Distinctively American

From The Blue and The Gray (Volume One) The Nomination of Lincoln To The Eve of Gettysburg, by Henry Steele Commager:

Every war dramatizes the ordinary and accentuates the characteristic; more than any other in which we have ever been engaged the Civil War brought out in sharp relief those qualities that we think of as distinctively American. The American was practical, experimental, inventive, intelligent, self-reliant, opportunistic, energetic, careless, undisciplined, amateurish, equalitarian, sentimental, humorous, generous and moral.