Did We Give Peace a Chance in 1861?

Jay Winik made his first big splash in Civil War history-writing in 2001 with April 1865: The Month That Saved America, a fast-paced account of the closing weeks of the war. It was also his first book-length adventure after a career in the diplomatic service that took him to the sites of a number of modern-day civil wars, and it successfully landed him on bestseller and recommended-reading lists across the country. Thereafter, Winik zigzagged, first to the 18th century with The Great Upheaval: America and the Birth of the Modern World, 1788–1800 in 2007, and then to the 20th with 1944: FDR and the Year That Changed History in 2015. The needle has now returned to its original Civil War position, this time with a fresh account of the coming of the war in 1861: The Lost Peace.

That fatal year has attracted more than the usual share of historians’ attention. The terrible season that extended from the election of 1860 to the firing on Fort Sumter five months later has been the subject of great work by David Potter, Shearer Bowman, William Freehling, Adam Goodheart, William Cooper, and Russell McClintock, among many others. Even the Sumter crisis has generated wonderful writing by W.A. Swanberg, Eric Larsen, and David Detzer. What separates Winik from this crowded field is that almost every other historian writes about the year 1861 as an inevitable countdown to an inevitable war; Winik’s story is about the lost opportunities for peace. This is why the real centerpiece of the book is not Lincoln or even Fort Sumter, but the much-neglected national Peace Conference that assembled at the Willard Hotel in Washington in February 1861 to consider the ambitious compromises crafted by Kentucky’s senior senator, John J. Crittenden.

If there is a hero in this story for Winik, it is Crittenden, "one of history’s unsung figures," who against every expectation came within an ace of persuading the conference and Congress to amend the Constitution and head off the rush to war. The conference has generally been dismissed by historians as too-little-too-late, and even by Horace Greeley in 1861 as "The Old Gentlemen’s Convention." Winik is more cautious in his estimate. Crittenden, the heir of Henry Clay’s Union-saving mantle, was "humble, patriotic, dignified," all the while "carefully monitoring the pulse of the American public in the North as well as the South." The compromise proposals—chiefly, a federal commitment to protect slavery, but only in the states where it was legal—read to modern eyes as amoral deals with the devil. But as Winik notices, the Southern delegates who accepted those compromises were quietly recognizing congressional authority to limit the spread of slavery to the West, something they had been swearing since 1857 and Dred Scott that they would never do.

In the end, it all came to naught. "Both sides," Winik writes, "were seduced by their own illusions," and especially the illusion that the other side would cave first and obviate the need for compromise. Remembering Southern threats of civil war as early as 1850, the Republican stalwart Carl Schurz assured nervous Northerners that the threats of 1861 would end the same way. In 1850, "the South … went out, took a drink, and then came back." Now, they would try to leave the Union again, "and this time would take two drinks but come back again." The Chicago Tribune snorted at secession as "a confidence game" which, "when the real meaning and scope of this secession business is understood," will be dismissed by "the capitalists and business men" and end with "a hearty laugh all around." Abraham Lincoln, whose election sent South Carolina racing toward secession in the first place, was certain, even after South Carolina’s secession convention declared its ties to the Union dissolved, that "things have reached their worst point in the South, and they are likely to mend in the future."

They could not have been more horribly wrong. "What was begun," Winik writes, "to quell an insurrection would consume more than 600,000 lives" and would turn the South into "charred and lonely reminders of once thriving cities." True, it gave us "the genius of Abraham Lincoln," and for African Americans it provided "their own struggle for true freedom." But there is still the hint of resignation in Winik’s conclusion. Even "the exhilaration of emancipation" would be tempered by "its unfulfilled promise."

This is an ambitious, even daring, reconstruction of the issues and personalities that led to the outbreak of the Civil War. The question, of course, is whether Winik has quite pulled-off his dare. Judged purely by Winik’s considerable narrative skills, 1861: The Lost Peace is fast-paced, swift and colorful in its strokes, generous in its compassion. But there are a number of oddities about 1861 which burden even the most well-earned praise. First, there is the peculiar fact that, in a book of only 268 pages of text, Winik doesn’t actually reach the year of his title until after page 140. It’s also odd that, despite Winik’s claim to have "extensively woven primary sources with secondary sources," there are no footnotes or endnotes, no bibliography, and no way to know what those sources are. It does not help, either, that the copyeditors allowed a number of embarrassing misprints to slip past: diffused rather than defused, broadsides rather than broadswords, Ward Hill Lehman rather than Lamon, Thurgood Marshall rather than John Marshall.

The are other questions, too. It is somewhat wide of the mark to say that there was "no record" of Lincoln’s "lost" Bloomington speech of 1856 (there was no transcript, but the Alton Weekly Courier, the Belleville Advocate, and the Bloomington Weekly Pantagraph all reported on the speech). Likewise, Francis Preston Blair was many things, but not a "renowned diplomat." John Crittenden did not gaze "from the windows of his Senate office" because there were no Senate offices in 1860. Robert E. Lee did not attend the hanging of John Brown, nor was he descended from "two signers of the Declaration of Independence." Edwin Stanton did not become Lincoln’s secretary of war until 1862. Above all, Fort Sumter does not "face the sea" but instead overlooks the principal ship channel just inside the Charleston harbor mouth, and its gorge wall had no resemblance whatsoever to "the doomed picket fence manned by the Tennesseans at the Alamo." Tossing and goring in this manner is not pleasant, so let this much suffice.

There is, of course, no such thing as an error-proof historical narrative; the cloud of doubt arises when slip-ups accumulate to the degree they do in 1861. But the most debate-ready doubts hover around 1861’s basic implication: that the Civil War should have somehow been an avoidable war. Is this too optimistic, or at least too hopeful? Slavery was a system of injustice; but it was more than that. To protect it, one section of the country had invented a hideous structure of oligarchy, Romantic racial blather, and outright treason that marched in exactly the opposite direction from the Founders of the republic. We had become two incommensurable cultures, and it would have taken more than the combined talents of even Lincoln and Crittenden to avoid a collision. That the collision ended on the side of truth and right is something Winik, rightly and to his credit, acknowledges when he concludes that "the lost peace was the necessary war." Let us pray that we do not have a similar regret to utter about our own times.

1861: The Lost Peace
by Jay Winik
Grand Central Publishing, 304 pp., $35

Allen C. Guelzo is the Thomas W. Smith Distinguished Research Scholar in the James Madison Program at Princeton University and a Non-Resident Fellow of the American Enterprise Institute.

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