It’s notable that our national songs do not resemble this crusading, blood-thirsty nonsense until our civil war when songs like the Battle Hymn of the Republic emerged. Then a more strictly ideological concept of America which demanded uniformity and defined our countrymen as traitors emerged. What a sad time. But the “creedal nation” reductionism is scandalized by our patriotic songs. Let’s remind these neoconservatives, who would strip away our country’s other more traditional aspects of identy, of how mistaken they are by remembering our history and traditions, many of which are still in living memory like our patriotic songs.

Americans of both the Red & Blue persuasions might well be shocked to learn the French were so bloodthirsty a bunch, since we’ve come to associate them with stuff like fine wine, cheese, and making love with their faces….

Let’s go children of the fatherland,
The day of glory has arrived!
Against us tyranny’s
Bloody flag is raised! (repeat)
In the countryside, do you hear
The roaring of these fierce soldiers?
They come right to our arms
To slit the throats of our sons, our friends!

Refrain

Grab your weapons, citizens!
Form your batallions!
Let us march! Let us march!
May impure blood
Water our fields!

This horde of slaves, traitors, plotting kings,
What do they want?
For whom these vile shackles,
These long-prepared irons? (repeat)
Frenchmen, for us, oh! what an insult!

What emotions that must excite!
It is us that they dare to consider
Returning to ancient slavery!

What! These foreign troops
Would make laws in our home!
What! These mercenary phalanxes
Would bring down our proud warriors! (repeat)

Good Lord! By chained hands
Our brows would bend beneath the yoke!
Vile despots would become
The masters of our fate!

Tremble, tyrants! and you, traitors,
The disgrace of all groups,
Tremble! Your parricidal plans
Will finally pay the price! (repeat)
Everyone is a soldier to fight you,
If they fall, our young heros,
France will make more,
Ready to battle you!

Frenchmen, as magnanimous warriors,
Bear or hold back your blows!
Spare these sad victims,
Regretfully arming against us. (repeat)

But not these bloodthirsty despots,
But not these accomplices of Bouillé,
All of these animals who, without pity,
Tear their mother’s breast to pieces!

Sacred love of France,
Lead, support our avenging arms!
Liberty, beloved Liberty,
Fight with your defenders! (repeat)
Under our flags, let victory
Hasten to your manly tones!
May your dying enemies
See your triumph and our glory!

Refrain

We will enter the pit
When our elders are no longer there;
There, we will find their dust
And the traces of their virtues. (repeat)
Much less eager to outlive them
Than to share their casket,
We will have the sublime pride
Of avenging them or following them!

Refrain

I think to speak in generalities we had commonalities and differences then as now. And then more than now those differences were defined by regional cultures, the predominance of slave-holding, regional cultures imported from England, geography, and probaly other factors too.

I think a nation can exist without a state requiring an “indsoluble” union. The German nation, for instance, once stretched from Germany to Austria to East Prussia and a smattering of villages across Eastern Europe. And the Indian and Chinese diasporas today have created a kind of multi-state nation of Chinese, just as the diaspora Jews were once a nation in many respects without a country or a state in which they were coexstensive.

So, I think we were a people, but also peoples. But the exact contours of that relationship is hard for me to gauge. I studied the ideology of the American Revolution pretty extesnsively in college and after, but the opposition, not so much.

First, let me state that I agree with the proposition that America is more than just a creed (which, I take it, we agree is stated in the Declaration of Independence). What, however, happened prior to July 4 (America’s “birthday”) that created the “American” people (inhabiting 13 separate English colonies) which distinguished that people from the English-speakers still in England and elsewhere? Were the inhabitants of Canada at the time of the Revolution simply “Americans” who chose not to go along with the whole independence thing, in which case the only real differences between them and the “Americans” were the government to which they gave their allegiance and their refusal to accept the American “creed”?

It seems to me this discussion goes straight to the heart of what was at stake in the Civil War. Chris’s post appears to presume that the United States is a “country,” which seems to me another way of saying it’s an indisoluble union. (Remember that Robert E. Lee referred to Virginia as his “country.”) I agree with Chris’s proposition but struggle to define what created the American “country” other than the Declaration of Independence (which I beleive Jefferson and Madison referred to as the “act of Union”).

Anxious for thoughts on all this.

You are correct that some characterised the war as the second war for independence, and there is a certain ring of truth to this characterisation (though our real independence from British finance never really happened during the 19th century). It is worth noting, however, that this phrase about the second war of independence comes from Calhoun, who was at that time a very excited War Hawk. He was liable to make the war into something perhaps a little more grand and high-minded than it was. It did become, very quickly, a purely defensive struggle because of the remarkable failure (as usual) of our Canadian campaigns, and certainly victory at New Orleans secured the West for us and made sure that we would not be hemmed in by the British on two sides.