William W. Freehling
Senior Fellow, Virginia Foundation for the Humanities
“The Road to Disunion: The Climactic Uncertainty”
Tues., Oct. 30
3:30 p.m.
Alumni I Ballroom
George Watts Hill Alumni Center
UNC-CH campus

The James A. Hutchins Lectures are presented with support from the UNC General Alumni Association.

Secession was hardly the southern majority’s instant, automatic response to Lincoln’s election. Most Southerners initially favored a less dangerous, nonrevolutionary response. That unionist preference caused great nervousness in the hotbed of secessionism, South Carolina. This minority’s path toward daring to force a rebellion on the reluctant went through a conspiracy, a rather incredible coincidence, and aspects of a military coup in the Lower South. Only after Lincoln called up troops to “coerce” the secessionists did a majority of Southerners ally to the Confederacy’s colors. Even then, an ominous one third of southern whites (to say nothing of southern blacks) favored the blue over the gray. This tale of secessionists’ minority triumph, right before the war, thus bears crucial importance for comprehending the war itself, for understanding the variety of Southerners that made up the most unsolid South, and for appreciating potential minority dominion over a supposedly majoritarian democracy.
                                                                                    
In mid-April, 2007, the Oxford University Press published the second and concluding volume of Professor William W. Freehling’s Road to Disunion, subtitled Secessionists Triumphant 1854–1861 (a main selection of the History Book Club as was the first volume, published in 1990 and winner of the Owsley Prize). Together with the already-published sequel volume, The South versus the South: How Southern Anti-Confederates Shaped the Course of the Civil War (published in 2002 and winner of the Jefferson Davis Prize), the new publication completes a trilogy of books, offering a major reinterpretation of the causes of the Civil War and of Confederate defeat. The reinterpretation, written in the epic narrative style and replete with rare photographs, is as accessible to nonscholars as to scholars. The new book also brings to climax a lifetime’s work on the Old South and the Civil War, begun forty years ago with the publication of Prelude to Civil War; The Nullification Controversy in South Carolina (winner of the Nevins and Bancroft Prizes).

Professor Freehling grew up in Chicago, received his A.B. degree Magna Cum Laude and Phi Beta Kappa from Harvard College (where he wrote his honors thesis under Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.), and his M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley (where he wrote his PhD thesis under Kenneth Stampp). He has taught at Berkeley and Harvard, held full professorships at Michigan and Hopkins, and endowed chairs at SUNY Buffalo and at Kentucky. Now retired from a university career that brought him as many honors for teaching as for books, Freehling currently writes full time at the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities as a permanent Senior Fellow. His current projects include a book of essays on the writing of Road to Disunion (to be published in 2008) and a reinterpretation of Abraham Lincoln’s early presidency (to be published in 2009). He and his wife Alison (also an American history author) live in Charlottesville with their five Norwich Terriers and close to their two adult children (both journalists).