David M. Potter, The Impending Crisis, 1848-1861

I keep, mentally, a short list of revelatory works. These are not simply great books. They are books that, because they contain or refute a world view, reveal (or, at least, revealed to me) a new way of thinking about large subjects. The list does not contain any of the obvious works: anyone who is not influenced by Thucydides, Gibbon, Burke, or Smith is simply not very smart, and classics like these are included on any list of worthwhile reads by right.

My list fluctuates slightly towards its tail, depending on the times and my concerns. Lower down in the list are B.G. Burkett’s Stolen Valor, which will demolish everything you think you know about Vietnam; Correlli Barnett’s Collapse of British Power, a remarkably angry work of cultural history and imperial strategy; Christopher Andrew’s Sword and the Shield, the story of the KGB and of the greatest intelligence coup of the Cold War; and J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, a conservative epic of grand strategy.

At the top of the list sits, securely, David M. Potter’s The Impending Crisis, 1848-1861. The Civil War, even more than the Revolution, is America’s Illiad and Odyssey, and its historians are among American’s finest – Catton, MacPherson, and Guelzo, to name only three of many. But Potter’s work is the greatest of all. Completed after his death by Don E. Fehrenbacher – a superb historian in his own right – Potter’s greatness rests partly in his command of his era, partly in the way that all his facts drive his narrative, and partly in the grace of his prose.

But, first, it rests in his irony of his title. For what Potter does is to write a history of the coming of the Civil War from the perspective of a generation who did not know it was coming. Slavery mattered to them, of course, but so did a great many other things – the Mexican War, Irish immigration, the Know Nothings, Manifest Destiny, tariffs, and religion. Potter’s genius is to show how all of these things – many of these only tangentially connected to the Civil War, formally considered – were pulled into the maw of the coming conflict, and in the end brought it closer.

Lincoln appears, of course, but so do many other now less-remembered statesmen, all treated not quite with sympathy, but with deep understanding: Calhoun, Webster, Clay, and Douglas. Potter’s appreciation for rhetoric is profound, and his summaries of the character and appeal of these great men often rises to the level of aphorism. And he does not simply practice rhetoric: his extended appreciations of the great speeches of the day, in an era when speeches were of formidable length and intellectual quality, leaves me in awe of them, and of him.

A truly great work about the Civil War is, by itself, a work for the ages. But Potter rises to the level of revelation because this is not, simply, a work of history. Potter was more than a historian of the Civil War – his challenge to the Turner thesis, contained in his short People of Plenty, shows him as a historian of nations. And at heart, Impending Crisis is a work of political philosophy, of nation-building (and nation-breaking), and of international politics. It shows the Civil War as not just an American epic, but as one great instance of an enduring problem.

Potter’s argument, presented most fully in his chapter on “The Nature of Southern Separatism,” is that multiple loyalties – to town, to region, to religion, to state, to nation – are not a symptom of schizophrenia. Rather, they are commonplace. If they are all aligned, if they are congruent, if it is possible to maintain all of them at the same time, then their multiplicity poses no problem, and they can even be mutually reinforcing. But when events push one loyalty unavoidably out of alignment with the other – as happened in the approach to the Civil War – the conflict between loyalties becomes real, and intolerable. The job of the historian is to explain how and why loyalties that used to cohere came to conflict.

That is a task that Potter performs better than any other historian of the approach of the Civil War. But his understanding of the nature of loyalties, the political conflicts created when they come to conflict, and the need for statecraft that prevents them from doing so, is applicable to problems in politics and international affairs that have nothing to do with the Civil War. Potter was no conservative, but he advances a vision that might be called Burkian in its emphasis on the dangers of careless change and its appreciation of the value of multiple loyalties cemented by tradition. Read his work for its story, for its language, and to better understand the United States. But like all great works, it is about far more than it is about.

Ted R. Bromund is the Senior Research Fellow at the Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom and a frequent contributor to Commentary.