Holding the Early US Together

From Tyler Cowen's interview with historian Alan Taylor:

COWEN: A very general question. You’ve written about this in a number of your books, but many early commentators, especially in Britain, in Canada, even in America, some of the Founding Fathers, they were very afraid the American republic was going to collapse. It was too large, too chaotic, some thought too democratic. What exactly did they get wrong, the people who thought that? What did they fail to see? Because those arguments did not sound crazy at the time, right?

TAYLOR: No, they didn’t sound crazy at the time. They weren’t crazy to worry about it, in that the United States did fall apart in 1860 to 1861. And it took an enormous effort, very expensive effort in terms of lives and money to put Humpty Dumpty back together again. They had spent a long time ever since 1776 worrying about what actually did happen in 1860 to 1861. You could say, “Yes, they fended it off for 90 years.”

There’s a recurrent sense of crisis within the American republic through much of that period of time, because there’s just fear that some region within the country would be growing too powerful, or there’s a recurrent fear that the country is getting too large. You’re getting Americans that now live on the Pacific coast. It was an open question whether those American states would spin off and create their own country. A lot of things still seem to be possible.

It’s also important to remember that the form of government that they were gambling on, a republic, had not worked very well in the past in Europe. It had never been tried on this geographic scale. They don’t yet have the confidence that their institutions will be durable. Surviving the Civil War is an enormous confidence booster that the United States will hold together, despite its great internal diversity and despite its geographic scale. Before that success in the Civil War, that confidence was absent.