History's Divining Rod

If history is like a “complex system of underground rivers and springs, creating its own subterranean pressures” and “latent meanings” in particular places, as Edward Ayers and Peter Onuf write in their introduction to All Over the Map (p. 5), then the concept of region is history’s divining rod. No one is quite sure how it does what it does, yet it leads them to discoveries. Or does it? The four authors whose essays are collected in this volume are by turns intrigued, seduced, and confounded by the region category, just as American cultural observers have been for generations, all attempting to make sense of our amorphous “nation of regions” (p. 10).

Ayers, Onuf, and their coauthors, Stephen Nissenbaum and Patricia Limerick, are well aware of this indeterminate character of regions—in some cases, perhaps too aware. At the outset, Ayers and Onuf are careful to warn that regions have never been “bounded and complete entities” but have been continually redrawn and redefined throughout American history (p. 4). The cultural and political construction of regions is one of three unifying themes of the book, explored especially in the opening essay by Onuf, who offers an excellent synthesis covering the revolutionary era to the Civil War. He argues that antebellum sectionalism was not an outgrowth of “fundamentally different social systems” in the North, South, or West, but instead was “integral” to republican ideology and the conception of the federal system itself (p. 12). Having fought a nationalist revolution against distant centralized power and “metropolitan authority,” the founding fathers were careful to ratify the “empowerment of an expanding periphery” as a counterweight to the “strengthened center” guaranteed by the federal constitution (pp. 13–14). Their hope, writes Onuf, was to preclude both the rise of a “new imperial center” and the fragmentation of “unrestrained regional rivalries” by binding the union into harmonious economic and political interdependence (pp. 16, 19). Antebellum politicians on the national stage (particularly westerners like Henry Clay) later sought to mute sectional differences in order to extend their influence and broaden coalitions. In due course, according to Onuf, “the absence of internal and external threats to the union by the mid-1820s” made the disunionist scenarios feared by the founders seem “irrelevant” (p. 34). Unfortunately, during the ensuing debate over slavery each side recklessly “essentialized” sectional distinctions that were never as “real” or “fundamental” as believed (pp. 11–12, 37). Americans in the North and South came to equate union and national political control by one section with the specter of imperial tyranny over their particular region, the seat of “deeper loyalties and more transcendent values” (p. 35). Consequently the great divide between North and South overwhelmed the “multiplicity of provisional . . . sections and sectional alliances” that the decentralized federal system engendered. The “sphere of the nonnegotiable” thus became larger and larger, Onuf concludes, and the war came (p. 37).

Stephen Nissenbaum expands on this depiction of the “necessarily provisional and indeterminate” construction of regions with his delightful account of the invention of pastoral New England during the nineteenth century (p. 36). He begins by noting recent scholarship that disputes the stereotype of the tightly “nucleated” colonial New England village, where even the hymn-singing was more raw and rural than we have assumed (pp. 42–44). Commercialization and industrialization gave the New England village its classic Our Town shape, he contends, and antebellum “culture wars” supplied the region with its enduring mythology (pp. 39, 52). In the Federal period, the town common proved to be an efficient central location to conduct business, and only after the Civil War was it landscaped and beautified in communities like Litchfield, Connecticut, where residents wanted a “traditional” refuge from ugly industrial centers. Nissenbaum reminds us that the decline of New England economically and politically after 1800 (relative to other regions) had sparked the first efforts at inventing this tradition by individuals such as Timothy Dwight, who suggested...