Nationalism from the Grass Roots: Civil Society and American Identity, 1776–1865

Prominent theorists of nationalism suggest that nationalism originates among elites. To some, such as Reinhold Niebuhr and Eric Hobsbawm, elites deploy nationalist rhetoric to sustain the loyalties of a restive population. In Hobsbawm’s famous phrase, elite nationalists create “invented traditions” to connect ordinary people to a particular nation-state. To others, like Benedict Anderson, nationalism originates among creole elites who, sensitive to their own position relative to the world, and participating in a wider reading public, come to think of themselves as nationals.

Many scholars of the United States tend to follow these assumptions. More important, critics of the American national history tradition, and national histories in general, argue that national histories reinforce nationalism instead of embracing globalization and/or pluralism.                

This paper challenges these assumptions. It argues that American nationalism developed from the grass roots, from daily activities in civil society. Nationalism requires institutional outlets, sites in which nationalism is “performed.” To many Americans those outlets were the institutions of civil society—churches, reform associations, and political parties. By participating in the local activities of voluntary associations, ordinary Americans helped create and sustain American identity. In fact, they built it for themselves. We therefore cannot see the formation of American nationalism simply as a top-down affair but rather must recognize the role of ordinary citizens in transforming the United States from a colonial society of “Britons” into one composed of “Americans.”

My paper will not only explore the development of American national identity but will, I hope, urge listeners to rethink the critique of national historiography more generally. It asks whether historians, in their passion to globalize historiography, rob ordinary people of their identity.