Repeating Our Racist Past

PAST IS PROLOGUE?

Is America Doomed to Repeat Its Racist Past?

The minority that wants to hate has a passion however twisted, that most of the majority does not. And now they have the president of the country in their corner.

MICHAEL TOMASKY

08.26.17 12:00 AM ET

Each week of the Trump era brings some new, specific thing to be depressed about. One week it’s the future of the Constitution. Another it’s contemplating the shame of the United States starting a nuclear war. Another it’s something else.

In the wake of Charlottesville, it’s been race. More specifically, for me, the horror of the racial future that awaits us in both the short and longer terms. In the short term, it seems virtually certain that we’re in for another Charlottesville, and another, and another. It’s hard to think of any logical reason why the neo-Nazis wouldn’t march again; they got lots of publicity—not much of it positive, but as the old saw has it, they spelled their names right. And the president of the United States had their backs.

So one suspects that we’ll see more of these, and that the president will do what he has always done in cases like this and vacillate between reading a script with all the verve of a hostage and then saying and tweeting what he really thinks. It seems nearly impossible that it will dawn on him that as president he embodies the nation and should strive to represent both, or all, sides. He’s far too small-minded and insecure for that. And besides that, it’s increasingly hard to dispute the argument that this guy who does and says a lot of racist things is just plain racist, so he’s going to keep doing and saying racist things.

So that’s the short term. At the risk of tempting you to click away from this column and read something less morose, I have to say that right now, the long term for our country looks even worse.

If we look at our nation’s entire racial history, we see a pattern, and it’s not a reassuring one. I divide that history into six chapters.

Chapter 1: Slavery. The original sin needed eight decades and a four-year war that killed 600,000 people to eradicate. The period was also characterized, we should remember, by monstrous political equivocation on the part of many people who knew better and a near-constant effort to placate the South and let it keep its peculiar institution. Anti-slavery but non-abolitionist Northern politicians decided from the Constitutional Convention onward that preserving the union was more important than doing anything about slavery. It was only after Stephen Douglas sold out the North and agreed to “popular sovereignty” for Kansas and Nebraska that everyone admitted what they (and their forebears) knew deep down all along—the slavery was immoral and unsustainable and inconsistent, to put it mildly, with the stated values of the republic.

Chapter 2: Emancipation. This was one of the great accomplishments in our history, and Abraham Lincoln will rightfully live on forever for doing it. It’s also worth remembering that it didn’t just happen. Ultimately it had to be done at gunpoint, during Reconstruction. But done it was. 

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Chapter 3: The Backlash. Emancipation was opposed immediately in the South, and yes, by a handful of “Copperheads” and “doughfaces” in the North, too. They couldn’t do much at first, with the Union Army occupying the South. But once the troops left in 1877, the backlash started in earnest, and you know that grim record: resegregation, Jim Crow, state constitutions in the South drawn up specifically to exclude blacks from political and civic life, the rise of the Ku Klux Klan, and more. 

We can say that the backlash lasted until the mid-1920s, culminating perhaps in that big Klan march on Washington in 1925, with 25,000 men in robes and hoods marching down Pennsylvania Avenue. It’s not as if there was no progress for African Americans in this time. Some African Americans came to national prominence like George Washington Carver and Booker T. Washington, the NAACP was founded, the Harlem Renaissance began. But the point is that when black people were given a new level of freedom in Chapter 2, millions of white people rose up in Chapter 3 to resist and reverse it.

Chapter 4: The quiet status quo. The hallmark of this 30-year period from the 1920s to the 1950s was how little things changed in both South and North. In the South, we had apartheid. In the North, we didn’t quite have that, but we did have a society in which black people could expect to be hired for only a few categories of jobs and were, with a few exceptions, culturally invisible. The Daughters of the American Revolution wouldn’t even let a black woman sing at their hall until a sitting first lady basically made them (actually, the concert took place at the Lincoln Memorial). Harry Truman did integrate the armed forces, but that was about all that happened.

Chapter 5: The civil rights era. We might say this lasted until the mid- to late-1970s; yes, until Ronald Reagan. Funny, isn’t it, how the two periods of emancipation and a fuller equality for black people in this country were exactly 100 years apart.

Chapter 6: The post-civil rights era. This, too, has been an era of backlash against the progress. It’s more complicated than the first backlash, because in today’s America, black people have made tremendous advances. The vast majority of African Americans today are middle class (though net-worth racial disparities are massive). Black writers and entertainers are beloved by millions of whites in a way that wouldn’t have been possible before the civil rights revolution. America’s favorite physicist is a black man, and of course there’s Barack Obama.

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But the backlash has been real and severe. On voting rights. In our public schools, which are now resegregated back to pre-1970s levels. In conservative rhetoric about the “moocher class,” in the anger that is constantly doused with gasoline by talk-radio hosts about the people who want something for nothing; and now in the streets of Charlottesville, egged on by the man we elected—we elected—to be the president.

I used to hope—used to think, actually—that the United States was on the cusp of turning a new page in race relations. I thought this back in the 1990s, when I noticed, for example, that Bob Dole didn’t play racial-resentment politics in his 1996 presidential run. I took that at the time as a more hopeful sign than I should have. I realized later that it was less a noble restraint than a lack of blunt racial instruments laying around. If Bill Clinton had vetoed the welfare bill, Dole would’ve been right there with the worst of them.

Then I thought Obama’s victory signaled something. No, not the “end of racism.” But I did think it mean that a majority of Americans was now ready for an uneasy racial truce. Not kumbaya time, but an acceptance of each other that was something a little better than grudging; an ability to sometimes agree—and more importantly, to sometimes disagree, but without making the disagreement racial.

Actually, I still think Obama’s victory signaled that about a majority of Americans. But what I didn’t reckon enough was that minority, which doesn’t want any part of a truce. They want to hate. They may have been a minority in 1789, and 1861, and 1956 when Rosa Parks rode on that bus. They are definitely a minority today. But they have a passion, however twisted, that most of the majority does not. And now they have the president of the country in their corner.

We’re not going anywhere on this, I’m afraid. We have a cycle of status quo, progress, and backlash, a cycle that has repeated itself twice in our 240-odd-year history. I once thought we were close to breaking that cycle. Now I fear we’re stuck in it. Is it really going to be the 2060s—that is, every 100 years—before we see important progress again? And are the 2080s fated to produce more backlash? I once thought we were better than that. But it may be precisely who we are.

Confronting our History

What Trump's Generation Learned About the Civil War

History textbooks used in New York City during the president’s childhood called the Klan “patriotic,” and downplayed the role of slavery in “the War Between the States.”

A scene from the Gettysburg Cyclorama, an 1883 cyclorama painting depicting the climactic clash between Union and Confederate forces during the Battle of Gettysburg in 1863.Paul Philippoteaux / Wikimedia Commons

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In March, President Trump visited the Hermitage, a former slave plantation in Tennessee once owned by Andrew Jackson, to pay homage to his 19th century predecessor. For Trump and his then-chief strategist Steve Bannon, the parallels were irresistible: An agrarian populist from the Tennessee frontier, Jackson was the first to cast himself as the common man’s warrior against corrupt Washington elites and moneyed political interests.
But even more revealing than their similarities was how Trump viewed his predecessor's place in American history. In an interview a month after the trip, he alleged that Jackson, who died in 1845, could have prevented the Civil War:

I mean, had Andrew Jackson been a little later you wouldn’t have had the Civil War. He was a very tough person, but he had a big heart. He was really angry that he saw what was happening with regard to the Civil War. He said, “There’s no reason for this.” People don’t realize, you know, the Civil War, if you think about it, why? People don’t ask that question, but why was there a Civil War? Why could that one not have been worked out?

Historians today broadly agree that a slaveholding aristocracy was irreconcilable with the nation’s founding pledges of liberty and equality, and that decades of compromises between top American statesmen only delayed an inevitable confrontation. But the president’s view that the conflict could’ve been “worked out” would’ve fit at home in another place: the history classes of his youth.

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Until the late 1960s, history curricula in Trump’s home state of New York largely adhered to a narrow vision of American history, especially when discussing slavery, the Civil War, and its aftermath. This was true in the predominately white public schools throughout the country. The African American experience and its broader significance received little to no attention. When textbooks did cover black Americans, their portrayals were often based on racist tropes or otherwise negative stereotypes. Trump’s understanding of the Civil War may be out of step with current scholarship, but it’s one that was taught to millions of Americans for decades.
“The dominant story was that secession was a mistake, but so was Reconstruction,” Jonathan Zimmerman, a New York University professor who studies the history of American education, told me. “And Reconstruction was a mistake because [the North] put ‘childlike’ and ‘bestial’ blacks in charge of the South, and the only thing that saved white womanhood was the Ku Klux Klan. When African Americans read this in their textbooks, they obviously bristled.”

Thanks to his family’s wealth, Trump did not attend public school in Queens, where he grew up. In 1951, his father Fred enrolled him in the Kew-Forest School for kindergarten, and he stayed there until seventh grade. When he was 13 years old, his father sent him away to the New York Military Academy, a rigorous military-themed boarding school in the Hudson Valley—to “get him in line” because he was too “rambunctious,” Trump told The Washington Post last year. He completed his high-school education there and graduated in 1964.
Attending private institutions would not have inoculated the president from the retrograde learning of this era, because private schools often used the same history textbooks and curricula as their public counterparts.
Trump’s high-school education coincided with the resurgence of the civil-rights movement and its push to improve American history classes. The fight has its roots in World War II. Defeating Nazi Germany and its racist ideology inspired a new generation of black activists, Zimmerman said. Spurred by the wartime realignment of the American economy, thousands of black families left the South for new opportunities in the North and the West during the Second Great Migration in the 1940s. They quickly encountered stark differences in what their children learned about America’s past. Segregated black schools in the South had often used works by black scholars like Carter Woodson, who became known as the father of black history, and W.E.B. Du Bois to teach history. Northern and Western schools followed a different path. Their textbooks about slavery and the Civil War prompted protests from black families and community leaders.

African American parents and students emerged as the strongest voices in protesting history curricula. Major black newspapers like the Chicago Defenderand the New York Amsterdam News regularly covered new developments in the fight. Civil-rights organizations like the NAACP and the Urban League appointed committees to review textbooks and push back on flawed material. They pressured public officials and textbook publishers to present a more accurate and comprehensive view of black Americans in history.
“For more than 100 years, the American educational system has revolved around four basic R’s—reading, ‘riting, ‘rithmetic, and racism,” historian Lerone Bennett Jr. wrote in Ebony magazine in 1967. “By sins of commission and omission, by words said but also by words not said, facts conveniently overlooked and images suppressed, the American school system has made the fourth R—racism—the ground of the traditional three-R fare.”
New York’s schools were no different. A 1957 report found a textbook on the city’s recommended list which, while roundly condemning its violence, said of the postwar Ku Klux Klan, “Its purposes were patriotic, but its methods cannot be defended.”
In 1960, four years before Trump graduated high school, Albert Alexander, a textbook analyst for the New York City Board of Education, complained that publishers had warped their coverage of the Civil War so their products could be sold in both the North and the South. He noted that four of the textbooks used in city schools only referred to the conflict as the “War Between the States,” the segregationist South’s preferred term.

In 1966, Irving Sloan, a New York social-studies teacher, published a study for the American Federation of Teachers reviewing how contemporary American history textbooks covered black history. He opened by observing that many publishers had improved their coverage in recent years. But he also qualified his praise of their progress, noting that “none of the texts have completely succeeded, and several are so far from the target that they invite suspicion.”
Sloan noted, for example, that even some newer textbooks “still cling to the romanticized versions of the happy slave life.” Abolitionism was mostly depicted as a solely white movement. “No text gives enough attention to the participation of Negroes in this struggle for their freedom,” he observed. Things got worse when students moved past the Civil War. “In analysis after analysis of the texts, the reader will find the statement that after Reconstruction ‘200-300 pages pass before we get a reference to the Negro,’” Sloan wrote. “This is why whites do not always ‘see’ Negroes. As Ralph Ellison puts it, they are ‘invisible.’ And the reason they are unseen is that they are left out from such a large part of American history.”
The quality of the textbooks reviewed by Sloan varied. He praised the junior-high text Land of the Free for its quality, which he partly credits to eminent black historian John Hope Franklin’s co-authorship. Others received more scathing treatments. Sloan’s critiques of a senior-level high-school history textbook titled Our Nation From Its Creation typify the most common errors he encountered.

In a section dealing with different opinions about the causes of the “War Between the States,” the authors include the opinion of ‘more and more Northerners and some Southerners … that slavery was a moral evil and had to go.” The text's presentation of the Southern response to the moral question is worth quoting in full: “Aren't our slaves much better off than your so-called free workers in the filthy factories of the North? One Southern writer suggested that the so-called free laborers of the North would be better off if the North turned them into slaves.”
[...]
Coming to the period after the war, the Reconstruction era, the authors discuss the condition of the Freedmen. A statement such as, “Some thought that now that they were free, life was going to be one long spree, without work,” is at best gratuitous and at worst unsupportable. But it remains consistent with much of the tone of this text's treatment of the Negro.

“Since the authors of the text are New York City teachers, it probably has wide use in the city,” Sloan concluded. “What is more, it probably has wide use in the South. Among high school texts, this gives one of the poorest treatments of the Negro encountered in our study.”

Racist material permeated other sections of the American curriculum, well beyond the field of history. Geography textbooks depicted Africa as “the dark continent” and either ignored it or portrayed it as a place of cannibalism and barbarity. “[Black] critics condemned biology textbooks, which often reflected eugenic theories of racial hierarchy,” Zimmerman wrote in a 2004 article on U.S. textbook changes after the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision. “Still other blacks attacked music textbooks for including songs by [prolific 19th-century songwriter] Stephen Foster, complete with Foster’s original lexicon—‘darkey,’ ‘nigger,’ and so on.”
These textbooks shouldn’t be interpreted as reflecting their readers’ views, Zimmerman cautioned me. Instead, they offer a window into what students would have learned in a previous era. “This tells us more about the culture of race as expressed in the curriculum than it does about what any given individual imbibed or not,” he explained.

Washington and Jefferson devoted their lives to setting the American experiment in motion; Lee and Jackson killed thousands of their countrymen in an attempt to end it.

With the horrors of slavery diminished and its presence occasionally justified, it’s easy to see how someone from Trump’s generation could view the Civil War as a conflict whose core tensions could be “worked out” without violence. Trump himself has recently embraced other extraordinary views of that era. After a deadly attack on demonstrators protesting a white-nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia earlier this month, he became an avowed defender of Confederate statues.
“So this week, it is Robert E. Lee. I noticed that Stonewall Jackson is coming down,” he said at a Trump Tower press conference on August 15, referring to two Confederate generals’ statues. “I wonder, is it George Washington next week? And is it Thomas Jefferson the week after?” His embrace of the statues and the white-nationalist movement defending them served clearly political purposes, but it also betrayed a flimsy understanding of the country’s history: Washington and Jefferson devoted their lives to setting the American experiment in motion; Lee and Jackson killed thousands of their countrymen in an attempt to end it.

Of course, Trump is far from the only American politician with an outdated understanding of the Civil War era. In a January 2016 town hall in Iowa, Hillary Clinton—who is one year younger than Trump—said that had he not been killed, Abraham Lincoln’s more tolerant policies may have hastened national reconciliation, and that what actually happened left white Southerners “feeling totally discouraged and defiant.” My colleague Ta-Nehisi Coates noted similarities between Clinton’s statement and the Lost Cause view “that Reconstruction was a mistake brought about by vengeful Northern radicals.”
For Trump and Clinton’s generation, the curriculum’s impact may be measurable. In August 2015, a McClatchy-Marist poll asked American adults whether schools should teach that slavery was the main cause of the Civil War. Sixty percent of 18- to 29-year-olds said they should, as did 59 percent of 30- to 44-year-olds and 57 percent of 45- to 59-year-olds. Support then dropped off markedly among those who would’ve been offered more retrograde views of the Civil War in school: Only 49 percent of Americans over the age of 65 thought slavery should be taught as its main cause, the poll found.
By the 1970s, activist pressure brought about significant changes in how history classes would be taught. But how American children learn the history of non-white groups is still controversial, and led to a recent federal court battle in Arizona. During a wider clash over laws targeting undocumented immigrants in 2010, the state legislature banned classes that “promote resentment toward a race or class of people,” that are “designed primarily for pupils of a particular ethnic group,” or that “advocate ethnic solidarity instead of the treatment of pupils as individuals.” Judge A. Wallace Tashima ruled Wednesday that the law violated the First Amendment because “both [its] enactment and enforcement were motivated by racial animus,” citing disparaging blog posts about Mexican immigrants by the statute’s author.
The fight over fair treatment in textbooks and curricula also continues. In 2015, an African American student in Houston noticed his geography textbook described the slave trade as bringing “millions of workers” to plantations across the South, eliding the difference between mass immigration and indentured servitude from Europe and the enslavement of Africans. He sent a picture of it to his mother, whose criticism of the phrasing went viral on social media. McGraw-Hill Education, the book’s publisher, apologized and said it would revise future editions.
That incident, Zimmerman noted, evoked a previous generation of textbook battles that had before reshaped American history education. “And again the reason that it changed was that people of color objected, thank God,” he said.

Potter's Crisis (4)

ANDREW HARTMAN

 

AUGUST 25, 2017

Reflections on David Potter’s The Impending Crisis, part 4

The following is part four in our ongoing roundtable on David Potter’s The Impending Crisis. For part one, by Frank Towers, go here. For part two, by Keri Leigh Merritt, go here. For part three, by Lauren N. Haumesser, go here.

Potter’s Unbalanced Intellectual History in The Impending Crisis

By Rebecca Brenner, a Ph.D. student at American University and current S-USIH Secretary.

In The Impending Crisis, 1848-1861, historian David M. Potter synthesizes key events leading to the American Civil War. [1] A central takeaway is the importance of considering how antebellum Americans viewed each step as it unfolded, apart from the war and without hindsight. Potter delves into antebellum political philosophies to explain events, devoting a significant portion of his narrative to politicians’ reasoning. Alas, Potter offers a level of patience to the pro-slavery ideologies that he does not award to the anti-slavery movement, and as a result, his unbalanced intellectual history deflects attention from the institution of slavery as the primary catalyst for the war.

Following Nat Turner’s slave rebellion in 1831, Potter explains an “intellectual blockade” among southern slaveholders. The perceived threat of enslaved people rising against their captors created a climate of paranoia, hindering critical examinations of slavery. Also in the 1830s, Potter refers to the abolitionists as everything from “abusive” to “humanitarian.” [2] To be fair, he only describes them as “abusive” from the Southerners’ perspective. For Potter, the abolitionists were “humanitarians” and “moralists.” [3] But nowhere in his synthesis does Potter take seriously the thoughts and ideas of the enslaved men and women or the abolitionists. Potter describes Frederick Douglass as “talented,” aligning with how northerners too often viewed the African American scholar as an exception to the perceived natural ignorance of his race. [4] While Douglass was formerly enslaved, his past should not overshadow his intellect and status as a political thinker.

Potter’s account of Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas’s 1858 contest for the US Senate marks a key point in the narrative because the new Republican Party was eager to see if preeminent northern Democrat Stephen Douglas could lose. Potter states that Lincoln and Douglas “came closer than any two public men of their generation to confronting the need for a consideration of the slavery anomaly in its relation to American democratic thought.” [5] In contrast to the general public who grouped North and South into cultural stereotypes, Lincoln and Douglas each articulated political philosophies. [6] Douglas invoked Christian doctrine to advocate treating African Americans as people, not property. At the same time, Douglas was an unapologetic white supremacist who wanted to continue disenfranchising former slaves. According to Potter, popular sovereignty fit Douglas’s ideology well because Douglas hoped that the majority of voting people would abolish slavery, without disrupting the union that he prioritized over the rights of enslaved men and women. [7]

Lincoln, in contrast, argued that freeing all slaves was constitutionally and morally required. He cited the Framers’ plan to end the slave trade as evidence of their inclination toward eventual abolition. Potter writes: “Lincoln hated slavery because he regarded Negroes as humans and because he believed, philosophically at least, in the equality of all men.” [8] This claim about Lincoln’s ideology is a product of 1970s language at best and an oversimplification of Lincoln’s racial ideology at worst. While feelings are important, feelings alone cannot motivate change. While he hated slavery, Lincoln seriously considered deporting African Americans to a colony in Africa. Potter misses this opportunity to unpack the complex racial ideologies of Lincoln and Douglas, whom he claims, “came closer than any two public men of their generation” to relating the “slavery anomaly” to “American democratic thought.” [9]

As the narrative approaches 1860, Potter attempts to understand secessionism by measuring the secessionists’ national loyalty against sectional loyalty. He contends that an individual can remain simultaneously loyal to multiple political entities, such as a country and a region. Many secessionists retained their patriotism for the union while seceding. Potter attributes the triumph of their sectional loyalty, however, to their shared dependency on an inhumane, insecure institution. [10] He explains: “The enslaved will tend to resist their servitude and that the slave-owners must devise effective, practical means of control.” [11] Yet, Potter’s intellectual comparison between nationalism and sectional loyalty distracts from the more fundamental issues of racism and slavery. Historian Manisha Sinha’s 2000 The Counterrevolution of Slavery improves upon The Impending Crisis by tracing the racist roots of secessionist philosophy in South Carolina. [12]

While his forays into intellectual history are vital to understand the course of events preceding the Civil War, Potter should have divided attention more evenly between the abolitionists and secessionists. He refers to northern leaders as “preaching” and to southern leaders as “arguing.” [13] A good intellectual history would take seriously the abolitionists’ arguments, too. Consequently, Potter falls into the trap of Civil War rhetoric, insinuating that the conflict was over secession. But at its core, ideologically and philosophically, the American Civil War was about slavery. The Impending Crisis underemphasizes slavery because neither abolitionists nor enslaved men and women receive the patient analysis that Potter devotes to the secessionists.

[1] David M. Potter, The Impending Crisis, 1848-1861 (New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1976).

[2] Potter, 39

[3] Potter, 40

[4] Potter, 40; Ibram Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (New York: Nation Books, 2016) 82.

[5] Potter, 340

[6] Potter, 43

[7] Potter, 341

[8] Potter, 342

[9] Potter, 340

[10] Potter, 450

[11] Potter, 452

[12] Manisha Sinha, The Counterrevolution of Slavery (The University of North Carolina Press, 2000).

[13] Potter, 60

Potter's Crisis (5)

ANDREW HARTMAN

 

AUGUST 26, 2017

Reflections on David Potter’s The Impending Crisis, part 5

The following is the fifth and final entry in our roundtable on David Potter’s The Impending Crisis. For part one, by Frank Towers, go here. For part two, by Keri Leigh Merritt, go here. For part three, by Lauren N. Haumesser, go here. For part for, by Rebecca Brenner, go here.

Potter’s Impending Crisis: Problems Aplenty

By Michael Todd Landis, Assistant Professor of History at Tarleton State University in Stephenville, Texas and author of Northern Men with Southern Loyalties: The Democratic Party and the Sectional Crisis. (Thanks to Michael for organizing and editing the roundtable.)

As Keri Leigh Merritt and Rebecca Brenner have noted, there are some problems with Potter’s approach to the sectional crisis.  Most problematic, however, is his bias against anti-slavery activists and in favor of white pro-slavery Southerners.  Potter’s bias manifests in four different ways: conceptual bias; linguistic bias; misrepresenting events; and outright defense of Southern actions. 

Conceptual Bias

In order to tell his tale of political “crisis” and dramatic divisions of the 1850s, Potter needs a nation previously united.  Thus, Potter begins his study on the pretext of the “basic homogeneity” of all Americans, minimizing demographic realities and the strong currents of mid-nineteenth century dissent. [1]  Abolitionists, Transcendentalists, Indigenous Americans, social reformers of all stripes, and millions of enslaved people of color would be appalled to learn that Potter lumps them together with enslavers, Indian killers, and war mongers, just as Westerners, Southerners, and New Englanders would have balked at a similar white-washing of regional differences.  In reality, the adolescent USA was fractured and fractious; a variety of disparate groups wrangled with each other over the future of the country while an entrenched Slave Power ruled with an iron fist. [2]

Central to this premise of “homogeneity” is the denigration and diminution of the anti-slavery movement.  As the work of Manisha Sinha and others have demonstrated, the fight against slavery was dynamic, determined, powerful, and progressive.  Yet Potter reduces it to mere “anti-Negro” sentiment. [3]  The Underground Railroad, too, he relegates to fictional “legend.”  “The historian must not be too impatient with the popular yearning to find drama in the past and fabricate it where it is lacking,” counsels Potter on understanding anti-slavery activism. [4]  And later he posits that the entire territorial crisis was a “drama” concocted by abolitionists for publicity: “To arouse public opinion against the proslavery party, a drama was necessary, in which there would be heroes and villains embodying good and evil.  Once this conception was put into effect, it worked to distort much of the evidence available to the historian.” [5]  In other words, historians must be weary of abolitionist “distortions.”

Likewise, major Congressional crises over slavery, such as Missouri, Nullification, the “Gag Rule,” and the annexation of Texas, are shrugged-off as “minor contests” and “marginal affairs.” [6]  Potter creates a mythical, united, homogenous nation in order to set the stage for the dramatic divisions of the 1850s.  His pre-1850s America must be peaceful, benevolent, and uniform so that he can assign blame for its destruction.  Despite his warning to his colleagues about “heroes and villains,” he employs that approach, pitting heroic Unionists against villainous abolitionists.

Language Bias 

At every opportunity, Potter employs language to clarify his preference for Unionism, and, by implication, the rule of the Slave Power.  The Civil War, for him and many of his generation, was something to be prevented and lamented – the great catastrophe that could have and should have been avoided.  If that meant keeping millions of Americans in bondage and unfathomable suffering, so be it.

Potter’s language reflects his bias against anti-slavery machinations.  Abolitionist efforts are labeled “extremist,” “less moral,” and with little value beyond “keeping the emotions of the public at a high pitch;” their publications are derided as  “sanctimonious indignation;” and their politicians condemned as “political free lances who lacked a normal basis of political support” or craven politicos with “an insatiable craving for boodle.” [7]  On the other hand, those who labored to appease enslavers and acquiesced to the spread of slavery are celebrated as “moderate” or “Unionist.”

For Potter, pro-slavery Unionism is the “middle ground” between the sectional extremes of abolitionism and secession.  He defends the policy of “popular sovereignty,” for instance, as a “middle-ground alternative” to opposing the expansion of slavery. [8]  When, in July 1848, John Clayton of Delaware submitted a bill that would “establish no restrictions on slavery,” Potter gives it his blessing, labeling it “the middle-ground position.” [9]  And when pro-slavery militants hijacked the Kansas Territory in 1854-55, Potter laments the absence of “a middle ground of accommodation.” [10]  Time and again, Potter makes it clear he prefers an outcome that “accommodates” pro-slavery interests for the sake of the Union.

Potter’s language throughout the book is strategic.  “Impetuous” Northern “hotheads” “breathed fire” while “cool-headed” Southerners “responded by stating openly” what they “preferred.” [11]  But even when he is less obnoxious with adjectives, his treatment of motives is telling: Southerners act of out principle and thoughtful Constitutional interpretation, while anti-slavery Northerners are characterized as reckless zealots motivated by emotion.  Southerners, moreover, are always depicted as being on the defensive, parrying thrusts from aggressive Yankees.  He even uses the term “handicap” to describe Southerners’ supposed vulnerability. [12]  Small linguistic choices, but powerful nonetheless.  Hundreds of pages of biased language like this can have a deep effect on the reader’s perception.  As Paul Finkelman, Ed Baptist, and myself have recently argued, words matter. [13]

Another tactic of Potter’s, and one recently employed by President Trump, is to blame “partisans on both sides” for the crises. [14]  Both secessionists and abolitionists stirred-up trouble, enflamed emotions, and catastrophized partisanship, he asserts; they played an equal part, equally worthy of condemnation.  Such a seemingly neutral assessment is actually a pro-slavery position.  It undermines the moral righteousness of the abolitionist cause and makes “Unionism” (the spread of slavery under the Slave Power regime) the beau ideal.  At other times, Potter drops the façade of neutrality and openly paints anti-slavery politicos as the enemies of progress.  In his treatment of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, for example, the narrative style builds exciting momentum behind supporters of the bill with a thesaurus full of positive adjectives for the bill’s managers, leading readers to get frustrated when Free Soilers “revolt,” “refuse,” and “bury” the bill – negative words selected to generate negative feelings.  Potter was a gifted writer, and he knew the power of language.  “The greatest problem for the historian confronting the developments of 1854,” lectures Potter, “is not to penetrate what is hidden so much as to clear away the propaganda smokescreen employed with great effectiveness by the free soilers in their campaign against the Kansas-Nebraska Act.” [15]  In short, anti-slavery activists were full of shit.

Misrepresenting Events

In addition to a biased narrative style, Potter misrepresents key events to make Southerners look good and abolitionists look bad.

As careful historians know, the so-called “Compromise of 1850” was boldly pro-slavery and virtually one-sided, granting almost every demand of the enslavers.  “It was never a compromise at all,” explains Paul Finkelman.  “It gave almost everything to slavery and almost nothing to freedom.” [16]  Nevertheless, Potter refuses to concede the pro-slavery victory in 1850 (concessions to the slave states were “rather limited,” he contends) and is content to praise it as a “great accomplishment.” [17]  Moreover, he issues a multi-page defense of the package as the only viable option.  “The South had either to be conciliated or to be coerced,” he reasons. [18]  Then, later: “If, as Lincoln believed, the cause of freedom was linked with the cause of Union, a policy which dealt recklessly with the destiny of the Union [anti-slavery] could hardly have promoted the cause of freedom.” [19]  A blunt admission of his bias toward appeasement.

Potter also misrepresents the antebellum Democratic Party, laboring to separate the organization from slavery and its enslaver leadership.  Newly-elected President Pierce, for instance, was, according to Potter, pledged to “keeping the slavery question out of politics.” [20]  But the opposite was true: Pierce won the nomination by guaranteeing an actively pro-slavery administration, and his inaugural address promised aggressive territorial expansion and vigorous enforcement of the new Fugitive Slave Law.  One white Southerner could hardly contain her enthusiasm for the sour New Englander, celebrating his agenda as “bold pro-slaveryism.” [21]  Potter’s claim that Pierce and the Democrats intended to minimize slavery is either a willful misreading of the sources or a careless treatment of the material.  Either way, such mistakes greatly undermine Potter’s credibility.

Another example of anti-abolitionist spin is his brief coverage of the near-murder of US Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts in May 1856 by pro-slavery firebrand Preston Brooks of South Carolina.  Potter places blame on the victim, whose “remarkably vituperative” speech against slavery days earlier was “uniquely offensive” to his Southern colleagues. [22]  Only a very shallow understanding of Congressional oratory and antebellum politics could yield such a conclusion.  As more balanced and vigilant historians have shown, there was little that was unique or especially outrageous about Sumner’s speech. [23]  By claiming Sumner violated Senate rules of decorum and etiquette, Potter hints that the abolitionist got what he deserved.

Outright Defense of White Southerners

My final warning to readers is that Potter’s repeated criticism of abolitionists and his frequent defenses of slavery make The Impending Crisis deeply flawed.  As I have pointed out above, Potter’s premise, language, and treatment of the material are all biased toward enslavers, but at certain points his disgust for abolitionism becomes manifest and he loses his patience.  For instance, in the middle of his discussion of the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 (which permitted the spread of slavery into formerly free territory), Potter lashes out at abolitionists who dared to oppose the bill (which Potter, of course, insists was about railroads, not slavery): “The Appeal of the Independent Democrats [a public anti-slavery manifesto] was significant for its highly effective use of an antislavery tactic which had been used already by the abolitionists and which is perhaps always used in any situation of angry controversy, but which reached a supreme level of effectiveness in 1854, and the years following.  This was the tactic of attacking the defenders of slavery not on the merits or demerits of their position, but on the grounds that they were vicious, dishonest, and evil.  Ironically, this accusation, which was in many cases not true, proved much more effective for publicity or propaganda . . ..” [24]  So enslavers who spent their lives murdering, torturing, and raping for both pleasure and financial gain were not “evil” or “vicious”?!  And anyone who has studied the planter politicians of the American South can attest to their loose relationship with truth, especially concerning their beloved peculiar institution.

By the time readers reach the secession winter of 1860-61, Potter is ready to drop the ideological hammer, so to speak.  He devotes an entire chapter to the legitimacy of Southern nationalism and the legality and viability of secession.  In highly affectionate language, Potter explains that secession leaders “were lawyers who confined themselves largely to drawing refined inferences from the exact wording of the Constitution and following every clue as to the intentions of the framers.”  They had, he concludes, “quite a strong case.” [25]  Then, acting as a secessionist lawyer himself, he lays out five reasons for the legality of disunion.

In the end, Potter’s The Impending Crisis is essentially a rehashing of the old Southern, racist canard: vicious, conniving Yankee abolitionists attacked principled Southerners, fabricated a national crisis through lies and propaganda, and provoked an unnecessary and regrettable Civil War.  His linguistic choices, his narrative style, and his constant defense of a pro-slavery “middle ground” present the reader with a distorted version of events.

Despite these disturbing flaws, Potter has become a mainstay of reading lists, syllabi, and bibliographies, much to my dismay.  Even if you do not agree with all of my assertions herein, I hope that my contribution to this roundtable will at least make you more cautious about Potter’s treatment of the material.  But, ideally, I would be happiest if you never used Potter at all.

[1] David Potter, The Impending Crisis, 1848-1861 (New York: Harper & Row, 1976), 14.

[2] See Manisha Sinha, The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition (New Haven, 2016); Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848 (New York, 2009); Daniel Walker Howe, The Political Culture of the American Whigs (Chicago, 1984); Stanley Harrold, Border War: Fighting Over Slavery Before the Civil War (Chapel Hill, 2010); Kyle Volk, Moral Minorities and the Making of American Democracy (New York: 2017).

[3] Potter, Impending Crisis, 35-36.

[4] Potter, Impending Crisis, 137.

[5] Potter, Impending Crisis, 217.

[6] Potter, Impending Crisis, 52.

[7] Potter, Impending Crisis, 164, 215, 216.

[8] Potter, Impending Crisis, 59, 164.

[9] Potter, Impending Crisis, 73-74.

[10] Potter, Impending Crisis, 206.

[11] Potter, Impending Crisis, 67-68, 201, 205.

[12] Potter, Impending Crisis, 65, 224.

[13] http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/proposal-change-vocabulary-we-use-when-talking-about-civil-war-180956547/

[14] Potter, Impending Crisis, 135.

[15] Potter, Impending Crisis, 167-68.

[16] Paul Finkelman, “The Appeasement of 1850” in  Paul Finkelman and Donald R. Kennon, eds., Congress and the Crisis of the 1850s (Athens, 2012), 79.

[17] Potter, Impending Crisis, 113-14, 122.

[18] Potter, Impending Crisis, 118.

[19] Potter, Impending Crisis, 119.

[20] Potter, Impending Crisis, 143.

[21] Virginia Clay-Clopton, A Belle of the Fifties . . . (London, 1905), 59; see also Michael Landis, Northern Men with Southern Loyalties (Ithaca, 2014).

[22] Potter, Impending Crisis, 210.

[23] Manisha Sinha, “The Caning of Charles Sumner: Slavery, Race, and Ideology in the Age of the Civil War,” The Journal of the Early Republic 23, No. 2 (Summer 2003): 233-262.

[24] Potter, Impending Crisis, 163.

[25] Potter, Impending Crisis, 479.