From Pluribus to Unum? The Civil War and Imagined Sovereignty in 19th Century America

Summary:

Contestation over the structure and location of final sovereign authority – the right to make and enforce binding rules – occupies a central role in political development. Historically, war often settled these debates and institutionalized the victor’s vision. Yet sovereign authority requires more than institutions; it ultimately rests on the recognition of the governed. How does war shape imagined sovereignty? We explore the effect of warfare in the United States, where the debate over two competing visions of sovereignty erupted into the American Civil War. We exploit the grammatical shift in the “United States” from a plural to a singular noun as a measure of imagined sovereignty, drawing upon two large textual corpuses: newspapers (1800–1899) and Congressional speeches (1851–1899). We demonstrate that war shapes imagined sovereignty, but for the North only. Our results suggest that Northern Republicans played an important role as ideological entrepreneurs in bringing about this shift.

Bio:

Melissa M. Lee is Assistant Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University. She studies the international and domestic politics of state-building and state development. Professor Lee is the author of Crippling Leviathan: How Foreign Subversion Weakens the State (Cornell University Press, 2020). Her research has also been published in the American Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics, International Organization, and the Annual Review of Political Science, and her policy writing has appeared in Foreign Affairs. Her work has received the American Political Science Association’s 2016 Helen Dwight Reid (now Merze Tate) award, APSA’s European Politics and Society Section 2020 Best Article Prize, and Perry World House’s Emerging Scholar Global Policy Prize. In AY2020-21, she was in residence at the University of Pennsylvania as the Perry World House Lightning Scholar. Professor Lee received her Ph.D. in Political Science from Stanford University and her B.A. in Political Science from the University of California - San Diego.