Patriotism

Revolutionary and Early National America

American patriotism first appeared with intensifying resistance to British colonial policies in the 1760s and 1770s. American opponents of British laws identified themselves as “Patriots” and, defining their cause as a heroic defense of liberty, formed organizations such as the Sons of Liberty. An association between manliness and patriotism thus underlay the formation of national identity in the United States.

Still, patriotic devotion to an abstract concept of American nationhood took form only gradually and unevenly. During the debates surrounding the writing of the Constitution, devotion to the nation was identified with the civic virtue that early Americans considered essential to liberty under a republican form of government. Yet there were differences over the implications of manly patriotism: Both Federalist supporters of the Constitution and a strong national government and their Anti-Federalist critics associated their positions with republican manhood and the true fulfillment of Revolutionary patriotism. In light of such divisions, the figure of General George Washington (soon to be President Washington) served as both a powerful masculine symbol for national integration and a focus for patriotic sentiment. His birthday remained an important occasion for public celebrations of manly patriotism through much of the nineteenth century.

The Antebellum Period

Patriotic devotion to the American nation intensified during and after the War of 1812—sometimes considered a second war for independence—and again during the 1830s and 1840s as white Americans linked westward expansion to Manifest Destiny, patriotic duty, and masculinity. In this context, the independence of Texas and the unsuccessful 1836 defense of the Alamo by so-called freedom fighters such as Davy Crockett served as symbols for masculine patriotic perseverance. Many white Americans regarded geographic expansion in the Pacific during the 1840s and the nation's expansionist war against Mexico as a fulfillment of a patriotic continental vision of the United States as a nation. At the same time, opponents of the Mexican War, such as transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau, regarded resistance to the war as an expression of American ideals and a mark of manly patriotism.

Race, ethnicity, and religion figured implicitly, yet prominently, in antebellum definitions of patriotism and manliness. Western expansion carried a promise of free land and economic opportunities for white men. The removal of nonwhite, [Page 359]non-Protestant men (Native Americans and Mexicans) from western lands was justified by a race-coded, patriotic manliness. Similarly, nativists defined their opposition to Irish immigration in terms of a race-coded manly patriotism: They portrayed the Roman Catholic Irish as nonwhite, devoted to an authority outside the United States (the pope in Rome), and therefore incapable of undivided patriotism.

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