American Exceptionalism began with those who escaped Europe during the Thirty Years War because they were unwilling to fight for one orthodoxy, and its asserted Magisterium, against all competing orthodoxies. As a consequence of the first Americans simply leaving the quarrels of Europe behind, the American colonies developed a very different concept of polity than the post-Westphalian nation-states of Europe. The victory of the Union in the American Civil War led to a century when the Federal government attempted to remake the Union as a European, Bismarckian nation-state. In addition, the rise of Marxism as a transnational, supranational philosophy of government by moral principle has intruded into the American debate a moral authority putatively greater than that of the self-sovereign individual.