Newest Born of Nations: European Nationalist Movements and the Making of the Confederacy by Ann L. Tucker

Abstract

Reviewed by: Newest Born of Nations: European Nationalist Movements and the Making of the Confederacy by Ann L. Tucker Brian Schoen (bio) Newest Born of Nations: European Nationalist Movements and the Making of the Confederacy. By Ann L. Tucker. (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2020. Pp. 272. Cloth, $45.00.) Antebellum white southerners were not the naval gazers previous generations thought them to be. They looked across the Atlantic and perceived themselves in relational and comparative ways. They proved particularly effective at spinning strands of international news and global ideas into webs of self-justification. Ann Tucker’s Newest Born of Nations offers probably the most probative treatment of how “elite white southerners used an international perspective [or at least a Eurocentric one] to understand, imagine, and defend their visions of nationhood” (4). For Tucker, this operated at a couple of levels. Events from unrealized nationalist efforts in Ireland and Hungary to eventually realized ones on the Italian peninsula offered reference points for considering and intensifying the sectional conflict. Southern sectionalists, for example, invoked and debated images of themselves as a Poland to the Tsarist-like North. Global events also “deepened” southerners’ sense of nationalism, as they looked for metaphors, foils, and models for their own efforts to construct [End Page 422] an independent nation (24). Tucker argues that a wider perspective served as a “mechanism for translating their concerns . . . into the more internationally resonant language of rights, values, and nationhood” (4). In short, white southerners learned to be, or at least talk, like a nation by watching and reflecting on the world around them and their place within it. Those mental efforts did not, however, bring agreement. Tucker identifies three oft-competing strains of southern nationalist thought. A “liberal nationalist”–turned–”liberal secessionist” vein tapped into the rights-based language of the American Revolution, which had been reanimated and romanticized amid the European revolutions of 1848. Southerners celebrated, for example, Italian revolutionary Giuseppe Garibaldi and the European republicanism he symbolically led. This strand, especially prominent in Democratic circles, emphasized that the South had a right to greater self-determination. Aided by voices like exiled Irish nationalist editor John Mitchel, it cloaked “concerns about slavery within broader liberal principles” (114). A second variant that emerged from the embers of the 1848 revolutions was a “conservative nationalism” that, though also generally republican, emphasized the need for authority and law and order. In its balder versions, this strand of thought affixed the South as a bulwark against European-style radical “red republicanism” that many southern whites feared was being imported into the United States. Slavery was trumpeted as a tonic to the perceived excesses of free labor and excessive democracy. This conservative nationalism translated into a call for secession as the best means to defend southern society. In total, Tucker shows that thinking about European political changes taught southern whites to perceive themselves as different from the North. Overlapping southern liberalist and conservative impulses converged in a secessionist impulse that erupted in 1860. Revealing the necessarily slippery use of these labels, Tucker suggests that “it is more appropriate to refer to secessionists who used a liberal versus a conservative perspective, rather than referring to southern liberals versus southern conservatives” (118). It was not uncommon, it seems, for the same person or newspaper to invoke both liberal and conservative justifications. Yet there does emerge a clear trajectory of the emphasis within wartime Confederate global thinking. Early on, Jefferson Davis’s government appealed to liberal nationalist impulses that had helped free parts of Italy from Hapsburg rule and ultimately led to its unification under a constitutional monarchy. Yet for reasons not fully explored here, but presumably tied to slavery, those liberal nationalist arguments had little impact. Their failure forced Confederate propagandists to turn toward conservative [End Page 423] arguments they hoped would land with Hapsburg rulers and conservative Catholics, a point that reinforces the argument of Don Doyle’s synthetic work The Cause of All Nations: An International History of the American Civil War (2014). In seizing on the global roots of Confederate nationalism, Tucker builds on ground previously trod by Andre Fleche, Paul Quigley, Timothy Roberts, and Niels Eichhorn. But Tucker adds to...