This dissertation describes how Americans came to think of themselves as specially favored by God during the colonial and Revolutionary periods, and then examines the effects of this belief on issues of race and citizenship in the nineteenth century. Part one locates the origins of providential thinking in England, and suggests that it was the confusing outcome of the English Civil War rather than an innate exceptionalism that encouraged New England settlers to imagine a special destiny for America. In the political crisis of the 1770s, the colonists proudly narrated the history of their progress and found easy recourse to the idea that God sanctioned American independence, even as British commentators struggled to imagine a higher mission for their nation or to assuage their fears that Britain was doomed.
Part two examines the uses of providentialism to define the boundaries of American influence and citizenship in the early republic. After a bitter and inconclusive debate over the relationship between the revolutions in America and France, white Americans turned their attention from Europe and argued that God intended blacks and Indians to be removed from the United States. Meanwhile, blacks and white abolitionists maintained that God would punish or destroy America for its cruelty towards non-whites. The eventual onset of the Civil War seemed to confirm this wrathful understanding of God's will, until Northerners recast the war as an expiation of America's only sin--slavery--and argued that the United States had been prepared for a still higher mission by this terrible conflict.
This dissertation presents a new framework for understanding the familiar question of America's purpose in a divine scheme. The idea that God controlled the nation was European rather than American in origin, and persisted in Britain until at least the late-eighteenth century. Americans and Britons employed a broad range of providential appeals, and the various forms of national providentialism offered very different possibilities for making sense of the political present and the national future. Finally, the language of providentialism has its own history, and is better understood as contingent and shifting rather than timeless and essentially American.
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