Like their forefathers of 1776, who justified American independence by condemning English parliamentary legislation and attacking George III's reputation, secessionists tore at the bonds that bound Americans to one another and their government as they maligned northerners and found sinister intent in federal policy. But equally as adamant on the opposite side were the determined abolitionists and others in the North who sought to hold the Union together.

Tariffs, the loss of political power, and the anti-slavery movement were all taking their toll on the South, but it took specific individuals and groups to bring to action the causes they believed in and thus to alter the course of history. The Men of Secession and Civil War, 1859-1861 traces the period from John Brown's 1859 Harper's Ferry raid to the Confederate attack on Fort Sumter and the subsequent secession of the Upper South states in April 1861.

The cast of characters in this book includes abolitionists John Brown and Salmon P. Chase; President Abraham Lincoln; U.S. Senator Stephen Douglas, who tried to compromise sectional conflict over territorial slavery and engaged in the famous Lincoln-Douglas debates; Andrew Johnson, whom Lincoln named his vice president in 1864; secessionists Jefferson Davis, Roger Taney, and Barnwell Rhett; John Breckenridge, the 1860 presidential nominee of the Southern DemocraticParty who was ambivalent about slavery but supported efforts to establish it in the territories; and Tennessee Senator John Bell, who employed several hundred slaves in his mines and rolling mill, yet opposed efforts to force slavery in the Kansas Territory.

Written for the general reader by historian James L. Abrahamson, The Men of Secession and Civil War is ideal for all who are interested in the Civil War and the underlying forces and key individuals who led the North and the South into this tumultuous period in United States history. This is the first in a series of books on the Civil War era from SR Books.