American Nations by Colin Woodard
I.The Country Contains Multitudes
What is “Real America?” Is it the coastal cities older than the republic itself? Is it the rural interior? A small town? An immigrant community? An indigenous community?
Divisive questions to be sure. Colin Woodard’s answer would be none and all of those places are “Real America” and none and all of those people are “Real Americans.” That is because there is no such thing as “Real America” because America itself is not a single thing.
In his book, American Nations, Woodard claims the United States is not truly a single nation in the traditional sense, but a supranational federation. Its constituent nations are not defined by race or ethnicity, but by culture. Woodard identifies 11 “Real Americas”, each with a claim on the country’s history and heritage. Each with a right to be called an authentic expression of what it means to be an American, for good or ill. Eleven stateless, but real, nations.
To his credit, Woodard does not assume these nations fall neatly along existing state lines. The book provides a map with granularity down to the county level, but it is probably best not to take that too literally. One could argue where one nation begins and ends, but clearly New England is in a different nation than Alabama, which is different from the mountain states, which is different from the Midwest, etc. Also, each nation contains a full political spectrum with conservative Yankees and liberal southerners. The key concept is that these nations have real cultural and political effects on the existing states above them and U.S. history is defined by conflict among these hidden actors. I should note that while the identification and description of the nations are from Woodard, the specific groupings below are mine.
II.The American Triumvirate
As with any collection of nations, social, political, and economic influence are not evenly distributed. Events in U.S. history are dominated by the actions of the three great powers: Yankeedom, the Deep South, and Greater Appalachia.
Yankeedom
Yankeedom was founded by the Puritans in New England and spread across northern New York, the Great Lakes, and the northern prairie through Minnesota. The ultimate goal of Yankeedom is to establish a utopian society through the identification and punishment of collective guilt thereby leading to collective redemption. If one is sympathetic to the Yankees, one would say they are the moral center of the country, always pushing us towards a more perfect union and to be the “City on a Hill” we were meant to be. If one is unsympathetic, one would say they are a bunch of meddling busybodies, casting aside freedom in the name of the “greater good” while overturning long held traditions, with little to no regard of the damage inflicted until they move on to some other cause.
The Deep South
The Deep South starts at the Atlantic coast from the southern portion of North Carolina midway down Florida, then runs across the south between Tennessee and the Gulf of Mexico to east Texas. Founded by the slave lords of the Caribbean, the Deep South built massive and highly concentrated amounts of wealth through cotton produced by enslaved workers. This concentrated wealth led to concentrated power. Elites granted little to no political rights to the rest of the community and generally held them in low social esteem. This contempt for “common” people has been a permanent source of tension with the neighboring great power of Greater Appalachia.
Greater Appalachia
Greater Appalachia starts in the Appalachian Mountains of Virginia and pushes west along the Ohio River Valley, over the Mississippi River and into central and western Texas. Unlike the other two great powers it was not established as a cohesive and well-defined society, but rather a loose association of like minded settlers who rejected the societies of the Atlantic coast. The people are highly individualistic and skeptical of centralized authority, which empowers local elites. These elites can be no less authoritarian than the coastal elites Greater Appalachians reject, but they are able to command respect by paying homage to local values.
III.The Roleplayers
In the shadow of the three great powers are five minor nations. While these nations do not drive U.S. history, they are valuable as coalition partners and their allegiance or hostility to one of the great powers has been decisive in past conflicts. Two of these nations, Tidewater and the Left Coast, are closely related to the great powers of the Deep South and Yankeedom respectively. Two others, New Netherland and New France, are in essence city-states that define themselves in opposition to the surrounding region. The final minor nation is the Midlands, which acts as a type of buffer state between Yankeedom and Greater Appalachia.
Tidewater
Tidewater is the coastal region of Virginia and North Carolina as well as the Chesapeake parts of Maryland and most of Delaware. For most of its early history, Tidewater was one of the key players on the continent, supported by tobacco exports. However, Tidewater is eclipsed by the Deep South in the early 19th century in terms of economic and political importance for two main reasons. First, cotton surpasses tobacco as the United States’ premier export crop. Second, geography and Greater Appalachian settlement keeps Tidewater from expanding west and stifling any potential growth. By the time of the Civil War, Tidewater was the Greece to the Deep South’s Rome. As someone who has lived in what Woodard would call Tidewater for the past 15 years, in my view, it does not really exist anymore, having been partitioned between the Midlands in the north and Greater Appalachia in the west.
The Left Coast
The Left Coast is the strip of land between the Pacific coast and the mountains running from mid-way between Los Angeles and San Francisco up to the Canadian border. The Left Coast was originally settled by Yankees in the mid-19th century and the Left Coast has been a strong ally of Yankeedom. However, what sets it apart as a different nation is the large amount of Greater Appalachian and other settlers post gold rush, which create a fusion culture that incorporates some aspects of Yankeedom, such as utopian and collective thinking, but with a strong counterculture and anti-establishment strain.
New France
New France encompasses the greater New Orleans metropolitan area in the United States and Quebec in Canada. The New French opted for peaceful commerce and coexistence with the inhabitants of the new world. This coexistence would lead the New French to combine European, African, and Native American religions and traditions into a distinctive culture that was much more cosmopolitan and diverse than the strict racial hierarchy of the Deep South. New France plays a very small role in power politics among the regions, but wields a considerable amount of soft power via its cultural influence.
New Netherland
New Netherland is the greater New York City metropolitan area. Its tradition of accepting refugees fleeing political or religious persecution, and economic migrants comes from its early troubles attracting actual Dutch settlers. As the Netherlands had a very high standard of living very few middle-class Dutch families were willing to migrate to the new world, leaving the colonial authorities little choice but to throw open the gates of Manhattan to all comers. Founded as a commercial venture rather than a utopian one, New Netherland does not share Yankeedom’s communal or missionary spirit, instead valuing commerce and the individual. For much of U.S. history New Netherland and Yankeedom are at odds. Their seemingly tight-knit alliance now is a function of the current culture war.
The Midlands
The Midlands start in Philadelphia and run west in a thin line across the Midwest between Yankeedom and Greater Appalachia before broadening out in Iowa, spreading down into Oklahoma and up into the Dakotas. Founded as a pacifist society by the Quakers, the Midlanders lacked the Yankee’s missionary zeal and espoused tolerance over conversion. The Midlands would be defined by the constant inflow of (mostly German) immigrants, which would influence the culture of the nation as it pushed west alongside the Yankees. The border between the two nations becomes very ill-defined in areas like Wisconsin, with Milwaukee being more Midlands than Yankee.
IV.The Periphery
Finally, there are three nations that find themselves more acted upon by the great powers and their allies rather than actors: El Norte, The Far West, and First Nation.
El Norte
El Norte, consists of northern Mexico, the southern parts of California, Arizona, Texas, and most of New Mexico. Like Greater Appalachia, El Norte proved difficult for central authorities to administer given the terrain and vast distances between settlements. This isolation led to domination by local elites and there were strong and persistent secessionist movements throughout the region in the early 19th Century. Spurred by settlers and encouragement from the Deep South and Greater Appalachia, the most famous is Texas’ War of Independence. Greater Appalachia and the Deep South would later take large parts of Texas following this and the 1848 Mexican-American War.
The Far West
The Far West is the mountain and desert region of the western third of the United States. This region was largely inhospitable to eastern-style farming and so became dominated by capital intensive mining and ranching operations. Extremely low density also meant that transportation infrastructure was limited and monopolized. Since this economic development took place in the wake of the Civil War, most of these interests were dominated by Yankee and New Netherland capital. As a result, the Far West developed a populist movement hostile to the Northeast part of the country. The region is also home to many Mormons, who Woodard defines as an enclave rather than a nation unto itself.
First Nation
First Nation (Woodard’s term for Native Americans, specifically in Northern Canada, although I think this could apply across North America) is ironically the newest of the nations despite the name. For the most part, Native American societies and lands were areas of competitive settlement between the eastern nations. As the borders between established nations do not really shift, almost all territorial changes are a result of the western push into Native American lands.
V.The History of all Hitherto Existing American Society is the History of Regional Struggles
The 11 nations Woodard identifies are not terribly surprising and draws heavily on similar past works, which he dutifully references in the beginning of the book. To me, the interesting aspect of Woodard’s framework is its more ambitious goal of analyzing conflict among the nations as the primary driver of U.S. history. Shifting alliances, diplomatic revolutions, no permanent friends or enemies, just permanent interests. There are three major wars among the nations to define the “American System” for that era. The stakes are such that we would consider them World Wars if they happened among recognized nation-state alliances.
The American Revolution
In Woodard’s telling, the American Revolution was not a single war between U.S. revolutionary forces (along with their French allies, indeed the French get little mention at all in this book) and the British, but six different, parallel wars between Britain along with her loyalist nations allies and the revolutionary coalition.
On the revolutionary side was Yankeedom, Greater Appalachia, Tidewater (still a major power at this point) and, to some extent, the Deep South. The Yankees kicked off the conflict with a popular uprising in response to British encroachments on what they saw as their traditional rights. Tidewater also joins the war early, more offended by British attempts to treat them as subjects instead of peers rather than any abstract political concerns. Most of Greater Appalachia sides with the revolutionary coalition, with the deciding factor being whether neighboring elites the local group of Greater Appalachians wanted to fight were loyal or revolutionary. The Deep South ambivalently joins the revolutionary coalition early on, but in Woodard’s telling folds pretty quickly once the British invade in 1778.
Remaining loyal were New Netherland and the Midlands. New Netherland was concerned about Yankee domination of the region in the absence of the British and so became a loyalist redoubt. The Midlands may not have had any great love for the United Kingdom, but given their pacifist nature, wanted to remain neutral. This attempt failed following what amounted to a foreign intervention and invasion by Greater Appalachia – which plunged both Pennsylvania and New Jersey into chaos.
This section, while interesting, ultimately shows some of the weaknesses of applying the framework of international conflict to a group of stateless nations. Four of the six existing nations sided with the revolutionaries, with only New Netherland really opposing independence (the Midlands seemed to favor neutrality over an active pro-UK stance.) Woodard would say that the Greater Appalachian victory over the Midlands in Pennsylvania and Yankee domination of New York produced a unanimity that was not really present, but the fact remains that there was one Declaration of Independence and one Treaty of Paris ending the war – not several. Also, French contributions as a result of U.S. diplomacy are not really touched upon nor the concurrent implication that the French certainty saw themselves allying with a singular polity. Ultimately though, a weak version of Woodard’s thesis makes a lot of sense, instead of six different wars, maybe six different theaters and phases of the war.
The Civil War
In contrast, Woodard’s framework is expectedly strongest when analyzing an actual large-scale conflict among the states. In this analysis, the U.S. Civil War is not fought between two homogenous factions – Union and Confederate, but something much more like Europe’s complex alliance structure on the eve of the First World War.
By mid-century, decades of industrialization and immigration had tipped the economic and political scales in favor of the northern nations over the southern ones. However, this only put Yankeedom into a first-among-equals position rather than anything close to hegemony. Coupled with the Deep South essentially converting Tidewater into a satellite state, this meant that any attempt by Yankeedom to enforce unionism or abolitionism on the Deep South alone would be doomed to failure.
A successful war against the Deep South would require Yankeedom to achieve two things.
First, they must have the full backing of the other free state nations, the Midlands and New Netherland.
Second, Greater Appalachia must not side with the Deep South. As Lincoln is reported to have said, “I hope to have God on my side, but I must have Kentucky.”
The first could only be achieved by making sure the Deep South bears the odium of aggression, allowing the Yankees to frame the war as a defensive struggle to save the United States. Woodard discusses how prior to the Confederate attack on Fort Sumter, the Midlands was making plans to establish a new confederacy of buffer states between Yankeedom and the Deep South in the event the union dissolved. New Netherland, eager to keep commercial connections with the southern regions, also was opposed to any unnecessary wars of Yankee aggression.
The Deep South obliges Yankeedom by firing on Fort Sumter, allowing Yankeedom to rally the Midlands and New Netherland around the flag. Without this, it is possible that one or both of the nations may have resisted the call for war and while being stateless they probably could not have opted fully out of the war, it would pose an incredible challenge for the North to win in a divided state.
For the second, Yankeedom also gets some unintended assistance from the Deep South, although one that had been long in coming. The Deep South thought that as much of Greater Appalachia was in slave states, they would be natural allies in a war against abolitionist Yankees. However, Greater Appalachia had a fully rational reason to oppose the Deep South, despite being on the same side of the slave-free divide.
The U.S. Civil War was not about mere slavery (i.e. can a person own another person?), but about SLAVERY, an entire system where a handful of elites owned almost all the slaves and dominated economic, social, and political life. A system where the White middle class more or less did not exist and poor whites were shut out of any opportunity for advancement. Woodard notes that within the White-Black racial binary in the Deep South, there was also a hierarchy of White people, with the Whites of the Deep South and Tidewater having a God-given inherent right to rule and the Whites of Appalachia having a natural place as servants.
While Greater Appalachia may not have cared about freedom and emancipation for enslaved Black people, they did deeply care about the common White person avoiding, if not slavery, serfdom. In Greater Appalachia’s analysis, Yankees could be annoying with their moral crusades, but a Deep South victory, in particular a Confederacy dominated by the Deep South, posed an existential threat to Greater Appalachia’s vital national interests.
Following this framework, we can also see how the story of reconstruction is the story of the collapse of a wartime alliance. Much like the dissolution of the Allies following the First World War, once the threat posed by the Deep South is gone, national interests reassert themselves. Greater Appalachia, seeing the Deep South as a threat no more, goes back to seeing Yankee meddling as the main threat to their liberty. The Midlands and New Netherland lose their appetite for the cost of the social engineering reconstruction would entail. Yankeedom, unable to fight for reconstruction on its own, would be forced to abandon the effort for nearly a century.
The Civil Rights Movement and the Culture War
The final major conflict is the multiple civil rights and other rights movements arising out of the 1950s and 1960s that shape the United States today. We generally refer to this as the “Culture War.”
In the decades following the end of Reconstruction, Yankeedom had searched in vain for a way back into the affairs of the Deep South. Attempts, such as the 1890 Force Bill to allow for greater federal oversight and regulation of elections, were defeated by New Netherland opposition (in addition to Deep South opposition of course.) The civil rights protests of Black Deep Southerners in the 1950s would provide the opening Yankeedom needed. Throughout the Deep South, northern activists provided support to Deep South Black protests from the Montgomery Bus Boycott through Selma. Similar to Fort Sumter, once the conflict became a fight to preserve the larger system such as enforcing Supreme Court rulings, a broader northern coalition could form, for example, with Midlander President Eisenhower sending the U.S. Army to Little Rock in 1957 to enforce school desegregation.
Importantly, Woodard notes that Greater Appalachia accepted desegregation more quickly and with less resistance than the Deep South. The Greater Appalachian states of Missouri, Tennessee, and Kentucky do not follow the Deep South in supporting the Thurmondcandidacy in 1948, Goldwater in 1964, or Wallace in 1968. Interestingly, the Tidewater states of North Carolina and Virginia also do not follow, perhaps signally the beginning of the end as Tidewater both as a Deep South satellite and as a separate nation.
As with Reconstruction, the Deep South is able to turn things around when it can present itself to the other nations not as a troublemaker and threat to the system, but as a source of stability and order. The youth revolts and other movements (anti-war protests, feminism, secularism, etc.) in the 1960s and 1970s in the northern nations, gave the Deep South this chance. Conservative forces were able to flip the Midlands and Greater Appalachia in their triumphs of 1972 and 1984, turning back the more far-reaching dreamers of Yankeedom. By the 21st century (this book was published in 2011), the front lines in the culture war have settled into the familiar Red vs. Blue stalemate.
VI.All Models are Wrong, some are Useful
So, what to make of Woodard’s analysis?
One can take issue with exactly how and where he lays out the various nations.
First, I think the Mormon community merits more than just being called an enclave. Given the social and political differences between it and the rest of the Far West (communal vs individual), it deserves further analysis.
Second, there is no mention of southern Florida. This is because Woodard does not even consider the southern third of Florida to be part of the “American Nations” (it gets labeled as part of the Spanish Caribbean.) As someone who grew up there, perhaps you could make a case that Miami is its own thing, I would say that while Miami itself may be a separate culture the suburbs in that area would most likely rate as some mix of New Netherland, Midlands, and Greater Appalachia. Its development and role in U.S. history should be part of this analysis.
Finally, obviously I cannot say what impact this book had on the Clinton campaign’s 2016 strategy, but I will say that if one were to read this book and truly internalize the idea there is a unified Yankeedom running from Boston to Minneapolis, that person would probably be a strong believer in the idea of a “Blue Wall.” Woodard even notes that the Yankeedom states supported the same presidential candidate from 1988 to 2008 (the most recent election of the book’s publication). I would say that assumption should be revisited and instead there are two Yankeedoms, a New England one and a New Yankeedom that is much more influenced by the Midlands around the Great Lakes.
However, that is just tinkering around the edges and adjusting some aspects of the model. Is the model itself useful? I would say yes, for two reasons.
First, it shows that the United States is much more diverse and much more complicated than merely a land of two tribes, Red and Blue. While there are many factors that drive history (Woodard mostly ignores the role of class conflict), it would be difficult, if not impossible, to understand the United States and its history without understanding the regional conflict described in this book. There have been, and will continue to be, profound differences among nations we today consider to be in lockstep. This is not a new argument – and Woodard dutifully references the many authors who have written on similar themes before. However, given the discourse of the past 20 years or so, this is a useful reminder.
This leads to the second point. This book destroys the ridiculous notion that the United States could ever have anything close to a clean “National Divorce.” It would be impossible to split the country into a Red and Blue America and even if it were to be attempted, each nation would most likely quickly collapse into regional fighting. A stable equilibrium, if not all the way down to the 50 states, would be something like the dozen or nations Woodard envisions. And of course, as noted, the ethnic or cultural national lines would not cleanly fit into existing political boundaries, with pockets of groups stuck on the “wrong side” of a border – which has always been a recipe for instability and conflict.
In a way, what we have now is the true Pax Americana. Regional (what Woodard’s framework would call national) interests, rivalries, and yes, hatreds are contested in the halls of Congress or over electoral college maps rather than the battlefield. This is what the Founders understood when drafting the Constitution. In the absence of a strong federal state, the result would not be peaceful coexistence but endless war.