When is a Nation not a Nation? The Crisis of American Nationality in the Mid‐Nineteenth Century

Abstract

Abstract. The United States of America is conspicuous by its absence from most studies of nations and nationalism. The reasons for this omission are essentially twofold: America is a ‘nation of immigrants’, and therefore clearly lacks the ethnic homogeneity that sustains many modern European nations; more importantly, the focus, the core of the American nation has, since the late‐nineteenth century, become obscured as American society has continued to diversify and expand. In those studies which do examine the American case, an over‐concentration on the colonial and revolutionary periods has led both scholars of nationalism and historians of the United States to miss the most crucial period in the development of the American nation, the early to mid‐nineteenth century. Evidence is offered here that this period witnessed an identifiable process of ‘nation building’. In order to demonstrate this, the period 1854 through 1856 has been isolated for particular attention, since those years witnessed the emergence of a new political party, the Republicans, whose ideology and rhetoric were aggressively national, yet whose appeal was essentially sectional.