Consensus Revisited

Consensus Revisited ALLAN SMITH Major L. Wilson, Space, Time andFreedom:The Questfor Nationality and the Irrepressible Conflict, 1815-1861. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1974. 309 pp. Ruch Welter, TheMind of America 1820-1860.New York: Columbia University Press, 1975. 603pp. Consensus historians have faced two sets of particularly burdensome difficulties in the course of their efforts to unify the elements of the American experience. In the face of much - sectional differences, ethnic identification, even class consciousness - that might have been expected to mitigate the sense of a common participation in a shared national experience, they have had to argue the proposition that Americans inhabited the same universe of belief and value. Secondly, they have had to decide whether this universe, once identified, was an historical product which assumed form and definition over time, or whether it was in possession of its essential characteristics throughout the course of American history .1 Perhaps the most difficult of the problems in the first category was that posed by the existence of the South. There if anywhere seemed to be a separate civilization founded upon its own economy, possessing its own values, and sustaining its own culture. Its very being appeared to make the argument for consensus difficult; that it had been kept in the Union only by force of arms to make it impossible. The fact, however, that decades had passed before the South declared a separate allegiance, and the further circumstance that the process of reconciliation after 1865 was relatively quick, gave the historians of consensus their opportunity. They found it possible to concede differences in outlook between northerners and southerners, and then to deny them any real importance . Thus, writes one observer, "even in the American Civil War [Daniel J. Boorstin] can discern, as did Whitman, a drama of conflicting wills within which resides a deeper unity of mind." 2 C. Vann Woodward, for his part, asserted that the South "remains more American by far than anything else, and has allalong." 3 And David M. Potter urged the necessity of seeing "how very thin the historical evidences of a separate southern culture really are." 4 For all the ingenuity with THE CANADIAN REVIEW OF AMERICAN STUDIES VOL. VII, NO. 2, FALL 1976 which the consensus historians argued their case, they were not, however uniformly happy with what they had wrought. Thus Louis Hartz, notwithstand~ mg his rendering of John C. Calhoun as, like other Americans, essentially a Lockean, conceded that the South continued to pose a special problem for anyone wishing to understand American society as one unified around a set of common principles. 5 So it has remained. If consensus historians were not in all cases satisfied with their work in uniting Americans in support of a single system of belief, they also experienced some difficulty in determining whether that system was as enduring and fixed in time as it was pervasive in space. In spite of their commitment, as historians, to the reality of change, most concluded that it was. They could, indeed, do no other, for they claimed to be defining their society in terms of constants in its behaviour and outlook. They did not, to be sure, set aside the reality of time altogether. The relationship it bore to the culture they were defining was, however, to be explained in new and unusual ways. Hartz claimed that the Americans' abstraction from the historical process as it was working itself out in Europe had, by lodging them in an essentially unchanging fragment culture, made them incapable of understanding how the flow of history produced new modes of thinking. They had become absolutist in their attachment to liberal values and it was asa consequence of this that their twentieth-century confrontation with what the passage of time had brought in other parts of the world - socialism - acquired such hysterical overtones. Boors tin, on the other hand, allowed for the reality of time in quite a different way. Change and a disposition to accept it were, he asserted, cardinal features of American society and the American mind. American life and behaviour were characterized by flexibility and pragmatism. American society, fluid and unformed, was in a continuous process of becoming. Yet...