| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.1

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Scott A. Silverstone. Divided Union: The Politics of War in the Early American Republic. (Cornell Studies in Security Affairs.) Ithaca: Cornell University Press. 2004. Pp. vii, 278. $42.50.

Political and military historians are naturally concerned with why wars occur, but Scott A. Silverstone is just as interested in why they do not. While the United States went to war twice during the first half of the nineteenth century, it was embroiled in numerous crises with European powers and Mexico that brought the nation dangerously close to armed conflict. To understand why U.S. policy makers pulled back from the brink of war on these occasions, Silverstone emphasizes the federal character of the American republic. A wide range of competing parochial interests, he argues, acted to thwart the emergence of a national consensus for military action, with the clamor for war from one section frequently offset by calls for peace from another. This check on Washington's war-making authority, he further argues, was precisely what the nation's founders had intended. Just as James Madison and John Jay envisioned the separation of powers acting to limit the power of domestic political actors, they saw the interplay of regional interests in a federal system serving as an institutional constraint to reduce aggressive tendencies in the sphere of international relations. The result, the author suggests, was a "peace-prone republic" (p. vi) that was less inclined than other nation-states to commit itself to war.

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