Notes — Alan Taylor on Revolutionary Ironies and the Continental Civil War

Notes on Alan Taylor in conversation with Tyler Cowen — Conversations with Tyler (https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/alan-taylor/), 24 July 2024.

Four questions [Adler frame]

Q1 — What is it about as a whole? A continental tour of North American political and economic history from the American Revolution through the aftermath of the US Civil War, built around Taylor’s new book American Civil Wars: A Continental History, 1850–1873. Taylor connects the Revolution’s economic ironies, Canada’s repeated near-absorption into the United States, the Mexican War’s role in making the Civil War near-inevitable, and parallel 19th-century crises in Mexico, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and Cuba — treating the United States, Canada, Mexico, and the Caribbean as one interlocking system rather than separate national stories.

Q2 — How is it argued? Chiefly through population and fiscal logic applied to counterfactual questions Cowen poses directly: why did only 13 colonies rebel, why didn’t the US conquer Canada, was civil war avoidable. Taylor answers with concrete figures — population growth rates, army sizes, mortality and debt figures — and traces how economic interdependence (British capital in American infrastructure, American markets for British goods) shaped decisions that pure military calculation would not explain. He is willing to use the word ‘inevitable’ about the Civil War, more than most historians, while explicitly flagging that historians generally resist the term.

Q3 — Is it true, in whole or part? Well-grounded in Taylor’s own established scholarship — he has written specifically on the War of 1812, the Revolution’s Loyalist migration, and the run-up to the Civil War, and holds two Pulitzer Prizes for early American history. His claims about Canada’s near-conquest in 1865 and the economic interdependence deterring a ‘third war’ with Britain are consistent with standard diplomatic-history accounts. [?] The claim that civil war was effectively unavoidable by 1850 is a considered historian’s judgement, not a consensus position — he says so himself, noting historians generally resist claims of inevitability. His remarks on contemporary Mexico are explicitly flagged as ‘superficial impressions’ from someone who has ‘never been to Mexico’, not scholarly claims.

Q4 — What of it? The recurring move is to treat the 13-colony Revolution, the War of 1812, the Civil War, and Mexico’s own 1860s civil war as a single continental system linked by capital flows, population pressure, and contested land — not four separate national stories. The wiki’s first sustained treatment of the American Revolution’s economic aftermath, the War of 1812, Confederation-era Canada, and the international dimension of the US Civil War.

Glossary

British North America Act (1867) — the UK statute that created the Dominion of Canada, uniting Ontario, Quebec, and the Maritime provinces under a federal structure loose enough to preserve Quebec’s autonomy; driven by Anglo-French tension within the existing Ontario–Quebec union, fear of renewed conflict with the United States, and Britain’s wish to stop paying for Canadian defence. [§ On Canada and why America never conquered it]

Belligerent recognition — Britain’s decision during the US Civil War to treat the Confederacy as a belligerent power rather than mere rebels, short of full diplomatic recognition; this, plus Britain’s tolerance of Confederate warship construction, fuelled Northern anger that briefly made a post-war invasion of Canada a live idea. [§ On Canada and why America never conquered it]

Debt peonage — Mexico’s coercive labour system after it abolished chattel slavery: workers bound by debt to an employer, distinct from the buying and selling of people across generations that defined American slavery. [§ On Mexico from the 1850s on]

Free-labour vs slave-labour territory — the unresolved 1850s question of which economic and legal system would govern land the United States conquered from Mexico, which Taylor identifies as the concrete issue that hardened North and South into incompatible visions of the good society. [§ On America’s early obsession with the prospect of its own collapse]

Key claims by section

On why only the 13 colonies rebelled [§ Opening]

Rebellion tracked population size and connectivity, not the intensity of grievance: the 13 colonies had the largest, best-linked population in British North America, giving them confidence they could sustain armed resistance; Canada and the West Indian islands were too small and too dependent on the Royal Navy to risk it.
Canada’s French-speaking, Catholic-majority population had just been placated by Britain’s 1774 recognition of French Canadian law and religion — an accommodation that alienated the anti-Catholic 13 colonies rather than the reverse.
The same population logic explains British reliance on Native allies: thin British garrisons in Canada needed Native military support, while Native nations saw American settler expansion, not the British Empire, as the primary threat to their land.

On the Revolution’s economic ironies [§ Opening]

British Canada offered settlers free land, funded by direct British subsidy of colonial government (keeping local taxes low); the new United States, lacking an income tax, financed war debt through land sales and land taxes, making American land relatively dearer.
Of roughly 50,000 Loyalist-era migrants to Canada, Taylor estimates about a third left for political reasons (mostly in the 1780s) and two-thirds for the cheaper land and lower taxes (1790s onward).
The war years saw the American economy shrink by roughly a third (1775–1790) — by Taylor’s account the second-worst depression in American history — before a 1790s boom, coinciding with a new federal government and peace, restored lost asset values.

On Canada and why America never conquered it [§ On Canada and why America never conquered it]

The War of 1812 failed for the United States (7 million people) against a much smaller Canada (300,000–500,000) because of a tiny, undertrained American army, long and difficult supply lines, and superior British logistics along the Great Lakes and St Lawrence River, aided by effective Native allies fighting in forested terrain.
No third Anglo-American war followed because of deep economic interdependence: the United States was Britain’s most important export market, and British capital financed American canal and railroad development that a capital-poor United States could not otherwise afford.
The closest the United States came to conquering Canada was immediately after the Civil War (1865): an angry, war-hardened Union public, resentful of British tolerance for Confederate warships and partial recognition of the Confederacy as a belligerent, briefly entertained invasion with a roughly million-strong army against about 12,000 British troops — a war Taylor says the Union would have won outright, though the Royal Navy could still have damaged coastal cities like Boston or New York. Rapid demobilisation, driven by public war-weariness, ended the possibility.
The British North America Act (1867) followed, uniting Ontario, Quebec, and the Maritime provinces; Quebec’s assent required a looser federal structure granting more provincial autonomy. The Maritime provinces, more economically tied to the United States than to a landlocked Canada, seriously weighed independence, joining Canada, or joining the United States. Newfoundland took a separate path, remaining a distinct British colony (its economy essentially just fishing for the British market) until the late 1940s.

On America’s early obsession with the prospect of its own collapse [§ On America’s early obsession with the prospect of its own collapse]

Early fears that the American republic would collapse — too large, too chaotic, too democratic, with no precedent at continental scale — were not irrational: the country did fall apart in 1860–61, and spent roughly ninety years in recurrent crisis over regional power imbalances and sheer size (including open questions about whether Pacific-coast settlers would form their own country).
The Swiss Confederacy barely registered as a model in 1780s American political writing; the Dutch Republic was the more common reference point, until the weakness of the Articles of Confederation itself pushed American leaders toward a stronger national government.
Taylor departs from his mentor Marvin Meyers’s Jacksonian Persuasion chiefly on race and expansion: by modern standards Jacksonian democracy was not very democratic (excluding women entirely, and African Americans outside a few Northern states with high property requirements), but it was a genuine broadening of the male electorate by removing property qualifications, judged against its own era.
The expansionism of the Jacksonian and Mexican War era is, in Taylor’s reading, the ‘bill’ that comes due in the 1850s in the form of sectional conflict over conquered territory.

On the road to civil war and Mexico’s own crisis [§ On Mexico from the 1850s on]

Conquering roughly 40 percent of Mexico’s territory (California, Arizona, New Mexico) in the Mexican War left unresolved which labour system — free or enslaved — would govern the new land, hardening North and South into incompatible, self-consciously superior visions of the good society.
Taylor is more willing than most historians to call the resulting civil war effectively unavoidable: an early-1861 compromise proposal (permanent protection of slavery, a fixed dividing line across Western territory, capped federal tariff powers) found no support from either a North committed to majority rule or a Deep South unwilling to remain in a nation on those terms.
Tocqueville correctly predicted civil war but expected it to run along racial lines within every state, not as a North–South sectional conflict — the one place Taylor thinks he got it wrong.
Proximity to Mexico (which had abolished slavery, retaining the milder debt-peonage system) directly destabilised Texan slavery: several thousand enslaved Texans escaped across the border despite Southern pressure on Mexico to extradite them.
Mexico ran its own parallel civil war between modernising liberals and traditionalist conservatives; Napoleon III’s opportunistic intervention on the conservative side (part of a grandiose vision of uniting Catholic ‘Latin’ America against the US) collapsed into a costly guerrilla war and discredited Mexican conservatism once France lost.
The subsequent liberal triumph under Benito Juárez — freer elections, a freer press, a more equitable legal system, though not full land reform — is, in Taylor’s judgement, one of the most consequential 19th-century North American events, and the precondition for the railroad investment that followed once American capital had a stable government partner. [?]

On Caribbean divergence [§ On the deep and shallow roots of Caribbean development]

Haiti’s post-independence isolation was compounded by a specific financial burden: France withheld recognition until Haiti agreed to a large indemnity for lost plantation property, locking Haiti into a coercive export economy to service the debt — a root, in Taylor’s account, of its enduring poverty and authoritarian political tradition.
The Dominican Republic, sharing the same island, never carried that indemnity; the two economies looked comparable as late as the 1870s, and the debt burden is Taylor’s best explanation for their subsequent divergence.
Cuba remained part of the Spanish Empire until the 1898 American conquest; the United States’s own grudging retreat from promises of full Cuban independence bred resentment that Taylor traces forward into the eventual communist revolution.
Two lighter asides: Uncle Tom’s Cabin is historically indispensable but, read today, mainly a document of 19th-century sentimental culture rather than a good read; Maine, despite its Atlantic coastline, functioned as New England’s actual frontier — cheap, undeveloped farmland — well into the 1830s and 1840s.