United by Necessity: How the American Revolution Averted Civil War

Deconstructed

The Intercept

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4.8 • 4.7K Ratings

🗓️ 4 August 2023

⏱️ 40 minutes

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Summary

In a provocative new book, historian Eli Merritt argues that the Thirteen Colonies only overcame their differences and united into a single entity due to an existential fear of civil war, collapse, and invasion. That fear is now gone. This week on Deconstructed, Merritt joins Ryan Grim to discuss his new book, “Disunion Among Ourselves: The Perilous Politics of the American Revolution.” Merritt argues that the founders — motivated by surviving as an independent government — united to avoid a civil war between the colonies. The “survivalist interpretation” of the nation’s founding, he explains, led to a historic “shotgun wedding”: a compromise-laden journey leading to the Declaration of Independence and a failure to confront slavery.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Deconstructed. I'm Ryan Grimm on today's episode. We are joined by Eli Meredith,
0:10.1	a political historian at Vanderbilt University, and he's the author of the new book, Disunion
0:15.2	Among Ourselves, the perilous politics of the American Revolution. Eli, thanks for joining
0:20.4	me. Great to be with you, Ryan. And so I'm not kind of steeped in all of the different
0:25.8	historiography around this period. So can you just set the tone a little bit by telling
0:32.0	us what is new in the kind of disunionist versus the kind of unionist literature that
0:38.1	had come before? Because I know as somebody who writes books myself, I don't actually have
0:43.5	to be kind of new. I can just kind of write the same story that other people have written
0:47.3	and write it a little bit differently and with better interviews and a little bit better
0:50.7	style. And that's okay for a journalistic nonfiction book, but I know in the kind of academic
0:57.1	world you've got to be breaking new ground. So what's the new ground that you would say
1:00.5	you're breaking with this book? Yeah, I think that in its overall premises, this book,
1:05.6	it's about the American Revolution. It really highlights some things that we get wrong about
1:11.1	our understanding of that first founding seven or eight years. And what that is is when
1:16.4	we think of the American Revolution, there's a general consensus over several centuries
1:20.8	that what the founders of the nation feared most was the power and might of the British
1:26.5	Army and Navy. And when you read the text closely, meaning their letters and their speeches,
1:32.6	what you find is in fact that that's not correct. What they feared most was disunion leading
1:37.6	to civil wars among themselves. And so the concept or the emotion of fear has always
1:43.8	been of great interest to me. So long before I started researching this book, I had come
1:49.2	to the conclusion that fear is the number one motivator of human behavior. And so that's
1:53.8	the approach I took to the book. And it really is very true. We think of the founders as
	...

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