page_945 < previous page page_945 next page > Page 945 can independence was secured, drew on the author's earlier experiences in America and expressed his admiration for the simple, egalitarian, and free life of its people. Thomas Hollis, an English radical Whig, sent shipment after shipment of libertarian literature to America before the Revolution because he believed there was a better chance to preserve liberty in this fresh new land than in his own. After the Revolution, these intellectuals observed events in the United States with greater interest than ever. The Americans were engaged in an experiment in democratic government that had powerful implications for their own countries. In 1786 the French philosopher Condorcet argued that the United States was living proof that enlightened ideas were the source of human happiness: It is not enough that the rights of man be written in the books of philosophers and inscribed in the hearts of virtuous men; the weak and ignorant must be able to read them in the example of a great nation. America has given us this example. (The Influence of the American Revolution on Europe) The Americans, of course, greeted the French Revolution with joy and relief. The establishment of a constitutional monarchy and subsequently a republic sustained the American experiment in many ways. It assured them that the United States led the way in the pursuit of freedom and that it was not alone in its commitment to republicanism. Now the United States and one of the most powerful nations on earth were joined in the grand experiment. French diplomats, French culture, French news, were welcomed everywhere. In the course of the 1790s the rejoicing turned to horror as the French Revolution moved rapidly from constitutional monarchy to republic to Terror to chaos to a dictatorial directorate and finally to Napoleon. The course of the French Revolution fulfilled to the letter the classical predictions of the fate of a democracy. From being a source of strength, the French example became a powerful critique and prophecy of doom for the United States. Troubled by their own disorders in the 1790s, American conservatives felt that every effort must be made to prevent the United States from following the same made course. The extremes of the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, which severely limited freedom to criticize government, reflected the anxieties many American leaders felt. The first half of the nineteenth century repeated, less dramatically, the cycle of hope and despair that Americans had passed through with the French revolutions. A few successful revolutions in Latin America and Greece shored up confidence in the general applicability of republican government, and Americans honored the heroes of those revolutions as successors to their own Washington. But more characteristically attempted revolutions in the major European nations began with expectations of establishing democracy and ended with a restoration of monarchy. A series of revolts in 1830 failed, and the more ambitious revolutions of 1848 were followed by even sterner repression. On each occasion the example of the United States initially gave courage to the revolutionaries, but the subsequent failure disheartened Americans. As late as the Civil War, the United States still stood as a lonely beacon of republican government. Although democracy had made great progress in England under constitutional monarchy, repressed peoples in Latin America and Europe looked to the United States for inspiration. Abraham Lincoln had these facts in mind as the nation entered the Civil War. America was, he said, the "last best hope" of democracy. If the United States divided against itself and was allowed to splinter, it would demonstrate conclusively the long-standing predictions of the skeptics: a nation founded in liberty could not survive. Lincoln believed that America fought to preserve the Union not for its own sake alone but so that "government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth." Government by the people did not perish from the earth; in the century after the Civil War democratic government spread through Europe and elsewhere through the world, with the American example ever present as a reserve of experience on which other nations could draw. Â < previous page page_945 next page >