Americans debating the fate of slavery often invoked the specter of
disunion to frighten their opponents. As Elizabeth R. Varon shows,
"disunion" connoted the dissolution of the republic--the failure of the
founders' effort to establish a stable and lasting representative
government. For many Americans in both the North and the South, disunion
was a nightmare, a cataclysm that would plunge the nation into the kind
of fear and misery that seemed to pervade the rest of the world. For
many others, however, disunion was seen as the main instrument by which
they could achieve their partisan and sectional goals. Varon blends
political history with intellectual, cultural, and gender history to
examine the ongoing debates over disunion that long preceded the
secession crisis of 1860-61.