Independence and Union: Imperfect Unions in Revolutionary Anglo-America
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Independence or union? Alone or connected? In revolutionary America, this was a false choice. Most defined the choice of revolution—the choice for the North American provinces, and for themselves—as between remaining in one complex polity and creating another. The choice was between competing unions. But there had always been more than one union in the colonists’ Atlantic world, and, after independence, the possibilities for association proliferated. The Age of Revolutions witnessed an astounding array of imaginative plans for integrating peoples, places, and ideas. Only in retrospect does the reciprocity between independence and union seem paradoxical. Many still remember that the Declaration of Independence “dissolve[d]” the “political connections” to Great Britain, but not Congress’s simultaneous assumption of the power to “contract alliances, establish commerce, and to do all other acts and things which independent states may of right do.” Although Patrick Henry’s demand for “liberty or death” may have rallied some to the cause, Benjamin Franklin’s repeated injunction to “join, or die” better captured revolutionary imperatives. Similarly, most recall President Washington’s warning in his Farewell Address to “steer clear” of political and military alliances, rather than his administration’s pursuit of international integration along almost every other dimension, or what he called “harmony [and] liberal intercourse with all nations.” Peaceful rather than defensive unions were the key to the nation’s success. Early Americans built their independence-through-union projects along three intersecting planes: the national, the international, and the trans- national. American national projects for independence and union included the most well-known examples: The independence of the thirteen revolutionary states and their cooperation in the Continental Congress, under the Articles of Confederation, and eventually in “a more perfect” union under the federal Constitution of 1787. Projects for international union included negotiated cooperation through treaties and indirect coordination through the law of nations, which was supposed to regulate the interaction of early modern nations in lieu of or auxiliary to treaty relations. White North Americans were not, however, the only international union-makers in the Americas. Other associations included real and imagined unions among different polities, such as serial Native American confederations designed to challenge the United States’ claims to the western territories; British and Spanish attempts to establish multinational Native American barrier states east of the Mississippi River and insulate their colonies from American expansion; and the effort of Latin Americans to unite in their own unions—even, in some recurrent imaginings, in a Pan-American union that would include the United States. Finally, Americans forged transnational unions to coordinate activity across borders. These included commercial unions, religious societies, as well as what some began calling “human rights” associations, such as the movements to end the Atlantic slave trade and to spread republican self-government. People stacked their memberships in these unions, as subjects or citizens, adherents to international treaties, and associates in organizations that transcended the nation, rearranging them as their interests and circumstances required. This three-plane division is admittedly schematic and misleading, for most unions mixed all three dimensions, and each depended on the others. National and international spheres interpenetrated as a matter of definition; the boundaries between them were contested. The point of greatest connection—and friction—was law. Some in the United States exploited the contact between the law of nations and American law to further projects for international integration, at home among the states and abroad, while others sought to separate them more clearly to pursue their different projects. Together they participated in a transnational dialogue about what it meant to be a “civilized nation.” Similarly, builders of transnational unions depended on national and international law for their projects: treaties and an increasingly transnational commercial law, as well as municipal charters of incorporation, local judicial remedies, and transnational networks of lawyers. They operated beyond and across nations, but rarely outside them.
Source Publication
Cambridge History of America and the World
Source Editors/Authors
Eliga Gould, Paul Mapp, Carla Gardina Pestana
Publication Date
2022
Volume Number
1: 1500-1820
Recommended Citation
Hulsebosch, Daniel J., "Independence and Union: Imperfect Unions in Revolutionary Anglo-America" (2022). Faculty Chapters. 899.
https://gretchen.law.nyu.edu/fac-chapt/899
