Exceptionalism in Crisis: Faction, Anarchy, and Mexico in the US Imagination during the Civil War Era, Alys D Beverton, 2025, University of North Carolina Press
It was an English revolutionary who spawned the lie of American exceptionalism.
Yet it was not until he was 37 years old that Thomas Paine, the radical thinker who would become a Founding Father, even set foot on the soil of his new homeland.
“We have it in our power to begin the world over again,” Paine declared ostentatiously in 1776 in the Appendix to Common Sense, “The birthday of a new world is at hand …”
It’s a rousing quote celebrated mawkishly by US patriots—but its real-world consequences in the 250 years since have been nothing but trouble for the rest of us.
Paine’s words established a political myth worshipped by all US presidents ever since: American independence gave birth to a new world order, establishing the country as truly peerless and blessing it with a “special providence”.
Two distinct species of exceptionalist perspective have emerged, internationalist and isolationist, seeking either to spread America’s so-called democratic virtues across an uncivilised planet, or to protect them from it.
But as keen observers such as Stewart Patrick at the Carnegie Endowment have noted, isolationism has in fact often translated into “exemptionalism”—opting out of multilateral obligations even if these had originally been fashioned purely in US interests.
As evidenced by his imperious imposition of tariffs as just one example, Donald Trump clearly falls into the latter category, proposing retrenchment from overseas entanglements, securing borders, withdrawing the US from past obligations etc.
There is no doubt that he is similarly deluded by the myth of exceptionalism—a term he used in his inaugural address when he promised the US a new “golden age” and to bring unity to “a world that has been angry, violent, and totally unpredictable”.
In the absence of imagination, Trump has opted to pray loudly at the same old altar of exceptionalism as his predecessors, merely undertaking a 180-degree turn from Joe Biden to swap the internationalist prayerbook for the non-conformist devotions of exemptionalism.
And as has happened so often in the past, the rest of us will have to pick up the pieces of this political fantasy, paying a high price to deal with someone else’s addiction.
As Patrick writes: “The ongoing struggle between these alternative forms of American exceptionalism leaves the rest of the world whipsawed between US overreach and solipsism.”
Latin America has been paying a higher price than most for 200 years, enduring the travails of the Monroe Doctrine and, in the case of Mexico, Manifest Destiny—a racist superiority complex as divisive as it was morally repugnant.
But how would the American story differ if the veil of exceptionalism were to lift? What would be the consequences for a long-suffering world if the US were to awaken from its fever dream?
This intriguing question is the premise of Alys Beverton’s highly original and timely exploration of an aspect of the American Civil War in which the country’s vision of itself came crashing from the heavens down to the blood-soaked earth.
Exceptionalism in Crisis examines how the conflict upended the comforting myth decreed by Providence that the American republic would forever enjoy stability and prosperity, exempting it from the fratricidal condition of—God forbid—Mexico.
Beverton writes: “Whether they welcomed the war or not, this was an extraordinary realization for people in the Union and the Confederacy to come to, and one that forced them to revisit certain long-held assumptions about their country’s identity and global purpose.”
The author examines newspaper articles from the period in which both northern and southern editors, journalists, politicians and orators grappled with the bitter reality that their civil war was no different to those of the troubled Spanish American republics they had been indoctrinated to believe were peopled by inferior beings incapable of ruling themselves.
Although the Spanish American revolutionaries of the early 19th century had mostly been driven by similar goals of independence and republicanism, in the half-century preceding the Civil War American citizens looking south considered the results to have been disastrous.
Mexico, more than any other country, was the target of criticism for its endemic instability originating in bitter disagreements about what form self-government should ultimately take but also traumatic imperial interventions that sought to take advantage of its weakness.
Antebellum US newspapers portrayed Mexico’s woes as a struggle between liberalism and conservatism that played out in endless disputes over federalism, secularism, and economic modernisation.
Between 1825 and 1855 the Mexican presidency changed hands 48 times, and never as a result of a meaningful democratic election, and behind the scenes the Catholic Church ruled a parallel colonial state often at odds with the political class.
By the 1850s—the decade in which the divisions in the North were coming to a head—Mexico’s disagreements had spiralled out of control, and in 1857 they sparked the three-year War of Reform.
As Beverton points out, upon this turmoil were layered numerous ethnic, regional and class struggles that further fragmented the country and stoked other uprisings to create, for outsiders, a vision of pure anarchy.
It was hardly surprising that US citizens were confounded by their neighbour, but scratch beneath the surface of the dominant narratives and in a climate of growing scientific racism Americans clutched for racial explanations for Mexico’s instability.
US observers perceived Mexico’s “mongrelized hordes” as childlike, tribal and prone to violence, the mestizo product of racial mixing inheriting the worst qualities of both parents, and Hispanic elites as fiery and vainglorious.
As a result, the term “Mexican republicanism” became both an easy pejorative byword for an instability inherent in Spanish American republicanism writ large, but also a means of reinforcing US racial exceptionalism.
Beverton writes: “Labelling Mexico a failed republic therefore enabled US Americans to collapse the endless complexities of the wider hemisphere into a single unit while sharpening the sense of their own nation’s distinctiveness.”
The author explores the role exceptionalism played in 19th-century America, primarily as a nation-building tool that helped nurture social consensus, and how this myth was dealt a profound blow with the outbreak of the Civil War in April 1861.
Suddenly, Americans of all stripes were forced to come to terms with the harsh reality that they were not immune to the instability that had plagued Mexico, which was then set into further relief by the French invasion of 1862.
American editors and journalists began to talk of the “Mexicanization” of their fragmenting country, making analogies that would continue throughout the Civil War—but, importantly, also long after the end of formal hostilities and into the 1880s.
This lingering sense that the bubble of exceptionalism had been well and truly burst may offer lessons for the present because, as the author suggests, Mexicanization narratives gave voice to popular concerns about the state of US political culture.
Beverton writes: “At its core was the concept of factionalism, meaning a scenario in which popular politics became tribal, with parties binding their members together through shared hatred of the opposition, whom they viewed as would-be destroyers of the country.”
If that sounds familiar, consider the unease in the US today that has been generated by Trump’s bellicose and divisive political rhetoric, which has echoes of the aftermath of the 1860 presidential election that shattered the fallacy of American exceptionalism.
Moreover, contemporary US depictions of lawlessness in Mexico, “rogue nations” and “failed states” throughout Latin America bear a striking resemblance to antebellum perceptions of Spanish America before 1860.
And no matter how unrealistic it may be, Trump’s re-election has revived references to civil war among US politicians and legitimised the prepping of militias. It has also gained cultural expression: Alex Garland’s dystopian 2024 movie Civil War paints a chilling vision of proliferating militia violence in a US where secessionist states battle an authoritarian president serving a third term—in a clear allegory about Trump.
Bearing this in mind puts into context Beverton’s concluding observations about how historians have reflexively assessed the US-Mexico relationship in a blinkered way from the position of stable American strength versus unstable Mexican weakness.
In fact, exposing the lie of US exceptionalism draws attention to the similarities of these two North American countries in the mid-19th century and how, far from representing a fate that Providence had spared the US republic, Mexico might in fact have represented its future.
Read this and receive articles straight to your inbox by subscribing on Substack
Categories: Mexico, North America, United States