Reluctant Confederates

My first book, Reluctant Confederates: Upper South Unionists in the Secession Crisis (University of North Carolina Press, 1989), focused on Virginia, North Carolina, and Tennessee—the three large pivotal states in the Upper South that ultimately sided with the Confederacy.  I look especially at white Southerners who opposed secession and at their unsuccessful efforts to find some peaceful resolution to the crisis.  The book includes an extensive segment on conciliatory Northerners, most notably William H. Seward, the incoming secretary of state in Abraham Lincoln’s cabinet, who attempted to find common ground with Southern Unionists. A paperback edition of Reluctant Confederates appeared in 1993.  Excerpts from Reluctant Confederates were published in several widely assigned anthologies on the history of the Old South and the coming of the Civil War.

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