The Legacy of Daniel Webster

 

We Fought Over American National Identity During the Antebellum Period. The Fight Should Be Ongoing.

A new work of history finds the best antidote to today’s authoritarian politics in Daniel Webster’s nineteenth-century civic nationalism.

Indivisible: Daniel Webster and the Birth of American Nationalism

Joel Richard Paul

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Riverhead Books, 528 pp., $30.00

It’s often forgotten that New England, not the South, was the first part of the country to flirt with breaking away. As the War of 1812 dragged on, the northeast region—battered by successive embargoes on trade with Britain and vulnerable to attack by the formidable Royal Navy—was fed up with a conflict it viewed as the fault of Southerners who didn’t have to suffer the consequences. Resentment had been brewing for a while. The South blasted the Yankees as traitors for their refusal to go along with the war effort; the Yankees countered that the South had rigged the system with the Three-Fifths Compromise—which included enslaved people when determining a state’s proportional representation in Congress—and locked the North out of power. Tensions grew so high that in late 1814, when New England’s political elite gathered in Hartford, Connecticut, to deliberate a response to the perceived attack on their regional interests, secession was not off the table. Just a few decades into its existence as something more than a hodgepodge of British colonies, the “United” States was less reality than aspiration, and “American” national identity was mostly a convenient fiction.

Joel Richard Paul’s new book, Indivisible: Daniel Webster and the Birth of American Nationalism, retraces the process by which that fiction became a reality. In his overview of the period between 1812 and 1852, the University of California law professor presents the great antebellum orator and statesman as a foundational figure in the American pluralist tradition, which holds that the United States represents “a coming together of many identities” under the rule of law. Webster’s vision of a nation united in allegiance to the Constitution profoundly shaped the development of American national identity and, Paul argues, remains its dominant expression. But the triumph of a liberal democratic conception of the body politic was not a foregone conclusion. Out of several alternative philosophies vying for supremacy, the racist populism of Andrew Jackson and his spiritual successors proved (and continues to prove) the strongest challenger to an inclusive civic nationalism of the kind Webster advanced. Indivisible makes the case that, then as now, Webster’s insistence on a common American destiny enshrined in law is the single best “antidote” to authoritarian politics.