“Partialist” and “universalist”: American exceptionalism in antebellum writing on national identity

Abstract

In this article, I analyze six well‐known antebellum essays on US national identity from the perspective of their engagement with the contemporary exceptionalist discourse. My focus is on their representations of the particular and the universal, whose paradoxical relationship lies at the core of all national exceptionalisms. I approach antebellum exceptionalism as part of the history in which the authors of these texts (Emerson, Fuller, Simms, Douglass, and Delany) lived their lives and to which they responded in different ways. The analysis shows how the universal–particular duality at the core of US exceptionalism is conceived and operates in these essays' discourses of American identity. A tentative conclusion is that whenever the universal dimension of American exceptionalism is enlarged or challenged by other universal criteria, the nationalist ideology loosens its grip; conversely, its presence is stronger when particularization occurs. Furthermore, the representations of the universal and the particular in these texts are discussed in relationship with certain aspects of US exceptionalism as a cultural phenomenon of antebellum history, namely, Manifest Destiny, cultural nationalism, the concept of civilization, and the growing tensions of slavery and racial discrimination in the free states.