A Contest of Civilizations: Exposing the Crisis of American Exceptionalism in the Civil War Era by Andrew F. Lang

Abstract

American exceptionalism has emerged as the leitmotif of recent calls to transform the field of United States history. Effervescent, elusive, and parochial as it may be, scholars know it when they see it. But, as Lang’s powerful work deftly shows, it was also historically contingent, precise, and internationalist.In A Contest of Civilizations, Lang places exceptionalist discourses front and center in the political crises of the Civil War era through a fine-grained reading of an impressive range of speeches, pamphlets, Congressional records, and personal papers. American citizens and statesmen alike emerge from Lang’s work comparing themselves habitually to an imagined turbulent, antidemocratic world of privileged aristocrats, reactionary monarchism, and overbearing imperialists. The result of this international gaze? “A powerful exceptionalist conviction that the United States remained a lone democratic nation surrounded by dangerous and radical influences”—if only Americans could agree on the meaning of Union (10). A Contest of Civilizations is a powerful synthesis and bold reappraisal of political ideas in the Civil War era.Lang’s crisis of exceptionalism unfolds in three acts. Part I, “Conceived in Liberty,” offers a sweeping survey of how the concept of Union shaped nineteenth-century American identities and how competing exceptionalist nationalisms (slaveholding and antislavery) pulled the union apart to invite the very fears of international conquest that haunted the American imagination. Part II, “Now We Are Engaged in a Great Civil War,” interprets the Civil War as a contested effort to preserve democracy from the international dangers posed by radical slaveholders and antislavery advocates whose competing exceptionalisms were not amenable to peaceful reconciliation. Part III, “Shall Not Perish from the Earth,” explores the contested effort to restore the republic and secure an enduring peace during Reconstruction. This final act casts the volume’s core argument as a tragedy. The shortcomings of exceptionalist discourse lay in the willingness to abandon the enforcement of racial equality for political stability, since to stand apart from the world’s political absolutisms Republicans eschewed the military centralization required to make racial equality endure.Attempting to avoid exceptionalist frameworks, historians have invested a great deal of energy in the past decade examining the global and transnational dimensions of the American Civil War. They have unpacked the War’s place in global imaginaries; plotted the intricate patterns of trade, exchange, and diplomacy that embedded the conflict in world affairs; and placed it in a global comparative context. Lang is clear that he is not deploying these methods (15). Instead, he is most interested in writing a history of exceptionalism: “Engaging mid-nineteenth-century American exceptionalism compels modern audiences to take seriously the concept as historical contemporaries understood and deployed it, and not as a validation or refutation of exceptionalism’s legitimacy” (10). Thus, his book is a history of political ideas, and a powerful one, rather than a work of interdisciplinary research.But Lang is not simply dismissive of global and transnational approaches. Rather, by drawing together recent insights from scholars of American nationalism, conservatism, and political stabilization, he demonstrates that Northern and Southern exceptionalisms were profoundly shaped by international (primarily Atlantic World) currents. Hence, he argues that Northern and Southern exceptionalisms were defined by a “conservative political culture” that aimed to “preserve a moderate republic within a seemingly radical, antidemocratic world” (12). The international threats were many, including the recrudescent empires of Old World monarchies, dangerous “Africanization” (a barbaric state conditioned by blackness), “Indianization” (a savage tribalism averse to progress), and “Mexicanization” (the apparent inability of Latin American nations to practice restrained and legitimate democracy).Yet, the task of preserving the Union was rendered impossible, because “competing and often discordant conceptions of civilization inhabiting the same republic” derived from slavery and freedom were irreconcilable (13). In this reading, Unionists and Confederates engaged in a contest to purge the United States from the malignant forces of antidemocratic, potentially uncivilized, internationalism and produced “affirming nationalisms that aimed to safeguard more than they destroyed” (15). As a result, the war came.