The Realist.

• Author: Heilbrunn, Jacob

America's Purpose

In 1853, American diplomats appeared in suits rather than court uniforms at a reception in Berlin. Their perplexed Prussian counterparts asked why they were dressed in black like undertakers. "We could not," one American official quipped, "be more appropriately dressed than we are, at European courts, where what we represent is the burial of monarchy."

This exchange might seem like an instance of innocent raillery, but it underscores the early American republic's enthusiasm for egalitarian and anti-monarchical sentiments that regularly vexed European leaders. The belief that America represented a Novus ordo seclorum, or a new age, antedated 1776 itself. John Adams, who would become America's second president, wrote in 1765 that the settlement of America had opened a new chapter in the annals of freedom, "a grand scheme and design of Providence for the illumination and emancipation of the slavish part of mankind all over the earth." His ebullient assessment was widely shared. In 1789, as minister at Paris, Thomas Jefferson assisted French revolutionaries in drawing up the Declaration of the Rights of Man. Nor did he ever lose his faith in regime change, declaring in 1795 that the American revolution had set in motion a "ball of liberty" that would "roll around the globe." More cautious was Jefferson's frenemy, John Quincy Adams, who abhorred the French Revolution and delivered a July 4 oration in 1821 adjuring his countrymen, many of whom had become enamored of supporting the struggle for Greek independence by any means necessary, that they should serve as an example rather than go abroad in search of monsters to destroy.

But the impulse to set wrong aright was difficult to suppress: in 1851 Congress passed a joint resolution stating that the statesman and orator Louis Kossuth, who had led an abortive uprising in Hungary against the Habsburg monarchy as part of the 1848 revolutions, should be invited to America as the "guest of the nation." During his travels across America, Kossuth met with the Senate in full military dress and was feted at a congressional banquet by Secretary of State Daniel Webster. "We shall rejoice," Webster declared, "to see our American model upon the Lower Danube and on the mountains of Hungary." The conviction that America should serve as a model for the world was perhaps most warmly espoused by Herman Melville in his novel White-jacket.

we bear the ark of the liberties of the world. ...let us...