North and South, who supported their positions by appealing to a “Higher Law,” moral or religious, separate from constitutionalism, finding that it was critical to the polarization and divisiveness that led to the Civil War. While taking this position, Merry also recognizes the moral evil of slavery. His hero in the book is Abraham Lincoln, who, prior to the outbreak of the Civil War, stressed the moral evil of slavery and strongly opposed its extension to the territories while trying to respect the Constitutional protections given to slavery in the states where it already existed. Merry does not, in the final analysis find compromise on the slavery issue possible and he sees the Civil War as the probably unavoidable result of a Union trying to be half slave and half free.
In an article published at the time of the publication of this book[2], Merry warns of what he sees as the polarization and divisiveness of current American politics on several issues, none of which, in his view, have the moral imperative of the issue of slavery. The article draws parallels between the United States of the 1850s and what Merry sees as the United States of the present. Merry urges Americans to tone down the search for moral absolutes and certitudes and to work toward compromise and cooperation within the framework of American constitutionalism.
With Decade of Disunion, Merry has written a thoughtful book that will interest serious students of the Civil War and American history.
[1] A Country of Vast Designs, James K. Polk, the Mexican War, and the Conquest of the American Continent. Robert W. Merry, author. New York, Simon & Schuster, 2010.
[2] “Are We Living Through Another 1850s?” Robert W. Merry, author, “The American Conservative”, July 22, 2024, https://www.theamericanconservative.com/are-we-living-through-another-1850s (digital).
I am currently reading this book and think it is a great companion to the Civil War canon. Interestingly enough, I had also thought about the similarities of the 1850’s with today’s political environment. I discovered this book in an interview of Mr. Merry on the Civil War Talk Radio podcast. It is a worthwhile listen for those that are interested in the topic.
Oops. Preston Brooks caned Sumner in 1856. Must be a typo,
Yes. Thank you for the catch,
A worthy topic. My Pennsylvania ancestors, who sent 30 young men to the Federal armies, were Democrats, and they were furious at the incompetence of the Buchanan administration, and furious with the Abolitionists who were advocating for making war on their Southern brethren to end something that was legal, protected by the Constitution, and, as was to be seen, was allowed to continue unabated in the states remaining in the Union until the end of 1865. They were willing to fight to preserve the Union – and five of them died, and nearly all the others variously suffered capture, near-starvation, disease, gunshot wounds, broken bones, etc. – but not to end slavery. None approved of it; none approved of making civil war to end it when it was Congress’ job to end it.