The critical and potentially fractious language of the Puritan jeremiad—in which seventeenth-century New England clergy denounced the social, moral, and religious failures of their communities in a series of lamentations reflecting or threatening a break of the settlers’ covenant with God, while offering the hope of a return to the true way of God through renunciation of sin—was intrinsic to Christian republicanism’s campaigning in the early republic. Abolitionists appropriated its tradition of goading a whole people for collective sin, but they used the jeremiad’s condemnatory language to cast such grave doubts on the nation’s exceptionality that some critics repudiated the protean tradition altogether, and others tested American exceptionalism’s limits as a coherent belief system. The questioning of the nation’s practice and values became so ferocious that it turned, through the radical abolitionists, into a critique of the Christian republic idea. Exceptionalism could no longer be identified with the existing American state because its institutions lacked the qualities that God ordained.

Opposition to slavery grew as evangelical conversions in the North tied sin to moral and political deficiencies. Antislavery advocates based their condemnation of human bondage, American style, largely on its violation of the right to individual liberty, and therefore as a sin in their estimate. The holding of slaves appeared to block the path of individual conversion to God and the ability to lead a moral life without the brutalizing effects of the “peculiar institution.”

Within that unequivocal understanding of sinfulness, personal identity became both entangled with religious identity and highly disruptive of patriotic identity. The sternest opponents of slavery, such as William Lloyd Garrison, attacked American institutions as compromised by evil and incompatible with following God’s word and spirit. Garrison condemned the U.S. Constitution on this ground. Some abolitionists, like the anti-institutionalists from whom Garrison received support, preached Christian perfectionism and separation from institutional religion as a way to achieve the millennium through individual repentance reproduced on mass scale. But the resistance of slaveholders invited other blistering denunciations.

Slavery’s persistence in the face of attempts to persuade Southern Christian converts of its evil nature inevitably led antislavery reformers to criticize not only Christianity but also the republican liberty associated with it by moral reformers. Frederick Douglass’ abolitionist Fifth of July speech (1852), delivered at the invitation of the “Ladies” of the Rochester Anti-Slavery Sewing Society, highlighted how the promise of liberty under the Declaration of Independence had exactly the opposite result for African Americans. But Douglass still hoped to redeem the American nation. He separated the potential for human fulfillment of the Declaration from the arguments of politicians and Southern churchmen defending their interpretation of the Constitution as proslavery. After his final break in 1851 with the Garrisonian abolitionists, Douglass sought a political place within the liberal democratic polity for African Americans liberated from slavery. This effort paralleled the position of antislavery advocates within the newly formed Republican Party in 1854. Rather than renounce the United States, Douglass offered a jeremiad as a warning, drawn from the parallel casting out of Israel by a God angry over collective sin.

Highly negative assessments of American exceptionalism came from some white abolitionists as well. Hailing from upstate New York, William Goodell first came to prominence as editor of the Genius of Temperance (1829–33). Therein he preached the need for universal and benevolent reform to spread liberty across the globe. But the failure of the United States to abolish slavery led Goodell to a radical course. In the eyes of the world, he reasoned, the United States had not embraced the high moral example that the Benevolent Empire—the Protestant colleges, pulpits, and reform societies of the early republic—professed. By tolerating slavery, the American people and American institutions were shown to be uncivilized in a world where key European nations had eliminated the evil. Ironically, the one way that the nation seemed truly exceptional to Goodell was its embarrassingly sinful status as a slaveholding republic. It was “an anomalous republic,” in his words, not an exception in a positive sense but in a derelict way. The anomaly was not simply the failure to follow religious teaching but the “incongruity” between “universal human rights” inspired by the French and American revolutions and republican practice. Abject support of “human chattelhood” had actually undermined the spread of republicanism globally, Goodell argued. The United States “armed the world’s despots with their most plausible pleas against republican institutions.”

With the American republic considered a garden-variety nation that condoned oppression, it would be necessary to bring about a global revolution of the masses to end this circumstance. Writing after the failed European revolutions of 1848, Goodell was sensitized to the fact that slavery was a form of labor and therefore part of a larger pattern of class oppression that included the peasants of Ireland and the serfs of Russia. He did not, however, overtly connect his argument to The Communist Manifesto written by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in that same turbulent year in European history. Instead Goodell deployed the classic jeremiad that went back to the Puritans. He treated the dialectic of slavery and freedom as moral as much as economic. As a “political abolitionist,” Goodell did not single out the government for condemnation but included the people, who either elected corrupt representatives or failed to right the wrongs of the existing constitution by active protest. Goodell attempted to hold the United States to its nominally high standards. He joined James Birney’s Liberty Party to effect change and was the party’s presidential candidate in 1852.

Goodell went further than a nationally specific ideal of liberty to attack the entire organization of society and argued for a universal revolution of freedom that drew on hope for a Christian millennium. He argued that slavery represented “absolute authority.” “True” Calvinism, with its “knowledge of divine sovereignty and human depravity,” could recognize that in such a system “the slaveholder was playing God”—thus interfering with the spiritual life of the slave. Far from being an anti-institutionalist like Garrison, Goodell presented radicalism as the “application of the governmental view of God” to the question of slavery. Goodell later argued that violence, in the form of John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry in 1859, was “the providential remedy” for slavery when warnings went unheeded and when government did not act.

Similar antiexceptionalist beliefs could be found among more conservative Christian republicans such as George Barrell Cheever. He won notoriety as the author of Deacon Giles’ Distillery, a tract that condemned a Salem, Massachusetts, church elder and distiller for his compromise with the evils of the demon drink. Cheever was jailed in 1835 for libel over this issue. He also crossed swords with the Democrat journalist John L. O’Sullivan, debating in the affirmative the merits of capital punishment with him. Cheever then scandalized Protestant clergy with his frank condemnation of slavery. Later, Cheever wrote for Goodell’s Principia magazine.

Cheever angrily denounced Christian preachers who did not condemn slavery. They used the “Christian name to palliate if not to justify and sanctify the wrong.” Like Goodell, Cheever deployed the jeremiad to excoriate the republic’s vaunted claims of special status in the eyes of God. He made the Bible his standard for both human conduct and the Constitution. The sin of slavery “could never be, if we, as a people, had kept the word of God in view, and had not forgotten or denied its principles.” National catastrophe was nigh, he warned in 1857. Even politicians “must take [a] stand on God’s word, and square our policy, our platform, according to it, or we shall surely perish as a nation.” The Civil War gave even theologically conservative Protestants an opening to condemn the American state using their own version of the moral order. For Cheever, the United States would be damned to a truly exceptional fate if slavery were not abolished; the nation would face “such a destruction as the world never beheld.”

Questioning American exceptionalism in the light of slavery was not a prerogative of evangelicals alone. Unitarians such as the prominent historian John Lothrop Motley were scathing about national vanity. Motley denied the nation’s “singular” status in the rise of democracy. American history was not “born of the cloud embraces of a false Divinity,” he declared. In An Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans, yet another reformer of Unitarian background, Lydia Child, added her criticism of exceptionalism and slavery. She compared slavery across the ages and analyzed it as a historical creation of social forces, not something outside time. Though condemning both Great Britain and the United States for displaying the worst examples of slavery, the cookbook author and novelist proclaimed that “my countrymen are fond of preeminence, and I am afraid they deserve it here.” Widespread and boastful proclamations of exceptionalism invited this critique of American vanity. As has often been the case in condemnations of the United States, the criticism retained residual tinges of exceptionalism in its negativity, but the substance of her work was analytical and empirical.

While American exceptionalism came under fire from antislavery evangelicals and from Unitarian and secular abolitionists, their proslavery opponents embraced the exceptionalist idea—for themselves. Edgefield County, South Carolina, planter Arthur Simkins noted in a widely circulated address of 1855 that “the Southern people of the American Union are the chosen race of modern times.” Observing that God’s original chosen country was an agrarian society like the South, and that Old Testament stories sanctioned slavery, Simkins claimed that only the South, not the industrializing and urbanizing North, could possibly be the successor state of ancient Israel uniquely favored by God. Southern opinion was divided over the merits of secession, but its accomplishment solidified the idea of the South as a chosen nation in its own right. Though originally opposed to a breakup of the Union, Alexander Stephen, vice president of the newly created Confederacy, spoke for the fledging Southern nation when he attacked the “pestilent heresy” of the Declaration of Independence that “all men, of all races, were equal.” He vowed that an independent South, with white supremacy its “cornerstone,” would be the genuine “model nation of history,” founded on a superior social order and the primacy of cotton in the world economy.

As the “chosen race” idea and its Old Testament justifications hinted, Southern exceptionalism made religion as much as race central to its singularity. The Confederate Constitution invoked in its preamble “the favor and guidance of Almighty God,” whereas the U.S. Constitution had no such mention. Some proslavery writers speculated that it was the Calvinist belief in a God-ordained country that rendered the South superior. Northerners responded that their own section was the model republic but, to many abolitionists, the presence of slavery’s indirect constitutional sanction and the repeated threats of disunion in the 1850s indicated otherwise.

The antislavery jeremiad insisted that the failed promise of the republic could register, through the South’s secession from the Union, a greater damnation than any other nation had ever faced. As one preacher complained, “Our failure to stand up before the nations of the earth as a model nation, to exhibit to them the beauty and glory of free institutions—of a self-governed people—a great moral fountain whose fertilizing streams should go out to bless a desert world; these and a long list of our national sins, have provoked our Lord and King to subject us to his chastening hand.” So railed Hollis Read, a best-selling author and former missionary to India.

If, for Southerners, war victory could confirm their own existing exceptionalism asserted in secession, for Northerners, only a bloody triumph could enable redemption of the nation’s lost promise. This was the conclusion of John Brown in his preexecution speech after the failed raid on Harpers Ferry of October 1859, when he referenced the nation as a “guilty land.” But people far less radical thought much the same. The Civil War gave Northern Protestant exceptionalists a chance to consolidate their position and to equate their version of the doctrine with the forward march of history.

This position was most famously extended through American popular culture in Julia Ward Howe’s “Battle Hymn of the Republic” (1862). An alternative military marching piece, George Frederick Root’s “The Battle Cry of Freedom” was popular at the time, and more practical to perform, but had an innocuous theological content. In contrast, Howe’s words expressed a providential tale in which the blood of Christ was equated with the blood of soldiers lost in patriotic battle. In the rivalry of the Civil War songs, evangelical religion proved more productive of nationalism than secular causes, however important the freeing of the slaves and the progress of liberty became as the war rolled on.

Excerpt reprinted with permission from American Exceptionalism: A New History of an Old Idea by Ian Tyrrell, published by The University of Chicago Press. © 2021 by The University of Chicago Press. All rights reserved.

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