‘‘American exceptionalism’’ is a highly adaptable narrative for commentators on
the political culture of the United States. The American protagonist in excep-
tionalist literature is both a stoic killer and a benign sell-out; the narrative posits
a republic that manages to be both murderous and banal. Variously, the USA
appears as uniquely sacred, ruthlessly secular, hyper-individualistic, conformist,
bland, and profoundly violent. Perhaps it would be unsurprising for any one
nation to be all these things in the course of its history; but all of them at once,
and in ways that deWne the country? It is even more striking that generations of
politicians and scholars have insisted that the United States has a singular and
‘‘essential American soul,’’ summed up by some deWning virtue and a mission of
global signiWcance, inhabiting and being shaped by a continental stage that
commands the attention of the rest of humanity. A classic example of this
tendency is the Declaration of Independence; the revolutionaries preface their
christening (‘‘We hold these truths to be self-evident.. .’’) and their call to war
in the New World with an appeal to the ‘‘enlightened opinion of mankind.’’ The
republic will be founded as the revolutionaries name themselves and declare
their credo before a rational (and presumably rapt) audience.
The fashioning of an exemplary America continued after July 4 , 1776 ; the
Declaration was deWnitional but not deWnitive. On July 17 , 1776 , after mem-
bers of the New York Sons of Liberty toppled a statue of George III, a
bystander reacted with an extemporaneous quotation. Nothing peculiar in
that; public events in Britain’s North American colonies were not infrequently
heralded by apropos citations of Biblical or classical texts. This gentleman,
however, cited not Jeremiah or Cicero but John Milton, and in doing so
conjured up an unlikely exemplar. At the beginning ofParadise Lost, Satan
and Beelzebub lie broken in the ‘‘utter darkness’’ of Hell, after beingXung
from Heaven subsequent to their rebellion against ‘‘the Throne and Mon-
archy of God.’’ The New York revolutionary quotes from theWrst lines of
dialogue in the poem: ‘‘If you b’st he. But Ah, how fallen! How changed!’’
(Fliegelman 1982 , 157 ). The obvious object of the comment is the King’s statue
(another witness responded that ‘‘there is not one Tory among the Seraphim,’’
underscoring this reading of the quotation). But in repeating Satan’s opening
line, after losing a war against his monarch and just before pledging that ‘‘to
do aught good never will be our task, but ever to do ill our sole delight, as
being the contrary to his high will whom we resist,’’ our bystander also
connects the cause of the American revolutionaries with that of the rebellious
* I am greatly indebted to Elizabeth Mann for her help in the preparation of this chapter.282 ronald j. schmidt, jr.