A Contest of Civilizations: Exposing the Crisis of American Exceptionalism in the Civil War Era

Abstract

American exceptionalism is as old as the republic itself, and Andrew F. Lang's important study surveys the history of the idea during the mid-nineteenth century. Americans of the era believed their country had a unique destiny as a civilized republic and beacon of freedom, even as slavery persisted, the Union dissolved, war erupted, and reconstruction ensued. Writing within the spirit of the “global turn,” Lang seeks to explain “diverse concepts of nationhood” held by Civil War–era Americans, while relying heavily on Abraham Lincoln's rhetoric as a framework. Focusing on political thought, constitutional values, and foreign policy, Lang offers insights into how the events of the era—and Americans' perception of them—fit within an international context. Lang divides the book into antebellum, wartime, and postwar sections. The first sets up the paradox of freedom and slavery—the United States by the 1850s, in Lang's words, was “the world's most liberal democracy and its largest slaveholding country”—and explains how U.S. slaveholders came to occupy such an important position in national politics (p. 72, emphasis in original). The second section begins with secession, which ensued as the culmination of this paradox and embodied diverging interpretation of democracy and American exceptionalism. The Confederacy rested on the idea that a slaveholding republic restrained democracy's excesses and preserved order, while the Union upheld the principle that preserving the nation and emancipating the enslaved fulfilled the founders' vision and offered, in Lincoln's words, “the last best hope of earth” for democratic civilization. Just war theory and notions of civilized warfare not only pervaded wartime debates over military strategy but also shaped the aftermath of war, including the possibilities for enforcing reconstruction. In section three of the book, Lang perceptively shows how northerners during the Reconstruction era sought to restore local civilian control to the conquered South, to prevent the sort of violence and social upheaval that had engulfed evolutionary France. “Employing a moderate occupation concomitant with demobilization demonstrated to the world how civilized republics ended civil wars,” Lang concludes (p. 305). Americans had a further opportunity to distinguish themselves from “less civilized” nations when Maximilian's French-supported rule in Mexico collapsed in 1867, resulting in his execution. The following year in the United States, in contrast, former radical abolitionists led by Gerrit Smith led the effort to end the prosecution of former Confederate president Jefferson Davis, a symbolic gesture that portended national reunion and the end of Reconstruction. Americans would not be in the business of executing their political opponents.