Indivisible

August 15, 2022
Historian Paul (Without Precedent) examines in this intriguing study the role that 19th-century lawyer, congressman, and orator Daniel Webster played in promoting the idea of American nationalism based on the Constitution. From the 1810s to the 1850s, Paul shows, America’s national identity was being formed by leaders including Henry Clay, who advocated for infrastructure subsidies to “knit the country closer together,” and Andrew Jackson, whose “insistent defense of slavery and white superiority won him popular support and unprecedented powers.” The vast expansion of the U.S. through the annexation of Texas, California, and New Mexico and the literature of James Fenimore Cooper, Washington Irving, and others also helped shape the ways Americans thought about themselves. Paul places Webster at the center of competing visions of “what it meant to be American,” arguing that his “unequaled eloquence” as a constitutional advocate “was the antidote to Jackson’s toxic populism.” Though Paul describes Webster’s 1830 speech against the theory of nullification, which held that states had the power to nullify federal law, “as the greatest extemporaneous oration ever delivered before Congress,” he also explains how Webster’s support for the Fugitive Slave Act backfired. Full of fascinating digressions and astute analysis, this is a rewarding look at one of America’s most enduring fault lines.