The Civil War also started in Yankeedom, with its moralizing abolitionists. It was only thanks to a late shift by Midlander voters that Abraham Lincoln was elected. It was only after the secessionists fired on Fort Sumter that New Netherland, the Midlands and Borderlanders rallied to Yankeedom’s side. And the war that saved the union only exacerbated some divides — for one thing, Reconstruction broadened the Yankee-Borderlander split.
“Since 1877, the driving force in American politics hasn’t primarily been a class struggle or tension between agrarian and commercial interests, or even between competing partisan ideologies, although each has played a role,” Woodard writes. “Ultimately, the determinative political struggle has been a clash between shifting coalitions of ethnoregional nations, one invariably headed by the Deep South, the other by Yankeedom.”
Throughout, Woodard sprinkles nuggets that make the country’s current divides seem more explicable. Blue-staters unsettled by Rick Perry’s “day of prayer” should know that, in 1801, some 20,000 Borderlanders gathered in Cane Ridge, Ky., for a Christian revival where “hundreds fell prostrate under the mighty power of God, as men slain in battle.” Red-staters who suspect coastal Yankees of viewing the interior as a foreign country will be amused to know that one group of New Englanders sailing down the Ohio River to settle (and civilize) the Midwest called their ship “Mayflower of the West.” Anyone who thinks culture-war rhetoric is unique to our times should know that George Fitzhugh, a strongly pro-slavery Virginian, cast the Civil War as a clash between “Christians and infidels . . . the chaste and the libidinous; between marriage and free love.”
In any synthesis as sweeping as this, there are bound to be holes. Woodard skirts some inconvenient facts (for instance, New York became the commercial capital not only because of its Dutch roots, but because of the Erie Canal). He addresses the most obvious counterargument to his thesis, that regional cultures could hardly have held static in a land of immigrants and high mobility — arguing fairly persuasively that new arrivals adapted more to the cultures they found than vice versa — but he does not reckon with some major population shifts, such as the Great Migration of blacks to the North.
When his timeline reaches the late 20th century, the distinctions among his many nations blur into a more general blue-red divide. And while he is appealingly acerbic in characterizing the nations’ flaws, including Yankee priggishness, Woodard, a proud Mainer, comes down far hardest on the Deep South. Readers will differ on whether that’s merited.
Woodard concludes on a pessimistic note, wondering whether the bonds among his nations can hold. (He provocatively suggests that Canada has found the answer by accepting its binational, bilingual status.) I would have liked to see him wrestle with this question a bit more than he does. It’s easy to conclude from his tale that the country must resort to a more loosely federalist structure, devolving more power to the states, but is that really what Woodard wants?
Does the poor, uninsured family in East Texas have to accept its fate, just because it lives in “Deep South Nation”? Or is it part of what defines America to have Yankeedom meddling from beyond, despite the resentment of local elites? It is an age-old clash of values that “American Nations” captures well.
Alec MacGillis
is a senior editor at the New Republic.
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