Young America: The Transformation of Nationalism before the Civil War

by Mark Power Smith

Overview

The Young Americans were a nationalist movement within the Democratic Party made up of writers and politicians associated with the New York periodical, the Democratic Review. In this revealing book, Mark Power Smith explores the ways in which–in dialogue with its critics–the movement forged contrasting visions of American nationalism in the decades leading up to the Civil War.

Frustrated, fifty years after independence, by Britain’s political and cultural influence on the United States, the Young Americans drew on a wide variety of intellectual authorities—in the fields of literature, political science, phrenology and international law—to tie popular sovereignty for white men to the universalist idea of natural rights. The movement supported a noxious program of foreign interventionism, racial segregation, and cultural nationalism. What united these policies was a new view of national allegiance: one that saw democracy and free trade not as political privileges but as natural rights for white men.

Despite its national reach, this view of the Union inadvertently turned Northern and Southern states against each other, helping to cultivate the conditions for the Civil War. In the end, the Young America movement was ultimately consumed by the sectional ideologies it had brought into being.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780813948539
Publisher:	University of Virginia Press
Publication date:	09/22/2022
Series:	A Nation Divided
Pages:	292
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.25(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Mark Power Smith is a Junior Research Fellow in History at Mansfield College, University of Oxford, and author of The Connell Short Guide to President Lincoln.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction: Young America Democrats—-The Post-Jacksonian Generation
1. The Intellectual Culture of the Young America Movement, 1844-1854
2. The Dorr Rebellion: Democracy, Natural Rights, and the Domestic Politics of the 1840s
3. Global Transformations: Territorial Expansion and Democratic Politics
4. Nature and the Political Order: Young America and the European Revolutions of 1848
5. Cuban Annexation and the Problem of Slavery
6. A State of Nature: Slavery and the Crisis of Democracy, 1854-1857
7. Popular Sovereignty and the Struggle against Slavery, 1857-1861
Conclusion: Liberal Nationalisms in an Age of Civil Wars
Notes
Bibliography
Index

What People are Saying About This

Michael E. Woods

Power Smith does an exceptionally good job of braiding intellectual with political history. The result is a highly sophisticated interpretation of Young Americans’ views on nationalism, freedom, race, slavery, expansion, and democracy, as well as a finely grained view of antebellum politics. This book promises to make an original, insightful, and provocative contribution to the vast literature on antebellum American political and intellectual history.

Jay Sexton

In this lively study of political ideas, Mark Power Smith reveals the centrality of the Young America movement to the making and unmaking of the United States in the mid-nineteenth century. Young America was replete within internal tensions: it was at once internationalist and nationalist; opposed to European imperialism while advocating U.S. territorial conquest; natural law was its intellectual anchor, even as those ideas came to justify rigid forms of racial hierarchy. Power Smith persuasively shows how the internal contradictions within Young America were those of the Union more generally.

Editorial Reviews

A rich work of intellectual and political history . . . Young America is a pleasure to read and makes an incisive contribution to the growing body of work on antebellum Democrats.

Journal of the Civil War Era

In this lively study of political ideas, Mark Power Smith reveals the centrality of the Young America movement to the making and unmaking of the United States in the mid-nineteenth century. Young America was replete within internal tensions: it was at once internationalist and nationalist; opposed to European imperialism while advocating U.S. territorial conquest; natural law was its intellectual anchor, even as those ideas came to justify rigid forms of racial hierarchy. Power Smith persuasively shows how the internal contradictions within Young America were those of the Union more generally.

Jay Sexton

Power Smith does an exceptionally good job of braiding intellectual with political history. The result is a highly sophisticated interpretation of Young Americans’ views on nationalism, freedom, race, slavery, expansion, and democracy, as well as a finely grained view of antebellum politics. This book promises to make an original, insightful, and provocative contribution to the vast literature on antebellum American political and intellectual history.

Michael E. Woods