Few topics in American history have generated as much scholarly interest as the secession crisis. Coming to very different conclusions about its origins, leadership, and purpose, historians such as Michael Holt, David Potter, William Freehling, Drew Faust, Daniel Crofts, Elizabeth Varon, and Charles Dew have provided robust analyses of the forces that led to the Civil War. Naturally, much of this scholarship on secession has focussed on South Carolina, the first state to leave the Union, with excellent studies by Steven Channing, Manisha Sinha, and Stephanie McCurry. Lawrence McDonnell's Performing Disunion finds little of value in much of this scholarship, claiming that “scholars have failed at writing anything like a real history of secession,” substituting “theoretical claims for archival research” (7, 11). Understanding secession, McDonnell argues, requires a close examination of Charleston, the birthplace of the movement, and the men who lived there.

McDonnell presents antebellum Charleston as a chaotic city, driven by internal factions and contradictions. Secession, he argues, arose not from a mass movement or from an ideological core, but from the social and cultural tensions embedded in Charleston's masculine culture. His focus is not so much on secession's leaders, but its rank and file, the young men who marched in the streets. He pays particular attention to the Vigilant Rifles, a volunteer militia company that emerges in 1860 and quickly disappears after Fort Sumter. He charts how these young men formed volunteer fire companies, fraternal organizations, and chess clubs, and their affinity for the blue cockade and hats. Drawing on the work of Eugene Genovese and Bertram Wyatt-Brown, McDonnell paints their world as obsessed with honor and distinctly premodern, rejecting wage capitalism.

Although based on impressive archival research and an exhaustive reading of local newspapers, several major problems mar this study. First, outside his dismissive comments in the introduction, McDonnell does not engage with the historiography: the scholarship is simply not referenced in the notes or in the bibliography, with a brief note pointing interested readers to his 2015 dissertation. Second, although McDonnell addresses questions of white masculinity, women and African Americans are almost entirely absent from this study, as is slavery as an analytical category: the inhabitants of McDonnell's Charleston appears to be almost uniformly white and male. Third, McDonnell's thematic approach makes understanding how these cultural factors contributed to secession difficult to trace. The book doesn't so much culminate in secession as circle around it. In a disorienting shift, the reader moves from December 1860 at the end of one chapter to the autumn of 1857 at the start of the next. Fourth, the book is too long by half. More thorough editing – cutting unnecessary asides and literary references that contribute little to the argument – would have produced a much tighter monograph that gave the reader a clearer indication of how the component parts worked together.

The most substantial problem with Performing Disunion is that it ultimately does not provide a coherent account of how and why white Charlestonians supported secession. To be fair, that's part of McDonnell's argument: young men joined the Vigilant Rifles not so much out of a well-formulated commitment to secession, but out of the inchoate dictates of the local culture which prioritized performing their masculinity in certain ways. However, the reader is left with more questions than answers. Indeed, McDonell admits in the final chapter that “we cannot know how vital the Vigilant Rifles’ story truly is” (402).

Although readers wanting to understand secession with leave disappointed, Performing Disunion does provide an interesting cultural history of late antebellum Charleston. McDonnell's thorough familiarity with the sources allows him to reconstruct the cultural geography of the city. When the Vigilant Rifles parade through Charleston, McDonnell's deep knowledge of its layout allows the reader to see the shops and hotels and to envision the cultural meanings that locals would have attached to the route. Indeed, for those interested in local history, Performing Disunion provides a wealth of new insights.