Young America: The Transformation of Nationalism Before the Civil War by Mark Power Smith (review)

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Reviewed by:

• Young America: The Transformation of Nationalism Before the Civil War by Mark Power Smith
• Graham A. Peck

Young America: The Transformation of Nationalism Before the Civil War. By Mark Power Smith. A Nation Divided: Studies in the Civil War Era. (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2022. Pp. xii, 277. $49.50, ISBN 978-0-8139-4853-9.)

Mark Power Smith’s Young America: The Transformation of Nationalism Before the Civil War examines the intellectual and political currents in the Young America movement from 1844 to 1861. Smith claims that its adherents pioneered a “novel conception of American nationalism” based on “the liberal tradition of natural law” and precipitated the political crisis of the 1850s (p. 10). To Young Americans, democracy “constituted the bedrock of American nationality, [and] increasingly became a natural right that predated political institutions, rather than a national inheritance designed to safeguard more fundamental rights” (p. 10). In so believing, Young Americans merged natural and political rights. State sovereignty rested on the “popular will” that preceded political institutions, and suffrage became “a natural right for white men” in accordance with natural distinctions between races and sexes (p. 12). These views were not retrogressive. Rather, Young Americans incorporated emerging ideas about political economy, international relations, and racial science into a conviction that “the social, economic, and political relations of the nation were, themselves, governed by natural law” (p. 12).

Smith traces these ideas primarily through the pages of New York City’s Democratic Review—the unofficial organ of Young America—and the words of literary and political figures associated with the periodical. Young Americans began as Jacksonian Democrats, boasting both northern and southern adherents, but splintered in the 1850s under the pressure of sectional politics. Their unifying “principles” were “state sovereignty, local self-government, and free trade for white men around the world” (p. 7). Illinois senator Stephen A. Douglas was perhaps the most prominent Young American. His youth, dynamism, territorial expansionism, militant nationalism, and advocacy of white [End Page 429] men’s democracy made him Young America’s ideal exponent. He corresponded with its literary figures and the Review’s editors, and he led its political arm in Congress. There, he turned an intellectual project into a political program of immense consequence.

Smith argues that Douglas’s Young American ideology precipitated the collapse of American democracy. The critical moment came in 1854, when Douglas drove the Kansas-Nebraska Act through Congress despite the risk of aggravating sectional controversy. His decision reflected his desire for national expansion and material progress and his belief that territorial settlers should decide the fate of slavery. In Smith’s words, Young America gave Douglas a “solution to sectional strife” that “rested on a whole set of assumptions long detailed in the Democratic Review” (pp. 139, 140). However, the act backfired, further polarizing the country unnecessarily. In the end, Young America “acted as a catalyst for the Civil War” (p. 197).

While innovative, Smith’s thesis is difficult to prove from evidence. This difficulty partly reflects his decision to intermix literary and political sources throughout his text, which clouds his effort to demonstrate Young America’s political influence. But mostly it reflects the philosophical problem that natural rights can only be realized in political communities. American slavery after 1776 illustrates this problem perfectly. Only those states that chose to honor Black inhabitants’ natural rights abolished slavery. Distinguishing between pre-political and political rights is essential, but Smith does not address the distinction adequately.

Most notable is the startling absence of American constitutionalism. The word constitution is not even in the index. Historians have extensively analyzed antebellum politicians’ exhaustive debates over property rights in slaves for good reason. Politicians agreed that the Constitution governed the political community. The United States was not in a pre-political state of nature. This explains why Douglas repeatedly stated in 1854 that territorial settlers should determine slavery’s legality according to the Constitution’s parameters. Those limitations bedeviled Douglas, popular sovereignty, and the country until 1861, and they also bedevil this book. The limitations of natural law had to come at the threshold of constitutional and other political rights.

Graham A. Peck University of Illinois...