I’ve been reading lots of history lately. Nothing cures shallow thinking like a rich dose of history. Recently I finished reading Daniel Walker Howe’s sweeping narrative of the period between Colonial and Civil War America, What God Hath Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848. This was a period dominated in many ways by Andrew Jackson. Anyone interested in contemporary debates over “American Exceptionalism” should study this period carefully.
Jacksonian America defintely was “exceptional” — the question is in what way. The brash entrepreneurial drive and populist dynamism that imbued this time remains a prominent, quintessentially American characteristic. Howe’s summary of the political dynamics of this period could map comfortably onto our times:
As the historian Daniel Feller has noted, ‘A newly functioning system of gathering an disseminating information [the telegraph] made people aware of a larger world and gave them the power to change it. This increased ‘power to change’ encouraged controversy and contest. Equal rights for the two human sexes was but the newest subject over which Americans divided. The disputes that raged among the people of the young republic between 1815 and 1848 cannot be reduced to a single fundamental conflict (such as the working class against the capitalists). Rancorous competition between the major political parties reflected real disagreements over policy as well as mutual distrust between their constituencies…. Constitutional and legal ambiguities combined with fierce ambitions to produce a culture of litigation. Racial, ethnic, and religious divisions spilled over into public violence.
Does any of this sound familiar? But Howe notes that the signature driver of this period was white violence against African slaves, Native Americans, and Mexico:
The most bloody conflicts, however, derived from the domination and exploitation of the North American continent by the white people of the United States and their government. If a primary driving force can be identified in American history for this period, this was it. As its most ardent exponents, the Jacksonian Democrats, conceived it, this imperialist program included the preservation and extension of African American slavery as well as the expropriation of Native Americans and Mexicans…. Above all, westward expansion rendered inescapable the issue that would tear the country assunder a dozen years later: whether to expand slavery.
This isn’t liberal revisionism. It’s the reality that America has been “exceptional” both in spreading liberty and promoting oppression; in creating prosperity and destroying livelihoods; in justice and peace and in brutal violence. It’s the messiness of all human history.