In many respects, the United States in 1776 was still closer to a traditional agrarian society than to a modern industrial one. The vast majority of citizens earned their living from the land. Manufacturing played no significant role in the economy. In spite of such cities as Philadelphia, New York, and Boston, urban life was known only to a few. There was no national market system; most products were either consumed locally or exported to Europe. Yet in the century and a half following its independence, the United States would become the leading example of a modern society. In time, the words modern and America would become almost synonymous, as many came to believe that the United States was the prototype for all societies seeking to modernize in the future.

Not all scholars agreed, however. Those who believe in American "exceptionalism"--that the development of the United States was substantially different from that of other nations--suggest it is a difficult, and possibly dangerous, example to imitate. Some of their reasoning we have already anticipated. The absence of a genuinely feudal system and the availability of cheap land to a good portion of the citizenry were conditions not found in other societies. Furthermore, the United States possessed a measure of "free security." Whereas most European and Asian states had to be constantly wary of threats from external enemies, Americans generally enjoyed the luxury of isolation from Old World ambitions and rivalries. American growth and development thus proceeded without interference or competition from outside powers.

Born Equal?

In the early 1830s, the young French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville toured the United States and made the classic case for American exceptionalism. Unlike the French, he observed, the Americans did not have to fight a bloody revolution to destroy hereditary privilege. The Americans were a nation "born equal." Of course, Tocqueville could not have meant that phrase literally, in the midst of slavery and the continued subjugation of American women. Moreover, the deferential society permitted revolutionaries such as Alexander Hamilton and John Adams to endorse the rule of "the rich, the well-born, and the able." Even Thomas Jefferson fretted occasionally about the "mobs" of the cities. Indeed, of the first six presidents of the United States, all but Washington were college educated; all had served extensively in a variety of political positions before becoming president; all were born into wealth.

Yet by the time of Tocqueville' s visit, that situation had changed. President Andrew Jackson was a military hero with no formal education, and his successor, Martin Van Buren, was the son of a New York taverner. The nation's highest political offices seemed to be available to a much broader social spectrum than would have been the case a generation earlier. This was accompanied by the rise of mass political parties, the first anywhere in the world. By mid-century, the deferential society was being eroded. "Universal" white male suffrage was proclaimed nearly everywhere as conservatives and democrats alike applauded the alleged absence of social class in America, which allowed the Jacksons, the Van Burens, and the Lincolns to attain its highest office.

Open Spaces and Free Security

When President Thomas Jefferson bought the Louisiana Territory from Napoleon Bonaparte in 1803, he extended the boundaries of the United States from the Atlantic to the Rockies. In 1819, Secretary of State John Quincy Adams negotiated the cession of Florida from Spain and simultaneously extended American claims to the Pacific. Then, in the late 1840s, the United States wrested Texas and California from the Mexicans and divided the Oregon Country with the British. In one lifetime, the United States had nearly tripled in size.

Unlike Europe, most of the new land lay in the public, not private, domain. Thus Congress facilitated the rapid settlement of the West by steadily lowering the price that pioneers and speculators paid for the land.

By the 1860s, land was being given away to those willing to settle it, Furthermore, government at all levels acted as a promoter of economic development by assisting in the construction of turnpikes, canals, and railroads. From the l820s through the l880s, the continent was bound together to a degree unmatched anywhere else in the world, and with enonnous consequences for American economic development.

No ancient titles or landed estates lay in the path of the westward expansion of white civilization. Only the Native Americans, many of them pushed across the Mississippi in Andrew Jackson's day, and later hemmed in by white farmers, ranchers, and miners, stood in the way. Although Native Americans occasionally slowed the settlement process and scored an occasional victory--as at Little Big Horn in 1876--they steadily weakened. Confronted by the transcontinental railroads that carved up their hunting grounds and accelerated the white settlement of the Plains and mountains, Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce' spoke for most of his people when he declared a year after Custer's Last Stand, "I will fight no more forever."

After the War of 1812, only the relatively under-populated Canada to the north and a weakened Mexico to the south were left as obstacles to U.S. expansion. Many Americans assumed it was only a matter of time before they too were annexed to the United States. By the mid-nineteenth century, the term manifest destiny summed up the vague set of religious, political, and racial imperatives that justified U.S. expansion. "Make way, I say, for the young American Buffalo," shouted an expansionist to a partisan convention in l844. "He has not yet got land enough. . . . He shall not stop his career until he slakes his thirst in the frozen ocean." Such spread-eagle oratory was typical of the era, and it encouraged many Americans to imagine a United States that stretched from the Arctic Circle to Panama. Whereas other nations had jealous rivals to check and throw back their advances--often at great cost--the United States, now attracting hundreds of thousands of European new-comers every year, had the field virtually to itself.

"A House Divided": The Second Watershed

The Civil War of 1861-1865 was the second great watershed in American history. It was a critical turning point in the drive toward modernization and consolidation in the United States, and has often heen compared to other wars of modernization and consolidation in Europe: in Italy in the l850s and in Germany in l870, for example. But beyond that, the American Civil War also answered decisively two questions left unresolved by the Founders: Was American slavery consistent with American democracy? Was the Union a voluntary league of sovereign states--like the present United Nations--from which a state might leave peacefully at any time? By answering both questions in the negative, the Civil War marked the end of an era and the beginning of a new one.

However, historians disagree about the relationship between modernization and the Civil War. According to the early twentieth-century historians Charles and Mary Beard, the Civil War was a "Second American Revolution . . . in which the capitalists, laborers, and farmers of the North and West drove from power in the national government the planting aristocracy of the South." More recently scholars have argued that northern economic and political supremacy was all but achieved by l860, and that southern secession was a counterrevolutionary reaction against northern modernization. Thus some scholars have viewed the Civil War as the means by which the United States achieved modernization, whereas others have maintained that it was a last-ditch attempt by the South to prevent modernization. Still others have argued that the differences between North and South have been exaggerated, and that the causes for the war must be sought in human folly and in the breakdown of political instititions that failed to preserve the Union.

It is clear that by 1861 the North led the South in the usual indices of modern development. The North had 86 percent of the country's manufacturing establishments and 71 percent of its railroad mileage. Its degree of urbanization was double that of the South, and its literacy rate was far higher. In the years following the adoption of the Constitution, American social and economic development had been distinctly uneven, and with that unevenness had come diverging views about the future of such "feudal" institutions as slavery. In those differing views lay the root cause of the American Civil War.

When Abraham Lincoln was elected president in 1860, it was as the leader of a new political party, the Republicans, who, unlike any of their predecessors. focused their appeal to only one section, the North.

That appeal was to the conviction of the majority of white northerners that slavery should not be allowed to expand further. By restricting the growth of slavery, the North was implying that slavery had no place in America's future, regardless of the role it had played in its past. It was the unwillingness of the South to accept this restriction that provoked secession in l860-l861. It was the unwillingness of northerners to accept secession that brought on the Civil War.

The American Civil War was the first modern war. The line between soldier and noncombatant was blurred. Public opinion and propaganda--essential in a democracy to sustain support for war--played a significant role in the war's outcome. New technologies-railroads, rifle barrels and minie' balls, iron-clad naval vessels--combined to change the nature of war, to make it more efficient and more deadly. The nation had changed; a second watershed had been passed. Whatever chance there had been to alter or slow down America's rush to modernization was destroyed with the fall of the Confederacy. Yet that was not all that was destroyed. Years later, the poet Stephen Vincent Benet would sum it up in his epic John Brown's Body:

Bury the bygone South
Bury the minstrel with the honey-mouth . . .
Bury the whip, bury the branding-bars
Bury the unjust thing . . .
And with these things, bury the purple dream
Of the America we have not been,
The tropic empire, seeking the warm sea
The last foray of aristocracy. . . .

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