Union: The Struggle to Forge the Story of United States Nationhood by Colin Woodard.
This book is sort of about how the United States developed its national identity. It was published last year and is timely because today many Americans sense that we really don’t have a national identity. The presidential election showed that we have two basic camps in the country, one that sees Donald Trump’s approach to governance as exemplary, with the other seeing him as the worst president ever. The extremes in these groups exhibit either the Trump Messiah Syndrome or the Trump Derangement Syndrome.
Woodard starts with the British surrender at Yorktown in 1781. The good news was that we won; the bad news was that we had no idea what “we” were now that we were independent of Great Britain. The colonists had created the Continental Army to fight the war, and the “United States of America” under the Articles of Confederation, which set up a very weak federal structure with each state essentially being a sovereign entity. After the surrender, the reason for the colonies to work together - the revolution - went away, as did their British identity which had defined them for decades. In 1784 George Washington worried that unless “a more formidable union” could be negotiated, the United States would soon fall apart. The USA was a state in search of nationhood.
The book is organized around the lives of five prominent Americans, each of whom had a different view of what was the idea of the nation United States: Historian George Bancoft from Worcester, MA; William Simms from Charleston, SC; Frederick Douglass from Maryland; Woodrow Wilson from Augusta, GA; and Frederick Jackson Turner of Wisconsin.
George Bancroft was the son of a preacher from Worcester, MA. His family was not wealthy but they valued education. Dad (Aaron) was a Harvard alum, and George followed him to Cambridge. Father and son both shared the Calvinist belief that Americans were God’s chosen people whose mission was to develop a more perfect society, a “city on a hill” that would be a model for all.
George was a diligent student who didn’t participate in pranks or sneak off to Boston across the river to go to bars. He graduated at the top of his class and expected to become a preacher. Harvard President John Kirkland had other ideas. He had noticed George’s solid work and asked him to go to Germany to earn his PhD and also to learn why European colleges were so much better than those in America.
Young Bancroft enrolled in Gottingen, a fine school that was the center of the German Enlightenment. He found the college intellectually rigorous but socially slack. While everyone studied hard, students did not behave like proper gentlemen, with a lot of them yelling, telling crude jokes, and questioning some aspects of the Bible. He got his doctorate and spent a year travelling around Europe before coming home. Bancroft rarely missed an opportunity to tout the virtues of America, a free country in contrast to Germany which was run by royalty.
While in Europe, he met with the Marquis de Lafayette who helped defeat the British; with Goethe, the German poet; with Lord Byron (the English poet and politician); and with many other celebrities and artists. He returned to New York in August of 1822 with his doctorate, but he still wanted to be a preacher. Unfortunately, he was not very good at delivering sermons when he got a chance to substitute preach. He then opened a school in Northampton, MA, and that didn’t go well either. Next, Bancroft tried research and writing, both of which he could do. He translated classic books and became interested in politics, becoming a strong supporter of the populist, President Andrew Jackson.
Bancroft got married and became a banker who did a lot of lobbying in Washington. He was never home and his wife was alone when their baby son died. While things weren’t great at home, George did well financially and had time to research and write. He published the first volume of A History of the United States, which took a very rosy approach to explaining America. It ignored slavery and sectional differences and became a perennial best seller, with ten editions.
Bancroft became more political and became customs collector for the port of Boston after Martin Van Buren was elected president in 1836. He lost the job in 1840 when the presidency changed parties, but he was still writing successful history books, with volume 3 hitting the bookstores. He was very involved in Democratic politics and became a big supporter of Manifest Destiny, the idea that the United States was destined to take over most of the North American continent. He was willing to have new states come in with slavery as long as the nation expanded. He thought that we can always get rid of slavery but expansion had to happen whenever the opportunity arose. He did travel to the South for the first time, where his hosts arranged for slaves to tell glowing tales of how great it was to be in bondage.
By the mid-1850s, the slave issue was coming to a boil. The Kansas-Nebraska act authorized people in the territories to vote to determine if slavery was to be legal. That caused a stir among abolitionists. The debate in the Senate was getting nasty, with members insulting each other routinely over sectional views on slavery. In 1856, Preston Brooks, a pro-slavery South Carolina congressman, came into the Senate chamber and bludgeoned abolitionist Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner so badly that it took him two years to recover.
Bancroft, who knew Simms through literary friends, visited him in Charleston. He had a fine time as they avoided talking about the big issue. Bancroft, like most people, was probably a casual racist who didn't think Negroes could survive on their own and did not prioritize ending “the peculiar institution” that defined the South. Despite Bancroft's success at turning out volume after volume of popular US history, Frederick Douglass was disgusted with his lack of passion on eliminating slavery.
Bancroft grew to appreciate Lincoln’s firm hand as the war raged on. When the president was assassinated in April of 1865, Bancroft saw this as opening the way for now-President Andrew Johnson to continue Lincoln’s work of bringing the country together again. Johnson did just the opposite, sabotaging Reconstruction and opening the door to letting Southern racists control their states again by implementing Black Codes which essentially forced ex-slaves back into servitude. As one Louisiana legislator observed, the Black Codes’ purpose was “getting things back as near to slavery as possible.”
As the slavocracy took over, former chattel who were working plantations at the direction of Union officers were kicked off the property as the original owners returned with the blessing of President Johnson.
Later, Bancroft finished his tenth volume of United States history. He was still confident that the country was blessed by God to be the shining city on a hill. He saw the Civil War as a bump in the road to perfectibility. He died in 1891 and went home to Worcester to be buried.
William Simms lived in South Carolina and attended the College of Charleston, the oldest higher education institution in the state and “quite possibly, the worst in the Union.” It had the curriculum of a poor grammar school, not surprising since the agrarian state was not big on education. Simms mother died while giving birth to a baby boy who did not survive. His father was so upset that he left the family for the unexplored territory of Mississippi. Young Simms was raised by his grandmother. In 1818 he finished college, thoroughly disgusted at how little he had actually learned, and threw himself into reading books to expand his educational horizons.
Simms went off to track down his father who had abandoned the family. Dad had set up a mini-plantation in the sticks of Mississippi, complete with twelve slaves. Dad, of truculent Scots-Irish descent, had a warrior ethic. He enjoyed fighting Indians and taking their land. Young Simms was not impressed with the frontier and had no interest in farming. He soon returned to South Carolina, determined to get into public service.
Simms eventually became a lawyer with a decent practice. He got married but his wife died soon thereafter and his income started to drop. He decided to go to New York City for a restart. He had friends there who introduced him to various literary figures. He returned to Charleston, determined to be a writer, He wrote a novel about the South which was published and sold well. In his fiction, slaves were happy and carefree and devoted to their benevolent masters.
Simms married up when he wed an 18-year old whose Dad gave the new couple a plantation as a wedding present. Simms was finally a gentleman farmer. He continued to write and had pieces published in various magazines. As always, he described slavery as a good deal for all concerned, especially the slaves.
Simms was a typical southerner who saw slavery as a positive good. He and his neighbor, James Hammond became involved in Democratic politics and routinely made the case that bondage was the “cornerstone of every durable republic.” Hammond, who would enjoy political success, married up and became the head of his wife’s plantation. (He also happened to be a pervert who groomed his young nieces for sex and bought a woman and her young daughter, also for sexual relations with both.)
Simms took offense to the gross misrepresentation of slavery in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s <em>Uncle Tom’s Cabin</em> and published all sorts of articles in response. His main argument was that slave owners helped inferior people by teaching them to work and obey their masters. He also argued that Indians had missed a great opportunity to be owned by whites.
Simms thought that he would be a good spokesman for the positive benefits of slavery, so he arranged a speaking tour of the Northeast. It was a disaster. Although there was not a strong abolitionist consensus in the northern part of the country, Simms was openly ridiculed for his views. Once he returned home, he was considered a hero for even trying to talk sense into northerners.
Simms personal life was in tatters. He and his wife, Chevillette, had 13 children, 7 of whom died very young. He fought waves of depression as he envisioned a separate southern nation, made up of slave states and some border states that would want to join the new nation. He was convinced that the north would not consider slavery worth fighting over and that the slave states could leave in peace.
Bancroft also believed that the slave issue would not result in war and he somehow blamed the new president, Abe Lincoln, for the conflict. If only a pro-slavery candidate had won, all would be well.
Simms had left the plantation and relocated to Columbia, SC, as the Union troops moved towards Atlanta. He lost much of his property in Columbia. Fortunately, much of the family plantation that he abandoned as the troops moved in was not burned. The former slaves were told to work the plantation by the Union officers in charge. By election day, 1868, the newly formed Ku Klux Klan, described by Simms and his confederates as a social club, had murdered at least 1,000 Blacks.
Simms was in tough shape. He lost much of what he had owned and the local economy was in tatters. He got food through a New York City charity that was helping to feed the South. In the late 1860s, he got back to writing articles and another novel, but his health was failing. He died in June of 1870.
Frederick Douglass was born as Frederick Bailey in 1818 to a slave family in rural Maryland. When he turned six, he was put to work. He was enslaved at the richest estate in Maryland, with 14,000 acres and 500 slaves. The owner of the plantation was Frederick Lloyd, who had served in Congress and the US Senate. Life was brutal, with slaves routinely being whipped and shot on a whim. Douglass caught a break and was sent to Baltimore to work for one of Lloyd’s relatives.
Baltimore was much better than the plantation. Frederick was assigned house duties where he had his own bed and clothes and was fed well. His new mistress, Sophie Auld, taught him to read. Her husband, Hugh, recoiled against teaching slaves anything. As he got older, Frederick grew to resent his situation and resolved to be free.
Frederick stood up to his masters and received a lot of beatings. He eventually was allowed to learn a trade - unusual for a slave - and he became a ship's caulker. He was still harassed by Hugh Auld, the master, so in September of 1838 he walked away from the plantation and took a train to freedom. He had forged documents which weren’t very good, but the train conductor, who knew they were fake, let him go. He first went to New York City and ended up in New Bedford, MA, an opulent place that was home to many successful whalers.
William Lloyd Garrison’s abolitionists tracked him down and invited him to meetings of the Anti-Slavery Society. Douglass (he had to change his name from Bailey after his escape to avoid capture) was a natural leader and a great speaker. Soon he was giving talks all over the northeast. As his reputation grew, so did the odds that he would be picked up by Master Auld’s people so he and a friend went to England to get out of harm’s way. He was a huge success in Britain, giving 184 speeches which were covered in US newspapers. His trip to England made him a bigger star back in America.
Once home, Douglass became disillusioned. Around 1850, the country was grappling with slavery, particularly its expansion as new states were added to the Union. The country could not compromise its way out of supporting a moral abomination, yet that’s what was happening with the Compromise of 1850 and the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 which gave lots of wiggle room to expand slavery. Douglass found the abolitionists too tame and went off on his own, founding a newspaper and giving moving anti-slavery speeches all over the North. He also financially supported John Brown, who in 1859 would lead a doomed mission to take over a federal arms cache in Harper's Ferry, VA. As a result of this insurrection, Brown was hanged and Douglass became a wanted man for supporting him. Eventually things died down when a congressional investigative committee couldn’t quite figure out what had happened and who did what.
Douglass was sharply critical of Lincoln as candidate and president. Abe just wasn’t anti-slavery enough for Frederick’s tastes. However, he was impressed with the Emancipation Proclamation in January of 1863. He also met with the president shortly thereafter and came away feeling good because Lincoln promised to equalize pay between black and white troops. Abe also treated Douglass as an equal, something that happened only rarely.
By the early 1870’s, Douglass was consumed with rage about how the losers of the Civil War were now the winners in oppressing Blacks. He was losing influence as the country seemed to have grown tired of all of the attention on former slaves. The Panic of 1873 unsettled many Americans who voted for change. The Democrats - the pro-slave party - returned to power in Washington, to the delight of much of the country.
In 1876 the Supreme Court essentially annulled the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments that granted power to former slaves. The Civil War seemed to have been fought for nothing in terms of freeing the slaves. The Klan continued its work in suppressing Black turnout and, in the ultimate backroom deal, Rutherford B. Hayes became president in order to keep overt white supremacist Samuel Tilden from the White House. Hayes would look the other way as the Old South rose again.
Frederick Douglass had made his peace with the fact that Hayes would take over the presidency in 1877. It was a rough transition of power. The president-elect had to take the oath of office in private due to assassination threats.
Douglass continued to lash out against the pushback on the rights of former slaves but became politically involved enough to secure several federal job appointments which paid well. His wife of many years died and he married a white woman, scandalous to all back then.
The Chicago World’s Fair of 1893 celebrated America’s emergence as a major country. The fairgrounds took up 690 acres on the shore of Lake Michigan and featured dozens of major exhibits including a Buddhist temple and a complete Hawaiian village. Each of the 44 states had its own building. Wisconsin exhibited a 22,000-pound block of cheese.
Turner, Wilson and Douglass had business at the fair. Turner, along with hundreds of other professors, was giving a series of history lectures for the public. Wilson went to an education conference where he was a speaker. Douglass tried to get noticed and to bring some Black presence to the festivities. There were no Blacks involved in planning the fair and virtually no minority representation at any of the exhibits, except for a former slave playing Aunt Jemima and flipping pancakes. Douglass crafted a carefully worded letter asking that Blacks be incorporated into the fair. He was ignored. Douglass left Chicago convinced that the South was now defining the entire nation.
He was right. He died two years later.
Thomas Woodrow Wilson was born in Augusta, Georgia, in 1857, just as the slave issue was heating up. his family’s being well off financially He didn’t learn how to read until he was twelve. He was probably dyslexic. The family moved to Columbia, SC, when he was thirteen. The 1868 election had produced a Black majority in the lower house and the legislature passed laws that opened up the state to former slaves. Wilson’s father, a conservative who supported slavery, was as outraged as his peers by the uppity behavior of former property. The Klan went after Black voters and candidates and, by 1872, the old slave owners were back in charge.
Tommy (he’d become Woodrow later) kept a diary but never commented on those proceedings. He was a slow learner and was very much into going off by himself and avoiding people. His dad got him into Davidson College, but Tommy wasn’t the college type so he soon dropped out. He went home for a year and then his father got him into the College of New Jersey, soon to be renamed Princeton. The schools reflected the essence of the Old South, with most of its students coming from formerly Confederate states.
Princeton students liked to play. They set fires to boardwalks, detonated homemade bombs outside unpopular teachers’ doors, and rioted in the streets. (“What’s not to like?” muses Bob in the Basement.) Woodrow also liked to play. He was a poor student but a good baseball player who captained the team. He graduated from Princeton and went off to law school at the University of Virginia which he found unsuitable due to its emphasis on academics over fun. He dropped out but passed the Georgia bar exam. You didn’t have to go to law school to be a lawyer back then. Wilson hated the law and decided that he wanted to be a professor so he went off to Johns Hopkins for graduate school.
Not surprisingly, Wilson wasn’t a very good student. He hated research, not a good thing if you're going for a doctorate. He was bored with school so he wrote a book, <em>Congressional Government</em>, which he later convinced his doctoral committee to accept as his dissertation. He got his PhD and as his first job, delivered lectures at Johns Hopkins. There he had Frederick Jackson Turner as a student.
Wilson wrote books and taught. He was always late for his deadlines but managed to get things done. He was an unrequited racist, not surprising given his Georgia and South Carolina roots. In his books he told of how indulgently slaves were dealt with and how comfortably quartered they were. Their benevolent masters brought out the best in slaves by helping them overcome their innate laziness. Reconstruction - letting former slaves participate in civic life as citizens - was bad because the Blacks created a “carnival of public crime under the forms of law.” His take on late 19th century America was embraced by most people, North and South, because it opened up the door to bringing the South back into the union as an equal partner.
Wilson became a professor at Princeton and went on to get involved in politics. He wrote in the popular press, extolling his beliefs about Negro inferiority, praising the virtues of slavery, and ignoring the Klan. He was anti-immigrant and pro-Aryan (broadly defined as elite whites). Wilson’s businessmen backers got him elected governor of New Jersey and ran him for president in 1912. He was a terrible candidate and lost every primary in a crowded Democratic field. He won the nomination on the 46th ballot at a brokered convention and went on to become president with 42% of the vote. Teddy Roosevelt's third-party Bull Moose Party candidacy ruined any chances the Republican Taft had to be reelected.
As president, Wilson undid a lot of the racial justice policies the federal government had put in place over the fifty years since the end of the Civil War. He segregated federal agencies and pushed back on Black rights. He had a private screening of The Birth of a Nation, the 1915 film that depicted the glory of the slavocracy. The Congress and the Supreme Court also were shown the movie, which was essentiallyGone with the Wind for Ku Klux Klansmen. Everyone loved it. It was popular all over the country, even in Boston, the one-time center of abolitionism. In the South, people got in line at 9 in the morning to get tickets for an 8 PM showing. The Klan enjoyed a massive rebirth as a result of the success of the movie. By the 1920’s it had 4 to 6 million members and published 150 magazines and newspapers.
Wilson was, after all, a gentleman of the Old South. While he had terrible racial policies from our perspective, he saw that his main job was to reconcile the country and get rid of sectionalism. Stomping all over former slaves was popular with the people.
Wilson was reelected in 1916 and led us into WWI. As president, he implemented lots of authoritarian legislation that crushed any dissent against the war and essentially outlawed Americans of German descent, of which there were many. Conditions for Blacks got worse, with mass killings of Blacks all over the country. Wilson was asked by the NAACP to condemn such violence. He chose not to.
At the conclusion of WWI Wilson went to the peace conference and did a pretty bad job of brokering a fair deal for Germany. There is some evidence that he was impaired while negotiating because he had contracted the virus from the Pandemic of 1918. In any event, the resultant Treaty of Versailles was so draconian that it led to the rise of the Nazis. Wilson died in 1924, about the same time that Adolph Hitler began to get noticed.
Frederick Jackson Turner, who would become a major voice in American history, was raised in a rural area near the western Wisconsin frontier. His father ran the local paper. Turner entered the University of Wisconsin at Madison in 1878. He was a good student and ended up teaching in the history department. His colleagues were impressed but told him that, in order to become a full faculty member, he had to get his PhD. Turner went off to Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore to complete his studies.
He finished his work and returned to Madison to teach. Turner’s concept of American history was completely opposite that of George Bancroft, who saw America as a providentially ordained exemplar of the best a nation could be. God would work out any problems. Turner had a much less deterministic view of history and the nation. He saw the USA as a creation and creature of its various sections, not just North and South in the Civil War, but also the Midwest and Far West, the Mississippi Valley and the Middle Atlantic, and the other specific areas where topography and geography defined the particular character. In October of 1992, Turner wrote a newspaper column that set out his major thesis that “the fundamental, dominating fact in United States history is the expansion of the United States from the Alleghenies to the Pacific.” This was the famous Frontier Thesis, with which anyone who delves deeply into American history is familiar. Turner saw the West as the real place of America’s birth, not New England.
Turner became nervous once the United States had stopped expanding. If there was no more frontier, what would happen to the country that depended on pushing the frontier out for its existence?
In the 1920s, he was working to develop a book setting out his theory that sectional physical differences accounted for the development of the US. There were two problems. First, his health was failing, although he was only in his mid-50s. Second, his theory was probably wrong. The evidence that he had just didn’t support the idea that geography was somehow destiny. What he had not accounted for was ethnicity. The Scots-Irish of the Virginia Tidewater and the Carolinas, the Yankees of New England, the Germans of the Upper Midwest, the Quakers of Pennsylvania, all seeded specific characteristics to the land that they settled.
Jackson never finished his book. He died in 1932
Bob’s Take
This was another big book with lots of detail. It wasn’t what I expected. I thought that the author would drill down on what historians call the Idea of Nation; What exactly is the concept, the underpinning, behind the United States of America? There is some of that in the book, but it never tried to define our national identity. The author did focus on race as a defining American feature.
George Bancroft was a believer in the providential nature of the country: God would take care of any problems as we evolved into the best country on earth. He did not foresee the Civil War or the racial animosity that followed the war.
William Simms had a different sense of nation, one that depended on the enslavement of millions of Black people. Woodrow Wilson was probably OK with ending slavery. He didn’t support equal rights for Blacks or any other ethnically inferior groups, which to him were any that weren’t Aryan.
Frederick Douglass’s idea of the American nation was based on the simple notion of equality for all, which turned out to be a tough sell during his lifetime. His eloquence and passion motivated many people to work for racial justice, but events - Lincoln’s assassination and the reversal of Reconstruction - overwhelmed that cause.
Frederick Jackson Turner is the most interesting in many ways. He wasn’t a politician or a public person. His view that the frontier defined and shaped America was inspirational and made a lot of sense for a long time, but he failed to account for people as a major variable in the development of various sections of the nation.
The most disappointing figure in the book is Woodrow Wilson. I haven’t had much exposure to him, although I knew the basics. He was a Southerner and an academic. He really wasn’t much of an academic, but back then there were so few that one could fake it pretty easily. I knew he was not sympathetic to racial equality, but I had no idea how racist he really was. He made his reputation through the history books that he wrote that were right out of Lost Cause Central - slavery was good, masters were benevolent, slaves were stupid, the KKK was a benign fraternal club that just liked to dress up in sheets sometimes. He also was virulently against any non-Aryan immigrants. While he was strutting on the world stage after WWI, one of his goals was to deny nationhood to inferior people - Africans, Poles, Hungarians, Asians, and lots of others. If you were Northern European, you were good to go. All others, not so much.
The book makes the point that for almost all of the nation’s existence, race has been a defining issue. That’s hard to argue against.
Union really clarified one point for me. Lincoln’s assassination was probably the most significant historic event in our history. Had he filled out his second term, Andrew Johnson would not have become president. There would have been no Black Codes, and there’s a pretty good chance that, with Abe looking on, the Supreme Court would not have nullified the 14th and 15th Amendments. The KKK would of course be there, but not with the power it has wielded throughout our history. The Union army would have stayed and protected freed slaves, which is not what happened under Johnson’s watch. Reconstruction would have had a lot of problems, but it would have worked a lot better than it did. Today, the country would still have issues around race, but not to the extent that we have had for the past 150 years or so.
Many of my generation see the Kennedy assassination as a world changer but I’m not sure. It’s not clear that JFK would have handled Vietnam better than LBJ did, and Kennedy would have had no shot of passing serious civil rights legislation.
Lincoln’s assassination was a nation-changing event.
