In Paul’s telling, a type of civic nationalism based on shared allegiance to the Constitution, as an “organic expression of the will of ‘We the People,’” proved victorious, with Daniel Webster as its avatar. Throughout the book, Webster functions more as a symbol of this idea than as a protagonist, disappearing for long stretches of the narrative only to reappear, deus ex machina–style, with a rousing speech defending national unity against growing secessionist influence. Perhaps even more than as a legislator, Webster was primarily known as an orator in his day, and Paul devotes special attention to his public addresses in order to tease out the essence of his philosophy. The picture that emerges is of a man whose deeply and sincerely held belief was that the United States should be understood not as a compact between former colonies, but as a true nation formed by an act of popular sovereignty. One famous phrase encapsulated his core conviction and defined his legacy: “Liberty and Union, now and for ever, one and inseparable.”
While he has not exactly written a hagiography, Paul is still more or less working within the “Great American Hero” framework, and he casts Webster’s particular civic nationalist idea as the germ of our country’s tradition of pluralism. This is a somewhat odd framing, given that Webster devoted his career as a politician and public speaker almost exclusively to establishing the federal government’s authority over the states and keeping the states united; there is little, if anything, in the speeches cited that connects political union to any notion of equality. Paul himself characterizes Webster as a “progressive conservative” who “disdained the democratic spirit that defined his milieu.”
Nevertheless, if Webster’s nationalism was limited in scope and legalistic in nature, within the time period in question, he is as good a stand-in for the liberal tradition as any. The other characters in Paul’s narrative also serve as proxies for concepts of American national identity, past and present, and a substantial portion of the book is devoted to looking at these roads not taken. Paul draws John Quincy Adams, son of John Adams and frenemy of Webster, in perhaps the most interesting and nuanced manner, associating Adams with “continental nationalism,” the idea that America was destined to become a (paradoxical) “empire of liberty” spanning the Atlantic to the Pacific, and highlighting his lesser-known role in establishing what would later be known as the Monroe Doctrine (the U.S. policy of opposing European intervention in the Americas). Late in life, Adams hewed closer to the liberalism that Paul less fittingly ascribes to Webster, becoming an indefatigable opponent of slavery and a defender of the rights of African captives in the Amistad trial.