In his T. S. Eliot Memorial Lectures delivered at the University of Kent in March, 1971, and subsequently published as In Bluebeard's Castle or Some Notes Towards A Re-definition of Culture, George Steiner apostrophized the condition of American culture in the following way:

America is the representative and premonitory example [of the democratization of high culture]. Nowhere has the debilitation of genuine literacy gone further (consider the recent surveys of reading-comprehension and recognition in American high schools). But nowhere, also, have the conservation and learned scrutiny of the art or literature of the past been pursued with more generous authority. American libraries, universities, archives, museums, centres for advanced study, are now the indispensable record and treasure-house of civilization. It is here that the European artist and scholar must come to see the cherished after-glow of his culture. Though often obsessed with the future, the United States is now, certainly in regard to the humanities, the active watchman of the classic past.

So far, so good. But Steiner's encomium (notwithstanding that second sentence) carried with it a conditional scrutiny which was less attractive in its implications.

“What is an American?” asked the French émigré Hector St. John Crèvecoeur in 1782. In so doing, Crèvecoeur posed one of the fundamental questions of the revolutionary era. When the colonists overthrew imperial authority; declared independence; formed an independent confederation of states; and waged war for its existence; they created a new nation and a new nationality. To be sure, colonists and Britons alike had long used the term “American,” none the less, a complete sense of American national identity was largely inchoate before the American Revolution. Before the Revolution, most Americans identified more with their individual colonies than with an abstract geographic concept like “America.” While the Revolution did not completely supplant regional loyalties, it introduced a new, compelling loyalty: to the United States of America. The Revolution forced Americans to choose between loyalty to Britain or the United States. Ultimately, the majority opted for the United States. Those who did, helped define what it meant to be American by their words and actions. The purpose of this article is to examine the development of loyalty to the United States and the development of an American national identity among one group of Americans: sailors imprisoned in Britain during the Revolution.

In the wake of World War II, the unofficial cartoonist laureate of the war, Bill Mauldin, turned the focus of his comic art to life within America's borders. In a 1946 panel, he portrayed two men talking in the shadow of the United States Capitol building. The listener was clearly a slick senator; the speaker looked to be a well-groomed tramp. His question no doubt left the senator fumbling for an answer: “Do you mean your American Way or my American Way, Senator?”

Mauldin did not provide us with the senator's response, but it hardly matters. The tramp's question all but answers itself. The supposed post-war consensus, the shared American Way, had not been achieved by unanimous consent, the tramp was suggesting, but by leaving out those who did not fit into it. The popular imagination of America might have attained a single, clean vision of the nation, but only by cropping out anything that could blur the picture. The imagined American Way would not admit it, but there were others trying to climb into the frame.

With how little cooperation of the societies after all is the past remembered – At first history had no muse – but a kind fate watched over her – some garrulous old man with tenacious memory told it to his child.

Henry David Thoreau,

Journals (1842)

In 1823, something of the bittersweet occurred in Cranston, Rhode Island: an aged revolutionary war veteran returned to his hometown after a prolonged exile in England. Hopeful about reuniting with his family and community after an absence of nearly fifty years, the old soldier was surprised and disappointed to learn that his property had been sold, his family had moved west, and few among the remaining villagers even remembered who he was. Such is the story of one Israel Potter. An adventurous fellow, he had fought at the battle near Bunker Hill, had met Benjamin Franklin, and, after being captured by the British, had roamed England after the war, continually poverty-stricken, while searching for a passage back to America. Once returned to Cranston, he applied for a federal pension for his wartime services. In all probability, Potter never received any financial compensation, but he left a narrative of his life, reminding his readers that at one point in the republic's history, he did matter.

An interpretation of frontier texts must respond to the demand by Gesa Mackenthun and other scholars that “empire be added to the study of American culture.” As written by authors like Frederick Jackson Turner, who placed themselves on the colonizing side of the frontier, these texts described the frontier as “the meeting point between savagery and civilization” where European immigrants became “Americanized, liberated, and fused into a mixed race.” Here was forged a “composite nationality for the American people.” Such texts with their understanding of the “Indian frontier ” as a “consolidating agent in our history” which developed “the stalwart and rugged qualities of the frontiersman,” helped to construct the American identity as the “imperial self” with its implicitly patriarchal, Eurocentric, and colonial assumptions. Describing the frontier as a “military training school, keeping alive the power of resistance to aggression,” such texts failed to acknowledge the aggressive acts that seized the land from its original inhabitants.

Northern reactions to the antebellum South can only be fully understood in the context of northern concerns for the future of the American republican experiment, which was at base the search for an American national identity. Central to antebellum concerns in this regard was the issue of freedom in a nation which yet retained slave labour. In the nineteenth century, the belief in freedom was, in Fred Somkin's words, “the res Americana, the matter of America.” In the decades preceding the Civil War, however, North and South came to hold very different ideas of what freedom meant, and what it entailed. In time, northern concerns over slavery and the society that relied upon it found political expression in what Eric Foner termed the “Republican critique of the South.” This critique was not focussed on slavery alone but on the South as a whole; its society, culture, industry, and intellectual achievements. It was both an attack on the South and an affirmation of northern superiority. Ultimately, it was a sectional message with national ambitions. The “matter of America” became the matter of the North. How this happened, however, has never been adequately explained.

This essay seeks to shed some light on the background to the “Republican critique” by looking in particular at the career of Horace Mann of Massachusetts, specifically at his brief period in Congress (1848–52) during which he adopted an increasingly confrontational stand toward slavery and the South.