Far from a monolithic block of diehard slave states, the South in the eight decades before the Civil War was, in William Freehling's words, "a world so lushly various as to be a storyteller's dream." It was a world where Deep South cotton planters clashed with South Carolina rice growers, where the egalitarian spirit sweeping the North seeped down through border states already uncertain about slavery, where even sections of the same state (for instance, coastal and mountain Virginia) divided bitterly on key issues. It was the world of Jefferson Davis, John C. Calhoun, Andrew Jackson, and Thomas Jefferson, and also of Gullah Jack, Nat Turner, and Frederick Douglass. Now, in the first volume of his long awaited, monumental study of the South's road to disunion, historian William Freehling offers a sweeping political and social history of the antebellum South from 1776 to 1854. All the dramatic events leading to secession are here: the Missouri Compromise, the Nullification Controversy, the Gag Rule ("the Pearl Harbor of the slavery controversy"), the Annexation of Texas, the Compromise of 1850, and the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Freehling vividly recounts each crisis, illuminating complex issues and sketching colorful portraits of major figures. Along the way, he reveals the surprising extent to which slavery influenced national politics before 1850, and he provides important reinterpretations of American republicanism, Jeffersonian states' rights, Jacksonian democracy, and the causes of the American Civil War. But for all Freehling's brilliant insight into American antebellum politics, Secessionists at Bay is at bottom the saga of the rich social tapestry of the pre-war South. He takes us to old Charleston, Natchez, and Nashville, to the big house of a typical plantation, and we feel anew the tensions between the slaveowner and his family, the poor whites and the planters, the established South and the newer South, and especially between the slave and his master, "Cuffee" and "Massa." Freehling brings the Old South back to life in all its color, cruelty, and diversity. It is a memorable portrait, certain to be a key analysis of this crucial era in American history. "This is an excellent book; the best that we have for the early period of the sectional conflict. I will put it on my reading list for my Civil War and Reconstruction course. Students in U.S. introductory courses could benefit from this book."--William C. Harris, North Carolina State Univ. "Many of the details, to be sure, are fresh, and so are some of the shifts in emphases."--Carl N. Degler, The Journal of American History "Freehling has struck as powerful blow for history as narrative art in this remarkable recounting of the southern secession movement up to 1854."--George M. Fredrickson, Stanford University. "The major work of scholarship by the author of Prelude to the Civil War....Will interest readers with its brilliant evocation of the antebellum South."--Publisher's Weekly The first volume of Freehling's monumental study of the antebellum South and the road to Civil War In the first volume of his long-awaited, monumental study of the South's road to disunion, eminent historian William W. Freehling offers a sweeping political and social history of the antebellum South from 1776-1854. William Freehling is Singletary Professor of the Humanities at the University of Kentucky. His first book, Prelude to Civil War , won both an Allan Nevins and a Bancroft Prize and is recognized as one of the most significant studies of the Civil War era published in the past three decades.