Politics & Power Quote by Albert Bushnell Hart

Hart is doing something historians love to do: tracing American “exceptionalism” to borrowed parts, then laundering the borrowing into destiny. By naming the Plymouth settlers’ time in the Netherlands alongside the later conquest of Dutch colonies, he links two very different encounters with “Dutch” governance - voluntary refuge and imperial takeover - and treats both as channels of civic education. The sleight of hand is the point. Contact with “wise and free institutions” becomes a civilizing transfer, even when the mechanism is conquest.

The phrasing is tellingly Victorian-progressive. “Singularly” signals admiration, but also a ranking: Dutch institutions are unusual, exemplary, worth emulating. Hart, writing as a late-19th/early-20th-century professional historian, is part of a moment when U.S. scholars were eager to explain American political culture through European antecedents: Protestant discipline, commercial modernity, republican habits. The Dutch fit neatly - toleration, municipal self-government, mercantile pragmatism - a convenient ancestor for a nation trying to see its capitalism and pluralism as principled, not merely profitable.

The subtext also smooths over conflict. “Brought the Americans into contact” is a soft verb for dispossession and war. It recasts geopolitical force as cultural exchange, implying that even expansion can be narrated as exposure to liberty. Hart’s intent isn’t just to praise the Dutch; it’s to authorize an American self-image: pragmatic freedom learned from a “wise” model, then carried forward, even through empire, as if history’s rough edges are just the delivery system for political maturation.