American Imperatives, Educational Reconstruction and the Post-Conflict Promise

Abstract

In one telling of the story, the transatlantic transfer of European civilization has created a new kind of democratic people who are haunted by an obligation to bring a similar conversion to other peoples around the world. After observing a review of Union troops in the midst of the American Civil War, the ardent abolitionist Julia Ward Howe penned the “Battle Hymn of the Republic,”² which proposed that the distinctive American mission of war was to “to make men free.” Though this notion has not gone unquestioned and though the song itself has been satirized many times—for example, by Mark Twain who in 1901 suggested, “as Christ died to make men holy, let men die to make us rich”³ —the ideas it expresses have shown a curious resiliency across American history. The notion that Americans have a messianic duty to make others free recurs as a topic of cultural reflection and regularly informs policy and actions. National symbols and national narratives come out in spades in times of war, yet war sometimes also provides moments of clarity and insight into the composition of social imaginaries.⁴ Howe’s battle hymn provides one crystalline image of the American relationship to military conflict; the “Star-Spangled Banner,” which became the U.S. national anthem in 1931, provides another.

In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea, With a glory in his bosom that transfigures you and me: As he died to make men holy, let us die to make men free,

—Julia Ward Howe,

“Battle Hymn of the Republic” (1862)¹