A MASTER’S LESSONS

AVID M. POTTER’S WORK has influenced me throughout my professional career. While in graduate school, I read (1942; revised edition, 1962), (1968), which included a version of Potter’s brilliant essay titled “The Historian’s Use of Nationalism and Vice Versa,” and , (1976), a volume in the prestigious New American Nation series. All three revealed Potter’s gifts for writing analytical narratives, explaining complex issues clearly, and highlighting the need to engage historical actors within the circumstances of their eras. alerted me to what Potter calls “the fallacy of reading history backward.” I refer to it as, Potter cautions about assuming that Republican leaders, as they debated how to deal with threats of secession in 1860, must have known that war was possible. “Inasmuch as they had been the first to foresee an ‘Irrepressible Conflict,’” he remarks regarding a common perception about Republicans, “it seems implausible that they should have been the last to recognize that the conflict was on the eve of materializing.” Historians and lay readers who knew battles such as Shiloh and Gettysburg followed secession and establishment of the Confederacy found it “scarcely credible that the Republicans should have been so oblivious to the impending tragedy.”