thinking about charles dew's apostles of disunion, a tiny slip of a book that packs a punch when read in 2024. foul, crude invective from minor men, delivered without regard to how foul and off-putting outsiders may find it, drove the nation to catastrophe, you say?
![to you. Fortunately they misjudged the durability of a Kennedy - and am back at the base now and [illegible]. As soon as possible I shall try to send you the whole story.
Much love to you all,
Jack](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:mwbazc3yyjfvbljylhwaz2ma/bafkreihcnwwbvwemxxqdjer4f4l4swx3abi343bsb26ohomqisipn7by4y)
![As sectional tension mounted in late 1860 and early 1861, five states of the lower South - Mississippi, Alabama, South Carolina, Georgia, and Louisiana - appointed commissioners to other slave states and instructed them to spread the secessionist message across the entire region. These commissioners often explained in detail why their states were exiting the union, and they did everything in their power to persuade laggard slave states to join the secessionist cause. From December 1860 to April 1861, they carried the gospel of disunion to the far corners of the South. [...]
They were often relatively obscure figures [...]
In the late nineteenth century when editors at the War Department were assembling a documentary record of the Civil War, they included extensive coverage of the commissioners in the volume dealing with the onset of the conflict - a clear indication that they considered these men to be key players in the sequence of events leading to the war. [...]
The commissioner's words convey an unmistakable impression of candor, of white Southerners talking to fellow Southerners with no need to hold back out of deference to outside sensibilities.](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:mwbazc3yyjfvbljylhwaz2ma/bafkreicnek6jyaadkzcahmnnxeycq6unwu5afzpvjptyfbnfuod3iolu7i)
