That the United States has been a “nation” since its founding — struggling through slavery, civil conflict, labor strife, economic depressions, and deep ethnic and racial divisions but still surviving as a single polity and people — has long been an article of faith in triumphal versions of our history. “We the People” have often needed a sense of our long continuity if we wished to hold ourselves together. A story, true and false, imagined or otherwise, with remembrance and a good deal of forgetting is perhaps the only thing that can unify a nation. Before he became president, Barack Obama inspired many of us with his clarion call in 2004 that “there is not a liberal America and a conservative America—there is the United States of America.” In these recent polarized years we’ve seen bitter refutations of this premise, even as its noble impulse survives. Just now the idea of the American nation needs serious attention from historians. (my emphasis)Assuming that homo sapiens can somehow avoid the worst in environmental damage and nuclear war, people will someday look back and marvel at the leaps of imagination required to conceive of a world of "nations." Even now, if we look back at the disputes before and after the First World War on how to go about defining and constructing nations, some of it looks pretty bizarre and unworkable.
But that will be a long time from now. Meanwhile, we have to deal with bizarre arguments over defining what's valuable and essential in the US national heritage. This is currently producing some strange manifestations, e.g.: Ana Ceballos, Florida targets school math textbooks over critical race theory objections Miami Herald 04/15/2022.
I suppose it's appropriate that it was during Confederate "Heritage" Month that I was first confronted with this new Florida idea of white supremacist mathematics. How does this work? If you count the number of people in a room, you only count the white people?
Blight focuses on a question of ongoing interest, how supporters and opponents of slavery invoked what they all considered a kind of sacred past, or at least a past that conveyed a patriotic burden, to address challenges that the Founders were unable to solve on a permanent basis.
He writes that James Madison, and by implication other Framers, were unable to resolve the contradiction in the Constitution's protection of slavery and the democratic-republican notion of human equality:
[Madison] embodied the contradiction at the same time that he may have provided later abolitionists a means to harness, rather than only condemn, the founding document. Many, especially Frederick Douglass, did just that, hoping to get the authority of the Bill of Rights and the plea for a “more perfect union” on the side of the antislavery cause. We have never stopped arguing about whether the Constitution was fundamentally proslavery—in effectively sustaining the system—or whether it contained antislavery elements that were revealed over time. What we do know is that eventually a strong segment of political abolitionists forged an antislavery interpretation of the Constitution that energized the original Republican Party and helped foment disunion. (my emphasis)Oh, Bright also has the following observation related to the evil spirit of American history:
[Andrew Delbanco] contends that Melville based Captain Ahab directly on the figure of John C. Calhoun, the South’s and slavery’s most notorious defender and a crucial proponent of the Fugitive Slave Law. One of the most interesting aspects of the book is Delbanco’s serious engagement with and analysis of Calhoun’s place in history — the political philosopher of proslavery ideology as well as the “two nations” conception of America. Ahab has been likened to everyone from Hitler to terrorists. But by arguing for Calhoun as the model for Ahab, Delbanco suggests that the slavery crisis was woven through Melville’s philosophical masterpiece about the human condition. (my emphasis)
