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American Exceptionalism

The most prominent participants in the American Revolution were white men of European descent who founded the American Republic believing that accomplishment marked a break from the patterns of European history and so was by nature exceptionalist. The 'extraordinarily large number of families of independent middling status' in the British North American colonies were, proportionately substantially more numerous than in any other contemporary Western society.

There are several schools of interpretation have dominated American historical research and generalisation. One, which may be justly associated with the name of the first great American historian, George Bancroft [1800-1891], explains the larger achievements in American national life by reference to the peculiar moral endowments of a people acting under divine guidance; or perhaps it would be more correct to say, it sees in the course of development the working out of a higher will than that of man. There is to be observed in the history of the struggle for the Constitution, to use Bancroft's words, "the movement of the divine power which gives unity to the universe, and order and connection to events."

George Bancroft was the most successful of all American historians. In mid-19th-century America, George Bancroft's was a household name in polite, middle-class society [and founder of the United States Naval Academy, eg "Bancroft Hall"]. A gentleman who wrote about history when history was still considered literature, rather than an academic historian, Bancroft’s "History of the United States" was hugely popular and made its author a small fortune.

"However great," Bancroft wrote, "may be the number of those who persuade themselves that there is in man nothing superior to himself, history interposes with evidence that tyranny and wrong lead inevitably to decay; that freedom and right, however hard may be the struggle always prove resistless. Through this assurance ancient nations learn how to renew their youth; the rising generation is incited to take a generous part in the grand drama of time; and old age, staying itself upon sweet Hope as its companion and cherisher, not bating a jot of courage, nor seeing cause to argue against the hand or the will of a higher power, stands waiting in the tranquil conviction that the path of humanity is still fresh with the dews of morning, that the Redeemer of the nations liveth."

The United States of America was transformed in the two centuries from the first English settlement at Jamestown in 1607 to the beginning of the 19th century. From a series of isolated colonial settlements hugging the Atlantic Coast, the United States evolved into a new nation, born in revolution, and guided by a Constitution embodying the principles of democratic self-government.

The United States of America did not emerge as a nation until about 175 years after its establishment as a group of mostly British colonies. Yet from the beginning it was a different society in the eyes of many Europeans who viewed it from afar, whether with hope or apprehension. Most of its settlers — whether the younger sons of aristocrats, religious dissenters, or impoverished indentured servants — came there lured by a promise of opportunity or freedom not available in the Old World.

Jean de Crèvecoeur in his Letters from an American Farmer (1782), when responded to the rhetorical question “What then is the American, this new man?” by observing that “He is an American, who, leaving behind him all his ancient prejudices and manners, receives new ones from the new mode of life he has embraced.... Here individuals of all nations are melted into a new race of men”.

The first Americans were reborn free, establishing themselves in a wilderness unencumbered by any social order other than that of the primitive aboriginal peoples they displaced. Having left the baggage of a feudal order behind them, they faced few obstacles to the development of a society built on the principles of political and social liberalism that emerged with difficulty in 17th and 18th-century Europe. Based on the thinking of the philosopher John Locke, this sort of liberalism emphasized the rights of the individual and constraints on government power.

Most immigrants to America came from the British Isles, the most liberal of the European polities along with The Netherlands. In religion, the majority adhered to various forms of Calvinism with its emphasis on both divine and secular contractual relationships. These greatly facilitated the emergence of a social order built on individual rights and social mobility. The development of a more complex and highly structured commercial society in coastal cities by the mid-18th century did not stunt this trend; it was in these cities that the American Revolution was made. The constant reconstruction of society along an ever-receding Western frontier equally contributed to a liberal-democratic spirit.

In Europe, ideals of individual rights advanced slowly and unevenly; the concept of democracy was even more alien. The attempt to establish both in continental Europe’s oldest nation led to the French Revolution. The effort to destroy a neofeudal society while establishing the rights of man and democratic fraternity generated terror, dictatorship, and Napoleonic despotism. In the end, it led to reaction and gave legitimacy to a decadent old order. In America, the European past was overwhelmed by ideals that sprang naturally from the process of building a new society on virgin land. The principles of liberalism and democracy were strong from the beginning. A society that had thrown off the burdens of European history would naturally give birth to a nation that saw itself as exceptional.

In the early twentieth century, the protagonist in Israel Zangwill's play, The Melting Pot, declares “A fig for your feuds and vendettas! Germans and Frenchmen, Irishmen and Englishmen, Jews and Russians—into the Crucible with you all! God is making the American.”

Alan Taylor's American Colonies suggests " the dominant colonial power on the Pacific rim became the United States, the hypercommercial nation founded by the Americans who won their independence from the British by revolution and war in the years 1775-83. Far from ending with the American Revolution, colonialism persisted in North America, but from a new base on the Atlantic seaboard."