The Nation's Nature: How Continental Presumptions Gave Rise to the United States of America (review)

How did the United States get to be so big? How did thirteen rebellious British provinces, strung along the Atlantic seaboard, create a dynamic union that could expand across the continent? Focusing on the character of the new regime, historians and political theorists have wondered how the founders could have resolved the conundrum of the "extended republic." Montesquieu had taught them that republics, animated by the "virtue" of an engaged citizenry, had to be small; the larger the polity, the greater was the need for the despotic rule of a powerful monarch.¹ Drake argues persuasively that we have been looking for answers to these questions in all the wrong places. The frustrated imperial patriots who became revolutionaries thought "big" from the outset. North America was "a unified, natural phenomenon, a single and unique geographical entity," and the destiny of the original thirteen colonies—within or outside the Empire—was to dominate the continent (87). The challenge was not to move from small to big but the reverse: Anglo-American imperialists "had the conceptual grammar to appropriate the continent if only it could overcome their countervailing language of provincialism" (80).

As they mobilized resistance to British authority, patriot leaders turned to the "people," thus unleashing the radical, democratic impulses that sometimes seemed to threaten their own authority. The solution was to draft new constitutions, grounded in popular sovereignty, at the state and federal levels. Federalists finally triumphed in the ratification debates, despite the Montesquiean concerns of skeptics about the immensity of the union and the danger of "consolidation," because they had nature—and therefore, perhaps, God—on their side. "Only an 'unnatural voice' would suggest that Americans could not have a strong continental union" (295). After all, the states to which fearful Antifederalists were so attached were mere "artifices of British rule . . . not natural communities" (304).

Drake's reconstruction of the "geography of the mind" gives us a fresh perspective on the origins and development of American democracy. The meaning of "equality" itself was shaped by geographical understandings, as constitution writers moved toward "apportionment based on population," displacing the presumably "equal" citizens from their "local circumstances" and making them "interchangeable" (296). Drake characterizes this move from "locally oriented to metageographical conceptions of space" as a return to the "virtual representation" of the old imperial regime; "with the ratification of the Constitution . . . virtual representation became the law of an extended republic" (307). This assumption, however, seems tendentious, suggesting that the founders betrayed the Revolution's democratic promise of "actual" representation in local, presumably more "natural communities." For better or worse, Americans' democratic aspirations would not be contained within little villages or small republics. "Casting themselves during the Revolution as a continent rejecting island rule," Americans "waged a war not just for colonial liberation; they had fought to assume their master's imperial mantle" (283). In their empire, mobile, colonizing (white) Americans would certainly be secure in their rights, including the right to actually participate in politics, wherever they came from.²

Drake's account of the metageographical origins of American nationhood is compelling: The Revolutionaries' "continental consciousness" enabled Americans to imagine themselves as a single people and the continent as their natural "home." Drake's handling of the ratification debates would have benefited, however, from more attention to the Confederation's geopolitical situation. Revolutionaries may not have feared descending into an anarchic "political state of nature" when they severed "ties with Britain," as Drake writes, because their continent seemed to have an inherent, natural "order" (155). But North America's supposed advantages over Europe, where "natural subdivisions" gave rise to "numerous peoples" who were constantly at war, no longer seemed obvious as the Confederation began to collapse and the disunited states faced the prospect of a Europeanized future (34).

In The Federalist, Hamilton demolished the idea that republics were naturally peaceful, "the deceitful dream of a golden age," and that...