Breakaway Americas: The Unmanifest Future of the Jacksonian United States by Thomas Richards, Jr. (review)

While historians of the early United States have increasingly questioned received narratives about U.S. expansion in recent decades, they have often continued to overlook how uncertain the geopolitics of North America remained throughout the early nineteenth century. This is the central historiographic challenge that animates Thomas Richards's excellent Breakaway Americas: The Unmanifest Future of the Jacksonian United States, which grapples with "a dizzying number of political formations between the years 1838 and 1846" (6), including Americans supporting republican rebellion in Upper Canada, Cherokee nationalists on Indian Territory, exiled Mormon dissidents in Mexico, and white settlers in Texas and on the Pacific Coast. While these short-lived efforts at political autonomy tend to be dismissed or ignored, Richards strives to evaluate them on their own terms and, in doing so, succeeds in striking a blow to the persistence of Manifest Destiny, an ideology that has caused historians, wittingly or not, to retroactively assume the eventual incorporation of the republics into the United States' territorial empire.

In defining the parameters of this wide-ranging study, Richards effectively frames his narrative around what he calls the "Texas Moment" (15): the decade between the establishment of the Republic of Texas and its annexation by the United States in 1846. On one level, he does this to show that the creation of this independent "sister republic" loomed large among U.S. audiences at the time, directly influencing or inspiring many of the events he explores in the book. On a deeper level, Richards uses the reverberations of Texan independence to suggest that the settlement and political structure of North America was far more open-ended than historians have often acknowledged. The reasons that each group sought to separate itself from the United States varied widely: Mormons aimed to establish a kind of American theocracy; removed Cherokees hoped to sustain their threatened sovereignty; white settlers in Texas, California, and Oregon sought more favorable political or economic conditions. Despite their differences, for Richards they were all seeking to found "colonies of Americans" (8) that were rooted in U.S. history and culture but distinguished by their unique political trajectories and aspirations.

Participants in this diverse set of examples were characterized by their Americanness, but they also sought to define themselves both apart from, and in contrast to, the United States. While each of the book's chapters follows the distinct circumstances of each "breakaway America," Richards skillfully interweaves their stories to emphasize his fundamental argument that they were formed alongside, and in response to, each other during the decade of Texan independence. In sharply drawn portraits, Richards condenses the complex details of each breakaway America with great clarity and skill. He manages to both expertly zoom in on the individual cases and elegantly position each component within the larger narrative arc of the book.

The expansive lens Richards uses to incorporate these diverse political formations into his analysis is the book's greatest strength as well as its greatest conceptual challenge. While the book's introduction carefully establishes a framework for uniting these breakaway Americas, Richards shows that they often shared as many differences as commonalities. For instance, the Americans who supported Upper Canadian rebels in large numbers through participation in pro-patriot societies shared a clear ideological affinity with advocates of Texan independence, but they lacked the same settler framework, with most choosing to remain in the United States and few actually serving in the rebellion. Nevertheless, Richards makes a very strong case that such distinct movements were part of the tapestry of rich debates taking place during the "Texas Moment" and deserve to be considered alongside each other.

Richards also persuasively argues that breakaway Americas were often driven by a desire to perfect or improve upon features of the United States. The cases he considers reflect this impulse to varying degrees, with the Cherokee-led...