A Contest of Civilizations: Exposing the Crisis of American Exceptionalism in the Civil War Era by Andrew F. Lang (review)

We were one of a kind. Americans never doubted it. In a world of aristocrats, autocrats, and mobs, the United States felt like the one safe haven for liberty wedded to law: a loose-jointed governing structure shared between the states and the nation, beholden to the public will but within a constitutional framework that barred the way to would-be dictators and leveling sans-culottes, running roughshod over the safeguards for individual freedom. Every upheaval in Europe, every fresh caudillo posing as a savior in Latin America, only told Americans how rare and precious the Founders' work was and how it was worth dying for its defense. That sense of exceptionalism, as Andrew F. Lang's closely researched study makes clear, helps explain both secession and its suppression, the new birth of freedom and what, to some at least, felt like its stunted growth in the years after the Civil War.

Time proved that the American experiment would not translate easily or smoothly into other cultures. It also made America more exceptional in one particular way: as one of the few Western countries where slavery persisted—indeed, embedded itself deeper. For northerners, slavery's spread looked ever more like a menace to what had made this country special. It revealed itself as a subversive force undermining white people's freedom as well as that of Black people. Slaveholding and democracy could not endure forever; the house divided could not stand. At the same time, as race and servitude became more deeply entwined with white southerners' identity, they came to see attacks on slavery as a threat to what made American republicanism special. With it, they saw danger to that other distinctively American fundamental—the federal system that let states define their own institutions as they would. So in 1860, many white southerners embraced secession as the only way to preserve what made the republic unique. They were willing to fight for it, just as so many others were prepared to shoulder arms to preserve those values that they thought defined America's distinctiveness: government by the consent of the governed, the rule of law, and, at least for the antislavery minority, that gradual working toward a Union in which all were treated equally. This sense of exceptionalism defined the kind of war soldiers preferred to make, to spare civilians and to limit themselves to military targets; rather than shelving the Constitution to meet the crisis, policy makers emphasized that at worst they were only stretching it, and not for keeps. Seceded states' sovereignty might slumber, but theirs was no sleep of death.

That sense of exceptionalism fostered a northern commitment to do whatever it took to save the Union, including recasting the relationship between the states and the national government and the caste system that gave white people such commanding sway over Black people. With the war's end, though, that sense of exceptionalism not only furthered the North's commitment to remake the Confederate South but also put a leash and a time limit on Reconstruction. The authority needed to subdue the often violent resistance to equal rights felt too much like the iron hand of authoritarian regimes elsewhere. The world was too much with us, late and soon: our eyes turned to French imperial adventurism in Mexico and mob law in Commune-run Paris. In President Ulysses S. Grant's use of troops to uphold southern governments, his critics saw Julius Caesar and Napoleon Bonaparte; in the so-called Force Bills they could read the ukases of czars and Iron Chancellors. Not racism alone, but a fear for the fragility of the one successful experiment in carefully restricted self-government, put confines on how far Reconstruction could go and on how long intervention from...