Emily Pears’s Cords of Affection: Constructing Constitutional Union in Early American History provides an illuminating exploration of the mechanisms used by early American leaders to help inculcate love of country and attachment to the nation’s political institutions. Although the book focuses on the past, the project arises out of deep concerns about the present. Like many others, Pears worries that Americans today have little faith in their government and its institutions. As was apparent from the 2020 election and its aftermath, many Americans do not trust the political process to reach fair results. And they distrust and even hate their fellow Americans who hold conflicting views. In the hope of identifying ways to restore America’s constitutional faith, Cords of Affection looks to the strategies employed by the first generations of American leaders to persuade Americans to develop attachments to their new nation. Even if one does not fully subscribe to Pears’s diagnosis of America’s current ills (as I do not), the book provides valuable insights because, to an astonishing degree, the nineteenth-century strategies examined here remain prevalent today, and the limitations that Pears identifies for each also remain true today.

Cords of Affection focuses on a problem faced by all governments—the need to ensure that citizens form what Pears refers to as “political attachments,” the patriotic sentiments and beliefs that connect citizens to their government, its principles, and its institutions. Governments cannot function well unless citizens respect government institutions, feel loyal to the government, and are willing to sacrifice for it. Pears makes the often-overlooked point that political leaders in the nation’s early decades had an acute recognition of the need to inculcate political attachments because Americans were not naturally attached to their new government and its institutions. Many Americans had been loyal to England and hadn’t supported the revolution, many Americans opposed the ratification of the Constitution, and many Americans felt most connected to their state governments and were largely indifferent to the new national government.

Pears makes a compelling case that political leaders in the nation’s early years undertook a wide variety of measures for the avowed purpose of creating loyalty to the new national government. In doing so, Pears identifies three basic strategies pursued in the nation’s early decades to construct and strengthen citizens’ feelings of connection to their government. The book concludes that each of these strategies may have had some success but each had significant limitations, and the goal of unifying the nation in common devotion to the nation’s constitutional institutions clearly failed, as demonstrated most dramatically in the cataclysm of the Civil War.

Cords of Affection first examines the “utilitarian” strategy favored by leaders who sought to increase Americans’ attachment to their government by providing them needed benefits, services, and goods. Pears focuses on Alexander Hamilton’s proposal to support the financial sector through a national bank and later proposals for national infrastructure projects, such as a national road system, which would create physical and economic ties among Americans who lived at great distances from each other. By providing direct benefits from federal programs, Hamilton and others hoped that Americans would feel gratitude and loyalty to the federal government. Pears rates this strategy as only modestly successful. While federal programs may have engendered some positive feelings toward the government, the benefits of these programs could not be spread evenly among all Americans, and resentments and allegations of corruption inevitably arose from those who were not the primary beneficiaries of these programs.

Cords of Affection next examines the “cultural” strategy employed by Noah Webster and Whig orators, who sought to foster political attachments by creating a national culture, most centrally through the creation and popularization of national historical narratives. These leaders believed that Americans might develop a shared feeling of loyalty and pride in their nation through the dissemination of patriotic histories that emphasized the values and heroism of the nation’s founders and their predecessors. By inspiring Americans with tales and legends of their history—stories of the Pilgrims and Puritans who came to North America in search of religious freedom and who succeeded in taming the wilderness through their hard work and moral virtues, or the bravery of the leaders of the American Revolution who stood up to monarchy and fought for freedom—Americans would feel connected to the nation’s past and to one another, and this patriotism could be harnessed to support the political institutions that arose out of that history. Pears argues, however, that the cultural strategy could not bridge the nation’s cultural and ideological divides.

Next, Cords of Affection examines the “participatory” strategy advocated by leaders like Martin Van Buren, who sought to make Americans feel connected to their government by providing them with opportunities to participate in the political process. Participating in politics might teach civic values and make participants more likely to accept compromise and outcomes with which they might otherwise disagree. Here, Pears focuses on Van Buren’s efforts to create a national political party, which he justified as a means to give Americans opportunities to participate in national politics in deeper and more engaging ways than merely voting. Pears concludes, however, that participation in partisan politics did not succeed in making Americans more attached to political institutions because it did not diminish the sectionalism and divisions that led to the Civil War. If anything, participation in politics may have increased the divisions that come with partisanship.

Although Pears offers voluminous evidence to show that Hamilton, Webster, Van Buren, and other early political leaders frequently asserted that their programs would help make Americans feel more connected to their government, the book might have told a more complicated story if Pears did not take these declarations at face value. Declarations that political programs will help unify the people in shared love of country have often served as a neutral, patriotic language to advance other goals. While Hamilton, Webster, Van Buren, and others may have been sincere in declaring that they sought to create abiding attachments to political institutions, the strategies they pursued also served their personal and political ambitions and advanced particular—and often highly controversial—ideologies about the role of the national government.

Cords of Affection also misses an opportunity to tell a more nuanced history by treating political attachment as an unproblematic goal unto itself that can be assessed as a linear vector. At the founding, Americans had weak attachments to the federal government, Pears asserts, and she worries that Americans today lack sufficient attachments to government institutions. Yet the development of strong attachments between citizens and the state cannot be seen as a good unto itself. Political attachments have often served as the vehicle for creating and maintaining hierarchies and for exclusion, tyranny, and violence. Political attachments may be necessary for government to function, but whether they are beneficial or not depends on what ends the government is serving.

Moreover, there’s some reason to be skeptical of the claim that Americans today suffer from a lack of sufficient attachments to the nation’s political institutions. Even the participants in the January 6, 2021, insurrection, who stormed the Capitol and sought to disrupt the process of finalizing the presidential election, believed that they were fighting to protect American institutions—the presidency and fair elections—against corrupt and foreign-controlled enemies who they believed were seeking to destroy the nation as they perceive it to be. Perhaps it was not a lack of attachments to American political institutions that led to the insurrection but overzealous and misguided defense of those institutions by a cohort of Americans who believe that the nation is under attack by their fellow citizens. To put it somewhat differently, political attachments come in more varieties than just “weak” and “strong” but instead involve varying kinds of attachments, a wide range of conceptions about the role and values of political institutions, and fundamental disagreements about how to act upon political attachments.

Despite these qualms about the book’s assessment of political attachments in contemporary America, Cords of Affection provides a valuable study of the strategies employed by American leaders to inculcate attachments in the nation’s early years and the limitations of those strategies. Indeed, these strategies are still used today and still suffer from the same limitations that Pears documents. For instance, political leaders today frequently employ versions of the utilitarian strategy, when they declare that they will make government work for the people by providing benefits to their constituents, whether through pork barrel spending projects or through national programs like the Affordable Care Act. While these programs may create some feelings of loyalty from the recipients of federal programs, it’s unclear whether they help create abiding attachments to government institutions per se or merely loyalty to the political leaders and parties who supported these programs. And just as in early America, many Americans express resentment toward their fellow citizens who receive federal benefits that they consider undeserved. Indeed, hostility to the utilitarian strategy is prevalent among conservatives, who invariably see government programs for the poor and others in need as a strategy to increase dependency on government and loyalty to the Democratic Party.

Similarly, the cultural strategy employed by Webster and Whig orators for fostering unity by crafting national histories remains prevalent, as can be heard in President Obama’s soaring rhetoric at the Edmund S. Pettis Bridge, where he sought to weave together the fight against British monarchy, abolitionism, the civil rights movement, the women’s rights movement, and the LGBTQ rights movement, as part of a grand narrative in which Americans have sought to carry out the nation’s foundational creed. As in the eras Pears examined, historians and American leaders today struggle to write national history that can unite Americans around a common understanding of their history and shared values, as can be seen in the controversies over the 1619 Project and the endless fights over public-school history curricula. As Cords of Affection makes clear, the inability of Americans to unite around a common history and common values is hardly a new phenomenon. National history is always written for present day purposes; when there are divisions on basic questions of national identity and ideology, as has always been true in the United States, national histories will reflect these divisions.

Likewise, the participation strategy favored by Van Buren finds its adherents today, through organizations that ask Americans to become involved in the day-to-day business of politics. Yet the same limitations persist—as studies show that politically active Americans are more likely to take extreme positions, are less likely to favor compromise, and are more likely to see their political adversaries as enemies and not merely fellow citizens with whom they disagree.

Although Pears ends on an optimistic note about the capacity of Americans to develop greater bonds with each other and with their government, her study is equally open to the conclusion that problems of political attachment were baked into the American pie from the nation’s founding.