The American Civil War was, above all, a contest over competing nationalist claims to independence and union. In this fascinating book Robert Bonner offers the first in-depth analysis of the intellectual framework for the South’s claim to nationhood. It is an impressive display of research and interpretation that casts an entirely new light on the debates over slavery, race, region, and nation. As we approach the sesquicentennial of the Civil War, this is a book everyone with an interest in the subject will want to read.” -Don H. Doyle, University of South Carolina
“Robert Bonner's outstanding analysis of proslavery nationalism makes a significant contribution to the dynamics and realities of the Old South's political culture. His multifaceted analysis deepens and enriches our understanding of the meaning, evolution, and the many aspects of political thought in the antebellum South. Mastering America makes a valuable addition to the history and historiography of nineteenth-century political culture, the contested terrain of nationalism, and the history of the Old South. This is intellectual history of the finest sort.” -Michael A. Morrison, Purdue University
“Mastering America recasts scholarly understanding of slaveholders’ relationship to American nationhood. Robert Bonner demonstrates that beginning with the Revolution slaveholding Southerners engaged American expansionism, constitutionalism, republicanism, evangelicalism, and patriotism in an ambitious mission to fashion a proslavery republic. Bonner’s careful argument gains added traction through his astute use of the comparative perspective, which frames the American story with other nationalisms and other emancipations.” -James L. Roark, Emory University
“Stellar in its telling, sedulous in its research, and compelling in its conclusions, Robert Bonner’s Mastering America captures the nuances of what it meant to champion southern nationalism in fine fashion. It is an essential work for anyone concerned with the framing and elaboration not simply of antebellum southern identity but with the formation of nationalism generally.” —Mark M. Smith, author of How Race Is Made: Slavery, Segregation, and the Senses
“Mastering America puts the lie to old notions that northerners in nineteenth-century America were the only nationalists while southerners were the sectionalists. With deft writing, innovative arguments, and prodigious research, Robert Bonner reveals that southerners were the ones who held the keys to American nationalism all along. It was southern slave masters who led the way in shaping the country's quest for empire, in creating its self-image as God's chosen land, and in articulating its distinctive, racialized historical mission. Little wonder, then, that southern slave owners were ready and able to create a new nation when the simmering sectional conflict erupted into Civil War. This vital new work exposes in global dimensions the tangled fate of mastery and nationalism in the nineteenth century.” -Michael Vorenberg, Brown University
"Mastering America is more litany than synthesis. That is, the book is largely an explication of the ideas with which proslavery publicists, in the aggregate, attempted to define...public understandings of what the founders had created in 1776 and 1787." -The Journal of American History, Jean B. Lee
"In this cogent and carefully argued volume, Robert Bonner has provided the best fresh analysis of the checkered career of southern nationalism since John McCardell's The Idea of a Southern Nation appeared in 1979." -Lacy K. Ford, Civil War History
"...a superior addition to a literature that contains fewer works of genuine quality and wisdom than the quantity on offer might lead one to expect. It is essential work any serious student of the period." -James D. Miller, The Register of the Kentucky Historical Society
