David M. Potter - Lincoln and His Party in the Secession Crisis

David Potter is my favorite historian.  He writes so clearly and backs his narratives with impeccable scholarship.  He did his homework unless some historians today.

This book was first published in 1942.  The author has a preface to that edition and an updated preface published in 1962.  The book includes an introduction from Daniel W. Crofts published in 1995.

In the intro Crofts says that Potter was a southerner but he transcended his lost cause upbringing.  All of us progressive southerners must follow this path.  We southerners genetically need to remember the past, but let's remember it accurately.

One the biggest takeaways from Potter is the fallacy of reading history backwards.  Historians must try to view a situation as it was viewed at the time.  P. ix

Lincoln view as the country seemed to him at the time he became President was a mere mortal.  He was not the transcendent immortal who saved the Union and abolished slavery.  I tend to think about Lerone Bennett's point that Lincoln was forced into glory.  He was the crucial person who did save the country while slavery was abolished along the way, but it all happened moving forward from 1861.  Events could have turned very differently.

In his 1962 preface Potter asked the MAIN question: Could and should have the Civil War been avoided?  No doubt it could have prevented, say, if Lincoln had approved of the Crittenden proposals. But SHOULD it have been avoided?  That's the question that would likely invite different answers. One conclusion for sure is that the country never should have gotten to the point where this question has to be asked.  P. xxxviii

The Crittenden Compromise would not have solved the slavery question.  It would have been only a stopgap measure which would have kicked the slavery question down the road.  P. xxxvix

Until the very end, Lincoln thought he could settle the secession crisis peacefully.

With the Ft. Sumter crisis did Lincoln act as Potter says in the belief that the matter could still be handled peacefully, or is Stampp correct that Lincoln had decided that violence was inevitable and that therefore he wanted to make the Confederates make the first move?