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Just as no man is a hero to his valet, so no author is to anyone who has to transcribe or translate them; but of the nearly two hundred books on this site (over 60 of them on American history), all of them rekeyed by hand, this is one of the few that the further I worked on it, the more I liked.
Every American schoolchild knows that 'the Southern states seceded from the Union, precipitating the Civil War': this book goes into the detailed dynamics of the process, showing it to be, as most processes are, much more complex than any propagandistic modern summary of it. Prof. Dumond spreads the blame around, but the bulk of it — rightly, in my opinion — he lays on Lincoln and his backers, who seem to have been about the only people in the country not to realize what a disaster they were bringing on themselves.
The skulduggeries and overly clever maneuvers of party hacks didn't help, either: all of which we get to see as near first-hand as we can, by extensive reference to newspapers of the time. In fact, The Secession Movement 1860‑1861 was only one-half of Dumond's output in 1931: the other book was a careful selection of editorials from those newspapers — which, curiously, saw its copyright renewed (one would expect his original writing to be the more carefully protected of the two), and I can therefore not share online, at least for now.
Two contemporary reviews of the work are also onsite:
• Frank Maloy Anderson in The American Historical Review
• J. G. de Rouilhac Hamilton in the Mississippi Valley Historical Review
For technical details on how this site is laid out, see below, after the author's preface and my table of contents.
Conflicting Political Principles, 1860 |
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A Project of Coöperation |
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The Crises in the Charleston Convention |
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The Democracy Divided |
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The Democratic Conventions at Baltimore |
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The Constitutional Union Convention and the Campaign |
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The Basis for Immediate Southern Independence |
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First Efforts at Compromise |
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The Result of the First Failure at Compromise |
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The Secession of the Gulf States |
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The Proposed Program for Reconstruction |
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The Washington Conference Convention |
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The edition transcribed here is the Negro Universities Press reprint, 1968. The original book was copyright 1931 — but the publishers failed to renew their copyright in the appropriate year, which would have been 1958 or 1959, so the text has fallen into the public domain (details here on the copyright law involved).
As almost always, I retyped the text by hand rather than scanning it — not only to minimize errors prior to proofreading, but as an opportunity for me to become intimately familiar with the work, an exercise which I heartily recommend: Qui scribit, bis legit. (Well-meaning attempts to get me to scan text, if successful, would merely turn me into some kind of machine: gambit declined.)
This transcription has been minutely proofread. In the table of contents above, the sections are shown on blue backgrounds, indicating that I believe the text of them to be completely errorfree. As elsewhere onsite, the header bar at the top of each chapter's webpage will remind you with the same color scheme.
The edition I followed was very well proofread, with very few typographical errors. I marked the few corrections, when important (or unavoidable because inside a link), with a bullet like this;º and when trivial, with a dotted underscore like this: as elsewhere on my site, glide your cursor over the bullet or the underscored words to read the variant. Similarly, bullets before measurements provide conversions to metric, e.g., •10 miles.
A small number of odd spellings, curious turns of phrase, etc. have been marked <!‑‑ sic in the sourcecode, just to confirm that they were checked.
Any overlooked mistakes, please drop me a line, of course: especially if you have a copy of the printed book in front of you.
For citation and indexing purposes, the pagination is shown in the right margin of the text at the page turns (as in the author's Preface above); these are also local anchors. Sticklers for total accuracy will of course find the anchor at its exact place in the sourcecode.
In addition, I've inserted a number of other local anchors: whatever links might be required to accommodate the author's own cross-references, as well as a few others for my own purposes. If in turn you have a website and would like to target a link to some specific passage of the text, please let me know: I'll be glad to insert a local anchor there as well.
The icon I use to indicate this subsite is an obvious one, a graphic view of the geographical split; bearing in mind that I've streamlined it, and a sizable part of that blue area was not yet formed into States. In the headers of the chapters, the thumbnail also shows how the differences became more and more pronounced:
With the march of events, not only does the South turn a more distinctive shade of red, but the North too loses much of its native blue. As intolerance took hold and the United States split, not only the South, but also the North, became less characteristically American, certainly to the extent that the nature of the Constitution as a compact between States was abandoned and coercion rather than consent became the basis of government.
Images with borders lead to more information.
The thicker the border, the more information. (Details here.) |
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A page or image on this site is in the public domain ONLY if its URL has a total of one *asterisk. If the URL has two **asterisks, the item is copyright someone else, and used by permission or fair use. If the URL has none the item is © Bill Thayer. See my copyright page for details and contact information. |
Site updated: 24 Aug 08