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Civil War itself for all can be understood as one continuous
controversy, in the thrashing out of what is in essence the
federal idea. How was a system to be devised in which the
colonies/states could be part of the empire/nation and pay
their fair share in taxes for their own defense and internal
improvements, while being adequately represented but at
the same time be fully self-governing in dealing with the
overwhelming majority of matters which the mother coun-
try/national government had neither the ability nor the de-
sire to administer?
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WilfredM. McClay
Slavery, however, proved to be an Achilles heel for the
federal idea, because it went to a fundamental principle about
which there had to be national uniformity the very point
Abraham Lincoln stressed in his famous  house divided
speech of 1858. In linking the defense of slavery, and later
racial segregation, to the defense of state prerogatives, the
South delivered a profound and lasting blow to the federal
idea, and to the nation. Only in recent years, and in fits and
starts, has the discourse of federalism begun to revive, partly
freed of the manacles of slavery and race. It will be interest-
ing to see if it has a future, or if the ideal of the consolidated
nation-state will continue to be the principal model of po-
litical order available. For the former to happen, however,
historians will have to rethink their conventional telling of
the American story, which nearly always links the rise of lib-
erty, democracy, and material prosperity exclusively with the
rising power of Washington.
For additional reading, see Samuel Beer, To Make A
Nation: The Rediscovery of American Federalism (Cambridge,
Mass., 1993), a magnificent defense of the national idea, and
Herbert Storing, What the Anti-Federalists Were For (Chicago,
1981), as well as Martin Diamond, As Far as Republican
Principles Will Admit: Essays (Washington, D.C., 1992), which
contains some of the best treatments of American federalism
ever written. Significantly, however, there is no book that does
for the federal idea what Herbert Croly s The Promise of
American Life (N.Y., 1909; New Brunswick, N.J., 1999) did for
the national idea.
66
A Student s Guide to U.S. History
nature
Nature has always been a powerful element in the way that
Americans have defined themselves, especially in relation to
Europe. One could, after all, redescribe early America s rela-
tively meager past as a virtue, rather than a defect. If  nature
was opposed to  culture, then a scarcity of one meant an
abundance of the other. America may not have been as sophis-
ticated as Europe, but it could claim to be more  natural.
Even for the New England Puritans, whose Calvinist distrust
of the fallen world extended in some respects to their concep-
tion of nature, America was the New Zion in the wilderness,
a place that had shaken free of the historical accretions of
Anglican and Roman Catholic ecclesiology and doctrine, and
therefore a place where the true and authentic apostolic
Church might be restored, and the order of nature redeemed.
And once the hold of Calvinist doctrine began to weaken
and there were those places where it never entirely took hold,
as in Anglican Virginia the open identification of America
with  nature became more and more pronounced. When
Virginian Thomas Jefferson referred in the Declaration of
Independence to  Nature and Nature s God as the guaran-
tors of America s  separate and equal station, and when in
another context he referred to the United States as  nature s
nation, he was simply stating what had become the common
sense of the matter.
As the example of Jefferson suggests, the preference for
 nature dovetailed nicely with a thoroughly modern ethos
based upon science, Enlightenment rationalism, and egali-
67
WilfredM. McClay
tarianism. What was  natural could be opposed to what was
 traditional, hieratic, and hidebound, particularly the class
hierarchies of feudalism and the ecclesiastical flummeries of
 revealed religion. A  natural aristocracy, based upon natu-
ral talent rather than birth, and an easygoing  natural reli-
gion, based upon universally accessible precepts rather than
privileged revelations these, it was hoped, would charac-
terize the emerging American genius. Lacking the European
past was an advantage, not a liability.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Marga-
ret Fuller, Walt Whitman, and the other nineteenth-century
prophets of American romanticism took this even further.
They urged, in Emerson s words,  an original relation to the
universe, expressed in  a poetry and philosophy of insight
and not of tradition, an insight proceeding from knowledge
of the mystic affinity or correspondence between the emo-
tions and sentiments of the individual person and the similar
dispositions in the Soul of Nature. Emerson was especially
articulate in bringing out the full implications of this for the
idea of America. The authentically  American Scholar, he
asserted, would be a pure example of  Man Thinking, a
thinker who at one and the same time exemplified romantic
 self-trust and yet spoke for the nation an American na-
tion in which, according to Emerson,  a nation of men will
for the first time exist, because each believes himself inspired
by the Divine Soul, which also animates Nature. For them
too, America s closeness to Nature was her principal virtue.
In the years since, however, Nature lost some of its nor-
68
A Student s Guide to U.S. History
mative authority in American life, as romanticism waned and
scientific understandings changed. Darwinian biology and
Einsteinian physics have done little to support the idea of a
mystic correspondence between the Soul of Nature and the
souls of human beings. Indeed, in the postmodern dispensa-
tion, the very mention of  nature is regarded in many quar-
ters with extreme suspicion, even hostility and contempt, as
nothing more than a mystification of power relations. Even
so, the quasi-religious overtones of the environmental move-
ment, and the post-1960s concern with  naturalness in foods,
clothing, and medicine not to mention the rising interest
in paganism, Native American spirituality,  deep ecology,
and the so-called Gaia hypothesis suggest that the deifica-
tion of nature has never disappeared entirely, and may even
be making a comeback. In contemporary debates between
those who see humans as the stewards of nature and those
who see humans as the greedy and overbearing foes of na-
ture, we may be seeing only the most recent manifestation of
a long line of Christian/pagan tensions in American culture.
For additional reading, in addition to the  canonical
writings of Emerson, see Barbara Novak s marvelous Nature
and Culture: American Landscape and Painting, 1825-1875 (N.Y.,
1980; revised edition, 1995); Roderick Nash, Wilderness and
the American Mind (New Haven, Conn., 1967; third edition, [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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