The Jeffersonian Triumph and American Exceptionalism

In his first major public address in January 1838, Abraham Lincoln made an extraordinary claim for exceptionalism. All the armies of Europe, Asia, and Africa combined, with all the treasure of the earth (our own excepted) in their military chest; with a Buonaparte for a commander, could not by force, take a drink from the Ohio, or make a track on the Blue Ridge, in a trial of a thousand years.... If destruction be lot, must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, must live through all time, or die by suicide.1 I doubt that any other sober statesman for any other major power could have made a comparable claim for his nation. Even though Lincoln overestimated the time span of the invulnerability of the United States-he did not foresee the age of the intercontinental ballistic missile-he was fundamentally correct about the century after about 1820. No combination of hostile powers could seriously threaten the United States so long as the Union remained intact. Ironically, Lincoln even got the chance to confirm his own hypothesis when he guided the Union through the most terrible crisis in its history. The secession of the southern states prompted France to intervene in Mexico and bring the European balance of power back into this hemisphere. Union victory convinced France to withdraw and restored hegemony on this side of the Atlantic. Lincoln's insight was fundamentally correct for his own day. That achievement was a Jeffersonian accomplishment, ratified by Whigs like Lincoln. It consisted of three interrelated parts: a commitment to indefinite continental expansionism, manipulation of Europe's detested balance of power to achieve hegemony for the United States at least in North America and perhaps in the whole western hemisphere, and a determination to accomplish these goals without building a centralized warmaking government in the United States. A fourth component of the Jeffersonians' achievement, the destruction of an incipient (Federalist) ruling class, was equally important to them and quite without precedent in their own day, but it became over time less of a badge of exceptionalism as other nations began to follow the same path. This aspect of Jeffersonian America not be further discussed in this essay.2 The Jeffersonians' main weapon in this quest would be the ordinary citizens of the Republic, and in their hands even the word American became powerful ammunition. As shapers of the first nation in this hemisphere to win its independence from Europe, they called themselves Americans and made their claim stick by forcing their opponents to use it too. The loyalist J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur conceded the point when he became one of the first to inquire, What is an American? So did the settlers of Upper Canada when they insisted they were not Americans. And by the 1790s, the residents of the Spanish borderlands routinely referred to their neighbors as Americanos. This essay use the word while urging readers not to forget that it was never a neutral term.3 For Jefferson and his followers this project had its soft side and its hard side. The soft version, the Empire for liberty, he proclaimed as early as 1780 in his instructions to George Rogers Clark and reaffirmed in a long letter to James Madison almost thirty years later. Expressing confidence in 1809 that the Floridas and Cuba would soon be annexed and that Canada would come into our confederacy, which would be of course in the first war, he proclaimed that then we should have such an empire for liberty as she has never surveyed since the creation: and I am persuaded no constitution was ever before so well calculated as ours for extensive empire and self government.4 Indians, blacks, and Spaniards experienced the hard side of these formulations. When the Cherokees launched hostilities against Virginia in 1776, Jefferson hoped they will now be driven beyond the Missisipi and that this in future be declared to the Indians the invariable consequence of their beginning a war

American exceptionalism · Economic history · Hegemony · Jeffersonian democracy · Political science · Politics · Power (physics · Secession · Victory · American Constitutional Law and Politics · History · Law

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