American Exceptionalisms
Thoughts on Andrew F. Lang’s “A Contest of Civilizations: Exposing the Crisis of American Exceptionalism in the Civil War Era.”
On August 11, 2021, Tennessee Governor Bill Lee took to Twitter and stoked the flames of a social media firestorm. The GOP businessman-turned-politician crowed that “In TN, our students will be taught unapologetic American exceptionalism.”
Lee’s statement presaged a war between Southern governors and the teaching of American history. It also ignited a predictable response. Culture warriors from across the ideological spectrum launched salvos attacking and defending the statement, adding more heat than light to questions about American exceptionalism and its place in American history.
Educators were again caught in the crossfire. How might they teach about American exceptionalism as an idea, without endorsing the idea itself?
One place for them to start might be the sectional crisis of the mid-19th century — what historian Andrew F. Lang describes in his recent book, A Contest of Civilizations, as a crisis of American exceptionalism. This roughly 800-page book is particularly relevant when considering what students learn in classrooms and how educational spaces might rise above these current crises.
American exceptionalism is the idea that the United States is unique among Western nations, in that it was founded not on the basis of kinship networks, hereditary privileges, or the legacy of shared culture, but rather by the virtues of individual liberty and free institutions. Lang argues that as the nation grew more divided over the future of slavery in the first half of the 19th century, Americans on both sides of the sectional divide came to embrace two conflicting visions of exceptionalism.
In coming to terms with these competing visions of American exceptionalism, Lang divides his book into three sections, each following one of the central themes of the Gettysburg Address, Abraham Lincoln’s concisely articulated exceptionalist speech.
The first section, “Conceived in Liberty,” looks at how America’s founding principles of political equality informed a national identity opposed to tyranny and oppression, and how a paradox soon emerged between individual liberty and centralized power. This section also demonstrates how conflicting visions for the future of slavery created a sectional conflict that threatened national consensus.
Next, “Now We Are Engaged in a Great Civil War,” demonstrates how over the course of the 19th century, two visions emerged about what America was, is, and should be. Slavery was at the center of these debates. Irreconcilable visions — one that underscored slavery as essential to freedom and another that emphasized slavery as a hindrance to it — framed disunion and provided the foundations for two modern nations at war.
Finally, “Shall Not Perish from the Earth,” examines the Reconstruction years and the previously unimaginable challenges of creating a biracial democracy in the wake of war. The response by white Southerners who proved unwilling to accept defeat? Black equality was antithetical to American democracy, Black people were undeserving of liberty, and they lacked the intellectual capacity for freedom.
Throughout, Lang clearly explains how Americans once invoked perceptions of our foundational principles to support their own biases — biases, at that time, with deeply sectional foundations.
One the eve of the American Civil War, Lang argues, competing visions of what it meant to be a free American had reached an impasse. “How,” he asks, “could an inimitable republic, conceived in liberty and devoted to propositions of equality, stand by midcentury as the largest slaveholding nation in the modern world?”
But where abolitionists, free Black people, and advocates of free labor ideology saw a contradiction, white southerners did not. To the contrary, they saw liberty as dependent on human bondage. While northerners fretted about a slave-holding kleptocratic oligarchy, in the South, slaveholders worried about what they saw as the tyranny of an abolitionist North. These irreconcilable exceptionalist visions, Lang demonstrates, came to frame disunion and provided the foundations for two nations, each claiming to be the inheritor of the founding principles.
To exceptionalists with a stake in the perpetuity of a slave society, slavery guaranteed white equality. It was the bedrock upon which southern (and northern, in many cases) wealth, status, and political authority rested. In a recent biography of John C. Calhoun, Robert Elder quotes the South Carolinian making this point to his colleague John Quincy Adams in 1820. Calhoun explained that slavery
was the best guarantee to equality among whites. It produced an unvarying level among them. It not only did not excite, but did not even admit of inequalities, by which one white man could domineer over another.
Racial slavery was, in other words, the “mudsill” that defined whiteness, and perhaps even “Americaness.”
Yet, this exclusionary exceptionalist configuration was not the only one. Those who would associate Calhoun’s odious justification for a race-based caste system with the principles of the founding would have a difficult time explaining a war that put the institution of slavery on the road to extinction.
They would have an equally difficult time explaining how in the wake of that war, many political actors worked diligently to create a democracy that better reflected the principles of equality articulated by the founders.
Of course, we know how that story developed. And so does Lang.
Ultimately, of course, the promise of the Reconstruction-era’s biracial democracy floundered at the altar of racism. And while Reconstruction may have opened the doors for future legislation, it was short-lived in the immediate sense. As W.E.B. Du Bois astutely noted in Black Reconstruction in America, “The slave went free; stood for a brief moment in the sun; then moved back again toward slavery.”
We see in the latter portions of Lang’s book how white power-brokers went right to work reasserting a deeply rooted racial hierarchy by recreating slavery in all but name — and for the better part of the next century at least, they succeeded. The issues stirred by the crisis in American exceptionalism reverberated for generations — and in many ways still do.
This review is part of New Ideas in American History, an initiative from New American History that features essays by historians about some of the most interesting recent books in the field.
