ALTERNATIVE AMERICAS
A Reading of Antebellum Political Culture
Anne Norton
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986
363 pp.
Anne Norton has written an original and profound study of the meaning and development of American national identity. Her subject is American political culture from 1815-1865, the period after the War of 1812 when the fledgling republic, having ended its last battle with England, began fighting with itself. What was the fight about, and is it over? Norton poses the former question but not the latter, yet she has written a book that prompts us to ask it. The question about what it means to be an American is still with us, and a necessary step to any humane and meaningful answer is to have worked through the minds of those Americans who loosed, and those who were cut down by, the fateful lightning of the "terrible swift sword."
Liberal, Progressive Barriers to Historical Understanding
We must try to put ourselves back in time to see how different concepts of American political culture were instantiated in the sectional conflict between the North and South. But it is difficult to carry out this act of historical reenactment for two reasons. First, owing to the prevailing liberal ideology, which has captured the main posts in the state and in literature, we are inclined to what Herbert Butterfield called the Whig interpretation of history, by which a present state of affairs is read into the past. This produces the illusion that in some way past agents were not only faint images of ourselves but also that the outcome of historical events was inevitable. We find it difficult to imagine that there was a time when there was no national union as we know it, that the expression "United States" was regularly followed by a plural verb, that the idea of an indivisible union was seen by many, North and South, as an innovation in violation of the established understanding of American political culture.
Given the slavery issue, we are inclined to think that the conflict and the defeat of the South were inevitable. We think this whenever we sing "The Battle Hymn of the Republic." It is difficult for us to entertain the idea that slavery could have been abolished peacefully if the South had been left alone. Slavery existed throughout Central and South America, and the regimes in these areas were not part of the Anglo-American liberal tradition. Yet, many had abolished slavery before the Civil War, and the rest followed suit soon after. America was the only country in the Western Hemisphere to have fought a war over slavery (if indeed that was what the war was about). If anything was "inevitable," it was that the South, like Brazil, would have abolished slavery in its own time and that that would have been soon enough. But given the horror of the war and its aftermath and the moral questions this thought raises about the North's conquest of the South, it is too troublesome to entertain seriously.
Second, the popular meaning of the war has been largely captured by liberal, progressive ideology: The war was fought for the moral purpose of freeing the slaves and, though the "cost" was high (approximately 600,000 men), the elimination of slavery was justified. Liberals who make such moral calculations
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