The Defining Relationship

Although Winston Churchill did not popularize the phrase “special relationship” until 1946, it is tempting to see the seeds of the bond he described being sown almost immediately after the War of 1812. Relations between the United States and Britain would still be bumpy, but the Treaty of Ghent established a durable peace; the 1817 Rush-Bagot Treaty reduced armaments on the Great Lakes; the Convention of 1818 set the U.S.-Canadian boundary and quieted the dispute over the Oregon Territory; and many Americans revered British culture.1 Yet Sam W. Haynes' well-researched, elegantly written book demonstrates that, from 1814 to the end of the U.S. war with Mexico, Americans felt deeply insecure about their relationship with their former imperial master. Anglophobia permeated American culture and politics; this fear and resentment of things British gave shape to a fledgling national identity. Haynes structures his work largely thematically, with most of the book's chapters illuminating Anglophobia in different arenas of American life. In all, self-doubt, a “strange mix of cultural affinity,” and a “competing geopolitical interest” gnawed at Americans (p. 294). They took umbrage at the censures of British travel writers such as Frances Trollope's widely read proclamation: “ ‘I do not like their principles, I do not like their manners, I do not like their opinions’ ” (p. 34). At the same time, Americans yearned to have literature and theater that rivaled British counterparts. They measured their writers and actors, such as James Fennimore Cooper and Edwin Forrest, against English contemporaries. Yet doing so could provide only cold comfort, for Americans simultaneously believed their nation to have a unique destiny. When they judged themselves by British standards, they implicitly exalted the parent country and uneasily emphasized continuity over originality, undercutting their own exceptionalism. They faced a dilemma common to postcolonial societies: They wanted complete independence, but found themselves unable to shed so many ofthe values and connections they had inherited. They had no sense of their true national character.

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