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

The interpretation of the founding of the United States played an important role in the history wars of the 1990s and in the more recent controversies over the content of textbooks and Advanced Placement U.S. history courses. Not surprisingly, these struggles have inspired vigorous debates in contemporary historians' works such as Gary B. Nash, Charlotte Crabtree, and Ross E. Dunn's History on Trial: Culture Wars and the Teaching of the Past (1997) and Andrew M. Schocket's Fighting over the Founders: How We Remember the American Revolution (2015).

In his timely contribution to the literature, Michael Conlin reminds us that struggles over the meaning of the nation's founding—and founders—are no new phenomenon. On the contrary, Americans in the two decades before the Civil War fought bitter "history wars," too, in order to determine the essential nature of the United States and to construct an American national identity (9). At the center of the antebellum battles over the meaning of the American Revolution, Conlin argues, stood the issue of slavery. Taking care to avoid portraying antebellum American national identity as an increasing dichotomy between distinctive northern and southern nationalisms, Conlin shows that except for the question of slavery, Americans in both the North and South shared a common national culture based on the civic virtues and values of the American Revolution. In short, Americans were "one nation divided by slavery" (12).

Slavery and its place in the American Revolution, in turn, played a central role in the attempts of all the relevant groups of American society to fashion a common, pansectional American identity. For the purpose of his study, Conlin divides American society into a "sectional trinity" consisting of opponents of slavery, moderates, and advocates of slavery (12). From opposing sides, both abolitionists and fire-eaters tried to assert their interpretation of slavery at the time of the American Revolution as the national norm. Abolitionists stressed the natural rights ideology of the American Revolution and regarded the Founders, even the slaveholders among them, as (crypto-)opponents of slavery. Advocates of slavery pointed to the fact that the United States was conceived as a union of thirteen slave states and dreamed of nationalizing the peculiar institution. The moderates in the North and South, finally, looked to the series of compromises between slave and nonslave states since the Constitution and contended that this spirit of compromise was the true spirit of '76 that ought to continue to serve as a guide for a common national future.

For the most part, Conlin's trinity works well in illustrating the various ways in which Americans in the antebellum era remembered the American Revolution and used their historical memory in attempting to fashion their specific version of an American national identity. The rather large and amorphous group of moderates, however, also presents some challenges. For example, the frequent references to violent antiabolitionist mobs incited by moderates pose the question of just how "moderate" some of these moderates really were.

Other historians such as Michael Morrison in Slavery and the American West: The Eclipse of Manifest Destiny and the Coming of the Civil War (1997) and Eric Foner in The Story of American Freedom (1998) have analyzed the sectional conflict in the antebellum era as a struggle over the legacy of the American Revolution. Yet Conlin successfully puts the antebellum "history wars" at center stage and—by using an impressive array of primary sources—in five chapters examines them in greater detail than has been done in other works. The first chapter looks at the different ways in which antebellum Americans remembered and celebrated the Fourth of July. While Americans in the North and South shared many practices, with the intensification of the sectional crisis in the 1840s and 1850s southern fire-eaters increasingly compared the federal government to George III...