The Impending Crisis: America Before the Civil War, 1848-1861 by David Morris Potter


The Impending Crisis: America Before the Civil War, 1848-1861
Title : The Impending Crisis: America Before the Civil War, 1848-1861
Author :
Rating :
ISBN : 0061319295
ISBN-10 : 9780061319297
Language : English
Format Type : Paperback
Number of Pages : 638
Publication : First published January 1, 1976
Awards : Pulitzer Prize History (1977)

“David M. Potter’s magisterial The Impending Crisis is the single best account to date of the coming of the Civil War.” —Civil War History

“The magnum opus of a great American historian.” —Newsweek

Now in a new edition for the 150th Anniversary of the Civil War, David Potter’s Pulitzer Prize-winning history of antebellum America offers an indispensible analysis of the causes of the war between the states. The Journal of Southern History calls Potter’s incisive account, “modern scholarship’s most comprehensive account of the coming of the Civil War,” and the New York Times Book Review hails it as “profound and original…. History in the grand tradition.”


The Impending Crisis: America Before the Civil War, 1848-1861 Reviews


  • Matt

    “Slavery presented an inescapable ethical question which precipitated a sharp conflict of values. It constituted a vast economic interest…The stakes were large in the rivalry of slavery and freedom for ascendancy in the territories. Also, slavery was basic to the cultural divergence of North and South, because it was inextricably fused into the key elements of southern life – the staple crop and plantation system, the social and political ascendancy of the planter class, the authoritarian system of social control. Similarly, slavery shaped southern economic features in such a way as to accentuate their clash with those of the North. The southern commitment to the use of slave labor inhibited economic diversification and industrialization and strengthened the tyranny of King Cotton…”
    - David Potter, The Impending Crisis: 1848-1861

    David Potter’s sweeping, epic, and award-winning The Impending Crisis presents a long look at America from the end of the Mexican-American War in 1848 to the bombardment of Fort Sumter in 1861. It tells the story of how the suppurating wound of slavery finally infected the whole of the United States, causing a rupture that resulted in a bloody four-year war, decades of legalized racism, and enormous efforts on behalf of civil rights activists to even begin to heal.

    The work, of course, is still not done. In trying to see a way forward, it is often helpful to use the past as a guide, if for no other reason than to help define the problem. To that end, for anyone seeking a fuller picture of how things came to be as they are with regard to race in America, The Impending Crisis is indispensable reading. It provides both wide coverage and sharp analysis as it traces the role of slavery in antebellum American politics – and how that all culminated in a war we are still trying to resolve.

    The Impending Crisis begins with the apotheosis of early-American nationalism. As we open, General Winfield Scott’s invading army has already demolished the Mexican forces in its path, marched into Mexico City, and forced Mexico to sign a treaty ceding enormous tracts of land in exchange for cash.

    In a way, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo turned into a poisoned chalice. No sooner had America received the deed of title than the issue of slavery – whether these newly-acquired lands would be free or not – rose with an uncontrolled ferocity. The issue which had been patched over since the signing of the Constitution could no longer be ignored. As Potter notes, David Wilmot set the limits of the question with his famous proviso banning slavery in these new territories. The resulting firestorm saw nationalism give way to sectionalism, and sectionalism to secession.

    In these tumultuous years, Potter devotes space to the Compromise of 1850, the saga of Bleeding Kansas, and the failed revolt at Harper’s Ferry. He traces the metamorphosis of the various political parties, as northern and southern Democrats split, the Whigs died, and the Republican Party was born (from the ashes of various other single-issue parties). Potter follows Stephen Douglas as his attempts to secure a western railroad leads him to make dangerous political calculations. He touches on the Fugitive Slave Act and Dred Scott, and follows Lincoln and Douglas during their famous debates. There’s even room given to attempts to annex Cuba in order to facilitate the spread of slavery to more hospitable climes. (The filibusterer William Walker deserves his own updated biography).

    This is a comprehensive book, but it approaches its many topics from the constrained angle of politics. There is a lot of talking, but not much action. Moreover, this is a volume that is heavy on analysis, and rather light on narrative. Accordingly, its prose can be a bit heavy at times, as Potter expounds on his concepts:

    The importance of slavery…is evident…in its polarizing effect upon the sections. No other sectional factor could have brought about this effect in the same way. Culturally, the dualism of a democratic North and an aristocratic South was not complete, for the North had its quota of blue-bloods and grandees who felt an affinity with those of the South, and the South had its backwoods democrats, who resented the lordly airs of the planters. Similarly, the glib antithesis of a dynamic “commercial” North and a static “feudal” South cannot conceal the profoundly commercial and capitalistic impulses of the plantation system. But slavery really had a polarizing effect, for the North had no slaveholders – at least not of resident slaves – and the South had virtually no abolitionists.


    Looking simply at the prose, this is not the kind of wordsmithing that’s going to knock your socks off, studded as it is with academic phrases much-loved by professors.

    (It should be noted that Potter died before this book was finished. It was completed and edited by Don Fehrenbacher, and later won the Pulitzer Prize).

    While this is far from unreadable, there are points where The Impending Crisis gets really slow and dense. This goes beyond the heaviness of the sentences. Specifically, you can only discuss the differences between 19th century political parties for so long before it feels necessary to take a break. By focusing on the politics, the narrative possibilities of, say, John Brown and Bleeding Kansas, are lost. This focus also tends to make slavery – which is this book’s chief subject – into something of an abstract concept. Potter is concerned with ideas, principles, competing ideologies; he spends no time imagining the actual physical consequences of slavery, which makes some of his statements (such as those regarding the Underground Railroad) irritatingly glib.

    (I would recommend The Half Has Never Been Told and River of Dark Dreams as examples of books that take a different tact, focusing on the experiences of the enslaved, while sharpening the rhetoric).

    Every once in a while, though, Potter (or Fehrenbacher) will get on a roll, and the words take flight, and The Impending Crisis becomes magnetic. I loved, for instance, the description of the great debate over the Compromise of 1850:

    Here, for the last time together, appeared a triumvirate of old men, relics of a golden age, who still towered like giants above the creatures of a later time: Webster, the kind of senator that Richard Wagner might have created at the height of his powers; Calhoun, the most majestic champion of error since Milton’s Satan in Paradise Lost; and Clay, the old Conciliator, who had already saved the Union twice and now came out of retirement to save it with his silver voice and his master touch once again before he died.


    If the recent movement to remove monuments relating to slavery have shown us anything, it is that while we may be done with the Civil War, the Civil War is not done with us. In order to understand the years between 1861-1865 – and the legacy those years have given us – we must study the decades that came before. The Impending Crisis can be heavy at times, but it is thorough, fair, and demonstrates with exactitude that all roads to civil war went through slavery.

  • Brian Willis

    Even a Pulitzer Prize can date a little. Great book though probably not as "modern" as academic concerns currently are preoccupied with. Nonetheless, it threads the needle between the Mexican War that clearly escalated the slavery crisis through the Compromise of 1850 to the Kansas Nebraska Act to the declarations of succession. It's eminently readable for such a potentially dense subject and is probably still the book on this era. If you want to read up on the causes of the Civil War, few books do it better.

  • CoachJim


    You must also study and learn the lessons of history because humanity has been involved in this soul-wrenching, existential struggle for a very long time. Quoted from A final message from John Lewis published in The New York Times shortly before his death on July 17, 2020.

    Hindsight, the historian’s chief asset and his main liability, has enabled all historical writers to know that the decade of the fifties terminated in a great civil war. Knowing it, they have consistently treated the decade not as a segment of time with a character of its own, but as a prelude to something else. By the very term “antebellum” they have diagnosed a whole period in the light of what came after. (Page 145)


    This is an extraordinary book covering an extraordinary period of American History.

    In the 10-12 years covered here the country lurched from crisis to crisis. Because the Senate and Supreme Court were dominated by Southerners, the issues were usually resolved in favor of the South. However, these were hollow victories as they alienated the public opinion and weakened one of its strengths — the Democratic party.

    There are so many interesting sections and chapters here that it is difficult to pick a favorite to describe. The author shines as a historian by the description, analysis and observations he makes about the events during this decade. He gives a presentation of all the sides to the events and situations. History should not just be a recitation of facts and events of a period.

    The main theme of the book is the sectionalism that divided the country and its politics. There were always sections of the country in conflict with other sections. This occurred between the East and West, the Whigs and Democrats and the North and South, but the biggest conflict was between the pro and anti slavery factions. The South was forced to defend the institution of slavery against the opinion of the rest of the world. However the issue of slavery which has dominated the conversation about the Civil War was not entirely true. Although there were no or few slaves in the North and an established institution in the South the conflict was not over the slavery of Negroes, but became a conflict over the issue of slavery in the territories. The South could not allow the North to become more dominate in the government by gaining representation from new states in the West.

    How much did the slavery issue really play here? He points out that even after emancipation the life of the Negro did not change. There is much evidence that the northerners and anti-slavery movement were not pro-Negro.

    After the Nat Turner slave revolution and the brutal slave revolt on the island of Santo Domingo southern slave owners had good reason to fear slave insurrections. Then the John Brown attempt at Harpers Ferry led southerners to believe northern abolitionists were encouraging slaves to revolt. The author spends some time dealing with John Brown who following his attempt at Harpers Ferry was praised in the North, but given the atrocities that were visited upon the slaves following his attempt he deserves our condemnation.

    The book is reminiscence of “old-school” history books (it was published in 1977). There is a quote on the cover of the book by Eric Foner calling it “history in the grand tradition”. It is heavily footnoted and I found these somewhat disruptive to the flow of the narrative, however, occasionally reading certain ones added important information.

    Much is made of the “Compromise of 1850”. Included in this compromise was the Fugitive Slave Act. This part of the compromise inflamed the passions of many in the North especially the abolitionists. This leads to a discussion of the Underground Railway. There is evidence that the count of the slaves rescued this way was exaggerated. However, the compromise did give the North a chance to prepare for a war they were unprepared for.

    There is an interesting account of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin”, the book said to have been responsible for the Civil War. The author reports that the book lacked the qualifications of such a literary success. However, there is no doubt of its impact on the public’s attitude towards slavery.

    It is pointed out that the southerners with their states rights politics were also pushing the “manifest destiny” policy. Their desire to acquire Cuba, Mexico and Nicaragua was ironic given the fact they did not want the United States government in their own states.

    A chapter on “Bleeding Kansas” asks why the pro-slavery faction fought for an area into which there were no plans (or at least very little) for slaves. This seemed to be a policy they followed which gave them small victories but lost the battle for the public’s sympathy.

    There was one more interesting event which I must mention given our current administration. Late in the Buchanan administration saw the first congressional investigation into some of the activities of administrative officials. The Democratic party had voted large appropriations to groups expected to then make large contributions to the party. The Secretary of War favored friends with government contracts, and President Buchanan denied an event for which there was proof of his approval. Any of this sound familiar?

    One of the more interesting chapters was “The Nature of Southern Separation”. Although the rest of the book is largely a history of events, this chapter is more of an essay (albeit a long one) on Southern Nationalism. The philosophies of the southerners regarding how to protect their culture and institutions are examined. The main issue is whether these can be protected within or without the Union.

    The John Lewis quote above advises reading history to understand the path taken by the African-Americans in the quest for equality in this country. This book is a huge contribution to that understanding. Seventy-five years after the end of World War II the nazi swastika is generally considered a symbol of hate and is unacceptable for public display. Over 150 years after the end of the Civil War we are now arguing about the appropriateness of public displays of the confederate flag, confirming Lewis’ statement that this struggle has been going on for a long time.

    The Civil War did far more to produce a southern nationalism which flourished in the cult of the Lost Cause then southern nationalism did to produce the war. (page 469)

  • Jeremy Perron

    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.

  • Porter Broyles

    I would love to give Potter’s book more than 3 stars, but this was a book that I struggled to read despite enjoying it. Unlike most books, it took me months to read this one, I kept finding reasons to put off reading it.
    One of the reasons was simply the appearance of the book. You know how you sometimes pick up a 250 page book and thinks, “Wow, the publisher did everything they could to stretch this book to 250 pages?” The margins are large, the font is big, the spacing is wide, etc. The author delivered 120 pages of text, but the publisher wanted a bigger book? This book was the exact opposite. It was just under 600 pages, but the font is small, the spacing is neglible, and the margins are non-existent. It is almost as if the author produced a 900 page book, but the publisher didn’t think a 900 page book could sell, so did everything to squeeze it into 600 pages. This gave the book a cramped feel.

    As for the book itself, I had a love/hate relationship with it. For the most part I loved it, but there were sections that dragged and were too compact—more of a list of facts than a narrative.

    But the parts that excelled, were great.

    But what makes reading a 43 year old history interesting is that it is a reflection upon the culture that wrote the book. This book was the best book on antebellum history as it was understood in 1976. Ideas that are accepted today, were novel or unheard of 43 years ago. Ideas that were accepted 43 years ago, have been rejected in the meantime. Issues that were focused on have changed.

    But what makes reading a 43 year old history interesting is that sometimes you realize that the issues that are pervasive today, were pervasive then, and 170 years ago. History may not repeat itself, but it definitely rhymes. Reading old history about history makes this fact come to life.

  • Dan

    The Impending Crisis by David M. Potter

    On the Dred Scott decision, The New York Independent wrote that the decision of the Supreme Court is the moral assassination of a race and cannot be obeyed. The New York Tribune said that no man who really desired the triumph of freedom over slavery in the territories would submit to the decision of a bench with five slaveholders and two dough faces on it.

    I took quite a few notes on this lengthy American history on the period between the end of the Mexican-American War and the beginning of the Civil War. The level of research is quite extensive and the writing is good though not always colorful.

    The author David M. Potter died in 1971. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize posthumously in 1977 for this book which Don Fehrenbacher helped complete and publish in 1976. Fehrenbacher himself won a Pulitzer Prize in 1979 for The Dred Scott Case: Its Significance in American Law and Politics.

    Here are my notes.

    1. Fort Bridger was located on the border of Utah and Wyoming and was a key stopping point on the Oregon, California and Mormon Trails. It was technically built on Mexican land but it was said that mountain man Jim Bridger had secured a small land grant from Mexico. This fort was relevant because of the explosion of Polk's Manifest Destiny and the migration along these trails.

    2. In 1850 there was a major crisis when South Carolina, Mississippi and Georgia tried to secede in Congress but ran into some procedural roadblocks and cooler heads prevailed.

    3. Bleeding Kansas in 1855, with only 1,600 registered voters was so deeply divided that abolitionist forces set up their own parallel government in Topeka. The official territorial capital and its pro-slavery governor were located in Lecompton. The capital was later moved to Lawrence and then eventually to Topeka in 1981 when Kansas was admitted to the union.

    4. May 21, 1856 was the sack of Lawrence Kansas, the home of abolitionists. The next day Congressman Brooks from South Carolina mercilessly caned Charles Sumner in the Senate chambers because of a highly personal oratory Sumner launched against slavery and impugned another Senator. Less than 24 hours later, an enraged John Brown killed four largely defenseless civilians in the Potawatomi Massacre.

    5. Between 1845 and 1854 there were 2.9 million immigrants to America. This was the largest influx of immigrants, percentage wise at 15%, in the history of United States. Many of these immigrants were from Ireland.

    6. It took seven years for the fugitive Dred Scott case to wind its way through the courts. A deeply racist Supreme Court and Chief Justice Roger Taney ruled against Scott. Scott was eventually manumitted by his owners and died a freed man.

    7. In the years following the Mexican American War, an America drunk with power, involved itself with invasions of Nicaragua, tried to first purchase Cuba from Spain, then meddled with it and then saw incursions by filibusterers like Wallace in Sonora Mexico, and even purchased the Gadsden strip for a planned railroad to the West Coast. Manifest Destiny knew no bounds.

    8. The 1858 Illinois Senate campaign and election was the most famous local election in American history. Lincoln versus Douglass. In July and August the two men vigorously debated one another in town after town.

    9. John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry. In his third raid on Kansas in the summer prior to Harper's Ferry, Brown was able to free eleven slaves and took them all the way east to security in Ontario. Following his capture at Harper's Ferry, Brown was admired by many southerners for his brashness and bravery. It was not enough to prevent him from being hanged and polarized the nation even more because the south feared more John Browns and how easily they might inspire slave revolts.

    10. In the famous 1860 political race for President that brought Abraham Lincoln to the White House, a new party called the Constitutional Union Party was formed. The party secured support from dozens of legislators and old war heroes from both the North and South. They were considered a moderate leaning party with some sympathies to slave holding states. They nominated John Bell for President who was a cold and uninspiring personality but was not in ill health like most of the other party favorites like Winfield Scott. They positioned themselves as a moderate choice compared to the Republican and abolitionist William Seward. What they did not count on was the rise of Lincoln and his nomination in Chicago.

    11. John Breckenridge of the Southern Democratic Party and Stephen Douglas of the Democratic Party comprised the other major Presidential candidates. They essentially split much of the vote with Douglas winning only one state despite his support of nearly 30% of the popular vote. So Lincoln won the electoral count and a plurality of the popular vote with 39%. Douglas already in ill health would die of typhoid in the summer of 1861 months after the election. He was just forty-eight years old.

    12. For the first time in fifty years ago a party that publicly opposed slavery now held the White House. It didn't long for several Southern states including South Carolina to drum up the militants to draw up plans to secede from the Union.

    13. After the election of 1860, outgoing President Buchanan was worried about a Civil War starting on his watch. He wanted to reinforce Charleston with Federal troops but received no support from his cabinet and in fact several of his cabinet members were already maneuvering for positions in the planned Confederacy. The author claims that while Buchanan was a weak president he did take the threat seriously.

    14. The final chapter covers Fort Sumter and Lincoln's arrival to Washington. There was a credible threat to Lincoln being assassinated as his train came through Baltimore. Maryland was still a slave state. So much subterfuge was applied to secret Lincoln safely into D.C. At his inaugural address Lincoln stood firm on the unity of the nation . I am loth to close. We are not enemies but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds for affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.

    15. At Charleston, Confederate general Beauregard had orders to not let the relief ship to Fort Sumter but Jefferson Davis wanted to act preemptively. On April 12th at 4:30 am the first Confederate shell hit Fort Sumter and thirty three hours later the Fort was surrendered.

    4.5 stars. While this history is not the colorful narrative non-fiction that I tend to eat up, one would be hard pressed to find a more informative book on any twelve year stretch of American history.

  • Jerome Otte

    A clear, rich history of the lead-up to the Civil War. Potter begins with the debate over the Wilmot Proviso and ends with the first shots at Fort Sumter, and clearly presents all of the economic, social and political aspects of the sectional conflict in between (with the most emphasis on the latter) All of Potter’s arguments are solidly backed up.

    Interestingly, Potter deals with the era as people saw it as the time, meaning he often covers issues that other historians skip over just because they don’t directly relate to the sectional crisis. He also portrays John Brown’s raid as a publicity stunt and his treatment of James Buchanan and Stephen Douglas is rather sympathetic. Potter also emphasizes how the South scored many tactical victories in the sectional conflict that later turned out to be strategic defeats.

    An evenhanded, consistent history, although social and economic history seems to take a relative backseat at times, and his downplaying of the Dred Scott case is not entirely convincing.

  • Dylan

    Good writing, terrible coverage, doesn't live up to the title.

    300 pages in and the totally myopic focus on Congressional political wrangling has just made this impossible to finish for me. Well written but with little discussion of culture and zero discussion of economics or everyday life. Despite the title, this is nothing close to a comprehensive account of the era. Read only as a supplement to other works.

  • Nancy Ellis

    This is an amazing book. It took me a long time to read because each page contains a wealth of information, and it's not something you can just breeze through if you're truly interested in the subject. I've been reading about the Civil War for almost 60 years now but have always been neglectful of material dealing with the 1850s. This volume cured that! There are several rather dry chapters on the political compromises dealing with the creation of new territories and addition of new states to the Union, the politicians attempting to avoid dealing with the issue of slavery. I found the later chapters on the Lincoln-Douglas debates and the John Brown fiasco at Harper's Ferry to be especially fascinating, making up for slogging through the political debates! At the end, I truly felt as if I had come to a much better understanding of how it all erupted into a civil war. Perhaps the greatest lesson we could all learn is to never judge the past based on the present. Just as that old proverb says: Never judge a person until you have walked a mile in his shoes. Unfortunately, we cannot travel back in time to share their experiences, so perhaps it's best that we keep our judgmental mouths shut and try to learn from history instead of repeating it.

  • Hana

    Reading
    Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution 1863-1877 by
    Eric Foner has reminded me of all the gaps in my knowledge of this critical period in U.S. history. This looks like a splendid overview of key events in the years just before the war.

  • Joe

    This is an extremely well-written book about the 1850's and the issues that led up to the Civil War. The secession of the South was about far more than the issue of slavery. In fact, even the issue of slavery was about more than slavery.

    Potter lays out the major happenings of the 1850's and how each one led to the distrust of the Union by the Southern States. For example, when the United States won the Mexican American War in 1848, we took over a lot of territory held originally by Mexico (California, New Mexico, Arizona). In the aftermath there was much argument about whether the territories would permit slavery or not. The politicians of the Southern States argued that this was a states' right issue and that the people of the territories should decide. The politicians and leaders in the Northern States wanted Congress to pass laws prohibiting slavery in the territories but allowing the people to vote on whether they wanted to be a free or slave state when they submitted for statehood.

    This was, of course, a thinly veiled attempt to outlaw slavery in the new states. By prohibiting slavery in the territories there would be no slavery supporters to vote for slavery when applying for statehood. While this seems to be about slavery, slavery actually plays a nominal role in this argument. For one thing, according to Potter, very few slave owners were going to move to the new territories because they were not conducive to using slaves to farm the crops. For another, the argument was really about how much power the central government would have. Remember that at this time in our history, states had much more power than they do now, and the politicians in those states did not want to relinquish it.

    Potter uses the other historical high points of the 1850's to show how this battle over states rights, the breakup of the Whig party, the internal fracturing of the Democratic Party, the Dred Scott decision by the Supreme Court, etc. each contributed another drop to the cauldron of disunion until it overflowed in Civil War.

  • Bob

    This is scholarly history at its best. Its Pulitzer is well-deserved. Potter's analysis of one of the most critical (and confusing) periods of American history is as comprehensive as could be wished. The writing is cogent and stimulating. I've read quite a few books about the Civil War, but never really understood exactly how the conflict came to pass. I found readng this book infinitely clarifying. Potter seems a faultless and highly objective guide to a complex era. All points of view are explored, some with more sympathy than others, but his treatment of everything seems eminently fair. I bought this book to fill a gap in my collection of volumes from The Oxford History of the United States. While this volume is not part of that series, it fulfills my purpose admirably. The thing that struck me most while reading this one was the disturbing number of parallels between the antebellum era and our own troubled times. The issues now are somewhat different, but the similarities seem obvious, chillingly so. Overall: If you have the slightest interest in the story of our nation, and have a tolerance for a more erudite form of the historical genre, I can't recommend this one too highly. I'll go further: Every American should try to read this book and to compare it with what they know of our present political climate. There are important lessons to be learned from such a comparison. Kudos to Potter and to his colleague and editor Fehrenbacher for a truly stellar work of history.

  • Jonathan Blanks

    Very well researched and clearly written. Its sometimes contrarian assertions are well supported, but it nevertheless suffers when it tries to be too objective regarding the white Southern perspective. It would be too much to say this book apologizes for the South, but in (otherwise appropriately) correcting the dominant narrative about the beneficence of the North, the narrative misses the day to day life in the South that informed the ‘Great Man’ politics in which this book relies.

    Written more than 40 years ago, it is not conservative in the way that today’s whitewashing of the antebellum South tends to operate, but at the same time a reader of histories written in the decades since will notice the conspicuous dearth of voices of those whose bondage was at the core of the coming conflict.

    All that said, it’s a remarkable work and I learned a great deal from it.

  • Donna

    This historic account of the state of the Union in the years prior to the Civil War focuses primarily on the slavery question--how matters were compromised and how the compromises broke down. It was written in the 1960s, so some of the theses younger historians have developed are not represented. It is an interesting book in that Lincoln plays so little a part in the story (as is correct), but also because Potter doesn't appear to be a big fan of Lincoln generally (he seems to dismiss Lincoln's role in the 1858 senatorial debates as not that important. Well worth reading, but not the entire story of the period.

  • jacobi

    kinda wild to write a book this long about the tension between the north and south in the years leading up to the civil war and to only ever mention slavery as a kind of economic/ethical rubix cube to be solved never touching on the conditions of the enslaved

  • Jeremy Silverman

    This is an outstanding history of the 13 years leading to the American Civil War. The focus is heavily on the political maneuvering on the part of congress and presidents, but social-cultural factors are attended to as well. I found it both brilliant and riveting. There are too many ways in which the polarization of the country in the 1850s have distressing parallels today, but these only add to the strong interest of this book.

  • Jim

    I was looking for a good overview of the period between James K. Polk's presidency and the beginning of the Civil War, and this was it. Written in the early 70s by David Potter and published by his estate in 1976, it provides a solid history of the fight over slavery in the new territories, Dred Scott, the transformations of the Democratic and Republican parties, and Southern efforts that began it's move toward secession. In fact, one of the most revealing aspects of the book was the inclusion of excerpts from the Congressional Globe, which was the predecessor to the current Congressional Record. In it, the words of Southern congressmen clearly articulate their pro-slavery views and their use of slavery as the primary cause of eventual Southern secession.

  • Rob Melich

    I finished this amazing book minutes after the announcement of the completion of the Mueller report. The timing was appropriate. (Is this 2019 investigation the Dred Scott decision of our times? Maybe?)
    I read a lot of history covering all generations and types. This is the best American history book I've read to date. It is a challenging read because it covers all elements of antebellum America: economic, cultural, political, legal and constitutional, and biographical. The depth of analysis and the extensive use of data to support claims made throughout make it unique, and at times slow reading (but well worth it).
    Anyone who has interest in the causes of the Civil War and want context around sectionalism, slavery, Dred Scott, slave rebellions (John Brown), the presidency, tariffs, and so much more will come away well informed.
    The lesson I learned is that the roots of the 2019 American divisions go back to our founding and the founders (mostly slave holders) inability to resolve the paradox of universal suffrage while maintaining an economic system derived from slave and indentured (low cost) labor.
    This book should be the only text needed for both a high school and college American history, political science, and economics course. It would be the only book needed to teach these topics well.

  • Joseph Stieb

    Obviously a profound and classic study of the origins of the CW, but it wasn't great as a listen, just a little too dense and detailed to follow. Still, this book is very good in a lot of ways. It is a deeply political history, as the focus is on party alignment and realignment, elections, intra-party politics, compromise, and so on. That is useful but not always super interesting at this level of depth. Some chapters really stand out, including the one on John Brown and on southern nationalism/regionalism.

    How did this book improve my understanding of the causes of the Civil War? Potter's explanation is essentially political: the Civil War was a product of the breakdown of one political system (Whigs and Democrats) over the issue of the expansion of slavery to the territories (not necessarily slavery per se, as very few in the political scene were challenging the legality of slavery in the states were it existed at the time). In its place came another political system, more fragmented and now based on opposition or support for slavery, with the Republicans as the key new factor in national politics.

    Beneath the question of slavery's expansion was a deeper question about what kind of country this would be: mostly driven by slavery and the "Slave Power" or mostly free and with slavery as a regional institution that would be weakened and eventually destroyed over time (The Republican position). Positions on both sides of this issue hardened between 1848 and 1860 because of the perception that each side was expanding their claims. Anti-slavery politicians who eventually formed the GOP believed that slavery was an aberration tolerated but not recognized by the COnstitution and clearly against the spirit of the Declaration of Independence. They believed that slavery should be contained to the states where it currently existed, where it would eventually be put on the road to extinction. They feared that the South wanted to claim an absolute and constitutionally supported right to own human beings as chattel, which would allow them to bring slaves into the Western territories, tipping the balance of power toward the South. Episodes like Kansas-Nebraska and Dred Scott reinforced this impression and the desire to hold strong against the Slave Power.

    For the slave-holding South, the fear was that slavery needed an outlet to the West for demographic and economic reasons. They believed the Constitution protected slavery as a national institution, that states had a right to nullify federal law (a Calhounian doctrine), and that the North was radicalizing on the question of slavery. Moreover, southerners no longer looked on slavery as an unfortunate necessity doomed to fall away, as many of the founders did, but as the basis of a harmonious social order that benefitted master and slave alike; why, then, shouldn't this way of life be allowed to spread? Episodes like the North's celebration of John Brown's raid and, obviously, the election of Lincoln as the first remotely anti-slavery president since JQA, reinforced this fear. Potter makes the interesting point that so much of these tensions were about very hypothetical issues: many Western territories were highly unlikely to be populated with . Still, the underlying issues of principle and identity were profound, as were the fears that the other side's intentions and ways of life were incompatible with the survival of one's own side.

    This book really highlights the career of STephen A. Douglas as a way to understand the roots of the Civil War. Douglass was the successor to Clay as the great compromiser. He believed that popular sovereignty was the answer to the controversies over slavery's WEstern expansion, even though this principle upset the longstanding MIssouri Compromise. He saw this as a white man's republic, and while he was not too fond of slavery, he was perfectly willing to enshrine its permanent status to keep the Union together. The Dred Scott decision messed up his strategy by declaring that slaves, as property, can be brought into any Western territory, but he still believed that slavery could only exist in states where state law supported it. This was a kind of ludicrous distinction, but it was his last desperate effort to protect pop sov as the glue of a fracturing union. In the campaign of 1860, he was the only candidate to campaign on a national basis in a last-ditch effort to hold the country together. Lincoln wasn't even on the ballot in southern states; a clear sign of the fragmentation of the union.

    My main critique of this book is that Potter doesn't always bring out the color and drama of the years preceding the Civil War. He does so with some parts of this history, but overall this book is on the dry and analytical side (just a heads-up for potential readers). For example, the chapters on the road to the Compromise of 1850 are very in-depth, almost to the point of distraction. Still, this book definitely sharpened my understanding of the politics of this era and the origins of the Civil War.

  • Derek Lee

    This history of the era before the Civil War was written in 1976, but to my surprise the narration of my audiobook version sounded quite modern. It really wasn't until a 1/3 of the way through that the author uses the then-acceptable term "negro" to refer to Black Americans. At the end of version, it then all made sense: audio recording 2017.

    The Impending Crisis gets its name from the 1857 book, The Impending Crisis of the South, which the author name checks (and we get the Family Guy joke of when the book mentions its own title). The period 1848-1861 is important - most Americans will understand 1861, but 1848 and the end of the Mexican-American War, the Gold Rush, and the 48er emigres from Europe kicked off a series of sequential shocks, panics, and events while the Civil War over slavery (and later the right to succession by states) built to a slow crescendo.

    The Impending Crisis won a Pulitzer, so even though it's 50 years old, it's not like it needs my approval. What I will say is that one of the reasons it took a while to catch that it was a half-century old was that the analysis is thorough and the narrative has not been debunked or reinterpreted too much. In other words, it's still a very credible narrative of the crisis years.

    Why the authoritative novel on the years before the Civil War became relevant enough to publish new editions after Trump became president should be obvious. The years before the Civil War saw rapid demographic change and a clash of cultures and values that saw one breathtaking crisis lead to the next. The series of crises, rather than making the outbreak of violence feel ever-nearer, led to apathy and dismissiveness à la the boy who cried wolf.

    In retrospect and especially with both the orthodox narrative of the Civil War taught in middle school US history, and the revisionist "states rights" ones, the Civil War is inevitable. As The Impending Crisis demonstrates, nothing in history is inevitable. Many divergence points leading to alternative histories are found up through the shelling and surrender of Fort Sumter. Points where different tactics, different communication, different players would have altered the trajectory towards war. In fact, one interesting rupture discussed is that the split could have possibly gone West vs. East instead of North vs. South.

    In that light, the whole period is cast with the view of retrospect - how critical the years before the Civil War were for staging the war. If there's one lesson it's that for those living before the Civil War, contemporaries had no idea that it was "before" a war that hasn't happened yet. That authors in 1857 predicted a rupture and civil war over the slavery issue means that it wasn't out of nowhere, either though.

    Fast forward to 2022, America is yet again at an impending crisis. The war of misinformation and the ever-increasing rhetoric and violence between the Left and the Right has reached the level that Northerners and Southerners had by 1856. Sides were talking past each other because debates stopped being legitimate ways to reach consensus through good faith discussion, but rather ways to win points among people that already agreed with them. A vocal minority saw the devastating future of bloodshed, and some like Stephen Douglas exhausted themselves to an early grave warning Americans of the horrible future.

    My hope is that our current era of 1992-20xx isn't looked back in the same way as 1848-1861 is today: as the rising action before the catastrophe.

  • Katie

    Years ago I cracked open a very thick book about the Civil War and found myself perplexed when it just jumped in right at the beginning of the fighting. "But how did we get here?" I wanted to know. I knew from history class the causes of the Civil War were arguments over slavery and state's rights, but how exactly did the North and South go from compromising to killing on a battlefield? When I found an old copy of David Potter's The Impending Crisis at a used book sale, it turned out to be exactly what I was looking for.

    This book starts in the 1840s and details the legislative and political activity in America all the way through 1861, ending with the bombardment of Fort Sumter. It discusses how during that time a series of events led to hardening of the sectionalism present since the founding of America into an uncompromisable political divide between North and South. This book is primarily a political history. The majority of the text dedicated to activity in Congress, with some social history sprinkled into add context. Potter is a very dynamic writer, and he frames each element (the Compromise of 1850, Bleeding Kansas, etc) so that you never forget the bloody climax we are building towards. Potter also never looses sight of the true source of conflict - protection of slavery in the South - when recounting all the various proxy battles in Congress on territorial issues. The politicking and legislative gridlock are uncomfortably familiar to a modern reader, which can be jarring as over it all hangs the specter of profound moral evil. It's extremely thought-provoking, especially since we still feel the consequences in modern America.

    Overall, I enjoyed this book very much and I learned an enormous amount. I took one star off for a couple of reasons. First, the beginning is a little disorienting as the book assumes the reader has detailed knowledge of American politics in the 1840s. I don't, so it took some time to get into it. The chapter on the Dred Scott Decision was also dense with nitpicky legal arguments, which I personally found pretty tedious. The second and more important criticism I have is that for a book about slavery, the viewpoint of Black people is conspicuously absent. This book is primarily concerned with arguments between White people - specifically White men - about slavery. Apart from some quotes by Frederick Douglass, people actually affected by slavery don't get a voice. As a political history, this makes a certain amount of sense given only White men could vote or hold office at time. From the perspective of 2020, however, a pretty huge piece of the picture is missing.

  • Dave Schoettinger

    In this book, Professor Potter presents a detailed account of the events that lead to the political polarization of the US in the mid-19th century that eventually resulted in the American Civil War. I read this book in hopes that I would find vast differences between the disagreements of our antebellum predecessors and those that we are obsessed with in the early 21st century. I was disappointed to find mostly glaring similarities. Professor Potter died nearly 50 years ago, so he was certainly not writing to point out these similarities.

    In some respects, it appears we may be in even worse shape than in the 1850s. During that decade, there were several politicians with large followings who were continually trying to find compromise solutions to relieve the partisan disagreements that dominated the political agenda. One can question the viability of these proposed compromises and the motivations of their supporters, but at least someone recognized the unsustainability of the situation and was trying to do something about it. Today finding support for something as simple as repairing roads and bridges takes all the good will that the parties can muster and vilification awaits persons such as Liz Cheney or Joe Manchin, who fall out of lockstep with the rest of their party.

    Potter explores the antebellum Southern psyche and finds that fear of slave insurrection as the dominant emotion of the white population. Because of this fear, even non-slaveholding whites opposed the end of slavery and the prospect of millions of former slaves, many of whom might be seeking violent retribution for centuries of involuntary servitude, living among them. Therefore, the author emphasizes John Brown's raid at Harpers Ferry as the event that made secession conceivable for many Southerners. The feckless Brown, whose poorly panned and amateurish effort never had a chance of success, was hung for his efforts, but to the horror of the South, was hailed as a hero and martyr for trying to incite and facilitate rebellion among the slave population. Attitudes were hardened on both sides and civil war became not nearly as unthinkable.

    My hope is that an equally slipshod attempt at rebellion that took place last January will not have similar results.