How and to what extent did the Civil War and Reconstruction refound the United States?
- Civil War: talk about: federalism and anti-federalism, reasons for secession (legal or moral?), Confederacy
- Reconstruction: talk about: First Founding vs Second Founding, Thirteenth and Fourteenth amendment, states rights vs federal rights as a zero sum game
Reconfiguration of constitutional compact
- Transference of authority from the states to the federal government on the matter of master-slave relationships by virtue of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendment
- Civil rights are rarely self-activating but come by way of federal powers, which explains the need to reconfigure this relationship
- Expanded federal powers to every individual in the Union, including those not previously protected
- Lives of newly freed people were not so radicaly changed, because of the failure to push through land reform, large numbers of freedmen tenants remained under explotative sharecropping arrangements in the same plantations where they once worked as slaves
Positive rights are granted by the federal government instead of the state
- From start to finish in the Civil War, participants on either side wrestled with the constitutional meaning of states' rights in the context of federal power. These rights were immunities operating at the vertical distribution of power; as opposed to the modern idea of rights as a horizontal set of claims of citizens against fellow citizens.
- These rights are secured by way of prohibition against state laws and state proceedings affecting those rights and privileges, as concluded in the invalidation of the public accommodations provisions of the Civil Rights Act of 1875.
- Justice Joseph Bradley on the Fourteenth Amendment: "it is only state action of a particular character that is prohibited. Individual invasion of individual rights is not the subject matter of the amendment." Thus the Court did not stymie the moral vision of the Radical Republicans, but merely clarified their developmental goals
Sunday, 19 April 2015
Exceptionalism in Revolutionary thought
Was the American Revolution radical or conservative? What was “first” in the “First New Nation?”
A conservative, "consensus" interpretation looks for revolutionary causation in the distant past, whereby revolutionaries adapted English institutions to novel American conditions. In this view Americans were pragmatic conservatives who mobilized against change to defend their liberty and property against the imposition of imperial reform, and identified themselves with the progress of European civilization more generally. On the other hand, the ideological interpretation situated revolutionaries at the "cusp of modernity", simultaneously looking backward at an idealized past and forward to an enlightened future, focusing instead on questions of nation-defining ideals and questions of identity that emerged with the imperial crisis. Either way, exceptionalists assume a fundamental opposition between empire and nation, old world from new. However the break with Britain took place, the new nation is defined against the mother country.
As much as founders exaggerated differences between monarchical and republican America, there were obscured fundamental continuities between old regime and new. Under open assertions of anglophobia in the tedious litany of the king's crimes, there is an undercurrent of anglophilia: similarities in British and American conceptions of national identity, similar desires for exploiting the boundless potential of the new world (and hence the conception of America as a "still greater Britain"). In terms of national identity, there lies the same tensions between inclusiveness and essentialist exclusivity, similar to the way the "little English" popular patriotism demonized Scots and Catholics. There was a growing cultural and demographic divergence between English center and British periphery; provincial Americans might have imagined a transatlantic British people united by interdependent transatlantic economy and consumer revolution, but condescending metropolitans could not imagine reciprocating.
Revolutionaries had to convince themselves that the distinction between servile subject and free citizen was absolute, with the future of a newly self-proclaimed people and of mankind generally hanging in the balance. The choice to become American might not be so clear after all, merely the shifting loyalties of Americans during the revolutionary war and beyond. Coupled with the uncertainty about the character and prospects of the federal republican experiment which obscured ideological clarity, Americans' loyalties were constantly being tested. There was no escaping British influence, either in the real world or in the development of a distinctively American national culture. National Republicans and their Whig and Republican successors sought to emulate Britain in order to rival its power, by opportunistically exploiting the resources and markets of Britain's free trade empire. Britain was either a model or the partner in the drive to reach the goal of eventually supplanting Britain and becoming the world's dominant superpower.
By the late nineteenth century, with Union victory in the Civil War and the consolidation of federal authority across the continent, Americans and foreign observers alike were convinced that American constitutionalism was a viable alternative to metropolitan model, juxtaposing republican self-government to monarchical rule of subjects. The rise of US to world power enabled Americans to finally overcome the post-colonial obsessions with mother country, no longer displaced into the future as manifest destiny but became an irrefutable geopolitical fact.
A conservative, "consensus" interpretation looks for revolutionary causation in the distant past, whereby revolutionaries adapted English institutions to novel American conditions. In this view Americans were pragmatic conservatives who mobilized against change to defend their liberty and property against the imposition of imperial reform, and identified themselves with the progress of European civilization more generally. On the other hand, the ideological interpretation situated revolutionaries at the "cusp of modernity", simultaneously looking backward at an idealized past and forward to an enlightened future, focusing instead on questions of nation-defining ideals and questions of identity that emerged with the imperial crisis. Either way, exceptionalists assume a fundamental opposition between empire and nation, old world from new. However the break with Britain took place, the new nation is defined against the mother country.
As much as founders exaggerated differences between monarchical and republican America, there were obscured fundamental continuities between old regime and new. Under open assertions of anglophobia in the tedious litany of the king's crimes, there is an undercurrent of anglophilia: similarities in British and American conceptions of national identity, similar desires for exploiting the boundless potential of the new world (and hence the conception of America as a "still greater Britain"). In terms of national identity, there lies the same tensions between inclusiveness and essentialist exclusivity, similar to the way the "little English" popular patriotism demonized Scots and Catholics. There was a growing cultural and demographic divergence between English center and British periphery; provincial Americans might have imagined a transatlantic British people united by interdependent transatlantic economy and consumer revolution, but condescending metropolitans could not imagine reciprocating.
Revolutionaries had to convince themselves that the distinction between servile subject and free citizen was absolute, with the future of a newly self-proclaimed people and of mankind generally hanging in the balance. The choice to become American might not be so clear after all, merely the shifting loyalties of Americans during the revolutionary war and beyond. Coupled with the uncertainty about the character and prospects of the federal republican experiment which obscured ideological clarity, Americans' loyalties were constantly being tested. There was no escaping British influence, either in the real world or in the development of a distinctively American national culture. National Republicans and their Whig and Republican successors sought to emulate Britain in order to rival its power, by opportunistically exploiting the resources and markets of Britain's free trade empire. Britain was either a model or the partner in the drive to reach the goal of eventually supplanting Britain and becoming the world's dominant superpower.
By the late nineteenth century, with Union victory in the Civil War and the consolidation of federal authority across the continent, Americans and foreign observers alike were convinced that American constitutionalism was a viable alternative to metropolitan model, juxtaposing republican self-government to monarchical rule of subjects. The rise of US to world power enabled Americans to finally overcome the post-colonial obsessions with mother country, no longer displaced into the future as manifest destiny but became an irrefutable geopolitical fact.
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