Covering the period between 1783, when the American Revolution ended, and 1850, when Congress passed compromise bills aimed (futilely) at saving the Union, Taylor describes a nation that was, in his words, “built on an unstable foundation of rival regions and an ambiguous Constitution.” In this “always-imperiled” country, as Taylor calls it, it seemed as if civil war could break out at any time between East and West or between North and South.
In his stimulating new book, “American Republics,” the historian Alan Taylor takes us back to the decades before the Civil War, when America was not so much divided as it was fragmented. As tragic as it was, the war had the positive outcome of pointing the nation toward civil rights for Black citizens. In 1858, Abraham Lincoln captured the unprecedented peril the nation faced when he quoted Matthew 12:25: “A house divided against itself cannot stand.” The Civil War, which took 750,000 American lives, was the bloody outcome of the divide over slavery. AMERICAN REPUBLICS: A Continental History of the United States, 1783-1850Īs politically and culturally divided as America is today, there was a time when it was even more so.
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