Abstract/Description

Contestation over the structure and location of final sovereign authority — the right to make and enforce binding rules — occupies a central role in political development. Historically, war often settled these debates and resulted in the institutionalization of the victor’s vision of sovereignty. Yet sovereign authority requires more than a set of institutions; it ultimately rests on the recognition and acceptance of the governed. How does war shape the popular imagination of sovereignty? Does war promote ideational convergence around the victor’s ideals, or does it polarize and harden attachments to competing visions of sovereignty? We explore the effect of warfare on imagined sovereignty in the United States, a case where the debate over two competing visions of sovereignty culminated in violence during the American Civil War. We exploit the grammatical shift in the “United States” from a plural to a singular noun as a measure of how sovereignty is imagined, drawing upon two large textual corpuses: newspapers between 1800–1899 and all Congressional speeches between 1851–1899. Our results indicate that war shapes the popular imagination of sovereignty, but for winning partisans only.