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American Republics: A Continental History of the United States, 1783-1850
In this beautifully written history of America’s formative period, a preeminent historian upends the traditional story of a young nation confidently marching to its continent-spanning destiny. The newly constituted United States actually emerged as a fragile, internally divided union of states contending still with European empires and other independent republics on the North American continent. Native peoples sought to defend their homelands from the flood of American settlers through strategic alliances with the other continental powers. The system of American slavery grew increasingly powerful and expansive, its vigorous internal trade in Black Americans separating parents and children, husbands and wives. Bitter party divisions pitted elites favoring strong government against those, like Andrew Jackson, espousing a democratic populism for white men. Violence was both routine and organized: the United States invaded Canada, Florida, Texas, and much of Mexico, and forcibly removed most of the Native peoples living east of the Mississippi. At the end of the period the United States, its conquered territory reaching the Pacific, remained internally divided, with sectional animosities over slavery growing more intense.
Taylor’s elegant history of this tumultuous period offers indelible miniatures of key characters from Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth to Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Margaret Fuller. It captures the high-stakes political drama as Jackson and Adams, Clay, Calhoun, and Webster contend over slavery, the economy, Indian removal, and national expansion. A ground-level account of American industrialization conveys the everyday lives of factory workers and immigrant families. And the immersive narrative puts us on the streets of Port-au-Prince, Mexico City, Quebec, and the Cherokee capital, New Echota.
Absorbing and chilling, American Republics illuminates the continuities between our own social and political divisions and the events of this formative period.
Taylor’s elegant history of this tumultuous period offers indelible miniatures of key characters from Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth to Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Margaret Fuller. It captures the high-stakes political drama as Jackson and Adams, Clay, Calhoun, and Webster contend over slavery, the economy, Indian removal, and national expansion. A ground-level account of American industrialization conveys the everyday lives of factory workers and immigrant families. And the immersive narrative puts us on the streets of Port-au-Prince, Mexico City, Quebec, and the Cherokee capital, New Echota.
Absorbing and chilling, American Republics illuminates the continuities between our own social and political divisions and the events of this formative period.
544 pages, Hardcover
First published May 18, 2021
About the author
Alan Taylor
165 books271 followersAlan Shaw Taylor is a historian specializing in early American history. He is the author of a number of books about colonial America, the American Revolution, and the Early American Republic. He has won a Pulitzer Prize and the Bancroft Prize for his work.
Taylor graduated from Colby College, in Waterville, Maine, in 1977 and earned his Ph.D. from Brandeis University in 1986. Currently a professor of history at the University of California, Davis, he will join the faculty of the Corcoran Department of History at the University of Virginia in 2014.
Taylor graduated from Colby College, in Waterville, Maine, in 1977 and earned his Ph.D. from Brandeis University in 1986. Currently a professor of history at the University of California, Davis, he will join the faculty of the Corcoran Department of History at the University of Virginia in 2014.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 90 reviews
June 9, 2021
Taylor’s fascinating book revolves around his recurring argument: that Manifest Destiny was not some providential duty to stretch Protestant Christianity and democracy across the continent but instead stemmed from American insecurity over having their fragile union of states upended by real and perceived enemies, both within and without.
In Taylor’s convincing view, white Americans saw danger from savage Indians and rebellious slaves around every corner with a host of European powers ready and willing to aid those groups in the fragmentation of the US. Only by removing Indians to the furthest corners of the continent and killing those who wouldn’t leave and placing ironclad restrictions on all Blacks, both free and slave could the country keep together the fragile strands of union.
Taylor tells his story with graphic detail (his coverage of the volunteer soldiers of the Mexican American War is particularly gruesome) and is not afraid to throw out phrases like white supremacy when describing America’s expansion during these years.
It’s a very good read; accessible and something for the casual history fan and history scholar alike. If you’re a flag-waving patriot though, proceed with caution.
In Taylor’s convincing view, white Americans saw danger from savage Indians and rebellious slaves around every corner with a host of European powers ready and willing to aid those groups in the fragmentation of the US. Only by removing Indians to the furthest corners of the continent and killing those who wouldn’t leave and placing ironclad restrictions on all Blacks, both free and slave could the country keep together the fragile strands of union.
Taylor tells his story with graphic detail (his coverage of the volunteer soldiers of the Mexican American War is particularly gruesome) and is not afraid to throw out phrases like white supremacy when describing America’s expansion during these years.
It’s a very good read; accessible and something for the casual history fan and history scholar alike. If you’re a flag-waving patriot though, proceed with caution.
November 23, 2021
A brisk and revealing overview of major political and cultural currents in antebellum United States. Unsurprisingly, it's primary focus is on slavery/race and the extraordinary influence both had on what the country did in virtually every sphere: the wars that were fought, political contests, foreign policy decisions, debates about expansion, economic policy, and on and on. It truly is astonishing.
I knew much of the material before from previous reading -- how fractious the country was from the beginning (Benjamin Franklin warned: “Our States are on the point of separation, only to meet hereafter for the purpose of cutting one another’s throats.”); how threats of secession were a constant in political discourse in both north and south; states' rights arguments (I hadn't known, though, that Jefferson was an advocate: according to Taylor, Jefferson actually wrote a Kentucky resolution saying that states could nullify federal laws); the duplicitous and violent mistreatment of Native Americans; the profound (if tenuous) transition from the locution "the United States are" to "the United States is" -- but it was still eye-opening and, to my mind at least, valuable in what it reveals about the foundations upon which our nation is built. The divisions that plagued the country then are still very much with us today. After reading this and other books on the period, I can't help but think it miraculous that the United States still exists.
There's too much material in the book to summarize here so I won't even try. A couple of things stood out for me, not least of which were the too numerous to name anecdotes of politicians behaving badly, acting hypocritically, bullying one another, questioning one another's manhood (paging Senator Hawley), widespread media propaganda, etc. (Should I have put in a spoiler alert before mentioning all this?) And incredibly revealing like this one, about a Black man abducted and taken into slavery: Hauled from Maryland to Columbia, South Carolina, Charles Ball recalled his auction during the Fourth of July while drunken whites sang and shouted “in honor of free government and the rights of man.”
I was struck -- because I hadn't known of it before -- by how actively and persistently England and Spain worked to encourage secession as a means of weakening the US: "To promote western secession, the British and Spanish sent secret agents into the new settlements, where they found local leaders seeking contingency plans for the anticipated collapse of the United States."
And this, which sounds so terribly familiar now: "Claiming exclusively to speak for the American people, each party cast rivals as insidious conspirators bent on destroying freedom and union. Both parties believed that free government hung in the balance, which lent desperation to their struggle."
And by how the myth of the Founding Fathers was carefully nurtured: "The passion for union fed on a mythic history that cast the founders as united in principles and goals during the revolutionary generation. Recover that spirit, orators insisted, and the Union will endure. Otherwise, they warned, the continent would be deluged in blood."
Taylor's discussion of how the Louisiana Purchase came to be told me things I had never heard before.
Jefferson wanted Napoleon to sell New Orleans and throw in Florida, although that still belonged to Spain. But the president did not seek to buy the entire Louisiana Territory, which stretched along the western bank of the Mississippi River. Jefferson rejected adding territory beyond the Mississippi as “almost as great a misfortune as a contraction of it on this side.” Jefferson’s bluff did not impress Napoleon, but the Americans got a lucky break thanks to people whom they despised: the Black rebels of Saint-Domingue. The French occupation unraveled when yellow fever and guerrilla resistance killed most of the invaders, including General Leclerc. Napoleon decided to sell Louisiana before the British could seize that colony in a renewed war. “Damn sugar, damn coffee, damn colonies,” Napoleon muttered. In April 1803, he surprised the American diplomats by offering all of Louisiana for $15 million. Livingston and Monroe tried to persuade the French to accept half that amount for just New Orleans and, perhaps, West Florida. But Napoleon insisted that the Americans must take the whole colony and pay his full price. Jefferson welcomed the deal because it saved the Union from civil war, “which was to burst in a tornado, and the public are unapprised how near this catastrophe was.”
It's clear throughout that the author was viewing the past through the lens of the present. On occasion, suggestions (or evidence, depending on one's view) of bias come through, like this remark offered with regard to Texas: "We have a long tradition of presidents seeking to make Mexico pay for American ambitions." That notwithstanding, "American Republics" is definitely worth reading. Tere is a great deal to be learned in ts pages.
I knew much of the material before from previous reading -- how fractious the country was from the beginning (Benjamin Franklin warned: “Our States are on the point of separation, only to meet hereafter for the purpose of cutting one another’s throats.”); how threats of secession were a constant in political discourse in both north and south; states' rights arguments (I hadn't known, though, that Jefferson was an advocate: according to Taylor, Jefferson actually wrote a Kentucky resolution saying that states could nullify federal laws); the duplicitous and violent mistreatment of Native Americans; the profound (if tenuous) transition from the locution "the United States are" to "the United States is" -- but it was still eye-opening and, to my mind at least, valuable in what it reveals about the foundations upon which our nation is built. The divisions that plagued the country then are still very much with us today. After reading this and other books on the period, I can't help but think it miraculous that the United States still exists.
There's too much material in the book to summarize here so I won't even try. A couple of things stood out for me, not least of which were the too numerous to name anecdotes of politicians behaving badly, acting hypocritically, bullying one another, questioning one another's manhood (paging Senator Hawley), widespread media propaganda, etc. (Should I have put in a spoiler alert before mentioning all this?) And incredibly revealing like this one, about a Black man abducted and taken into slavery: Hauled from Maryland to Columbia, South Carolina, Charles Ball recalled his auction during the Fourth of July while drunken whites sang and shouted “in honor of free government and the rights of man.”
I was struck -- because I hadn't known of it before -- by how actively and persistently England and Spain worked to encourage secession as a means of weakening the US: "To promote western secession, the British and Spanish sent secret agents into the new settlements, where they found local leaders seeking contingency plans for the anticipated collapse of the United States."
And this, which sounds so terribly familiar now: "Claiming exclusively to speak for the American people, each party cast rivals as insidious conspirators bent on destroying freedom and union. Both parties believed that free government hung in the balance, which lent desperation to their struggle."
And by how the myth of the Founding Fathers was carefully nurtured: "The passion for union fed on a mythic history that cast the founders as united in principles and goals during the revolutionary generation. Recover that spirit, orators insisted, and the Union will endure. Otherwise, they warned, the continent would be deluged in blood."
Taylor's discussion of how the Louisiana Purchase came to be told me things I had never heard before.
Jefferson wanted Napoleon to sell New Orleans and throw in Florida, although that still belonged to Spain. But the president did not seek to buy the entire Louisiana Territory, which stretched along the western bank of the Mississippi River. Jefferson rejected adding territory beyond the Mississippi as “almost as great a misfortune as a contraction of it on this side.” Jefferson’s bluff did not impress Napoleon, but the Americans got a lucky break thanks to people whom they despised: the Black rebels of Saint-Domingue. The French occupation unraveled when yellow fever and guerrilla resistance killed most of the invaders, including General Leclerc. Napoleon decided to sell Louisiana before the British could seize that colony in a renewed war. “Damn sugar, damn coffee, damn colonies,” Napoleon muttered. In April 1803, he surprised the American diplomats by offering all of Louisiana for $15 million. Livingston and Monroe tried to persuade the French to accept half that amount for just New Orleans and, perhaps, West Florida. But Napoleon insisted that the Americans must take the whole colony and pay his full price. Jefferson welcomed the deal because it saved the Union from civil war, “which was to burst in a tornado, and the public are unapprised how near this catastrophe was.”
It's clear throughout that the author was viewing the past through the lens of the present. On occasion, suggestions (or evidence, depending on one's view) of bias come through, like this remark offered with regard to Texas: "We have a long tradition of presidents seeking to make Mexico pay for American ambitions." That notwithstanding, "American Republics" is definitely worth reading. Tere is a great deal to be learned in ts pages.
June 5, 2021
Pretty good book but biased. Every single bad thing described is done by a white person. Totally ignores things like the behavior of the commanches or utah Indians selling their kids into slavery in mexico. The terrorism of Simon Bolivar is glossed over. I don’t mind reading bad things white people did or said but to exclude the other sides bad behavior is Howard Zinn like. Yes Gordon S Wood is right about this being a “woke” book. It is still valuable for the information contained even though the author has an agenda which is not the same as wanting to present the true nature of events.
July 8, 2021
A disjointed and uneven look at American secessionist movements that unpersuasively finds white supremacy around every corner.
Alan Taylor has won two Pullitzer Prizes for his work on William Cooper (father of James Fenimore Cooper) and his history of slavery in colonial Virginia. He should not win one for this book.
American Republics almost has a premise. To the extent there's a thesis here, it's that the new American nation wasn't as united as it purported to be and this caused many groups to attempt to split off from the country and form their own republics/ states/ communities.
What could have been a very intriguing history of American secession (there are TONS of examples) instead becomes an inconsistent and VERY general history of the United States up to 1850.
The book also claims to be a "Continental" history of the United States which in practice means we get some extended sections on Canadian and Mexican politics and their examples of internal secessionist groups. This is a highlight of the book simply because it's novel.
Otherwise, Taylor provides neither a comprehensive (or satisfying) history of the US nor a history of secession in the US. He covers Shay's Rebellion, the Whiskey Rebellion, Mormons, Gabriel Prossers' slave revolt, and early American Indian wars/removal among others.
While each is presented reasonably well, there's little connective narrative tissue here so the choices feel haphazard. Taylor tries, and fails, to tie every breakaway group/ movement to race essentialism or white supremacy but is rarely persuasive. Most of the examples he gives had motivating factors far more significant than then-contemporary racist notions or the protection of slavery. Yet because it's easy to find Americans in the early republic making racist statements, that becomes the raison d'etre for any subsequent behavior. It is unconvincing and unpersuasive.
What could have been a really solid history of American expansionism or secession instead is brought low by glib assertions of white supremacy at every turn.
Alan Taylor has won two Pullitzer Prizes for his work on William Cooper (father of James Fenimore Cooper) and his history of slavery in colonial Virginia. He should not win one for this book.
American Republics almost has a premise. To the extent there's a thesis here, it's that the new American nation wasn't as united as it purported to be and this caused many groups to attempt to split off from the country and form their own republics/ states/ communities.
What could have been a very intriguing history of American secession (there are TONS of examples) instead becomes an inconsistent and VERY general history of the United States up to 1850.
The book also claims to be a "Continental" history of the United States which in practice means we get some extended sections on Canadian and Mexican politics and their examples of internal secessionist groups. This is a highlight of the book simply because it's novel.
Otherwise, Taylor provides neither a comprehensive (or satisfying) history of the US nor a history of secession in the US. He covers Shay's Rebellion, the Whiskey Rebellion, Mormons, Gabriel Prossers' slave revolt, and early American Indian wars/removal among others.
While each is presented reasonably well, there's little connective narrative tissue here so the choices feel haphazard. Taylor tries, and fails, to tie every breakaway group/ movement to race essentialism or white supremacy but is rarely persuasive. Most of the examples he gives had motivating factors far more significant than then-contemporary racist notions or the protection of slavery. Yet because it's easy to find Americans in the early republic making racist statements, that becomes the raison d'etre for any subsequent behavior. It is unconvincing and unpersuasive.
What could have been a really solid history of American expansionism or secession instead is brought low by glib assertions of white supremacy at every turn.
July 19, 2021
Alan Taylor's American Republics provides a broad overview of America's first seven decades of independence. Taylor covers ground well-trod in recent years: there's nothing quite so fresh or revelatory in his account of antebellum America as in similar works by Daniel Walker Howe, David S. Reynolds and others. But there's something to be said for intelligent, discerning synthesis, and Taylor is quite good at reframing familiar events in a thought-provoking fashion. His narrative emphasizes the fragility of American unity in its early years: riven by internal divisions over slavery and politics, fending off colonial powers while expanding against indigenous peoples, enduring efforts to break up the union through secession or adventure. He also stresses America's parallel development alongside Canada, who gained a national identity (if not yet independence) by opposing American expansion, Mexico, itself a would-be empire prior to its calamitous war with the United States, new countries in South America and the Caribbean and the efforts of Native Americans either to resist or accommodate the new Republic (with little success, in either case). Unfortunately, like many books of such scope it's hard for Taylor to give specific events the focus they deserve; the focus on politics means that familiar figures like Jefferson, Jackson, etc. receive more focus than ordinary Americans. Still, by placing the country's fault lines front and center, and placing the "Empire of Liberty" in a continental context, Taylor does readers (especially those with only passing knowledge of the interval between Revolution and Civil War) a commendable service.
February 19, 2022
This is a history of the continental US from after the Revolution through the annexations that completed the “logo” map. We think of "the west” as being "wild", but as described here, the entire country was equally, if not more “wild” and violent.
The material is arranged in somewhat chronological chapters. The chapter names have broad themes with material that is often loosely tied to topic.
For instance, Chapter 5, “Democracy”, begins with a 4 page description of Joice Heth whom PT Barnum exhibited as the 161 year old former slave of George Washington. This is followed by shorter segments on how Americans saw themselves a “free people”; elections, politicians and patriotism; the development of the “spoils” system; building roads, bridges, canals; the industry, ambition and mobility of the people; the role of women and religion; the temperance movement; culture; education; work and pay and the Mormon movement.
Like Chapter 5, all chapters are loaded with topics which are fleshed out with episodes footnoted and often directly quoted from primary sources. There are four common threads: violence; racism (most often coupled with violence); hunger for land for white ownership; and the necessity of the Union for protection from the European powers that have colonies north, south and west. Sometimes they are all in one package, such as Andrew Jackson driving the Spanish out of Florida and and James Polk provoking a war with Texas not only to rid the country of foreign powers and obtain more land, but also to prevent slaves from escaping to a nearby free territory.
In incident after incident, you see white settler sense of entitlement to lands purchased from other foreign powers, or won in battle or just taken. There was no concern for the Native Americans who were living there. Settlers often claimed the land before the government had time to survey it or plan for its distribution… they just went there and starting farming, trapping or plied a trade.
Settlers lobbied the government to defend their claims. There was no redress for the original inhabitants, since minorities, free and enslaved, in most states, were not allowed to testify in court. As the native communities were destroyed, the native people are despised for being hungry and dirty with little awareness of how this happened. At one point, almost ½ of the federal budget was devoted to “Indian Removal”. The federal government's revenue for selling this land was significant.
This is not your high school history book (at least not now). Presidents Jackson, VanBuren and Polk are shown to be vengeful and cynical. Failures of the missionaries and the rise of the Mormons are given space, while the Great Awakening has only a mention. The war for Texas Independence is shown to be about the freedom to own slaves which Mexico would not allow. The PT Barnum story is not about building Jenny Lind’s career, but about the exploitation of a poor minority woman. Author Alan Taylor does not shy away from the term “White Supremacy”. Even the ending, showing John McLaughlin's attempts to treat the Native Americans in the Pacific Northwest with respect, shows the brutality and racism of the era.
I haven't read Howard Zinn, so I do not know how this compares. This is packed with information. You can see the forest through the trees and many of the examples will stay with me forever.
The material is arranged in somewhat chronological chapters. The chapter names have broad themes with material that is often loosely tied to topic.
For instance, Chapter 5, “Democracy”, begins with a 4 page description of Joice Heth whom PT Barnum exhibited as the 161 year old former slave of George Washington. This is followed by shorter segments on how Americans saw themselves a “free people”; elections, politicians and patriotism; the development of the “spoils” system; building roads, bridges, canals; the industry, ambition and mobility of the people; the role of women and religion; the temperance movement; culture; education; work and pay and the Mormon movement.
Like Chapter 5, all chapters are loaded with topics which are fleshed out with episodes footnoted and often directly quoted from primary sources. There are four common threads: violence; racism (most often coupled with violence); hunger for land for white ownership; and the necessity of the Union for protection from the European powers that have colonies north, south and west. Sometimes they are all in one package, such as Andrew Jackson driving the Spanish out of Florida and and James Polk provoking a war with Texas not only to rid the country of foreign powers and obtain more land, but also to prevent slaves from escaping to a nearby free territory.
In incident after incident, you see white settler sense of entitlement to lands purchased from other foreign powers, or won in battle or just taken. There was no concern for the Native Americans who were living there. Settlers often claimed the land before the government had time to survey it or plan for its distribution… they just went there and starting farming, trapping or plied a trade.
Settlers lobbied the government to defend their claims. There was no redress for the original inhabitants, since minorities, free and enslaved, in most states, were not allowed to testify in court. As the native communities were destroyed, the native people are despised for being hungry and dirty with little awareness of how this happened. At one point, almost ½ of the federal budget was devoted to “Indian Removal”. The federal government's revenue for selling this land was significant.
This is not your high school history book (at least not now). Presidents Jackson, VanBuren and Polk are shown to be vengeful and cynical. Failures of the missionaries and the rise of the Mormons are given space, while the Great Awakening has only a mention. The war for Texas Independence is shown to be about the freedom to own slaves which Mexico would not allow. The PT Barnum story is not about building Jenny Lind’s career, but about the exploitation of a poor minority woman. Author Alan Taylor does not shy away from the term “White Supremacy”. Even the ending, showing John McLaughlin's attempts to treat the Native Americans in the Pacific Northwest with respect, shows the brutality and racism of the era.
I haven't read Howard Zinn, so I do not know how this compares. This is packed with information. You can see the forest through the trees and many of the examples will stay with me forever.
June 21, 2021
Must read! Alan Taylor, in his dedication to helping us understand our own origins as a nation, is one of the most patriotic historians we will ever have. The greatest threat to any nation, religion, or even relationship occurs when people and movements try to advance a destructive, selfish agenda under the false flag of a shared, cherished principle such as freedom, equality, or even religious faith. While we may not agree as to who are the current bearers of the false flags, this dynamic is something every American would probably agree threatens society today. In a fast-moving, engaging style, Taylor logically lays out how false flags were sewn, raised, and waved in the time period this book covers to justify slavery and dispossession of native lands. This is hardly an attack on the people of America as he quotes countless people -white, black, and native- who speak out against those waving the false flags.
The book explains so much of the period, step by step. Taylor shows how that fear that if Britain and France were left to control territory on the continent, they could destroy the union. This fueled Americans rush to dispossess Indians of their lands. Similarly, people feared that if all the land were not under American control in the hands of slave states or states with fugitive slave laws, slaves could escape and then help others to revolt against whites and escape. You see that Manifest Destiny in its time was not so much a visionary prediction as a defensive position. You will learn about black and white abolitionists and about white people opposed slavery in the west, not because they were moral, but simply because they feared the power of the large plantation owner to control the wealth in the way corporations can today. Over and over again, you see where the stated reasons for slavery and the violent dispossession of land were cloaked as “freedom to have property” or “saving the savages”. Again, the author makes the case by using the words of the many moral Americans who wrote and spoke against the hypocrisy and brutality within the time period. He reveals the threats to liberty and justice for all by using the words of people who spoke up on behalf of those principals.
You learn about how urbanization and the separation from the workers and owners unfolded, the beginnings of the Mormons, how Andrew Jackson came to be Andrew Jackson and how he created a coalition of working people and how that coalition later falls apart. You will see how land was taken from Native Americans through pseudo-legal means. He covers the Southwest, including how the ranchos were created from the missions, how white people from the East and from Europe came to obtain these ranchos. There is the birth of the different Texases, California, and Oregon. The unfolding of the Mexican-American War, and the lead-up to the Civil War. If you want a handle on this time period, presented in a very cause and effect way, this book is an excellent overview that will foster many questions and much further reading in your mind. Read it! It’s a great book that will give you a much clearer understanding of the past and better ability to explain to yourself and others how we got here. It’s informative and a super easy read!
The book explains so much of the period, step by step. Taylor shows how that fear that if Britain and France were left to control territory on the continent, they could destroy the union. This fueled Americans rush to dispossess Indians of their lands. Similarly, people feared that if all the land were not under American control in the hands of slave states or states with fugitive slave laws, slaves could escape and then help others to revolt against whites and escape. You see that Manifest Destiny in its time was not so much a visionary prediction as a defensive position. You will learn about black and white abolitionists and about white people opposed slavery in the west, not because they were moral, but simply because they feared the power of the large plantation owner to control the wealth in the way corporations can today. Over and over again, you see where the stated reasons for slavery and the violent dispossession of land were cloaked as “freedom to have property” or “saving the savages”. Again, the author makes the case by using the words of the many moral Americans who wrote and spoke against the hypocrisy and brutality within the time period. He reveals the threats to liberty and justice for all by using the words of people who spoke up on behalf of those principals.
You learn about how urbanization and the separation from the workers and owners unfolded, the beginnings of the Mormons, how Andrew Jackson came to be Andrew Jackson and how he created a coalition of working people and how that coalition later falls apart. You will see how land was taken from Native Americans through pseudo-legal means. He covers the Southwest, including how the ranchos were created from the missions, how white people from the East and from Europe came to obtain these ranchos. There is the birth of the different Texases, California, and Oregon. The unfolding of the Mexican-American War, and the lead-up to the Civil War. If you want a handle on this time period, presented in a very cause and effect way, this book is an excellent overview that will foster many questions and much further reading in your mind. Read it! It’s a great book that will give you a much clearer understanding of the past and better ability to explain to yourself and others how we got here. It’s informative and a super easy read!
August 25, 2021
Despite the generous terms of the Treaty of Paris—under which Britain not only recognized the independence of its former American colonies but also ceded its territory south of the Great Lakes and east of the Mississippi River—the fledgling Confederation, much like my ex-wife*, was bloated, unstable, skittish, and sorely lacking in (political) integrity. Indeed, to European and American observers alike, the whole edifice seemed on the verge of collapse in the 1780s, as regional and sectarian tensions flared, the cash-strapped several states faced internal rebellion as they sought to impose burdensome taxes on similarly-destitute individuals to pay interest on their elephantine war debts, and American citizens were enticed by the tens of thousands to become Late Loyalists in Upper Canada or Spanish subjects in the Louisiana territory. The 1787 Constitution was a last-ditch effort to prevent the United States from fragmenting into smaller regional blocs that could easily be pitted against one another by European imperialists and their native allies. But the project of securing and solidifying the Union—of which the creation of a new federal constitution was just one element—was always elusive in fact and tenuous in conception, due primarily to the paradoxes at the heart of the American self-understanding, which could not be resolved internally but only projected outward beyond the billowing frontier.
Those paradoxes were twofold. The first was the coexistence—even the mutual reinforcement—of, on the one hand, a rapidly democratizing republic, founded on principles of civil liberty and equal citizenship, with an egalitarian culture and a broad middle class of yeoman farmers that were historically unique and unparalleled in scale; and, on the other, a conspicuously vicious system of chattel slavery with profiteers who were both haughty and shrill: adamant on the naturalness of slavery and black subjection, but deeply fearful that the meekest gust of dissent—either from outside “agitators” or from the slaves themselves—could topple the entire system and unleash a deluge of violent racial retribution. Consciousness of the brutal realities of slavery, far from being a scandal to early American republicanism, only heightened the jealously with which many white Americans guarded their liberty and their status as free citizens.
The second paradox was intertwined with the first: because the slavery question could not be resolved internally without imperiling the fragile Union, nor could the Indian nations within America’s borders be assimilated or destroyed unless they were deprived of access to European trade and support, the nation’s self-perceived weakness and insecurity could only be alleviated by a program of rapid territorial expansion.
Thus the first half of the nineteenth century was a desperate—and astonishingly successful—gambit to pacify the North American continent for the internal contradictions of the United States. The internal enemies—slaves and Indians—were always liable, in the eyes of white Americans, to be provoked or strengthened by foreign adversaries. The only solution was to solidify control of the former by pushing the latter further away. The Jay Treaty and Washington’s war against the Northwestern Indian Confederacy in the 1790s began a process through which the Union sought to harden its border with British Canada and isolate the Indian nations of the Northwest Territory, which could then be dissolved piecemeal to make way for white settlement. This endeavor continued into the 1810s, when Indiana’s territorial governor, William Henry Harrison, battled Tecumseh’s confederacy before and during the War of 1812, after which the northwestern tribes were severed from their British benefactors and the designs of the latter on creating a native power bloc south of the Great Lakes to thwart American expansion were foiled.
Oftentimes the push for expansion was not driven by a fear of foreign interference from the coveted territories, but merely by their very existence—or even perceived existence—as potential havens for American undesirables. It was the lack of tangible Spanish governance in Florida that turned the peninsula into a bastion of maroons and Seminoles, which served as a lure for would-be runaway slaves and persecuted Indians; a condition that southern planters could not tolerate, and which inspired ugly American wars of attrition that continued even after the annexation of Florida in 1819. Even though the destitute Texan republic had broken away from Mexico in 1836 in part to preserve slavery, the fear that the British Empire might condition financial assistance on abolition and create a free-labor state on the fringes of the Cotton Kingdom convinced American legislators that annexation was a strategic necessity. Once Texas was secured, Mexico itself, a republic of “half-Indians”, became the Union’s greatest liability, prompting a war of aggression that made the United States a continent-spanning power but disrupted the tender equilibrium between slave and free states and sent the nation spiraling toward civil war.
The greatest asset of the United States was not the strength of its arms but the zeal and volume of its settlers, who spearheaded territorial expansion and served as the vanguard of a political revolution. Much like the British during the colonial period, the Federalists—and later their quasi-successors, the Whigs—viewed western pioneers as a subversive force that could be drawn into the orbit of rival empires, and which inhibited economic growth in the east. Jefferson’s Republicans and Jackson’s Democrats, by contrast, embraced them as a powerful asset, generating a feedback loop in which settlers expanded the Union and ballooned its population, which kept Republicans and Democrats in power while dooming the Federalists to irrelevancy and relegating the Whigs to minority status, and the populist parties effected further expansion in turn. Through this process, the Jeffersonian vision of two civilizations, white and Indian, intercoursing from either side of the Mississippi watershed was brought to a grisly Jacksonian completion.
The Mexican War, despite its veneer of officiality, was primarily a settler’s war as well, because the American expeditionary force was comprised mostly of volunteers in search of land and plunder rather than professional soldiers. And when the United States had nowhere left to go after 1848, it became inevitable that the Union of Paradoxes would be forced into a confrontation with its own heart of darkness.
* I don't really have an ex-wife.
Those paradoxes were twofold. The first was the coexistence—even the mutual reinforcement—of, on the one hand, a rapidly democratizing republic, founded on principles of civil liberty and equal citizenship, with an egalitarian culture and a broad middle class of yeoman farmers that were historically unique and unparalleled in scale; and, on the other, a conspicuously vicious system of chattel slavery with profiteers who were both haughty and shrill: adamant on the naturalness of slavery and black subjection, but deeply fearful that the meekest gust of dissent—either from outside “agitators” or from the slaves themselves—could topple the entire system and unleash a deluge of violent racial retribution. Consciousness of the brutal realities of slavery, far from being a scandal to early American republicanism, only heightened the jealously with which many white Americans guarded their liberty and their status as free citizens.
The second paradox was intertwined with the first: because the slavery question could not be resolved internally without imperiling the fragile Union, nor could the Indian nations within America’s borders be assimilated or destroyed unless they were deprived of access to European trade and support, the nation’s self-perceived weakness and insecurity could only be alleviated by a program of rapid territorial expansion.
Thus the first half of the nineteenth century was a desperate—and astonishingly successful—gambit to pacify the North American continent for the internal contradictions of the United States. The internal enemies—slaves and Indians—were always liable, in the eyes of white Americans, to be provoked or strengthened by foreign adversaries. The only solution was to solidify control of the former by pushing the latter further away. The Jay Treaty and Washington’s war against the Northwestern Indian Confederacy in the 1790s began a process through which the Union sought to harden its border with British Canada and isolate the Indian nations of the Northwest Territory, which could then be dissolved piecemeal to make way for white settlement. This endeavor continued into the 1810s, when Indiana’s territorial governor, William Henry Harrison, battled Tecumseh’s confederacy before and during the War of 1812, after which the northwestern tribes were severed from their British benefactors and the designs of the latter on creating a native power bloc south of the Great Lakes to thwart American expansion were foiled.
Oftentimes the push for expansion was not driven by a fear of foreign interference from the coveted territories, but merely by their very existence—or even perceived existence—as potential havens for American undesirables. It was the lack of tangible Spanish governance in Florida that turned the peninsula into a bastion of maroons and Seminoles, which served as a lure for would-be runaway slaves and persecuted Indians; a condition that southern planters could not tolerate, and which inspired ugly American wars of attrition that continued even after the annexation of Florida in 1819. Even though the destitute Texan republic had broken away from Mexico in 1836 in part to preserve slavery, the fear that the British Empire might condition financial assistance on abolition and create a free-labor state on the fringes of the Cotton Kingdom convinced American legislators that annexation was a strategic necessity. Once Texas was secured, Mexico itself, a republic of “half-Indians”, became the Union’s greatest liability, prompting a war of aggression that made the United States a continent-spanning power but disrupted the tender equilibrium between slave and free states and sent the nation spiraling toward civil war.
The greatest asset of the United States was not the strength of its arms but the zeal and volume of its settlers, who spearheaded territorial expansion and served as the vanguard of a political revolution. Much like the British during the colonial period, the Federalists—and later their quasi-successors, the Whigs—viewed western pioneers as a subversive force that could be drawn into the orbit of rival empires, and which inhibited economic growth in the east. Jefferson’s Republicans and Jackson’s Democrats, by contrast, embraced them as a powerful asset, generating a feedback loop in which settlers expanded the Union and ballooned its population, which kept Republicans and Democrats in power while dooming the Federalists to irrelevancy and relegating the Whigs to minority status, and the populist parties effected further expansion in turn. Through this process, the Jeffersonian vision of two civilizations, white and Indian, intercoursing from either side of the Mississippi watershed was brought to a grisly Jacksonian completion.
The Mexican War, despite its veneer of officiality, was primarily a settler’s war as well, because the American expeditionary force was comprised mostly of volunteers in search of land and plunder rather than professional soldiers. And when the United States had nowhere left to go after 1848, it became inevitable that the Union of Paradoxes would be forced into a confrontation with its own heart of darkness.
* I don't really have an ex-wife.
September 20, 2021
for my money (well i got this from the library) (ok fine i pirated it) (shh) this makes the case of the 1619 project better than the 1619 project does, by bypassing the big loud thesis in favor of just quietly assembling a convincing political/military history of the USA that puts slavery/the preservation of slavery at the center of everything. taylor doesnt get editorial or really even past second gear in terms of judging the motivations of the various parties, nor does he contort himself looking for a flattering angle to get some redemptive hindsight. i wouldnt have minded a bit more on culture and society, but that would have been a different book. pairs well with claudio saunt's unworthy republic and feeds into richard white's the republic for which it stands.
October 27, 2022
American Republics:
A Continental History of the United States, 1783-1850
By Alan Taylor
Greg Cusack
October 26, 2022
The title really tells you what this Pulitzer Prize-winning historian is attempting in this very different way of telling US history. In fact, given his fulsome treatment of much of Canada’s and Mexico’s history, too, it really can be considered a North American history, something quite welcome as it fleshes out the context to aid 21st century citizens better understand the “wild and wooly ways” of our ancestors.
To be sure, since he relates this story through the use of various themes – such as, constitutions, empires, wars, race, etc. – there is some back-and-forth in both chronology and in the principal characters introduced therein, and that can get a tad bit confusing if one is not paying attention.
But the strength of this approach is that it allows him to both contrast and compare ideas and actions that a more traditional purely chronological approach to history does not as easily allow.
Of all of the interesting themes he chose to consider, two really stand out for me:
First, that for the entire period covered in this book, most citizens of the United States were not nationalists inasmuch as they identified themselves primarily as citizens of a certain state – I’m a Virginian much more than I’m an American – or a region – I’m from the West, he’s from the East. Consequently, what we today think of when we say a given person is a nationalist made little sense most of the time. In fact, about the only time that people became caught up in what could be called the national interest was when the US was involved in what we call the “Second War for Independence” waged from 1812-1815 (this was actually a world war in which our opponent – Great Britain again – was fighting desperately against French imperialism under Napoleon, an important fact for it is the only reason we didn’t get our tails kicked badly).
This fact of one’s identity being synonymous with states was exacerbated by the fact that the South was a slave-owning regime and, thus, regionalism was a factor from the very beginning of the United States, even before the revolution. It explains the peculiar – and undemocratic – structure of the US Congress, both in its origin – the smaller and slave states were united in demanding equal representation in the Senate to offset the non-slave, faster growing states of the North – but also in how things played out for the first half of the 19th century when every expansion, or hope for expansion, into new territories or in the creation of new states demanded that the balance between the number of slave-state senators remain the same (or greater) than the non-slave state senators.
Second, how thoroughly racism is indelibly intertwined with all of our history. Taylor includes wince-inducing, simply awful comments about Native, Black, Chinese, and Mexican peoples made by US residents in every part of the country. The idea that non-white people were allegedly inferior, dirtier, dumber, and all-around less capable seems to have been a nearly universal belief, and readers will encounter it everywhere throughout the book. Even those whom we now regard as at least sympathetic to non-whites – for example, Northerners who denounced the South’s slave system – nonetheless displayed the same basic racial attitudes. One of the reasons that so many people advanced the idea of sending Blacks to colonize a portion of Africa was because it seems that most people shared the view that we just cannot live alongside of those people.
This racist view of non-white peoples, coupled with omnipresent land avarice, is why Native peoples were steadily pushed out of their ancestral lands, first in territories east of the Mississippi River, and then – after the Louisiana Purchase opened up the vast West – in Western lands, too. It is also why slave-owners saw opportunities in acquiring new territories, as it would allow them to expand their slave system and ensure its survival, no matter what the Yankees thought! In the Gold Rush of the ‘40s, whites flooding into the West to hunt for gold disparaged, mistreated, and drove out non-whites, including Native peoples and Chinse immigrants. And in the decades-long land-grab that saw white North Americans steadily gobble up Texas, New Mexico, California, and Oregon the same story played out repeatedly: non-whites had to go. And, for the relative few who remained, they were always treated as inferior peoples.
That attitudes of white supremacy were so much a part of our history is an ugly fact, and it was something seldom mentioned in the history that was taught to me in grade school and high school. That it is only during the past 60 years that the true story has slowly been incorporated into a fuller and more honest telling of our country’s history may well be one of the reasons so many older Americans today resent newer historical scholarship, seeing it as biased against white people.
As one who remembers being taught a history that was so sadly incomplete – and, thus, dishonest – I can understand this reaction but in truth today’s history does not, in fact, leave out anything of “white” history but, rather, insists on bringing into the narrative the truth about non-white experiences as well.
It is one thing to find many aspects of our history unsettling and unpleasant – for this ought to be our reaction. But it is entirely a whole other matter to try to keep this fuller story from being taught.
Lastly, and much more briefly, here are some of the other intriguing themes that Professor Taylor illuminates:
Constant sectional rivalries in which every proposed piece of legislation to expand territory, spend monies on internal improvements (such as railroads) was regularly supported or opposed by people who feared that such measure would favor one part of the country over another
“Defensive imperialism,” Alan’s intriguing description of the justification some people advanced for invading Canada, or for removing Native peoples, or for the “necessity” of acquiring the entire West in order to frustrate British, French, or Russian designs on “grabbing” that territory first
Virulent language and dirty politics was widespread, and on my goodness are we supplied with plentiful examples of both, beginning with the Founders themselves as during the first president Washington’s terms of office people began forming sides either for or against Jefferson’s ideas of what would be best for the US or those of his rival, Federalist Alexander Hamilton. There was at least as much vicious, ad hominem, and use of scurrilous rumors then as is the case now. Politics ain’t beanball, and it helps us appreciate the advances we have largely (if imperfectly made) since then (and which are again under threat by those who seek always the lowest and the meanest).
Suspicions about the “worthiness” of immigrants and worries about their taking jobs away from “real” Americans. It is interesting that this “nation of immigrants” has always regarded the latest wave of immigration with suspicion and fear, even when they were “whites” like “ourselves.”
To take but one example, that of the Irish (my own ancestors): When they began to arrive in the US in large numbers because of the great famine in Ireland, they were looked at as dirty, poor, ignorant people inclined to drinking and fighting (proving that in some stereotypes there are kernels of truth!). However, it didn’t take long for these newly arrived Irish to regard free Blacks as persons who threatened them in competition for jobs, and some of the worst race riots of the first half of the 19th century involved Irish attacking, beating, and even killing Black people!
How rich capitalists played off the poor against each other. Indeed, the rich are always trying to gin the system so that they become richer, inevitably involving despoiling in some way the least among us.
The worst of this occurred as production of vital goods moved rather quickly away from home production – in which men and women produced whole goods and foodstuffs using their own land and abilities – to factory, larger industrial systems. This latter not only led to mind-numbing, repetitive labor, but it placed workers – whose individual skills were no longer valuable under such a system – as part of a larger labor pool that factory owners could use to keep wages low, often under appalling working conditions.
The constant threat the workers faced was if you demand better I can always replace you for someone who is desperate for work. This was the “free labor” system that many Southerners derived as being effectively wage slavery, no better than their slave system in the South. But here at least, Southerners countered, we feed and house our slaves; in your North, wage-slaves have to use whatever pittance you give them in order to provide for themselves.
In sum, this is a book very worth reading, even though parts of it are likely to make you as uncomfortable as they did me.
But I believe knowing and telling the truth is a vital part of our becoming freer, more accountable, more equal, and more compassionate citizens.
We all belong here!
A Continental History of the United States, 1783-1850
By Alan Taylor
Greg Cusack
October 26, 2022
The title really tells you what this Pulitzer Prize-winning historian is attempting in this very different way of telling US history. In fact, given his fulsome treatment of much of Canada’s and Mexico’s history, too, it really can be considered a North American history, something quite welcome as it fleshes out the context to aid 21st century citizens better understand the “wild and wooly ways” of our ancestors.
To be sure, since he relates this story through the use of various themes – such as, constitutions, empires, wars, race, etc. – there is some back-and-forth in both chronology and in the principal characters introduced therein, and that can get a tad bit confusing if one is not paying attention.
But the strength of this approach is that it allows him to both contrast and compare ideas and actions that a more traditional purely chronological approach to history does not as easily allow.
Of all of the interesting themes he chose to consider, two really stand out for me:
First, that for the entire period covered in this book, most citizens of the United States were not nationalists inasmuch as they identified themselves primarily as citizens of a certain state – I’m a Virginian much more than I’m an American – or a region – I’m from the West, he’s from the East. Consequently, what we today think of when we say a given person is a nationalist made little sense most of the time. In fact, about the only time that people became caught up in what could be called the national interest was when the US was involved in what we call the “Second War for Independence” waged from 1812-1815 (this was actually a world war in which our opponent – Great Britain again – was fighting desperately against French imperialism under Napoleon, an important fact for it is the only reason we didn’t get our tails kicked badly).
This fact of one’s identity being synonymous with states was exacerbated by the fact that the South was a slave-owning regime and, thus, regionalism was a factor from the very beginning of the United States, even before the revolution. It explains the peculiar – and undemocratic – structure of the US Congress, both in its origin – the smaller and slave states were united in demanding equal representation in the Senate to offset the non-slave, faster growing states of the North – but also in how things played out for the first half of the 19th century when every expansion, or hope for expansion, into new territories or in the creation of new states demanded that the balance between the number of slave-state senators remain the same (or greater) than the non-slave state senators.
Second, how thoroughly racism is indelibly intertwined with all of our history. Taylor includes wince-inducing, simply awful comments about Native, Black, Chinese, and Mexican peoples made by US residents in every part of the country. The idea that non-white people were allegedly inferior, dirtier, dumber, and all-around less capable seems to have been a nearly universal belief, and readers will encounter it everywhere throughout the book. Even those whom we now regard as at least sympathetic to non-whites – for example, Northerners who denounced the South’s slave system – nonetheless displayed the same basic racial attitudes. One of the reasons that so many people advanced the idea of sending Blacks to colonize a portion of Africa was because it seems that most people shared the view that we just cannot live alongside of those people.
This racist view of non-white peoples, coupled with omnipresent land avarice, is why Native peoples were steadily pushed out of their ancestral lands, first in territories east of the Mississippi River, and then – after the Louisiana Purchase opened up the vast West – in Western lands, too. It is also why slave-owners saw opportunities in acquiring new territories, as it would allow them to expand their slave system and ensure its survival, no matter what the Yankees thought! In the Gold Rush of the ‘40s, whites flooding into the West to hunt for gold disparaged, mistreated, and drove out non-whites, including Native peoples and Chinse immigrants. And in the decades-long land-grab that saw white North Americans steadily gobble up Texas, New Mexico, California, and Oregon the same story played out repeatedly: non-whites had to go. And, for the relative few who remained, they were always treated as inferior peoples.
That attitudes of white supremacy were so much a part of our history is an ugly fact, and it was something seldom mentioned in the history that was taught to me in grade school and high school. That it is only during the past 60 years that the true story has slowly been incorporated into a fuller and more honest telling of our country’s history may well be one of the reasons so many older Americans today resent newer historical scholarship, seeing it as biased against white people.
As one who remembers being taught a history that was so sadly incomplete – and, thus, dishonest – I can understand this reaction but in truth today’s history does not, in fact, leave out anything of “white” history but, rather, insists on bringing into the narrative the truth about non-white experiences as well.
It is one thing to find many aspects of our history unsettling and unpleasant – for this ought to be our reaction. But it is entirely a whole other matter to try to keep this fuller story from being taught.
Lastly, and much more briefly, here are some of the other intriguing themes that Professor Taylor illuminates:
Constant sectional rivalries in which every proposed piece of legislation to expand territory, spend monies on internal improvements (such as railroads) was regularly supported or opposed by people who feared that such measure would favor one part of the country over another
“Defensive imperialism,” Alan’s intriguing description of the justification some people advanced for invading Canada, or for removing Native peoples, or for the “necessity” of acquiring the entire West in order to frustrate British, French, or Russian designs on “grabbing” that territory first
Virulent language and dirty politics was widespread, and on my goodness are we supplied with plentiful examples of both, beginning with the Founders themselves as during the first president Washington’s terms of office people began forming sides either for or against Jefferson’s ideas of what would be best for the US or those of his rival, Federalist Alexander Hamilton. There was at least as much vicious, ad hominem, and use of scurrilous rumors then as is the case now. Politics ain’t beanball, and it helps us appreciate the advances we have largely (if imperfectly made) since then (and which are again under threat by those who seek always the lowest and the meanest).
Suspicions about the “worthiness” of immigrants and worries about their taking jobs away from “real” Americans. It is interesting that this “nation of immigrants” has always regarded the latest wave of immigration with suspicion and fear, even when they were “whites” like “ourselves.”
To take but one example, that of the Irish (my own ancestors): When they began to arrive in the US in large numbers because of the great famine in Ireland, they were looked at as dirty, poor, ignorant people inclined to drinking and fighting (proving that in some stereotypes there are kernels of truth!). However, it didn’t take long for these newly arrived Irish to regard free Blacks as persons who threatened them in competition for jobs, and some of the worst race riots of the first half of the 19th century involved Irish attacking, beating, and even killing Black people!
How rich capitalists played off the poor against each other. Indeed, the rich are always trying to gin the system so that they become richer, inevitably involving despoiling in some way the least among us.
The worst of this occurred as production of vital goods moved rather quickly away from home production – in which men and women produced whole goods and foodstuffs using their own land and abilities – to factory, larger industrial systems. This latter not only led to mind-numbing, repetitive labor, but it placed workers – whose individual skills were no longer valuable under such a system – as part of a larger labor pool that factory owners could use to keep wages low, often under appalling working conditions.
The constant threat the workers faced was if you demand better I can always replace you for someone who is desperate for work. This was the “free labor” system that many Southerners derived as being effectively wage slavery, no better than their slave system in the South. But here at least, Southerners countered, we feed and house our slaves; in your North, wage-slaves have to use whatever pittance you give them in order to provide for themselves.
In sum, this is a book very worth reading, even though parts of it are likely to make you as uncomfortable as they did me.
But I believe knowing and telling the truth is a vital part of our becoming freer, more accountable, more equal, and more compassionate citizens.
We all belong here!
January 20, 2023
Powerful read on an integral, fragile period of American history. I found myself reading this as a build-up to the civil war, inevitable calamity, but that’s the great bias of history: knowing how it ends.
What Taylor does best is evenly distribute thought and attention to the different regions and peoples of the US, including Canada, Mexico, freedmen and women, reformists, slaves, Natives, Tejanos and settlers. At no point is white supremacy and colonial expansion not the driving factor in the speeches of Calhoun, the rebuttals of JQA, the Trail of Tears, War with Mexico, the settling of Oregon. Taylor has no illusions about what nationalism or liberty mean to citizens of the young republic.
By the end I was struck most by an Emerson quote about how Union was so undesirable, civil war’s inevitability became a good thing. I think he’s right, the early republic teetered from conflict and humiliation to downright paranoia over slave uprisings, the ability of white men to purchase land, and the profitability of free enterprise. Paeans to the mantle inherited from the Revolutionary generations rang hollow. The South found itself more and more isolated and shackled as it ideologically transformed from viewing slavery as a “necessary evil” to a blessing, a cornerstone upon which its own purpose rested.
Taylor stirs emotion while sticking to facts and primary documents, while bringing clarity to deluge and nuance to a familiar tale.
What Taylor does best is evenly distribute thought and attention to the different regions and peoples of the US, including Canada, Mexico, freedmen and women, reformists, slaves, Natives, Tejanos and settlers. At no point is white supremacy and colonial expansion not the driving factor in the speeches of Calhoun, the rebuttals of JQA, the Trail of Tears, War with Mexico, the settling of Oregon. Taylor has no illusions about what nationalism or liberty mean to citizens of the young republic.
By the end I was struck most by an Emerson quote about how Union was so undesirable, civil war’s inevitability became a good thing. I think he’s right, the early republic teetered from conflict and humiliation to downright paranoia over slave uprisings, the ability of white men to purchase land, and the profitability of free enterprise. Paeans to the mantle inherited from the Revolutionary generations rang hollow. The South found itself more and more isolated and shackled as it ideologically transformed from viewing slavery as a “necessary evil” to a blessing, a cornerstone upon which its own purpose rested.
Taylor stirs emotion while sticking to facts and primary documents, while bringing clarity to deluge and nuance to a familiar tale.
February 8, 2024
An in-depth and damning look at the roots and history of American territorial expansion, much of which was driven by attempts to mitigate and propogate the process of slavery in equal measures, with a healthy and pervasive dose of anti-Indian racism and genocide thrown in to boot. This is a history that goes completely untold in broad swaths of our country, to the detriment of the understanding and empathy we might develop if we looked at ourselves with clear eyes as Americans.
November 13, 2023
Looking for an excellent overview of the early history of the United States, one that illuminates the past and informs the present, reads like the kind of history lecture that a master teacher would give, and is hard to put down? Here it is. Possibly the best American history I've ever read, rivaling James MacPherson's Battle Cry of Freedom. Taylor simplifies and puts into context without talking down to the reader or proselytizing. He lays out in clear detail, with judicious use of examples, how white supremacy was the essential underlying trend that shaped this nation. And without stating it directly—it is unavoidable to anyone who has paid attention to US history from 1850 through today—how it continues to impact our present and likely future.
For those who want to learn about American history, this should be essential reading. Any attempt to summarize or interpret it by me would be inadequate and trivializing. It's that good.
For those who want to learn about American history, this should be essential reading. Any attempt to summarize or interpret it by me would be inadequate and trivializing. It's that good.
January 12, 2022
382 pages of text plus 120 pages of footnotes. Too short to cover almost seven decades in any depth, but the book has a continental perspective which I found interesting. It devotes considerable attention to the early Republic’s expansion and does a good job explaining the forces behind our frenzied drive to control North America.
From Taylor’s perspective, a lot of our empire-building was defensive. He calls it “defensive imperialism.” The United States was a very fragile union of former colonies whose citizens had little sense of nationhood. Sectional interests, particularly slavery, kept the country teetering on the brink of disunion. The national government was weak and relied on tariffs and land sales for revenue. The Spanish, British and French empires had colonies and territorial claims in North America. Recognizing that a United States besieged by internal enemies would strengthen their own positions, they encouraged slaves to rebel or escape and they also provided military assistance and arms to Indians. This helped sustain a political environment where abolitionists could be accused of disloyalty or even treason.
Besides the need to drive out competing imperial forces, there were other factors that drove white expansion. These included massive immigration and population growth, revenue from federal land sales, resistance to geographical restrictions on slavery, and the desire to live in communities completely devoid of blacks.
Taylor depicts a United States in the thrall of violent racists who blithely enslaved and exterminated non-whites while proclaiming (white male) freedom and liberty. In this light, today’s populism, nationalism and general incivility look less like new developments and more like continuations of our earlier history. Much of what he covers will be familiar to readers of American history from the period. What’s distinctive is a certain lack of balance. He certainly doesn’t dwell on any part of our history which would inspire pride or admiration. In fact, one of his chapters is called “Monsters.” If you’re looking for reassurance that the Founding Fathers and nation builders were genial idealists, this book is not for you.
A few of many things I learned:
From Taylor’s perspective, a lot of our empire-building was defensive. He calls it “defensive imperialism.” The United States was a very fragile union of former colonies whose citizens had little sense of nationhood. Sectional interests, particularly slavery, kept the country teetering on the brink of disunion. The national government was weak and relied on tariffs and land sales for revenue. The Spanish, British and French empires had colonies and territorial claims in North America. Recognizing that a United States besieged by internal enemies would strengthen their own positions, they encouraged slaves to rebel or escape and they also provided military assistance and arms to Indians. This helped sustain a political environment where abolitionists could be accused of disloyalty or even treason.
Besides the need to drive out competing imperial forces, there were other factors that drove white expansion. These included massive immigration and population growth, revenue from federal land sales, resistance to geographical restrictions on slavery, and the desire to live in communities completely devoid of blacks.
Taylor depicts a United States in the thrall of violent racists who blithely enslaved and exterminated non-whites while proclaiming (white male) freedom and liberty. In this light, today’s populism, nationalism and general incivility look less like new developments and more like continuations of our earlier history. Much of what he covers will be familiar to readers of American history from the period. What’s distinctive is a certain lack of balance. He certainly doesn’t dwell on any part of our history which would inspire pride or admiration. In fact, one of his chapters is called “Monsters.” If you’re looking for reassurance that the Founding Fathers and nation builders were genial idealists, this book is not for you.
A few of many things I learned:
In 1805 masters accepted 50 pounds of cotton as a good day’s picking. By 1830 they demanded 130 pounds. Every pound short of the quota earned a slave one lash.
The price of slaves was directly related to the price of cotton. Specifically, it was 10,000 times the price of a pound. If cotton was seven cents a pound, a field hand was worth $700.
The southern frontier was extremely violent. The white-on-white murder rate in central Georgia was 45 times higher than in New England.
As someone who owed more than 600 slaves in his lifetime, Thomas Jefferson wrote, “A woman who brings a child every two years is more profitable than the best man on the farm. What she produces is an addition to capital, while his labor disappears in mere consumption.”
December 3, 2021
Next in my journey of US History. Again, being Canadian, this period was pretty blank for me. Sure I knew about the Alamo (but couldn't tell you much about where that fit in the Texas republic and the later mexican American war), and ongoing slavery, and some stuff about religious revivalism and westward expansion and manifest destiny and some of the horrors with Indian removal and trail of tears, and of course leading to the civil war - but really pretty weak and not well structured, and next to nothing about the presidents and politics involved during this period. This book was a good start for me to begin building a framework for this period and start making some sense out of it. No doubt the book is loaded with details and anecdotes (Not as detailed as the last book I read on the War of 1812, by same author, but very similar style and structure to the work) - though I think somewhat intentionally written as a survey/summary coverage with just enough detail and supporting evidence to satisfy oneself of its fairly unbiased validity.
As a survey type work, I was a little put off with some topics that were treated very lightly - to the point of, "why bother?" and others considerably more detailed where you wonder whether the author has lost his way in determining the intentions of this book.
Either way, I am happy with having started to fill this giant gap in my knowledge. I could and probably should go through this work many times over with more focus on the details and it would be worthwhile - but that isn't how I work. I've built some skeletal supports and look forward to new materials from new authors to continue to flesh this beast out... and no doubt, this early period, while usually I think considered kind of left out of history, is rich with challenges and nuance.
This definitely provides insight and supporting evidence for my budding hypothesis that the civil war in America, our struggle with slavery, equality, human rights, and white supremacy began as early as the revolutionary war and continued well after the civil war, and as we've seen in recent civil disorder, there are groups still living in the past, trying to rekindle their Neanderthal roots!
As a survey type work, I was a little put off with some topics that were treated very lightly - to the point of, "why bother?" and others considerably more detailed where you wonder whether the author has lost his way in determining the intentions of this book.
Either way, I am happy with having started to fill this giant gap in my knowledge. I could and probably should go through this work many times over with more focus on the details and it would be worthwhile - but that isn't how I work. I've built some skeletal supports and look forward to new materials from new authors to continue to flesh this beast out... and no doubt, this early period, while usually I think considered kind of left out of history, is rich with challenges and nuance.
This definitely provides insight and supporting evidence for my budding hypothesis that the civil war in America, our struggle with slavery, equality, human rights, and white supremacy began as early as the revolutionary war and continued well after the civil war, and as we've seen in recent civil disorder, there are groups still living in the past, trying to rekindle their Neanderthal roots!
August 29, 2021
Alan Taylor again offers his mastery of the subject and compellingly intelligible assessment of little known and little regarded elements of American history.
It turns out that “manifest destiny” was a political football that was passed back and forth among contending northern and southern interests, with the continuing dispute about slavery the basis of most regional and national politics.
American Republics presents a stunning account of the regular and vicious violence that was a completely tolerated element of most politicking.
The word “mob” turns up repeatedly in contemporary accounts of what was going on in the 18th and 19th centuries.
Taylor is not telling a pretty story.
I suspect that the next 4th of July speech I hear will sound vacuous.
read more of my book reviews and poems here:
www.richardsubber.com
It turns out that “manifest destiny” was a political football that was passed back and forth among contending northern and southern interests, with the continuing dispute about slavery the basis of most regional and national politics.
American Republics presents a stunning account of the regular and vicious violence that was a completely tolerated element of most politicking.
The word “mob” turns up repeatedly in contemporary accounts of what was going on in the 18th and 19th centuries.
Taylor is not telling a pretty story.
I suspect that the next 4th of July speech I hear will sound vacuous.
read more of my book reviews and poems here:
www.richardsubber.com
August 4, 2021
A fresh treatise of the American Republic's first seventy years. Thorough, while being somewhat controversial in spots, I came away with a more complete understanding of how the conflicting beliefs and policies played against each other, molding events which became our history.
If I had to identify the one characteristic that formed our nation, I would offer GREED as the prime impetus, closely closely followed by HATE and SELF-INTEREST. Americans have not changed much in the 170 years that have followed the period covered by this book.
If I had to identify the one characteristic that formed our nation, I would offer GREED as the prime impetus, closely closely followed by HATE and SELF-INTEREST. Americans have not changed much in the 170 years that have followed the period covered by this book.
September 23, 2022
Alan Taylor retells the history of the United States from 1783 to 1850 with two critical adjustments. He fully integrates Canada, Mexico, and Haiti in the narrative and he puts slavery at the center. This perspective clearly demonstrates how fragile, divided and racist the United States has been form its inception.
December 22, 2021
Review of: American Republics: A Continental History of the United States, 1783-1850,
by Alan Taylor
by Stan Prager (12-11-21)
Conspicuous in their absence from my 1960s elementary education were African Americans and Native Americans. Enslaved blacks made an appearance in my textbooks, of course, but slavery as an institution was sketched out as little more than a vague and largely benign product of the times. Then there was a Civil War fought over white men’s sectional grievances; there were dates, and battles, and generals, winners and losers. There was Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, then constitutional amendments that ended slavery and guaranteed equality. There was some bitterness but soon there was reconciliation, and we went on to finish building the transcontinental railroad. There were the obligatory walk-on cameos by Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman, and later George Washington Carver, who had something to do with peanuts. For Native Americans, the record was even worse. Our texts featured vignettes of Squanto, Pocahontas, Sacajawea, and Sitting Bull. The millions of Amerindians that once populated the country from coast to coast had been effectively erased.
Alan Taylor, Pulitzer Prize winning author and arguably the foremost living historian of early America, has devoted a lifetime to redressing those twin wrongs while restoring the nuanced complexity of our past that was utterly excised from the standard celebration of our national heritage that for so long dominated our historiography. In the process, in the eleven books he has published to date, he has also dramatically shifted the perspective and widened the lens from the familiar approach that more rigidly defines the boundaries of the geography and the established chapters in the history of the United States—a stunning collective achievement that reveals key peoples, critical elements, and greater themes often obscured by the traditional methodology.
I first encountered Taylor some years ago when I read his magnificent American Colonies: The Settling of North America, which restores the long overlooked multicultural and multinational participants who peopled the landscape, while at the same time enlarging the geographic scope beyond the English colonies that later comprised the United States to encompass the rest of the continent that was destined to become Canada and Mexico, as well as highlighting vital links to the West Indies. Later, in American Revolutions, Taylor identifies a series of social, economic and political revolutions of outsize significance over more than five decades that often go unnoticed in the shadows of the War of Independence, which receives all the attention.
Still, as Taylor underscores, it was the outcome of the latter struggle—in which white, former English colonists established a new nation—that was to have the most lasting and dire consequences for all those in their orbit who were not white, former English colonists, most especially blacks and Native Americans. The defeated British had previously drawn boundaries that served as a brake on westward expansion and left more of that vast territory as a home to the indigenous. That brake was now off. Some decades later, Britain was to abolish slavery throughout its empire, which no longer included its former colonies. Thus the legacy of the American Revolution was the tragic irony that a Republic established to champion liberty and equality for white men would ultimately be constructed upon the backs of blacks doomed to chattel slavery, as well as the banishment or extermination of Native Americans. This theme dominates much of Taylor’s work.
In his latest book, American Republics: A Continental History of the United States, 1783-1850, which roughly spans the period from the Peace of Paris to California statehood, Taylor further explores this grim theme in a brilliant analysis of how the principles of white supremacy—present at the creation—impacted the subsequent course of United States history. Now this is, of course, uncomfortable stuff for many Americans, who might cringe at that very notion amid cries of revisionism that insist contemporary models and morality are being appropriated and unfairly leveraged against the past. But terminology is less important than outcomes: non-whites were not only foreclosed from participating as citizens in the new Republic, but also from enjoying the life, liberty and pursuit of happiness allegedly granted to their white counterparts. At the same time, southern states where slavery thrived wielded outsize political power that frequently plotted the nation’s destiny. As in his other works, Taylor is a master of identifying unintended consequences, and there are more than a few to go around in the insightful, deeply analytical, and well-written narrative that follows.
These days, it is almost de rigueur for historians to decry the failure of the Founders to resolve the contradictions of permitting human chattel slavery to coexist within what was declared to be a Republic based upon freedom and equality. In almost the same breath, however, many in the field still champion the spirit of compromise that has marked the nation’s history. But if there is an original sin to underscore, it is less that slavery was allowed to endure than that it was codified within the very text of the Constitution of the United States by means of the infamous compromise that was the “three-fifths rule,” which for the purposes of representation permitted each state to count enslaved African Americans as three-fifths of a person, thus inflating the political power of each state based upon their enslaved population. This might have benefited all states equally, but since slavery was to rapidly decline and all but disappear above what would be drawn as the Mason-Dixon, all the advantage flowed to the south, where eventually some states saw its enslaved population outnumber its free white citizenry.
This was to prove dramatic, since the slave south claimed a disproportionate share of national political power when it came to advancing legislation or, for that matter, electing a president! Taylor notes that the disputed election of 1824 that went for decision to the House of Representatives would have been far less disputed without the three-fifths clause, since in that case John Quincy Adams would have led Andrew Jackson in the Electoral College 83 to 77 votes, instead of putting Jackson in the lead 99 to 84. [p253] When Jackson prevailed in the next election, it was the south that cemented his victory.
The scholarly consensus has established the centrality of slavery to the Civil War, but Taylor goes further, arguing that its significance extended long before secession: slavery was ever the central issue in American history, representing wealth, power, and political advantage. The revolutionary generation decried slavery on paper—slave masters Washington, Jefferson and Madison all pronounced it one form of abomination or another—but nevertheless failed to act against it, or even part with their own human property. Jefferson famously declared himself helpless, saying of the peculiar institution that “We have the wolf by the ear, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go,” but as slavery grew less profitable for Virginia in the upper south, Jefferson and his counterparts turned to breeding the enslaved for sale to the lower south, where the demand was great. Taylor points out that “In 1803 a male field hand sold for about $600 in South Carolina compared to $400 in Virginia: a $200 difference enticing to Virginia sellers and Carolina slave traders … Between 1790 and 1860, in one of the largest forced migrations in world history, slave traders and migrants herded over a million slaves from Virginia and Maryland to expand southern society ...” [p159] Data and statistics may obscure it, but these were after all living, breathing, sentient human beings who were frequently subjected to great brutalities while enriching those who held them as chattel property.
Jefferson and others of his ilk imagined that slavery would somehow fall out of favor at some distant date, but optimistically kicking the can down the road to future generations proved a fraught strategy: nothing but civil war could ever have ended it. As Taylor notes:
Contrary to the wishful thinking of many Patriots, slavery did not wither away after the American Revolution. Instead, it became more profitable and entrenched as the South expanded westward. From 698,600 in 1790, the number of enslaved people soared to nearly 4 million by 1860, when they comprised a third of the South’s population … In 1860, the monetary value of enslaved people exceeded that of all the nation’s banks, factories, and railroads combined. Masters would never part with so much valuable human property without a fight. [p196]
As bad as it was for enslaved blacks, in the end Native Americans fared far worse. It has been estimated that up to 90% of Amerindians died as a result to exposure to foreign pathogens within a century of the Columbian Experience. The survivors faced a grim future competing for land and resources with rapacious settlers who were better armed and better organized. It may very well be that conflict between colonists and the indigenous was inevitable, but as Taylor emphasizes, the trajectory of the relationship became especially disastrous for the latter after British retreat essentially removed all constraints on territorial expansion.
The stated goal of the American government was peaceful coexistence that emphasized native assimilation to “white civilization.” The Cherokees who once inhabited present-day Georgia actually attempted that, transitioning from hunting and gathering to agriculture, living in wooden houses, learning English, creating a written language. Many practiced Christianity. Some of the wealthiest worked plantations with enslaved human property. It was all for naught. With the discovery of gold in the vicinity, the Cherokees were stripped of their lands in the Indian Removal Act of 1830, championed by President Andrew Jackson, and marched at bayonet point over several months some 1200 miles to the far west. Thousands died in what has been dubbed the “Trail of Tears,” certainly one of the most shameful episodes of United States history. Sadly, rather than an exception, the fate of the Cherokees proved to be indicative of what lay in store for the rest of the indigenous as the new nation grew and the hunger for land exploded.
That hunger, of course, also fueled the Mexican War, launched on a pretext in yet another shameful episode that resulted in an enormous land grab that saw a weaker neighbor forced to cede one-third of its former domains. It was the determination of southern states to transplant plantation-based slavery to these new territories—and the fierce resistance to that by “Free-Soilers” in Lincoln’s Republican Party—that lit the fuse of secession and the bloody Civil War that it spawned.
If there are faults to this fine book, one is that there is simply too much material to capably cover in less than four hundred pages, despite the talented pen and brilliant analytical skills of Alan Taylor. The author devoted an entire volume—The Civil War of 1812—to the events surrounding the War of 1812, a conflict also central to a subsequent effort, The Internal Enemy. This kind of emphasis on a particular event or specific theme is typical of Taylor’s work. In American Republics, he strays from that technique to attempt the kind of grand narrative survey seen by other chroniclers of the Republic, powering through decades of significance at sometimes dizzying speeds, no doubt a delight for some readers but yet disappointing to others long accustomed to the author’s detailed focus on the more narrowly defined.
Characteristic of his remarkable perspicacity, Taylor identifies what other historians overlook, arguing in American Republics that the War of 1812 was only the most well-known struggle in a consequential if neglected era he calls the “Wars of the 1810s” that also saw the British retreat northward, the Spanish forsake Florida, and the dispossession of Native Americans accelerate. [p148] That could be a volume in itself. Likewise, American culture and politics in the twelve years that separate Madison and Jackson is worthy of book-length treatment. There is so much more.
Another issue is balance—or a lack thereof. If the history of my childhood was written solely in the triumphs of white men, such accomplishments are wholly absent in American Republics, which reveals the long-suppressed saga of the once invisible victims of white supremacy. It’s a true story, an important story—but it’s not the only story. Surely there are some achievements of the Republic worthy of recognition here?
As the culture wars heat to volcanic temperatures, such omissions only add tinder to the flames of those dedicated to the whitewash that promotes heritage over history. Already the right has conjured an imaginary bugaboo in Critical Race Theory (CRT), with legislation in place or pending in a string of states that proscribes the teaching of CRT. These laws have nothing to do with Critical Race Theory, of course, but rather give cover to the dog whistles of those who would intimidate educators so they cannot teach the truth about slavery, about Reconstruction, about Civil Rights. These laws put grade-school teachers at a risk of termination for incorporating factual elements of our past into their curriculum, effectively banning from the classroom the content of much of American Republics. This is very serious stuff: Alan Taylor is a distinguished professor at the University of Virginia, a state that saw the governor-elect recently ride to an unlikely victory astride a sort of anti-CRT Trojan Horse. Historians cannot afford any unforced errors in a game that scholars seem to be ceding to dogmatists. If the current trend continues, we may very well witness reprints of my childhood textbooks, with blacks and the indigenous once more consigned to the periphery.
I have read seven of Taylor’s books to date. Like the others, his most recent work represents a critical achievement for historical scholarship, as well as a powerful antidote to the propaganda that formerly tarnished studies of the American Experience. The United States was and remains a nation unique in the family of nations, replete with a fascinating history that is at once complicated, messy, and controversial. American history, at its most basic, is simply a story of how we got from then to now: it can only be properly understood and appreciated in the context of its entirety, warts and all. Anything less is a disservice to the discipline as well as to the audience. To that end, American Republics is required reading.
Review of: American Republics: A Continental History of the United States, 1783-1850, by Alan Taylor https://regarp.com/2021/12/11/review-...
----------------------------------------------------------
Note: I have reviewed other works by Alan Taylor here:
Review of: American Revolutions: A Continental History, 1750-1804, by Alan Taylor
Review of: The Internal Enemy: Slavery and the War in Virginia 1772-1832, by Alan Taylor
Review of: The Civil War of 1812: American Citizens, British Subjects, Irish Rebels, & Indian Allies by Alan Taylor
Review of: Thomas Jefferson’s Education, by Alan Taylor
----------------------------------------------------------
by Alan Taylor
by Stan Prager (12-11-21)
Conspicuous in their absence from my 1960s elementary education were African Americans and Native Americans. Enslaved blacks made an appearance in my textbooks, of course, but slavery as an institution was sketched out as little more than a vague and largely benign product of the times. Then there was a Civil War fought over white men’s sectional grievances; there were dates, and battles, and generals, winners and losers. There was Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, then constitutional amendments that ended slavery and guaranteed equality. There was some bitterness but soon there was reconciliation, and we went on to finish building the transcontinental railroad. There were the obligatory walk-on cameos by Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman, and later George Washington Carver, who had something to do with peanuts. For Native Americans, the record was even worse. Our texts featured vignettes of Squanto, Pocahontas, Sacajawea, and Sitting Bull. The millions of Amerindians that once populated the country from coast to coast had been effectively erased.
Alan Taylor, Pulitzer Prize winning author and arguably the foremost living historian of early America, has devoted a lifetime to redressing those twin wrongs while restoring the nuanced complexity of our past that was utterly excised from the standard celebration of our national heritage that for so long dominated our historiography. In the process, in the eleven books he has published to date, he has also dramatically shifted the perspective and widened the lens from the familiar approach that more rigidly defines the boundaries of the geography and the established chapters in the history of the United States—a stunning collective achievement that reveals key peoples, critical elements, and greater themes often obscured by the traditional methodology.
I first encountered Taylor some years ago when I read his magnificent American Colonies: The Settling of North America, which restores the long overlooked multicultural and multinational participants who peopled the landscape, while at the same time enlarging the geographic scope beyond the English colonies that later comprised the United States to encompass the rest of the continent that was destined to become Canada and Mexico, as well as highlighting vital links to the West Indies. Later, in American Revolutions, Taylor identifies a series of social, economic and political revolutions of outsize significance over more than five decades that often go unnoticed in the shadows of the War of Independence, which receives all the attention.
Still, as Taylor underscores, it was the outcome of the latter struggle—in which white, former English colonists established a new nation—that was to have the most lasting and dire consequences for all those in their orbit who were not white, former English colonists, most especially blacks and Native Americans. The defeated British had previously drawn boundaries that served as a brake on westward expansion and left more of that vast territory as a home to the indigenous. That brake was now off. Some decades later, Britain was to abolish slavery throughout its empire, which no longer included its former colonies. Thus the legacy of the American Revolution was the tragic irony that a Republic established to champion liberty and equality for white men would ultimately be constructed upon the backs of blacks doomed to chattel slavery, as well as the banishment or extermination of Native Americans. This theme dominates much of Taylor’s work.
In his latest book, American Republics: A Continental History of the United States, 1783-1850, which roughly spans the period from the Peace of Paris to California statehood, Taylor further explores this grim theme in a brilliant analysis of how the principles of white supremacy—present at the creation—impacted the subsequent course of United States history. Now this is, of course, uncomfortable stuff for many Americans, who might cringe at that very notion amid cries of revisionism that insist contemporary models and morality are being appropriated and unfairly leveraged against the past. But terminology is less important than outcomes: non-whites were not only foreclosed from participating as citizens in the new Republic, but also from enjoying the life, liberty and pursuit of happiness allegedly granted to their white counterparts. At the same time, southern states where slavery thrived wielded outsize political power that frequently plotted the nation’s destiny. As in his other works, Taylor is a master of identifying unintended consequences, and there are more than a few to go around in the insightful, deeply analytical, and well-written narrative that follows.
These days, it is almost de rigueur for historians to decry the failure of the Founders to resolve the contradictions of permitting human chattel slavery to coexist within what was declared to be a Republic based upon freedom and equality. In almost the same breath, however, many in the field still champion the spirit of compromise that has marked the nation’s history. But if there is an original sin to underscore, it is less that slavery was allowed to endure than that it was codified within the very text of the Constitution of the United States by means of the infamous compromise that was the “three-fifths rule,” which for the purposes of representation permitted each state to count enslaved African Americans as three-fifths of a person, thus inflating the political power of each state based upon their enslaved population. This might have benefited all states equally, but since slavery was to rapidly decline and all but disappear above what would be drawn as the Mason-Dixon, all the advantage flowed to the south, where eventually some states saw its enslaved population outnumber its free white citizenry.
This was to prove dramatic, since the slave south claimed a disproportionate share of national political power when it came to advancing legislation or, for that matter, electing a president! Taylor notes that the disputed election of 1824 that went for decision to the House of Representatives would have been far less disputed without the three-fifths clause, since in that case John Quincy Adams would have led Andrew Jackson in the Electoral College 83 to 77 votes, instead of putting Jackson in the lead 99 to 84. [p253] When Jackson prevailed in the next election, it was the south that cemented his victory.
The scholarly consensus has established the centrality of slavery to the Civil War, but Taylor goes further, arguing that its significance extended long before secession: slavery was ever the central issue in American history, representing wealth, power, and political advantage. The revolutionary generation decried slavery on paper—slave masters Washington, Jefferson and Madison all pronounced it one form of abomination or another—but nevertheless failed to act against it, or even part with their own human property. Jefferson famously declared himself helpless, saying of the peculiar institution that “We have the wolf by the ear, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go,” but as slavery grew less profitable for Virginia in the upper south, Jefferson and his counterparts turned to breeding the enslaved for sale to the lower south, where the demand was great. Taylor points out that “In 1803 a male field hand sold for about $600 in South Carolina compared to $400 in Virginia: a $200 difference enticing to Virginia sellers and Carolina slave traders … Between 1790 and 1860, in one of the largest forced migrations in world history, slave traders and migrants herded over a million slaves from Virginia and Maryland to expand southern society ...” [p159] Data and statistics may obscure it, but these were after all living, breathing, sentient human beings who were frequently subjected to great brutalities while enriching those who held them as chattel property.
Jefferson and others of his ilk imagined that slavery would somehow fall out of favor at some distant date, but optimistically kicking the can down the road to future generations proved a fraught strategy: nothing but civil war could ever have ended it. As Taylor notes:
Contrary to the wishful thinking of many Patriots, slavery did not wither away after the American Revolution. Instead, it became more profitable and entrenched as the South expanded westward. From 698,600 in 1790, the number of enslaved people soared to nearly 4 million by 1860, when they comprised a third of the South’s population … In 1860, the monetary value of enslaved people exceeded that of all the nation’s banks, factories, and railroads combined. Masters would never part with so much valuable human property without a fight. [p196]
As bad as it was for enslaved blacks, in the end Native Americans fared far worse. It has been estimated that up to 90% of Amerindians died as a result to exposure to foreign pathogens within a century of the Columbian Experience. The survivors faced a grim future competing for land and resources with rapacious settlers who were better armed and better organized. It may very well be that conflict between colonists and the indigenous was inevitable, but as Taylor emphasizes, the trajectory of the relationship became especially disastrous for the latter after British retreat essentially removed all constraints on territorial expansion.
The stated goal of the American government was peaceful coexistence that emphasized native assimilation to “white civilization.” The Cherokees who once inhabited present-day Georgia actually attempted that, transitioning from hunting and gathering to agriculture, living in wooden houses, learning English, creating a written language. Many practiced Christianity. Some of the wealthiest worked plantations with enslaved human property. It was all for naught. With the discovery of gold in the vicinity, the Cherokees were stripped of their lands in the Indian Removal Act of 1830, championed by President Andrew Jackson, and marched at bayonet point over several months some 1200 miles to the far west. Thousands died in what has been dubbed the “Trail of Tears,” certainly one of the most shameful episodes of United States history. Sadly, rather than an exception, the fate of the Cherokees proved to be indicative of what lay in store for the rest of the indigenous as the new nation grew and the hunger for land exploded.
That hunger, of course, also fueled the Mexican War, launched on a pretext in yet another shameful episode that resulted in an enormous land grab that saw a weaker neighbor forced to cede one-third of its former domains. It was the determination of southern states to transplant plantation-based slavery to these new territories—and the fierce resistance to that by “Free-Soilers” in Lincoln’s Republican Party—that lit the fuse of secession and the bloody Civil War that it spawned.
If there are faults to this fine book, one is that there is simply too much material to capably cover in less than four hundred pages, despite the talented pen and brilliant analytical skills of Alan Taylor. The author devoted an entire volume—The Civil War of 1812—to the events surrounding the War of 1812, a conflict also central to a subsequent effort, The Internal Enemy. This kind of emphasis on a particular event or specific theme is typical of Taylor’s work. In American Republics, he strays from that technique to attempt the kind of grand narrative survey seen by other chroniclers of the Republic, powering through decades of significance at sometimes dizzying speeds, no doubt a delight for some readers but yet disappointing to others long accustomed to the author’s detailed focus on the more narrowly defined.
Characteristic of his remarkable perspicacity, Taylor identifies what other historians overlook, arguing in American Republics that the War of 1812 was only the most well-known struggle in a consequential if neglected era he calls the “Wars of the 1810s” that also saw the British retreat northward, the Spanish forsake Florida, and the dispossession of Native Americans accelerate. [p148] That could be a volume in itself. Likewise, American culture and politics in the twelve years that separate Madison and Jackson is worthy of book-length treatment. There is so much more.
Another issue is balance—or a lack thereof. If the history of my childhood was written solely in the triumphs of white men, such accomplishments are wholly absent in American Republics, which reveals the long-suppressed saga of the once invisible victims of white supremacy. It’s a true story, an important story—but it’s not the only story. Surely there are some achievements of the Republic worthy of recognition here?
As the culture wars heat to volcanic temperatures, such omissions only add tinder to the flames of those dedicated to the whitewash that promotes heritage over history. Already the right has conjured an imaginary bugaboo in Critical Race Theory (CRT), with legislation in place or pending in a string of states that proscribes the teaching of CRT. These laws have nothing to do with Critical Race Theory, of course, but rather give cover to the dog whistles of those who would intimidate educators so they cannot teach the truth about slavery, about Reconstruction, about Civil Rights. These laws put grade-school teachers at a risk of termination for incorporating factual elements of our past into their curriculum, effectively banning from the classroom the content of much of American Republics. This is very serious stuff: Alan Taylor is a distinguished professor at the University of Virginia, a state that saw the governor-elect recently ride to an unlikely victory astride a sort of anti-CRT Trojan Horse. Historians cannot afford any unforced errors in a game that scholars seem to be ceding to dogmatists. If the current trend continues, we may very well witness reprints of my childhood textbooks, with blacks and the indigenous once more consigned to the periphery.
I have read seven of Taylor’s books to date. Like the others, his most recent work represents a critical achievement for historical scholarship, as well as a powerful antidote to the propaganda that formerly tarnished studies of the American Experience. The United States was and remains a nation unique in the family of nations, replete with a fascinating history that is at once complicated, messy, and controversial. American history, at its most basic, is simply a story of how we got from then to now: it can only be properly understood and appreciated in the context of its entirety, warts and all. Anything less is a disservice to the discipline as well as to the audience. To that end, American Republics is required reading.
Review of: American Republics: A Continental History of the United States, 1783-1850, by Alan Taylor https://regarp.com/2021/12/11/review-...
----------------------------------------------------------
Note: I have reviewed other works by Alan Taylor here:
Review of: American Revolutions: A Continental History, 1750-1804, by Alan Taylor
Review of: The Internal Enemy: Slavery and the War in Virginia 1772-1832, by Alan Taylor
Review of: The Civil War of 1812: American Citizens, British Subjects, Irish Rebels, & Indian Allies by Alan Taylor
Review of: Thomas Jefferson’s Education, by Alan Taylor
----------------------------------------------------------
April 16, 2023
This is the third Alan Taylor history of the early US that I have read and it's just as valuable, eye-opening and depressing/maddening as the other two. Once again, his scope is far greater than the usual American history books, spending time on area of North America that were not yet, and in some cases never would be, part of the United States. One reason Taylor's perspective is valuable is that it looks at the perspectives of non-Americans in the history of the United States.
Perhaps even more so than in American Revolutions, it feels like the fundamental conflicts and fissures that divide Americans today were already set during this period. Though the topics of the battles are different, it feels like American attitudes towards issues are already pretty well established. Reading about these debates - over slavery, over indigenous peoples, over Mexico - reminds me way too much about contemporary debates about racism, gun control, taxes, etc. I don't know whether this is a bad thing or a good thing, but it's illuminating. (If you ever despair for the state of debate in the United States, read one of these books and you'll hear some really horrible stuff.)
This is an era of US history that I don't know a lot about, beyond the War of 1812. So I learned a lot. And I actually had my view of the War of 1812 totally reframed. (I look forward to reading Taylor's history of the War of 1812.) Some people want to date the beginning of the American empire to WWII or even WWI. Some want to date it to the Spanish-American War, which has long struck me as the best option. But reading about what happened around the War of 1812 and then, especially, around the Mexican-American War, I'm kind of tempted to date it earlier, to the early 19th century. Taylor makes a case that this was mostly defensive - or, at least, justified as defensive by Americans - but I think that just makes the argument stronger. I feel like the justification for American empire has almost always been about "defending" Americans or other groups of people.
Like the first two books, this one highlights some really awful stuff that happened as the US became more of a country. I knew about a lot of this stuff in general, but it still is a good reminder, one that I think we all need to experience every once and a while. Though I am not personally complicit in this genocide, that doesn't mean I shouldn't be aware of it, and think long and hard about how I live my life knowing that I live in a country founded on genocide.
I really appreciate Taylor involving Canada and Mexico in this story. Taylor's histories are the first books I can remember reading explicitly about US history that bother with Canada in any great detail. I literally said aloud to my girlfriend "He mentions Francis Bond Head!" when I was reading about Upper Canada. I think this "continental" perspective is valuable.
Anyway, it's another strong history and I do think reading these three books is quite a good introduction to the pre-Civil War history of the United States. Taylor's lack of focus on dates and and names is especially forgivable given the existence of the internet and Wikipedia, and his focus on how the people already living in North America were affected by the existence of the US is something we all need to be familiar with.
Perhaps even more so than in American Revolutions, it feels like the fundamental conflicts and fissures that divide Americans today were already set during this period. Though the topics of the battles are different, it feels like American attitudes towards issues are already pretty well established. Reading about these debates - over slavery, over indigenous peoples, over Mexico - reminds me way too much about contemporary debates about racism, gun control, taxes, etc. I don't know whether this is a bad thing or a good thing, but it's illuminating. (If you ever despair for the state of debate in the United States, read one of these books and you'll hear some really horrible stuff.)
This is an era of US history that I don't know a lot about, beyond the War of 1812. So I learned a lot. And I actually had my view of the War of 1812 totally reframed. (I look forward to reading Taylor's history of the War of 1812.) Some people want to date the beginning of the American empire to WWII or even WWI. Some want to date it to the Spanish-American War, which has long struck me as the best option. But reading about what happened around the War of 1812 and then, especially, around the Mexican-American War, I'm kind of tempted to date it earlier, to the early 19th century. Taylor makes a case that this was mostly defensive - or, at least, justified as defensive by Americans - but I think that just makes the argument stronger. I feel like the justification for American empire has almost always been about "defending" Americans or other groups of people.
Like the first two books, this one highlights some really awful stuff that happened as the US became more of a country. I knew about a lot of this stuff in general, but it still is a good reminder, one that I think we all need to experience every once and a while. Though I am not personally complicit in this genocide, that doesn't mean I shouldn't be aware of it, and think long and hard about how I live my life knowing that I live in a country founded on genocide.
I really appreciate Taylor involving Canada and Mexico in this story. Taylor's histories are the first books I can remember reading explicitly about US history that bother with Canada in any great detail. I literally said aloud to my girlfriend "He mentions Francis Bond Head!" when I was reading about Upper Canada. I think this "continental" perspective is valuable.
Anyway, it's another strong history and I do think reading these three books is quite a good introduction to the pre-Civil War history of the United States. Taylor's lack of focus on dates and and names is especially forgivable given the existence of the internet and Wikipedia, and his focus on how the people already living in North America were affected by the existence of the US is something we all need to be familiar with.
September 20, 2022
There's been a lot of talk recently about how we define American history, and who gets to teach it. It's a fraught battle over legacy and tradition, and some see any attempt to redress the wrongs of the past as somehow "un-American." But here's the thing, folks: America has always been far short of realizing her ideals as espoused by the Declaration of Independence.
"American Republics" is a fantastic survey of the first seventy or so years of the American experiment, from the writing of the Constitution to the Mexican War. Highlighting many aspects of American history that don't always get their full weight in history classes, Alan Taylor shows that, far from the idealized portraits we get of the Founding Fathers and the early leaders of our nation, the men who started and perpetuated this country were often vain, racist, and greedy. Not a shock to this reviewer, to be fair, but I'm guessing the portraits of such figures as Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, and others might come as a shock to the "rose-colored glasses" contingent of history buffs out there. The nation was founded for the benefit of white men, because white supremacist thought is not a recent invention. It goes back all the way to Washington and his cohorts, the ones who wrote the Constitution after winning independence from the British. And they had a very different notion who who qualified as "all men" who were created equal than we might have today (most of us, anyway).
I first checked out this book during the summer, but never got into it and returned it to my local library after a month. Recently I decided to pick it up again, as I love reading history books that talk about the actual, real history of America (not the made-up crap that so many folks prefer, the kind where slavery wasn't that bad, Native Americans weren't slaughtered and rounded up, and every president was a good, decent white man who tried to do his best for all the people of the country). This is right in my wheelhouse, and should be required reading on the college level. It's that good, and it's an essential revision of the usual story of how America came to be. It's really important to be honest about our past as a country, so that we don't embrace a future of fascism. "American Republics" is about as honest and insightful as you can get.
"American Republics" is a fantastic survey of the first seventy or so years of the American experiment, from the writing of the Constitution to the Mexican War. Highlighting many aspects of American history that don't always get their full weight in history classes, Alan Taylor shows that, far from the idealized portraits we get of the Founding Fathers and the early leaders of our nation, the men who started and perpetuated this country were often vain, racist, and greedy. Not a shock to this reviewer, to be fair, but I'm guessing the portraits of such figures as Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, and others might come as a shock to the "rose-colored glasses" contingent of history buffs out there. The nation was founded for the benefit of white men, because white supremacist thought is not a recent invention. It goes back all the way to Washington and his cohorts, the ones who wrote the Constitution after winning independence from the British. And they had a very different notion who who qualified as "all men" who were created equal than we might have today (most of us, anyway).
I first checked out this book during the summer, but never got into it and returned it to my local library after a month. Recently I decided to pick it up again, as I love reading history books that talk about the actual, real history of America (not the made-up crap that so many folks prefer, the kind where slavery wasn't that bad, Native Americans weren't slaughtered and rounded up, and every president was a good, decent white man who tried to do his best for all the people of the country). This is right in my wheelhouse, and should be required reading on the college level. It's that good, and it's an essential revision of the usual story of how America came to be. It's really important to be honest about our past as a country, so that we don't embrace a future of fascism. "American Republics" is about as honest and insightful as you can get.
December 18, 2021
This was a little disappointing, though still a good overview of the period. It just wasn't long enough to cover this period in the detail I would prefer. I've been reading Jill Lepore's These Truths at the same time as this book, which is a book this book references. Lepore's book overviews much more of America's history, but the two books cover much of the same ground during this time period. However, Lepore's book goes into better detail at times than Taylor's. A general history like Lepore's shouldn't be more in-depth than Taylor's more narrow history book. Taylor should have made this book twice as long.
So if my criticism is that your book is not long enough, that should also show that it was well written and enjoyable, which this was. I really enjoy Taylor's writing in this and other books of his. There are good maps as well. This book has spurned my interest in a more detailed look at the Mexican American war of the late 1840s, which was an extremely impactful event in our history. In fact, James Polk was one of the most impactful presidents we've had. Under his presidency the US gained what is today most of western America.
So if my criticism is that your book is not long enough, that should also show that it was well written and enjoyable, which this was. I really enjoy Taylor's writing in this and other books of his. There are good maps as well. This book has spurned my interest in a more detailed look at the Mexican American war of the late 1840s, which was an extremely impactful event in our history. In fact, James Polk was one of the most impactful presidents we've had. Under his presidency the US gained what is today most of western America.
March 12, 2022
It’s a general history of the US covering over 65 years in under 400 pages, so it moves fast and goes over a wide array of topics. I liked that there was a general through line of peril and fragility though. The US emerging as a global superpower, or even a country at all, was far from assured during this time period. There were competing groups and risks all over the place which Taylor documents. He also does quick side topics in a few paragraphs, where I learned some things I never knew, such as how alcoholic most of the country was during this time period, consuming three to four more times as much alcohol as they do today.
June 10, 2023
Taylor covers an impressive amount of material and brings a rich supply of primary sources into the narrative. This history is brutal in its presentation of America's history -- brutally honest in that it shows how America was a nation held together by a thread, filled by tension and competing principles. The human toll of American expansion was immense, and this is often overlooked. However, because it covers so much in so little space, it moves with a breakneck pace that can be dizzying and disorienting at times. It's not as well paced or narrated as his other works, and the narrator pokes through at times to make insert observations, clarifications, and moral conclusions, but they often feel like awkward after thoughts. It's not Taylor's best work. Further, it's also a very grim book. It lays bare the horrors of American history, but it often fails to speak positively where it could. Where there were slave masters, there were abolitionists. Where there was cruelty there was also humanitarian ingenuity. Taylor tends to focus on the former to the neglect of the latter.
December 16, 2022
Excellent book! Excellent politics hidden under the guise of dad history. This is one to buy for your dad to reprogram him from all the patriotic nonsense he was raised on, he’ll never know what hit him!
October 5, 2021
helpful survey that contextualizes things quite well - was also a pleasure to be able to speak with professor taylor himself during class
July 8, 2023
Outstanding! This book provides the history of the era you were not taught in school, at least in Oklahoma!
December 21, 2023
"Nations, like individuals, are punished for their transgressions."
-Ulysses Grant
-Ulysses Grant
June 3, 2022
A well written and informative volume examining a critical period of American history between the founding and the civil war. The inclusion of related events in Canada and Mexico adds a valued and often overlooked facet to the story. The emphasis of the narrative is on the role played by slavery in shaping the developing nation and the brutality of westward expansion.
May 31, 2021
I do like reading history and find myself more prone to read historical fiction as the story brings the historical background to life. This book reads like historical fiction, unlike almost any other 'history' book that I have read. In particular, it is fun to read the intimacy of certain person's lives, as this makes the activities of the time feel more present. I must say, that while reading this, and then reading current events today (2021), we have not progressed much as a culture. Many of the conflicts and prejudices in the early 1800's could be transposed to today's strongly polarized world, and they didn't have the internet then to blame it on! I would even say that, compared to the festering Southern-Northern battle over slavery in that period, we have made next to no progress in coming to grips with economic and social magnitude of the slave-based economies of the early colonies, which gives the 1619 Project such relevance. Of course, this makes it ever so threatening to many who just cannot come to grips with the way they were fed a very white American History as they grew up, myself being one of them, and I thought that I had a good and broad education at the hands of the Cristian Brothers. How wrong I was. Although Taylor stopped at the doorstep of the Civil War, it is hard to not guess the logical conclusion of essentially two nations living as one, and how rupture was inevitable. But should this continue even today? Have we learned nothing from history?
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