Nearly 150 years after the firing on U.S. troops at Fort Sumter the causes of America’s Civil War are still being examined.

Among the scholars who have taken a long view of the conflict’s genesis is Temple University professor of history Elizabeth Varon. She will present a lecture, “Gendered Strife and Disunion: A New Look at the Origins of the Civil War,” at 8 p.m. Thursday, April 26, at the Elston Inn and Conference Center on Sweet Briar’s campus.

Elizabeth VaronVaron’s talk draws from her forthcoming book, provisionally titled “The Spectre of Disunion: The Origins of the Civil War, 1789-1861.”

“It argues that as far back as the founding, Americans across the political spectrum were haunted by fears of ‘disunion’ — of the fracturing and demise of their fragile Republic,” Varon wrote in description of the book.

In antebellum America, politicians, reformers and opinion makers routinely invoked disunion “talk” in public discourse, she said. It centered on the fate of slavery and on sectional tensions between the North and South, but also reflected pervasive anxieties about the role of women in American politics.

“Female abolitionists were routinely assailed, by anti-abolition Northerners and Southerners alike, for fomenting ‘disunion’ by ‘agitating’ the question of slavery and thus alienating the North from the South,” Varon said.

“At the same time, proslavery Southerners worried about the loyalty of white Southern women — who were presumed to be ‘sentimental’ and thus susceptible to antislavery rhetoric — to slavery.”

Varon’s Sweet Briar talk will look at how disunion was wielded as an accusation against the abolitionists, and how the growing antislavery coalition answered that accusation. She also will delve into how defenders of slavery, in Virginia and elsewhere, worked to ensure the loyalty of white women to the system.

“Both of these processes reveal how integral women, and gendered political rhetoric, were to antebellum debates over slavery and sectionalism,” she said.

Varon says her work on “The Spectre of Disunion” is a continuation of her interest in integrating social and political history. She argues that “women’s history is not a separate strand of American history but essential for understanding what have traditionally been defined as the ‘big’ questions — such as why the South seceded, and why the Confederacy lost the Civil War.”

Much of Varon’s professional research and writings are on Virginia history. She attributes that in part to her European immigrant parents’ keen curiosity about history and to growing up in Fairfax.

“We spent a lot of time exploring Virginia’s great historical sites,” Varon said.

“My long-standing fascination with Virginia history deepened in my high school years as my mother became very active in county and state politics. I’ve been especially interested in how various historical actors, women in particular, have defined themselves as ‘Virginians’ and as ‘Southerners’ — and how the meaning of those labels has been contested, and changed, over time.”

Varon’s lecture is the last in a three-part series hosted by Sweet Briar to celebrate both women’s history and the Jamestown 400th anniversary. Although her subject isn’t about Jamestown, it is related to another set of approaching anniversaries.

“My book was commissioned by [University of North Carolina] Press as part of series to commemorate the sesquicentennial of the Civil War,” she said. “So I am committed to the notion that such centennials should occasion not only celebration but a new round of critical thinking about the past.”

For more information, please e-mail
kchavigny@sbc.edu or call (434) 381-6234.

— By Jennifer McManamay, SBC staff writer