Nationalism - Continental expansion and the "young america" spirit

For nationalism to flourish, it was obvious that the United States had to prove its experiment successful. The War of 1812 was one proving ground. More significant than a diplomatic success against Britain was the spectacular rise in the national economy, sparked by population increase, territorial acquisitions, and technological changes in transportation and industry. Speaking of the period after the Treaty of Ghent, Henry Adams observed, "The continent lay before them, like an uncovered ore-bed. They could see and they even could calculate with reasonable accuracy the wealth it could be made to yield." The steady accumulation of power to the central government at the expense of the states was equated with the growth of America. Nationalism implied the denigration of sectionalism and states' rights.

The conflict between central and local governments that accompanied the rise of nationalism was not surprising. The European nation-states experienced the assertion of central power by means of powerful monarchs overcoming the separatism of feudal nobles. What distinguished the American experience from others was the special nature of the central authority; it was not personified by a president, not even George Washington. The mystical conception of a constitution blessing a union permitted the cherished American liberties to flourish.

The argument for centralizing government during the Confederation had been fought on the assumption that no other government could perform that function. States' rights might rally libertarians worried about the tyranny of rule from afar, but the veterans of the revolutionary war returning to their farms and villages were more concerned about economic depression and fore-closures on their properties than with the potential evils of a distant national government. Had there been a stronger central authority in the Confederation, revolutionary war heroes of the order of Ethan Allen, who proposed attaching Vermont to Canada, and George Rogers Clark, who considered a Spanish connection to secure Kentuckians' access to the Gulf of Mexico, would have been less tempted to join with the former British enemy and the hostile Spanish neighbor. Where the states individually or collectively as the Confederation had failed to respond to Indian or European threats in the West, the Union drove the Indians out of the Northwest, saved the nation from the British in 1812–1815, and wrested Florida from the Spanish in 1819. As the western territories entered the Union their loyalties were to the nation that welcomed them rather than to any pristine colonial commonwealth. Unlike the original thirteen states, they had been created by acts of the federal Congress.

Still, the centrifugal forces that had always been a part of the American experience had not disappeared. Such "good feeling" as existed after 1815 did not have its premise in the end of sectionalism or even states' consciousness; rather, the "American system" of Henry Clay was built on a common hostility to British economic power that would help to mesh the economies of the North, the West, and the South. If there was temporary harmony at this time, it was largely because each section had unrealistic expectations of special advantage from congressional support of tariffs or of internal improvements.

The slave-oriented South found the Union ultimately a threat both to its economy and to its society, and in the Civil War provided the greatest challenge the Union had to surmount in the nation's history. The war was considered by some as a struggle between two competing nationalisms. In the years preceding this conflict, the Union became the most vital national symbol to the North. Southern challenges on constitutional grounds became increasingly insufferable. The South's interpretations signified more than just a peculiar gloss of the Constitution; the North regarded them as a rending of the instrument of America's sovereignty and the consequent extinction of the American nation. While loyalty to a section greater than loyalty to the nation could be considered patriotism, by 1860 the majority of the country was convinced that an effective American sovereignty could be expressed only in a unified nation.

A generation earlier, Alexis de Tocqueville, that astute French visitor, wrote, "The Union is an ideal nation that exists, so to speak, only in the mind." It also existed in the heart. The passions over slavery converted it into something more than a means of achieving effective government. The Union became an object of reverence, the indispensable foundation of national values.

Daniel Webster attempted to exploit this sentiment to deflect sectional rivalry into the popular channel of xenophobia. In a direct insult to Austria in 1849, President Zachary Taylor promised recognition to Hungary if its revolution succeeded, and then, after its failure, his successor Millard Fillmore gave its leader a tumultuous welcome to America in 1852. Secretary of State Webster not only rejected Austria's subsequent protest but went out of his way to taunt its minister to the United States, Chevalier J. G. Hülsemann. He lectured the Austrian on Hungary's good sense in imitating the American Revolution. Should the Austrians have any objection, they must reckon with the fact that "the power of this republic, at the present moment, is spread over a region, one of the richest and most fertile on the globe, and of an extent in comparison with which the possessions of the House of Hapsburg are but as a patch on the earth's surface."

This well-publicized letter struck just the chord Webster hoped to reach in Americans. The appeal to chauvinism with hyperbolic rhetoric performed an important function in 1850. It united North and South in opposition to Europe. But the forces of disunion that Webster had hoped to dissipate were stronger than those of nationalism. In even greater desperation a decade later, Secretary of State William H. Seward tried to divert the country from war by urging President Abraham Lincoln to turn over the executive powers to him so that he could save the Union by initiating war against France or Spain, or all of Europe. The president rejected the proposal, but unrealistic as it may have been in 1861 and fantastic as it has sounded to later generations, the spirit behind the plan was the same one that had propelled the American system of Henry Clay, the Mexican War maneuvers of President James K. Polk, and Daniel Webster's note to Hülsemann. Antagonism to the Old World was a staple of American nationalism, especially in times of crisis.

The traumas of sectional conflict resulted in the removal of the constitutional question from nationalism. The Union had triumphed and with it sentiments of nationalism. The sobriety with which nationalism was expressed in the middle years of the century yielded to a reassertion of the older boisterous spirits. The end of war witnessed a period of even more rapid growth in population, wealth, and power than had been seen fifty years earlier, after the Treaty of Ghent. It also revived—in exaggerated ways before the century was over—the idea of mission that had been implicit in the American self-image from the beginning: the notion that God had given America a special portion of blessings, and with it a mission to share them with less-favored peoples.

Prior to the Civil War the most vocal articulation of the American mission had accompanied crises with Spain or Britain or France over their possessions in North America. They all violated a divine plan. While the idea of providential occupation of the West antedated the annexation of Texas and the demands for Oregon—and, indeed, may be found in Jeffersonian ruminations in the 1780s—it was John L. O'Sullivan, editor of the Democratic Review, who in 1845 specifically charged foreign hostility and jealousy with "limiting our greatness and checking the fulfillment of our manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions." Texas, California, and Oregon—and even Upper Canada—were equated with empty land awaiting the arrival of Americans to bring it under proper cultivation.

Americans did not regard these views or the actions that followed from them as analogous to European imperialism; they were simply the natural spread of free peoples and free institutions into unoccupied space wrongly claimed by others. Although such assertions might have sounded hypocritical to hostile observers, even opponents of the Mexican War could concede that the mission to spread liberty bore marks of idealism. Frederick Merk found in expansionism a spirit that was "idealistic, self-denying, hopeful for divine favor for national aspirations, though not sure of it." So if manifest destiny was connected with the grasping for land, it was also linked to the land's improvement by peopling it with what Americans of the period considered to be a better society than could have been achieved under its original proprietors. In the midst of the Mexican War, former secretary of the Treasury Albert Gallatin defined the American mission as a great experiment in which "a representative democratic republic" had a chance to try out its ideals on a large scale. "If it failed, the last hope of the friends of mankind was lost, or indefinitely postponed; and the eyes of the world were turned towards you. Whenever real or pretended apprehension of the imminent danger of trusting people at large with power were expressed, the answer was 'Look at America.'"

In this spirit the migration of Americans to Texas or California or Oregon signified not exploitation of native peoples, or governance over unwilling subjects, but the sharing of liberties over a wider area. The growing United States had spilled its surplus population into neighboring territories that were relatively empty. When those territories were sufficiently populous, they would enter the Union, ultimately as full and equal partners of the older states. If there was conflict within the United States over their admission, this was a function of the slavery quarrels, not of a desire for imperialist control on the part of the nation.

But it was difficult to deny that the partial dismemberment of Mexico compromised the missionary spirit behind manifest destiny. The opposition of such distinguished figures as John Quincy Adams, an authentic expansionist, and the poet James Russell Lowell helped to arouse a sense of guilt over a war that many abolitionists regarded as an act of aggression by southern slavery interests. That Mexican and Indian populations, no matter how scattered, lived in California or New Mexico gave a taste of imperialism to the fruits of American nationalism. Was manifest destiny, then, merely a mask for American conquest of a weak neighbor?

Although a repugnant element can never be expunged from nationalism, extenuating factors refine the annexation of Texas and even the ensuing war with Mexico. Manifest destiny was more than an instrument of southern interests; the pull of California had attracted New England mercantile ambitions as well. More important, it was a national rather than a sectional impulse, with a powerful England, as in the case of the Oregon quarrel, a major antagonist in 1844. The hope was that the two Canadas would sue for admission to the new and enlarged Union. O'Sullivan speculated that Canada, as easily as California, could be the next "customer."

Arrogant and self-serving as this language sounded in press, pulpit, and schools, its users could unreservedly contrast the freedom of religion and self-government in the territories under American control with the repression of a state church in Mexico and the limitations of political freedom in Canada. When the demands for annexation threatened to get out of hand, as in the pressure for the absorption of all Mexico, opponents stopped the threat effectively. Partisan fears of Mexico parceled into slave states may have been a powerful incentive for opposition, but they were fueled as well by the unpalatable prospect of governing an unassimilable population that would not participate in the American political process.

Although controversy continues to swirl about the purity of American motives in continental expansion, it does not apply to the display of nationalism in this period. It was genuine and widespread. If any emotion could have overcome the deep divisions within the Union in the middle of the nineteenth century, it was pride in American institutions and in the nation's power to proclaim them to the world. Had it not been for the slavery issue, Thomas Bailey of Stanford University speculated, "Americans would not only have swaggered more in the subsequent years but would have grasped more territories." As it was, the Young America spirit that flourished in the wake of the Mexican War expressed itself in provocations against Europe. The Revolution of 1848 was a suitable occasion for its display. George Bancroft, historian and diplomat, from his post in London expressed America's approval of the revolutions: "Can we show ourselves lukewarm, while the Old World is shaking off its chains and emancipating and enthroning the masses?"