The American public recently watched a surprising event: After months of saying that he would stay in the presidential race, Joe Biden dropped out. What interested me most was the predictions that preceded it.

Some pundits were adamant that he would stay in; others, such as Bill Maher and Vivek Ramaswamy, were certain he wouldn’t.  (I have had difficulty finding the words of those other than Donald Trump who said he would keep going. Maybe they know how to “bury negative search results” on Google.)

Biden’s decision led me to think about whether events in history were predictable. Could the following events have been predicted?

Ratification of the U.S. Constitution

Maybe. Nine states had to approve the Constitution for it to become law and replace the Articles of Confederation. Ratification was likely—but we tend to forget that there was a big fight over it.

As Jay Schalin wrote on these pages, history is not necessarily written by the winners, but by those “who can write best, even if they were the losers.” The supporters of the Constitution were both winners and good writers. The authors of The Federalist Papers were people who would soon have important posts in the new government: John Jay, Alexander Hamilton, and James Madison. They wrote well, and often.

But why did they have to write all those essays? Because the AntiFederalists—people such as George Mason and Patrick Henry—were genuinely concerned about the power that the Constitution gave to the national government. George Mason, for example, wrote,  “There is no declaration of any kind, for preserving the liberty of the press, or the trial by jury in civil cases; nor against the danger of standing armies in time of peace.”[1]

The debate brought us the Bill of Rights. We should be deeply grateful to the AntiFederalists.

The Civil War

I  say yes. The issue was the expansion of slavery (not slavery itself, at first). The buildup was slow and it took a long time, but the conflict only increased and the positions hardened as time went on.

Simply considering acts of Congress, the process started with the Missouri Compromise of 1820 (which let Missouri into the Union as a slave state, and Maine as a free state). That led to the Compromise of 1850 (a complicated collection of actions that brought in California as a free state but strengthened the Fugitive Slave Act). Then in 1854, there was the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which set off a firestorm because it allowed Kansas to vote on whether it would be slave or free (no one was too concerned about slavery in Nebraska. )

The Dred Scott decision, John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry, and the election of Lincoln quickly followed. After the firing on Fort Sumter, Lincoln asked for 75,000 volunteers to quell the southern rebellion. That caused the remaining Southern states to secede—and allowed southerners to name the conflict  “The War of Northern Aggression.”

The ultimate conflict seems inevitable. The only thing that might have prevented it would have been paying enslavers to free their slaves, as Great Britain did in the Caribbean. This seems impossible in the nineteenth-century United States.

World War I

Surely not! No one expected the horrific lengthy war that occurred, with 16.5 million people killed, and the seeds of anger planted for another world war 20 years later. [2] Retrospectively, we can see how the alliances had been set up to create a perfect storm. But in 1914, a global war must have seemed unlikely. There had already been two Balkan Wars (in two years—1912–1913), one of which ended the Ottoman Empire. Wouldn’t another war be like those? Troublesome for Europeans, but contained.

And when the war did start, everyone expected it to be a quick one. It might have been, if either France or Germany had decisively won the First Battle of the Marne in 1914. The French “victory” led the French to keep fighting. There were between 400,000 and 500,000 casualties (dead and wounded) in that one battle. [3]That should have been sacrifice enough to the gods of war.

Other Predictions

What about other dramatic events? The American Revolution—was it predictable? Think of how hard the Massachusetts firebrands had to work to bring it about. And if it weren’t for Patrick Henry and Thomas Paine they might not have succeeded.

What about the civil rights movement in the United States? The end of apartheid in South Africa? The Reformation?

I welcome your thoughts (and essays)!

Notes (Comments follow the notes).

[1] George Mason, Objections to This Form of Government, September 1787, https://www.archives.gov/files/legislative/resources/education/bill-of-rights/images/mason.pdf.

[2] Death estimates vary, but this seems to be the consensus. See Patrick J. Kiger, “How Many People Died in World War I?” History.com, May 20, 2024.  https://www.history.com/news/how-many-people-died-in-world-war-i.

[3] Kennedy Hickman,  “World War I: First Battle of the Marne.” ThoughtCo., https://www.thoughtco.com/first-battle-of-the-marne-2361397.