Title: The specter of disunion in the early American republic, 1783--1815
Description: Between 1783 and 1815, no specter haunted the American political imagination more than the prospect of the union's demise. Far from the preordained marriage of patriotic lore, the early American union was an impromptu coalition of heterogeneous elements. Once Americans secured their hard-won independence, the difficult work of perpetuating their accidental union began. This dissertation relates the story of that postwar struggle in the three decades between the American Revolution and the War of 1812, as early national citizens endeavored to locate a permanent basis for the post-Revolutionary union. Perennially aware of the union's diverse composition, American political thinkers regularly confronted the undesirable consequences of its dissolution. Disunion, they reckoned, had the potential to obliterate the recent gains of the Revolution and ensnare the newly independent states in domestic discord and foreign intrigue. In these unhappy visions of anarchy, despotism, and Europeanized politics, American statesmen discovered a new set of threats to their republican experiment, which served to replace British tyranny and wartime devastation as the common danger, or effective cement, of federal union. Finding mutual interest or affection among the various states lacking, early national Americans fell back on the shared menace of disunion's specter to hold their impromptu union together. By studying the specter of disunion at various sites of intellectual activity--namely, federal and state capitals and the printing houses, pulpits, and classrooms of the young nation--all five chapters of this dissertation testify to its profound influence in early American political culture.

Canvassing a wide range of primary sources--including newspapers, pamphlets, legislative debates, correspondence, personal papers, sermons, orations, and college disputations--this dissertation recovers the immensely important and enormously difficult project of perpetuating a federal union of diverse states in the aftermath of revolution. To combat disunion's pervasive specter, early national Americans forged a coherent unionist ideology that soon became the centerpiece of constitutional thought, domestic and foreign policy, political rhetoric, religious doctrine, and academic instruction. Between 1783 and 1815, disunion's specter and union's promise served as fundamental axioms in early American political thought and central organizing principles for post-Revolutionary society.