American Republics: A Continental History of the United States, 1783-1850

by Alan Taylor

Overview

Winner of the 2022 New-York Historical Society Book Prize in American History
A Washington Post and BookPage Best Nonfiction Book of 2021

From a Pulitzer Prize–winning historian, the powerful story of a fragile nation as it expands across a contested continent.

In this beautifully written history of America’s formative period, a preeminent historian upends the traditional story of a young nation confidently marching to its continent-spanning destiny. The newly constituted United States actually emerged as a fragile, internally divided union of states contending still with European empires and other independent republics on the North American continent. Native peoples sought to defend their homelands from the flood of American settlers through strategic alliances with the other continental powers. The system of American slavery grew increasingly powerful and expansive, its vigorous internal trade in Black Americans separating parents and children, husbands and wives. Bitter party divisions pitted elites favoring strong government against those, like Andrew Jackson, espousing a democratic populism for white men. Violence was both routine and organized: the United States invaded Canada, Florida, Texas, and much of Mexico, and forcibly removed most of the Native peoples living east of the Mississippi. At the end of the period the United States, its conquered territory reaching the Pacific, remained internally divided, with sectional animosities over slavery growing more intense.

Taylor’s elegant history of this tumultuous period offers indelible miniatures of key characters from Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth to Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Margaret Fuller. It captures the high-stakes political drama as Jackson and Adams, Clay, Calhoun, and Webster contend over slavery, the economy, Indian removal, and national expansion. A ground-level account of American industrialization conveys the everyday lives of factory workers and immigrant families. And the immersive narrative puts us on the streets of Port-au-Prince, Mexico City, Quebec, and the Cherokee capital, New Echota.

Absorbing and chilling, American Republics illuminates the continuities between our own social and political divisions and the events of this formative period.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781324005797
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	05/18/2021
Pages:	544
Sales rank:	1,141,040
Product dimensions:	5.60(w) x 9.20(h) x 1.80(d)

About the Author

Alan Taylor, twice awarded the Pulitzer Prize in History, is the author of American Revolutions and American Republics, prior volumes in his acclaimed continental history of the United States. He is Thomas Jefferson Foundation Professor of History at University of Virginia, and lives in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Table of Contents

List of Maps and Illustrations xi

Preface xxiii

Introduction 1

1 Constitutions 17

2 Empires 64

3 Wars 106

4 Race 150

5 Democracy 200

6 Monsters 250

7 R 296

8 Soil 344

Epilogue 379

Acknowledgments 383

Notes 385

Bibliography 463

Index 503

Editorial Reviews

★ 01/18/2021

An unstable nation deflected its seething tensions and anxieties into an aggressive expansionism, according to this trenchant history of the fledgling U.S. Pulitzer winner Taylor (American Revolutions) focuses on the growth of American territory and national power through diplomacy and wars aimed at clearing Native Americans from western land coveted by settlers, gaining new territory for slave states, and warding off Great Britain and Spain. The War of 1812, he argues, was actually part of a greater “War of the 1810s” that saw a decade of fighting from the Northwest Territory to Florida to consolidate and extend America’s borders. According to Taylor, this outward-directed program ended up exacerbating internal divisions, as unpopular wars and the prospect that new states might upset the slave state-free state balance stoked sectional antagonisms. The portrait of the U.S. that emerges is not flattering: Taylor foregrounds white supremacy, sexism, slavery, the miseries of industrial capitalism, the ethnic cleansing of Native Americans, and atrocities committed by U.S. soldiers in the Mexican War. This elegantly written and thoughtfully argued study shows how rickety and explosive the American project was from the start. (May)

Publishers Weekly

"Stimulating….Many histories of this important interregnum period have been written, but none emphasizes the fragility of the American experiment as strongly as Taylor’s book does. American Republics succeeds admirably."

David S. Reynolds

"A whirlwind of a narrative that seems presciently suited for our own unsettled hour."

Minneapolis Star Tribune - Kevin Duchschere

"American Republics is a worthy and apt continuation of Taylor’s excellent continental history of the United States. As one has come to expect from Taylor, his prose is excellent and his ability to weave together storytelling and scholarship is truly commendable."

New Criterion - Daniel N. Gullotta

"A beautifully crafted narrative…penetrating and provocative….American Republics provides readers (including professional historians) new ways of looking at seemingly familiar events."

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette - Glenn C. Altschuler

"A tour de force rich in fascinating and diverse characters, strong Native nations, contested borders, historical ironies, and paths almost taken."

Kathleen DuVal

04/01/2021

The newest volume in Taylor's U.S. history series, after American Revolutions, covers the post-revolutionary period through the Compromise of 1850; it counters widespread beliefs about U.S. geographic expansion. Taylor argues that the colonial push westward was driven by perceived threats to the precarious union—from distant and neighboring governments; Indigenous peoples displaced and attacked by the colonies; free and enslaved Black people; and short-lived republics developed by restive colonists. Taylor underscores the complexity of persistent U.S. instability: fear of these varied groups drove Anglo continental invasion, and each territorial advance increased regional tensions and mistrust, resulting in continual risks of disunion. Racism was an underlying cause of U.S. expansion and insecurity: see, for example, self-interested white Americans who, believing that people of color shouldn't have their own land, brutally wrested arable territory from Indigenous peoples and non-white immigrants; Southern slaveholders who perpetuated slave labor and feared rebellions by enslaved people; low-income white Southerners' whose status depended on their ranking above enslaved people; and the North's bowing to threats of Southern secession because the economy relied on cheap cotton and because, despite Northerners' theoretical abolitionism, they did not want to have Black neighbors. VERDICT This insightful and engaging survey is essential reading for scholars as well as casual readers of history.—Margaret Kappanadze, Elmira Coll. Lib., NY

Library Journal

2021-01-19
The acclaimed historian offers a relevant follow-up to American Revolutions (2016).

In a book that falls midway between narrative survey and classroom text, Taylor continues the story of the settlement and conquest of what became the lower 48 states. The author, a two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize and professor at the University of Virginia, is among the few historians who would attempt such a history of this single century of the American past. With characteristically graceful prose, he relates the costs and limits, as well as gains and triumphs, of the nation’s sweep westward after the Revolution. His subjects—events, wars, laws, treaties—will be familiar to those who paid attention in their American history courses, but Taylor presents them in fresh, thought-provoking ways. Three themes run through the book, whose basic narrative concerns the search for “elusive security.” First, nothing was foreordained; many nations and peoples fought over the same territory when the American republic was weak and vulnerable. Second, based on unassailable evidence, crippling payments were exacted from non-White people in the pursuit of Manifest Destiny to conquer much of North America. Third, it wasn’t all about White men; women, Native Americans, and African Americans played significant roles on all sides in the politics, military battles, land settlements, and opposition to American encroachments on others’ territories. Readers will encounter many little-known characters who advanced, thwarted, honored, and sullied American ambitions. It’s not a pretty picture, but such warts-and-all history is now conventional among scholars and considered more congruent with historical realities than the drum-and-trumpet stories that used to be the standard approach of historical narratives and textbooks. Though the narrative lacks an overall argument and ends in an abrupt, somewhat jarring fashion, Taylor is always a consummate guide to the early republic.

A fine new look at a critical period of American history.

Kirkus Reviews

"American Republics is a masterpiece. Taylor’s stories, revealing collisions between principles on the one hand and greed, violence, racism, and transnational entanglement on the other, resonate eerily across time. This book’s coherence, wisdom, and eloquence leave me inspired. But its unflinching narrative leaves me rattled to the core."

Elizabeth Fenn

"A history that speaks directly to the racial concerns of twenty-first-century Americans."

Booklist (starred review)

"From one of America’s greatest historians, American Republics is an engrossing introduction to the fragile, exclusionary epoch when the United States went transcontinental."

Brian DeLay

"Alan Taylor’s unparalleled storytelling abilities are on full display in this brilliant narrative history revealing the essential fragility of the early American republic."

Amy S. Greenberg

"Alan Taylor has—once again—given us a new understanding of a critical era in the history of the United States."

Edward L. Ayers

"American Republics sweeps away rosy accounts of the rise of the United States. It is a searing history that exposes how white supremacy disfigured U.S. politics, underwrote westward expansion, and remade the lives of North America’s diverse peoples. Incisive and powerful, it leaves a lasting impression."

Claudio Saunt

"Sweeping, beautifully written, prodigiously researched, and myth-busting….Anyone interested in American history will appreciate this richly rewarding book."

BookPage - Roger Bishop

"Enthralling…Taylor brings to the table a lifetime of history learning and a rare ability to focus our attention on the things from the past that really matter."

Andrés Reséndez

"Diligently researched, engagingly written and refreshingly framed, American Republics is an unflinching historical work that shows how far we’ve come toward achieving the ideals in the Declaration—and the deep roots of the opposition to those ideals."

Colin Woodard