Break It Up

Journalist and historian Richard Kreitner examines a recurring idea in American life: that the country should be split apart. His central argument is that the United States has never truly matched its name and never will. Disunion did not begin or end with the Civil War, and its appeal was not confined to the South or to the nineteenth century.

Kreitner traces disunion movements through every period and region of the nation's past. Each New England town founded after Plymouth broke away from another. The thirteen colonies saw their union as a tool for winning independence rather than a goal in itself. George Washington worried about separatism beyond the Alleghenies. Aaron Burr plotted to build a new empire. John Quincy Adams carried a Massachusetts town's petition to dissolve the Union onto the floor of Congress, and William Lloyd Garrison condemned the Constitution as a compact with the devil that protected slavery.

The book also looks at present-day tensions, from a cold civil war between partisan camps to secession movements in California and Texas. Kreitner argues that the divisions threatening the country now have roots reaching back to the early Republic. Written with careful research and a clear argument, the book aims to help readers understand a fractured present through its history.