The Fictive Transformation of American Nationalism after Sir Walter Scott

Abstract

The Fictive Transformation of American Nationalism after Sir Walter Scott David Moltke-Hansen (bio) Americans had to invent their nationalism. As David Waldstreicher has indicated, nationalism was a new phenomenon at the end of the Revolution.1 Another closely related feeling, however, was already familiar. Like the Protestant Irish, colonists in British America early developed their attachment to British traditions, institutions, and the monarchy into a culture of patriotism. They had multiple reasons. They wished to be co-equal in self-government and standing with the English in England, and they wanted to claim the benefits of British commerce and military protection against both native populations and foreign invaders. By the late 1760s, they also sought to ally themselves with the colonial policies of the Whig Party in England. To these ends, as Colin Kidd has noted, Americans, like the Anglo-Irish and 18th-century Scots, asserted "a Gothic heritage of liberty, laws and institutions."2 American Revolutionaries, in turn, used that mythic claim to justify their appropriation of the patriot label for themselves in their defense of British institutions and traditions of self-government against the monarchy. They argued that they were acting out of love of the body politic—the patria. In this way, a culture of patriotism continued through the Revolution. But this culture's parades and celebrations were used to promote not loyalty to a distant king or common antecedents, but to a shared future and government and the putatively traditional principles on which these were founded. American patriotism united people despite their widely divergent ethnic, religious, and geographic antecedents, attachments, and interests. Americans were developing a nationalism of hope, ideological commitment, and Revolutionary pride, but not of ethnic identity—not yet. At the same time as the former colonists were transforming their British patriotism into American nationalism, Sir Walter Scott began writing books that promoted British nationalism at home. He had a receptive public. Many in Britain accepted the Gothic heritage evoked by Scott. Moreover, in the wake of the loss of British colonies in America and in the midst of the wars with Napoleonic France (then also starting to explore its "Gothic" roots), a growing number of Britons were eager to embrace any allegiance that would unite ever more closely the English and the Scots across their common border. For Scott and his readers, nationalism was an antidote to, rather than an expression of, ethnic particularism. It also transferred to the state the feelings of attachment, loyalty, and identity that in earlier times had adhered at different levels to monarchs and nobles, to ecclesiastical authorities, and to clans and tribes. In making his case, Scott deconstructed both English and Scottish ethnicity, arguing that lowland and highland Scots were historically different peoples and describing the English as a fusion of Anglo-Saxon and Norman peoples and cultures. The process of amalgamation, furthermore, was continuing both within Scotland and between the Scots and the English. Click for larger view View full resolution Sir Walter Scott Scott's example inspired American writers to think about how literature could be used to promote nationalism. None more closely followed the Scottish writer than William Gilmore Simms of Charleston, South Carolina. Joining the new Young America circle in the late 1830s, he began to flesh out a coherent and consistent set of ideas about the relationship between literature and nationalism. He did this as he wrote southern romances that emulated Scott's Scottish border romances. Gradually, in the face of growing sectional tensions, these vigorously developed and expounded commitments led him as well through American nationalism to southern nationalism. In the end, Simms decided, nationalism should not unite, but rather should separate divergent peoples if and when and as they became strong enough to govern themselves. Americans had developed sufficient strength by 1776, and white Southerners soon would be strong enough to seek independence in their turn. In making this case, Simms did not argue that Americans were essentially a distinct people from the beginning. Instead, he contended that they had developed into a distinct people over time. The same process was playing out for white Southerners. Ethnicities emerged historically through the joint processes of amalgamation and differentiation or speciation...