Redeemer Nation: The Idea of America's Millenial Role (review)

BOOK REVIEWS351 author's findings and follows the lines laid down by the actual course of party formation. New England and the Middle Atlantic states (including Delaware and Maryland) form familiar groupings. The Old South incorporates the South Atlantic states from Virginia to Georgia (excluding South Carolina) and Kentucky and Tennessee. South Carolina is not covered because the absence of popular election of presidential electors, or of other statewide officeholders, leaves the historian without a party system. In a group designated as the New States, all of the remainder of those admitted to statehood in time to participate fully in the party formation under study are included. Professor McCormick has provided an indispensable tool for any who would study political parties in this period by any approach. Pitfalls abound for the unwary in seeking to generalize about institutions made up of as many discrete elements as the state parties of the United States. This work maps a wide array of such traps and offers guidance through the maze of differentials in time and space that seem to be inherent in this multistate arrangement for national parties. It is particularly fortunate for those who are experimenting with quantification tools for investigating party systems of this period that this exposition of the very human and unpredictable elements in the account has made its appearance. The promising assemblage of data bearing on United States political history that is mounting at the Inter-University Consortium for Political Science at the University of Michigan will be more valuable and less treacherous for the Jacksonian Era because of the perceptive and painstaking labors that went into this book. The availability of what must become one of the most widely consulted references for American poUtical history has already been enhanced by the appearance of a paperback edition from the original publisher. Thomas B. Alexander University of Alabama Redeemer Nation: The Idea of America's Millenial Role. By Ernest Lee Tuveson. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968. Pp. xi, 238. $6.75.) The American sense of purpose, the powerful conviction that the United States has a "redemptive mission" in tiie world, has provided one of the strongest threads in the pattern of American ideology. Professor Tuveson, a member of the English department at the University of California, has traced the development of this influential element of American thought from its religious beginnings to the later nineteenth century—for he believes it to be essentially theological in its origins—and has suggested some of its relationships to contemporary thought and foreign policy. His book is a tightly-organized and solidly researched segment of scholarship concerning the development of the national character, and well worth putting on the reader's history shelf. 352CIVIL WAR HISTORY Many nations, of course, have considered themselves to be chosen people, granted special purposes in the world, but the United States has been particularly dominated by its concept of itself as a "redeemer nation." In analyzing this concept, the author finds in it these elements: that the Americans are a new chosen people, engaged in a war against old world evil and reaction; and that the nation has a divinely-bestowed responsibility to lead the world away from corruption toward the millenial-utopian destiny which the deity has reserved for mankind. 'Trovidence, or history," he writes, "has put a special responsibility on the American people to spread the blessings of Uberty, democracy, and equahty to others throughout the earth, and to defeat, by force if necessary, the sinister powers of darkness." The conjunction of forces that produced this sense of mission and settled it in the American consciousness lay in die simultaneous discovery of the continent and the reversal of the Augustinian view of history. The Reformation 's conviction that the City of God could be realized on earth, and the discovery of a fresh, unspoiled land where it could be done, combined to produce the drive toward the millenium that the United States as a nation inherited from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It seemed to many Americans that, as Jefferson said, their country was "God's last best hope on earth." "We Americans are a pecuhar, chosen people," wrote Herman Melville , "the Israel...