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The Invention of the United States

By Gordon S. Wood

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The United States is not a nation like other nations, and it never has been. There is
at present no American ethnicity to back up the state called the United States, and there
was no such distinctive ethnicity even in 1776 when the United States was created. Many
European countries, Germany, for example, were nations before they became states. Most
of the European states were created out of a prior sense of a common ethnicity or
language. Some of these European states, the Czech Republic, for example, are new,
created in the twentieth century, and are certainly newer than the 235-year old United
States. Yet these European states, new as they may be, are under-girded by peoples who
had a preexisting sense of their own distinctiveness, their own nationhood. In the United
States the process was reversed. Americans created a state before they were a nation, and
much of American history has been an effort to define the nature of that nationality.
Americas lack of a national identity and a common ethnicity may turn out to be
an advantage in the twenty-first century, dominated as it is by mass immigration from the
south to the north. It certainly enables the United States to be more capable of accepting
and absorbing immigrants. The whole world is now in the United States. Of course,
America has its own recent problem with immigrants, especially those illegal immigrants
coming from Mexico, but its problems with immigration pale in comparison with the
problems of immigration that the European nations are facing and will continue to face
over the rest of the twenty-first century.
Since Americans have never been a nation in any traditional meaning of the term,
it has been the state, the Constitution, the principles of liberty, equality, and free
government that make Americans think of themselves as a single people. To be an
American is not to be someone, but to believe in something.
3
This was true at the birth of the United States.
At the end of the Declaration of Independence of 1776 that created the United States, the
members of the Continental Congress mutually pledged to each other their lives, their
fortunes, and their sacred honor. There was nothing else but themselves they could
dedicate themselves to-no patria, no fatherland, no nation as yet.
The American Revolution was not a consequence of two and half million people
deciding in 1776 that they were a distinct ethnicity that had to break away from the
British Empire. The American Revolution was not like the Algerian break from France in
the 1960s or the Indian and Pakistani break from the British Empire in the 1940s. The
Americans almost to the moment of declaring independence in 1776 considered
themselves Englishmen, equal in every way to Englishmen in the metropolitan center
three thousand miles away. The rights they invoked in defense of themselves against the
actions of the British government were English rights, such as no taxation without
representation or the right of trial by jury. They never demanded rights or privileges that
were unique to them as Americans.
When the Continental Congress began to anticipate a break from England in 1775,
some of the delegates realized that to continue to talk of defending English rights was
becoming embarrassing. So they decided to call these rights natural rights, but the rights
were the same, good old English rights. It was a strange revolution, as some of the
leaders realized, one that was undertaken on behalf of the English constitution, not in
opposition to it. The British themselves, the Americans said in 1776, must applaud an
action which accords so eminently with the true spirit of their own constitution.
1

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Since the colonists had always thought of themselves as Englishman or Britons,
they were slow to think of themselves as Americans. They shared no common history
except as Britons. They shared no common historic institutions except the crown and
Parliament. Beyond their particular individual colony, their focus was on the mother
country across the Atlantic, not on the other colonies. Until the Continental Congress met
in Philadelphia 1774, more of its members had been to London than had been to
Philadelphia.
2

During the colonial period they did not call themselves Americans. It was the
British officials in London who called the North American colonists Americans. British
officials were the ones who throughout the first half of the eighteenth century had
imagined and feared the possibility of an independent America. In their minds they
created America before the colonists did. It took the imperial crisis of 1765-1776 to
convince the colonists that they should have a separate destiny from the Englishmen at
home. Only during the imperial crisis of the 1760s and 70s did the colonists begin to refer
to themselves as Americans.
There was certainly no real nation in 1776; and not even a semblance of a real
national government. Indeed, Americans had no experience being a nation or running a
central government. Prior to the revolution, John Jay later recalled, we had little
occasion to inquire or know much about national affairs. . . . War and peace, alliances
and treaties, and commerce and navigation were conducted and regulated without our
advice or control.
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Running a nation in a world of other nations had to be learned on the
fly.
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At the outset the United States lacked nearly all of the symbols of a real nation,
one that had the respect of the civilized world. It had no flag, no great seal, no rites, no
rituals, no ceremonies, no emblems of nationhood.
4
The American commissioner in
France, Silas Deane, was embarrassed that the Declaration of Independence arrived
without proper authentication by a national seal, the use of seals, said Deane, being a
very ancient custom in Europe. Unsure that it was dealing with a real nation-state,
France in 1778 asked that the thirteen United States of North America individually
ratify the commercial treaty and the military alliance that had been negotiated in Paris.
5

The new governments only semblance of a national symbol was the number
thirteen. Indeed, the thirteen separate states that revolted in 1776 were what commanded
peoples loyalties. A mans country was his state, whether it was Virginia or
Pennsylvania or Massachusetts. Since there was no definition of national citizenship until
the Fourteenth Amendment passed in the aftermath of the Civil War, people were citizens
of a particular state, which is what made them citizens of the United States.
6

Americans today are remarkably mobile and are apt to think of their home state as
simply one administrative unit among many. Consequently, it is hard for even Americans
today to realize how emotionally important the states were to people of the early
Republic. Citizens of Virginia and Massachusetts had 150 years of provincial history to
sustain their loyalty to their respective states. Against that experience the new United
States could scarcely compete. The problem is similar to that of creating a sense of
Europeanness today against the loyalty people feel toward their respective nations in
Europe.
6
The initial central authority was very weak. Indeed, the Continental Congress was
not really a governmental body at all. John Adams termed the Massachusetts delegation
in the Continental Congress our Embassy.
7
The Congress was a delegation of
embassies from each colony (a diplomatic assembly, Adams called it) brought together
by the exigency of events in 1774.
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It bore no resemblance to a legislature; instead, it was
a gathering of separate, individual states to solve some common problems, similar, as its
name indicates, to the Congress of Vienna of 1815. The Declaration of Independence
drawn up by the Continental Congress emphasized the sovereignty of the individual
states, proclaiming that as Free and Independent States they have full power to levy war,
conclude peace, contract alliances, establish commerce, and to do all the other things
which independent States may of right do. At the outset the United States of America
had a literal plural meaning that has since been lost.
These independent states were very different from one another. It was their
common language and their common English heritage that made them seem alike. Except
for that common language and heritage, they were almost as different from one another
as the eighteenth-century European states were from one another. Puritan Massachusetts
with its small farms and its pervasive sense of equality had very little in common with the
aristocratic and slaveholding colony of Virginia, where 40 percent of the population was
composed of African slaves.
Inevitably, these thirteen states, if they were to successfully fight Great Britain,
the greatest power in the world, would have to have some sort of union. Hence they
created the Articles of Confederation by signing a treaty. The confederation was not a
state; it was a league of friendship, a treaty of confederation of separate and
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independent states, very similar to the present-day European Union. Even getting the
states to agree to this union was difficult, and it was not ratified by all the states until
March 1781, three years after the Treaty of Alliance with France was signed and only six
months before the battle of Yorktown that effectively ended the war.
Consequently, during the war the states assumed powers that presumably
belonged to only the Confederation Congress, including waging war, laying embargoes,
and even in some cases carrying on separate diplomatic correspondence and negotiations
abroad. Under such circumstances it was difficult for the collective entity called the
United States to establish its character or reputation as a legitimate nation-state in eyes of
the world. Were it certain that the United States, could be brought to act as a Nation, and
would jointly and fairly conduct their Commerce on Principles of Reciprocity with all
Nations, the American commissioners in Paris negotiating the peace treaty told
Congress in 1783, then good commercial relations with the rest of the world would
become possible.
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Somehow after a long and bloody war this disunited and ramshackle government
defeated the British---with considerable French aid, both financial and military. It seems
unlikely that the Americans could have won without the aid of France. Certainly the
clinching victory at Yorktown in 1781 was essentially a French victory. It was not easy
for a government like that of Britain an ocean away to put down an insurgency that had
the support of a large proportion of the population. It is a lesson that has not been well
heeded by recent American governments.
Some Americans did not want the war to end, for fear that with peace the country
would fall apart. It seemed that only the military cause had kept the states more or less
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united. With the peace treaty ratified in 1783, the various sectional rivalries emerged.
And talk of disunion and the creating regional confederacies went from the privacy of
drawing rooms to the public press.
Since the country seemed unable to follow the law of nations, it had no respect
abroad. The states tended to ignore some of the obligations made by the United States in
the peace treaty, including even paying back wartime loans made to the countrys friends.
Indeed, John Jay, the secretary of foreign affairs, told John Adams that there had not
been a single day since [the treaty] took effect on which it has not been violated in
America, by one or other of the States.
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One Frenchman told the Americans that Till
you order your confederation better, till you take measures in common to pay debts,
which you contracted in common, till you have a form of government and a political
influence, the county would never have any standing in the world.
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The British had even more contempt for the new republic. They refused to send a
diplomatic representative to the United States and continued to occupy posts in the
western territory of the country. John Adams, the first minister to the Court of St. James,
reported in 1785 that there is no question more frequently asked me by the foreign
ministers, than what can be the reason of such frequent divisions of States in America.
They wanted to know why the country was so disposed to crumble into little separate
societies, why it was in danger of multiplying the members of the Confederation
without end, or of setting up petty republics, unacknowledged by the confederacy, and
refusing obedience to its laws. The European states---Spain, France, Britain---used to
be divided into many pieces, but now, he said, they were each busy pulling themselves
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together, creating single kingdoms out of their many parts. Why couldnt the United
States do something similar?
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It wasnt inevitable that a few American leaders would come together in 1787 in
order to form a more perfect Union. The so-called United States could easily have
broken into several separate regional states. After all, the wars for independence in Latin
America produced twenty-two independent nations from only a few vice-royalties.
The creation of the Constitution in 1787 was something of a miracle. No one ten
years earlier in 1776 had even imagined the possibility of such a strong federal
government. All experience and all theory were opposed to such a large continental
republic. Americans had revolted out of fear of far-removed power threatening their
liberties, and now they had created just such a distant and powerful government. The best
theorists of the age, Montesquieu being the most well-known, said that republics could
never be sustained over a large and diverse people. Republics, if they were to hold
together, had to be small in size and homogeneous in their culture. The new expansive
and extended federal government seemed to challenge both experience and this
conventional wisdom.
Yet such was the relief felt over the ratification of the new Constitution that the
American people were more excited and more united than at any time since the
Declaration of Independence a decade earlier. Tis done! declared Dr. Benjamin Rush
in July 1788. We have become a nation.
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This was an extravagant claim, to say the least, no doubt fed by Rushs
confidence that the United States at last had a government that could command the
respect of the civilized world. But most Americans did not share Rushs enthusiasm.
10
They knew they were not yet a nation and that it would not be easy to create one.
Because of extensive immigration, America already had a diverse society. In addition to
seven hundred thousand people of African descent and tens of thousands of native
Indians, nearly all the peoples of Western Europe were present in the country. In census
of 1790 only sixty percent of the white population of well over three million remained
English in ancestry. The rest were composed of a variety of ethnicities. Nearly nine
percent was German, over eight percent was Scots, six percent was Scots-Irish, nearly
four percent was Irish, and over three percent was Dutch; the remainder were made up of
French, Swedes, Spanish, and people of unknown ethnicity.
But for eighteenth century enlightened reformers ethnic diversity and
multiculturalism were not good things, Instead of emphasizing the multicultural variety
of the different immigrants, reformers sought to stress the remarkable acculturation and
assimilation of the many immigrants into one people, which, as the Massachusetts
political and literary figure Fisher Ames pointed out, meant, to use the modern jargon,
nationalized.
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The Revolutionary leaders idea of a modern nation, shared by enlightened
British, French, and German eighteenth-century reformers as well, was one that was not
fractured by differences of language, ethnicity, religion, and local customs. Sameness and
uniformity among the people were desirable for any nation, but, as Montesquieu had
emphasized, especially for a republic. The many state histories written in the aftermath of
the Revolution were anything but celebrations of localism and the diversity of the nation.
Indeed, declared David Ramsay who wrote a history of his state of South Carolina, these
local histories were testimonies to the American commitment to enlightened nationhood;
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they were designed to "wear away prejudices--rub off asperities and mould us into an
homogeneous people."
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Homogeneous people! This is a phrase that seems to separate Americans of today
most decisively from that different, distant eighteenth-century world. Because Americans
today can take their nationhood much more for granted, they can indulge themselves with
the luxury of celebrating their multicultural diversity. But two hundred years ago
Americans were trying to create a nation from scratch and had no such luxury. They were
desperately trying to make themselves one people, and that desperate need to be a single
people tended to make someone like John Jay stress Americas homogeneity in spite of
its diversity.
Jay lived in New York City, the most ethnically and religiously diverse place in
all America, and was himself three-eighths French and five-eighths Dutch, without any
English ancestry whatsoever. Nevertheless, Jay could declare in Federalist No. 2, that
Providence has been pleased to give this one connected country to one united people-
a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the
same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their
manners and customs and who, by their joint counsels, arms, and efforts. . . have nobly
established general liberty and independence.
Jay actually believed that he was English. What is remarkable was the extent to
which the variety of European peoples in America had assimilated British culture.
England of course was historically very good at accommodating foreign immigrants, as
long as they were Protestants. It had taken in 50,000 French Huguenots at the end of the
seventeenth century and in the early eighteenth century had accepted tens of thousands of
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Germans from the Palatine and from other German-speaking areas, many of whom
moved on to the American colonies. The British naturalization act of 1740 was
remarkably liberal for the age. It allowed non-Catholic foreign immigrants to the
colonies---but not to Britain itself---to be naturalized as full British subjects after seven
years residence. Unlike the other imperial powers, Britain encouraged foreign Protestant
immigrants to its colonies.
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Like immigrants in more recent times, the foreign colonial immigrants worried
about the encroachment of English on their native tongue. But English usage was difficult
to resist. Henry Muhlenberg, the patriarch of the Lutheran Church in eighteenth-century
North America, for example, frequently found it necessary to preach in English, since he
often had non-German speakers attending his services.
American society was diverse but it remained dominantly British. Nearly three-
quarters of Americans were of British heritage, most looked like Britons, and most spoke
the same language as the subjects of the former mother country. Which is why most
Europeans came to call them Anglo-Americans.
Could these colonists who had been British and who had celebrated their
Britishness for generations become a truly independent people? How could one united
people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, and professing
the same Protestant religion differentiate themselves from the people of the former
mother country? Since American culture over the subsequent years remained
overwhelmingly British, how could they be a separate and distinctive nation?
These questions, perhaps more than any others, bedeviled the politics and the
culture during the early decades of the new Republics history.
13
If they were to be a single national people with a national character, Americans
would have to invent themselves. Initially, they struggled with a proper name for their
new country. On the tercentenary celebration of Columbuss discovery of America in
1792 one patriot suggested The United States of Columbia as a name for the new
Republic. Poets, ranging from the female black slave Phillis Wheatley to the young
Princeton graduate Philip Freneau, saw the logic of the name and thus repeatedly referred
to the nation as Columbia. With the same rhythm and number of syllables, Columbia
could easily replace Britannia in new compositions set to the music of traditional English
songs.
17

But Columbia did not stick. Neither did Dr. Samuel Mitchills suggestion that new
nation be called Fredonia and its people Fredonians. Despite Mitchills argument that
we cannot be national in feeling and in fact until we have a national name, the
countrys designation remained the United States of America, with its people
appropriating the name that rightfully belonged to all the peoples of the New World.
18

Since their country lacked a unique name and ethnicity, the best Americans could
do was to locate their national identity and character in something other than the
traditional sources of nationhood. One of the ways they sought to establish their
nationhood was to claim, as the Congress did in 1796, to be the freest and most
enlightened nation in the world.
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This was an extraordinary, mind boggling claim. To most educated Europeans,
America seemed to be an undeveloped country, recently removed from the wilderness,
filled with a mongrel people, surrounded by savages. America had no sophisticated court
life, no magnificent cities, no great concert halls, no lavish drawing rooms,
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and not much to speak of in the way of the fine arts. Its economy was primitive. There
was as yet nothing comparable to the Bank of England, no stock exchanges, no great
centers of capital. Nineteen out of twenty Americans were employed in agriculture and
most of them lived in tiny rural communities.
Nevertheless, as far removed from the centers of civilization as they were, many
Americans persisted in believing not only that they were the most enlightened people on
earth but also that because they were enlightened they were by that fact alone a nation.
Indeed, America became the first nation in the world to base its nationhood on
Enlightenment values. This claim was what transformed what otherwise might have been
a mere colonial rebellion into a world-historical event that promised, as Richard Price and
other foreign liberals pointed out, a new future not just for Americans but for all
humanity..
Americans told themselves that they were the most cosmopolitan, the most
compassionate, the most egalitarian, the most tolerant, and the most literate people in the
world. They had few of the vulgar peasant customs charivaries, for ex) that still plagued
much of Europe. Despite their diversity almost all of them spoke the same language
without the parochial dialects that fragmented the countries of Europe. People in
Yorkshire could not be understood in Somerset and vice-versa. On the eve of the French
Revolution the majority of Frenchmen did not speak French. Unlike the countries of the
Old World, Americans could be understood from one end of their country to another.
The other source of nationhood that Americans appealed to was the fact of union
itself. Indeed, Union often became a synonym for nation. President George Washington,
whose prestige as the father of the country was unmatched by anyone, personified that
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Union. During the first eight years of the new Republic, from 1789 to 1796, he almost
singlehandedly held the nation together as an elected monarch.
Creating this union was no simple matter. Believing that the Americans would
sooner or later have to return to their rightful place in the British Empire, the British
government in Canada made generous offers of free land and attracted tens of thousands
of American migrants in the early 1790s. These emigrants seemed to have very little
emotional investment in the United States and had no trouble leaving it for the sake of
free land. The same sort of out-migration was soon taking place in the Southwest as
thousands of Americans took advantage of cheap land offered by the Spanish government
in Mexico. These southwestern emigrants left the United States with no sense that they
were going to create the future state of Texas. All they wanted was good land and the
opportunity to make some money.
Confronted with such weak and fluid feelings of loyalty to the United States,
Washington and his fellow Federalists desperately sought to strengthen the Union. They
used patronage, the army, the federal courts, and ultimately coercion and repression to
create unity and prevent what they thought would be a French invasion of the United
States supported by the Fifth Column followers of Thomas Jefferson. They pushed too far
and brought the country to the brink of civil war in 1798-99.
The election of Thomas Jefferson as president in 1800 eased the crisis and
produced a new sense of beginning again. Jefferson repudiated the Federalist vision of
the United States as a modern, integrated nation-states. In its place he wanted the least
government possible, one without patronage, bureaucracy, a military establishment, and
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all the other coercive instrument of power. Under Jeffersons administration only the
delivery of the mail reminded people that they had a federal government at all.
Not only did Jefferson refuse to recognize the structure and institutions of a
modern state, he scarcely accepted the basic premise of a state, that is, its presumed
monopoly of legitimate control over a prescribed territory. For him during his first
presidential administration the United States was really just a loosely bound
confederation, not all that different from the government of the former Articles of
Confederation. Hence his vision of an expanding empire of liberty over a huge continent
posed no problems for his relaxed idea of a state. "Who can limit the extent to which the
federative principle may operate effectively?" he asked in his second inaugural address.
In fact, Jefferson always conceived of his "empire of liberty" as one of like principles, not
like boundaries. As long as Americans believed certain things, they remained Americans,
regardless of the boundaries of the government they happened to be in. At times he was
remarkably indifferent to the possibility that a western confederacy might break away
from the eastern United States. What did it matter? he asked in 1804. "Those of the
western confederacy will be as much our children & descendents as those of the
eastern."
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Not every American was enthralled by the Jeffersonian vision. A large proportion
of the population, most of whom were in New England, remained deeply alienated from
Jeffersons regime. Some New Englanders even began talking of taking their section out
of the Union. Fear of the democratic passions unleashed by the Jeffersonian Republicans
made many Federalists rethink Americas 1776 break from Great Britain. Amidst a
revolutionary world gone mad, Britain in 1809 seemed to be a bastion of stability, and, in
17
the words of Timothy Pickering, former Federalist secretary of state, the country of our
forefathers, and the country to which we are indebted for all the institutions held dear to
freemen.
21

Federalist magazines even denied that there was any such thing as Americanness.
Benjamin Rush in 1805 thought that most of the Federalists, that is, he said, a majority
of the old and wealthy native citizens, were still Englishmen in their hearts. Indeed,
Rush went so far as to say that he had been wrong in 1788 in saying that Americans had
created a nation. They had, he now said, no national character, and however much we
may boast of it, there are very few true Americans in the United States.
22

Because most Americans were anxiously trying to establish their identity as an
independent people, distinct from their British ancestors, the kinds of Anglophilic
sentiments expressed by the Federalists were bound to be misinterpreted and used against
them The leader of the Federalists in the House of Representatives, Josiah Quincy,
realized only too keenly the mistakes many of his colleagues were making in professing
an emotional attachment to Great Britain. Not only did such professions do little credit
to their patriotism, but they did infinitely less to their judgment. The truth is, he said
in 1812, the British look upon us as a foreign nation, and we must look upon them in the
same light.
23

Since British culture was everywhere, it was hard to think of Britain as foreign.
Most of the plays that Americans watched in the early Republic were not American but
British in origin and were performed by traveling British actors. Of the one hundred-sixty
plays professionally put on in Philadelphia between May 1792 and July 1794 only two
were written by Americans. Even when native authors attempted something of their own,
18
the English influence was inescapable. Take, for example, the play Independence written
in 1805 by the young South Carolina playwright William Ioor. Despite the patriotic title,
the play was based on an English novel, was set in England, and had only English
characters.
24

Seventy per cent of the books Americans read were pirated English editions.
About three-fourths of every issue of one of Americas leading magazines, the
Columbian, was borrowed from British sources. Most of the songs Americans sang were
British songs. The homes and gardens of Americans were copies of English styles.
Culturally, and in other ways as well, the United States still seemed to be a provincial
outpost of the British Empire.
It is in this context that we can understand the Americans declaration of war
against Great Britain in 1812. President James Madison said that the United States was
going to war against Great Britain solely because of the British impressment of American
sailors---the practice of British warships stopping American commercial vessels to seize
sailors thought to be British subjects---and the British violations of Americas maritime
rights---the right as a neutral to carry non-contraband goods to a belligerent port. Both
issues suggested that the United States was in some sense still a colony of Great Britain.
Since American and British sailors often sounded and looked alike, British ship
commanders often seized American citizens whom they mistakenly believed to be British
subjects. This practice of impressment aroused so much anger precisely because it threw
into the faces of the Americans the ambiguous and fluid nature of their national identity.
Although the war of 1812 ended as a draw, most Americans thought it had been a
great victory. The United States, once thought to be so fragile that it would soon fall
19
apart, emerged from the war with a new sense of strength and unity. The people, observed
Albert Gallatin in 1815, are more American; they feel and act more as a nation; and I
hope that the permanency of the Union is thereby better secured.
25
The war, which
Americans called a second American revolution, seemed to vindicate the Americans bold
experiment in democracy. The Federalists were completely discredited, and the new
Republic gained a self-confidence that it had never possessed before.
From that moment on Americans turned inward and began to perceive that they
had a much deeper problem of potential disunity than their British heritage. From the
Missouri crisis of 1819 on the issue of slavery dominated their thinking. From that
moment on, the Civil War became inevitable. Only in its aftermath did Americans finally
begin to create a united nation.












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1
Pennsylvania Gazette, 9 Oct. 1776.
2
John M. Murrin, A roof without Walls: The Dilemma of
American Politics, in Richard Beeman et al., eds., Beyond
Confederation: the Origins of the Constitution and American
National Identity (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 1787), 340.
3
John Jay, Address to the People of the State of New
York (1787), in Henry P. Johnson, ed., The Correspondence
and Public Papers of John Jay (New York: G.P. Putnams
sons, 18910, 3: 298-99.
4
Benjamin Irvin, Clothed in Robes of Sovereignty: The
Continental Congress and the People Out of Doors (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2011.)
5
David M. Golove and Daniel J. Hulsebosch, A
Civilized Nation: The Early American Constitution, the Law
of Nations, and the Pursuit of International Recognition,
New York University Law Review, 85 (2010), 932-1066.
21

6
James H. Kettner, The Development of American
Citizenship, 1608-1870 (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 19780, 213-47.
7
John Adams to Abigail Adams, 18 Sept. 1774, in L.H.
Butterfield et al., eds., Adams Family Correspondence
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963), 1: 158.
8
Adams, quoted in Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the
American Republic, 1776-1787 (Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 1969), 580.
9
The American Peace Commissioners to the President of
Congress, 10 Sept. 1783, in Gregg L. Lint et al., eds.,
Papers of John Adams (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2010), 15: 286-87.
10
John Jay to John Adams, 1 Nov. 1786, in Diplomatic
Correspondence of the United States of America: From the
Signing of the Definitive Treaty of Peace, September 10,
1783, to the Adoption of the Constitution, March 4, 1789. .
. (Washington, DC: Blair and Rives, 1837), 2: 674.
11
Chevalier de Chastellux to Gouverneur Morris, 8 Dec.
1784, in Jared Sparks, ed., The Life of Gouverneur Morris,
with Selections from His Correspondence. . . (Boston: Gray
and Bowen, 1832), 1 :272.
22

12
John Adams to John Jay, 24 Nov. 1785, in Charles
Francis Adams, ed., The Works of John Adams (Boston:
Little, Brown, 1850-56), 8: 347-48.
13
Rush to Elias Boudinot[?], 9 july 1788, in Lyman H.
Butterfield, ed., Letters of Benjamin Rush (Princeton:
American Philosophical Society, 1951), 1: 470-75.
14
Fisher Ames, Falkland III, 10 Feb. 1801, Works of
Fisher Ames (1854), ed. W.B Allen (Indianapolis: Liberty
Fund, 1983), 1: 216.
15
David Ramsay to John Eliot, 11 Aug. 1792, in Robert
L. Brunhouse, ed., David Ramsey, 1749-1815: Selections from
His Writings (American Philosophical Society, Trans. N.s.
55, pt. 4 (1965), 133.
16
Kettner, Development of American Citizenship, 74-75.
17
Matthew Dennis, The Eighteenth-Century Discovery of
America: The Columbian Tercentenary (1792) and the Creation
of American Identity, in William Pencak, Matthew Dennis,
and Simon Newman, eds., Riot and Revelry in Early America
(University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press,
2002), 205-228.
18
Alan David Aberbach, In Search of an American
Identity: Samuel Latham Mitchill, Jeffersonion Nationalist
(New York, 1988), 154-56; Joseph Jones, Hail, Fredonia!
23

American Speech (1934), 12-17; Richard L. Merritt, Symbols
of American Community, 1735-1775 (New Haven: Yale
University Press:, 1966); T.H. Breen, Ideology and
Nationalism on the eve of the American Revolution:
Revisions Once More in Need of Revising, Journal of
American History, 84(1997), 13-39.
19
Charles s. Hyneman and George W. Carey, eds., A
Second Federalist: Congress Creates a Government (New York:
Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1967), 24.,
20
Gordon S. Wood, Revolutionary Characters: What Made
the Founders Different (New York: Penguin Press, 2006),
108.
21
Henry Adams, ed., Documents Relating to New England
Federalism, 1800-1815 (Boston, 1877), 389.
22
Benjamin Rush to John Adams, 29 June, 14 Aug. 1805,
in John A. Schutz and Douglass Adair, eds., The Spur of
Fame: Dialogues of Johan Adams and Benjamin Rush, 1805-1813
(San Marino, CA: The Huntington, 1966), 28, 31.
23
Bradford Perkins, Prologue to War, 61.
24
Gordon S. Wood, Empire of Liberty: A History of the
Early Republic, 1789-1815 (New York, Oxford University
Press, 2009), 599.
24

25
Gallatin to Matthew Lyon, 7 May 1816, in Henry
Adams, ed., The Writings of Albert Gallatin (Philadelphia,
1879), 2: 700.