American Republics: A Continental History of the United States, 1783-1850
By Alan Taylor
W. W. Norton & Company, 2021
★★★★★

Bottom Line Up Front: Taylor delivers a masterful deconstruction of American exceptionalism that every educator and student of early American history needs to read. This is essential scholarship disguised as compelling narrative.

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Two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Alan Taylor has crafted a devastating and necessary corrective to the sanitized mythology that has long dominated American historical education. “American Republics” forms a trilogy with two earlier works, “American Colonies” (2001) and “American Revolutions” (2016), representing what amounts to a complete reimagining of how we understand the first decades of the American republic.

Dismantling Founding Father Mythology

Taylor’s greatest contribution lies in his unflinching examination of the profound contradictions and moral failures that characterized the early republic. Rather than the confident march toward manifest destiny taught in most classrooms, Taylor reveals an era of “manifest uncertainty” and terrible tragedy for many of the continent’s inhabitants. He systematically exposes how most of the Founding Fathers didn’t intend to create a democracy but instead designed a national republic to restrain state democracies, and most believed that preserving slavery was the price to pay for holding the fragile Union together.

The book ruthlessly documents how the United States started in a position of weakness, “built on an unstable foundation of rival regions and an ambiguous constitution”, with the Founding Fathers themselves voicing deep anxieties about whether the nation would survive at all. This is not the heroic narrative of inevitability that dominates most textbooks.

Native American Agency and Cherokee Republican Aspirations

One of Taylor’s most significant achievements is his nuanced portrayal of Native American political sophistication and resistance. The immersive narrative puts us on the streets of the Cherokee capital, New Echota, revealing how Indigenous peoples were not passive victims but active political agents who sought to defend their homelands from the flood of American settlers through strategic alliances with the other continental powers.

The Cherokee experience serves as a particularly powerful case study. The Cherokees who once inhabited present-day Georgia actually attempted assimilation, transitioning from hunting and gathering to agriculture, living in wooden houses, learning English, creating a written language. Their efforts to establish what amounted to a modern constitutional republic within their ancestral lands directly challenged American assumptions about Indigenous “savagery” and exposed the hypocrisy of American claims to spread civilization and democracy.

Taylor demonstrates how Native American political innovations, particularly in constitutional governance and federal structures, influenced both Canadian and American governmental development throughout the early 1800s. The book shows that the fate of the Cherokees proved to be indicative of what lay in store for the rest of the indigenous as the new nation grew and the hunger for land exploded, revealing how American expansion systematically destroyed sophisticated Indigenous political systems.

International Complications and Filibustering

Taylor excels in his analysis of how American territorial ambitions created international crises that presidents consistently tried to avoid but were ultimately forced to confront. The book meticulously documents the activities of American filibusters—private military adventurers who operated beyond official government sanction but with tacit approval. Taylor provides arresting biographical detail for figures such as Stephen F. Austin and Mexican strongman Antonio de Lopez Santa Anna, showing how American settlement in Texas violated the terms of land grants and created a diplomatic nightmare for Washington.

The author reveals how Mexico’s efforts to “Mexicanize” American settlers predictably failed. The largely Protestant American settlers rejected Catholicism and embraced slavery, which violated the terms of their land grants. Andrew Jackson’s role in these complications emerges as particularly damaging, with Taylor portraying Jackson as a vindictive and violent authoritarian who repeatedly violated the rule of law in his quest for power.

Continental Perspective and Multiple Republics

What sets this work apart is Taylor’s truly continental scope. He shifts his frame of reference to see events from multiple vantages: British, French and Spanish; Canadian, Mexican and Haitian; Seminole, Cherokee and Metis; enslaved people and abolitionists; women’s rights campaigners and Spanish-speaking Tejanos. This multinational approach reveals how Spain had freed its enslaved people in Florida and given them political rights, but the United States reversed both on acquiring the territory, demonstrating that American expansion often represented a step backward for human freedom rather than progress.

The book’s treatment of Haiti, Mexico, and Canada as equal players in North American development challenges the traditional narrative that treats these nations as mere footnotes to American expansion. Taylor shows how the short-lived Lone Star Republic was the continent’s most proslavery regime, illustrating how American territorial expansion was fundamentally about extending and strengthening slavery rather than spreading liberty.

Essential Resource for Educators

This book represents an invaluable resource for high school US history teachers and college students studying the early American republic. The author presents familiar subjects—events, wars, laws, treaties—in fresh, thought-provoking ways, making it perfect for challenging students’ preconceptions about American exceptionalism. The work provides extensive documentation for classroom discussions about the routine and organized violence: the United States invaded Canada, Florida, Texas, and much of Mexico, and forcibly removed most of the Native peoples living east of the Mississippi.

For educators seeking to provide students with a more honest and complete understanding of American development, Taylor’s work represents a critical achievement for historical scholarship, as well as a powerful antidote to the propaganda that formerly tarnished studies of the American Experience. The book offers concrete examples and detailed analysis that can help students understand how white supremacy disfigured U.S. politics, underwrote westward expansion, and remade the lives of North America’s diverse peoples.

Scholarly Rigor Meets Accessible Narrative

Despite tackling complex themes across multiple nations and cultures, Taylor is always a consummate guide to the early republic, maintaining narrative momentum while providing rigorous scholarship. Taylor’s elegant history offers indelible miniatures of key characters from Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth to Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Margaret Fuller, making abstract historical forces tangible through compelling human stories.

The book successfully balances comprehensive coverage with readability, though there is simply too much material to capably cover in less than four hundred pages, despite the talented pen and brilliant analytical skills of Alan Taylor. This density actually strengthens its value as a reference work for serious students and educators.

Final Assessment

“American Republics” is required reading for anyone seeking to understand how the United States actually developed rather than how we have been taught it developed. Taylor has produced a work that is simultaneously devastating to American mythologies and essential for genuine American patriotism—the kind that acknowledges our actual history rather than a sanitized fantasy.

For educators committed to preparing students for thoughtful citizenship in a diverse democracy, this book provides the intellectual foundation necessary to understand both the deep roots of contemporary American divisions and the historical precedents for our ongoing struggles with questions of inclusion, justice, and national identity. “Absorbing and chilling, American Republics illuminates the continuities between our own social and political divisions and the events of this formative period”.

Recommended for: Advanced high school students, college courses on early American history, educators seeking comprehensive historical context, anyone interested in understanding the real foundations of American political development.

Content Warning: Contains detailed discussions of slavery, violence against Indigenous peoples, and systematic racism that some readers may find disturbing but which are essential to understanding American historical development.

This is part of a collection of book and movie reviews intended to help educators. I have read/screened of of these books and at times included excerpts in my classroom over the years and highly recommend them. Keep in mind that not all classrooms are the same and every educator should evaluate school and district recommendations before using any book, movie, or podcast in classes.
To read more of my reviews follow the link.