AMERICAN REPUBLICS: A Continental History of the United States, 1783-1850
By Alan Taylor

As politically and culturally divided as America is today, there was a time when it was even more so. 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. As tragic as it was, the war had the positive outcome of pointing the nation toward civil rights for Black citizens.

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. 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. Many histories of this important interregnum period have been written, but none emphasizes the fragility of the American experiment as strongly as Taylor’s book does.

It was a time when the primary presence of the national government in the everyday lives of Americans was the Postal Service. A general mistrust of federal authority bred passionate loyalty to one’s state. A Massachusetts politician declared: “Instead of feeling as a nation, a state is our country. We look with indifference, often with hatred, fear and aversion to the other states.” The fledgling states, Taylor demonstrates, lacked common bonds. He writes, “Carolinians resented Virginians almost as much as New Yorkers despised New Englanders.”

Even within individual states or among social groups, hostilities flared. In the 1780s, stringent economic conditions in western Massachusetts gave rise to Shay’s Rebellion, in which debt-ridden farmers rose up in armed protest against state taxes. The rebellion was a warning sign of potential anarchy that contributed to the calling of the Constitutional Convention in 1787, which enhanced the power of the federal government — power that President George Washington put to use in 1794 when he enlisted 15,000 state militiamen to quell the so-called Whiskey Rebellion, in which backcountry farmers from Pennsylvania down to Georgia staged an insurrection in anger over an excise tax on alcohol.

Taylor, acutely sensitive to such strains on the national fabric, traces the continuing conflict between competing visions of democracy: the Hamiltonian, which favored centralization and rule by the social elite; and the Jeffersonian, skeptical of national power and devoted to states’ rights and the common man. The overall drift of American politics, as Taylor points out, was toward democratization, epitomized by the populist Andrew Jackson, who served two terms as president (1829-37).

Taylor’s special contribution in “American Republics” is his capacity for panning out to capture major historical trends. Not only does he cover about five decades in a relatively concise 384 pages of text, but he discusses events and people in various sections of the nation and in Canada and Mexico as well. The result of this broad-spectrum approach is, as Taylor’s subtitle indicates, a truly continental history.