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“Beyond Anti-Exceptionalism: Using Transnational History
to Write the History of Nationalism”
W. Caleb McDaniel
University of Denver
[email protected]
(PLEASE DO NOT CITE WITHOUT PERMISSION)
Since the early 1990s, numerous manifestoes for “transnational history” have urged
American historians to focus less on the history of the nation-state and more on the circulation of
people, goods, and ideas across national borders. The primary reason for writing transnational
histories, according to these manifestoes, is to counteract the influence of “American
exceptionalism” on historical practice. Roughly defined, exceptionalism is the idea that the
United States has been a unique case in world history, unaffected by the historical forces that
have shaped other nations and superior because of its uniqueness. It is an idea that has long
defined Americans’ image of themselves. As abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison mordantly
noted in 1829, Americans tend to believe that “the republic is immortal; that its flight, like a
strong angel’s, has been perpetually upward, till it has soared above the impurities of earth …
and, having attained perfection, is forever out of the reach of circumstance and change.”
According to Garrison, antebellum Americans assumed that “our ark will float securely when the
world is drowned.”1
1
“To the Editor of the Boston Courier,” 9 July 1829, in Walter M. Merrill and Louis Ruchames, The
Letters of William Lloyd Garrison (6 vols.; Boston, 1971-1981), 1:85. For manifestoes on transnational history, see
David Thelen, “The Nation and Beyond: Transnational Perspectives on United States History,” Journal of American
History [JAH] 86, no. 3 (1999), 965-975; Ian Tyrrell, “American Exceptionalism in an Age of International
History,” American Historical Review [AHR] 96, no. 4 (October 1991): 1031-1055; Thomas Bender, “No Borders:
Beyond the Nation-State,” Chronicle of Higher Education, 7 April 2006; Thelen, “Of Audiences, Borderlands, and
Comparisons: Toward the Internationalization of American History,” JAH 79, no. 2 (1992): 432-62; Thelen,
“Making History and Making the United States,” Journal of American Studies 32, no. 3 (1998): 373-397; Daniel T.
Rodgers, “Exceptionalism,” in Imagined Histories: American Historians Interpret the Past, ed. Anthony Molho and
Gordon S. Wood (Princeton, 1998), 21-40; Joyce Appleby, “Recovering America's Historic Diversity: Beyond
Exceptionalism,” JAH 79, no. 2 (1992): 419-31.
2
But according to transnational historians, the exceptionalism that Garrison criticized still
exercises undue influence on the practice of American history over 150 years later. To be sure,
few professional historians would now compare the growth of the republic to the upward flight
of an angel. But some argue that by focusing on the nation-state in isolation from the history of
the surrounding world, historians perpetuate the myth that the United States is an impermeable
“ark,” removed from the “circumstance and change” that affects other nations. Transnational
historians, however, want to silence these “lingering notes of American exceptionalism.” By
exploring the dense connections and exchanges between Americans and the rest of the world,
they promise to defuse the idea that the United States has been uniquely separated from the
histories of other nations. And by placing American history in broader perspectives, they hope
to demonstrate that the United States was caught up in global processes over which the nationstate often had limited control.2
Most manifestoes for transnational history describe exceptionalism primarily as a
historiographical error, produced by the fact that professional history was twinned at birth with
the rise of powerful nation-states.3 But for many historians, exceptionalism is also morally and
politically suspect. Inspired by theories about contemporary globalization, which sometimes
forecast the eventual obsolescence of nation-states, some transnational historians argue that
exceptionalism is dangerous in a “global” age better suited to cosmopolitan ideals.4 In short,
2
Quote taken from Charles Bright and Michael Geyer, “Where in the World is America? The History of
the United States in the Global Age,” in Rethinking American History in a Global Age, ed. Thomas Bender
(Berkeley and Los Angeles, 2002), 64.
3
On the relation of exceptionalism to the professionalization of American history and social science, see
Dorothy Ross, The Origins of American Social Science (New York, 1991); Ross, “Grand Narrative in American
Historical Writing: From Romance to Uncertainty,” AHR 100, no. 3 (June 1995), 651-577.
4
For examples of how ideas about globalization influenced manifestoes for transnational history, see
Thelen, “Making History,” 374, 397; Thelen, “Nation and Beyond.” See also Paul Kramer’s review of Bender, ed.,
Rethinking American History in a Global Age, in Social History 30, no. 1 (February 2005), 97-100, which notes the
“assertively presentist” rhetoric of many transnational historians.
3
whether for historiographical or presentist reasons, most transnational historians identify as
sworn enemies of exceptionalism.
Yet some critics have argued that a rigid posture of anti-exceptionalism can distort
American history as much as the dogmatic exceptionalism that it is supposed to replace.5 First,
by positing stark contrasts between transnational history and the history of nations, antiexceptionalist rhetoric obscures the ways that transnational processes have strengthened nationstates. Early manifestoes implied that transnational flows of people, goods, and ideas always
worked to destabilize nation-states, but recent historians have argued that modern nation-states
were partly products of, not precursors to, globalization. Anti-exceptionalist rhetoric also begins
by presuming, rather than proving, that exceptionalism is totally false. But recent scholarship
has argued that in some senses the United States really was unique. Eric Rauchway even
suggests that American state development after the Civil War was unique because of global
transformations. Such arguments reveal that transnational history and exceptionalism may not
be as antithetical as early manifestoes sometimes implied.6
In this paper, I want to suggest another reason for transnational historians to move
beyond anti-exceptionalism. Namely, by casting exceptionalism in an entirely adversarial role,
transnational historians have not sufficiently explained or understood exceptionalism itself.
Indeed, critics have struggled to define American exceptionalism in a way that does not
5
See Louis A. Pérez, Jr., “We are the World: Internationalizing the National, Nationalizing the
International,” JAH 89, no. 2 (September 2002): 558-68; David A. Hollinger, “The Historian’s Use of the United
States and Vice Versa,” in Bender, Rethinking American History, 381-96; Michael McGerr, “The Price of the ‘New
Transnational History,’” AHR 96, no. 4 (October 1991): 1056-67.
6
See Jay Sexton, “The Global View of the United States,” The Historical Journal 48, no. 1 (2005), 268.
For examples of recent scholarship on the ways globalization contributed to state-building and national
differentiation, see Eric Rauchway, Blessed among Nations: How the World Made America (New York, 2006); C.
A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, 1780-1914: Global Connections and Comparisons (Malden, Mass.,
2004); Geyer and Bright, “Where in the World is America?,” 68-71; David Reynolds, “Expansion and Integration:
Reflections on the History of America’s Approach to Globalization,” in The Paradox of a Global USA, ed. Bruce
Mazlish, Nayan Chanda, and Kenneth Weisbrode (Stanford, 2007), 49-63.
4
reproduce it by implying that exceptionalism was produced by intellectual and cultural
conditions unique to the United States. Ian Tyrrell concedes that exceptionalism was common to
many nations, but he argues that it was especially “resilient” in the United States because of a
long tradition of myths that were lodged in American culture. Similarly, Dorothy Ross criticizes
the way that American exceptionalism shaped the development of professional social science in
the United States, but she “plead[s] guilty to a species of American exceptionalism” by arguing
that “the ideology of American exceptionalism” played a uniquely “important role in American
life” and made American social and political theory distinctive.7 Conceived in the Puritan dream
of America as a “city on a hill,” cultivated by expansionists before the Civil War, and reasserted
by consensus historians in the twentieth century, exceptionalism is often seen as an idea “made
in the U.S.A.” by and for Americans.8 Critiques of American exceptionalism too often end up
endorsing it.
One way out of this impasse is to bring the insights of transnational historians to bear on
the history of American exceptionalism itself. Instead of seeing American exceptionalism
merely as a historiographical error, transnational historians need to approach the ideas and
rhetorical tropes of exceptionalism as historical phenomena. And like many other historical
phenomena, exceptionalism itself was produced partly by transnational exchanges, connections,
and confrontations across borders. In this paper I will suggest that Americans came to view
themselves as exceptional not in spite, but partly because of, their embeddedness in the histories
of other nations. Consequently, exceptionalism itself requires a transnational history. My goal
7
Tyrell, “American Exceptionalism in an Age of International History,” 1031; Ross, Origins of American
Social Science, xviii. See also Hans R. Guggisberg, “American Exceptionalism as National History?” in Bridging
the Atlantic: The Question of American Exceptionalism in Perspective, ed. Elisabeth Glaser and Hermann
Wellenreuther (Cambridge, Eng., 2002), 275-276.
8
For examples of this typical narrative of the history of exceptionalism, see Deborah L. Madsen, American
Exceptionalism (Jackson, Miss., 1998); Richard T. Hughes, Myths America Lives By (Urbana and Chicago, 2003).
5
in this paper is to sketch what such a transnational history of American exceptionalism might
look like and to encourage historians to write it.
I
One casualty of the anti-exceptionalism in many transnational manifestoes has been the first half
of the nineteenth century. As Jay Sexton has recently noted, the particular attraction of
transnational historians to the twentieth century has largely resulted in their “leaving the
nineteenth century behind.” One reason may be that the early nineteenth century is often seen as
the heyday of American exceptionalism. The first generations of American citizens boasted
loudly of their distinctive national identity and heralded their rising star as a national power.
Believing that the country was predestined by God and by its geographical situation to lead the
rest of the world, many subscribed to the sentiment of a popular antebellum political slogan,
“Our Country, Right or Wrong.” More than one foreign traveler in the period experienced the
frustration felt by Alexis de Tocqueville, who noted the “irritable patriotism” of the Americans
he met. “The foreigner would be very willing to praise much in their country,” Tocqueville said,
“but would like to be allowed a few criticisms; that is exactly what he is refused.”9
This picture of antebellum Americans as irritable patriots, impervious to outside
criticism, may partly account for the fact that many transnational historians have steered clear of
the early nineteenth century. Indeed, most recent historical scholarship on the early national
period and the pre-Civil War years has pictured an antebellum America too preoccupied with
building a strong nation-state and forging a national identity to be of much interest to
transnational historians. Some advocates of transnational history have even used the antebellum
9
Sexton, “Global View of the United States,” 274; Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans.
Gerald Bevan (London, 2003), 277. See also Francis and Theresa Pulszky, White, Red, Black: Sketches of Society in
the United States during the Visit of their Guests, vol. 2 (New York, 1853), 251.
6
period as a foil against which to set the putatively more transnational orientation of later
Americans.10
Consider, for example, the treatment of the antebellum period in Daniel Rodgers’ Atlantic
Crossings, a book that has served as a touchstone for many transnational historians. Atlantic
Crossings argues that American social welfare politics in the twentieth century were produced by
a complex transatlantic dialogue between American intellectuals and policymakers and their
counterparts in fin-de-siecle Europe. American Progressives feared that America’s social and
political institutions were lagging behind Europe’s and went abroad looking for solutions to the
shared problems of an industrial world. But the willingness of Progressives to cross the Atlantic
was unique in American history, according to Rodgers. The period between 1870 and the
Second World War was a “distinctive phase” when “American politics was peculiarly open to
foreign models and imported ideas.” That openness was allegedly absent in the antebellum
period, when Americans presumably believed they were ahead of the world’s nations, not
lagging behind, and saw Europe as too different from America to offer relevant lessons. The
Atlantic crossings of Progressives, says Rodgers, could take place only after the Civil War, when
“confidence in the peculiar dispensation of the United States from the fate of other nations” was
temporarily suspended.11
10
Joyce Chaplin has recently noted that the significance of the “Atlantic world” in colonial historiography
has not been extended into the early national period, especially since the “new political history” of early national
historians like David Waldstreicher and the influence of theorists like Benedict Anderson has focused attention on
the rise of American nationalism in the early 1800s. See Joyce E. Chaplin, “Expansion and Exceptionalism in Early
American History,” JAH 89, no. 4 (March 2003), http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/jah/89.4/chaplin.html,
pars. 8-9. Sean Wilentz’s magisterial and Bancroft-winning The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln
(New York, 2005), also puts the formation of the American nation at center stage for the period, with only slight
references to the global context in which American nation-building took place.
11
Daniel T. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge, Mass., 1998),
3-4. Rodgers’ demarcation of the period between 1870 and 1940 as an unusually internationalist era for American
reformers is also implicitly echoed by the concentration of other transnational historians of reform on the late
nineteenth and twentieth centuries. See James T. Kloppenberg, Uncertain Victory: Social Democracy and
Progressivism in European and American Thought, 1870-1920 (New York, 1986); Ian Tyrrell, Woman's
7
Rodgers describes exceptionalism as a kind of solipsism that prevented Americans before
the Civil War from looking abroad. Their image of America “depended utterly on its contrast
with an imaged Europe” that was feudalistic, undemocratic, aristocratic, militaristic,
monarchical, religiously benighted and mired in the past. “From a Europe so conceived,” asserts
Rodgers, “there was nothing to be learned.” Americans who did cross the Atlantic in the midnineteenth century simply confirmed what they already believed about the “backwardness and
poverty” of European society. As an example, Rodgers offers the memoirs of Gilbert Haven, a
Methodist abolitionist who traveled to Europe in 1862. According to his memoir, Haven had
barely been in England for a day before he “felt as never before the unspeakable superiority of
America.” Rodgers infers that Haven’s views were typical of his countrymen. Convinced of
their exceptionalism, they learned little from the world.12
This sketch of the antebellum period complements Rodgers’s larger critique of American
exceptionalism, which takes place on two fronts. First, Rodgers argues that the exceptionalism
of historians has distorted accounts of Progressive politics and the rise of the welfare state in
America, which cannot be explained fully without attention to the “Atlantic crossings” that his
book describes. Exceptionalism, then, is first and foremost a historiographical vice for Rodgers.
Yet Rodgers also valorizes his historical subjects for their ability to suspend exceptionalist
presumptions long enough to learn from Europe. Rodgers even laments the fact that Clinton-era
World/Woman's Empire: The Women's Christian Temperance Union in International Perspective, 1880-1930
(Chapel Hill, 1991); Ian Tyrrell, True Gardens of the Gods: Californian-Australian Environmental Reform, 18601930 (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1999); Deidre M. Moloney, American Catholic Lay Groups and Transatlantic
Social Reform in the Progressive Era (Chapel Hill, 2002); Alan Dawley, Changing the World: American
Progressives in War and Revolution (Princeton, 2003); Leslie Butler, Critical Americans: Victorian Intellectuals
and Transatlantic Liberal Reform (Chapel Hill, 2007); Leila J. Rupp, “Constructing Internationalism: The Case of
Transnational Women’s Organizations, 1888-1945,” AHR 99, no. 5 (December 1994): 1571-1572. Even works that
might challenge to Rodgers’ periodization by showing the transnational dimensions of antebellum American
reformers usually share Rodgers’ view that international borrowings were attenuated by the centripetal force of
sectional debates over slavery and the coming of Civil War. See, for example, Bonnie Anderson, Joyous Greetings:
The First International Women’s Movement, 1830-1860 (New York, 2000), 203-205.
12
Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings, 35, 37, 39.
8
attempts to reform health insurance rejected European models. In Atlantic Crossings, then,
American exceptionalism is not only a historiographical vice, but a political one. Yet since
Rodgers is committed to the idea that exceptionalism and transnationalism are stark opposites, he
cannot see the exceptionalism of antebellum Americans as anything other than indifference to
the lessons of Europe. His anti-exceptionalist posture forecloses the possibility that views like
Haven’s may also have been produced partly by “Atlantic crossings.”13
The exceptionalism of antebellum Americans relied on two central ideas: first, that the
world was divided into distinct “nations” of people, whose special characteristics were
determined by their unique histories, institutions, geographical location, and cultural practices;
and second, that the special characteristics of the American nation made it a model republic and
gave it a providential mission to spread republican government around the world. Allegedly
freed from the historical corruption of “old” nations in Europe, the United States was imagined
by exceptionalists as a young nation blessed with free institutions, a dynamic society, and
seemingly limitless space for territorial expansion. For these and other reasons, Alexis de
Tocqueville argued that the “situation of the Americans” was “entirely exceptional” and would
never be replicated again.14
Yet as the example of Tocqueville shows, the myths of American exceptionalism did not
develop in isolation from the rest of the world and were not the exclusive property of Americans.
Atlantic crossings like Tocqueville’s also played a role in the construction of exceptionalism.
First, the very fact that Americans were obsessed with defining their character as a “nation” and
asserting its uniqueness was encouraged by the transnational circulation of people and ideas. As
13
14
See ibid., 1-4.
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. Harvey C. Mansfield and Delba Winthrop
(Chicago, 2000), 430.
9
numerous historians have observed, the forty years before the Civil War was an era of nationbuilding around the globe. Those decades witnessed the maturation of independent nation-states
in Latin America; struggles for independence by Poland and Greece; nascent demands for selfdetermination in Ireland, British India, and Egypt; national unification movements in Germany
and Italy; and the stirrings of modern nationalism in Japan. Over a decade before the American
Civil War, the Revolutions of 1848 also unleashed a continental wave of national revolutions in
Europe. These global transformations produced new kinds of nationalism. European theorists
began to argue for the existence of distinct cultural “nations” with rights to political selfdetermination, and nationalists on both sides of the Atlantic also began to conceive nations as
territorially bounded, internally homogenous spaces. Given these transatlantic currents of
nationalism, the fact that antebellum Americans were also interested in defining their nation’s
unique qualities may reflect not how little they learned from Europe, but how attuned they were
to transatlantic discussions about nationality.15
Americans were drawn into those transatlantic discussions by a variety of means. First,
nationalist uprisings abroad often created communities of political exiles who sought asylum in
the United States. Shiploads of Irish immigrants in the mid-nineteenth-century brought to the
United States beliefs about their national identity and organized Irish American associations for
“home rule.” German refugees from the Revolutions of 1848 also brought nationalist ideas from
the continent to America and, as in the case of Carl Schurz, sometimes became prominent
political figures. Some European nationalists took up influential positions in American
universities, like Charles Follen at Harvard University and Francis Lieber at South Carolina
College and later Columbia University. Lieber’s theories about nationality influenced numerous
15
See Thomas Bender, A Nation among Nations: America’s Place in World History (New York, 2006),
116-181; Bayly, Birth of the Modern World, 205-206; Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution, 1789-1848 (1962;
New York, 1996), 132-145; David M. Potter, The Impending Crisis, 1848-1861 (New York, 1976), 14-15.
10
American thinkers in the pre-Civil War period, and Follen’s courses on German literature and
philosophy helped introduce New England intellectuals like Ralph Waldo Emerson and
Theodore Parker to what they believed was a distinctively German weltanschauung. But an
interest in the distinctive character of nations was not confined to the ivory tower in antebellum
America. An explosion of print culture in the early nineteenth century introduced countless
readers of literary reviews, evangelical magazines, books, and newspapers to travel narratives
and articles about the national characteristics of the Poles, the Slavs, the Italians, the English, and
others. One such article on Poland concluded, from a review of events abroad, that “the struggle
against nationality is a hopeless one. Nationality is the idea of the age.”16
Americans were introduced to this “idea of the age” not just by the arrival of Europeans
on their shores, and not just by a sprawling print culture that published countless portraits of
“national” characters, but also by their own Atlantic crossings. In the 1840s and 1850s, cheaper
ocean transportation and the expansion of railroad networks in Europe facilitated overseas
tourism by antebellum Americans. These tourists published numerous memoirs that sought to fit
the people they saw abroad into distinct, national categories. But whereas Rodgers sees that
impulse to categorize as a byproduct of Americans’ exceptionalist assumptions, it is as plausible
16
“Poland: Nationality,” Littel's Living Age (Boston), 9 May 1846, ProQuest American Periodical Series
Online. On the nationalism of Irish immigrants, see, e.g., Gilbert Osofsky, “Abolitionists, Irish Immigrants, and the
Dilemmas of Romantic Nationalism,” AHR 80, no. 4 (October 1975); John F. Quinn, “The Rise and Fall of Repeal:
Slavery and Irish Nationalism in Antebellum Philadelphia,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 130,
no. 1 (January 2006), 45-78. On the “forty-eighters,” see Andre Michel Fleche, “The Revolution of 1861: The
Legacy of the European Revolutions of 1848 and the American Civil War” (Ph.D. diss., University of Virginia,
2006); James M. Bergquist, “The Forty-Eighters: Catalysts of German-American Politics,” in The GermanAmerican Encounter: Conflict and Cooperation between Two Cultures, 1800-2000, ed. Frank Trommler and Elliott
Shore (New York, 2001), 22-36; A. E. Zucker, ed., The Forty-Eighters: Political Refugees of the German
Revolution of 1848 (New York, 1950); Carl Wittke, Refugees of Revolution: The German Forty-Eighters in America
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1952). On Follen, see Edmund Spevack, Charles Follen’s Search
for Nationality and Freedom: Germany and America, 1796-1840 (Cambridge, Mass., 1997); Spevack, “Charles
Follen’s View of Republicanism in Germany and the United States, 1815-1840,” in Republicanism and Liberalism
in America and the German States, 1750-1850, ed. Jurgen Heideking and others (Cambridge, Eng., 2002), 235-260.
On Lieber, see Dorothy Ross, “’Are We a Nation?’: The Conjuncture of Nationhood and Race in the United States,
1850-1876,” Modern Intellectual History 2, no. 3 (2005), 327-360.
11
to argue that contact with non-Americans, many of whom also believed in their own national
uniqueness, spurred Americans to reflect on and articulate their own distinctive characteristics.
In fact, Adam R. Nelson has recently argued that the nationalistic bent of much American
scholarship in the antebellum period was, paradoxically, a byproduct of the increasingly
international training of American scholars. Mid-nineteenth-century Americans studied abroad
in larger numbers than before, but they were often trained by European professors who taught
them to see the function and academic knowledge as nationalistic both in its content and
function. By way of example, Nelson offers the career of William Dwight Whitney, an
American philologist who studied at the University of Berlin in the early 1850s and then became
a professor at Yale University. In the 1860s, Whitney continued the earlier efforts of American
linguists like Noah Webster to define and explain the origins of a distinctly “American” version
of the English language. Whitney and others believed that cultivating an “American” language
would help bolster a sense of national uniqueness and superiority among Americans. But as
Nelson points out, Whitney was following the example of his German tutors, who advocated the
political unification of Germany by positing that the German Volk shared an exceptional cultural
and linguistic history. By believing that a shared “language” would solidify the political unity of
the United States, Whitney was not simply expressing “American” ideas. He was partly
applying the methods of his overseas mentors. Nelson concludes that “the proliferation of
overseas study in the nineteenth century” did not make scholars more “internationalist,” but
instead “fostered more nationalist views.” American scholars “learned nationalism abroad.”17
17
Adam R. Nelson, “The Emergence of the American University: An International Perspective,” History of
Education Quarterly 45, no. 3 (September 2005), 427-437, quoted on p. 433. On Whitney, see Nelson,
“Internationalization as a Cause of Nationalization in American Scholarship: The Paradoxes of Academic Travel in
the Nineteenth Century,” Zeitschrift für pädagogische Historiographie (2005), http://ihbf.phzh.ch/webautordata/23/Thema_Nelson.pdf; Nelson, “Nationalism, Transnationalism, and the American Scholar in the Nineteenth
Century: Thoughts on the Career of William Dwight Whitney,” New England Quarterly 78, no. 3 (September 2005),
12
Americans also learned the idea that the United States was a “model republic” partly
from their Atlantic crossings. As Charles Bright and Michael Geyer have observed, Americans’
image of themselves coexisted from the birth of the United States with an “offshore America”
imagined by outside observers.18 And in the antebellum period, many of these offshore
observers claimed that the United States was a unique republican experiment. From Paine
onwards, numerous reformers, nationalists, and political radicals in Europe pointed to America
as an example for their own countries to follow. Believing that their own countries needed
democratization, they acknowledged the same flaws that antebellum Americans identified in
European society and also drew stark contrasts between America and their homelands. For
example, supporters of universal manhood suffrage in England like the working-class Chartists
pointed to the prosperity of the United States as evidence that extended voting rights could close
the deep cleavages in English society. European land reformers pointed to the availability of
land in the United States as a secret to its national success. European free traders celebrated the
dynamism of the American economy.19
Americans’ image of their society as uniquely fluid and egalitarian, offering the
possibility of social advancement to all, was also confirmed and elaborated by the observations
of reform-minded travelers like Tocqueville. After touring the United States between 1818 and
1820, Scottish radical and feminist Frances Wright concluded that the “American nation” was so
339-374. See also Nelson, “Nationalist Science and International Academic Travel in the Early Nineteenth Century:
Geological Surveys and Global Economics, 1800-1840,” Perspectives on the History of Higher Education 25
(2006), 43-88.
18
19
See Bright and Geyer, “Where in the World is America?,” 72.
See, for example, the memoir of Chartist William Lovett, Life and Struggles of William Lovett in his
Pursuit of Bread, Knowledge, and Freedom, with Some Short Account of the Different Associations he Belonged to
and of the Opinions he Entertained (1876; New York, 1920), 108, 142, 161-162, 179-182; the writings of free-trader
Richard Cobden on America, in The Political Writings of Richard Cobden, with an Introductory Essay by Sir Louis
Mallet, C. B. (London, 1878), 43-66. On land reformers, see Jamie L. Bronstein, Land Reform and Working-Class
Experience in Britain and the United States, 1800-1862 (Stanford, 1999).
13
blessed by its free institutions that “the liberties of mankind are entrusted to their guardianship.”
“No nation, in the whole history the known world” had begun its career so free of the “evils” that
plagued Europe, Wright proclaimed, adding that Americans were “singularly enlightened in the
art of government.” Upon the success of their federal “experiment,” she wrote, the liberties not
just of a nation, but “perhaps of a world,” depended.20
Wright was only one of many European republicans and reformers who praised the
exceptional freedom and universal mission of the United States. In the antebellum period,
moreover, vast numbers of ordinary Americans came into contact with this “offshore America”
imagined by European admirers. Travelogues like Wright’s were widely read, and the activities
and speeches of European democrats like the Chartists or Italian republican Giuseppe Mazzini
were closely followed in the American press.21 Personal networks between American reformers
and European radicals also multiplied in the decades before the Civil War. Republican
statesmen like Charles Sumner opened correspondence with like-minded European liberals such
as John Bright and Richard Cobden, advocates of the repeal of England’s protectionist Corn
Laws. Reformers in movements for abolition, temperance, peace, and prison reform created
dense ties with their counterparts on either side of the Atlantic and organized several
international conferences, often known as “World’s Conventions,” between 1840 and 1854 in
20
21
Frances Wright, Views of Society and Manners in America (London, 1821), 522, 155, 329, 332.
Although my focus in this paper is on “Atlantic crossings,” more work needs to be done on the ways
non-Americans in Asia or Latin America viewed the antebellum United States. At least some Latin American
nationalists shared the enthusiasm of European radicals for the example of the United States. See, for instance,
Lorenzo de Zavala, Journey to the United States of North America/Viaje a los Estados Unidos del Norte de America
(1830; Houston, 2005). On travelogues by Europeans to America, see Christopher Mulvey, Transatlantic Manners:
Social Patterns in Nineteenth-Century Anglo-American Travel Literature (Cambridge, Eng., 1990); Mulvey, AngloAmerican Landscapes: A Study of Nineteenth-Century Anglo-American Travel Literature (New York, 1983).Max
Berger, The British Traveller in America, 1836-1860 (New York, 1943); Thomas K. Murphy, A Land without
Castles: The Changing Image of Amerca in Europe, 1780-1830 (Lanham, Md., 2001); Richard Mullen, Birds of
Passage: Five Englishwomen in Search of America (New York, 1994); Helen K. Heineman, Three Victorians in the
New World: Interpretations of the New World in the Works of Frances Trollope, Charles Dickens, and Anthony
Trollope (New York, 1992); Peter Conrad, Imagining America (New York, 1980), 30-60.
14
London, Paris, Geneva, and Frankfurt.22 Perhaps most important, high-profile American tours
by European revolutionaries like the Marquis de Lafayette, Ireland’s Thomas Meagher, and
Louis Kossuth, the Magyar leader of Hungary’s failed revolution for independence from Austria,
gave American citizens immediate access to the “offshore America” of Europeans. During
Kossuth’s celebrated 1851 tour, which sparked a well-documented “Magyar-mania” throughout
the United States, the Hungarian hero frequently began his speeches by praising America’s
special mission to the world and applauding the exceptional freedom of its institutions. Three
decades earlier, Lafayette’s tour of the United States similarly endorsed the idea of America as a
republic with a universal mission.23
European reformers had many reasons for imagining an exceptionalist “offshore
America.” Some depended on the example of the United States to rebut the arguments of antirepublicans in Europe, who predicted that an expansion of suffrage or a dismantling of feudal
land monopolies would result in social anarchy and national implosion. For others, endorsing
American exceptionalism promised more tangible rewards. Kossuth came to the United States
22
On transatlantic reform in this period, see Frank Thistlethwaite’s still useful The Anglo-American
Connection in the Early Nineteenth Century (Philadelphia, 1959). Most recently, see Ian Tyrrell, Transnational
Nation: United States History in Global Perspective since 1789 (Houndmills, Basinstoke, Hampshire, Eng., 2007),
chap. 3. On Sumner’s European connections, see Anne-Marie Taylor, Young Charles Sumner and the Legacy of the
American Enlightenment, 1811-1851 (Amherst, Mass., 2001), 257ff.
23
See Joseph Rossi, The Image of America in Mazzini’s Writings (Madison, Wisc., 1954); D. P. Crook,
American Democracy in English Politics, 1815-1860 (Oxford, 1965); James Epstein, “‘America’ in the Victorian
Cultural Imagination,” in Anglo-American Attitudes: From Revolution to Partnership, ed. Fred M. Leventhal and
Roland Quinault (Aldershot, Eng., 2000), 107-123; Ray Boston, British Chartists in America, 1839-1900
(Manchester, Eng., 1971), 13-20; Marvin Fisher, Workshops in the Wilderness: The European Response to
American Industrialization, 1830-1860 (New York, 1967). On Lafyette’s visit, see Fred Somkin, Unquiet Eagle:
Memory and Desire in the Idea of American Freedom, 1815-1860 (Ithaca, N. Y., 1967), 131-174. On Kossuth’s
visit to the United States, see Donald S. Spencer, Louis Kossuth and Young America: A Study of Sectionalism and
Foreign Policy, 1848-1852 (Columbia, Missouri, 1977); Larry Reynolds, European Revolutions and the American
Literary Renaissance, ch. 8; Michael A. Morrison, “American Reaction to European Revolutions, 1848-1852:
Sectionalism, Memory, and the Revolutionary Heritage,” Civil War History 49, no. 2 (2003), 111-132; Steven Béla
Várdy, “Kossuth’s Effort to Enlist America into the Hungarian Cause,” Hungarian Studies 16, no. 2 (2002): 237-52;
Arthur James May, Contemporary American Opinion of the Mid-Century Revolutions in Central Europe
(Philadelphia, 1927), 44-128; Ronald Zarychta, “Louis Kossuth and the United States, 1848-1852” (D.A. thesis,
Carnegie-Mellon University, 1976).
15
hoping to secure American military intervention in his ongoing struggle for independence against
Austria and Russia, a goal he hoped to reach by appealing to Americans’ exceptionalist ideas
about their role in the world. After the failure of the Roman Republic in 1849, Mazzini and
Giuseppe Garibaldi also spent years in exile. Mazzini in particular followed Kossuth in trying to
secure support for American intervention on behalf of republicanism in Europe. For example, in
1865, at the close of the Civil War, Mazzini and a committee of European republicans addressed
a group of prominent Republicans urging them to use the “immense” power of the United States
to assist European radicals. Having survived its internal struggle, Americans “could now be, and
therefore must be, for the good of your own country and of mankind, a leading and initiating
Power. And to fulfill that duty, you have only to represent within your geographical limits and
abroad, the principle of your National life,” which was republicanism.24
Antebellum Americans interpreted figures like Kossuth and Mazzini as proof of their
nation’s enlightening influence on Europe, but at the same time the testimony of figures like
Mazzini contributed to the ongoing process by which Americans identified and articulated what
“the principle of [their] National life” was. In 1856, peace reformer Elihu Burritt confidently
wrote that “in whatever lands beyond the sea, the American citizen may sojourn, he carries with
him the glowing sentiment of his country’s greatness and capacity for mighty deeds.” And
according to Burritt, Americans found that sentiment confirmed wherever they went. “The
Governments and people of Europe … frequently call [the United States] the mighty Republic of
the Western World. … [and] there seems to be an expectation prevalent … that our nation will
soon do some great thing.” But while Burritt, like his contemporaries, saw “offshore America”
24
Address to the Friends of Republican Principles in America from the Friends of those Principles in
Europe (N. p., 1865?), 1, pamphlet held by the New-York Historical Society. For examples of Kossuth’s flattering
comments on America’s exceptional world mission, see Kossuth in New England: A Full Account of the Hungarian
Governor’s Visit to Massachusetts, with His Speeches … (Boston, 1852).
16
merely as a product of American influence, “offshore America” also influenced the way
Americans saw themselves. Exceptionalism was not just something that Americans carried
abroad. It was an idea compounded and shaped by various expectations about the United States
in “lands beyond the sea.”25
One way to consider the importance of transnational exchange to the construction of
American exceptionalism is to conduct a counterfactual thought experiment. What would
antebellum American nationalism have looked like if the “offshore America” imagined by
Europeans like Kossuth and Mazzini had not existed at all, or if antebellum Americans, closed
off from the world outside the United States, had not been aware European “Americophilia”? It
is conceivable that the idea of American exceptionalism in the United States would have been
weaker than it was, or that it would have taken on a very different shape. In the absence of the
“offshore America” constructed by European republicans, Americans might simply have
imagined their free institutions as the exclusive properties of native Americans. Indeed, there
was a recessive strain of antebellum American nationalism that did doubt the ability of other
nations to be as free or as republican as the United States. During the Revolutions of 1848, some
American conservatives, bolstered by emerging “scientific” theories of race, publicly doubted
whether Italians or Hungarians were suited for republican self-government.26 In the long run of
American history, however, this exclusivist strain of American exceptionalism never eclipsed the
idea that the nation’s democratic institutions were exportable to other national contexts, an idea
that still animates much American foreign policy today. Perhaps—at certain moments and for
25
Elihu Burritt, A Plan of Brotherly Copartnership of the North and South, for the Peaceful Extinction of
Slavery (New York, 1856), 3, 11.
26
See Paola Gemme, Domesticating Foreign Struggles: the Italian Risorgimento and Antebellum American
Identity (Athens, Georgia, 2005); Reginald Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial
Anglo-Saxonism (Cambridge, Mass., 1981); Thomas R. Hietala, Manifest Design: American Exceptionalism and
Empire, rev. ed. (Ithaca, N. Y., 2003), chap. 5.
17
some people—it was the visibility and influence of “offshore America” that tipped the balance in
favor of the universalizing version of exceptionalism and against more exclusivist ones. The fact
that prominent non-Americans like Lafayette, Kossuth and Mazzini gleaned inspiration from the
model of the United States made exceptionalist claims about the nation’s global mission more
credible, popular, and durable than claims that the example of the United States would never be
replicated abroad.
To be sure, not all foreigners’ assessments of the antebellum United States were rosy.
Numerous European travelogues, including famous ones like Charles Dickens’s and Fanny
Trollope’s, offered sardonic criticisms of American manners and politics. Even European
radicals who expatriated to the United States were often disenchanted by what they found there.
Those Europeans like Tocqueville and Lieber who stressed the uniqueness of the American
experiment also criticized its habits of untrammeled popular democracy as dangerous trends that
Europe would be ill-advised to copy exactly.27 Americans angrily reacted to these criticisms by
returning fire on European society and reasserting their exceptional status. The regular
publication of condescending British travelogues about the crudity of American manners and
culture contributed to the popular image of an ongoing quarrel between “Brother Jonathan” (the
United States) and “John Bull” (England).
Yet the regularity and publicity of these back-and-forth exchanges contributed to the
elaboration of exceptionalist myths. Foreign criticism encouraged Americans to contrast
themselves with England and contributed to a general cultural obsession with identifying the
“national characteristics” of different countries. Rather than having no effect on American
exceptionalism, transnational contact, confrontation, and mutual criticism may have helped to
27
Crook, American Democracy in English Politics, shows that there was a wide spectrum of opinion about
America among liberal politicians in early Victorian England, not all of it flattering. Boston, British Chartists in
America, 36-44, also argues that many radical Chartists were disillusioned with the United States once they arrived.
18
create exceptionalism and intensify its shrillness. Whether “offshore America” pictured the
United States as a panacea or a problem, Americans were still forced, in print or in person, to
wrestle with European images of their nation. In 1864, one American writer published a booklength survey of European travel literature about the United States with the intent of “vindicating
as well as illustrating the claims and character of our outraged nationality.” Such publications
reveal that it was in the process of “vindicating” American nationality from foreign criticisms
that Americans imagined and identified their national “character.” Exceptionalism was less a
seamless suit of armor that blocked out all criticism, and more a defensive parry in transatlantic
arguments about the United States.28
Moreover, even European critics of the United States tended to implicitly reinforce the
notion that Americans had a special role to play in the world. European political radicals, for
instance, often attacked American slavery and urged Americans to rid themselves of this blot on
their national character. Yet usually they justified these admonitions by explaining that
American hypocrisy on the subject of slavery hindered reform abroad. In 1846, Henry Vincent,
an English Chartist, told William Lloyd Garrison’s antislavery newspaper, the Liberator, that he
was concerned about the “fatal influence America was exercising upon the cause of liberty
throughout Europe.” Whenever Chartists like himself tried to argue for reforms in England, “the
rejoinder invariably was, ‘Ah, but in America the people have power—your own system is in
operation there, and why does it not crush these evils [like slavery and poverty]?’” Vincent and
28
Henry T. Tuckerman, America and Her Commentators, with a Critical Sketch of Travel in the United
States (New York, 1864), iv. On pp. 1-12, Tuckerman’s introduction also argued that the testimonies of European
critics and observers could even help Americans see unique aspects of their nationality that were too near-at-hand
and familiar to be perceived otherwise. For more on the way that transatlantic arguments about American manners
forged national identity, rather than simply reproducing it, see Robert Lemelin, Pathway to the National Character,
1830-1861 (Port Washington, N. Y., 1974), 5-10; Paul Langford, “Manners and Character in Anglo-American
Perceptions, 1750-1850,” in Leventhal and Quinault, eds., Anglo-American Attitudes, 76-90.
19
other Europeans urged Americans to improve themselves so that the United States could live up
to its exemplary role.29
In short, when antebellum Americans asserted that the unique role of the United States
was to serve as a “model republic” for the rest of the world, they partly echoed the rhetoric of
offshore republicans and reformers. When a young Abraham Lincoln said in 1838 that the
success of the United States was “the fondest hope, of the lovers of freedom, throughout the
world,” that sentiment was not simply an expression of inward-looking hubris. It was
substantiated and encouraged by the testimony of actual “lovers of freedom, throughout the
world,” many of whom addressed antebellum Americans in print or visited the United States in
person.30 That possibility, at least, should call into question Rodgers’s interpretation of the
antebellum period as an era in which exceptionalism prevented Americans from being affected at
all by their Atlantic crossings. For Rodgers, Americans were so hidebound by their images of
Europe as a backward, anti-republican, aristocratic continent that they could learn nothing from
Europe. But the idea that they were different from the rest of the world was a notion that
Americans learned partly from the rest of the world. At the least, instead of assuming that
preexisting exceptionalism made antebellum Americans impervious to change, historians of the
mid-nineteenth-century need to explore how and to what extent exceptionalism itself was shaped
by transnational dialogue between Americans and the “offshore America” they encountered in
the rhetoric of others.
29
For Vincent quote, see “Dissolution of the American Union: Letter from Henry C. Wright,” Liberator
(Boston), 30 January 1846. See also Samuel May, Jr., “Foreign Interference,” Boston Public Library,
Ms.B.1.6.13.39, which uses Vincent’s letter as proof that European republicans have a vital interest in the slave
question in the United States: “Their own liberties & their hopes for the liberties of their children & of mankind are
deeply concerned in this matter.” For other examples of this theme, see B. Godwin, “England and America,”
Liberty Bell (Boston), vol. 2 (1841), 1-17; Lovett, Life and Struggles, 132-137; Matthew Mason, Slavery and
Politics in the Early American Republic (Chapel Hill, 2006), 94-95.
30
“Address to the Young Men’s Lyceum of Sprinfield, Illinois, January 27, 1838,” in Lincoln: Selected
Speeches and Writings, comp. Don Fehrenbacher (New York, 1992), 17.
20
II
A skeptic might object at this point that historians like Rodgers are more right than wrong. It
could be argued that instead of contributing to the development of American exceptionalism,
foreign republicans like Kossuth or Mazzini merely recognized and exploited preexisting myths
that Americans had constructed by themselves. Surely the influence of indigenous traditions,
which stretched back to the Puritans, shaped American exceptionalism more powerfully and
directly than the interventions of “offshore America.” On this view, transnational exchanges
added strength to antebellum American exceptionalism only about as much as a gob of super
glue would reinforce the Tower of London.
This objection, however, assumes that there was ever a time in history when Americans’
own ideas about themselves could be disentangled from “offshore America.” But as historians
like Jack Greene have shown, incipient ideas about American exceptionalism began to take
shape as early as the first discovery of the New World by European explorers. Before there even
were people who called themselves Americans and certainly before there was a United States,
writers in multiple national contexts argued that the New World was freer than the Old and was
providentially destined to regenerate Europe. It may be impossible to speak of a purely
American ideology of “American exceptionalism” that was ever built in total isolation from the
rest of the world.31
The claim that “offshore America” did little to reinforce the exceptionalism of “onshore
America” may also overstate how strong American exceptionalism was in the antebellum United
31
Jack Greene, The Intellectual Construction of America: Exceptionalism and Identity from 1492 to 1800
(Chapel Hill, N. C., 1993); Edmundo O’Gorman, The Invention of America: An Inquiry into the Historical Nature of
the New World and the Meaning of Its History (Bloomington, Ind., 1961). Matthew Rainbow Hale has also argued
that the forging of national identity in the immediate aftermath of the American Revolution was a transatlantic
process in which Americans defined themselves in relation to the British and the French. See Hale, “Neither Britons
nor Frenchmen: The French Revolution and American National Identity” (Ph.D. diss., Brandeis University, 2002).
21
States. Exceptionalist effusions often masked a deep anxiety among Americans about the future
of their republic. As Christopher Mulvey puts it, “pride in the superiority of the American and
the American nation was, in addition to whatever else it might be, an expression of a fear of the
inferiority of the American and the American nation.” Some of that fear even stemmed from the
ideas about nationality that Americans were learning from their encounters with Europe. The
emphasis that European theorists placed on ethnic homogeneity as a premise for political
unification made some Americans wonder whether the United States, with its heterogeneous
population and decentralized federal government, had the necessary prerequisites to be a nation.
When Charles Sumner asked, in a speech at the close of the Civil War, “Are We a Nation?,” the
question was partly prompted by a survey of nations abroad. While exceptionalism pictured the
youth of the United States as an advantage, the recently unsuccessful attempts to create new
nation-states in Italy and Germany also suggested that youth could be a disadvantage, especially
when Sumner considered countries like Sweden and Spain that had become nations early in their
long histories.32
In the forty years before the American Civil War, social reform movements also
proliferated exponentially, each convinced that some social evil—slavery, sectionalism,
alcoholism, dueling, war, impiety, prostitution, factories, land monopoly, materialism, urban
riots, Catholicism, freemasonry, unbridled democracy, or all of the above—threatened the
existence of the nation. Given such widespread doubts, historians should not assume that
exceptionalist faith came easily and indubitably to antebellum Americans. In his 1838 address to
the Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield, a young Abraham Lincoln did confidently predict that
Americans had no nation to fear but themselves: “As a nation of freemen, we must live through
32
Mulvey, Transatlantic Manners, 6. See Ross, “Are We a Nation?,” 327-328; Charles Sumner, “Are We
a Nation?,” in The Works of Charles Sumner (Boston, 1877), 12:200-204.
22
all time, or die by suicide.” Yet as Lincoln surveyed the rising disregard for the law in America
and the increasing frequency of urban riots in the 1830s, the threat of national suicide seemed
real. For him and others, the faith that America would “live through all time” was chastened by
the fear that it might not.33
That fear became more worrisome as Americans inched closer and closer to Civil War in
the 1840s and 1850s. Antislavery activists and politicians worried that the growing strength of a
Southern “Slave Power” threatened the future of republicanism, and their worries intensified as
conservatives in Europe turned back the republican tide of the Revolution of 1848. When a
weary President Lincoln told Congress in December 1862 that they had the power to “nobly
save, or meanly lose, the last best, hope of earth,” he spoke more with a tone of ambivalence than
triumphal certainty. By 1862, after a Thermidorean decade in Europe and a conservative
rebellion by the Confederacy, it was reasonable to wonder whether republican America would
suffer the fate of every previous republic. The following year, when Lincoln more optimistically
predicted that “government of the people, by the people, and for the people” would “not perish
from the earth,” his tone was one of relief, in view of how close the world had come to letting
democracy die. Lincoln’s acute awareness of the world outside prompted both his fear about the
future of the United States and his faith that it was the only nation left to serve as the world’s
republic—the “best” hope of earth partly because it was the “last.”34
33
Lincoln, “Address to the Young Men’s Lyceum,” 14. On the bleak assessment that American reformers
gave of the antebellum United States, see Steven Mintz, “The Specter of Social Breakdown,” chap. 1 in Moralists
and Modernizers: America’s Pre-Civil War Reformers (Baltimore, 1995); Edward Pessen, Most Uncommon
Jacksonians: The Radical Leaders of the Early Labor Movement (Albany, N. Y., 1967), chap. 8.
34
“From Annual Message to Congress, December 1, 1862,” in Lincoln: Selected Speeches and Writings,
364; “Address at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, November 19, 1863,” in ibid., 405. David Potter also places the
Gettysburg Address in the context of the Revolutions of 1848 by noting that Lincoln never once mentions
“America” by name in the speech, but instead “defined the Civil War as a testing” of the idea that “any nation”
conceived in liberty could endure—an idea thrown in doubt by the results of 1848. See Potter, Impending Crisis, 16.
23
Even Lincoln’s reference to democracy as “government of the people, by the people, and
for the people” evinces his participation in transatlantic discourses about republicanism spawned
by the Revolutions of 1848. Historians have long debated the origins of that eye-catching phrase
from the Gettysburg Address. Some have attributed its first use to Theodore Parker, but
European republicans like Kossuth and Mazzini also used variations of Lincoln’s “government
of the people” long before Gettysburg. As historian Joseph Rossi writes, “the slogan was a
familiar one among liberal thinkers on both sides of the Atlantic,” and historian Steven Bela
Vardy notes that Louis Kossuth defined democracy as government “all for the people, and all by
the people” in an address delivered in Columbus, Ohio, in February 1852. Lincoln’s use of a
similar phrase in an address often seen as the quintessential expression of exceptionalism
underlines the way that his nationalism was shaped partly by events and ideas outside the borders
of the United States.35
A skeptic might still object that for most antebellum Americans, native traditions of
exceptionalism were stronger than the fear that the United States would fall prey to the
destructive forces that threatened other nations. The identification of the United States as a
unique experiment in democratic government also stretched back to the Declaration of
Independence and arguably needed little buttressing from celebrities like Kossuth. To some
extent and in some cases, that objection may be true. Yet it is also important to remember that
there were antebellum Americans who dissented entirely from the myths of American
exceptionalism.
35
Rossi, The Image of America in Mazzini’s Writings, 136; Várdy, “Kossuth’s Effort to Enlist America,”
241. While still a young, upcoming Whig in Illinois, Lincoln caught the “Magyar-mania” inspired by Kossuth’s
visit and helped organize a committee to invite Kossuth to Springfield. See “Call for Kossuth Meeting,” in The
Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, vol. 2, ed. Roy P. Basler (New Brunswick, N. J., 1953), 118. The idea that
Lincoln followed Kossuth’s speeches in the Midwest and may have been influenced by them is therefore not farfetched.
24
In the 1830s, for instance, radical abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison denounced
Americans’ claims to be a “model republic.” For Garrison and his followers, the federal
Constitution was an “agreement with hell” and the United States was headed there in a handbasket. Some antebellum labor radicals also denied that America was exempt from the evils
being produced by capitalism around the world. As Carl J. Guarneri shows in his history of the
American disciples of French socialist Charles Fourier, socialists rejected key tenets of
exceptionalism, believing that “a republican form of government, however praiseworthy, could
not prevent America from following Europe’s road to ruin.”36
Both abolitionists and socialists reversed standard formulas of exceptionalism by
claiming that reformers in other countries were in advance of the United States. After the
successful passage of British West Indian Emancipation in 1833, American abolitionists praised
antislavery Britain as a model nation, far in advance of the United States in its views about race
and slavery. According to the German liberal Charles Follen, who became an abolitionist after
coming to Harvard, England was now the world’s “torch-bearer, leading the way to the liberation
of mankind.” Abolitionists put their Anglophilia into practice as well, forging close ties of
correspondence and travel with abolitionists in Britain, who hosted a “World’s Convention” on
slavery in London in 1840.37 Critics of capitalism in the United States also looked abroad in
search of ideas and allies. American Albert Brisbane discovered the socialist theories of Charles
Fourier while studying in Paris in the 1830s and then made it his life’s mission to implement
Fourier’s ideas in the United States, where an eclectic group of reformers including Horace
36
Carl J. Guarneri, The Utopian Alternative: Fourierism in Nineteenth-Century America (Ithaca, N. Y.,
1991), 112-115, quoted on p. 112. For Garrison’s description of the Constitution as an “agreement with hell” and
his disunionism, see any biography, including, most recently, Henry Mayer, All on Fire: William Lloyd Garrison
and the Abolition of Slavery (New York, 1998).
37
Charles Follen, Address to the People of the United States on the Subject of Slavery (Boston, 1834), 16.
25
Greeley, William Henry Channing, and the utopian communalists at Brook Farm rallied around
Brisbane’s teachings.38
Both Garrisonian abolitionists and American Fourierists disavowed the prevailing
American exceptionalism of their contemporaries. In a period when many Americans proudly
declared, “Our Country, Right or Wrong,” Garrison published a quite different motto on the
masthead of his newspaper, the Liberator: “Our Country is the World—our Countrymen are all
Mankind.” Some Garrisonian radicals not only disavowed American patriotism as an evil, but
looked forward to the eventual disappearance of all national boundaries and the realization of a
universal human brotherhood in which nation-states would be obsolete. Fourierists also
described their cause as a solvent of national pride and prejudice, arguing that cooperative
socialism would harmonize the world’s population by breaking down class barriers. Both
abolitionists and Fourierists believed that their own extensive international networks proved the
value of cosmopolitan identities and foreshadowed the imminent demise of national divisions.
As Garrison sailed to the “World’s Convention” in London in 1840, he described that meeting as
a harbinger of a new world order, in which mankind would soon be “reconciled together” and
“their country [would] no longer be hemmed in by geographical boundaries, or bounded by any
number of square miles less than the whole globe.”39
Because of their openness to reform ideas from Europe and their cosmopolitan rejection
of American nationalism, abolitionists and Fourierists are the kinds of subjects that transnational
historians like Rodgers should love to study, since they seem to prove how Atlantic crossings
38
39
See Guarneri, Utopian Alternative, 15-34.
William Lloyd Garrison to Oliver Johnson, 22 May 1840, Letters of William Lloyd Garrison, 2:626. See
also Garrison to Richard P. Hunt, 1 May 1840, and Garrison to Maria W. Chapman, 3 June 1840, both in Letters of
William Lloyd Garrison, 2:595, 2:632-633. On Garrisonian cosmopolitanism more generally, see William Caleb
McDaniel, “Our Country is the World: Radical American Abolitionists Abrod” (Ph. D. diss., Johns Hopkins
University, 2006).
26
destabilized American exceptionalism. Yet even these dissenters from American exceptionalism
ultimately returned to a qualified belief in exceptionalism, and they did so partly because of their
experiences abroad. Guarneri shows that although Fouriersts initially “repudiated nationalist
prejudices” in favor of international socialism, they later “did a startling about-face on the
question of American exceptionalism.” As Fourierists and their European allies began to
organize utopian socialist communes in the 1840s and started the difficult task of promoting their
ideas, they settled on the United States as the best place to begin their revolution. There, the
availability of cheap land and the relative youth of the population made it easier to found the
communitarian “phalanxes” that Fourier believed would undermine capitalism. English
socialists like Robert Owen, though different from Fourier, also saw America as a prime place to
found communes. In promotional literature on their socialist experiments at places like Brook
Farm and New Harmony, both Owenite and Fourierist socialists appealed to the idea of America
as a peculiarly blessed country. Socialists thus eventually returned to a form of American
exceptionalism, but the route they took ran through, not around, the ideas of Europeans like
Owen and Fourier.40
After 1840, Garrisonian abolitionists also did a “startling about-face” on the question of
America’s uniqueness, and their revised estimates of the United States were also produced partly
by encounters with reformers abroad. At the “World’s Convention,” Garrisonians inaugurated
long-lasting friendships with reformers who were involved in a variety of British reform
movements. These British friends, as supporters of causes like the repeal of the Union between
England and Ireland, the expansion of free suffrage, the repeal of the Corn Laws, and the
40
Guarneri, Utopian Alternative, 112-113. See also Carl Guarneri, “Importing Fourierism to America,”
Journal of the History of Ideas 43, no. 4 (October-December, 1982), 581-594. On Owenites, see J. F. C. Harrison,
Robert Owen and the Owenites in Britain and America: The Quest for the New Moral World (London: Routledge,
1969); Ronald G. Walters, American Reformers, 1815-1860, rev. ed. (New York, 1997), 60-67.
27
disestablishment of the church, disabused Garrisonians of the notion that England was free of
social problems just because it had abolished slavery. After seeing Europe firsthand and learning
more about reform movements there, some Garrisonians returned home from the “World’s
Convention” with a higher regard for the United States. Before the Convention of 1840 Garrison
would have agreed with his friend Charles Follen that England was the “torchbearer” of freedom
and America the follower, but after contact with English political reformers he was more
convinced that in many ways “Great Britain falls far in the rear of the United States, and her
population have many and grievous burdens to bear, which are unknown to the white inhabitants
of this highly favored country.” Such statements might suggest, at first glance, that Garrison’s
Atlantic crossing simply revealed his latent belief in the “highly favored” status of the United
States. But given Garrison’s earlier and later denunciations of America’s image as a model
republic, it is also possible that his experience abroad and his exposure to European reformers
made him more of an exceptionalist than he had been before or would have been otherwise.41
The contrast Garrison drew between England and the United States was also partly a
product of more specific reasons for disillusion with the “World’s Convention” in 1840.
Garrison and his supporters, who supported equal rights for women as well as for slaves, were
outraged when the Convention’s British organizers prohibited women from attending as full
delegates. Organizers explained to the Garrisonians, who had delegated several women to attend
the meeting, that in Britain the national “custom” was for men and women to belong to separate
reform associations. But Garrisonians ridiculed that rationale by appealing to their expectations
that the meeting would be internationalist in orientation, not beholden to British customs.
41
See William Lloyd Garrison to Helen E. Garrison, 29 June 1840, Letters of William Lloyd Garrison,
2:656; Garrison to Henry C. Wright, 23 August 1840, Letters of William Lloyd Garrison, 2:680; and Garrison to
Henry C. Wright, 1 April 1843, Letters of William Lloyd Garrison, 3:144. On transatlantic networks between
Garrisonians and European radicals and reformers, see McDaniel, “Our Country is the World,” chaps. 3-6.
28
Quarrels over the World’s Convention continued long after it had ended; eventually the leading
British antislavery organization dissociated itself from Garrisonian radicals who insisted on
yoking the “woman question” with the antislavery cause. Dismayed by their excommunication
from the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society (BFASS), however, many Garrisonians
recanted their unqualified praise for Britain as a “torchbearer” of freedom. Some even argued
that the exclusion of women from the meeting proved the general lack of democratic openness in
Britain and suggested that Boston would be more likely to hold a true “World’s Convention”
open to men and women.42
The suggestion that a true “World’s Convention” could only be hosted by the United
States might also seem to indicate that Garrisonians were parochial all along. But their symbolic
embrace of Boston and the rhetoric of exceptionalism was partly a means of expressing outrage
with their treatment at the World’s Convention. Their assertions of exceptionalism, far from
proving their detachment from Europe or their lack of openness to European reform ideas, were
the ironic products of their efforts to build transnational networks and their frustration with the
national chauvinism of the BFASS. For Garrisonians as well as for Fourierists, their “aboutface” showed how transnational networks of reform could, for different reasons, encourage
exceptionalist rhetoric. Radical socialists and abolitionists were not representative of antebellum
Americans, but precisely because of their initial dissent from the myths of American patriotism,
they offer compelling examples of how transnationalism has sometimes worked to produce
exceptionalism. It was precisely because abolitionists and socialists crossed national borders,
embraced the ideas of European allies, and tried to forge international ties that they ultimately
42
See McDaniel, “Our Country is the World,” chap. 2.
29
embraced versions of exceptionalism. For such radical reformers, to paraphrase an English
proverb, the shortest way home was around the world.
Cases like the Garrisonians and the Fourierists raise the question, though, of whether other
antebellum Americans arrived at exceptionalist conclusions via transnational routes. My purpose
in this paper has been to encourage historians to ask that question, instead of assuming that
transnational routes usually lead away from exceptionalism. The Garrisonians and Fourierists
should also caution historians against assuming that American exceptionalism was a monolithic
and uniform system of thought. Instead, it was a rhetorical repertoire that both Americans and
non-Americans could draw on to advocate particular causes, shame political opponents, and
support certain social theories. A Fourierist’s reason for asserting American exceptionalism
(because the United States was the best place to correct the evils of industrial capitalism) was
quite different from a Boston merchant’s reason for believing in exceptionalism (because the
United States was free of the inequality that marred Europe). Garrison’s reason for praising the
“highly favored” status of the United States (in order to criticize those British abolitionists who
did not share his radical views on women’s equality) was different still from the Fourierist’s
reasons or the reasons of Louis Kossuth. One of the most potentially fruitful results of a
transnational history of American exceptionalism may be its ability to show the multiple forms
and context-specific meanings of the idea itself.
But to account for the exceptionalism of the Fourierists and abolitionists, or to show how
and when “offshore America” contributed to Americans’ image of themselves, transnational
historians will first have to move beyond the anti-exceptionalist rhetoric of their earliest
manifestoes. Those manifestoes, by setting up rigid dichotomies between globalization,
30
transnationalism, and cosmopolitanism, on the one hand, and nationalism, exceptionalism, and
parochialism, on the other, left little space for historians even to consider the more complex
possibilities I have sketched in this paper, like the possibility that transnational, cosmopolitan
reformers could become American exceptionalists, or that non-Americans contributed to the
evolution of American exceptionalism. Transnational historians are right to question the validity
of exceptionalist assumptions. But as Thomas Haskell puts it, “there is more than one way to
take exception to exceptionalism.” One way is to show that American exceptionalism cannot
even account for its own history without paying attention to historical connections and exchanges
that stretch across national borders.43
43
Thomas L. Haskell, “Taking Exception to Exceptionalism,” Reviews in American History 28, no. 1
(March 2000), 164. In some of the most recent scholarship by transnational historians, there are encouraging signs
that this move “beyond anti-exceptionalism” is already beginning to take place, along with an upsurge of interest in
writing transnational histories of the antebellum period and the Civil War era. See, for example, Bender, A Nation
among Nations, chap. 3; Sven Beckert, "Emancipation and Empire: Reconstructing the Worldwide Web of Cotton
Production in the Age of the American Civil War," AHR 109, no. 5 (Dec. 2004), 1405-1438; Tyrrell, Transnational
Nation, chap. 7. Transnational historians have also begun to hint at the ways their proposed methods might shed
light on how nationalism and national identity were constructed. See Tyrrell, Transnational Nation, 99-100; “AHR
Conversation: On Transnational History,” AHR 111, no. 5 (December 2006), http://www.historycooperative.org/
journals/ahr/111.5/introduction.html, para. 22.