Colin Woodard - Union: The Struggle to Forge the Story of United States Nationhood

Oceans End

The Lobster Coast

The Republic of Pirates

American Nations

American Character

I have long wondered how and by whom the story of United States nationhood was created. Nearly a decade ago I wrote a book, American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America, that argued there was never one America but several, with distinctions dating back to the differences between the various North American colonial projects and the swaths of the continent each settled in the decades and centuries that followed. I knew that these regional culturesGreater New England, Greater Appalachia, the Tidewater, the Deep South, and so onhad their own ethnographic, religious, political, and philosophical characteristics and that most had rallied together in response to an external threat: Britains attempt to systemize, homogenize, and consolidate its empire. At its birth, nobody seemed quite sure what the United States was. A treaty organization? A federation of sovereign nations? A nation-state in waiting? I was also aware that these questions persisted as late as the 1830s, and that the lack of answers threatened the survival of this new entity, whatever it was.

In Union I set out to write a book that would reveal how the story of a shared nationhood was devised, disseminated, and ultimately upheld. What I discovered in the course of my research was an intellectual battle of the highest possible stakes that spanned a century and ultimately helped explain a great deal about the age in which we now live. I have told this story through the lives of five people who made themselves standard-bearers as well as lightning rods in this struggle for the hearts and minds of millions.

The battle was initially fought between two vainglorious men who had been professional acquaintances and partisan alliesone a Harvard-educated New England preachers son, the other a mostly self-educated South Carolinian torn in his loyalties between aristocratic Charleston and the crude and dangerous Deep Southern frontier. One believed we were a nation founded upon shared, God-given ideals, the other that we were an alliance of sovereign nations defined by blood and built on inequity. They were both unexpectedly challenged by a fugitive slave from the Maryland Tidewater, who denounced their arguments from the greatest stages in the land and from the pages of his immensely popular books. The conflict would not be settled until the 1910s, after terrorist campaigns and a war that killed hundreds of thousands, when a Deep Southern president vanquished his ideological opponents and united the federation under an ethnonationalist vision of the American identity. Even then, one of his closest friends, perhaps the most famous American scholar of his age, was laying the groundwork for a later revolution. This book tells their story.

At this writing our Republic faces existential dangers not unlike those of the 1820s, when the federation was sharply divided along regional lines and its members uncertain of what, if anything, held it together. The paths Unions principal characters fought over remain before us, and the survival of the United States is at stake in the choices we make about which one to follow.

Freeport, Maine

December 2019