Joel Richard Paul’s Indivisible: Daniel Webster and the Birth of American Nationalism seeks to pull from our past different concepts that affect our politics today, particularly populism and nationalism, by telling the story of how “while the Union was falling apart, our American identity was taking place.” He credits New England statesman Daniel Webster as the primary driver of the “national constitutionalism” that helped prop up this identity by serving as “an antidote to Jackson’s toxic populism” and the state-compact version of nationalism espoused by Thomas Jefferson.
