The New Nation of America

6 Key excerpts on "The New Nation of America"

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  The First New Nation

  The United States in Historical and Comparative Perspective

  • Donald K. Routh, Seymour Lipset(Authors)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  PART 1 AMERICA AS A NEW NATION Passage contains an image

  1 Establishing National Authority

  The United States may properly claim the title of the first new nation. It was the first major colony successfully to break away from colonial rule through revolution. It was, of course, followed within a few decades by most of the Spanish colonies in Central and South America. But while the United States exemplifies a new nation which successfully developed an industrial economy, a relatively integrated social structure (the race issue apart) and a stable democratic polity, most of the nations of Latin America do not. They remain underdeveloped economically, divided internally along racial, class, and (in some cases) linguistic lines, and have unstable polities, whether democratic or dictatorial. So perhaps the first new nation can contribute more than money to the latter-day ones; perhaps its development can give us some clues as to how revolutionary equalitarian and populist values may eventually become incorporated into a stable nonauthoritarian polity.

  In this section I will examine the early period of America’s history as a new nation, in an effort to elucidate through comparative analysis some of the problems and some of the developmental processes that are common to all new nations. And in so doing, I will also highlight some of the circumstances that were unique to American development, some of the conditions that made young America a particularly auspicious place to develop democratic institutions.

  There is a tendency for older nations to view with impatience the internal turmoil of new ones, and to become especially alarmed at the way oligarchical-dictatorial and revolutionary forces shake their tenuous foundations. Coupled with this is a tendency to expect them to accomplish in a decade what other nations have taken a century or more to do. A backward glance into our own past should destroy the notion that the United States proceeded easily toward the establishment of democratic political institutions. In the period which saw the establishment of political legitimacy and party government, it was touch and go whether the complex balance of forces would swing in the direction of a one- or two-party system, or even whether the nation would survive as an entity. It took time to institutionalize values, beliefs, and practices, and there were many incidents that revealed how fragile the commitments to democracy and nationhood really were.

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  The Story of Religion in America

  An Introduction

  • James P. Byrd, James Hudnut-Beumler(Authors)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Westminster John Knox Press

    (Publisher)

  7. The New Nation

  When determined colonists living on the edge of the frontier defeated the British Empire, their world changed. Many of them started believing that ordinary people had extraordinary potential. No longer did they need to tip their hats to social elites. They were as good as anybody. They had the chance to usher in a new era for a new nation, but what kind of nation would it be? Would it be ruled by a strong, centralized government, or would it be led by a loose confederation of states? And what role would religion play in the new nation?

  Whatever else happened, it was clear that American religion would be more diverse and more democratic than it had been in the colonial period. Democratic ideas inspired people, changed their outlook on life, and changed their religious views. In a nation that had no official religion, denominations competed with one another, turning religious life into a marketplace of ideas and practices, and it quickly became apparent that evangelicals had a decisive edge.1

  The Constitution and Religion

  After the Revolutionary War had been won, colonists went about the business of founding a nation, and one of the most pressing issues was the need (or not) for a Constitution, a question that had not been decided by the time the Constitutional Convention was held in Philadelphia in 1787.

  Supporters of the Constitution, called “Federalists,” wanted a stronger federal government to revise the Articles of Confederation (1781), which had established a confederation of states that came together temporarily for common interests, like fighting wars, but left most of the power in the states.2 Although the Revolution had empowered more people to vote and even to hold public office, some wondered if this was a good idea. Would the common people be able to rule themselves? Or, more precisely, would the common people have the moral virtue and good sense necessary to elect able and virtuous leaders? By the 1780s some founders, including James Madison (1751–1836), had begun to worry. If average Americans lacked “virtue and intelligence to select men of virtue and wisdom,” then, Madison wrote, “no theoretical checks, no form of government, can render us secure.”3

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  Liberty's Surest Guardian

  American Nation-Building from the Founders to Obama

  • Jeremi Suri(Author)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • Free Press

    (Publisher)

  The creation of the American nation and government in the late eighteenth century unleashed an outpouring of participation on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean that forever changed the fabric of modern politics. “The Revolution,” one historian writes, “resembled the breaking of a dam, releasing thousands upon thousands of pent-up pressures. . . suddenly it was as if the whole traditional structure, enfeebled and brittle to begin with, broke apart, and people and their energies were set loose in an unprecedented outburst.” 17 The energies of citizens found collective voice in the constitutional institutions created to manage them. As “Americans,” literate individuals were now part of a national debate about a common government. “Public opinion”—measured in tone and attitude, rather than surveys or elections—shaped a national identity, government policies, and much more. The United States emerged as a new kind of broad and yet ordered democracy in action. “The Revolution,” Gordon Wood writes, “rapidly expanded this ‘public’ and democratized its opinion. Every conceivable form of printed matter—books, pamphlets, handbills, posters, broadsides, and especially newspapers—multiplied and were now written and read by many more ordinary people than ever before in history. . . . By the early nineteenth century this newly enlarged and democratized public opinion had become the ‘vital principle’ underlying American government, society, and culture.” 18 People felt they mattered as they had not before. Government now had to serve the people. Farmers and merchants, not kings and aristocrats, made the government. For these revolutionary circumstances to endure and prosper, nation and government had to remain closely tied together. The alternative was a reversion to separation and despotism. The alternative was a return of European empire on the ashes of the revolutionary experiment

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  Turning the World Upside Down

  The War of American Independence and the Problem of Empire

  • Neil L. York(Author)
  • 2003(Publication Date)
  • Praeger

    (Publisher)

  CHAPTER 5 New Nation, New Empire I HAVE thus shewn wherein consists the true political welfare of a civil com- munity. The foundation is laid in a judicious distribution of property, and in a good system of polity and jurisprudence; on which will arise, under a truly patriotick, upright, and firm administration, the beautiful superstructure of a well governed and prosperous empire. ALREADY does the new constellation of the United States begin to realize this glory. It has already risen to an acknowledged sovereignty among the republicks and kingdoms of the world. And we have reason to hope, and I believe to expect, that GOD has still greater blessings in store, for this vine which his own right hand hath planted, to make us high among the nations in praise, and in name, and in honour. Ezra Stiles (1783) 1 Most of the distresses of our country, and the mistakes which Europeans have formed of us, have arisen from a belief that the American Revolution is over. This is so far from being the case that we have only finished the first act of the great drama. We have changed our forms of government, but it remains yet to effect a revolution in our principles, opinions, and manners so as to accommodate them to the forms of government we have adopted. This is the most difficult part of the business of the patriots and legislators of the coun- try. It requires more wisdom and fortitude than to expel or to reduce armies into captivity. Benjamin Rush (1786) 2 George Washington had a genius for political theatre, an almost uncanny knack for accentuating the drama of already dramatic moments. He demonstrated it when he wore his uniform at the Continental Congress in 150 Turning the World Upside Down the spring of 1775; he showed it again in the summer when he promoted riflemen as Indian fighters come to beat the British.

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  The American School of Empire

  • Edward Larkin(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  The debates over the Constitution, however, framed the argument in the United States such that the key question has been (and continues to be) how to balance elements of the nation and empire effectively. My point, then, is that postnationalist American studies has not gone far enough to challenge the national narrative that remains one of the last remaining vestiges of exceptionalism. Reconceptualizing the early United States as an empire allows for a more capacious and diverse literary and cultural history, one that reflects the diversity of cultures present in the states rather than attempting to identify one unitary tradition at the expense of the others. To define the nation as the central issue of the period is necessarily to limit the scope of what constituted legitimately American thinking and writing. If we acknowledge that the nation, while a pressing question for many at the time, had not yet come into being – and would not until at least sixty years later – the originary moment in US culture becomes one of possibi- lities, competing visions for the country, and vigorous dissent. How it settled, in turn, can then be reinterpreted in terms of a closing down or an effort to circumscribe. By insisting on the nation form, ironically, scholars only contribute to a narrative of homogeneity. Instead, we ought to recognize the serious dissent, the unsettled state of affairs, and the general incoherence that characterized much of early US politics and culture. This vision is borne of a deep skepticism (even perhaps cynicism) that sees the Revolution and early Republic as a time when multiple possibilities were open and available not because early Americans embraced diversity but because they were divided along many different kinds of lines, and those divisions produced real tensions that cannot be reduced to a consensus model, such as the one advocated by Bercovitch, that then transforms them into assent.

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  American Politics in the Early Republic

  The New Nation in Crisis

  • Cathy Song(Author)
  • 1993(Publication Date)
  • Yale University Press

    (Publisher)

  Georg e Washingto n and the New Nation Because of the threat of British arms, the Revolution had served as a great unifying fOrce . . . under whose banner private , ethnic, sec-tional, and other differences were submerged.8 By 178g, however, with the Peace of Paris already six years old, the sense of national purpose tha t the Revolution had temporarily given Americans was clear ly waning, and the corrosive forces of sectional hostility and sus-picion were in ascendance. Furthermore, the Revolution, by eroding the authority of the traditional political elite and destroying the cen-tral and legitimizing authority of the crown, had politicized large num-bers of people and had whet ted the public's appetite for greater popu-lar participation in public affairs 9 The crisis-induced unity of the Revolution and the imperfect union of the Articles of Confederation had not resulted in an effective na-tional authority. Because of American suspicions toward government in general, but particularly toward government beyond the local or sta te level, the Articles had not required the yielding of state sover-eignty. Now, with the ratification of the Consti tution, Americans were attemp ting to take a giant step in the long, complicated, and agonizing process of crealiug a national community. Many Americans in 1789 feared that the country was too large and too diverse to develop and sustain a sense of national community.

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