The rhetorical genesis of American political union

This essay examines a familiar but still perplexing problem in U.S. political history: how a group of fiercely separatist, diverse British colonies successfully formed a separate national union. Tracing patterns in colonial and revolutionary-era political speech, I demonstrate that the origins of American political union were in important part rhetorical. A combination of religious doctrines and anti-British sentiment elevated union into one of the most important, if contested, political concepts in the founding era. This study is carried out via a combination of close reading and data analysis, the latter based on a representative set of period American newspapers. A lesser puzzle is addressed along the way: why "union" virtually disappeared as a referent for intercolonial contact during the critical years leading to independence, following 1763. The answer: British officials insisted on a very different understanding of the term.