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11 1 World Revolutions and the Coming of the American Civil War THE YEAR 1848 PROVED PARTICULARLY SIGNIFICANT FOR THE FUTURE of the American nation. On February second of that year, negotiators representing Mexico and the United States concluded the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which ended the Mexican War and extended America’s boundaries to the Pacific Ocean. Several weeks later, revolutions broke out in Europe that promised to establish representative governments across the continent. It seemed to many observers that America’s experiment in republican government had succeeded in establishing a model for successful nation-building that could be followed anywhere in the world. Some observers even suggested that the millennium had arrived. By applying their system to the world, Americans believed a peaceful and prosperous community of nation-states would emerge across the globe. At the height of the Union’s success, however, Americans came face to face with their nation’s own mortality. The revolutionary movements in Europe collapsed in a wave of reaction. Monarchy and aristocracy emerged ascendant once again. At the same time, the American union appeared to be in danger of imploding. The rapid and dramatic expansion of the American nation threatened to disrupt the Union by reinvigorating the debate over the place of slavery in the territories. In this context, the memory of the revolutions that had rocked Europe during the past half-century proved especially relevant. The growing sectional crisis caused Americans to reflect on the meaning of the revolution of 1776, and at the same time take note of the ways in which thinking about democratic revolution had changed in the years since that event. Americans in the North and the South remained profoundly influenced by the legacy of their own revolution. They especially celebrated their experiment in republican government, or “republicanism,” by which they meant the rule of elected officials, not kings, queens, or princes. They 12 • REVOLUTIONS AND THE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR believed that the example of the American patriots of the War for Independence could inspire people around the world to rise up and establish representative governments of their own. For the thinkers and statesmen that held these views, the spread of republican government and the expansion of the American nation became vitally important. Such a development would ensure the future of the fragile American union and, indeed, the world. Many Americans shared Thomas Jefferson’s faith in the ability of representative republics to perpetuate global peace and prosperity. The success of America’s federal system seemed to confirm that belief. In America, in the view of Jefferson and others, many sovereign republics had agreed to associate for the express purpose of promoting the good of the whole. The new United States, governed by the will and well-being of the people, appeared to have transcended the power politics and petty dynastic ambitions that had so often bathed Europe in blood. If the states of the Old World only followed America’s lead in establishing republics, it seemed, world peace might reign indefinitely. In such a friendly international environment , America’s young nation could endure forever.1 The “legacy of 1776,” however, never remained static during the nineteenth century. Instead, the meaning of America’s revolution changed in response to foreign events as well as domestic ones. The French and Haitian revolutions, the wars for independence in Latin America, and the midcentury revolutions in Europe engaged concepts and issues that the patriots of 1776 had not anticipated. These wars and revolutions seemed to present different models of republican nation-building and offer alternative definitions of what democratic revolution could entail. European nationalist movements, unlike the American Revolution, defined “oppressed nationalities” in ethnic or cultural, rather than voluntary, terms. Many of them also engaged questions Americans had not yet resolved. European nationalist movements confronted the problems of slavery and industrial and rural poverty that troubled societies on both sides of the Atlantic. Americans intent on celebrating and perpetuating their own revolutionary heritage would increasingly have to make clear exactly how they defined that heritage. Mid-nineteenth-century Americans believed they lived in an age of revolutions . They tracked the progress of the ideals embodied in their revolution of 1776 by observing European struggles for freedom from monarchy, aristocracy, and despotic government. The successes and failures of Old World peoples served as a barometer of the strength and safety of America ’s experiment in republican government, as well as a reminder of the [3.19.56.45] Project MUSE (2024...

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