In August 1835, a young enslaved man named Arthur Bowen was arrested on charges of attempted murder. After meeting with free Blacks, he had gone ax in hand to the bedroom of his owner, a wealthy Washington widow, before fleeing. She said he was drunk and had meant no harm, but a mob wanted to hang him.
"We ought to be free, and we will be free," Bowen sputtered to police. "And if we are not, there is going to be such confusion and bloodshed as to astonish the world."
Bowen "was a prophet," writes Alan Taylor in his latest examination of the early history of the United States, a whirlwind of a narrative that seems presciently suited for our own unsettled hour.
As with two of his previous books, Taylor — a history professor at the University of Virginia and two-time Pulitzer Prize winner — scrutinizes the nation through a continental-wide lens, this time from the end of the Revolution to the pre-Civil War years. It was an era when, he says, many American leaders believed the price of keeping their shaky union together was the perpetuation of slavery and the decimation of Native Americans.
The title "American Republics" is plural by design. Taylor holds that the fledgling United States of America was just one of several "republics" — the myriad Indian nations, Mexico, foreign empires such as Britain and Spain, Upper and Lower Canada, even individual states — that struggled for dominance in North America in the decades following the Revolutionary War.
The survival of the young nation was by no means certain, Taylor argues, and its story emerges in the working out of that tension. Contrary to the notion of manifest destiny, the widely held belief in America's inevitable continental supremacy, the early United States was characterized instead by "manifest divisions, instability, and uncertainty."
Although the states had banded together long enough to defeat the British in 1781, they remained invested in regional concerns and largely saw themselves as separate countries with little need to work together. Americans were split between those who, like George Washington, favored a strong central government, and others who believed, like Thomas Jefferson, that only a loose confederation of sovereign states could sustain a national union.
How to mold a lasting and resilient nation out of this quarrelsome collection of commonwealths? Their answer, according to Taylor, was to extend the young country across the continent to cement a sense of national purpose and accommodate the rising tide of white settlers.
