Moral Superiority in American History: Roots and Hypocrisy
This essay examines the historical roots of American moral superiority, tracing the sentiment from the Revolutionary era through the nineteenth century. Drawing on primary texts by Thomas Paine, J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, John L. O'Sullivan, Henry David Thoreau, Sojourner Truth, and Herman Melville, the paper argues that a belief in divine destiny and national exceptionalism ran alongside — and often contradicted — practices such as the displacement of Native Americans, slavery, and the subjugation of women. The essay connects these early ideological formations to broader international perceptions of American arrogance and self-righteousness that persist into the modern era.
- Introduction: A World-Wide Perception: Global resentment of American moral self-assurance introduced
- Revolutionary Origins: Thomas Paine and Divine Right: Paine frames colonial rebellion as divinely ordained superiority
- Manifest Destiny and the Displacement of Native Americans: O'Sullivan justifies westward expansion despite Native dispossession
- Slavery, Muslim Nations, and the Problem of Hypocrisy: American anti-slavery rhetoric clashes with domestic slave practice
- The Degradation of Women and the Abolitionist Connection: Women's subjugation linked to slavery and moral double standards
- A Nation of Pride and Contradiction: Melville's Moby Dick mirrors American exceptionalism's dark duality
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What makes this paper effective
- It grounds an abstract cultural argument — American moral superiority — in specific primary source quotations, letting historical voices speak for themselves rather than relying on unsupported assertion.
- It maintains a consistent critical thread, showing how the same ideological assumptions reappeared across different eras and issues (revolution, westward expansion, slavery, gender), building a cumulative case.
- The opening joke and the closing literary parallel with Moby Dick give the essay a distinctive framing that makes its argument memorable and rhetorically coherent.
Key academic technique demonstrated
The paper exemplifies the use of counterexample and internal contradiction as an analytical tool. Rather than simply cataloguing expressions of American pride, the author repeatedly juxtaposes a patriotic claim against a contemporaneous practice — O'Sullivan's rhetoric of freedom against the dispossession of Native Americans, condemnation of Algerian slavery against domestic slavery — to expose hypocrisy as a structural feature of American exceptionalism, not merely an occasional lapse.
Structure breakdown
The essay opens with a framing anecdote and moves chronologically, beginning with the Revolutionary era (Paine, 1776), advancing through early national writing (Crèvecoeur, O'Sullivan, 1839), then addressing antebellum moral contradictions (Thoreau, Sojourner Truth, Susan B. Anthony). It closes with a literary synthesis via Melville's Moby Dick, using Ripley's 1851 review to reframe the entire argument as a question of foreign perception. The structure is roughly five to six thematic paragraphs without formal subheadings in the source, making it a tightly integrated analytical essay.
Introduction: A World-Wide Perception
"A survey was conducted in the world. Respondents were asked to 'please write down your opinion about food shortages in other countries.' The survey failed because Africa didn't know the meaning of 'food,' Western Europe didn't know the meaning of 'shortage,' Eastern Europe didn't know the meaning of 'opinion,' and the United States didn't know the meaning of 'other countries.'"
— joke circulating in Hungarian cyberspace
Americans, already reeling in shock from the tragedy of September 11, were appalled at television images of Muslim children laughing and celebrating at the injury done to the United States. It was a visceral reminder of the hatred that many nations feel for the US — hatred certainly engendered in part through envy for the comparative wealth and freedoms that Americans enjoy, but also in part by the virtually worldwide perception of Americans as blissfully certain of their moral superiority to all other nationalities, and abundantly willing to steamroller other cultures with their opinions and beliefs. Did this attitude emerge with the Founding Fathers?
Revolutionary Origins: Thomas Paine and Divine Right
In Common Sense (1776), Thomas Paine declared: "Neither can ye reconcile Britain and America… The Almighty hath implanted in us these inextinguishable feelings for good and wise purposes. They are the guardians of His image in our hearts. They distinguish us from the herd of common animals." Clearly, Paine believed that the Revolution was pre-ordained and that the moral high ground was held by the Colonies. In his Epistle to the Quakers, he rebutted their Loyalist and pacifist sentiments by saying, "We view our enemies in the character of highwaymen and housebreakers."
Paine's view, then, was that God had ordained the colonial rebellion, that the colonists were entirely justified in it, and — more significantly — that any enemy of the colonies was by definition a criminal. Here we see the beginning of the mindset that would culminate, more than two centuries later, in President Bush's "war against evil."
Crèvecoeur, in describing Nantucket, commented on the indigenous peoples: "In the year 1763, above half the Indians of this island perished by a strange fever… they appear to be a race doomed to recede and disappear before the superior genius of the Europeans." From this we see that the opinion existed not only that Native Americans were destined to lose their lands to the white man, but that this outcome was rightful and natural.
Manifest Destiny and the Displacement of Native Americans
John L. O'Sullivan, writing "Manifest Destiny" in 1839, declared: "Nor have the American people ever suffered themselves to be led on by wicked ambition to depopulate the land, to spread desolation far and wide, that a human being might be placed upon a seat of supremacy." Yet the belief in Manifest Destiny led Americans to settle the West, effectively deposing its aboriginal inhabitants, and certainly spreading desolation far and wide as the slaughter of the buffalo removed the staff of life from the Native American.
The rapacity of the settlers in taking land from the Indians — all the while justifying themselves, in O'Sullivan's words, as being "the nation of human progress, and who can, what can, set limits to our onward march?" — has widely been regarded as a permanent blot on the moral history of the United States.
The other great disgrace is, of course, slavery. O'Sullivan continued: "Yes, we are the nation of progress, of individual freedom, of universal enfranchisement. For this blessed mission to the nations of the world, which are shut out from the life-giving light of truth, has America been chosen; and her high example shall smite unto death the tyranny of kings, hierarchs, and oligarchs, and carry the glad tidings of peace and good will where myriads now endure an existence scarcely more enviable than that of the beasts of the field." So, while hypocritically ignoring the misery of slaves at home, the United States — cast as the sole beneficiary of divine truth — was imagined to be destined to bring the correct form of government to the benighted remainder of the world.
Works Cited
Baym, Nina, ed. The Norton Anthology of American Literature. Vol. 1, 5th ed.
Allison, Robert. "Muslims on America's Mind, A.D. 1790." The Globalist, September 28, 2001. Adapted from Allison, Robert J. The Crescent Obscured: The United States and the Muslim World, 1776–1815.
De Crèvecoeur, J. Hector St. John. Letters From an American Farmer. New York: Fox, Duffield, 1904.
O'Sullivan, John L. "Manifest Destiny." 1839.
Paine, Thomas. "Common Sense." 1776.
Paine, Thomas. "Epistle to Quakers."
Ripley, George. "A Pregnant Allegory: Review of Moby Dick." Harper's New Monthly Magazine, December 1851.
Thoreau, Henry David. "Civil Disobedience." Walden and Other Writings. Ed. Joseph Wood Krutch. New York: Bantam Books Inc., 1965.
Truth, Sojourner. "Ain't I a Woman?" 1851. www.pbs.org/amex/lincolns/wworld/esantebellum.html
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