In 1866, an English magazine, the Spectator, grudgingly observed, “Nobody doubts any more that the United States is a power of the first class, a nation which it is very dangerous to offend and almost impossible to attack.” In the immediate sense, this observation reflected the confirmation of nationhood through Union success in the Civil War. In larger perspective, it reflected an amazing growth of power since the republic’s birth ninety years earlier, little more than the lifetime of John Quincy Adams’s generation.
At the end of the Civil War, the nation’s population exceeded 35 million; Britain and France had fewer people. Although still far behind Great Britain, America’s industrial output nearly equaled that of France and exceeded that of other countries. American agriculture was the world’s most productive. Territory had swelled from fewer than a million square miles in 1783 to exceed 3 million square miles. The arbitrament of war had confirmed the viability of republican government.
The success of the United States owed much to achievements — some earned, some not — in relations with foreign powers. Otto von Bismarck, Germany’s “Iron Chancellor,” is supposed to have said that God seemed to have a special place in his heart for drunkards, idiots, and Americans. Good fortune did seem to fall on the young Republic, perhaps most notably in its escape from the consequences of mismanagement by Jefferson and Madison, but also in such things as the fortuitous dominance over British policy by Shelburne and Aberdeen at critical times.
But luck, a cynic may claim, tends to fall upon those who already have an edge. In Samuel Flagg Bemis’s familiar apothegm, “Europe’s distress” was. often America’s “advantage.”* The success of the Amer-
1 Samuel Flagg Bemis, Pinckney’s Treaty (Baltimore, 1926), iii.
Ican Revolution, from the European point of view a sideshow in a desperate struggle for power, and the peaceful acquisition of Louisiana are perhaps the best examples. Of course, Europe’s distresses could also prove contagious, as they did in 1812, but even then the Americans were able to survive in large part because Britain’s resources were at full stretch in the war against Napoleon. And Bemis’s word, “distress,” does not fully encompass those European factors that helped the Americans. Distractions were enough. Simmering rivalries nearer to home, well short of war, made London, in particular, but other capitals as well, wary of adding controversy with the United States. In differing ways, but persistently, European factors were major contributors to American success.
The Americans were also fortunate, whether through God’s favor or not, that they were often pushing on half-open or at least insecurely locked doors. They did not have to mobilize large armies of conquest to ensure their expansion, nor did they require standing armies to defend their empire. For the war against Mexico they mobilized forces one-sixteenth the size of those used by the North alone in the civil conflict fifteen years later. Peacetime armed forces never exceeded twenty thousand before the 1840s, and they were fewer than thirty thousand when the Civil War began. The Spanish in Florida, the Mexicans, the Indians — all were too weak to slam shut the door on housebreakers, and it did not take a military genius of Napoleon’s caliber to understand that Louisiana was indefensible in 1803.
Above all, however, the Americans owed their success to their own drive and ambition. Sometimes their methods were brutal. Sometimes their leaders miscalculated. Some of them, particularly in the years before the Treaty of Ghent, worried like other citizens about the future of the republican experiment. But all embodied or at least were driven by the republican nationalism of their fellow citizens. Young America may not have been in all ways attractive, besmirched as the nation was by slavery, by nativism, by egotism and arrogance. Certainly European conservatives did not find it so, as may be seen in such matters as their reaction to the Monroe Doctrine and their attitudes during the Civil War. “Lust of wealth, and trust in it; vulgar faith in magnitude and multitude, instead of nobleness; perpetual self-contemplation in passionate vanity” — so John Ruskin, a major figure in mid-Victorian letters, assessed the United States in 1863, during the trial of republicanism. Ruskin’s venom aside, these qualities — economic individualism, a belief in popular sovereignty, and conviction of superiority to other peoples — had made the nation what it was. They had provided policy with its quenchless vigor.
“American exceptionalism” and “the American consensus,” two concepts once used as interpretive guideposts by historians, have come under heavy attack in recent years. The exceptionalist interpretation stresses the view that the United States is unique, that its history is to a large degree not comparable with that of other nations. The not unrelated consensus view maintains that, in contrast to others, the American people overwhelmingly, nearly unanimously, agree on the fundamentals of government and policy. Both of these, many now argue, reflect the smug conservatism of the years in which they gained prominence. To claim that America has always been governed by consensus suggests a national homogeneity belied by, among other things, the Civil War, and to stress American uniqueness raises the temptation to assert American superiority.
For the diplomatic historian, however, the concept of consensus, and that of exceptionalism, still have usefulness if properly and cautiously applied. The struggles between Federalists and Republicans early in the nation’s history and, some decades later, the opposed views of Democrats and Whigs regarding the tactics and timing of expansion are at the heart of the record of American diplomacy. Such differences must not be allowed to obscure the consensus on national aims shared by policymakers and, when they turned their attention to foreign policy, the people. All Americans wanted and expected the nation to expand, territorially and commercially. All wanted to stay aloof from European politics. All believed in republicanism — as they defined it — and considered America a “beacon of liberty” for the world. At this level, a consensus existed.
No nations are clones of one another, yet America, certainly nineteenth-century America, may properly be described as truly “exceptional.” To make such a claim is not to assert America’s superiority, moral or otherwise, only to underline the distinctiveness of its beliefs, its opportunities, and its view of its own place in the world. We may leave to the founders and builders of the republican empire the claim that American uniqueness and Ameriran superiority were synonymous, but we must recognize that their conviction — their arrogance, perhaps — helped to drive national policy. In 1785, continuing the outpouring of nationalistic poetry he had begun at Yale, Timothy Dwight predicted the future:
Here Empire's last, and brightest throne shall rise;
And Peace and Right, and Freedom, greet the skies.
So believed his countrymen, and, so believing, by 1865 they had created a republican empire.
World History
