The Art of Compromise and the Right of Self-Creation

When faced with the disaster of the Civil War, Americans prefer to conclude that the Union was secure except for slavery, the tragic flaw or alternatively, that fools had inherited and ruined a nearly perfect machine. This is not altogether surprising: we are a self-deceiving people who need history to affirm the righteousness of our pragmatic, ambitious innovations. Our exceptional virtue must be rooted in the founding or nowhere at all, and so we idolize a Constitution that sketched out more of a promise than a practical machine. The founders themselves worried endlessly that jealousy, greed, and local feeling would wreck their fragile system of self-government, and one suspects they would not have been surprised in 1861 to find the Union on the rocks over slavery. The elders of the second generation, however, expressed shock and dismay as the Union disintegrated, and historians ever since have shown a tendency to conflate the contemporaries' horror at the prospect of disunion with our retrospective horror at the basic contradictions that produced such a violent collision. Peter B. Knupfer's new book, The Union as It Is, strives to recover the perspective of the innocents and look with fresh eyes at the tradition of plain old political compromise within the American republican system. Knupfer locates the strategy of compromise inside the constitutional framework, and in doing so anchors the causes of the sectional crisis at the center instead of on the fringes of the American political tradition. Convinced (as were the framers) that the 1787 Constitution rested on expedient and fragile compromises, Knupfer sees the subsequent politics of sectional accommodation not as evidence of eroding consensus but as the original consensus itself. Party maneuvers to prevent sectional issues from invading national politics, while not anticipated by the antiparty founders, nevertheless carried forward, in Knupfer's view, the essential work of the delegates at Philadel

Compromise · Political science · American Constitutional Law and Politics · Law · Legal and Constitutional Studies · Political Theory and Influence

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