Gary Kornblith’s Rethinking the Coming of the Civil War is an exercise in the counterfactual method; that is, a very refined version of a “what if?” scenario. Kornblith draws on his close knowledge of the period, as well as contemporary writings, to project what would have happened if Henry Clay had won the election of 1844 rather than James K. Polk.
Kornblith’s conclusions are extensive, but the main thrust of his argument is that had Clay been elected, Texas would not have been annexed, thus the Mexican-American War would not have occurred. Without the great expansion of U.S. territory, conflicts between slaveholding and non-slaveholding interests, and thus the South and the North, would have had no impetus to explode into secession and war.
First, to give legitimacy to his argument, Kornblith explains how close the race between Clay and Polk actually was, and that with just a slight difference in the voting of New York, Clay could have become president. He argues Polk did not ride into office on a wave of “war hawk” sentiment sweeping the nation; but rather, a variety of factors, such as patterns of immigrant voting, enabled him to edge into a victory that “seems more arbitrary than inevitable.”
Kornblith then describes his vision of quite a different America under Clay, “one that might have ended in a permanently smaller United States and no civil war—at least no civil war in the early 1860s.” Using Clay’s personal writings to judge his opinions, Kornblith concludes that Clay valued harmony, both between the sections and with foreign powers, over the expansion of American territory. Thus, to avoid conflict with Mexico, he would not have annexed Texas, preferring instead to keep it as a friendly neighbor. Following this train of events, Kornblith hypothesizes that the second party system, rather than falling apart at constitutional arguments incited by the expansion of slavery into vast new territories, would have remained strong under Clay’s presidency and beyond. The future of slavery, and of the antislavery movement, Kornblith is less sure of. He does admit, quoting Gavin Wright, that “the notion that slavery would have faded away peacefully in the late nineteenth century has always been a wishful chapter in historical fiction, not part of a plausible counterfactual history.”
I believe Kornblith’s article is more useful in revealing the follies of historical determinism than in providing a strong argument of its own. While counterfactual reasoning is very interesting, and while his projections of likely events are doubtless well-considered, I have a hard time getting myself to consider the argument seriously. A quick search through the article reveals how many times he uses such words as “probably” and “most likely.” Of course, these are necessary for the type of thought experiment he is performing; however, the fact that he bases his entire argument on something that seems like it should have happened, yet didn’t, undoes the rest of the threads he weaves. For every probable outcome he posits, it is entirely possible that due to some chance, quite another outcome might have occurred. And if one such “probably” is undone, his argument is in danger of being affected by a domino effect.
I certainly found the article an interesting read, and it did get me to consider more critically the idea that a civil war was inevitable. Kornblith imagines a perfectly believable world where large-scale violence did not occur, at least not until much later than actually happened. I entirely believe that such a world could have come into being. Although troubling questions remain, such as how long it would have taken for America to abolish slavery altogether, we cannot project wishful thinking onto the past and assume that a great cataclysm was destined to happen soon, even without the Mexican-American war. However, it is Kornblith’s specific arguments that I call into question. It is hard to believe that Kornblith could figure out Clay’s policies, let alone predict how larger legislative bodies and American society would react. Surely such an office as the presidency must affect anyone elected, and there is no guarantee that under the immense pressure, Clay would have kept to ideals he had professed up until that point. Surely not even Clay himself could have predicted the policies he would have actually enacted had he won the presidency, let alone Kornblith looking on a century and a half later.