The Impending Crisis, 1848-1861

In order to understand the crucial years between the Revolutionary War and the Civil War, years in which the character and future course of the American republic were largely created and charted, there are three superb books whose breadth and depth make them required reading: The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln by Sean Wilentz, Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815 (Oxford History of the United States) by Gordon S. Wood and The Impending Crisis, America Before the Civil War 1848-1861. The years between the two wars featured immense growth in the size of the new nation, essentially filling the continent and fulfilling manifest destiny. America was now a shining new land bordered by two oceans, an island of spectacular size whose geographic isolation helped it to give birth to a new form of democracy, free from the fear of invasion. The spectacular growth in size functioned as a powerful attraction to landless immigrants. The American form of republican democracy, always a work-in-progress, now contended with an increasingly diverse population whose experience in their new country was like a political laboratory in which the nature of freedom was held up for study Reading all three books offer the reader a firm background in the nature of the events of the era and will provide a true, in-depth understanding of their significance. Where David M. Potter's book really shines is in its tight focus on the critical years of 1848-1861. These were years in which the Mexican War provided America with its southwest. When the dust had cleared and hostilities had ceased, Mexico had lost about one-third of its territory, including nearly all of the present-day states of California, Utah, Nevada, Arizona and New Mexico. The 1857 Dred Scott decision in the Supreme Court held that blacks, whether now enslaved or free, and whose ancestors were imported into the U.S .and were sold as slaves, could not be an American citizen and therefore had no standing to sue in federal court. The ruling essentially said that slaves were not people, but (valuable) property. Abolitionist John Brown resorted to violence in reaction to that ruling and to others. Especially significant was the rise of Abraham Lincoln to the presidency and his willingness to address the slavery issue head-on by issuing the Emancipation Proclamation in 1862. The Impending Crisis, with its keen focus on the final strife-ridden 13 years, is an especially fine introduction to the Civil War. The cascading calamities that led to war are the source of this book's superb narrative. If you are looking for an exceptional analysis of the Civil War's genesis. The Impending Crisis is one of the finest available. If you wish to place these final years in context, then read all three books for a superlative overview of events. The Impending Crisis 1848-1861 is a true classic of historical writing.

“The Impending Crisis” is a masterful telling of the story of US politics from the Mexican-American War through Fort Sumter, one of the most convoluted and confusing periods in American political history. Potter walks through the challenges and major events of the time, introducing the reader to the powerful and varied voices that moved and shaped the country, driving us inexorably towards the great American tragedy of the Civil War. This book deep dives into key events while also showing the threads that tied what might seem like disparate events into a complex whole. Potter is academically rigorous, citing widely varied primary sources and citing extensive footnotes, while still maintaining superb readability. All in all, this was both an entertaining and deeply informative read.

I would rate this as one of the most important books I have read. For the first time, I came to an understanding of many of the mysteries of the events that lead to the Civil War which seem impenetrable to a modern reader. Potter first outlines the demographic and social conditions of the United States in the period which preceded the War. The turning point was the Mexican War which upset the balance between North and South with the addition of new territories whose status regarding slavery was unclear. Potter shows that ethnically, the American population in 1850 was quite homogeous---mostly Protestants of English backgroud. Thus, ethnic diversity was NOT the cause of the tensions between North and South. Potter shows that the extreme emotions regarding Kansas and the other new territories regarding the status of slavery in them was purely theoretical...the geographical, climatic and agricultural conditions there were not conducive to a slave economy, yet the South was extremely emotionally involved in this abstract argument. The book then shows how national economic development was retarded by the South in such matters as the building of a Transcontinental Railroad and passage of the Homestead Act, both of which they opposed because they viewed them as strengthening anti-slavery elements in the US. One particularly fascinating thing Potter shows is the fact that anti-slavery sentiment overlapped with anti-immigrant feeling which was espoused by the Know-Nothing nativists. Potter says this seems irrational to a modern person, but he shows how the anti-Catholic feelings aroused by the recent Irish immigration was part and parcel of view of Catholics being part of a supposedly sexually perverted, conspiratorialist organization which they believed the Catholic Church represented, but those who held this felt the same way about the aristocratic slave-owing plantation barons in the South. Thus the new anti-slavery Republican Party went out of its way to attract nativist, anti-Catholic voters. Another interesting fact that is brought out is that many militantly anti-slavery and abolitionist people actually had little love for the Blacks and felt the best solution was to free them and then "send the back where they came from", i.e. Africa. Thus, many anti-slavery people held these views because they thought that slavery was bad for them, by giving slave owners inexpensive labor which free white laborers could not compete with, fearing that it would weaken the free labor movement in the US. Abraham Lincoln came across like this during his famous 1858 Senate race with Stephen Douglas, but Potter attributes this more to political opportunism and trying to win votes among racist Illinois voters than to real sentiments on Lincoln's part. Another valuable section deals with the legal intracicies of the Dred Scott decision. I found out that it did NOT legalize slavery in the states, only Congress was stripped of the power of prohibiting slavery in the territories. It was then believed that states were sovereign and they did have the rigth to prohibit slavery within their borders. Finally, Potter shows that up until Fort Sumter, the North thought the South was bluffing and would not go through with secession. Both the Democratic and Whig parties had both Northern and Southern branches and both had pro- and anti-slavery wings so this political balance held the country together. The collapse of the Whigs and the victory of the anti-slavery, sectional (i.e. Northern only) Republican party in the election of 1860 was the straw that broke the camel's back. I found the book a very good, well-written interesting read, and it provides a real education to the reader regarding social and political developments in a state of national crisis. Highly recommended.

David Potter died before this book was published so all the success and praise, including a Pulitzer Prize, could only be received posthumously. It is however a magnificent work that captures the over a decade period that was leading up to the Civil War. The book is part of the New American History series not the Oxford History series that I had been reading. Unlike the Oxford History volumes, it does not dive as deep into the average people as well as the elites with the same amount of elegant detail, nevertheless it is a great book. A small note to any readers that when they read this book they may to want to be aware beforehand: it was written before the term 'African-American' became widely accepted and instead uses the anachronistic word 'Negro'. It actually took me a minute to catch on because when reading about the past one comes about the word Negro quite a bit, normally I just view the term in its historic lens, but as I read further the term was used quite generally referring to 'the Negro population' and to Fredrick Douglass as a 'leading Negro thinker' even when not talking from a historical perspective. This book covers the political battles of the many participants who were in the political arena in the late 1850s; the work also covers the political theories of the state of American Nationalism, and the formation of Southern Nationalism. Potter also discusses how the impact of books and literature that were written in the 1850s impacted the time period. One example of a powerful and hard-hitting book was the original The Impending Crisis that dealt with the problem of slavery from a southern prospective of non-slaveholding whites. A more famous example of strong literature is the immortal Uncle Tom's Cabin. "In almost every respect, Uncle Tom's Cabin lacked the standard qualifications for such great literary success. It may plausibly be argued that Mrs. Stowe's characters were impossible and her Negroes were blackface stereotypes, that her plot was sentimental, her dialect absurd, her literary technique crude, and her overall picture of the conditions of slavery distorted. But without any of the vituperation in which the abolitionists were so fluent, and with a sincere though unappreciated effort to avoid blaming the South, she made vivid the plight of the slave as a human being held in bondage. It was perhaps because of the steadiness with which she held this focus that Lord Palmerston, a man noted for his cynicism, admired the book not only for 'its story but for the statesmanship of it.' History cannot evaluate with precision the influence of a novel upon public opinion, but the northern attitude toward slavery was never quite the same after Uncle Tom's Cabin. Men who had remained unmoved by real fugitives wept for Tom under the lash and cheered for Eliza with the bloodhounds on her track."p.140 One of the things Potter discusses in the book that I was very pleased to here is the tendency for most people to look back at the past with the feeling of inevitability. This attitude does everyone a disservice because it creates a misinterpretation of the past and the people who were living in it. Although, his own title of this book helps with that narrative that he was trying to combat. "Seen this way the decade of the fifties becomes a kind of vortex, whirling the country in ever narrower circles and more rapid revolutions into the pit of war. Because of the need for a theme and focus in any history, this is probably inevitable. But for the sake of realism, it should be remembered that most human beings during these years went about their daily lives, preoccupied with their personal affairs, with no sense of impending disaster nor any fixation on the issue of slavery."p.145 Potter also discusses the Lincoln-Douglas debates, and while doing so he tries to cut though the legend and misinterpretations that often are made about this event. He tries to make it plain what the two opponents believed and what they were fighting for. "The difference between Douglas and Lincoln--and in a large sense between proslavery and antislavery thought--was not that Douglas believed in chattel servitude (for he did not), or that Lincoln believed in an unqualified, full equality of blacks and whites (for he did not). The difference was that Douglas did not believe that slavery really mattered very much, because he did not believe that Negroes had enough human affinity with him to make it necessary for him to concern himself with them. Lincoln, on the contrary, believed that slavery mattered, because he recognized the human affinity with blacks which made their plight a necessary."p354 He explains the raid of Harper's Ferry and the antislavery crusader John Brown in his rather insane attempt to cause a slave rebellion. In Potter's narrative what Brown lacks as an armed rebel he excels as a martyr. The North morns his death, which infuriates the South and makes them feel more isolated. Thus after the election of Lincoln they begin their attempts to break the South away from the Union. Everything discussed in this review and more is covered in this incredible book. I would recommend it to people who already have a strong knowledge of the history of this country who would like to increase their understanding of this difficult time period.

The story of the runup to the Civil War has been told many times, with many different points of view, and with a focus on many different elements of the evolving bitterness between the North and the South. None of these accounts has captured the relentless force and complexity of the conflict as well as David Potter's The Impending Crisis. It almost seemed natural that the United States in 1850, a nation then only just over 60 years old, was still very much growing into its transcontinental form, still encompassing two vastly different cultures - that of the patrician slaveholders of the South, stuck a bit in the past, and of the mercantile interests, surging with energy and ambition, in the North. Not only were there economic and cultural differences but the political gulf that separated the North from the South ruined one of the two great parties of the country, the Whigs, and splintered the Democratic party into two belligerent wings. Through the forces of territorial expansion and increasing imbalances in economic power, the North confronted the South with gradually louder demands to dismantle the slavery system. Slavery, however, in the South had been too firmly woven into its cotton economy, based as it was on cheap labor. In addition, many in the South felt the potential insurrection potential of having six million exploited souls in its midst. Potter tells this agonizing drama with great skill. It is, indeed, a remarkable story, full of human conflict - Calhoun drifting further and further away from his former roommate, Henry Clay; Steven Douglas - never able to grant the concept of citizenship to the black population -- arguing for the rights of popular opinion in whether or not to retain or reject slavery in the new territories against an extraordinary rising politician in the new Republican party, Abraham Lincoln; Charles Sumner, the abolitionist Massachusetts senator clubbed brutally on the floor of the Senate by his senatorial colleague from South Carolina. More than anything, Potter tracks the gradual disintegration of the political parties. Since the first election, in 1796, the winner had carried both slave and free states until 1848. After that, no winner carried both the North and the South. In fact, as Potter points out, the next winner to prevail in both sections was Franklin Roosevelt in 1932. As the Whigs weakened, a new faction, the Republican party, picked up the pieces, almost all of which were derived from the Northern states. The Democratic party was increasingly a party led by the South. In fact, by 1860, the Republican candidate, Lincoln, won the election without even being on the ballot in the Southern states. This realignment of the political parties was a complicated process but Potter lets it unfold in a logical and absorbing way. By the time Potter arrives at the election of Lincoln in 1860, the story is complete. The South had far fewer natural advantages going in to the armed conflict. It had a far smaller economy, a smaller population, a sizable proportion of the population that could not be relied upon to remain orderly and submissive, and less developed transportation and communication systems. The South did, however, possess military figures of enormous skill, some with almost unnatural talents in picking the right fights at the right time. Only with the rapid promotion of Ulysses S. Grant ("Unconditional Surrender Grant") did the Union begin to turn the tide. This is book that requires time to absorb; each major topic is discussed with great care to present the context of both sides in the conflict. Each topic moves the reader along the path to understanding the core reasons for the differences between the North and the South. It is a fully rewarding experience to be led by Potter through this great story.

This is historical scholarship at its finest! I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book from start to finish; there were moments when I couldn't but marvel at the force of David Potter's intellect. This book gave me a good insight into what a historian aims to accomplish in his writing and made me proud that my late dad was a historian. Slavery had been accommodated at America's founding as a means of preserving the Union in the hope that it would outlive its usefulness and, by itself, pass into oblivion. That hope turned out to be rather misplaced and a costly miscalculation, as the peculiar institution gained in strength in the South of the United States, threatening the stability and viability of the Union. This book examines how Congress sought to resolve the dilemma of the continued existence of slavery in the land of liberty over the course of five presidencies (Polk, Taylor, Fillmore, Buchanan and Lincoln). Newly acquired territories in the West and Mid-West would serve as proxy battlegrounds on the question of slavery between the North and South, and repeated (failed) attempts at forging compromise legislation would amount to kicking the can down the road until the first shots were fired at Fort Sumter. Potter's "The Impending Crisis" isn't just a historical account of events leading up to the war; it is a treatise on political maneuvering and the place of leadership, or the lack thereof, in precipitating a monumental crisis. The chapter examining the positions of Lincoln and Stephen Douglas on slavery and the Union is one of the most insightful works of analysis I have ever read in any field. I can't speak highly enough of this work. I strongly recommend it to anyone who seeks to have an understanding of how America came to a civil war and why Lincoln occupies a place of eminence amongst the nation's leaders. The latter point will be best understood not primarily from the book's portrayal of Lincoln himself, but from it's portrayal of the leaders that came before him. One wonders how much more Mr. Potter would have contributed to historical scholarship had he not died rather prematurely. We owe him a debt of gratitude for this magisterial work!

I've been "out of school" for decades. I suppose, like many adult Americans, what we learned way back in the day of elementary, middle, and high school as pertains to American history has been forgotten or relegated to a status of less importance. Marriage, career, parenthood and family come to absorb most of our thoughts and musing. American history resides in the realm of academics but our lives remain replete with the mundane concerns of our day-to-day life. This book, The Impending Crisis 1848-1861, reveals what we've probably forgotten and discloses how our nation's leaders and citizens vehemently wrestled with the institution of slavery, its relevance to the newly obtained westward territories, the Southern rationale and proposal for disunion, and ultimately the consequential civil war. As mentioned, many years have passed since my learning of American history happened. The events in the book both impressed and pressed upon me how significant, troubling, impactful and unprecedented were the years from 1848-1861. Democracy aptly describes the process that our government leaders partook in during these turbulent years. We owe it to ourselves to be enlightened by the narrative presented by David Potter.

Potter argues in Impending Crisis that both prior to, and during, the time period his book covers, the Union had problems with sectionalism and argued that, "the North-South division which ended in the Civil War was nothing unique, but was only the most acute manifestation of a phenomenon which has appeared again and again (29)." Potter also states that, "Since the sectional impulse took a political form and circumstances of politics conditioned the operation of sectionalism," his work would primarily focus on political events (29). With the thesis and the focus of his book expressed, the author skillfully handles the increasingly complex political world the United States found herself in during the years between Polk and Lincoln's administrations. Potter does a masterful job of drawing in the reader, often making the reader feel he was listening to the author personally. The last two chapters are written, or at least completed by Don Fehrnebacher. Fehrnebacher does a fine job keeping the voice and tone of Potter alive. Sadly, Professor Potter passed away before he could finish this book, or as the editor, Fehrnebacher, says, "his magnum opus" (viii). Potter argues in chapter one that it was President Polk's war with Mexico and the ceded Southwest Territory that let to the sectionalism becoming insurmountable. The rest of his book is given over to the explanation of political events that built to a crescendo under Buchanan's administration, the incoming Lincoln presidency, and the firing upon Fort Sumter in 1861. His book is extensively footnoted throughout, giving the reader immediate recourse to the author's sources. This format is far more useful than the more current form of endnotes. Potter does not simply narrate events. He will digress to a scholarly discussion on various topics. For example, in chapter two, Potter explains the various schools of historical thought regarding why the North and South came to blows. Potter shows that the events swirling about the developing maelstrom were anything but clear and rejects the tendency of Monday-morning-quarterbacking that many historians like to indulge in. The confusion and frustration on all sides are painted in vivid detail. Each of the main historical figures, from Abraham Lincoln to John Brown, are explained, their past and motives, which in turn, makes the actions of the individuals understandable. Nothing is one-dimensional in Potter's book. I find Potter's argument that the North and South have had divisional problems since the beginning to be accurate. The face off over slavery that Polk's Southwest Territory produces, as Potter shows, acts as the catalyst increasing the fissure between the North and South. Polk gives understanding to why the Civil War came about. His book is insightful and well reasoned.

The definitive one-volume historical guide to the lead up to the American Civil War.

100%

The Impending Crisis is a step by step analysis of the sectional conflict between North and South leading to the Civil War. The expansion and protection of slavery was at the absolute heart of the conflict, Even if I liked the book, I found I learned nothing that the first chapters of "Battle Cry of Freedom" did not cover, in a better fashion at that. Good points for "The Impending Crisis" are the Lecompton story, the Lincoln-Douglas debates and the hours leading to Fort Sumter's attack by P.T. Beauregard. The weak point is that slavery is presented much like an abstract concept, not a living hell human beings were actually living. Also, the fact that the South was a backward region, where education for white children as well as blacks where of no concern to the politicians, among other things, are not mentionned, much less covered. Although a good read, in my opinion it is still an incompte work.