In a letter published last Friday, Mr. Cory St. Esprit recommends reading C. Dew's Apostles of Disunion to understand the major causes of the Civil War. I agree completely. [The library call number is E459.D4 2001.]

But I cannot see how he can possibly reconcile that with his other assertions.

He claims that Southern soldiers fought "to preserve personal freedom."

He claims that "an issue was slavery, but it was so much more than that."

But what the book actually does is to provide still more evidence for what most people already knew; as the author sums it up (page 81), "slavery and race were absolutely critical elements in the coming of the war."