Most of us reject the concept of “inevitability” as a force in history we much prefer “contingency,” the constancy of change in cause and effect. For historians, the stakes of the question are very high. Historians from the 1930s to the 1960s engaged in a prolonged debate over whether the war was inevitable, and if it was, when it became so. The debate over whether America is on an irreversible path to division and breakup like the one that led the country to war in 1861 raises an obvious question: Was the Civil War preventable? Although it is no longer at the center of academic history, this question once dominated American historians’ minds like no other. Walter argues that we will never again see a sectional or regional conflict between armies in the United States, but she believes that decentralized insurgencies, which she calls the “21st-century civil war,” are possible. The first is whether a government is a “partial democracy” - either a backsliding democracy or an autocracy trying to democratize - and the second is whether its population is voting based on people’s ethnic, religious or racial identity rather than on something else. Walter’s “How Civil Wars Start” examines more than 200 civil wars in modern history and suggests two major variables that help gauge the potential for civil conflict. They share a culture of fear that the American experiment is in peril and in need of regeneration - through politics or violent conflict or both.Ī recent book offers sobering prospects for where our current situation might lead. Each era inspired great hope for a limitless future, but also dread of internal conflict and violence.
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What these two decades do share, however, are cultures of what the historian John Higham called a “boundlessness” colliding into “consolidation.” Possibilities could seem infinite to an inventor in 1855 seeking to patent a new grain reaper or a thousand other devices needed in an expanding early industrial economy, as they do today for creators of software in the biomedical or aerospace industries. Americans of the 1850s were governed by the 1789 Constitution today we live under the Constitution forged during Reconstruction by the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments.
We do not even have the same Constitution. …The 2020s are vastly different from the 1850s in terms of technology, demographics, race relations, media and America’s standing in global affairs. I am going to skip the opening of Blight’s essay, which focuses on the lead-up to the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott Decision, but here are substantial excerpts from the article entitled “Was the Civil War Inevitable?”: As you might imagine, the article is getting a prominent place in the media because of growing talk of a modern civil war in our own 21st Century. David Blight, the Yale historian who has been a leading interpreter of the Civil War Era for more than a quarter century, has an extended article in this weekend’s New York Times Magazine on whether the Civil war was inevitable.
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