North Over South: Northern Nationalism and American Identity in the Antebellum Era. (Book Reviews).

North Over South: Northern Nationalism and American Identity in the Antebellum Era. By Susan-Mary Grant. (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, c. 2000. Pp. xiv, 250. $35.00, ISBN 0-7006-1025-1.)

Susan-Mary Grant' s North Over South is a provocative, contrarian addition to the vast literature on antebellum America. Like much of that historical scholarship, the Civil War and its meaning is the question that looms in the background, although Grant does take her analysis beyond the end of the war. Grant's subject is the development of a neglected American nationalism that has not been placed within the conceptual context of recent literature on nationalism. If such an approach is taken, then, according to Grant, United States nation-building can only be understood as an example of the shift from romantic to imperialist nationalism. Imperialist nation-building (in this case the definition of an exclusively northern sectionalist nationalism that excludes the South) emerges as early as the 1830s and flowers under the leadership of the Republican Party in the 1850s.

Specifically, Grant's argument is that while northern perceptions of the South included positive and negative views after the Revolution, by the 1850s northerners (mainly New England intellectuals and opinion-makers) used the South as a negative reference point from which to develop their own exclusive national spirit. As the South was lazy, so the North was energetic and entrepreneurial. As the South was slave, so the North was free. As the North embraced republican virtues of freedom and liberty, so the society that slavery built was controlled by despotic slaveholders. "Northern reactions to the antebellum South can be fully understood only in the context of northern concerns for the future of the American republican experiment, which was basically the search for an American national identity" (p. 111).

Eventually, from a diffuse hostility to the South, a specifically northern nationalism develops in the Republican Party, whose leaders see the South as a threat to the republic. "The negative image of the South expressed, refined, and reiterated for so many years throughout the North, became dangerously concentrated once it entered the arena of partisan debate" (p. 157). Given its own insecurities resulting from urbanization, immigration, and industrialization, the North needed the South for its own self-identity. As a result, "northerners could no more allow the secession of the southern states in 1861 than they could permit the South to remain in the Union unchanged" (p. 9)--to which many incredulous historians may respond that they thought the South did secede.

As Grant makes clear in her exposition of this aggressive, sectionally centered northern nationalism, this is not the way things always were. (While arguably irrelevant, there is too little in North Over South on the ratcheting effect of southern aggression on northern reactions.) After the American Revolution the perceptions of a shared historical event of creation was a bond, but even this disappeared until the North--ever the ideological aggressor, according to Grant--interpreted the South out of the nation's moments of glory. By the 1840s (with the turning point being the Mexican-American War), the South, transmogrified by northerners into a blight and a threat, was a hostile world apart from the North. By the mid-1850s a Whig-Republican critique attacked the South, even as it simultaneously affirmed northern superiority.

Grant bases her argument on travel accounts, especially those of Frederick Law Olmsted and William Cullen Bryant, as well as "source material that either had not been used before" (there is not much of this) "or had been used in a different way" (p. 11). Horace Mann--who has surely been used in "a different way" herein--is characterized as a "representative" northerner (p. 129) whose views demonstrate the change in the tone of what Grant calls in her subtitle "northern nationalism."

Grant concentrates on New England sources of "northeastern conservative opinions" (p. 173) in which an identifiable public message promoting what Benedict Anderson has called "an imagined political community" appears. Given such a road map of sources, it is off-putting to find Grant's dependence on Abraham Lincoln throughout. Democrats are not a part of her research design, although they offer divergent views of both nationalism and the South and therefore contradict an analysis that seeks to establish an overarching northern nationalism.

In a 1983 article ("Antebellum Southern Exceptionalism: A New Look at an Old Question," Civil War History, 29 [September 1983], 230-44) James M. McPherson identified the South as the region that changed the least, maintaining its ancient culture and mores while the North was transformed. To some extent Grant's volume grows out of this same general sentiment. There is much to disagree with in this slender volume, but Grant's basic argument is worth a tolerant and admiring perusal.

JEAN H. BAKER
Goucher College