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Andrew F. Lang, Ann L. Tucker. Newest Born of Nations: European Nationalist Movements and the Making of the Confederacy., The American Historical Review, Volume 128, Issue 1, March 2023, Pages 521–522, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhad096
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Ann L. Tucker’s Newest Born of Nations contributes to a vast scholarly conversation on the United States’ place within the nineteenth-century Atlantic world. The book also adds to a substantial dialogue on the nature of antebellum southern identity, the degree of slaveholding nationalism, the durability of Confederate national commitment, and the extent of anti-Confederate Unionism. Documenting “a southern interpretation of nationhood” (2), Tucker explains how a domestic sense of nationalism depended on comparisons to nations and nationalist movements abroad. In her telling, elite white southerners looked to the promise and peril of Europe’s 1848 democratic revolutions to measure the stability of their slaveholding republic and to justify disunion and Confederate nationhood.
The “international perspective,” Tucker explains, was “a readily available metaphor for speaking to an audience of fellow white southerners, one that allowed its adopter to translate the concerns of slaveholders into the language of international nationalism” (4). Deftly analyzing a wide range of printed sources, Tucker details how elite white southerners interpreted the fates of distant nations within domestic understandings of liberalism and conservatism. Like most American nationalists, white southerners cherished their liberal privilege of democratic self-government, an ideal under assault across much of the Atlantic rim. The rule of law, individual rights—at least for white men—and the assurance of constitutional sovereignty bolstered the slaveholders’ Union. White southerners nevertheless renounced unchecked liberalism as a threat to a conservative, hierarchical social order. American slaveholders interpreted the stark imbalances of European nations swinging from the extremes of revolutionary democracy to counterrevolutionary centralization as a clear lesson that the United States had to align liberalism and conservatism; otherwise, the alleged right to enslave people would become imperiled.
