Contingency

History is full of instances that at the time, and when viewed alone, seem to be innocent enough but end up dramatically changing the course of events when you look beyond that isolated moment. Often we stray into the somewhat treacherous realm of "What If" history while considering these events, where one can draw just about any conclusion they want if they stack the historic dominoes the right way. While it's interesting to consider how things could have changed in a different situation, I'm not arguing that historic figures should have had a clear view of what the end result of their choices would be. Rather, in most cases I argue the exact opposite: that we generally can not possibly know what the long term results of present actions will be until after the fact (sometimes not until decades or even centuries later), and even then it is a confused and muddled picture that we may never be able to grasp completely.

There are few spheres of history more rife with contingency than military history, and the fact that debates still rage on the consequences of certain actions shows that it is impossible to determine even hundreds of years later how much of history changes with a few different flips of the coin. Battles and even entire wars can be won or lost by a single decision or random event, whether it's made by the commanding officer, a conscript on the battlefield, or nature itself. One war that has contingency bursting from the seams is the American Revolution and there are entire books on some of the lucky breaks the Americans got during the war. And while most of these lucky breaks have fairly reasonable explanations for them, there are a few that are interesting to consider how close things really were. The most famous is probably Washington's retreat from Brooklyn Heights on August 29th-30th, 1776. Completely surrounded with the East River to their backs, Washington decided that to live to fight another day was better than a last stand and he organized for boats to ferry what was left of his army across the river. The winds stayed perfect for preventing the British ships from sailing up the river to cut off the retreat and General Howe oddly told his men to hold off the final attack and dig in, both of which bought the Americans some time. But the clincher was probably the heavy fog that settled along Long Island which prevented British sentries from seeing the American withdrawal and hitting them while they were vulnerable. The retreat succeeded and Washington slipped away with the remainder of his army to continue the fight.

Another fateful choice came later in the war, this time from the British navy. In 1781 the usually aggressive Admiral Rodney of the British Navy decided, for a multitude of reasons, not to engage a French convoy led by Admiral de Grasse, the same Admiral that was on his way to seal General Cornwallis in at Yorktown (and, interestingly, the same Admiral who was soundly thrashed by Rodney at the Battle of the Saintes one year later). The author Barbara Tuchman argues in The First Salute that in this case the British were actually aware of the possible result of their actions and yet failed to prevent it. Whether or not they fully grasped the contingency involved is impossible for me to say, but it does illustrate how one decision can have a large influence on world history.

There are plenty more I would like to include here, but I'll only choose one to expand on. Charles Guiteau was an American "lawyer" who obtained his law license under questionable circumstances at best, which later in life helped give rise to political aspirations. He spent some time in a New York jail, was nearly committed to an insane asylum but escaped to a neighboring state, and apparently narrowly avoided death in a steam boat collision in 1881. After hounding the White House for months and being politely refused for a political appointment he had absolutely no qualifications for, Guiteau decided to shoot President James A. Garfield as his plan to cure the Republican Party of its "problems" (mainly him not receiving his appointment). If any one of those circumstances had changed for the opposite, perhaps Garfield would have fulfilled his term and drastically changed the list of presidents? Regardless of how the eventual domino effect plays out, had he been removed from the picture at any one of those earlier moments it is unlikely that someone else as insane as Guiteau would have come along to assassinate President Garfield.

Whether or not history would have changed with any of these events and to what extent is impossible to say and indeed irrelevant to my point. The point is that any chance occurrence that happens today can have a butterfly effect tomorrow. It is both exciting and terrifying to think about what happens based on our actions each day. Perhaps you throw out that old sandwich which causes you to not die of food poisoning and eventually go on to cure cancer? Maybe your party losing in a disastrous midterm election *ahem* causes it to rethink its strategy and win big two years from now? Or the opposite? We know just as much about the results of our actions as Admiral Rodney did by choosing not to pursue de Grasse in 1781. I can't wait to see how it pans out.