One Nation Divided by Slavery: Remembering the American Revolution while Marching toward the Civil War by Michael F. Conlin (review)

Michael Conlin’s One Nation Divided by Slavery offers a clearly written and informative overview of the contested meaning of the American Revolution for antebellum Americans. As Conlin notes, although scholars have widely acknowledged the importance of the Revolution to both antebellum northerners and southerners, there has not really been a study focused specifically on how the nation as a whole viewed the Revolution in that time. By honing in on the antebellum era, Conlin is able to give a more in-depth analysis of this topic than Michael Kammen does in his seminal book on the memory and meaning of the Revolution, A Season of Youth: The American Revolution and the Historical Imagination (New York: Knopf, 1978)—which, surprisingly, he does not cite—and the more recent collection of essays on the subject, Remembering the Revolution: Memory, History, and Nation Making from Independence to the Civil War, edited by Michael A. McDonnell, Clare Corbould, Frances M. Clarke, and W. Fitzhugh Brundage (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2013), both of which extend over a wider time span.

This book’s strength lies in the wealth of fascinating material Conlin has gathered and in his nuanced analysis of that material. Although he relies heavily on elite sources like the North American Review and De Bow’s Review, Conlin also incorporates a diverse range of other voices, from those of slaves to individuals like the abolitionist dentist Thomas Drew and the South Carolina schoolteacher Samuel T. Jones. One of his account’s virtues is the way he breaks the Revolution down into many different elements, rather than speaking broadly of it as a whole or narrowly focusing only on one theme. Thus he organizes his analysis thematically, looking at different forms and subjects of memory. He begins with commemorations of the Fourth of July, followed by chapters on the images of Thomas Jefferson and George Washington. He then turns to the memory of the Revolutionary War, which he argues became increasingly sectionalized by the 1850s and concludes with a discussion of how these conflicts came to fruition during the prelude to and outbreak of the Civil War.

Likewise, even as Conlin groups antebellum responses to the Revolution into three main categories defined by their positions on slavery, he recognizes the variations and divisions within each category. Within broad divisions—opponents of slavery, moderates, and advocates of slavery—he focuses on abolitionists and fire-eaters. At opposing extremes, according to Conlin, both abolitionists and fire-eaters made slavery central to the debate over the legacy of the Revolution. Where abolitionists emphasized the antislavery character of the Revolution and believed the nation would not fulfill its ideals until slavery was eradicated, southern fire-eaters argued that the nation was founded on slavery and made slavery central to American identity. Between these two extremes, moderates from both sections sought “to bridge the slavery divide” and preserve national unity by interpreting the legacy of the founding as one of compromise over slavery and defining the nation in those terms (13).

Yet, as Conlin recognizes, the meaning of the Revolution was sharply contested even within these groups. Thus he points to how extremists on both sides of the slavery divide diverged between appropriating the Fourth of July for their own cause and disavowing it. If some proslavery southerners repudiated the holiday because they feared the natural rights doctrines of the Declaration of Independence as a threat to slavery, some northern opponents of slavery rejected it in favor of other holidays that they believed more truly embodied their antislavery principles.

Conlin’s broad categories seem somewhat at odds with the attention to nuance that characterizes the rest of his analysis. The category of “moderate,” in particular, seems a rather broad and loosely defined grouping that is of questionable usefulness. Should Abraham Lincoln, for...