Even after a century of intense “nation talk” in Europe and the Americas, the French philosopher Ernest Renan felt moved to ask in 1882 “What is a Nation?” There yet remained he said questions that a “thoughtful person would wish to have settled in order to put his mind at rest.” In particular, Renan puzzled at the relationship between principles of nationality and principles of race. Treating race in terms synonymous with ethnicity Renan asked how it was that Switzerland, with three languages, two religions and three or four “races” was a nation. Why did Europeans continue to find “Poland” a meaningful term even though any such national territory had been partitioned out of existence? Why were nations not synonymous with races and states not synonymous with nations? In the United States questions concerning the relationship between race, nationality and the political state were as far from being settled by the Constitution as they were in the Europe that emerged from the Napoleonic Wars. As the descendants of enslaved, coerced or voluntary migrants drawn from two continents neither white nor black Americans could follow the organic path to nationhood described in the late eighteenth-century by Romantic nationalists like Johann Gottlieb Fichte: a model wherein peoples, acting on their own cultural characteristics, seamlessly created nations reflecting their particular qualities. (America’s native peoples were the only inhabitants of the continent who could lay claim to form of national development). For many white Americans the continued enslavement of African-Americans, buttressed as it was by attributions of racial inferiority and superiority, transcended their ethnic, religious and political divisions and held “their” country together. But the institution of slavery, and the racial thinking it reflected and promoted, also introduced destabilising definitions of nationality to the white republic.
