like Beelzebub; in others, they were more directly tools of Divine chastise-
ment. But in either case, they served as a mediating presence, a physical
border between the Puritan settlers and the wilderness against which they
were deWned. In Richard Slotkin’s words, ‘‘The individual Indians... were
not to be appreciated as real, individual beings, but rather as symbolic ‘masks’
of the domestic wilderness. The real interaction was that which took place
between the Puritan and the ‘invisible world’ behind the Indian world. What
happened to the mediating Indian world in the course of that interaction was
of secondary importance’’ (Slotkin 1974 , 119 ). America’s exceptional nature
would be deWned in its sacred wars; race would mark the barriers between
chosen nation and scourge of God. Long after the fall of the Puritan elites,
this narrative remains the basic structure of the ‘‘exceptionalist’’ history of the
American republic.
This narrative was dangerous, obviously, to the Native Americans, and to
anyone that stood in symbolically for America’s deWning enemies; but it was
also potentially dangerous for the Puritan community itself. The reading of
the New England colonies as Israel was an optimistic one for the Puritans;
without constant vigilance and virtue, the colonies might turn out to be
Nineveh. And that failure would serve, Winthrop promised, as a ‘‘byword,’’ a
lesson witnessed by the entire world of the consequences that would befall
nations that failed to live up to God’s promise. TheWrst political rendering of
American exceptionalism was thus a sacred and a violent one; the exceptional
nature of the new society could only be proven, not assumed, and the proof
lay in the capacity of the nation to destroy its enemies, endure divine
scourging, and subdue the Earth.
There is an alternate founding story for British North America, one
invoked by theWrst generation of American scholars to use the concept of
‘‘American exceptionalism’’ to explain the politics of the United States. ‘‘In
the beginning,’’ wrote John Locke, ‘‘all the world was America, only more so
than it is now.’’ In this founding story, the New World enabled a continent full
of rational economically-driven individuals to begin over with fresh slates:
the education of children, the crafting of social contracts, the invention of
currency were all open for human invention. This vision of US history is what
Hartz and others were conjuring when theyWrst coined the phrase ‘‘American
exceptionalism.’’ Why was there no revolutionary tradition in the United
States, no radical response to political crises after the founding? Because of
the long-standing and exceptional tradition of Lockean individualism in the
New World.
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