Themes of the American Civil War

Indians.
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Yet these developments did not mean that the colonies were growing away from Britain on the contrary, if anything, they shared in the growing sense of Britishness that Linda Colley has discerned in Britain in the eighteenth century, and they took pride in their place in the triumphant
British Empire. The menace of Indians and the presence of African slaves encouraged even non-British settlers to identify with their English-speaking neighbors, and racial and cultural affinity provided a common bond for all white Protestant colonists.
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This shared political outlook was fully revealed after 1763 as the colonies came into conflict with the British government. Though each colony had its own grievances, the underlying rationale was the same and the common ideology gained clear expression in the resistance to the Stamp Act of Americans in all the colonies that possessed provincial legislatures found themselves struggling to preserve what they saw as basic protections of their rights and liberties as British citizens. The continuing argument quickly transposed this sense of a common British citizenship into an exclusive
American self-identification, as the colonists concluded by 1774 that the failure of people in Britain to prevent the repeated threats to colonial liberties meant that the people there were corrupt and no longer capable of defending liberty. Thus the degeneration of the home country made America Gods last best hope for the preservation of civil freedoms. In these circumstances,
colonial newspapers, notably in the South, increasingly used the word
“American” as the common descriptor of the colonies and by 1773 were expressing a clear sense of continental identity. Even before fighting began,
recent historians have detected the existence of a distinct American political community.”
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The very character of the Revolution assisted the social construction of this national feeling. The transfer of power to the former colonies was justified on the principle of the sovereignty of the people, but that principle was necessarily based on the assumption—clearly expressed in the Declaration of Independence of that Americans constituted a single, coherent
“people.” Aware of the need for outward expressions of this identity,
Americans everywhere adapted traditional British street celebrations into rituals that legitimized the new order the toasts—initially always thirteen in number—offered at public festivals expressed national rather than provincial pride. Most important, the reports of the scattered events of the Revolution and of local celebrations then circulated through the press, giving them a national import and helping to create what Benedict Anderson has called an imagined political community Indeed, we might argue that the sense of American nationality gained deep roots so quickly because the binding thread of a common “print-language,” so essential for creating an awareness of sharing a communal identity, was not restricted to an upper class,
since literacy was already widespread and newspapers were extraordinarily
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numerous. Hence the evidence of recent cultural historians increasingly suggests, in David Waldstreicher’s words, that Americans practiced nationalism before they had a fully developed national state.”
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In practice, a Union government was established even before the separate states had a legal existence. Faced by British military and naval power, the colonies had no choice (as Franklin said) but to hang together. The Continental
Congress, called in 1774, swiftly began to act in the collective interest of the colonies, authorizing a Continental Association to embargo trade with
Britain, raising a Continental army, issuing a Continental currency, and negotiating with foreign powers, long before its constitutional powers were defined. The Association of October, 1774, in particular was an act of revolutionary nationalism, with Congress bypassing provincial governments and directly ordering the creation of extralegal local authorities, which was accepted with an amazing agreement through the continent As the crisis deepened in 1776 the Virginia House of Burgesses recognized that it was inappropriate fora single colony to declare its independence and so pressed its representatives in Philadelphia to persuade Congress to take the critical step on behalf of the whole American people. It may have been difficult—in
John Adams’s famous phrase—to make thirteen clocks strike as one, but the
United States took its stand as an integral political entity on the world scene long before any state asserted its sovereignty. When foreign powers recognized Congress as the legitimate and authoritative exponent of the Union’s will, in both the French alliance of 1778 and the peace treaty of 1783, they in effect recognized the priority of the sovereignty of the United States.
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Popular commitment to the new republic gained deep emotional roots as a result of the War for Independence. Just as the French and Indian wars had a unifying effect on sentiment before 1763, so Americans sanctified their cause by the spilling of blood together in resisting the British effort to conquer them. Some historians have argued that the fighting between and 1781 had probably a greater impact on proportionately more of the
American population than the Civil War fourscore and ten years later, as ordinary people allover the country bullied neighbors, fought skirmishes,
had property impounded, and suffered harassment, injury, and tragic loss.
In the South, the last eighteen months of the struggle degenerated into a guerrilla, even terrorist, war between Patriot and Loyalist neighbors. The memory of the war subsequently became the touchstone of national feeling,
just as the Civil War did for the late nineteenth century. Strikingly, the
Congress agreed in the early s that, since the war had been a common effort, those states such as South Carolina that had paid out proportionately more than average for the war effort should be recompensed by the states that had paid less. A congressional settlement commission promptly began to audit state accounts in order to apportion the cost of the war among the states on a per capita basis, though this commitment to back patriotic
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sentiment with hard cash remained unfulfilled in the s because of postwar financial difficulties and Congress’s lack of authority.
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The weakness of Congress after the war reflects the reality that the new republic was made up of thirteen very different and widely separated states,
each proudly asserting the provincial autonomy that it believed Britain had threatened. Moreover, the ideology of the Revolution emphasized the principle of self-determination and insisted that the states came together involuntary association. As a consequence, the Articles of Confederation
(drafted in 1776–77 but not ratified until 1781) expressed the conviction of the states that Congress must not become an overly powerful central government that might threaten the plural and decentralized nature of the
Union. But, faced after 1783 by the republic’s ineffectiveness in dealing with hostile foreign powers and imperial neighbors, and experiencing the disruptive social and political consequences of the postwar financial and economic crisis, politically aware Americans faced up to the need for constitutional revision remarkably quickly. The new Constitution of was produced by a nationally conscious political elite that welded together an overwhelming coalition of merchants and urban artisans, young men and old patriots, slaveholders and capitalists, major ports and financially overstrained states, exposed frontier areas and metropolitan interests. The eleven state conventions that approved the Constitution before 1789 did so,
overall, by a two-to-one margin among their members.
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This decision has often been seen—like the initial Act of Union in as a forced response to the critical situation in which the newly independent states found themselves. Thus, it is argued, continental institutions were necessarily created before a true sense of nationhood existed. Since, according to John Murrin, American national identity was . . . an unexpected,
impromptu, artificial, and therefore extremely fragile creation of the
Revolution,” the Founding Fathers were apparently doomed to erect over their heads a national roof that was not supported by the walls of popular nationalism.
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Of course, American national identity was ill defined and the process of defining its meanings would take many decades, lasting long beyond the Civil War, but many indications confirmed that a basic sense of American political community did already exist. For example, when
Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay wrote a series of newspapers articles into help secure the ratification of the Constitution in New York—the famous Federalist Papers—they necessarily emphasized the pragmatic utility of the Union and the merits of the new constitutional scheme, but their argument constantly assumed, and without any disagreement from their opponents, that a single American people existed that rightly belonged together in some sort of political relationship.
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Indeed, the decision to create a more perfect Union in 1787–88 cannot be satisfactorily explained without the prior existence of some sense of
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nationality. After all, those who opposed ratification of the Constitution—
the “Antifederalists”—controlled at least six of the ratifying conventions when they first met, but proved unwilling to vote the new scheme down. In the New Hampshire convention, a number of Antifederalists who had been instructed to vote against the Constitution voted for an adjournment instead;
and the four-month interim was then successfully used to persuade their constituents that their fears of the proposed system were groundless. The truth was that the Antifederalists were not hostile to the Union they wanted to preserve the existing Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union”
(my italics, but with a few necessary amendments that experience had already shown could not pass the amendment process laid down in the
Articles, which required the agreement of all the states. Lacking a viable alternative of their own, enough Antifederalists were persuaded by the merits of the proposed scheme—and encouraged by the promise of a Bill of
Rights—to produce the necessary majorities and by the time of the first federal elections in the fall of 1788 even the most recalcitrant of their fellows had accepted the new framework and promptly worked within it. Their ideas persisted, but in future the former Antifederalists of 1787–88 would argue over the meaning of the Constitution, not its legitimacy.
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The coming together of the states in 1787–88 may, within limits, bethought of as comparable to an international diplomatic negotiation.
Certainly the Founders feared that internecine wars would follow a breakup of the Union, but they also had the advantage of the ideological, cultural,
emotional, and practical bonds that meant they negotiated as something more than potential partners. Certainly the Constitution provided a significant model of how relationships between international powers might be civilized in future through the creation of international law, but it also created so much more than a peace pact so much more than a league of states It transformed the Thirteen Colonies, with their varying constitutions and imperial relationships, from a composite polity typical of early modern
Europe into a qualitatively different condition in which they stood on a common legal and constitutional footing with each other. Though federated,
the United States was now a single political entity of the kind envisaged for the empire by British statesmen before 1776, even if the Constitution also recognized the (now limited) internal autonomy of the states. As Max
Edling has argued, the Founding Fathers had deliberately created a fiscal- military state itself composed of established states suspicious of exactly such centralized power.
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On any interpretation, the system of government established in was no mere token of national unity, but gave a remarkable range of power to the central authority. If the states retained sovereignty in important areas, the new federal government gained absolute control in many others.
Just compare the powers undoubtedly conceded to the American Union in
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1787–88 with those that some European countries nowadays are reluctant to concede to the European Union. The American people in their various states not only agreed to create a single market, with no internal barriers to the free movement of people and goods, but also established a central government worthy of the name—controlling a single defense policy, a single foreign policy, a single immigration policy, and even a single currency. Laws exercising these powers were to be determined by unqualified majority voting, and their application could not be limited by opt-out clauses for any particularist state. Indeed, the Constitution required the people of a state to accept the operation, within their state, of an outside jurisdiction, possibly controlled by a rival interest and that meant accepting not just externally appointed executive officers but an external system of justice operating at the local level. Given the lack of a comparable sense of European nationality,
can one imagine any country in present-day Europe submitting to the collection of direct taxes by officeholders appointed by outsiders In practice,
of course, the US. government would usually appoint residents of the state concerned as federal officers, but there was no guarantee that this would always happen, as many southerners appreciated in But the sense of American community among the politically active—and that was a lot of people—was strong enough in 1787 for the majority of their representatives to be persuaded that such a sacrifice could be made with safety.

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