Distant Revolutions: 1848 and the Challenge to American Exceptionalism

Chapter 8: The Antislavery Movement as a Crisis of American Exceptionalism

168 Many Americans at the outset of the 1848 revolutions considered the prospect that, at least politically, the United States and Europe were growing closer together. But Americans viewed the revolutions’ lack of success as a debacle, and many inferred that the ingredients necessary for revolutionary success resided only on the western side of the Atlantic. Only in the United States were citizens capable of gaining constitutional rights through minimal violence and maintaining the prosperity that accompanied those rights. Thus, in the early 1850s many Americans saw themselves alone, with a fate to be determined by historically unique circumstances and internal events, rather than as contributing or receiving members of a transatlantic world. In conjunction with rising tension over the question of the expansion of slavery, however, this assumption would soon reverse. The 1848 revolutions had prodded many Americans to a∞rm the conservative character of their own national beginning. The 1848 revolutions presented complicated conditions of conflict between groups—as in France, where parties struggled over local, not universal issues; or, in Germany and among the Slavic peoples, where they struggled over divided political and ethnic loyalties. The revolutions involved wars over contested sovereignty between Hungary, Austria, and Russia, and between Hungary and Slavic peoples. They included conflicts in which peoples of a supposedly backward religion rose against the authorities of a supposedly backward political regime, as in Italy. Amid such distinctions most Americans embraced a more idealistic narrative of revolution, a popular majority using universal legal precepts and organic attitudes to oust a clearly corrupt foreign tyrant. One famous history of the American Revolution that appeared shortly after the 1848 revolutions reflected this understanding of revolution. The 8. The Antislavery Movement as a Crisis of American Exceptionalism The Antislavery Movement as a Crisis 169 historian George Bancroft issued his History of the United States beginning in 1852, its first volumes focused on the American Revolution, completed during and shortly after his tenure as the U.S. minister to Great Britain. Thus, his account of the American past was written in the context of the turbulent European present. Accordingly, Bancroft’s account conveys an unmistakable trace of his musing over contemporary events: For Europe, the crisis foreboded the struggles of generations. . . . In the chaos of states, the ancient forms of society, after convulsive agonies, were doomed to be broken in pieces. . . . In America, the influences of time were molded by the creative force of reason, sentiment, and nature . Its political edifice rose in lovely proportions, as if to melodies of the lyre. Peacefully and without crime, humanity was to make for itself a new existence. . . . The American Revolution . . . was most radical in its character, yet achieved with such benign tranquility, that even conservatism hesitated to censure. Bancroft’s description of a chaotic Europe and a serene America seems curious, given his stated purpose of recounting an forceful overthrow of colonial government and the destruction of its defenders. But such was the paradoxical lesson that someone like Bancroft, an apostle of the notion of an organic and harmonious American democracy and a firsthand observer of European upheaval, took from Europe. Conservatism in America had fled underground in the late eighteenth century with the triumph of radical republicanism.1 During 1848 American conservatism had resurfaced, couched in images of an American revolutionary identity framed by negative perceptions of European turbulence.2 At the time that Bancroft’s salute to America’s organic identity appeared , however, the troublesome topic of slavery was becoming the central focus of debate over America’s di≠erences from Europe. Did American slavery make the United States more or less stable than the Old World? Some Northern writers joined Southern apologists in a∞rming slavery’s benevolent social influence. Bancroft, for example, claimed that Europeans had foisted slavery on the New World. He rationalized the institution ’s perpetuation as a tragedy of racial incompatibility: if slaves had been white, the problem of slavery would have been remedied “by the benevolent spirit of colonial legislation.” Nonetheless, black slavery, over time, 170 Distant Revolutions would perform “the o∞ce of advancing and civilizing the Negro.” Slavery, in Bancroft’s view, was a vestige of Old World corruption. Not only would American democratic institutions gradually eradicate the institution from the New World, but their global spread could also redeem Africa. Likewise, Solon Robinson, the agricultural editor of the New York Tribune, after...