A Contest of Civilizations

Exposing the Crisis of American Exceptionalism in the Civil War Era

Andrew F. Lang

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781469660080
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: American Civil War History
• Index: History

Most mid-nineteenth-century Americans regarded the United States as an exceptional democratic republic that stood apart from a world seemingly riddled with revolutionary turmoil and aristocratic consolidation. Viewing themselves as distinct from and even superior to other societies, Americans considered their nation an unprecedented experiment in political moderation and constitutional democracy. But as abolitionism in England, economic unrest in Europe, and upheaval in the Caribbean and Latin America began to influence domestic affairs, the foundational ideas of national identity also faced new questions. And with the outbreak of civil war, as two rival governments each claimed the mantle of civilized democracy, the United States' claim to unique standing in the community of nations dissolved into crisis. Could the Union chart a distinct course in human affairs when slaveholders, abolitionists, free people of color, and enslaved African Americans all possessed irreconcilable definitions of nationhood? In this sweeping history of political ideas, Andrew F. Lang reappraises the Civil War era as a crisis of American exceptionalism. Through this lens, Lang shows how the intellectual, political, and social ramifications of the war and its meaning rippled through the decades that followed, not only for the nation's own people but also in the ways the nation sought to redefine its place on the world stage.

PART I

Conceived in Liberty

★ ★ ★

The situation of the Americans is therefore entirely exceptional, and it is to be believed that no [other] democratic people will ever be placed in it.

ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE,
Democracy in America

1

Union

★ ★ ★

In 1861, in the wake of his electoral triumph to the presidency, Abraham Lincoln reflected on what he considered the “philosophical” attributes of American nationhood. In many ways, the United States resembled the nations of the world. The citizenry claimed a common language and heritage. The country boasted vast agrarian domains dotted by burgeoning metropolitan centers. And the national governing charter outlined modern processes of administration and oversight. Though a young republic within a world of ancient nations, the United States had stabilized from the tentative days of its infancy to enjoy an abounding adolescence. As a physical space, the republic could grow with seeming indeterminacy. The law safeguarded the individual acquisition and proliferation of property, forging an independent middling class. In short, the American Union had emerged as a nation among the prosperous community of Western nations.¹

For Lincoln, however, the United States also transcended the meaning of nationhood itself. The Union’s prosperity, its security, its vast expanse were “not the result of accident.” Even the bold act of rebelling against colonial oppression and establishing a new nation “are not the primary cause of our great prosperity. There is something back of these, entwining itself more closely about the human heart,” Lincoln imagined, as he reflected on the republic’s founding. The Union was unique among the nations of the world because it was not merely a nation. The Declaration of Independence proclaimed an unprecedented national “principle of ‘Liberty to all’—the principle that clears the path for all—gives hope to all—and, by consequence, enterprize, and industry to all.” The first nation ever to center individual human dignity at the apex of national purpose, the Union pledged as its signal obligation the protection and propagation of individual rights to life, liberty, and happiness. This lofty ideal held that ordinary people were not consigned as helpless wards of the state, their coerced labor enriching the coffers of favored elites. The nation’s citizenry, Lincoln alleged, claimed the liberty to chart sovereign lives freed from arbitrary state-sanctioned oppression. The Union’s founding principles fostered a timeless “promise of something better” for all its citizens, a sacred commitment that Lincoln believed had “secured our free government, and consequent prosperity.”²

Lincoln underscored the centrality of Union as the foundational pillar of early nineteenth-century American life. Union evoked pledges of national accord, embodied a special test of popular government, and aroused egalitarian appeals. According to the Anglo-American citizenry, the Union stood apart from a global order of monarchies, aristocracies, and oligarchies in which noble patricians ruled with subjective fiat. As a free people who claimed the rational capacity to self-government, white Americans defended a constitutional Union that guaranteed their civil liberties, political equality, and economic opportunity as the essential national purpose. In an elegant analogy, Lincoln explored how these “principle[s]” of nationhood have “proved an ‘apple of gold’ to us. The Union, and the Constitution”—indeed, the physical nation and the rule of law—“are the picture of silver” that encase, boast, and enhance the apple of liberty displayed in the Declaration of Independence. “The picture was made, not to conceal, or destroy the apple; but to adorn, and preserve it. The picture was made for the apple—not the apple for the picture.” In Lincoln’s reading of national life, the Constitution, as the governing charter of Union, limited the government from encroaching on or redefining the Declaration’s natural right to liberty. The national purpose was thus open for all to gaze at, to imagine, to claim as their own. Americans possessed a universal charge to conserve the picture and reinforce the frame so that the apple would live forever.³

America Guided by Wisdom: An Allegorical Representation of the United States Depicting Their Independence and Prosperity, 1815, by John J. Barralett and engraved by Benjamin Tanner, depicts symbolic aspects of nineteenth-century American exceptionalism. Under the watchful eye of George Washington, the young republic is blessed by the confident rays of Divine Providence, the future is boundless and bountiful, and the nation is secure from the contaminations of the world. Gender assumes a critical role in the formation of the republic: men are seen expanding the nation while women provide virtue at home. (Library of Congress)

The Union’s unique national purpose nevertheless yielded an inconsistent application of its ideals. Though the United States was premised on the notion that no human should bow to domineering tyrants, not all Americans ate equally from the Union’s apple of liberty. Some had been forever deprived of its sustenance altogether. Mid-nineteenth-century America boasted the greatest white popular democracy anywhere in the world. But the very attributes that sustained that republic—the rule of law, a vast and seemingly uncluttered continent, and even notions of liberty and civilization—displaced sovereign Indigenous nations, marginalized free people of color, created the world’s largest slaveholding empire, and excluded women from representative democracy. For instance, slaveholders ordered their liberty by asserting a natural and lawful right to owning human property even as enslaved people claimed that the same rights of nature sanctioned their emancipation. Indeed, the very timeless and universal attributes that underwrote the national purpose privileged free white citizens foremost. Marginalized groups thus levied powerful critiques against the soaring rhetoric of white liberty to contest the Union’s shortcomings and to demand that the republic polish its sacred apple as the universal fruit for all of humanity.

Even those segregated or enslaved within the nation looked to the Union as their foremost tool for liberation. As Lincoln explained, because the Union was as much an enduring ideal as it was a nation, the republic invited unlimited claims for inclusion and equal protection, even if white Americans routinely rejected those petitions. Nineteenth-century women and African Americans voiced what Lincoln called the “most happy, and fortunate” principles articulated in the Declaration of Independence to dispute their second-class positions in the republic. In practicing an informal but dynamic politics, they challenged the idea that “American” denoted only elite, free, white men. John Adams anticipated as early as 1776 how the powerful concept of Union would forever inspire such quests for liberty and equality. “We have been told that our Struggle has loosened the bands of Government every where. That Children and Apprentices were disobedient—that schools and Colledges were grown turbulent—that Indians slighted their Guardians and Negroes grew insolent to their Masters,” the conservative and no doubt apprehensive Adams outlined on the eve of declaring independence. As Lincoln later believed, the republic’s founders had not conducted a typical exercise in nation-state formation. They had unleashed a universal revolution in human affairs. “There will be no End of it,” Adams predicted. “New Claims will arise. Women will demand a Vote. Lads from 12 to 21 will think their Rights not enough attended to, and every Man, who has not a Farthing, will demand an equal Voice with any other in all Acts of State. It tends to confound and destroy all Distinctions, and prostrate all Ranks, to one common Levell.”⁴

The contemporary sense that the Union enjoyed a special international mission was punctuated by the failure of democracy throughout the nineteenth-century world. Across the Atlantic rim, common people demanded liberation from oppressive regimes only to be met with violent, state-sponsored repression. The collapse of democracy in Europe and Latin America fostered an acute domestic impression that only the United States promoted the kind of popular government that humans had long sought, but failed, to procure. Though republics dated to antiquity and dotted the nineteenth-century globe, Americans regarded their Union as the world’s foremost beacon of freedom. Although the promise of universal liberty coexisted in a democratic nation that limited access to that liberty, oppressed Americans also believed that few places on earth held the ideal of liberty like the United States.

Discourses of Union

For white nineteenth-century Americans, the idea of Union informed a national purpose distinct from all other human societies. The republic supplanted “a corrupt Old World monarchy with a pure New World republic,” fastening the principles of “liberty and equality” to the nation’s bedrock. “The whole of Europe was originally divided into small warlike clans, and the combination of these clans form its present great divisions,” Niles’ Weekly Register, a foremost voice of American civilization, explained of European tribalism. Conversely, “the fruits of union”—consent, liberty, reason, and egalitarianism—were “the origin of the American republic.” In changing their form of government through revolution, early Americans transformed the functioning assumptions of society. Discarding what John Quincy Adams called “a race of kings, whose title to sovereignty had originally been founded on conquest,” republicanism replaced monarchism, egalitarianism replaced hierarchy, sovereignty replaced dependence. “Our political revolution of ’76,” noted Abraham Lincoln in 1842, “has given us a degree of political freedom, far exceeding that of any other of the nations of the earth. In it the world has found a solution of that long mooted problem, as to the capability of man to govern himself.” A decade later, the New York Daily Tribune echoed a widespread conviction “that American nationality . . . is a thing of ideas solely, and not a thing of races. It is neither English nor Irish, nor Dutch, nor French. . . . Our nationality is our self-government, our system of popular liberty and equal law. . . . Aside from the identity of our national principles we have no national identity, nor shall we for centuries.”⁵

On his grand tour of the United States in 1831, the young French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville explored these many claims of American uniqueness. In a celebrated but often misappropriated passage Tocqueville declared, “The situation of the Americans is therefore entirely exceptional, and it is to be believed that no [other] democratic people will ever be placed in it.” He did not concede the superiority of the United States more than he acknowledged the oddities of the American character. Isolated by a “proximity from Europe,” Americans exhibited a fierce “social egalitarianism” underwritten at once by “meritocratic tendencies” and a hatred of centralized authority. Tocqueville observed that Americans peopled a nation unlike any other in the world, unbound from a feudal past, absolved from noble ruling classes, and uncorrupted by an established state church. The citizenry’s social standing and economic destiny depended not on the static happenstance of birth but instead on “purely material things. Their passions, needs, education, circumstances—all in fact seem to cooperate in making the inhabitant of the United States incline toward the earth.” Americans did not have time for “science, literature, and the arts”; they paraded “uniquely commercial habits” in the quest for mobile independence. “The free institutions that the inhabitants of the United States possess and the political rights of which they make so much use recall to each citizen constantly . . . that he lives in society,” Tocqueville concluded.⁶

Tocqueville regarded the Union as a unique experiment in democratic republicanism. Republics organized free citizens along a consensus of political and social equality, safeguarding individual liberty from government coercion and economic immobility. “I am affectionately attached to the Republican theory,” testified Alexander Hamilton. “I desire above all things to see the equality of political rights, exclusive of all hereditary distinction, firmly established by a practical demonstration of its being consistent with the order and happiness of society.” Republics drew profound meaning from what they were not: aristocracies, nobilities, and monarchies. The founding generation stripped from the new American republic inherited titles, laws of primogeniture, and landed ranks, marginalizing institutional aristocracies from procuring exploitative, undue privileges from government. Reflecting a widespread sense of what Tocqueville later observed as the “equality of conditions,” common citizens were not born into fixed or predetermined stations. A republican citizenry could chart lives of mobility in their pursuit of personal independence. “In North America there were no ‘feudal’ structures that had to be smashed,” fostering a civic consciousness deeply suspicious of concentrated power and divine license. “Republics are created by the virtue, public spirit, and intelligence of the citizens,” remarked Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story in 1840. “They fall, when the wise are banished from the public councils, because they dare to be honest, and the profligate are rewarded, because they flatter the people, in order to betray them.”⁷

As Story well understood, republics since antiquity typically surrendered the civic virtue necessary to sustain an equitable society. Foreign powers did not have to invade and conquer a republic; republicans possessed their own capacity for self-destructive faction. Early Americans nevertheless exuded a boastful confidence that their Union transcended the immoveable, inevitable, decaying tides of history. “We have it in our power to begin the world over again,” announced Thomas Paine on the eve of American independence. The United States offered an unprecedented “asylum for mankind,” a refuge against a “world [which] is overrun with oppression.” This new republic ostensibly broke from the traditions and assumptions of the Old World, challenging the interminable idea that some were born to rule and others were born to be ruled. In America, so went the thought, aristocratic privilege, divine right, class stagnation, and republican decline were not humanity’s natural and inexorable fates. “Those who would like to imitate us,” a Bostonian informed Alexis de Tocqueville, “should remember that there are no precedents for our history.” A South Carolina orator voiced a common refrain in 1848 when he reminded his audience how “the American revolution, regarded merely as the division of one country from another[,] was . . . an ordinary occurrence among European nations, but considered as establishing the dogma that governments were to be the work of the popular will, it formed an era in the history of the world.”⁸

The Union at once closed the long march of human history and inaugurated a new epoch altogether. History taught that republics inevitably deteriorated because they could not withstand “the modern civilization and refinement Europe called progress.” Proponents of the American republic upheld theirs as the product of human reason and agency, designed to embrace and direct modern progress. Herman Melville expressed this boundless optimism when he averred in 1850, “The past is dead, and has no resurrection; but the Future is endowed with such a life, that it lives to us even in anticipation. The past is, in many things, the foe of mankind; the Future is, in all things, our friend.” Though the world had seemingly failed to secure universal natural rights did not mean that American posterity would suffer similar misfortunes. “We Americans are driven to a rejection of the maxims of the Past,” concluded Melville, “seeing that, ere long, the van of nations must, of right, belong to ourselves.” Absolution from the rigid forces of national tradition and divine-right governance permitted Americans to chart a new birth of global freedom. “We are so young a people that we feel the want of nationality, and delight in whatever asserts our national ‘American’ existence,” prominent diarist George Templeton Strong acknowledged in 1854. “We have no, like England and France, centuries of achievements and calamities to look back on; we have no record of Americanism.”⁹

Americans therefore welcomed a mission to model their Union for the world. “Trusted with the destinies of this solitary republic,” explained Thomas Jefferson in 1809, the Union would illustrate the ideal of self-government “to be lighted up in other regions, of the earth.” Only a rational and liberated people, observed Alexander Hamilton in the first entry of The Federalist, could “decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force.” If Americans extinguished what George Washington termed “the sacred fire of liberty,” the inescapable rot of history would suffocate the republic. “Our beloved country is set up by Providence, as a great exemplar to the world, from which the most enlightened and best governed of the ancient nations have much to learn,” believed Boston orator Edward Everett. When he announced in 1835 that “our country is eminently characterized as the depository of liberty,” Kentucky Presbyterian minister John Breckinridge likewise believed that governments the world over had rejected representative self-government. “What do the rights of man mean, at Vienna, or St. Petersburg? What does sovereign mean in America? What does good government mean at Madrid? What does freedom, or liberty of the press, or Christianity mean at Rome at this day? Our freedom is our peculiarity, as it is our glory; our institutions make our country.”¹⁰

Presenting an exceptional republic to the world informed a vibrant civil religion that gave spiritual meaning to Union. A cultural synthesis of “evangelical Protestant religion, republican political ideology, and commonsense moral reasoning” provided an “ethical framework, a moral compass, and a vocabulary of suasion for much of the nation’s public life.” Baptist preacher Richard Furman thus urged his congregation in 1802 to “look forward, with pleasing hopes, to a day when America will be the praise of the whole earth; and shall participate, largely, in the fulfillment of those sacred prophecies which have foretold the glory of Messiah’s kingdom.” Recognizing t...