James M. McPherson - Is Blood Thicker Than Water?

C HAPTER O NE:
A Tale of Two Nations

C HAPTER T WO:
Ethnic versus Civic Nationalism in the American Civil War

I am grateful to David Frum and his family for the opportunity to deliver the Barbara Frum Lecture in honor of the memory of one of Canadas foremost journalists. I am also indebted to David Frum for his initial suggestion of a topic for this lecture, the origins of civil wars, which set me to thinking about nationalism. To a native Canadian whom I have never met, Michael Ignatieff, I owe an intellectual debt of sizable proportions; his book, Blood and Belonging: Journeys into the New Nationalism, provided me with the framework of ethnic and civic nationalism for the lecture and for this book. I must also thank Elisabeth Sifton of Hill and Wang Publishers for calling Blood and Belonging to my attention. Doug Pepper of Random House of Canada has been a most encouraging editor who suggested sources to help me overcome my embarrassing ignorance of Canadian history and listened patiently to my half-formed ideas. Professor R. Craig of Toronto University also offered useful suggestions about Canadian sources.

T HIS IS THE STORY of a geographically large country in North America with a federal form of government. The population of this country considered themselves to be two distinct peoples, each concentrated mostly in a discrete region, with conflicting interests that threatened to divide them into separate nations. What held them together in the early years was a shared fear of domination by another country. As the decades passed, the people in one region remained mostly rural and agricultural, conservative in their cultural and religious outlook, with minimal educational facilities that served the elite but left many of the rest illiterate. The other region diversified its economy, established a flourishing system of education that created almost universal literacy, built an impressive transportation infrastructure, experienced growing urbanization, and attracted most of the large number of immigrants who entered the country to gain the benefits of its dynamic economy. As a consequence, this region grew in population, prosperity, and cultural diversity faster than the other region, which saw its share of the national population gradually shrink from half to little more than a quarter.

These developments kindled the smouldering tensions that had always existed between the two peoples. Bankers, investors, and industrialists in the more modernized region gained control of sectors of the others economy. Cultural leaders in the more advanced region disparaged the backwardness of those in the other. The increasingly multicultural society of the majority population, which had expanded into a continent-wide affiliation of like-minded regions, provoked a fierce defensive response in the other, which closed ranks in an aggressive reaffirmation of its distinct society. A not-so-quiet revolution of cultural and economic nationalism emerged in the minority region to modernize its economy, improve its educational system, raise the consciousness and self-confidence of its people, and liberate them from a self-perceived colonial subordination to the majority and make them masters in their own house.

Political power became a weapon in the minoritys effort to consolidate its distinctiveness in its home region and protect its status in the larger federation. At home a militant regional party enacted restrictive legislation against those suspected of identifying with the majority in the rest of the country. This legislation had the effect of forcing many within the minority region to emigrate a consequence not unwelcome to those who intended to become masters in their own house.

So long as the minority region remained in the national federation, however, its people continued to fear a threat from without to their distinct society within. To ward off this threat, they turned to coalition politics and a quest for constitutional reform at the federal level. Over a period of several decades, a majority of voters in the minority region combined with fluctuating pluralities of voters in other regions, and they won control of the federal government most of the time for more than half a century. During much of that time, a political leader from the minority region was head of the federal government. As the not-so-quiet revolution of consciousness raising accelerated in the minority region, the federal government under this party leaned over backwards to accommodate many of the demands from the minority region to protect its special interests.

These accommodations did not go far enough for some leaders in the minority region, whose decreasing proportion of the national population created something of a siege mentality. Many residents of this region became convinced that, if they were to remain masters in their own house, they must take that house out of the national federation; the two peoples must become two nations. As a step in that direction or perhaps as a step to forestall it from happening, depending on ones point of view a political leader in the minority region proposed a form of sovereignty association in which the minority and majority regions would each exercise a separate sovereignty over most matters of domestic concern within its borders.