Part 1 of a Series

The North Atlantic, 1630

Do I contradict myself?

Very well then I contradict myself,

(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

- Walt Whitman

One day in the late spring of 1630, on the deck of a three-masted, 350-ton ship somewhere in the North Atlantic, John Winthrop set forth his vision for the community he and his Puritan congregation would build in New England. “For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill,” he told his 300 fellow passengers toward the end of his long sermon. “The eyes of all people are upon us.” And so, even before the Arbella had anchored off what would become Boston, Massachusetts, and 146 years before independence had been declared, American Exceptionalism was born.

“American Exceptionalism” – the idea that America is a unique place whose people are on a special mission – has remained a powerful and controversial component of the American identity ever since. It has been a subject of academic debate and political bluster, at various times falling in and out of favor with groups across the ideological spectrum. It has influenced how American history is taught, defined the parameters of American politics, and driven American foreign policy. Lastly, it is now a litmus test for today’s Republican Party.

Although the term itself is thought to have been coined by Joseph Stalin in 1929, the idea can be traced through four documents across the first four centuries of European settlement in North America: Winthrop’s “A Model of Christian Charity” (1630); “The Declaration of Independence,” written by Thomas Jefferson (1776); Abraham Lincoln’s “Gettysburg Address” (1863); and Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech (1963). Each of the documents affirms a vision that holds the people of America to an exceedingly high standard. Each addresses threats to that vision from without and from within. Each appeals beyond its immediate audience to the world – to, in Jefferson’s words, “the opinions of mankind.”

Finally, each appears at a time of crisis. The immediate issue for Winthrop was whether his congregation would even survive in New England, let alone become a beacon for the England they had left behind and to which they expected, one day, to return. Jefferson and the other signers had no guarantee that the nation they had just called into being would, in fact, be born. If their revolution failed, they would likely be hanged. When Lincoln spoke at Gettysburg, Civil War threated the survival of the nation declared 87 years before. By the time the war was over more than 600,000 American soldiers were dead, and the country was embarking on a brutal, still-unfinished journey toward reconstruction. One hundred years later King led a non-violent civil rights movement that faced unspeakable violence, including his own assassination at the age of 39. King’s current iconic status should not blind us to the fact that his call for civil, but unrelenting, disobedience brought down on him the wrath of America’s most powerful institutions.

This is the first of a twice-weekly series of short essays that will examine the four documents, both for what their words say and for what they tell us about the America their authors saw –  about the ideals they assert and also the contradictions they embody: that Winthrop, for example, came to the New World, not to establish religious freedom but to stamp it out; that Jefferson, who advocated both equality and liberty, owned hundreds of slaves; that Lincoln appealed to American idealism even as he waged total war; that King, whose people had been denied rights guaranteed to all Americans, called for a revolution built on the American Dream.

We will also consider other documents that refute the traditional American narrative . . . in particular, The 1619 Project by Nicole Hannah-Jones; Frederick Douglass’s 1852 speech on the meaning for slaves of the 4th of July; the Supreme Court’s shameful 1857 decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford; and the 1968 Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, all of which are essential for understanding more fully what it is to be an American.