28 The New York Review
become a slaveholding leviathan. Had
that happened, the antislavery cause
would have been set back indefinitely.
In short, although slavery became
more entrenched and the slavehold-
ers more powerful in the new United
States after the Revolution, the success
of the Revolution greatly hastened, di-
rectly and indirectly, the overthrow of
slavery in the Anglo-American world.
Holton’s hidden history of the Revolu-
tion, with all of its richness of detail on
popular egalitarian politics, does not
admit of that paradox. To understand
the paradox fully, though, requires a
closer examination of the decades that
led to the Civil War.
Alan Taylor, the Thomas Jefferson
Memorial Foundation Professor of His-
tory at the University of Virginia, is a
preeminent historian of early America,
the author of ten books, and the recip-
ient of two Pulitzer Prizes. His new
book, American Republics, is the final
installment of an impressive trilogy that
began in 2001 with a sweeping survey of
colonial America and was followed fif-
teen years later by a sequel on the Revo-
lution. Now comes his volume covering
the era from the Revolution to 1850.
All three books display Taylor’s tal-
ents for writing engaging, sprawling
narratives that greatly expand early
American history beyond its conven-
tional Anglocentric boundaries. The
first, American Colonies, embraced Af-
ricans and Native Americans as well as
the Spanish, French, and Dutch as im-
portant participants in settling Amer-
ica. The second, American Revolutions,
presented the Revolution as a product of
numerous imperial struggles in the New
World, not least important the colonists’
conflicts with Native Americans and
enslaved Africans. (It also offered, as
did one of his other books, The Internal
Enemy: Slavery and War in Virginia,
1772–1832, an account of the Dunmore
incident that is similar to Holton’s and
equally unpersuasive.) By design, ev-
idently, American Republics is a less
ambitious and comprehensive work,
described by Taylor simply as “a concise
introduction” that offers “basic cover-
age of some conventional topics” com-
bined with less familiar excursions into
the country’s difficult relations with the
British and Spanish Empires, numer-
ous Indian nations, and the two other
independent republics in the Americas,
Mexico and Haiti. Yet his description is
too modest, as the book emphatically
develops two important arguments
about postrevolutionary America.
The first argument, broadly accepted
by professional historians, is less fa-
miliar to the wider audience Taylor
addresses. “The United States,” he
writes, “was far from united before
1850.” Despite the framers’ efforts
to create a national government that
would, as James Madison envisaged,
check divisive parochial interests,
Americans remained firmly, even pas-
sionately tied to their state and local
allegiances. Rent internally by mutual
suspicion, exposed to interference
by external forces (including Native
Americans and, long after the Revolu-
tion, the British Empire), and haunted,
at least in the South, by the specter of
slave insurrection, the United States
was less a nation and more like a league
of autonomous states periodically on
the verge of disunion. The Confederate
secession in 1860–1861 marked not a
wrenching break from a settled Amer-
ican nationalism but a continuation
and culmination of the country’s essen-
tial fractiousness, turning on slavery,
which had from the start been (as Tay-
lor quotes one newspaper editor) “the
weak point of our Union.”
The second argument, more con-
tested among historians, holds that the
primary force uniting the majority of
the citizenry was a belligerent expan-
sionism based on deeply engrained pre-
sumptions of white supremacy. Taylor
by no means presents America’s empire
building as single-minded and purpose-
ful. “By 1850,” he contends, “the United
States had swept its claims across the
continent to the Pacific coast—but it
did so with far less confidence than we
usually recognize.” Truculent asser-
tions of America’s Manifest Destiny to
invade other countries like Mexico and
other countries’ possessions like Flor-
ida stemmed less from confidence than
from anxiety, covering what Taylor calls
a “pervasive, driving fear of dissolution”
and a search for “elusive security against
the internal divisions of an unstable
union.” Still, white supremacy prevailed
throughout the country in his account;
it is an unrelieved story of acts of bru-
tality by white men against Natives and
African Americans, from the disposses-
sion of indigenous people whom whites
regarded as savages to deadly mob as-
saults on free blacks in northern cities.This evaluation represents not so much
a modification or even rejection of ear-
lier scholarly arguments as an inversion
of them. One influential line of interpre-
tation of the period, for example, em-
phasizes how emerging class divisions
among white men aroused small farmers
and hard-pressed workingmen to rally to
the Democratic Party of Andrew Jack-
son. The centerpiece in these accounts is
Jackson’s war against the Second Bank
of the United States—an enormous
private institution with extraordinary
public power. Jackson denounced its cor-
porate monopoly and decried how “the
rich and powerful too often bend the
acts of government to their selfish pur-
poses.” Political struggles over slavery
figure in, exposing deep contradictions
in the egalitarianism of the slaveholder
Jackson and his party. But by focusing
on class divisions, many of these histo-
rians minimized or even completely
overlooked the racial divisions deep-
ened by Jacksonian Democrats, not
least Jackson’s notorious Indian re-
moval policies, as well as the imperial
dimensions of American expansionism.
Taylor turns that view inside out. He
writes early on that “while denying the
power of class in public life, Americans
practiced it with a vengeance in private
circles.” That perception fades, how-
ever, through the rest of the book, apart
from a brief section covering the Low-
ell factory girls, exploited big-city wage
earners, and early trade unions. Taylor
has little to say about the travails of
ordinary rural white households strug-
gling to make ends meet while beset by
periodic financial panics and economic
depressions. He notes in passing that,
by the 1840s, the wealthiest 5 percent of
free men owned 70 percent of the wealth
in the nation’s major cities but does not
explore how those glaring inequalities
fed the era’s turmoil, including racial
turmoil. Disregarding the question of
the Second Bank’s concentration of
wealth and power as a genuine threatto democracy, he dismisses Jackson’s
war against it as conspiracy-minded
demagogy—playing “the class card”—
in order to whip up votes for a party
devoted chiefly to eradicating Indians,
expanding racial slavery, and other-
wise fortifying white supremacy. While
Taylor’s reversal rightly corrects other
historians’ omissions and distortions, it
ends up presenting a caricature of his-
tory reduced to a chronicle of racial op-
pression and imperial conquest.
Taylor’s fixation on white supremacy
enfeebles his treatment of abolitionism
and the antislavery movement. Like
Holton, he has little to say about the
antislavery currents that flowed out of
the Revolution except to scoff at the
gradual emancipation laws passed in
the northern states for not securing
freedom for those already enslaved.
He thereby omits that these laws, with
all of their limitations, were of world-
historical importance, the first leg-
islative emancipations of their kind
enacted by any slaveholding govern-
ment in human history; he also omits
that they were instigated by the first an-
tislavery activities of their kind in the
world and achieved with difficulty.
Taylor devotes a meager if admiring
section of just over four pages to the
radical abolitionist movement of the
1830s, which was, he allows, antiracist
as well as antislavery. Yet precisely be-
cause of their radicalism, he suggests,
these abolitionists succeeded chiefly in
inflaming northern racists and provok-
ing southern leaders, who banned their
literature from the mails, blocked their
petitions to Congress, and sharpened
the defense of “the peculiar institu-
tion” as a positive good. Taylor misses
how the movement, by standing de-
fiantly for its right to be heard and by
exposing the true horrors of southern
slavery, began awakening the sympa-
thies of northerners far beyond its ac-
tual membership.How, then, in Taylor’s white suprema-
cist America, did opposition to slavery
eventually generate the world’s first mass
antislavery political party, win a presi-
dential election, and prompt southern
secession? Because American Repub-
lics concludes in 1850, it does not cover
the formation of the Republican Party,
but it does discuss the developments in
the 1840s that prepared the way by forc-
ing the issue of slavery’s expansion to
the center of national debates. In what
Taylor correctly views as an enormous
paradox, America’s imperial drive to
annex Texas, invade Mexico, and annex
Mexican land north of the Rio Grande
opened up the question of whether slav-
ery ought to be allowed to expand into
the newly acquired territory. The con-
troversy battered the two major parties,
the Democrats and the Whigs, and bol-
stered the rise of national antislavery
politics, leading in 1848 to the creation
of the Free Soil Party, a successor to the
smaller Liberty Party and the Republi-
can Party’s forerunner.
The Free Soilers only managed to win
10 percent of the total presidential tally
in 1848 and collapsed into a remnant in
1852 before dissolving, but according to
Taylor, this hardly meant that the party
was not also white supremacist. Rather,
he writes, white America had divided
into two camps of what he calls “white
nationalism”: northern racist Free Soil-
ers who wanted to halt slavery’s expan-
sion in order to prevent the migrationof blacks and the degradation of white
free labor, and southern racists who as-
serted that slavery enabled white men
to achieve their ambitions. It would
take another dozen years before Amer-
icans went to war with each other, but
by 1850, in Taylor’s account, a good
deal of the political ground had been
cleared, with white supremacy uniting
the white male citizenry, no matter
their views on slavery.
This is another caricature. To be sure,
particularly in the western states, anti-
slavery could go hand in hand with Ne-
grophobia, and the Free Soilers in those
areas, seeking the largest possible coa-
lition, appealed for those votes. But the
Free Soilers were hardly proponents of
“white nationalism.” Having ignored
the larger history of abolitionism and
antislavery politics, Taylor disregards
the fact that the figures who guided the
party’s rise and progress and defined its
political program—including Salmon
P. Chase, Joshua Levitt, John P. Hale,
and Charles Sumner—were veteran po-
litical abolitionists who devoted their
careers to opposing racial inequality as
well as slavery.
Because he erases the history of anti-
slavery constitutionalism dating back to
the founding, Taylor fails to see that bar-
ring slavery’s expansion was a means to
hasten its destruction throughout the
United States, not just to keep slavery
(and thus blacks) out of the territories,
which antislavery proponents well un-
derstood—slavery’s “ultimate extinc-
tion,” as Abraham Lincoln later called
it. He certainly cannot explain how and
why Frederick Douglass and other mil-
itant black abolitionists supported the
Free Soilers in 1848 and even attended
the party’s founding convention—pre-
saging Douglass’s support of the Re-
publican Party and Lincoln’s election.Holton’s and Taylor’s books are in-
dicative of several current trends in
the writing of American history. Both
continue the long-standing emphasis
on the lives and impact of Americans
whom historians overlooked sixty
years ago. Both sustain an enduring
skepticism about America’s professed
egalitarian ideals, portraying them as,
at best, unfulfilled platitudes and, at
worst, camouflage for greed and bru-
tality. Both advance a more recent
turn toward placing early American
history in a larger Atlantic and global
setting. Yet both books also offer fresh
perspectives, Holton’s by linking his-
tory from below with more traditional
military history, Taylor’s by exploring
how anxiety and fear of disunion lay at
the heart of American expansionism.
These arguments are certainly open
to debate at every step, much like the
work of the historians that Holton and
Taylor build on.
Less open to debate, though, are
weak but attention-getting arguments
based on glaring inaccuracies or gross
distortion, as when Holton suggests that
slaveholder hysteria helped cause the
American Revolution or when Taylor
presents the pre–Civil War clash over
slavery as a battle between white nation-
alists. Those claims turn out to be no
more credible coming from two distin-
guished historians than they are coming
from less accomplished writers. Lacking
stronger arguments and actual evidence,
they amount to fables constructed in
search of a past tailored to the issues and
causes of the present. Q