Abstract: Out of the One, Many traces the transformation of the language of republicanism in the works of the American writers David Bruce, Charles Brockden Brown, and Hugh Henry Brackenridge. With the unexpected emergence of vehement partisanship in the 1790s, these writers set about to rethink the nation's history, politics, and character. In literature's capacity for symbolic expression they found ways of satisfying the impossible task of democratic unity: to make sovereignty, inherently indissoluble though it is, plural. The aforementioned three dimensions of republican discourse provide the rationale for the division of chapters: history in Bruce, politics in Brown, and character in Brackenridge. Chapter One argues that Bruce's poetic invention of a Scots-Irish 'people' out of the scattered remnants of transatlantic tradition was driven by the failure of American nationalism to find a social basis. By producing an apparent reconciliation of the tension between patriotic devotion and individualistic self-interest, Bruce contributed to the formation of an identity which outlasted the experience of anti-Irish prejudice that may initially have motivated him. If Bruce surprises modern readers with the suggestion that American citizenship is inert even as ethnicity is dynamic, the novelist Charles Brockden Brown trades on a related set of inversions. Brown's novels depict the subversion of the republican distinction between the political and the social by interpreting the problem of national sovereignty through the phenomenon of sympathy. By pushing sympathy to the limit-experience of falling under the sway of another, his Gothic fictions investigate the unsettling links between sympathy and mastery. Finally, Chapter Three examines Brackenridge's idea that moderation should serve as the foundation of civic unity. I argue that Brackenridge initially saw moderation as a trait of character, but then recognized the feebleness of the concept in the face of the democratic phenomenon of mass opinion. As his view of moderation evolved, Brackenridge literalized the constitutional contrivance of 'checks and balances,' thereby producing a parody of republican character.