Beyond antislavery and proslavery: a new term, eventualism, and a refined interpretive approach

ABSTRACT For decades, historians of slavery have grappled with an interpretive constraint. Despite a conviction that the past is as complex as the present, we have operated, to a significant degree, on the simplifying premise that historical attitudes toward enslavement were either antislavery or proslavery—in modified form, immediatist/gradualist or perpetualist. These binary frames have undermined our efforts to write about, and in some ways to discern, attitudes that fell in the ambivalent middle. Through a case study of Henry Clay, one of the most influential politicians operating in this middle range, this article argues for the adoption of a new term, eventualism, that describes one of the most common expressions of ambivalence: declaring opposition to slavery while insisting that, for the sake of the Union, it be left alone and allowed to follow a natural course to extinction. By illustrating the benefits of a refined interpretive approach, immediatism-gradualism-eventualism-perpetualism, along with the benefits of certain interpretive principles that, if more widely adopted, will clarify and enhance inter-scholarly engagements, this article seeks to encourage and enable historians to continue the important work of explicating how and why many Americans, predominantly white Americans, espoused attitudes with significant internal tensions.