Nationalism

Nationalism is a loyalty to an “imagined community.” It creates a sense of common identity even among people who have never met one another and probably never will. In large part, that is its function. We speak of American or German nationalism, but not the national identity of Luxembourg or Liechtenstein, where a far higher percentage of the people do in fact know one another. Even in large nations, the issues of who is imagined to be part of the community and who is entitled to do the imagining have often been fiercely contested. Beginning with the Revolutionary War, African Americans have tried to use their participation in major wars to win acceptance of their membership in the national community, while those who founded and sustained that community have tried to exclude them or restrict their participation. By contrast, some white reformers were trying to turn Indians into American citizens at a time when most Indians preferred to be left alone as distinct peoples on enough land to sustain their ancestral ways. The American quest for national identity has shown a pattern toward greater inclusiveness over time, but the stages of that struggle have been marked by some of the most violent confrontations in the history of the country.

In the great age of European nationalism from the French Revolution to World War II, peoples who spoke the same language or shared a common ethnicity fought to build their own nation‐states. The unification of Germany and Italy, and later the achievement of independence by Poland and other East European states, also meant the weakening and eventual destruction of the polyglot Habsburg and Ottoman empires. German nationalism took shape in sharp reaction against Napoleonic France, while Italian unity required the repudiation of rule from Vienna. Most historians—always with a nervous glance at Germany from the 1860s to 1945—have assumed that the stronger the nationalism, the greater its ability to prevail.

These nineteenth‐century European models do not help much in trying to understand nationalism in the Americas. The thirteen colonies won independence from Britain without claiming a preexisting common identity distinct from that of the mother country. They certainly had no quarrel with the English language. That pattern recurred a generation later in the Latin American struggles for independence. The Latin revolutionaries, like those in North America, accepted most of the geographical boundaries that had been laid out by the imperial states of Spain and Portugal and continued to use the old imperial languages after independence. In North America in the nineteenth century, only one major nationalist movement failed: the attempt to establish the Confederate States of America. Ironically, at least by European norms, the Confederacy was the most militantly nationalist movement to appear in the Americas. In North America, unlike Europe, the gentler and weaker nationalisms of the United States and Canada have survived, but the Confederacy was crushed.

The United States of America emerged as a separate nation before its citizens had any firm sense of a distinct national identity. In England's mainland colonies in the seventeenth century, most settlers assumed that they belonged to the English “nation,” the first European society to define itself in these terms. An Englishman's identity involved a strong commitment to liberty, property, and “no popery,” although the English quarreled fiercely and sometimes violently over how Protestant, or Puritan, England should be. These quarrels crossed the ocean, but the rival positions tended to take hold in different colonies, which were also founded for different purposes. Moderate Anglicans always controlled Virginia, and over time these values took hold throughout the southern colonies, where the pursuit of wealth energized the settlers far more than the demands of piety. By contrast, Puritanism largely defined what was most distinctive about the New England colonies. In the middle colonies, the competition among denominations in New York and New Jersey, and the Quakers' idealism in Pennsylvania, together guaranteed a regional victory for religious liberty by about 1720. But in this region ethnic and religious pluralism made even a sense of English identity problematic.

Many seventeenth‐century colonists believed that they could create overseas a better society than England was ever likely to become. Then England's Glorious Revolution of 1688 guaranteed a Protestant succession to the throne, annual meetings of Parliament, and toleration for Protestant dissenters. Over the next twenty‐five years, England (which united with Scotland to form the kingdom of Great Britain in 1707) emerged quite unexpectedly as one of Europe's great powers, the one usually best positioned to prevent France, or any other power, from establishing hegemony over the rest. Britons began to celebrate their “mixed and balanced constitution” of king, Lords, and Commons as the great wonder of the age, the foundation for the liberty, property, and Protestantism that made the nation distinct. Colonists joined in this celebration, and in the process of embracing a British national identity also seemed quietly to abandon any ambitions of creating a more just society than Britain's. This trend became most visible during Britain's mid‐eighteenth‐century wars with Catholic Spain and France. Colonial spokesmen proudly proclaimed their loyalty to the world's most successful empire, which by 1763 had expelled France from Canada and Spain from Florida and had taken control of everything east of the Mississippi River except New Orleans.

In one of history's most astonishing reversals, triumphant Britain then alienated the colonists so totally over the next twelve years that war broke out between the two sides in April 1775. Britain's policies included two major attempts to tax the settlers without their consent—the Sugar and Stamp Acts of 1764–65, and the Townshend Revenue Act of 1767. At first the revenue was to be used only to pay part of the costs of North America's military establishment; but by 1767, some of it was designed to make royal governors and judges independent of the financial support of the colonies' elective assemblies. To North American settlers, the insistence on “no taxation without representation” marked a demand for traditional English property rights, not a quest for something distinctively “American.”

For decades British spokesmen had predicted that eventually the American colonies would be strong enough to throw off all subjection to Britain. The reforms of 1763–67 were designed, at least in part, to postpone that terrible day. Colonists found this fear misconceived and even dangerous. Acutely aware of how different the colonies were from one another, they repeatedly affirmed their loyalty to Britain and their admiration for the British constitution. They denied that they harbored any desire for independence, and many of them doubted that any viable union of such disparate colonies was even possible. In short, “America” began as Britain's idea. Into the 1770s, almost nobody on either side of the Atlantic actively favored the creation of a separate American nation.

Fifteen months of terrible warfare, beginning at Lexington in April 1775, changed these sensibilities. The Second Continental Congress long insisted that it was fighting only to restore English rights to the settlers under the traditional government of the empire. But when George III refused even to receive Congress's very moderate Olive Branch Petition and instead proclaimed the colonists rebels in August 1775, sentiment began to shift, more obviously at first in private correspondence than in public statements. In January 1776, Thomas Paine published Common Sense, a call for both independence and American union. An English immigrant who had been in Philadelphia for only fourteen months, Paine saw an “American” nation around him, where other settlers were able to perceive only separate colonies. His eloquence was infectious, however, and Common Sense persuaded many colonists that both independence and union were attainable. In July 1776 Congress concluded that independence was necessary, but union remained another matter.

Many things seemed self‐evident to the patriots of 1776, but the benefits of a unified nation‐state were not among them. John Dickinson of Pennsylvania believed that the colonies were strong enough to resist even Britain's military might, but the prospect of success terrified him. Where “shall we find another Britain, to supply our loss?” he asked. “Torn from the body to which we are united by religion, liberty, laws, affections, relation, language, and commerce, we must bleed at every vein.” Even though he refused to sign the Declaration of Independence, he did become the principal draftsman of the Articles of Confederation, which Congress did not send to the states until late 1777, and which failed to win ratification by all thirteen states until March 1781. Charles Thomson, secretary to Congress from 1774 until 1789, doubted that the American Union could long outlast the war. Even though Congress prevailed in the long struggle for independence, scored two diplomatic triumphs in the French alliance of 1778 and the Peace of Paris in 1783, and designed an imaginative and expansionist western policy culminating in the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, it provided little focus for popular loyalty and won little respect, even among its own members. By 1786–87, with Daniel Shays's Rebellion disrupting rural Massachusetts and with Congress itself ominously divided over the proposed Jay‐Gardoquí Treaty, which would have surrendered the navigation of the Mississippi for twenty‐five years in exchange for commercial privileges within the Spanish empire, talk of disunion became serious and even erupted into the newspapers. Southern states blocked the treaty because it would have privileged northeastern merchants at the expense of southern planters.

In May 1787, the Constitutional Convention met in Philadelphia and, by September, produced a charter for a radically new form of federal government, one that lodged sovereignty in the people themselves while permitting them to delegate sovereign powers to both their state and national governments. One of the most thoughtful delegates, James Wilson of Pennsylvania, declared that the United States was not yet a nation, but that the Constitution would create a framework to make that transition possible. “As we shall become a nation, I trust that we shall also form a national character; and that this character will be adapted to the principles and genius of our system of government.” He based that expectation, not upon the shared memories of a largely mythical past (the kind of thing that shaped English nationalism), but upon popular expectations for a glorious and prosperous future in a vast continent with enormous resources.

Without the Constitution, the Union would probably not have survived the tumultuous years of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars. American national identity would have died in infancy. But the Constitution by itself could not guarantee the success of the Union, or even define the form that American political culture would assume.

The struggles between the Federalists and the Democratic‐Republicans after 1790 reshaped American political culture and, indeed, American identity. “A nation without a national government is, in my view, an awful spectacle,” proclaimed Alexander Hamilton in the last of The Federalist Papers. He and other Federalists believed that creating a national government capable of holding its own against the great powers of the Atlantic world required funding the Revolutionary War debt at par, collecting sufficient revenue to meet other national objectives, empowering a vigorous executive, creating an efficient army and navy, and establishing an activist federal court system—measures that made the United States resemble a transplanted Britain, lacking only a royal court and an hereditary aristocracy. His opponents insisted that Americans had fought Britain to become something quite different. Once they captured power in 1801, they began to define what such a nation could become.

Jeffersonians set out to pay off the national debt as soon as possible, reduced the army and navy to token forces, repealed all internal taxes, and did their best to tame the federal judiciary. Especially after the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, they began to seek a combination of goals that no other movement or nation, anywhere else in the world, had yet put together. Under their leadership, the United States would repudiate the balance‐of‐power politics that prevailed in Europe. Within the Atlantic world, Jeffersonians favored trade with all of Europe's maritime powers but alliances with none. They believed that American commerce was so important that a mere threat of withholding it could force the great powers to respect American rights without resort to war, a policy that revealed its limitations when the United States finally declared war on Britain in the War of 1812. But on this side of the ocean, the new republic would achieve hegemony within the western hemisphere—that is, it would be stronger than any combination of enemies that could be aligned against it—without the need to create standing armies or impose heavy taxes. The energy of the people, especially their determination to settle ever more western lands, would achieve this hegemonic goal with little more than mild supervision from Washington, while avoiding the class conflicts of Europe. The Jacksonian era saw this process become the ideology of “manifest destiny,” whose apologists saw almost no limit to how large the United States might become (some even favored the annexation of Ireland!), provided that most governmental activities remained decentralized to the state level.

Liberty and empire remained compatible so long as the free and slave states could agree on how to share the spoils of western lands. By the 1830s, the Jeffersonian formula for hemispheric hegemony had won wide acceptance. As Abraham Lincoln argued in one of his earliest speeches, “All the armies of Europe, Asia and Africa combined … could not by force, take a drink from the Ohio, or make a track on the Blue Ridge, in a trial of a thousand years.” Any threat to the Union, he insisted in 1838, “cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.”

When Lincoln wrote, the “imagined community” of the United States was still restricted to white men. Its success depended on the republic's ability to deprive Indians of nearly all of their land, usually without significant compensation or any willingness to incorporate Indians into the polity. Enslaved African Americans were not part of the polity either. During the Revolution, most blacks south of New England in a position to choose sided with the British, not the American republic. Partly because Federalists pushed harder for abolition in northern states than did their opponents, the Jeffersonian triumph magnified these trends. In 1807, when the Democratic‐Republicans took control of New Jersey (the only state that permitted some women to vote), they righteously disfranchised women, Indians, and free blacks, thus announcing to the world that their brand of democracy applied to white men only.

The early 1830s largely defined the extremes that would shape American politics and national identity for the next three decades. Northern evangelical Protestants launched a vigorous abolitionist movement that increasingly alarmed the South. South Carolina nullified the tariff in 1832 and threatened secession if President Andrew Jackson resorted to force. Jackson pushed a “Force Act” through Congress but also agreed with Congress's decision to lower the tariff by stages over the next decade. Disillusioned nullifiers began to envision an independent southern nation taking shape, united in the defense of slavery. Jackson's supporters, for the first time in the history of the republic, insisted that the Constitution had created a “perpetual union,” one that could not be destroyed. Many of Jackson's northern opponents agreed. As Daniel Webster put it in 1830, “Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable.” But after the Mexican War, North and South could not agree on how to digest America's enormous conquest, nor even on how to divide between them the remaining unsettled portion of the Louisiana Purchase. Expansionism, instead of solving the nation's problems, was tearing it apart. The two ideas, of a southern nation and an indestructible union, finally clashed when the Civil War erupted in April 1861.

Both sides did their best to appropriate the principles of 1776. Confederate apologists insisted that they were the true heirs of the Revolution, much as the patriots of that era had claimed to be defending English liberty against a government bent on destroying it. Lincoln insisted well into 1862 that he was fighting only to preserve the Union that the founding fathers had created.

Despite these similarities between the Revolution and the Civil War, the differences are even more compelling. In 1775–76, the colonists went to war and fought for fifteen months before Congress finally proclaimed American independence. In 1860–61, seven Southern states seceded from the Union, created the Confederate States of America and then began a war against the United States by firing upon Fort Sumter. When President Lincoln responded with a summons to arms, four more states seceded and joined the Confederacy. In other words, the Revolutionary War preceded the creation of an American nation, but the Confederate nation preceded the Civil War. Some “fire‐eaters” had been agitating for a southern nation for nearly three decades by then, a movement without parallel in the colonies before 1776. The Confederacy was, in short, very much the product of an active and aggressive nationalism in a way that the original American Union had not been.

At first, both sides tried not to interfere with the constricted sense of American identity that Jeffersonians had bequeathed to them. But the Emancipation Proclamation, followed by the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution, boldly offered freedom, citizenship, the duty to bear arms, and suffrage to black males while ignoring the demands of the early women's suffrage movement. This mobilization of blacks contributed immensely to Union victory by 1865. But the failure of Radical Reconstruction and the imposition of Jim Crow legislation throughout the former Confederate and border states deprived nearly all black men of the ability to vote by the early twentieth century. Blacks were free but not equal. The warring sections of the republic achieved reconciliation around principles of liberty, union—and white supremacy. While disfranchising blacks, they enfranchised white women, beginning in several western states near the end of the nineteenth century and culminating in the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution during World War I.

World War II marked the next watershed. The Pacific War became a merciless contest between two racial ideologies—Japan's determination to make the divine Yamato race prevail throughout Asia and the Pacific versus the white supremacy of the Western powers, led by the United States. By contrast, the United States fought to destroy Nazi racism in the European theater; and in the aftermath of the war and during the onset of the Cold War, the attack on racism became a major force in domestic politics as well. President Harry S. Truman began the desegregation of American armed forces on the eve of the Korean War. Over the next two decades, the American defense establishment (along with the world of professional and intercollegiate sports) led all other sectors of American society in the quest for equal opportunity regardless of race. Ironically, while the rest of the world largely condemned American intervention in Vietnam as a ruthless manifestation of arrogant racial supremacy, the United States fought the Vietnam War with the most completely integrated military establishment the nation had ever possessed. Colin Powell, an African American who fought in Vietnam as a junior officer, would become by the 1990s the most powerful military officer in the land, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. By then, women had also won far broader opportunities for military careers than had ever been available to them before.

What it means to belong to the American nation is still hotly contested, but at the end of the twentieth century that identity has become far more inclusive than ever before.
[See also Culture, War, and the Military; Internationalism; Militarism and Antimilitarism; Patriotism; Religion and War; Women in the Military.]

Bibliography

Frederick Merk , Manifest Destiny and Mission in American History, 1963.
David M. Potter , The Historian's Use of Nationalism and Vice Versa, in his The South and the Sectional Conflict, 1968, pp. 34–83.
Lance Banning , Republican Ideology and the Triumph of the Constitution, 1789 to 1793, The William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 31 (1974), pp. 167–88.
J. M. Bumsted , ‘Things in the Womb of Time’: Ideas of American Independence, 1633 to 1763, The William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 31 (1974), pp. 533–64.
Paul D. Escott , After Secession: Jefferson Davis and the Failure of Confederate Nationalism, 1978.
Kenneth M. Stampp , The Concept of a Perpetual Union, in his The Imperiled Union: Essays on the Background of the Civil War, 1980, pp. 3–36.
John M. Murrin , A Roof Without Walls: The Dilemma of American National Identity, in Richard Beeman, Stephen Botein, and Edward C. Carter II, eds., Beyond Confederation: Origins of the Constitution and American National Identity, 1987, pp. 333–48.
Benedict Anderson , Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed., 1991.
Liah Greenfeld , Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity, 1992.
Linda Colley , Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837, 1992.
David Waldstreicher , In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes: The Making of American Nationalism, 1776–1820, 1997.
Gary W. Gallagher , The Confederate War, 1997.

John M. Murrin