David M. Potter, in his well regarded and still quite valuable history, “The Impending Crisis”, published in 1976, says that at the time of the Mexican War the various aspects of American structure and culture were remarkably uniform in that they intersected and functionally supported their regional economies, shared the values that had supported the Revolution, and were homogeneous in that they were mostly of English speaking peoples, all with the exception of what had happened to the slaves. Potter makes this point so as to say the road to disunion was created after the Mexican War, and so could perhaps become unnecessary if other political and structural things had happened. That is very different from saying that the Civil War had been inevitable in the sense that what happened in the intervening years, or even back to the arrival of slavery in 1619, had been compromises to try to avoid the inevitable outcome of civil war, whether they were due to the arrangements in the Constitution that allowed slaves to be counted as three fifths the number for the calculation of state representation, or because of the three compromises composed by Henry Clay that allowed the Union to persist from 1831, the time of the Missouri Compromise, where north of that state the territories would be free states, to 1861, never finding a long term solution to the dilemma of slavery. The view today is very different from what it was in Potter’s time. Nowadays, people speak of slavery as having been the original sin from which we have not as yet staunched its wounds, there needing to be a great reckoning of what was unfolded in the past. No justice; no peace. I want to address this highly toxic issue through carefully addressing the words that people deploy in engaging this discussion.
Potter was following the mid century historians who wanted to see the United States as an integrated singularity, as having fully established itself as a distinctive and largely appealing nation, and so he used “exception”, when speaking of the slave and population, as a rhetorical figure to coordinate two ideas that were contradictory or just contrary and so go into what had happened for what ensued after the Mexican War. It is a historian’s way to make the prose move more smoothly. If the word “exception” is used more carefully, however, it means a violation of a pattern whereby it is a minority or lesser force than prevails that is usually less consequential or temporary, as when it is said that “an exception proves the rule”, which means that the rule prevails even if there are special reasons for the exception to be there at all. An exception cannot sustain itself for very long, for if it did, then it is something else, such as a burr under the saddle, which has to be confronted rather than dismissed. And that is the case with slavery. In one form or another, it persists rather than simply disappears, as other ethnic groups have done, the Jews and the Irish having assimilated into the mix of American culture, the present state of them largely nominal, just like the gens in Rome who were affiliated with one another in a group largely for hereditary rather than cultural differences.
So the question about exception has to do with persistence rather than transience, whether or not it is a minority. Another word that is relevant is that an exception is one that is coincidental rather than essential. There is something about the persistence of Jews in the world scene, and so is an exception of the Christian tradition, just as there is the persistence of African Americans, their situation and their heartaches, that persist since 1619, and therefore it is difficult to think these things as an exception. What is essential about the situation of slavery and ex-slavery? One view is that the South was essentially self-limiting in that slavery could persist only in an economy where cotton was grown and so slavery would not flourish in the wheatlands or in the Southwest. It would die of its own accord. Southerners, however, thought otherwise. The essential fact, the circumstance of slavery that could not be avoided, was that the South had its wealth consist of the price of slaves themselves and so the South had to find a way to export slaves to other places so as to keep up the price of slaves. Cuba and the Southwest were possibilities, as were, James McPherson says, slaves as working in the mines in Nevada and California.
Now what is being noticed is that the shift of focus is not an environmental or economic feature that is essential but something that might be thought coincidental in the sense that it is transitory: something political. It is the view of Southerners that they needed, no matter what, to expand slavery rather than to engage in a transition to a post slave regime, which is just what happened when sharecropping replaced slavery after the Civil War. Moreover, many of the slaveholders also believed, contrary to Jefferson Davis, who McPherson cites in another book, says that this would be a long war, the belief among Southerners that the Yankees would quickly be whipped or perhaps just let the Confederacy go without a fight, allowing the emergence of a new nation from the Atlantic shore to at least the western boundary of Texas, and from Mobile to Alexandria, Virginia, a nation larger and more robust than most European states. What the Southerners had not counted on was that Lincoln persisted in his war aims to maintain the Union whatever the obstacles he faced and the willingness of most of the North to withstand its losses.
Another way to describe what is not “essential” is “what might not have been” rather than conditions which persist because of, as I have said, the inevitabilities of cotton plantations or the wealth of investment in slaves. There are so many of these political decisions that are different from even the cultural ones that persist beyond the fashions of the moment, such as in the belief of the inevitable difference between the slaves as a people in opposition to the civilized white people. Politics is that which might not have happened, with all its contingencies, and that, I think, is the driving and decisive force of history. To again cite McPherson in a different one of his books, the problem with Jefferson Davis not following up after Bull Run or launching an invasion of Ohio was that he did not have enough weapons and manpower. But at least the manpower would have been solved if Davis had insisted on calling volunteers or even requiring a draft so as to press quickly against the Union. But either he thought it unlikely to press so hard and the Southern supporters of Succession were not as urgent to join the colors as Margaret Mitchell had described the case to be in “Gone With the Wind”. On such momentous decisions and sentiments at the moment are what decide the future.
Potter was on to something as the primacy of politics even if he used ordinary rather than more precise language. The issues between North and South were engaged in politics and, in particular, about expanding or contracting the number of free states rather than by, let us say, making slavery more moderate so as to make the claim that it was indeed a more hjumane system than was the case in the North, where the poor suffered from free market wages, which let insufferably low wages prevail. But the Southern States did not ameliorate the conditions of slaves and the Confederate Constitution also did not do so, slaves to be dealt with as states saw fit. Sherman, in his memoirs, says that he had suggested ways to ease slavery to his brethren at what became Louisiana State University before he left the South to join the Union. His compatriots at the time had no objection to those unspecified measures but nothing came of that, even after war began, when there was a time when European powers might have assisted the Confederacy if it had accommodate on slavery, but that was not to be, and there was a price to pay for the politics refusing to alter the culture.
Potter instead goes over the negotiations that had to do with whether Kansas would become a slave or a free state. He reviews quite vividly the high hopes of having the state become free and so cement the idea of state sovereignty, which would resolve the disputes between the North and the South. Things did not go well because the free state Democrats were not willing to engage in a vote that they believed had been previously rigged and Southerners began to take heart that the State would support slavery. At this point, it is possible to say that the divisions between the North and the South could no longer be settled through a fair election, and so the last hope of reconciliation was ended, however many more attempts there were afterwards, but a satisfactory resolution through the machinations of Kansas politics might have won out. Remember that the Arab Spring Westernizers in Egypt had some initiative when they flooded Tahrir Square with their demands. There was a legitimate election whereby they might have taken power but were surprised instead by the victory of the Muslim Brotherhood. That is because the Westerners had not coalesced around a single candidate, as people more astute in politics might have done, and so the situation was rife for El-Cici to take over as a military ruler who still remains in power. It is possible to say, of course, that Arabs have a cultural disinclination to democracy. Nevertheless, there was an election that might have mattered, and so have reset what were the cultural parameters, or what were the essential aspects of Egyptian society. So it seemed for a while that the Obama Administration thought at the time. Maybe politics could have rescued the United States from its road to disunion in the generation before the Civil War. Politics, because it can change in important things, can alter inevitabilities.
What is really essential about politics, even if politics are highly contingent and problematic, is that politics allows people to shift their views in a decisive and consequential way. Leaders and followers shift their views, as happened so recently when the South Carolina primary jumped on the Biden bandwagon and most of the Democratic aspirants for the nomination also followed suit lest they follow the Republican course where their nominees didn’t coalesce and so were stuck with a nomination all of them thought to be appalling. Momentary sentiment also applied at the time of the Civil Rights Movement. Southern resistance to desegregation was expressed as “Segregation now, Segregation forever” and by the universal condemnation of Southern Senators to refuse to comply with desegregation. Only a delicate tete a tete with two Presidents, JFK and LBJ, allowed Martin Luther King, Jr. to pull off desegregation, whatever were the cultural forces in favor of segregation in the South, with remarkably few casualties on either side of the segregation battle and we should remain surprised at how peaceful a transition it was. I find Black advocates are at the moment the people who sound intemperate however righteous may be their cause against police brutality, however convenient it is for them to neglect Black on Black brutality. Remember that political rhetoric is precious and precarious because a moment of it can prove so consequential.