In the article, “Rethinking the Coming of the Civil War: A Counterfactual Exercise,” the author points out many similarities between the Revolutionary War and the Civil War. He also emphasizes the importance of the Mexican-American war as the precursor to the Civil War. He bases a great amount of his argument on the election of Henry Clay vs James Polk. In fact, he argues that if Clay had won the very tight election, things would have turned out drastically different. This election was heavily centered on the annexation of Texas, which he argues is also very important to consider in the outcome of the war. If Clay had won, there might be a separate country known as Texas, he suggests. This addition of Texas upset the territorial balance between the North and South. He also considers the separation of California from the U.S. as a possible outcome. These ideas add territories to the list of reasons why the Civil War could have happened, as well as a difference in politics; a revisionist view. The idea of a national bank is also brought into play. In essence, the essay suggests possible outcomes under the Clay presidency instead of the Polk presidency. It goes on to mention differences between North and South as far as slavery goes, which all sounds fairly familiar: a small abolitionist group up North unable to persuade or combat a very large pro-slave attitude in the South, or of despondency even in the North.
There are a few things I don’t like about this article, but my main problem with this article is the method of his argument: the counterfactual method. Reading through this, one spots a very large amount of “would have’s” and “what if’s.” Although there are some good points to be made in considering early factors such as the Mexican-American War, the annexation of Texas, and the overall election of Clay versus Polk, there does not seem to be too much support from primary evidence; at least not enough to make the types of claims he’s making, such as Texas being an independent nation, or the Emancipation process being started earlier under Clay. There is also a strong focus on what Clay would have done, and very little on either Polk or any other opposing argument. I feel that the author spends too much time trying to reconstruct what could have happened and not enough time focusing on why history happened the way it did. The author doesn’t spend enough time talking about reasons for the war, but instead spends all his time on the would-have-been presidency of Henry Clay. Granted, there are some decent ideas that arise out of this reconstruction, but it becomes a matter of how he presents it and what angle he takes on it. Slavery is also somehow underrepresented in this article. Although there is a good amount written about it, the angle tends to be from the politics of it all, such as from Henry Clay’s theoretical presidency. There are some good and sometimes familiar points made in this article, but overall becomes a hypothetical scenario through most of it. If the author focused more on the ideas and supported them, rather than reconstructing a scenario that didn’t happen just to make a few points, there possibly could have been a lot of evidence for them and a good argument would have been formed. However, in short, I feel this article falls short of what it could have been.