In this paper, I investigate the tension between particularism and universalism at the core of antebellum American exceptionalism. “Particularism” is herein understood as a broader term encompassing “nationalism”, “jingoism”, “sectarianism”, as well as “individualism” and “self-interest”.  As for “universalism”, it is conceived neither in theological terms as the doctrine that all people will be eventually saved, nor as a kind of foreign policy, but as virtually synonymous to “universality”, or the condition and quality of being universal. Taking my cues from one of Emerson’s famous paradoxes, namely that “every man is a partialist… and… every man is a universalist also” (in the essay “Nominalist and Realist”), I proceed to identify and compare representations of particularism and universalism in antebellum writings on U.S. national identity by Emerson, Fuller, Simms, Douglass, and Delany.