The Impending Crisis, 1848–1861
by David M. Potter
Summary
David M. Potter spent much of his career studying the sectional crisis that led to the Civil War, and The Impending Crisis gathers that lifetime of study into a single sweeping account of the political collapse that took the country from the Mexican War's territorial spoils to secession. Potter traces the failed compromises, beginning with the Compromise of 1850 and running through the Kansas Nebraska Act, the collapse of the Whig party, the rise of the Republican party and the Dred Scott decision, showing how each attempted solution to the question of slavery in the territories only deepened the divide it was meant to close.
Potter treats the South not as an isolated region acting alone but as a full participant in a national political system that was failing everyone, giving real weight to the structural pressures, economic, demographic and constitutional, that narrowed the options available to leaders on both sides as the 1850s wore on. He follows the political figures of the decade, Stephen Douglas and Abraham Lincoln chief among them, with genuine balance, resisting the temptation to treat the outcome as inevitable or to assign easy blame.
Potter died of cancer in February 1971 with the manuscript unfinished, and the historian Don E. Fehrenbacher completed and edited it for publication in 1976, working from Potter's own notes and drafts to bring the project to print. Reading the book means following one of the most balanced, comprehensive accounts of how the United States actually arrived at civil war, and it suits a reader who wants the decade's tangled political maneuvering explained in full rather than compressed into a handful of famous events.
Historical Context & Significance
The Impending Crisis, 1848 to 1861 won the 1977 Pulitzer Prize for History, six years after Potter's death in February 1971 and one year after Don E. Fehrenbacher completed and published the unfinished manuscript. No finalists were published that year; the Pulitzer board began naming them only in 1980.
Potter had taught at Yale for nearly two decades before moving to Stanford as Coe Professor of American History, and he was serving as president of both the American Historical Association and the Organization of American Historians when he died. The book stands as one of the fullest accounts of the political road to the Civil War, and Fehrenbacher, who saw it into print, went on to win the same prize himself two years later for his own book on the Dred Scott decision.