<i>Indivisible: Daniel Webster and the Birth of American Nationalism.</i> By Joel Richard Paul

Among the commendable qualities of Joel Richard Paul's Indivisible, two clearly stand out: first, the book's sense of mission, its determination to bring the first half of America's nineteenth century to dynamic, even offensive life. And secondly, for all its understandable darkness—the last paragraph finds Ralph Waldo Emerson wandering the beach, as desolate after Daniel Webster's death as Lord Byron was after Percy Bysshe Shelley's—Indivisible bobs on a strong current of optimism. We know where this story is going; Paul does not hide the fact that, for all his fame and success, Webster's career was tragic and foretold the nation's greater tragedy. But the book prefers to focus on what came before and what it judges to have been fundamental: a sense of national coherence resting on constitutional order. For Paul, the nationalism of his subtitle equals union, and union equals Webster.It is strange, then, that this giant, on whose shoulders so much seems to stand, is an obscure presence in the book. He disappears for long stretches. Yes, we are reacquainted with Webster in the round: his triumphant speeches, his dissolute habits, his forehead. But Indivisible is not, and does not try to be, a biography. For the most colorful details, the author relies on Robert Remini's life of Webster. Paul, a law professor, is at his best when blending the biographical with an incisive analysis of the cases like Gibbons v. Ogden—the Dartmouth College case, that were crucial to Webster's career and to our national jurisprudence. Still, for most of the book, Webster is not the motive force at hand.Webster's celebrity is a fascinating subject, both for its intensity and its impermanence. Paul's core argument does not convince, even if readers allow that antebellum nationalism was constitutional respect masquerading as a schoolboy crush, a love note in the language of Webster's second reply to Hayne. Sensing, perhaps, that his version of nationalism didn't thrive beyond its peculiar habitat or moment, Paul turns to the shortcomings of other rival nationalisms. Andrew Jackson (and all he represents) is the volcano smoldering in the near distance, but Indivisible prefers to look away: that was populism, not nationalism. Paul mentions the U.S. Capitol riot of January 6, 2021—just before the book's publication—to dismiss the Jacksonian strain as aberrant.To Paul's credit, he studies the impact of literary nationalism—the literati admired Webster too, for a while—but his instinct is to underplay it. His Webster looms larger in our culture than Nathaniel Hawthorne's Puritans or Washington Irving's Knickerbockers—or does he? Paul spends some time with Irving but neglects his History of New York. That was the young Irving's attempt to de-Anglicize the country's colonial past and decenter the American Revolution as its consummate event. The first effort was prophetic; people without Yankee connections embraced American patriotism. The second effort was a failure, as an older Irving conceded with the popular biography of his namesake.Abraham Lincoln, once one of the boys who hung on Webster's every word, struck an enduring, poetic balance in the Gettysburg Address. The past was distilled down to one moment of clarity—1776, four-score-and-seven—which all citizens could claim as their own. The other colonial and cultural niceties (expounded upon that same day and at exhaustive length by Webster's friend, Edward Everett) did not matter. And what mattered most was that Lincoln spoke at a battlefield, a graveyard. Graduate students remember “Liberty and Union.” And they should, as the phrase and its inventor are important historical artifacts. But for Indivisible’s target audience, “Union” is a term inseparable from the Civil War: the Union Army, saving the Union. The term is another bloody shirt. Nationalism in most of its forms, and certainly the popular one, is too gory for seamless acceptance or comfort.