Book Review: American Nations

Well, I wrapped up Colin Woodard’s American Nations: A History of the Eleven Regional Cultures of North America over the weekend.  It’s been only about a month since I even learned of the book, and given that I’ve already made reference to it a half-dozen times on this blog, it is fairly safe to say that I really enjoyed reading it, although that is not to say that I was necessarily persuaded of the entirety of the book’s premise.

As usual, so as not to spoil the book for anyone who intends to read it for themselves and draw their own conclusions, my thoughts on American Nations are below the fold.

Aristocracy and Slavery vs. Democracy and Freedom

In The Atlantic’s special issue commemorating the 150^th anniversary of the Civil War, Ta-Nehisi Coates has an article titled “Why Do So Few Blacks Study the Civil War?”  Coates is an amateur Civil War scholar and he devotes the article in large part to refuting the convenient fiction that the Civil War was fought over anything other than the issue of slavery.  It really is very good and I highly recommend clicking over to read it. 

This passage in particular caught my attention:

The Civil War marks the first great defense of democracy and the modern West.  Its legacy lies in everything from women’s suffrage to the revolutions now sweeping the Middle East.  It was during the Civil War that the heady principles of the Enlightenment were first, and most spectacularly, called fully to account.

In our present time, to express the view of the enslaved – to say that the Civil War was a significant battle in the long war against bondage and for government by the people – is to compromise the comfortable narrative.  It is to remind us that some of our own forefathers once explicitly rejected the republic to which they’d pledged themselves, and dreamed up another country, with slavery not merely as a bug, but as its very premise.  (emphasis added)

No doubt that this resonated with me because I am still working my way through Colin Woodard’s American Nations. 

AsI mentioned when I first started reading the book, Woodard argues that from the very start the country was divided by the northern states’ Germanic idea of “Freiheit” and the southern states’ Latin idea of “libertas.”  Essentially, Freiheit (“freedom”) held that all people are born free and equal before the law, that they all possess at least certain minimal rights that have to be mutually respected, and that they are capable of self-governance.  Conversely, libertas (“liberty”) held that most people are born into bondage, that liberties are granted as a privilege, that most people are not capable of self-governance, and that only a very few, governing elite could or should enjoy the full blessings of liberty.

Woodard returns to this theme in his chapter outlining how the states subsequently split over the issue of slavery.  Woodard shows that the secessionist states most wedded to the concept of libertas had embraced it in order to justify their slaveholding, and this embrace inexorably led them to the idea that even more people should be enslaved:

There is no question that the Deep South seceded and fought the Civil War to defend slavery, and its leaders made no secret of this motive.  Slavery, they argued ad nauseum, was the foundation for a virtuous, biblically sanctioned social system superior to that of the free states.

When nineteenth-century Deep Southerners spoke of defending their “traditions,” “heritage,” and “way of life,” they proudly identified the enslavement of others as the centerpiece of all three.  Indeed, many of their leaders even argued that all lower-class people should be enslaved, regardless of race, for their own good.

. . . .  James Henry Hammond, former governor of South Carolina, published  a seminal book arguing that enslaved laborers were happier, fitter, and better looked after than their “free” counterparts in Britain and the North, who were ruthlessly exploited by industrial capitalists.  Free societies were therefore unstable, as there was always a danger that the exploited would rise up, creating “a fearful crisis in Republican institutions.”  Slaves, by contrast, were kept in their place by violent means and denied the right to vote, resist, or testify, ensuring the “foundation of every well-designed and durable” republic.  Enslavement of the white working class would be, in his words, “a most glorious act of emancipation.”

[snip]

George Fitzhugh, scion of one of Virginia’s oldest families, became the [Tidewater] region’s proslavery standard-bearer.  In his voluminous writings, Fitzhugh endorsed and expanded upon Hammond’s argument to enslave all poor people.  Aristocrats, he explained, were really “the nation’s magna carta” because they owned so much and had the “affection which all men feel for what belongs to them,” which naturally led them to protect and provide for “wives, children, and slaves.”  Fitzhugh, whose books were enormously popular, declared he was “quite as intent on abolishing Free Society as you [Northerners] are on abolishing slavery.”

Placed within this historical context, Coates’s statement that the Civil War called the very principles of the Enlightenment into account by requiring that violent action be taken against bondage and in favor of self-governance seems all the more exact.  The Civil War was the most violent conflict in the eternal political struggle between – in Jefferson’s words – “aristocrats and democrats,” and in 1865 the idea of democracy won by sheer force of arms.

OWS: Liberty vs. Freedom

Real Life stuff and trying to keep up with what is going on with the Occupy movement has delayed me getting into American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America, but I picked it up again yesterday. 

The author, Colin Woodard, begins by describing in chronological order the origin of the oldest of these cultures: El Norte (the northern portion of Spain’s American empire, essentially a 100 mile strip running along the modern U.S./Mexico border and – at the time – up into California), New France (the settlement of eastern Canada and, as an outpost and afterthought, Louisiana), Tidewater (English planters in Maryland, Virginia, southern Delaware, and northern North Carolina), and Yankeedom (the New England states, especially after the Puritans’ Massachusetts Bay Colony established dominion over them following Cromwell’s victory in the English Civil War).

In his description of the Tidewater culture, Woodard begins foreshadowing the United States’ own Civil War by offering a cultural/historical explanation for the starkly different traditions that would develop between the states.  He describes 17^th century Tidewater as essentially nothing more than a place of huge manorial estates without a single actual town to be found there.  He explains that each such estate was in essence a perfect fiefdom, in which the planter whose estate it was had complete and absolutely authority – including that of life and death – over all persons.

He then attempts to explain how a culture of such authoritarianism could produce champions of republicanism like Thomas Jefferson, George Washington and James Madison. 

New Book: American Nations

Well, I’ve found my new book.  It is American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America, by Colin Woodard. 

(I swear, having access to Kindle technology and the consequent ability to download interesting books immediately is bad for me.  This morning I came across an article by Woodard in this month’s Washington Monthly titled “A Geography Lesson for the Tea Party,” and that is where I learned about American Nations.  Fifteen minutes later, I had purchased it.)

Apparently, Woodard contends that North America (including Canada and Mexico) has 11 distinct and geographically contiguous regional states, and that a proper understanding of each of these regions’ individual cultures is necessary to understand the continent’s history and its current political makeup.  This seems to me a rather broad-based claim (although rooted in some truth, to be sure) and I think it’ll be interesting to see precisely where Woodard draws his lines and on what basis he makes these regional distinctions.

From the article, this passage caught my eye:

Throughout the colonial period and the Early Republic, they saw themselves as competitors – for land, settlers, and capital – and even as enemies, taking opposing sides in the English Civil War, the American Revolution, and the War of 1812 . . . .  Immigration enriched these nations – or, more accurately, the nations that were attractive to immigrants – but it did not fundamentally alter the characteristics of these “dominant” cultures; the children and grandchildren of immigrants didn’t assimilate into an American culture, instead tending to assimilate to the norms of the regional culture in which they found themselves.  There’s never been an America, but several Americas, and there are eleven today.  (emphasis added)

Well . . . maybe.  I won’t deny that there are significant regional differences and competing tensions between the various geographic parts of the United States, but there is more to it as well. 

After the Soviet Union collapsed I remember watching Yugoslavia break up, and I remember watching people in the Balkans self-segregate into smaller and smaller political groups.  I remember wondering why it was that people who had lived together as one nation for decades now found continuing as a single political entity anathema. 

Of course, maybe this kind of self-segregation is something that all human societies do.  To be sure, the United States attempted to break itself up – hell, we fought a bloody Civil War to decide whether the country’s constituent parts would remain whole or go their separate ways.  And maybe it is only because of that war and the fact the Union prevailed that we now are much stronger in our union.  Despite the many regional differences in our nation, in every single one of the 50 states our citizens proudly identify themselves as being “Americans” before anything else.

But I’ve long suspected that it was more than just fighting and winning the Civil War to preserve the Union that is responsible for our subsequent patriotism.  Say whatever you want about how the United States operates in practice, the idea of the United States is a beautiful thing.  The idea of the United States is that anybody – anybody – can be an American.  We don’t care about your skin color, your religion, your accent, your beliefs, or where you’re from.  To be an American, all you have to do is agree to abide by our laws and Constitution, agree to respect the principles of representative democracy, and recognize to those special “carve outs” for individual rights that may not be trampled on by the majority:  freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom of consciousness, equality before the law, etc.

The idea of America functions almost as a national, secular religion (if that isn’t too blatant a contradiction in terms), and I’ve long believed that it provides the necessary glue, the commonality we all need, to hold us together as a people.  As much as I complain and cavil about my country and the things done in its name, like everyone else I know I’ve never stopped being proud of the ideas for which it stands.  And the unifying nature of those ideals, to which we all consciously pledge our allegiance, vastly outweighs the more instinctive cultural differences found in the United States.

But, who knows?  Maybe Woodard will prove me wrong.

Should be interesting.