In "Apostles of Disunion," the author, Charles Dew attempted to explain what caused the South to secede and start a civil war. Dew's ancestors fought for the Confederacy, and growing up, he was taught the only reason the South had seceded was for states' rights. It was not until thorough research in the official documents of the Union and Confederate Armies that Dew concluded that if slavery was in fact, the major cause for the secession of the South and the civil war; these primary sources are the key into finding the truth in finding evidence about the civil war that had it not been an issue about slavery, there would not have been a civil war at all. .
The secession commissioners repeated the same message throughout any argument: Lincoln and the Republicans were abolitionists that determined to establish racial equality; secession and independence offered white men the only alternative to degradation and cultural destruction. The secession commissioners argued the Republican threat was for "racial equality, race war, and racial union. The authors of Mississippi's "Declaration of Immediate Causes," for instance, claimed that the North "advocates Negro equality, socially and politically, and promotes insurrection and incendiarism in our midst" (Dew 13). Another example would be how Alabama's Leroy Pope Walker summarized that Republican rule would cost southerners first, "our property," "then our liberties," and finally "the sacred purity of our daughters" (79). .
However, the South had the wrong conception in what the Union wanted. Freeing the slaves was not in the Republican platform of 1860.