The Impending Crisis: 1848-1861
David M. Potter, 1976
Henry Steele Commager introduced this posthumous edition of Potter’s magnum opus (completed by Don Fehrenbacher) by praising Potter’s ability to see that although “slavery was indeed the overshadowing problem of the decade,” it seemed not to have “monopolized the politics of the decade as it now tends to monopolize its history.” Potter returned to this point again and again. Abraham Lincoln was hardly a household name in 1850 and it was far from inevitable in the minds of most Americans that slavery would lead to secession, emancipation, and Civil War. Even in “Bleeding Kansas,” Potter said, “a majority of the inhabitants apparently did not care very much one way or the other about slavery...an overwhelming proportion of the settlers were far more concerned about land titles than they were about any other public question.” This is especially interesting to me, as I seem to spend a lot of my time wondering what the regular people out in the countryside actually thought about all the “historic events” I’m reading about in all these books.
Potter began his story with a description of James K. Polk’s response to the treaty ending the Mexican-American War in 1848. President Polk didn’t want to sign but was pressured by his knowledge that the war, which was “highly unpopular throughout a large part of the country,” had to end. The peace, Potter said, created a nation and also its greatest challenge. A few pages later, he suggested that the Missouri Compromise allowed slavery to take center stage, arguing that “the issue structured and polarized many random, unoriented points of conflict on which sectional interest diverged.” For the most part, Potter bypassed these voices and issues on the periphery of the main political story, but it’s interesting to speculate how they might have motivated some of the otherwise inexplicable decisions of the central players. For example, “the Whigs passed over their party leader, Henry Clay, and nominated Zachary Taylor...a Louisiana planter who owned more than a hundred slaves but whose nomination had been engineered in part by two prominent anti-slavery Whigs from New York--Thurlow Weed and William H. Seward.” I’m reminded of a couple of 1844 letters I found from a New England Yankee traveling in upstate New York. As a Free Soil candidate and activist, his main political goal in that election year was to stop Henry Clay. How much of that feeling was still strong in Weed and Seward’s constituency and how did influences from home play on the national politics practiced by Congressmen, Senators, and Presidential candidates?
Potter’s description of the 1848 election returns also suggests I should look at this more closely, especially when I get around to studying third parties. “The results of Martin Van Buren’s candidacy,” he said, “were especially confusing, for he carried enough normally Democratic votes in New York to throw the state to Taylor, but enough normally Whig districts in Ohio to throw the state to Lewis Cass. He did not carry any state, but he ran ahead of Cass in New York, Massachusetts, and Vermont. His vote was large enough to make all northern Democrats respectful of the Free Soilers, but small enough to discourage his followers from continuing their third-party organization, so that in 1852 most of them returned to the Democratic ranks.” Later, in 1856, after building a large and apparently strong organization, the nativists “were giving their support to John C. Frémont, a man who had never been in a Know-Nothing lodge and whose marriage to the daughter of Senator Benton had been performed by a Catholic priest.” Stories like this, which Potter called one of the most “obscure and neglected aspects of American political history,” just seem to be screaming for someone to take a closer look at them.
Potter’s skepticism led him to ask interesting questions throughout his story. “Was the Underground Railroad,” he wondered, “really a large-scale organization, actually operating to facilitate the mass escape of fugitive slaves, or was it not rather a gigantic propaganda device, more significant psychologically than as an institution?” I can imagine the controversy a question like this could cause. But I am fascinated by Potter’s repeated arguments that “It is also realistic to recognize that for many people there were other public issues more important than slavery.” Even if we ultimately condemn these people a little bit for their parochial outlook, if that’s what a large portion of the population were thinking, it’s important for us to know it. One of our difficulties understanding Free Soilers and nativists seems to be that it’s hard to imagine the frustration of people in upstate New York and the (old) West, who had just spent a generation or two carving out farms and towns from the forest; and just when things were settling down for them, change began to accelerate. A rising tide of immigration and the extension of plantation slavery and southern social organization into the territories threatened to overturn the new society they had just worked so hard to build. Why do we consider it a moral failure if some of them were more concerned about the challenges to their neighborhoods and families, than about the plight of faraway strangers or about an abstract ethical/political argument?
The Free Soil party, Potter said, “mitigated the strain on the old parties by removing the strongest anti-slavery pressures within them.” He attributed part of its disappearance after the 1848 election to the fact that “43 percent of the Free Soil vote had been concentrated in the Empire State,” and “In 1849, John Van Buren led most of his father’s Barnburner followers back into the Democratic fold.” In Ohio, where Potter said the Free Soil party “collapsed,” the election resulted in “giving the state’s Senate seats to Chase and Wade, two of the most pronounced anti-slavery men in public life.” The irony of this result suggests we might need to reevaluate how we measure success and failure in third party politics
Potter reminded us that party choices were not always made for high ideological reasons. English immigrants, he said “went Whig by a ratio of 75:25,” while by 1844 (according to Benson) “the Catholic Irish of New York were Democratic by a ratio of 95 to 5 ...The Irish, one imagines, took one look, saw the British and the Puritans on one side, and knew they must belong to the other.” He also reminded us that our ideas of what motivated politics do not necessarily apply. “The antislavery and Nativist groups frequently avoided a contest with one another,” he said, “for the good reason that both appealed to the same elements of the population.” He continued, “American historians have been slow to recognize the relation between Know-Nothingism and Republicanism in 1854,” partly because “it has been psychologically difficult, because of their predominantly liberal orientation, for them to cope with the fact that anti-slavery, which they tend to idealize, and nativism, which they tend to scorn, should have operated in partnership.” And he calls attention to John R. Commons’ 1909 article “Horace Greeley and the Working Class Origins of the Republican Party,” which suggested that “homestead policy was the primary motive force of the Republicans.”
Potter also alluded to some stories that may hold the potential for interpretations he doesn’t necessarily see. He briefly mentioned Asa Whitney, who in 1844 proposed to build a railroad from Milwaukee to the Pacific if the government would sell him a “strip of land sixty miles wide...for sixteen cents an acre.” Potter said Whitney’s scheme created three “articles of faith” for railway enthusiasts: “There must be a railroad to the Pacific; it must be financed by grants of public lands along the route; and it must be built by private interests which received these grants.” I don’t see the inevitability of private ownership, trusts, and the Credit Mobilier in Potter’s description of Whitney’s proposal. I tend to trace all that back the land grants Lincoln and Douglass got for the Illinois Central in 1851.
Another really interesting moment was when “On the evening before Washington’s birthday, George N. Sanders, the American consul in London, held a dinner party at which the guests included seven revolutionists--Massini, Garibaldi, and Orsini of Italy, Kossuth of Hungary, Arnold Ruge of Germany, Ledru-Rollin of France, Alexander Herzen of Russia--and the American Minster to the UK, James Buchanan of Pennsylvania. Sanders was one of the most aggressive members of the Young America movement, whose members believed emphatically in both the world mission and the territorial growth of the United States. He and his guests drank toasts to ‘a future alliance of America with a federation of the free peoples of Europe’.” (quoting Curti, “Young America”)