"Mastering America puts the lie to old notions that northerners in nineteenth-century America were the only nationalists while southerners were the sectionalists. With deft writing, innovative arguments, and prodigious research, Robert Bonner reveals that southerners were the ones who held the keys to American nationalism all along. It was southern slave masters who led the way in shaping the country's quest for empire, in creating its self-image as God's chosen land, and in articulating its distinctive, racialized historical mission. Little wonder, then, that southern slave owners were ready and able to create a new nation when the simmering sectional conflict erupted into Civil War. This vital new work exposes in global dimensions the tangled fate of mastery and nationalism in the nineteenth century." -Michael Vorenberg, Brown University.