We Are Not One People: Secession and Separatism in American Politics Since 1776

This presentation will focus on Dr. Atchisons’s co-authored book by the same title that was published by Oxford University Press. E pluribus unum was suggested for the national seal in 1776, but national oneness has been haunted by its opposite ever since. This presentation will examine how the persistence of separatist movements in American history reveals as much about the nation’s politics as it does the would be separatists. The presentation will explore how great swaths of Americans of every ideological stripe, in good times and bad, in and beyond the South, have disputed the nation’s oneness and stressed its divisibility. Trumpeted in American myths, mottos, movies, and songs, separatism is omnipresent in American political culture. We can learn much about the durable appeal and enduring fragility of the United States from those who tried to leave it. As one Vermont separatist quips, leaving is as American “as apple pie.”