Newest Born of Nations: European Nationalist Movements and the Making of the Confederacy by Ann L. Tucker (review)

Although the field of southern history has long utilized comparative methodologies, Ann L. Tucker’s Newest Born of Nations: European Nationalist Movements and the Making of the Confederacy, a history of southern responses to nineteenth-century European revolutions, is the latest of a more recent spate of books that aim to understand the Civil War within international contexts. Because the South did not produce a substantial work of political theory devoted to the national question, Newest Born of Nations is a history primarily of popular political opinion grounded mostly in newspaper sources. Nonetheless, the book offers a well-organized and crisp account of the ways that distinct factions of white southerners were influenced by Europe’s early-nineteenth-century nationalist movements and used them to justify and understand their experiments in nation-making.

In some respects, Tucker’s work revisits an old subject. Historians of the eighteenth century have long emphasized that the 1789 French Revolution organized the first iterations of party politics. Historians of the post–Civil War period have highlighted how the Paris Commune of 1871 crystallized for opponents of Reconstruction how radical movements could threaten property and the stability of the bourgeois social order. Even the revolutions of 1848 have received a share of historians’ attention, most notably in Timothy Mason Roberts’s Distant Revolutions: 1848 and the Challenge to American Exceptionalism (Charlottesville, 2009). What sets Tucker apart is her focus on the South.

Nationalist revolutions were endemic to nineteenth-century Europe, and Newest Born of Nations describes how white southerners responded across three distinct eras—the emergence of sectionalism, secession, and the war— and in three mostly discrete modes. For Tucker, the main thrust of southern nationalism was rooted in the traditional Lockean-liberal language of natural rights and the argument that political communities sought their independence and authority when subjected to oppressive foreign rule. However, like their Jeffersonian forebears, southern liberal nationalists struggled to make space for the obvious contradictions of slavery, which further haunted the Confederacy as it sought legitimacy and recognition from fellow revolutionary aspirants abroad. Tucker terms the principal mode of popular southern nationalist thought “conservative.” Proffering a nationalism that included a robust defense of white supremacy, conservative nationalists set the region’s political trajectory at odds with European models. Conservative nationalists associated European revolution with the North’s drift toward atomistic liberal individualism and radical democracy, for which slavery, as the cornerstone of a more organic order, was the antidote. Though they receive less attention within Newest Born of Nations, Tucker finally also attends carefully to southern Unionists, who drew sobering transatlantic lessons from the near universal failure of Europe’s nationalist revolutions.

As Tucker explains, conceptions of nationalism were shaped in the nineteenth-century U.S. South by the long evolution from an idea of a political community forged by an Enlightenment-based natural rights tradition to one rooted in a romantic vision constituted by an imagined ethnic, religious, linguistic, historical, geographic, or sociocultural community. In the U.S. South, this romantic tradition could be reduced to Christian white supremacy, but Tucker argues that both traditions were also able to “peacefully coexist” (p. 11). Tucker does not devote that much attention to northern responses to Europe’s Age of Revolution, but had she done so, she would have found some common ground between northern and southern conceptions of regional difference. France’s 1848 revolution organized distinct northern and southern critiques of the pervasive spread of market individualism. Northern reformers saw the possibility of social democracy, represented in France by the establishment of the National Workshops and the right to work as a step beyond the American experiment. To southerners, France’s 1848 experience represented the danger inherent in the North’s social and economic trajectory. That said, Tucker joins recent...