The Case for Nationalism: How It Made Us Powerful, United, and Free by Rich Lowry

Author:Rich Lowry
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: 20th Century, Commentary & Opinion, History, Ideologies & Doctrines, Nationalism, Political Ideologies, Political Science, United States
Publisher: Broadside Books
Published: 2019-11-05T03:00:00+00:00

Slavery Threatened Westward Expansion and the Union Itself

The real check on US territorial expansion, at least for a time, would be slavery and the contention between the country’s sections over its future. The argument over slavery also threatened American nationalism in another of its aspects: the push for a national government competent enough to command the respect of other nations and knit the country together.

This project got a boost after the War of 1812. The United States ended the war feeling a burst of pride, despite the farcical failure of an attempted invasion of Canada and the humiliation of officials having to flee Washington as the British burned down the seat of the US government.83 We had acquitted ourselves well enough, all things considered (in other words, taking into account financial embarrassments, an utterly inadequate military, and nearly catastrophic political dysfunction as New England Federalists flirted with secession). An overriding lesson, though, was that the Jeffersonian vision of barely existent national institutions sitting atop a growing continental power was incompatible with the exigencies of government and warfare in the real world.84 We had learned that going to war with a major European power while lacking a strong navy (the frugal Jefferson didn’t want to spend money on it) was a very bad idea.85

The United States embarked on what became known as an “age of nationalism.” According to Albert Gallatin, the Treasury secretary under presidents Jefferson and Madison, his countrymen emerged after the war with “more general objects of attachment with which their pride and political opinions are connected. They are more Americans; they feel and act more as a nation.”86

Supreme Court justice Joseph Story enthused after the war, “Let us extend the national authority over the whole extent of power given by the Constitution. Let us have great military and naval schools; an adequate regular army; the broad foundations laid of a permanent navy; a National bank; a National system of bankruptcy; a great navigation act; a general survey of our ports, and appointments of port wardens and pilots; Judicial courts which shall embrace the whole constitutional powers; National notaries; public and national justices of the peace, for the commercial and national concerns of the United States.”87

For about a decade, that vision held sway, and even his erstwhile opponents ended up adopting a version of the hated Alexander Hamilton’s nationalizing program. What was for a time a kind of national consensus blew up with the Jacksonian revolution targeting financial and eastern interests and with the fight over slavery. The South worried that if the federal government was strong enough to do anything of much significance, it would be strong enough to act against the peculiar institution.88

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