A brief reconstruction of American Exceptionalism-Part 1

“The position of the Americans is therefore quite exceptional, and it may be believed that no democratic people will ever be placed in a similar one.”


Alexis de Tocqueville
“Democracy in America “

Individual human beings have always tended to consider themselves unique or exceptional in their own way from other individual. I might tend to think that I can play cricket better than some other boy in the street and that boy may tend to think that he can write love poems better than me. These are all small feelings of uniqueness or Exceptionalism that we as human beings tend to think about each other. This feeling is as normal as any other human emotion such as love, hate, fear, shame, pride or fear. It is normal for us human beings to feel in this way since we can think for ourselves unlike other animals those cannot.

Like individuals, nations also do tend to think that they are unique or exceptional than others. This has been true in particular for all the major nations who had created vast empires for themselves. The Greeks used to think themselves as the only civilized men and the rest as barbarians. The Jews call themselves as the “Chosen People” and the rest as Gentile or Goyim. The Romans called their empire “Pax Romana” and they also thought the German tribes as “barbarians”. The British used to think that sun will never set on their empire.
But what happens when every aspect of a nation’s culture, politics, social norms, commerce and foreign policy is based upon the sense of exceptionalism? This is exactly the case with the most powerful nation in the late 20-th and early 21-st century i.e. United States of America.

I will try to discuss in a series of writings how the sense of exceptionalism has been the most potent issue which has effectively influenced the policies (both domestic and foreign) of the USA from her birth to the very present day.

I will focus in this particular essay how American Exceptionalism shaped America from the early puritan settlements until American declaration of independence.


Let us go to the beginning. What today most of us call the United States of America(USA) was formed largely by a group of English-speaking , fundamentalist Christians whom we now a days call “Puritans”. This was a people who had strong sense of what they considered “good and evil”, these people used to have complete blind faith in Christian doctrines and did not use reason or rational thinking to understand Christian scripture.

These puritans were driven by two other characteristics,
1. A militant resistance towards progressive thinking and change.
2. A great sense of fear and hatred towards anyone whom the puritans considered “non-believer” towards their beliefs.
3. A great belief that they are the “Chosen people of God” and the US is the new land of Israel. The belief signifies that the importance of the US is to the Puritans is same as the importance of Israel to the ancient Israelites.
4. Invoking of divine providence in all the works of daily life. This explains Puritan justification of colonization of Native American lands on biblical grounds since Joshua also colonized the Palestinian lands in the Old Testament.
5. A belief that the USA is the only hope for salvation for an immoral humanity and the USA has a god-given mandate to convert the whole of humanity according to her values and ideas. This concept is also called “manifest destiny”.
6. A sense of superiority of the American nation, American values and American way of life over all the other nations.

I will now try to give examples from the past as well as that of the modern times to emphasize how the above mentioned behavior have influenced American policies in both home and abroad and how it may continue to effect them in future.


Let’s start from the beginning. John Winthrop, Governor of the Massachusetts colony, was the first of the American leaders to propagate some ideas akin towards modern American exceptionalism when he gave the famous “city on a hill” sermon to the people of the Massachusetts colony in 1630. In this he was the first to start the tradition of thinking that the USA has been chosen by divine providence for great things in the world.

Things started to move gradually from there. As the English colonialization started to take effect, the Native Americans who have been living in the Americas for centuries before the coming of European colonists , slowly but surely started to feel the heat.

The new arriving English settlers first started to encroach upon the land of the natives then they started to convert the natives into their different versions of Christianity and after that it was followed by Europeans spreading diseases that would kill the natives by hundreds of thousands. If the native Indians tried to fought back they will be silenced in strong military actions perpetrated by their English overlords. The native survivors of these wars were always sold as slaves.

The colonists justified their actions by explaining that God has given them the Native American land as a chosen people.
On May 26, 1637, the English Captain John Mason burnt down the village of Misistuck (present day Mystic) killing all but 7 of the 700 inhabitants of the village, mostly old men, women and children. This event is called “Mystic massacre”. In the aftermath of the massacre Captain Mason had the following to say about the whole thing: “the attack against the Pequot was the act of a God who laughed his Enemies and the Enemies of his People to scorn making [the Pequot] as a fiery Oven . . . Thus did the Lord Judge among the Heathen, filling [Mystic] with dead Bodies.”

The Puritan colonists had the following to say after the destruction and extermination of the Pequot Indians in 1637.

“Let the whole Earth be filled with his Glory! Thus the LORD was pleased to smite our Enemies in the hinder Parts and to give us their Land for an Inheritance”.

Although one must admit that the English puritan colonists were not the first to commit these sorts of massacres upon the Native Americans. Long back Christopher Columbus had the following to say upon seeing the Tarawa Indians of the Bahamas,
“They would make fine servants. With fifty men we could subjugate them and make them do whatever we want.”
do whatever we want".
The mystic massacre was by no means the end of the plight for the Native Americans. In 1644, At New Amsterdam (present day New York), John Underhill, an English mercenary and a veteran of the Pequot war, hired by the Dutch, repeated the “Mystic massacre” strategy of burning a sleeping village, killing about 500 Indian people.

While analyzing these above atrocities committed against the native Indians we can find some common points among them.

1. Rapid colonization and expropriation of Native American lands.
2. The justification of this colonization with divine and other supernatural reasons.
3. The de-humanization of the Native Americans by the colonists which ensures that the Native Americans are treated no better than the animals which can be sacrificed at the alter of new-born American exceptionalism.

The oppression of the Native Americans by the English settlers can be considered one of two greatest ironical tragedies of History when an oppressed people go on to become oppressors themselves. The puritans were themselves heavily oppressed by the British Monarchy for Puritan beliefs and practices which challenged the traditional Anglican belief system as well as the regal authority. Many of the puritans came to the new world to survive from the persecutions at home. The fact that these people who would ultimately go on to oppress and annihilate the Native Americans is a tragic twisting of history. There is only one precedent in history for this scenario where the oppressed become oppressors themselves. The Jews who were brutalized and massacred through the Holocaust went on to create the state of Israel by displacing and oppressing the Palestinians.

Slavery was a common practice in those days. The Atlantic slave trade was in full swing. The colonists for their rapid colonization of the American lands needed massive proportions of labor to fulfill it’s needs for industrial and agricultural expansion. Slaves from Africa were going to be used to fulfill those labor shortages.

From this point onwards in History the colonial intellectual elite started thinking in terms of a new philosophical concept “Libertarianism”. The American elite were most impressed by the writings of the English philosopher John Locke. Thomas Jefferson ranked him alongside Roger Bacon and Isaac Newton as three most influential persons in his life.

American exceptionalism also took a new turn from this time. Thomas Paine in his book “a common sense” expressed for the first time that America was not just an extension of Europe but a new land, a country of nearly unlimited potential and opportunity that had outgrown the British mother country. These sentiments laid the intellectual foundations for the Revolutionary concept of American exceptionalism and were closely tied to “Republicanism”, the belief that sovereignty belonged to the people, not to a hereditary ruling class.

The English King had introduced some new tariffs in this time around which also made him unpopular among the new American intellectual elite. Some other decisions by the English monarch was to place foreign mercenaries (i.e. German and Dutch troops) onto American soil for fighting the French in neighboring Canada or cutting deals with some of the Native American tribes to secure the frontiers were very unpopular among most American religious leaders. They used to belief that American land was a gift of the God towards the American colonists. The coming of these foreign troops was to them a pollution of their sacred land. This is reminiscent of Osama Bin Laden’s objection of American troops on Saudi soil.

The mood in these times can be understood from the story “The Gray Champion” by Nathaniel Hawthorne who uses supernatural overtones in this story where an American town is saved from the oppressive rule of its English ruler by a supernatural American patriot.

Some important characteristics of these libertarian Americans at this time were a deep sense of paranoia and a hitherto unseen zeal for action.

All these came to be seen in the events of Boston Tea Party in 1773 when after officials in Boston refused to return three shiploads of taxed tea to Britain, a group of colonists boarded the ships and destroyed the tea by throwing it into Boston Harbor.

Even someone like Benjamin Franklin who at the time of the event was in Europe, trying to negotiate a solution for the issue of high taxes with the British, was overwhelmed by this situation.

All these events culminated in the declaration of American Independence in 1776.

The religious exceptional overtone can be seen very frequently even during the American revolutionary war also.

Benjamin Franklin who was not a very religious man had the following to say about the war in 1787:
“ ... In the beginning of the contest with G. Britain, when we were sensible of danger we had daily prayer in this room for the Divine Protection. -- Our prayers, Sir, were heard, and they were graciously answered. All of us who were engaged in the struggle must have observed frequent instances of superintending providence in our favor. ... And have we now forgotten that powerful friend? or do we imagine that we no longer need His assistance. I have lived, Sir, a long time and the longer I live, the more convincing proofs I see of this truth -- that God governs in the affairs of men. And if a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without his notice, is it probable that an empire can rise without his aid? We have been assured, Sir, in the sacred writings that "except the Lord build they labor in vain that build it." I firmly believe this; and I also believe that without his concurring aid we shall succeed in this political building no better than the Builders of Babel: ...I therefore beg leave to move -- that henceforth prayers imploring the assistance of Heaven, and its blessings on our deliberations, be held in this Assembly every morning before we proceed to business, and that one or more of the Clergy of this City be requested to officiate in that service.”

The Revolution strengthened millennialist strains in American theology. At the beginning of the war some ministers were persuaded that, with God's help, America might become "the principal Seat of the glorious Kingdom which Christ shall erect upon Earth in the latter Days." Victory over the British was taken as a sign of God's partiality for America and stimulated an outpouring of millennialist expectations--the conviction that Christ would rule on earth for 1,000 years.

An independent historian will be surprised to see the amount of religious overtone in the American Revolution when considering that the French revolution which took place within a decade of the American revolution, did not have any explicit religious overtones like the American one. Another irony is that in both the revolutions the intellectual elites of the revolution were followers of the same set of liberal beliefs which were proposed to the world by philosophers like John Locke.

American colonists won their war with the British (with the help of the French) in 1783.
The American constitution was adopted in 1787 and George Washington went on to become the first US president in 1789. The colonists had now become the masters in the land which they had conquered from it’s native inhabitants.

The colonists might had won the war and gained independence from their mother country but the plight of the Native Americans and the African-American slaves were not over.

Although the makers of the American constitution had included very lofty and grandiose goals and ideals like liberty, equality and pursuit of happiness and beliefs like “All men are created equal” but obviously these ideals did not include any provisions for the slaves and the Native Americans.

Indeed the issue of slavery will play an increasingly greater role in the coming years of the American nation.

I will discuss the role of American exceptionalism in the next chapter of this essay where I will cover the time from the American independence till the American civil war.