We’ve all heard it: “before the Civil War most Americans viewed themselves as citizens of their state first and their country second.” It gets uncritically repeated at even high levels of academia (often with respect to the revolutionary era as well). Well, it’s bullshit, and regardless of the intention of the speaker it reinforces the lie that Confederates fought the Civil War over states’ rights.
This r/AskHistorians post serves as an example (note how the question assumes at any point most Americans viewed themselves primarily as state citizens) and the top comment outlines the evidence that’s usually trotted out in support of the myth:
- Robert E. Lee said he really totally wanted to fight for the Union, but was just too loyal to Virginia!
Wow, you’re telling me a guy who viewed himself as a noble gentleman warrior, and who was appealing to people who viewed themselves similarly, said he was fighting for something more justifiable than chattel slavery? The institution that even southern slaveowners privately acknowledged was wrong for generations? This “evidence” (it’s amazing how commonly this specific anecdote is raised, it’s even the first point our reddit historian brings up!) should be given the same weight as Eichmann’s defense of himself in Jerusalem, especially in light of Lee personally owning slaves. It could not more transparently be a self-serving lie.
- People used to say “the United States are,” not “the United States is”!
Another incredibly common defense of this myth that collapses under even the slightest scrutiny. As another commenter on that post points out, the available textual evidence doesn’t even support this – as far as we can tell today, by the 1860s “the United States is” had been the most common phrasing for 30 years. That 30-year period also happens to be the first 30 years where one could say formal American English (at least spelling and definitions) began to be standardized. Noah Webster’s first American English dictionary was published in 1828, a decade or two before the first experiments in public education. And of course we must account for a period of “linguistic settling” (a term I just made up), that is, the period between when a need arises for a new phrase and when one possible phrasing becomes dominant/formally recognized (see: Twitter rebranding to X and there still being no dominant/formally recognized way of phrasing how to describe posting to X, to replace “tweeting” or “tweeted”). All told, at best we can draw no conclusion from how people used “United States” in the lead up to the Civil War; at worst the actual evidence points to the consensus trending towards “United States is” decades before the conflict.
- Communication and transport got so much easier after the Civil War!
This is a slippery one, because while mutual contact is indeed a key part of forming a national identity, focusing on railroads and telegraphs vastly undersells how much contact there was between even the pre-Revolution American Colonies. On the face of it, of course there was substantial mutual contact prior to 1776, because how else would the colonials have conceived and executed a jointly-orchestrated rebellion in the first place? A generation before the Declaration of Independence you had the 1754 Albany Plan of Union, a plan for “a more centralized government” adopted by representatives from seven colonies, followed shortly by the Seven Years’ War (1756-1763), which cast the colonies as Britain’s collective representative in North America, which contributed to a shared series of colony/metropole issues that directly influenced the eventual Revolution, and which was started in no small part due to westward colonial expansion – a common interest of all colonies in opposition to the Crown, that the new United States would inherit as a collective interest and project after independence. One of the less-upvoted comments (of course) in the r/AskHistorians post helpfully points out that the new states ceded their westward land claims to the new nation, and that the 80 years of indigenous genocide and white settlement were a decidedly national project, enforced by the U.S. Army and managed by the U.S. federal government. I’m supposed to believe the people that spent most of a century united in cutting a bloody path across an entire continent actually viewed themselves as only partially invested in such an expansive national project? Extensive documentation of pre-independence (to say nothing of pre-Civil War) communication and political cooperation can be found in Gerald Horne’s The Counter-Revolution of 1776 (re: cooperating to keep down slave rebellions and kill the indigenous, commercial ties binding the entire country to the slave economy, the conscious forming of the white identity out of European castoffs in support of the above) and Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities (more specific detail on what newspapers were published throughout the colonies, how frequently, and when).
There’s also the question of who exactly we’re talking about when we speak of people forming national or state allegiances. I’d imagine enslaved people generally had low allegiance to either tier of oppressor in the antebellum South. Free black people saw discrimination at local and national levels in both the North and South, as did various groups of immigrants, although in material terms your European immigrants could obtain free real estate from the federal government in federal territories that were sometimes decades from achieving statehood, which was likely reflected in whether they viewed themselves as a national or state citizen first. Certainly plenty of people’s response to “do you view yourself first as a national or state citizen?” would have been “dude I’m trying to grill here,” or “uh I’m explicitly disenfranchised because I’m a woman/don’t meet the wealth requirement/am not pale enough.” Indigenous Americans, who were not made into U.S. citizens until well into the 20th century, would be even more dismissive of the question.
In short, of the people this myth even meaningfully applies to, it’s complete bullshit by the time of the Civil War. Generously speaking, it’s a strained argument even around the revolutionary era, considering the colonies declared independence, fought a war, and then formed a national government as one. My theory is it was originally nurtured by “states’ rights” losers, with a sprinkling of constitutional originalists, but draw me the Venn diagram on that one.
i think you go a bit too far off the other end. the Articles of Confederation and early federal organization surely indicate a much greater state-affiliation than we see later, realities like someone identifying most with their state was probably common in the 1780s-1820s, though continually declining with federal centralization. tbh the invasion of Mexico may well be a better water-mark for the unity of the states, with very little regional opposition to it, just a handful of whigs. compare to 1812, where northern states locally opposed, and states tendered the majority of soldiers through militia.
I was thinking more about the Articles of Confederation after writing this. On one hand, yes, the much weaker centralized government is a mark in favor of stronger state identification (although we circle back to the question of “who exactly are we talking about?”, as maybe it’s just your bourgeois delegates who want to keep their local power in their local fiefdoms, and your rank-and-file enfranchised citizenry were along for the ride). On the other hand, they still ultimately formed a centralized government – at no point was any other option seriously explored, and certainly none materialized – and right away it was deemed unworkable and discarded in favor of a stronger one.
Another thought I had is that from before independence through well after the Civil War, the U.S. has defined itself in no small part in contrast to something else – the Crown, the frontier, whiteness itself was constructed to meld a bunch of disparate Europeans together against enslaved and indigenous people. Horne goes into a bunch of detail about how the latter especially was a conscious political project, as the ruling class needed poor settlers to buy into them rather than find common ground with each other, the enslaved, or the indigenous.
At the end of the day, it is inescapably weird to me how a group of British colonists (with an interconnected economy, who’ve been talking about greater colonial organization for a generation) jointly declare independence, jointly form a Continental Army, jointly manage and win a war under a unified government, then four short years after winning that war form an even stronger central government… are commonly viewed today as prioritizing their state identity over their national one. The default assumption should be that the people who declared independence and fought a war together saw themselves as one integrated polity, and we should be asking for considerable evidence to reverse that assumption.
considerable evidence to reverse that assumption
you’re being very dismissive of the articles of confederation, but it was the form of organization that was actually adopted and implemented for 12 years. that’s much stronger testimony than the Albany plan. worse, the Continental Army was a voluntary association of portions of the states’ armed forces and finances—the Continental Congress could not compel either from members—it was not the only, exclusive army, the states maintained their own in addition. a state needs a monopoly on violence, which the US federal government did not credibly assume for several decades after independence.
I see the AoC as evidence that a sizable chunk of the colonial bourgeois prioritized their state-based power over all else, even as they recognized the benefits of working together. I don’t think this necessarily means:
- Even a majority of the colonial bourgeois felt this way; they needed a strong consensus to move forward, not just a 51% vote, and that means accommodating minority opinions to a great extent.
- The colonial bourgeois who prioritized their state-based power (the fact that they were big fishes in their respective ponds) actually viewed themselves as citizens of their state above all else; they could have thought of themselves as Americans while shrewdly playing to maximize the power they already had, which would look exactly like what happened.
- That a majority of the actual residents of the colonies, or even just the enfranchised residents, saw themselves as state citizens first.
Basically, I think your big swinging dick from Virgina or New York – if he wasn’t one of the crowd that explicitly wanted a strong federal government – was primarily concerned with at least maintaining his existing economic and political standing. If there had been a proposal to hand all power to the federal government but grant the wealthiest few men from each colony a shitload of political power in that federal system (sound kind of like the Senate?), I bet the folks talking about state power when drawing up the AoC would have agreed. I think they were more concerned with keeping the game rigged in their favor than with some abstract notion of state citizenship (this was all very early in the formation of any kind of national/state identity, anywhere, too). And your poor-but-enfranchised citizens don’t have any comparable set of incentives, so why would they be attached (even cynically) to a state identity over a national one?
There were only four years between the end of the Revolutionary War and the start of the Constitutional Convention. The AoC has some weight here, but it’s a footnote in American history for a reason – it was gone in a flash because everyone realized it wouldn’t fly.
a state needs a monopoly on violence, which the US federal government did not credibly assume for several decades after independence
I think this is a little anachronistic. Modern states are conventionally defined as having a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence, but the American Revolution was right on the cusp of that concept developing. Many states were at the time claiming vast swaths of land they had almost no control over (see the Louisiana Purchase), and for generations to come you’d have violence used semi-legitimately by non-state actors (duels, lynchings, beatings of one’s children or wife, etc.). The “monopoly” part of that definition is always strained, but basically nowhere was a state by a reasonable interpretation of it in the late 18th century.
Then there’s the dual sovereignty feature of the U.S., where even today the feds practically lack jurisdiction over most ordinary crime. If one of your neighbors assaults another it’s not the feds who will punish the offender, it’s the state. Is the modern U.S. federal government not a state, then?
in lieu of being able to interview someone from 1800, i think it’s a good idea to analyze the institution and location of power. unless we do a meta-analysis of colonist personal journals our insight into how people feel is pretty indirect.
And your poor-but-enfranchised citizens don’t have any comparable set of incentives, so why would they be attached (even cynically) to a state identity over a national one
because it’s where they lived and as you say the national identity is still being fabricated. the state identity was transferred from the colonial one, and we know colony identity meant something to those colonists because they’d had specific religious designations and fought each other over religion & state borders.
but basically nowhere was a state by a reasonable interpretation of it in the late 18th century
Revolutionary France. which is a good comparison case for the centralizing and decentralizing tensions in an 18th century bourgeois government. they resolved their regionalists relatively quickly by blade and fusillade in 1793-1800. without shooting thomas jefferson and the states rights crowd it clearly took longer for the US.
The drivers of the American revolution were wealthy American merchants and land speculators who wanted independence from Britain to escape the British restrictions on trade and take native American land.
The project was a bourgeoisie revolution, not initially at least, a nationalist one, so I don’t see why you are under the impression that they would see themselves as one integrated polity.
a group of British colonists (with an interconnected economy, who’ve been talking about greater colonial organization for a generation) jointly declare independence, jointly form a Continental Army, jointly manage and win a war under a unified government, then four short years after winning that war form an even stronger central government
Because they acted as one polity in all sorts of ways before, during, and after the revolution.
It’s much stranger of me to assume that they were supremely loyal to arbitrary political subdivisions of their former sovereign. It’d be similar to an individual state having a revolution today and assuming most people would be loyal to their local counties, even though they acted in concert to overthrow their state government.
The colonies weren’t arbitrary subdivisions though, and they weren’t created by the sovereign. They grew out of various disparate colonisation efforts over two hundred years.
They had their own cultural and religious character, in many places very different from each other.It’d be similar to an individual state having a revolution today and assuming most people would be loyal to their local counties, even though they acted in concert to overthrow their state government.
Plenty of places that could be the case. Just as an example, if California seceded for whatever reason, it’s entirely conceivable that they would want to split into at least partially independent regions.
