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

Abstract

Reviewed by: A Contest of Civilizations: Exposing the Crisis of American Exceptionalism in the Civil War Era by Andrew F. Lang Ian Tyrrell (bio) A Contest of Civilizations: Exposing the Crisis of American Exceptionalism in the Civil War Era. By Andrew F. Lang. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021. Pp. 558. Cloth, $34.95.) It was the English philosopher R. G. Collingwood who coined the dictum that "all history is the history of thought." Though not articulated in [End Page 122] such terms, Andrew F. Lang's A Contest of Civilizations is an expression of that approach. Lang reconstructs the mental world of southerners and northerners to explain how Americans came to clash and interprets that clash as a struggle over the exceptional character of the United States. Lang does not mention that the first known use of "exceptionalism" in print appeared as a British reflection on the American Civil War in 1861 and that its use sank without a trace for another seven decades. Nevertheless, many if not most Americans in the antebellum period regarded the nation as having something corresponding to an exceptional status without either a name to describe it or a settled understanding of the concept. The Civil War becomes, in Lang's account, a struggle over that meaning, with each side convinced of its own superiority and alignment with the values of the nation. These values were underpinned by allegiance to "Union," which Lang interprets as a deeply felt and consensual republican and national commitment, not a thin and contested veneer on state and local allegiances. The idea of Union had been predicated on an acceptance of moderation and compromise to preserve individual liberty (for whites). From this liberty and the promotion of a liberal environment for American aspirations, the U.S. Constitution could advance material interests. Economic and political interests thus become less the motor forces of history and more the expressions of a civilizational worldview. While the Civil War has long been treated as unique in world history, Lang has cleverly integrated the transnational turn in American historiography into his analysis of the fratricidal conflict. Americans had their eyes on how they were perceived abroad and how events abroad might affect the conception of policies and attitudes. Most prominently, the European revolutions of 1848 refined key American beliefs and fears. Antebellum Americans understood their exceptionalism as a departure from the European precedents that other nations supposedly had to follow. In this view monarchy or aristocracy reproduced despotism and thwarted individual liberty. The limitations of the European system were exposed in its susceptibility to extremist revolution when popular aspirations were not encompassed within its hierarchical structures. European revolutions typically failed and a coercive state repressed dissent, whereas the U.S. Constitution allowed liberty to flourish within a framework of order. Americans also viewed Latin American revolutions as unsuccessful, deeming their liberal institutions fragile without the U.S. commitments to reason and compromise. This value-laden way of thinking Lang extracts from the rhetoric of articulate and dominant groups in political and intellectual [End Page 123] life. Lang might have also analyzed behavior to show just how closely ordinary Americans adhered to these beliefs. Antislavery advocates and their southern opponents increasingly challenged this framework of Union. Southerners viewed abolitionism and, more broadly, antislavery as a faulty importation of European radicalism to the good order of American politics. For antislavery proponents, the southern states were also, in a sense, an "international" threat because their conduct in upholding slavery besmirched the possibility of an American example to the world of liberty when the catch cry that all men are created equal was not followed. According to Lang, slavery's opponents detected the influence of a Slave Power conspiracy, which would reassert hierarchical attitudes and forms of government, thereby eliminating the radical difference between the republican United States and despotic Europe. Slaveholders could be aristocracy's "pernicious twin" incubating a coercive (European) mentality, which would threaten American democracy and liberal progress (99). If fracture over the underlying and shared sense of exceptionalism brought the United States to war, the war's conduct demonstrated, in Lang's telling, a common commitment that the dueling nations must conduct...