United States History

American History A

Mr. Bekemeyer

April 1865: The Month That Saved America

[Excerpt] by Jay Wink, (2001)

Please read the Chapter A Nation Delayed (below) from April 1865 by Jay Winik (2001). After completing the reading, please type your responses to the following

questions:

(12 Homework / class work points)

1.Explain the line, Americans had a country even before they had their nation.

2.According to the view of French philosopher Montesquieu, describe several

trends and events in American that threatened our republic.

3.According to Winik, trace the history of secessionist thought in America, listing

three examples.

4.With the phenomenal growth of the United States into previously undeveloped (according to European standards) territory, various political and cultural qualities seemed to pool in select sections of the country. The term used for this is

Sectionalism. Describe the sectionalism between the east and west.

5.States that strongly preserved their sovereignty were advocating nullification.

What does nullification mean?

6.Discuss the dissatisfaction and secessionist thinking of New England during the

debates on the Louisiana Purchase and the War of 1812.

7.Explain the terms: a. Regional self-interest

b.Regional self-rights

8.By the mid-19th century, how had the nation expanded?

9.Describe the tensions that were building in the nation.

10.If the conclusion of the Civil War did not somehow repair the nation, what were

the lessons from Europe and Latin America that threatened the United States?

11.How is Thomas Jeffersons home of Monticello used to conclude the selection reading?

FIND the typos Bonus two points

More than three and a half centuries earlier, in April 1507, Martin Waldseemuller, professor of cosmography at the University of Saint-Die, produced the first map showing the Western Hemisphere, a novo mondo with a long snaking coastline. He called it America, after the discoverer of the new continent, an appellation that belonged as much to Amerigo Vespucci, the Florentine merchant, as it did to Columbus. Like an enormous board game whose pieces were slowly being put into place, the science of geography would eventually give way to the science of government, and by the time the Founders gathered at Philadelphia in 1787, nationhood was beckoning. No words can capture the boldness of all thisAmerica not just as a place on a Spanish map or one more distant outpost of the sprawling British Empire, but an actual self-governing country. A country not to be forged by a thousand years of shared history and shared dreams, but to be conceived in the minds of a handful of men over a handful of months. With pluck, daring, iron will, and imagination, and a brilliance unsurpassed in history, the Founders would in turn beget the national idea, a country unlike any since the beginning of time.

But in the crucible of the occasion, fateful questions would linger: What would knit this country together? Was it to be one country and one nationor perhaps two, or even several? And was it to last in perpetuity, or to be a brave and daring experiment in democracy that could yet founder?

The fragility of America as a nation from its very first days cannot be exaggerated. Unlike the Old World, America was not born out of ancient custom or claim, its people bound together from the shadows of feudal, marauding bands, emerging as a nation by the time they could primitively write their own history. Where in most countries a sense of nationhood spontaneously arose over tens of centuries, the product of generations of common kinship, common language, common myths and a shared history, and the collective ties of tradition, America was born as an artificial series of states, woven together by negotiated compacts and agreements, charters and covenants. It did not arise naturally, as in Europe, or China, or Persia, but was made, almost abstractly, out of ink and paper, crafted by lawyers and statesmen. Insofar as the early Americans had a nationality, they were for more than a century and a half British. In fact, it remains a curious twist of fate that America was at first Britains idea; it was the British who finally persuaded the American settlers to accept some kind of distinct national identity. Significantly, even in 1776, their contract to become Americansthe Declaration

of Independencedid not make them a nation. Indeed, the very word nation was explicitly dropped from it, and all references were instead to the separate states. Thus, the very heading of the final version of the Declaration of Independence described the document as The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America, and the momentous resolution introduced in the Continental Congress on June 7, 1776, by Richard Henry Lee and seconded by John Adams, declared: That these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States. As historian Daniel Boorstin has noted, Independence had not created on nation but thirteen.

There is more than a measure of truth to this. Like the colonies that preceded them, these new states were as dramatically different from one another as they were from England; each jealously guarded its self-rule, its independence, and its sovereignty. Each meticulously gathered its own army, chartered its own navy, commanded military actions to protect its own interests, and oversaw its own Indian affairs and postal routes. Each had its own legislatures, its own functioning courts, its own taxes, and, in time, its own individual constitutions. And too often is this simple but telling fact: before independence, Americans were both British as well as citizens of Virginia or Massachusetts, New York or Connecticut, or some other home colony. After independence, they were no longer Britons, but neither were they Americans; there was, as yet, no American country to which to attach their loyalties. And so they remained faithful, proud members of their sovereign state, Massachusetts, or Virginia, or Connecticut. To the extent there was an American national identity, it was unexpected, impromptu, an artificial creation of the Revolutionand secondary.

And for all its genius, the U.S. Constitution provided no resolution. Until this point, constitutions were not national codes, but national inheritances; they were not written down, but existed intuitively, the ethereal sum of a whole countrys charters, statutes, declarations, informal understandings, habits, traditions, and attitudes. Yet for the United States, what had started out as an exercise to do little more than revise the existing Articles of Confederationa loose system designed for the exigencies of the Revolutionary Warinstead produced a far more audacious gamble, an entirely new body of laws: the Constitution. Nowhere on the planet had anything like it been devised; there it was, at once a central government with the authority to tax and to maintain an army, and at the same time, a republican government with its powers scrupulously divided among a president, a House of Representatives, a Senate, and a Supreme Court. But when it came to articulating America as one nation, the men at Philadelphia flinched. This was the one nut they couldnt crack.

The word nation or national appears nowhere in the Constitution. Unable to reconcile the gnawing tensions between the proponents of the states, the anti-Federalists, and the proponents of the new federal authority that would come into being, the Federalists, the Founders resorted to the more ambiguous phrase the United States. When it was all done, an elated George Washington recognized not just the historic import but also the precariousness of the whole enterprise; it was, he maintained, little short of a miracle that delegates from so many different States should have united to form a national government.

A national government, yes, but did it form a nation? That still fell a little short of anyones miracle. Consider Washingtons parting speech. He used the word nation in his Farewell Address, but only prescriptively: The name of American, which belongs to you in your national capacity, must always exalt the just pride of patriotism more than any appellation derived from local discriminations. This, of course, begged the question, was America a nation? Or was it simply a community of states? What is clear is that in the architecture of Nationhood, the United States had achieved something quite remarkable; as historian John Murrin had succinctly put it, Americans erected their constitutional roof before they put up national walls.

The result? With characteristic anachronism, and with the benefit of this ingenious contrivance, Americans had a country even before they had their nation. And, in turn, the Constitution did something quite unique in the annals of human history: it substituted as precisely that, a kind of national identity. Americans are intellectually autochthonous, Gary Wills had stated, having no pedigree except that of the idea. But in the ensuing years, America would not be able to escape the price for such geniusthe price of hate and blood in the making of nations. That would be paid in the Civil War.

The seeds of discord were there long before the guns of Fort Sumter began firing. In the absence of a common national identity, they were always there.

The generation that wrote the Constitution was obsessed by the specter that republican government would not survive across a vast domain. Tradition was against them. They were boldly obliged to repudiate a political axiom that had behind it the domineering authority of the French philosopher Montesquieu. In the mid-eight