Union: The Struggle to Forge the Story of United States Nationhood

by Colin Woodard Narrated by Robert Petkoff

Overview

By the bestselling author of American Nations, the story of how the myth of U.S. national unity was created and fought over in the nineteenth century--a myth that continues to affect us today

Union tells the story of the struggle to create a national myth for the United States, one that could hold its rival regional cultures together and forge an American nationhood. On one hand, a small group of individuals--historians, political leaders, and novelists--fashioned and promoted the idea of America as nation that had a God-given mission to lead humanity toward freedom, equality, and self-government. But this emerging narrative was swiftly contested by another set of intellectuals and firebrands who argued that the United States was instead the homeland of the allegedly superior "Anglo-Saxon" race, upon whom divine and Darwinian favor shined.

Colin Woodard tells the story of the genesis and epic confrontations between these visions of our nation's path and purpose through the lives of the key figures who created them, a cast of characters whose personal quirks and virtues, gifts and demons shaped the destiny of millions.

Editorial Reviews

NOVEMBER 2020 - AudioFile

The United States did not become a unified nation just because the U.S. Constitution was signed. In the 100 years that followed, our nation grew slowly and painfully. Narrator Robert Petkoff tells the story of how a group of states grappled with their vision of a unified future and with the process of how to achieve that vision. Petkoff's perfect news announcer's voice is as riveting as the story itself, which is told from the perspective of men who lived through the times, including politicians, writers, historians, and even abolitionist Frederick Douglass. The author makes no attempt to hide the missteps and outright evils done in the century following our nation's birth. The story he tells leads us to a better appreciation of how delicate nationhood can be. M.S. © AudioFile 2020, Portland, Maine

Publishers Weekly

04/06/2020

Journalist Woodard (American Nations) chronicles the history of attempts to define America’s national identity in this ambitious and accessible narrative. Identifying two competing visions of U.S. nationhood that emerged in the 19th and early 20th centuries, Woodard profiles U.S. Navy secretary and historian George Bancroft (1800–1891), who saw national character through the lens of a series of propositions—a belief in personal freedom, equality before the law, republican governance—and pro-slavery novelist and politician William Gilmore Simms (1806–1870), who advocated Anglo-Saxon ethnic and racial chauvinism. During the Civil War, Bancroft’s vision won a grand victory, but Simms’s ethnonationalism, according to Woodard, has continued to be a persistent component of the country’s public life, embodied by the Ku Klux Klan, the social Darwinist–inspired scholarship of Frederick Jackson Turner and Woodrow Wilson, and the “expanding churches of illiberalism” galvanized by the election of Donald Trump. Woodard oversells his argument by treating pride in the nation’s constitutional legacy as historically discrete from pride in America’s cultural heritage, but he marshals a wealth of information into a fluid narrative that manages to make abstract intellectual concepts tangible. This enlightening and character-driven account will resonate with progressive history buffs. (June)

From the Publisher

Praise for Union

"Woodard traces a gradual, emerging consensus of American unity. It’s a dark tale. This country purchased its sense of itself as a unified whole at a high price, he writes: that of racial equality. . . . In Woodard’s hands, [history] leaps to life. He shows just how powerful a form popular nonfiction can be in the hands of a disciplined writer who won’t tolerate generality or abstraction. . . . The writing is relentlessly accessible. . . . This is that rare history that tells what influential thinkers failed to think, what famous writers left unwritten. . . . Woodard demonstrates that something more complicated than reason is always afoot, some swirl of politics, events, and wordless popular sentiment that sweeps the hapless thinker in its wake."
—Jill Leovy, The American Scholar

"Compelling. . . . George Bancroft’s portrait is only one of many utterly gripping depictions scattered throughout Union. . . . The stakes are nothing short of determining how a nation thinks about itself, how it teaches posterity about itself. In Union, that battle sprawls out of the narrow confines of academia and embroils the entire country – and the fight is ongoing."
—The Christian Science Monitor

"Woodard succeeds in demonstrating the high stakes of master narratives, versions of the past that people choose as identities and stories in which they wish to live. . . . This book will help readers grasp the staying power and the consequences of the idea — ingrained in generations — that American history is essentially a chronicle of progress, a saga of liberty unfolding under some illusive pattern of exceptionalism and divine design. . . . Woodard does make visions of history into a kind of human drama. He writes with a storyteller’s pace and vividness."
—David Blight, The Washington Post

"A fascinating journey through history. . . . Union is timely and thought-provoking."
—BookPage

“Colin Woodard tells not the story of how America became a nation, but rather of how America crafted its own version of its national history, and how that national mythology has changed over the decades.”
—The Christian Science Monitor ("best nonfiction books of 2020")

"Overall, Woodard effectively shows how the country struggled to create a national myth, and an international image of unity. . . . Woodard is a gifted historiographer, and this excellent work will be appreciated by anyone interested in American history and how it came to be written."
—Library Journal (starred review)

"Ambitious and accessible. . . . This enlightening and character-driven account will resonate with progressive history buffs."
—Publishers Weekly

"Sturdy American history."
—Kirkus Reviews

"Union is detailed and unflashy, and it contains many valuable historical lessons modern readers will find useful."
—Booklist

Praise for American Nations

2012 Maine Literary Award for Non-fiction
The New Republic Best Books of 2011
The Globalist Best Books of 2011

“Mr. Woodard’s approach is breezier than Mr. Fischer’s and more historical than Mr. Garreau’s, but [Woodard] has earned a place on the shelf between them."
—The Wall Street Journal

“Compelling and informative.”
—The Washington Post

“One of the most original books I read in the last year was American Nations. . . . During my five years as an ambassador in the United States, I spent a lot of time studying the voting patterns of different states and reading American history, and I have to say I find Woodard’s thesis to be fully borne out by my own observations.”
—John Bruton, former European Union ambassador to the United States

“Incredible perspective on North and Central America.”
—Jack Dorsey, founder and CEO, Twitter
 
"A eye opening experience for me. . . . Many Americans say they love their country. The question is — which country are they talking about.”
—Chai Feldblum, former commissioner,  U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission

“In a compelling mash-up of the contemporary political geography of authors like Joel Garreau and Dante Chinni with the ethnography and history of David Hackett Finscher (Albion’s Seed), [Colin] Woodard divides North America into eleven distinct “nations." . . . [A] fascinating new ethnographic history of North America.”
—Alec MacGillis, The New Republic

“American Nations pulls off the unlikely feat of both offering the tools for just such a broader, deeper understanding—and demonstrates why, in a larger sense, that effort is doomed….The key to the [American Nations]’s effectiveness is Woodard’s skill—and irreverence—in delving into history with no qualms about being both brisk and contrarian….[I]n offering us a way to better understand the forces at play in the rumpus room of current American politics, Colin Woodard has scored a true triumph. I am going to order copies for my father and sister immediately—and I hope Woodard gets a wide hearing for his fascinating study.”
—The Daily Beast

 “[Colin] Woodard offers a fascinating way to parse American (writ large) politics and history in this excellent book.”
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“In American Nations, [Colin Woodard] persuasively reshapes our understanding of how the American political entity came to be. . . . [A] fascinating new take on history.”
—The Christian Science Monitor

“Provocative reading.”
—The News & Observer

“Well-researched analysis with appeal to both casual and scholarly readers.”
—Library Journal

“Fascinating. . . . Engrossing. . . . In the end, though, [American Nations] is a smart read that feels particularly timely now, when so many would claim a mythically unified “Founding Fathers” as their political ancestors.”
—The Boston Globe

“Woodard persuasively argues that since the founding of the United States, eleven distinct geographical “nations” have formed within the Union, each with its own identity and set of values.”
—Military History Quarterly

"Woodard’s account of American history is a refreshing take, and one I’d recommend to those curious of what causes our cultural differences.”
—Montana Kaimin

“[C]ontroversial and thought-provoking. . . . This is an important sociological study.”
—Morning Sentinel

“[F]or people interested in American history and sociology, American Nations demands reading. . . . American Nations is important reading.”
—St. Louis Post-Dispatch 

Library Journal

★ 06/01/2020

The theme of Woodard's (American Nations; American Character) writing is that in order for one to understand the national history of the United States, one must account for the regional differences in the country as well as the way those regions have related to each other and the nation as a whole. Woodward picks up this theme in this latest work by tracing the lives and careers of five Americans: William Simms, George Bancroft, Frederick Douglass, Woodrow Wilson, and Frederick Turner. Each of his subjects was an historian, and the book describes how American history came to be understood and written. Woodard explains how the promises of the United States, freedom and equality, have been reserved primarily for white men throughout most of our history. The book tells the sad story of how Northern military victory in the Civil War turned into Southern cultural victory when Reconstruction was abandoned, culminating in the election of the unabashed racist, Woodrow Wilson. Overall, Woodward effectively shows how the country struggled to create a national myth, and an international image of unity. VERDICT Woodard is a gifted historiographer, and this excellent work will be appreciated by anyone interested in American history and how it came to be written.—Michael Farrell, Reformed Theological Seminary, Orlando, FL

NOVEMBER 2020 - AudioFile

The United States did not become a unified nation just because the U.S. Constitution was signed. In the 100 years that followed, our nation grew slowly and painfully. Narrator Robert Petkoff tells the story of how a group of states grappled with their vision of a unified future and with the process of how to achieve that vision. Petkoff's perfect news announcer's voice is as riveting as the story itself, which is told from the perspective of men who lived through the times, including politicians, writers, historians, and even abolitionist Frederick Douglass. The author makes no attempt to hide the missteps and outright evils done in the century following our nation's birth. The story he tells leads us to a better appreciation of how delicate nationhood can be. M.S. © AudioFile 2020, Portland, Maine

Kirkus Reviews

2020-03-29
A veteran foreign correspondent highlights the essential regional makeup of the U.S. through several historical personages who used their sectional differences to attempt to weld a national character.

How did a sense of a shared nationhood coalesce through so many sectional differences? First, Woodard, a state and national affairs writer at the Portland Press Herald, delineates the mission of New England elite George Bancroft. Educated at Harvard and abroad in Germany, he was a failed teacher who supported himself in his wife’s family business before embarking on his great life’s scheme to write a history of the U.S. in terms of God’s plan for the unfolding of its triumphant mission of “popular sovereignty, equal justice, and a free economy.” While creating his decidedly blinkered American national myth—he utterly ignored Native and African Americans—his New England bias was criticized by Southerners. One of them was Charleston, South Carolina, native William Gilmore Simms, who serves as Woodard’s second model regional character. Simms was a wildly popular hack novelist of Southern fiction in which the masters were benevolent and the slaves so happy with their condition that they declined freedom. Dallying in politics, he went on to support some of the most die-hard secessionist and anti-Reconstructionist leaders. The third of the author’s primary characters is Frederick Douglass, who escaped slavery and joined the abolitionist movement of William Lloyd Garrison, then published his enormously popular autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, in 1845. Woodard manages to bring all of his disparate biographical threads together in a coherent narrative, using as his apotheosis the life of Woodrow Wilson, Southern-born writer of his own Anglo Saxon–centered History of the American People and proponent of D.W. Griffith’s white supremacist film Birth of a Nation (1915); Wilson became president despite his racism. One glaring omission is the lack of at least one strong female presence; otherwise, the scholarship is sound.

Sturdy American history.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940177395050
Publisher:	Penguin Random House
Publication date:	06/16/2020
Edition description:	Unabridged
Sales rank:	1,095,829

Read an Excerpt

ONE

The enemy's forces were surrounded, artillery raining down on them from three sides, their backs to the river, huddled in fortifications from which there was no escape. All through the night and into the morning, French and rebel cannonballs blasted the town's hewn-log defenses, propelling wooden shrapnel through flesh and bone. Shells tore through buildings, buried men in their trenches, and scattered severed limbs across muddy streets. Within the collapsing walls, food was scarce, even though the commander had already expelled all the fugitive slaves who had sought shelter beneath his flag, the Union Jack.

Then a red-coated drummer appeared at the top of the parapet. His arms began moving rapidly as he beat on his instrument. The soldiers of the besieging armies couldn't hear the drumroll over the din of artillery, but when a British officer appeared beside him, holding a white handkerchief above his head, the meaning was clear enough. The cannon stopped firing, the last clouds of smoke slowly rose into the sky, and the beat of the drum could be heard, signaling a desire to parley. The British officer and the drummer-the latter still broadcasting the request for a truce-stepped down from the defenses and walked slowly toward the American lines. A Continental officer ran up to greet his British counterpart and fastened a handkerchief over his eyes. He sent the drummer back over the parapet to Yorktown and led the blindfolded officer to meet General George Washington.

After a solemn night beneath a clear sky "decorated with ten thousand stars," Lord Cornwallis negotiated his surrender. The day after that, October 19, 1781, his seven-thousand-man army marched out of the shattered Virginia port between rows of French and Continental troops, their regimental flags furled, the drummers playing "Welcome Brother Debtor," a tune associated with imprisonment. They laid their rifles in heaps at the rebel's feet.

The war for American independence was at an end. But what now?

Thirteen of Britain's seventeen mainland North American colonies had won independence, having banded together to face a common threat to their respective political institutions, traditions, and liberties. They had created a joint military command, the Continental Army, and a sort-of treaty organization, "The United States of America," under the Articles of Confederation. Each of these American states was sovereign and independent, having agreed only to delegate defense, foreign trade, and foreign policy duties to their shared body, the Congress, which had fled from place to place during the conflict. Nobody really knew what this United States was or what it should become or even if it should continue to exist at all.

These new states' citizens didn't think of themselves as "Americans," except in the sense that French, German, and Spanish people might have considered themselves "Europeans." If asked what country they were from, the soldiers who now occupied Yorktown would have said "Massachusetts" or "Virginia," "Pennsylvania" or "South Carolina." For years to come, newspaper editors across the former colonies would refer to the new collective not as a nation but as a "league" or as the "American states" or "Confederated America," unsure of what it was or how long it might last.

The ethno-cultural landscape-with all its implications for nationhood-was even more complex. The descendants of English Puritans dominated most of New England and upstate New York; those of Southern English gentry and their indentured servants and slaves populated the Chesapeake country; those of the English slave planters of Barbados controlled life in the Deep Southern lowlands. The legacy of the Dutch colony of New Netherland had shaped the development of the area around New York City, while that of William Penn's Quakers had begat an ethnic and religious mosaic (with a German plurality) up and down the Delaware Valley. The backcountry was overwhelmingly Scots-Irish, in constant friction with the coastal societies that usually governed them. If a nation can be described as a people with a sense of common culture, history, and belonging, there were, in effect, a half dozen of them within these "United States," and outside New England there wasn't a single state that wasn't divided between two or, in the case of Maryland and Pennsylvania, three of them.

In the run-up to the war, one of the biggest arguments against leaving the Empire had been that a shared British identity was one of the few things keeping the colonies at peace with one another. In 1764 one anonymous letter to the editor of the New York Mercury warned that if the colonies achieved independence, "the disputes amongst ourselves would throw us into all the confusion, and bring on us all the calamities usually attendant on civil wars." In Maryland Reverend Jonathan Boucher warned New Englanders would become "the Goths and Vandals of America," conquering their neighbors. The Founding Father John Dickinson of Pennsylvania predicted that an independent British North America would collapse into "a multitude of Commonwealths, Crimes, and Calamities-centuries of mutual Jealousies, Hatreds, Wars and Devastations, until at last the exhausted Provinces shall sink into Slavery under the yoke of some fortunate conqueror." Leaving Britain, he added, was tantamount to "destroying a house before we have got another, in winter, with a small family."

Wartime regional divisions were so profound that, in 1778, the British secret agent Paul Wentworth reported there would be not one American Republic, but three: an "eastern republic of Independents in church and state," a "middle republic of toleration in church and state," and a "southern . . . mixed government copied nearly from Great Britain." The differences between them, Wentworth argued, were greater than those between the nations of Europe. Even after the war the London papers reported that "the States consider themselves thirteen independent provinces, subject to no other control than their own assemblies. The authority of Congress, to which they submitted but from necessity during the war they have now almost generally thrown off." Edward Bancroft, a postwar British spy, predicted the American confederation would surely splinter, leaving only the "question whether we shall have thirteen separate states in alliance or whether New England, the middle, and the southern states will form three new Confederations."

One thing was clear to the confederation's elites in the aftermath of the war: Unless a more formidable union could be negotiated, the United States would soon fall apart. "I . . . predict the worst consequences from a half-starved, limping government, that appears to be always moving upon crutches and tottering at every step," Washington wrote in 1784, and added in 1786: "I do not conceive we can long exist as a nation without having lodged somewhere a power which will pervade the whole union in as energetic a manner as the authority of the different state governments extends over the several states." Everyone realized, Jefferson would later recall, that "these separate independencies, like the petty States of Greece, would be eternally at war with each other."

The Constitutional Convention of 1787 was called in response to this growing crisis and yielded a legalistic remedy: a stronger federal government constrained by elaborate checks and balances between its monarchical, aristocratic, democratic, and priestly components-the presidency, Senate, House, and Supreme Court-and vis-ˆ-vis the states themselves, which arguably remained sovereign little nations. The whole point was to ensure no one block of colonies-no one regional culture-would be able to force its will on the others. The word "nation" was conspicuously absent from the constitution that was drafted.

The United States of America came into being as a contractual agreement, a means to an end for the parties involved. No one thought they had created a nation-state of the sort that Holland or Prussia or post-Revolutionary France was, and that central Europe's Romantic thinkers hoped the states of the German Confederation might one day become. Its people lacked a shared history, religion, or ethnicity. They didn't speak a unique language all their own. They hadn't occupied the continent long enough to imagine it as a mythic homeland, a place their people had dwelled in since time immemorial, and they'd killed or supplanted those people who did have the right to make such a claim. They lacked a common political heritage apart from the imperial ties against which they had just revolted, and they had no shared story of who they were and what their purpose was. In short, they had none of the practical or ideological foundations of a nation-state.

The United States was a state in search of nationhood, a country in search of a story of its origins, identity, and purpose. It needed to find these things if it was to survive.

For a time the ad hoc remedy to this problem was to define American identity in terms of participation in the shared struggle of the American Revolution. Washington, commander in chief and founding president, was venerated almost as a monarch until his death in 1799, then promptly promoted to demigod: the father of the nation, the mythic lawgiver, a man of perfect virtue, wisdom, and morals whom "Americans" might strive to emulate. Parson Mason Weems, a hustler-cum-historian, invented stories to buttress this image and disseminated them at considerable profit in pamphlets and, later, his book-length Life of George Washington. Washington's birthday was made a public holiday. His remains were treated as sacred relics, their resting place fought over between Virginia (which held them) and the U.S. Congress, which had appropriated money to house them in a purpose-built D.C. shrine. Virginia won.

But the beatification of Washington and his wartime supporting cast-Henry Knox, Nathan Hale, Ethan Allen, the Marquis de Lafayette-only worked as a placeholder for a national narrative for as long as 1776 remained in living memory. By the 1810s the Revolutionary soldiers and Founding Fathers began dying off, leaving a growing void where the country's sense of national identity should have been. Backcountry settlers in the Appalachian uplands had rebelled against the authority of the governments of Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, and the United States in the early 1790s. New Englanders considered seceding from the federation during the War of 1812, and the governor of Massachusetts had conspired with British officials to frustrate the federal war effort.

The federation's leaders began panicking. Senators slapped a tariff on the British books they feared were brainwashing Americans in their own schools and libraries. Noah Webster toiled away at compiling an "American" dictionary with distinctive words and spelling conventions in an effort to create a "national" language because, as he put it, "America should have her own, distinct from all the world." The intellectuals who wrote for the leading journal of the era, The North American Review, lamented that the United States couldn't produce a history of its own-a story of itself and its origins-because its component states couldn't agree on what it should say. "It will be at best but a combination of distinct histories," one lamented, "which subsequent events only show the propriety of uniting in a single narrative." If new adhesives weren't developed, if someone didn't fashion a compelling story of what America was, the young Union was expected to fall apart.

This is the story of the struggle to create that national story and, with it, an American nationhood. It is told through the eyes of the primary combatants themselves: three men born in very different circumstances at the dawn of the nineteenth century who would develop three competing answers to the United States' existential questions; and two who came of age in the aftermath of the Civil War and witnessed the triumph of one vision over the other in the second decade of a new century. It's the story of how the peoples of the United States answered those great existential questions of nationhood: Where did we come from? Who are we? Where are we going?

I end the story at the point when a broad consensus on how to answer these questions was finally achieved. It's a struggle that takes the better part of a century, a period in which we see the federation radically transformed-geographically, technologically, economically, and philosophically-into an industrial empire capable of dominating the world. This consensus was by no means final, but its contours make this a sobering and cautionary tale for readers today.

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