To Save Us All from Slavery's Power: Republican Alarms, Southern Terrors, and the Plunge Into Civil War

By Mark Wahlgren Summers

Book Overview

A dramatic reappraisal and retelling of the destruction of the American Union

To Save Us All from Slavery's Power is a novel assessment of the culmination of the sectional crisis before the Civil War. It is a story of mutual misunderstanding, journalistic mendacity, and irreconcilable visions of the country's future. With threats of disunion and rebellion rising in a thunderous chorus from the South in 1860, how could Republicans not have believed them until it was too late?

As Summers shows, Republicans in 1860 found it difficult to take the disunionist threat seriously because they knew that their party posed no imminent danger to slavery where it existed. But by then Americans were living in different political realities, and white Southerners could not see Republicans as anything less than an existential threat. To Save Us All from Slavery's Power describes in dramatic detail how negative perceptions between the sections festered, and how the antagonism between them reached, and then went past, the breaking point.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0813955270
• ISBN13: 9780813955278
• Release Date: June 2026
• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Length: 300 Pages