And let me say that there are some positive aspects we can attribute to this concept. We were after all the first modern experiment in democracy. We were the inspiration for the French Revolution and other revolutions and "evolutions" to freedom and democracy around the world that followed in its wake. The concept of liberty and freedom inherent in our Revolution has been an inspiration to "freedom fighters" around the world ever since.
Unfortunately however there are other ways where American Exceptionalism runs in the other direction. Recently I was thinking of this in terms of slavery.
If you asked the average American about the history of slavery in the United States it might go something like this:
- Slavery existed in the American colonies because it existed in the countries that colonized America
- Slavery was bad
- We fought a Civil War to end slavery and passed a Constitutional Amendment ending it once the war was over
- Slavery is over, there was some discrimination afterwards, but we had a civil rights movement, we are back to being the beacon on the hill, so shut up already. USA! USA! USA!
If you are a true America loving conservative, like former Representative Michelle Bachmann, you even gloss over the time between the Revolution and the Civil War, and boast of how the Founding Fathers worked tirelessly until slavery was abolished. No mention of how many generations that took or the Civil War required to end it.
What they never taught you, or at least never taught me, was how America lagged behind the other nations of the Western Hemisphere, as well as the countries of Europe, in abolishing slavery. And most of those countries didn't require a bloody Civil War to accomplish it.
American History was one of my favorite subjects in school. I even achieved a perfect score on the American History achievement test, which is mentioned by way of credentials, not boastfully. So it's not that I fell asleep in class that day and missed it. They just didn't teach it.
Instead we discover that the countries of Europe and North and South America had mostly abolished slavery before our Civil War began. Some of them did it incrementally, others all at once. Some did it voluntarily, some required "persuasion" or payments from such external forces as the British Empire to see the light. A partial summary is noted below, while a more comprehensive listing can be found here.
- 1811 - abolished in Spain and all Spanish colonies except Cuba, Puerto Rico and Santo Domingo
- 1814 - Netherlands; Uruguay
- 1819 - Canada
- 1821 - Ecuador and Panama
- 1823 - Chile
- 1824 - Mexico (and in 1830 extended the ban on slavery to the Texas territory - and of course when Texas declared itself independent it re-established slavery in 1836)
- 1831 - Bolivia
- 1834 - 1843 - Britain outlaws slavery for itself and eventually all its colonies
- 1848 - all French and Dutch colonies
- 1850 - Brazil and Colombia
- 1854 - Peru and Venezuela
- 1861 - the year our Civil War began - Russia frees all its serfs
So there you have it. This is what they didn't teach you in school, and probably couldn't in today's political climate in most states even if they wanted to. America was exceptional alright, exceptional in how long we held on to the "peculiar institution" of slavery, exceptional in how we required such a large and bloody struggle in order to end it.
And that doesn't even begin to deal with the aftermath of the Civil War and Reconstruction. It doesn't take into account the KKK, Jim Crow laws, separate but equal, redlining, and all the other ways black people were "kept in their place" after slavery was abolished.
But the proponents of American Exceptionalism will keep patting themselves on the back and giving themselves credit for ending slavery.