What is America?
Poli 110J 2.3
“We shall be as a city upon a hill”
3 Visions of America
• Winthrop: A City on a Hill
– The obligations of a chosen people
• Webster: National People, National Power
– The supremacy of federal government
• Calhoun: States’ Rights & White Supremacy
– Liberty & slavery
John Winthrop
• Governor of Massachusetts Bay Colony (starting
1629)
• Puritan
• Theocracy  Democracy
• Puritans like Winthrop extremely influential on
NE political culture
• “A Model of Christian Charity” is a sermon,
containing common Puritan religious and political
ideas.
John Winthrop
• The community is based in shared belief
– “Ye are the body of Christ and members of their
part. All the parts of this body being thus united
are made so contiguous in a special relation as
they must needs partake of each other's strength
and infirmity; joy and sorrow, weal and woe. If
one member suffers, all suffer with it, if one be in
honor, all rejoice with it.”
• To be virtuous religiously is to be responsible both to
God and the community
John Winthrop
• The community is held to a set of
transcendental standards, expressed in a text,
accessible to all, that must nonetheless be
interpreted
– Note that the argument is grounded in and
reinforced by citations from the Bible
John Winthrop
• Puritan religious standards render all
members of the community morally equal
– “From hence it appears plainly that no man is
made more honorable than another or more
wealthy etc., out of any particular and singular
respect to himself, but for the glory of his Creator
and the common good of the creature, man.”
John Winthrop
• The community is grounded in covenant.
• “We are entered into covenant with Him for
this work. We have taken out a commission…
Now if the Lord shall please to hear us, and
bring us in peace to the place we desire, then
hath He ratified this covenant and sealed our
commission, and will expect a strict
performance of the articles contained in it”
John Winthrop
• An exceptional status on the world stage
• “For we must consider that we shall be as a
city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are
upon us. So that if we shall deal falsely with
our God in this work we have undertaken, and
so cause Him to withdraw His present help
from us, we shall be made a story and a byword through the world.”
John Winthrop
• Exceptionality, cont’d
• “We shall open the mouths of enemies to
speak evil of the ways of God, and all
professors for God's sake. We shall shame the
faces of many of God's worthy servants, and
cause their prayers to be turned into curses
upon us till we be consumed out of the good
land whither we are going.”
Daniel Webster
• Towering figure in the Senate in first half of 19th
century, a Whig nationalist
– Secretary of State under Harrison, Tyler
• Wanted to preserve the Union, brokered a
number of compromises to do so
• Massachusetts
• 2nd Reply to Hayne spontaneous (Jan. 1830).
Against proposal in SC to nullify protective Tariff
of 1828
– Only Federal gov’t can set foreign trade policies.
Daniel Webster
• Is the Union the creation of the states?
– Hint: no. Rather, the national people created both the
states and the federal government
• The greatest power must rest with the national
government:
– “It is, Sir, the people's Constitution, the people's
government, made for the people, made by the
people, and answerable to the people. The people of
the United States have declared that the Constitution
shall be the supreme law. We must either admit the
proposition, or dispute their authority.”
Daniel Webster
• The people = the nation
– “the State legislatures, as political bodies,
however sovereign, are yet not sovereign over the
people. So far as the people have given the power
to the general government, so far the grant is
unquestionably good, and the government holds
of the people, and not of the State governments.”
Daniel Webster
• Supremacy of the national gov’t:
• “No State law is to be valid which comes in conflict
with the Constitution, or any law of the United States
passed in pursuance of it. But who shall decide this
question of intereference? To whom lies the last
appeal? This, Sir, the Constitution itself decides also, by
declaring, "That the judicial power shall extend to all
cases arising under the Constitution and laws of the
United States." These two provisions cover the whole
ground. They are, in truth, the keystone of the arch!
With these it is a government; without them it is a
confederation.”
Daniel Webster
• The state preserves liberty, which cannot exist
without it
– “Liberty and Union, now and for ever, one and
inseparable!”
John C. Calhoun
• "the Union, next to our liberty, the most dear."
• From South Carolina, endorsed SC’s position in
nullification crisis.
• Federal gov’t becoming tyrannical, infringing on
Const’l rights of the states
• Champion of the South, states’ rights in Senate,
1st half 19th C. Major figure in antebellum
Democratic party
– VP Under J.Q. Adams, Jackson; Sec. of War under
Monroe
“Slavery a Positive Good” – Feb. 6, 1837
John C. Calhoun
• Broke with Jackson beginning with Force Act
(gave federal gov’t right to use force to
enforce the tariff)
– Jackson supported states’ rights, but thought
Union threatened by nullification
John C. Calhoun
• Strong states’ rights
– “The subject [slavery] is beyond the jurisdiction of
Congress - they have no right to touch it in any
shape or form, or to make it the subject of
deliberation or discussion. . . .”
• Exactly what powers were and were not ceded to the
Federal government in the Constitution?
John C. Calhoun
• Right to secession
• People in non-slave states soon “will have
been taught to hate the people and
institutions of nearly one-half of this Union,
with a hatred more deadly than one hostile
nation ever entertained towards another. It is
easy to see the end. By the necessary course
of events, if left to themselves, we must
become, finally, two people.”
John C. Calhoun
• Southern partisan:
– “We of the South will not, cannot, surrender our
institutions.”
• The South feels that the federal government is
a tool of the Northern, anti-slave faction.
They see it as hostile and oppressive.
John C. Calhoun
• Slavery: something for everyone
• For (elite) whites: freedom from labor leads to
greater accomplishments:
– “there never has yet existed a wealthy and
civilized society in which one portion of the
community did not, in point of fact, live on the
labor of the other.”
• (While other figures also believed in the supremacy of
whites, it did not play as central a role in their vision of
power & government)
John C. Calhoun
• White racial solidarity served to conceal the
real class divisions between plantationowning, slaveholding whites and small, nonslaveholding white farmers/citizens.
John C. Calhoun
• Benefits of slavery to slaves:
• “Never before has the black race of Central
Africa, from the dawn of history to the present
day, attained a condition so civilized and so
improved, not only physically, but morally and
intellectually.”
John C. Calhoun
• Benefit of slavery to slaves:
• “in few countries so much is left to the share
of the laborer, and so little exacted from him,
or where there is more kind attention paid to
him in sickness or infirmities of age.”
– Better than being an industrial laborer, a more
gentle, paternal form of power
John C. Calhoun
• Thus, slavery stabilizes society:
• “There is and always has been in an advanced
stage of wealth and civilization, a conflict
between labor and capital. The condition of
society in the South exempts us from the
disorders and dangers resulting from this conflict;
and which explains why it is that the political
condition of the slaveholding States has been so
much more stable and quiet than that of the
North. . . .”
A note on terminology
• Black vs. African-American (power and words)
– While the preferred term is today AfricanAmerican, the point is that black people at the
time we are discussing were deliberately excluded
from the American political community.
– When discussing the historical injustice of racial
relations in the US, it seems inappropriate to
pretend that people of African descent were not
excluded from the political community
A note on the class authors
• Great majority white men
• Non-whites, women largely excluded from
participating in public political debate
Coming Up
• Monday: MLK Holiday
• Wednesday: O’Sullivan
• Friday: Lincoln-Douglas debates