Disunion!

Language has a profound power to shape political reality. In the decades of the early republic, Americans debating the fate of slavery often invoked the specter of disunion to frighten their opponents. This title deals with the most provocative word in the political vocabulary of antebellum America.

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This title deaks with the most provocative word in the political vocabulary of antebellum America.Language has a profound power to shape political reality. In the decades of the early republic, Americans debating the fate of slavery often invoked the specter of disunion to frighten their opponents. According to Elizabeth Varon, ""disunion"" connoted the dissolution of the republic - the failure of the founders' effort to establish a stable and lasting representative government. For many Americans in both the North and the South, disunion was a nightmare, the image of a cataclysm that would reduce them to the kind of fear and misery that seemed to pervade the rest of the world. For many others, however, that same specter made disunion the most effective instrument with which they could achieve their partisan and sectional goals.Varon blends political history with intellectual and cultural history to examine the ongoing debates over disunion that long preceded the secession crisis. She focuses not only on politicians but also on a wide range of reformers, editors, writers, and commentators. Included here are the voices of fugitive slaves, white Southern dissenters, free black activists, abolitionist women, and other outsiders to the halls of power. In a new and expanding nation still learning how to meld disparate and powerful interests, the language of disunion proved volatile. As the word was marshaled by competing sectional interests and suffused Americans' visions of the future, the politics of compromise grew more remote and a sense of the inevitability of armed conflict between North and South took hold.