Exceptionalism, Irony and Political Action
When the Puritans arrived in the New World in the seventeenth century, they believed they were the Chosen Ones, placed in the Promised Land by the hand of God. They had extricated themselves from the oppressions and inequalities of the ancien régime and, in hopeful moments, fantasized that the iron laws of decay endemic to western civilization might not apply in the New World. What they ultimately concluded was that such laws would apply, but only as a test, a rite of passage. Life in the New World would be, in the words of J.G.A. Pocock, “the imperfect experience of the perfection of history.”
Seen against this background, the American Revolution, a final political break from the Old World, was loaded with historical symbolism. The new nation had once and for all loosed itself from its chains to the past, “dissolve[d] the political bands which have connected them with another.” Going forward, Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence, the country was to be in a “separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature’s God entitle them.”
According to George Washington, the new nation, by its very inception, had already proven itself to be exceptional. America, Washington concluded in 1783, had been “placed in the most enviable condition . . . peculiarly designated by Providence for the display of human greatness and felicity.” But for Washington, the question of whether America would ultimately be excepted from the tangled skein of history in the Old World was still open. Contingencies were involved. Although America had the ear of Providence, he suggested, we might lose its curiosity at any time. Our success as a nation would depend on the choices and sacrifices we made going forward. Decline and decay were still options, but if they came to pass the fault would be entirely our own.
The French-American writer and frontiersman Hector St. John de Crèvecœur was more somewhat more optimistic. Writing in 1784, Crèvecœur famously asked: “What then is the American, this new man?” His answer: “He is an American, who leaving behind him all his ancient prejudices and manners, receives new ones from the new mode of life he has embraced . . .” Like the Puritans, Crèvecœur believed that the American identity would be predicated on a negation of all that came before. To be an American was to erase one’s history totally and begin anew. But the United States, Crèvecœur intimated, would not be merely one new beginning — it would, if all worked out as planned, be an eternal new beginning and, as such, something like an escape from time itself. There would be no end, no exit, in the New World, only beginning. “We are,” Crèvecœur gushed in 1784, “the most perfect society now existing in the world.”
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The last decade of the eighteenth century – what historians call the “Early Republic” period – was a time in which the country struggled to find its political and ideological sea legs. The strident debates between America’s first political parties — the Federalists and the Republicans — might have destroyed the infant nation entirely were it not for the unifying leadership of George Washington. But could the country survive without its Dear Leader, its first (and only) King? Jefferson’s close presidential victory in 1800 over incumbent and Federalist John Adams – an election one historian calls a “magnificent catastrophe,” reflecting at once its historical significance and cacophonous character – provided the answer. The republic had emerged out of its divisive infancy in one piece and, in the place of Washington’s cult of personality, a single ideological vision was beginning to cohere, incorporating elements of both Hamilton’s and Jefferson’s approaches. “We are all Federalists,” Jefferson famously proclaimed in his written inaugural, “we are all Republicans!” The feeling of national unity in the subsequent decades, through the war of 1812 and the “Era of Good Feeling,” grew more intense than at any time in Unites States history, save World War II.
With its ideals of agrarianism, freehold property and individual self-sufficiency, Jeffersonian democracy provided an ideological basis for the reproduction of the Puritan drama of separation and regeneration within the continental United States in the nineteenth century. Now the eastern metropolitan regimes of authoritarian politics and international trade represented the Old World, while an ever-expanding frontier wilderness to the west provided the escape valve, the portal into the land of milk and honey. The Edenic tinge to the frontier vision was unmistakable. “In the beginning,” Locke had written over a century before, “all of the world was America.”
The salient historical events of the nineteenth century appeared to confirm the Puritan vision of America as a nation that had managed to remove itself from the vagaries of European history. This was the Romantic Age of American history. The century saw the triumph of Jacksonian democracy (in essence, a reaffirmation of Jeffersonianism in its original form), a string of military victories (two against the most powerful nation in the world, England), magical expansions of territory and resources, the unlikely preservation of the union through a devastating Civil War, and, subsequently, unprecedented material prosperity and growth in the Age of Industrialism. In this environment, it is hardly surprising that the millennial ideology of Manifest Destiny – which combined a sense of providential history with Enlightenment-inspired conceptions of human perfectibility – caught fire in the minds of Americans. Experience confirmed theory. The American prophecy was self-fulfilling.
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