Was the Civil War Inevitable?

You wouldn’t know it, but counterfactual history is thoroughly respectable. Its practitioners study what might have been, not what has been. The purpose, as reported on this blog, is to see what could have been done to avert catastrophic wars. It is not an ignoble pursuit.

One notes that economists studying the Great Depression have developed theories about how that calamity might have been avoided. They draw lessons from past policy errors and try to do better. They do not throw up their arms and stoically say it was all inevitable. It is not an ignoble enterprise.

I myself wrote about some of the counterfactual histories of World War I last month. Link here. With different leadership, with Theodore Roosevelt in charge after 1913, the war might have been averted. Or the carnage might have been reduced. The history of the twentieth century would have been radically different. Seeking to understand the errors that were made and knowing that different leaders would not have made the same errors is not an ignoble activity.

Or, at least, it wasn’t until one Donald Trump opined the other day that if Andrew Jackson had been president in the 1850s the Civil War might have been avoided. Of course, many astute historians noted that Jackson had been long dead by the time the first shots were fired at Fort Sumter, but Trump did suggest that “had Andrew Jackson been a little later.” The phrase tells us that Trump was contemplating what would have happened if Jackson had been born later.

Naturally, historians went apoplectic. Jim Grossman from the American Historical Association said this:

If one sees the Civil War as a war of liberation, which is what it was, then it shouldn't have been avoided. Had you compromised out the differences between the government and the confederacy, or between anti-slavery forces and southern slaveholders, the victims would have been the enslaved people of the south.

If the president has the notion that it would be desirable to compromise that out, without emancipation, it is frightening.

He is saying that the Civil War should not have been avoided. Would it have been possible to end slavery and emancipate the slaves without turning the nation into a killing field? Perhaps it would not have been possible, but Grossman’s cavalier statement that the Civil War was desirable does not inspire very much confidence. Could it have done more quickly, with less blood spilled? I do not know, but Grossman doesn’t know either. He does not seem to care. He thinks that the South deserved to be ravaged. 

Grossman thinks that Trump would have wanted to make a deal, but he imagines that Trump would have made a deal preserving slavery. Surely, that is too speculative. The question is whether the Southern states would have given up slavery without the war. Perhaps they would not have. We do not know. But we do not know the terms of an imaginary negotiation. And we do not know whether a similar result could have been accomplished with a shorter war and less bloodshed. Is it not worth the trouble to reflect on these matters? Inevitability is certainly not an historical fact.

Yale University historian David Blight dismisses Trump’s counterfactual:

If it reflects anything, it reflects a kind of great man idea of history, that if you just have the right man with the right strength you can change the course of history. And that is plain nonsense.

Why is this nonsense? We did not have to opine about how Theodore Roosevelt would have dealt with the outbreak of the Great War. And, Winston Churchill once noted that only one man on the planet could have averted that War. I presume he was referring to the weak-kneed American president, Woodrow Wilson.

By the way, wasn't Churchill’s leadership during World War II one of the decisive factors in the allied victory? Do you imagine that if Neville Chamberlain had not been sacked the outcome of that war would have been the same?

To put these theories to the test, blogger Ann Althouse,(via Maggie's Farm) who is not an historian, reread Jon Meachum’s 2009 book: Andrew Jackson: Lion in the White House. She offers a few excerpts:

[Jackson] believed to his core that [South Carolina] was about to destroy the nation... [I]n Charleston, radicals were raising an army to defend South Carolina’s right to nullify federal laws it chose not to accept— the first step, Jackson believed, toward secession, and the destruction of the Union. “I expect soon to hear that a civil war of extermination has commenced,” Jackson said, musing about arresting the Southern leaders and then hanging them....

“I seriously apprehend a civil war if something is not done to conciliate the discontents which prevail at this time and for aught that I can see will increase,” William Crawford of Georgia wrote Van Buren the month after the Jefferson dinner.....

Jackson sought the preservation of the Union, not personal vengeance; a powerful presidency, not a military dictatorship. He achieved that on Saturday, March 2, 1833, when he signed both the compromise tariff and the Force Bill into law. “We have beat the Nullifiers and things are quiet for a time— I verily thought we should have had a struggle and a short civil war, and was prepared once more to take the field,” Joel Poinsett wrote a friend on Monday, March 25, 1833. “I was exceedingly indignant with these Radicals and rather desired to put them down with a strong arm.… I have fought the good fight manfully and zealously, and now I am laying out grounds and making a garden.”

Serious political leaders do not rush into civil wars on the grounds that they are inevitable. The questions are interesting, but on this score the historians seem a little too wedded to their Trumpophobia.