This first volume of William Freehling's long-awaited, monumental study of the south's road to disunion offers a sweeping social history of the antebellum South from 1776 to 1854. All the dramatic events leading to secession are here from the Missouri Compromise to the Kansas-Nebraska Act, as are the major figures of the era, including Jefferson Davis, John C. Calhoun, Andrew Jackson, Thomas Jefferson, Nat Turner, and Frederick Douglass. Drawing heavily on contemporary sources, such as diaries and letters, Freehling evokes all the colour and cruelty of the vanished Old South and reveals the significant divisions of opinion that prevailed even in the slave states.