The Myth of the Chosen Nation: Puritanism and the Birth of American Exceptionalism

Every empire believes it is special. But America’s conviction of chosenness came from a unique inheritance. The Puritans once believed their communities were “the elect,” chosen by God. By the 1800s, that theology had grown into something bigger: a national myth of destiny.

John Winthrop’s warning in 1630, “we shall be as a city upon a hill, the eyes of all people are upon us”, was never forgotten. Two centuries later, John L. O’Sullivan gave the idea its most famous name:

“Our manifest destiny is to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions.” (1845)

Exceptionalism was no longer just a religious inheritance. It had become a political justification for conquest, expansion, and exploitation. The Puritan logic that once measured faith in discipline had been secularized into a cultural reflex: labor proved worth. And in industrial America, that reflex became a trap.

From Covenant to Continent

The logic of chosenness, once meant for small Puritan congregations, now justified continental conquest. Settling and working the land was framed as proof of virtue. Those who could not or would not toil — Indigenous peoples, enslaved Africans, or later, waves of immigrants who resisted assimilation — were cast as undeserving.

This was not only about territory. It was about identity. To be American was to belong to a nation chosen by Providence, a people whose labor was both duty and proof.

Immigration, Opportunity, and the Trap

For millions of immigrants, America offered opportunities unavailable in Europe. Landownership, mobility, and even eventual wealth were possible here. Horace Greeley captured the dream when he urged, “Go West, young man, and grow up with the country.”

The dream was costly. Mortality rates were staggering:

• On the Erie Canal project in the 1820s, over 1,000 Irish workers died of accidents and disease.

• Ellis Island rejected about 2 percent of arrivals, forcing desperate families back to Europe with nothing.

• In New York City tenements, one in five immigrant children died before age five.

Jacob Riis’s How the Other Half Lives (1890) captured the reality:

“Long hours and low wages, with the tenement thrown in, are destroying the lives of thousands upon thousands every year.”

The promise of America was real. Some families did rise. But most were trapped in cycles of labor and poverty. And instead of questioning the system, elites moralized the suffering. Poverty became a sign of vice. Success was read as providence. The Puritan logic endured.

Industrialization and the Mutation of Merit

As the nation industrialized, the meaning of labor changed. For Puritans, work had been a calling. For Americans in the 1800s, it became a commodity to be spent for the sake of others.

Skilled artisans — shoemakers, printers, mechanics — resisted wage cuts and devaluation.

Philadelphia shoemakers struck in 1806, only to be prosecuted under conspiracy laws. Women in the Lowell textile mills of the 1830s and 1840s protested wage cuts with rhetoric that echoed the Revolution:

“As daughters of freemen, we are determined to resist all attempts to enslave us.”

By 1900, one in five children under fifteen worked for wages. Families leaned into the idea that every hand must prove its worth. Yet the children paid with stunted health and shortened lives.

Industrialists sanctified the system. George Pullman, testifying in 1894 as his workers starved, insisted:

“The employees were not wronged. They simply failed to appreciate the conditions which surrounded them.”

Jay Gould, the railroad tycoon, was blunter:

“I can hire one half of the working class to kill the other half.”

None of these men quoted Calvin. By this point, the old moral value of labor had been stripped of theology and corrupted into something purely temporal. You could call it the gospel of work, or in modern language, workism. The theology had been discarded, but the logic endured: success as providence, labor as duty, suffering as proof of virtue.

The State Chisels It in Stone

Workers quickly learned they were not just fighting employers. They were fighting the government itself.

• 1806: Philadelphia shoemakers became the first American workers prosecuted for “conspiracy” against their bosses.

• 1877: The Great Railroad Strike erupted after wage cuts. Federal troops were sent to multiple cities. In Pittsburgh, militia fired into a crowd, killing over twenty.

• 1892: At Carnegie Steel’s Homestead plant, Pinkertons fought striking workers in a pitched battle that left sixteen dead. The Pennsylvania governor then sent in 8,000 National Guard troops to secure the mill.

• 1894: During the Pullman Strike, President Grover Cleveland sent federal troops to Chicago. Soldiers fired on crowds, killing at least twenty-five and wounding more than a hundred.

The message was clear: the state would side with capital. “Labor = merit” had hardened into “labor = duty.” Work was no longer only a measure of virtue. It was an obligation, enforced at gunpoint.

America vs. Europe

Industrial brutality was not unique to the United States. But the response was different. Britain began limiting child labor with the Factory Acts in the 1830s. Germany introduced health insurance, pensions, and accident insurance by the 1880s. In the United States, nothing similar arrived until the New Deal of the 1930s.

Was this because America’s Puritan inheritance made it easier to moralize suffering? Perhaps. At the very least, it gave elites and the state a ready-made language: hardship was deserved, success was providence, and reform was weakness.

The New Chosenness

By the late 1800s, the Puritan inheritance of “labor as virtue” had been fully weaponized. It justified the seizure of land, the exploitation of immigrants, the destruction of unions, and the conscription of children into factories.

Different classes interpreted the myth differently: artisans defending their trades, immigrants dreaming of mobility, women demanding dignity. But all collided with the same truth. The system used labor-as-merit as a leash. And the state stood behind it.

American Exceptionalism was not only about destiny abroad. It was about discipline at home. The promise was simple: if you killed yourself for a millionaire, maybe you could become one, too.

American Exceptionalism is simply Puritan anxiety scaled up to the size of a continent.

Bibliography

1. Bercovitch, Sacvan. The American Jeremiad. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978.

2. Greeley, Horace. Hints Toward Reforms. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1850.

3. Gould, Jay. Quoted in Matthew Josephson, The Robber Barons: The Great American Capitalists, 1861–1901. New York: Harcourt, Brace & Company, 1934.

4. Lowell Mill Girls. “Protest Broadside of 1834.” In Thomas Dublin, ed., Women at Work: The Transformation of Work and Community in Lowell, Massachusetts, 1826–1860. New York: Columbia University Press, 1979.

5. O’Sullivan, John L. “Annexation.” United States Magazine and Democratic Review 17, no. 1 (July–August 1845): 5–10.

6. Pullman, George. Testimony before the United States Strike Commission, 1894. In Report on the Chicago Strike of June–July 1894 by the United States Strike Commission. Washington: Government Printing Office, 1895.

7. Riis, Jacob. How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1890.

8. Stephanson, Anders. Manifest Destiny: American Expansion and the Empire of Right. New York: Hill and Wang, 1995.

9. Tawney, R. H. Religion and the Rise of Capitalism. London: John Murray, 1926.

10. Weber, Max. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Translated by Talcott Parsons. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1930.

11. Winthrop, John. “A Model of Christian Charity.” 1630. In Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 3rd ser., 7 (1838).