Race and Manifest Destiny

The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism

Reginald Horsman, Reginald HORSMAN

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 1986
• Print ISBN:
  9780674948051
  9780674745728
• eBook ISBN:
  9780674254640
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

American myths about national character tend to overshadow the historical realities. Reginald Horsman's book is the first study to examine the origins of racialism in America and to show that the belief in white American superiority was firmly ensconced in the nation's ideology by 1850.

The author deftly chronicles the beginnings and growth of an ideology stressing race, basic stock, and attributes in the blood. He traces how this ideology shifted from the more benign views of the Founding Fathers, which embraced ideas of progress and the spread of republican institutions for all. He finds linkages between the new, racialist ideology in America and the rising European ideas of Anglo-Saxon, Teutonic, and scientific ideologies of the early nineteenth century. Most importantly, however, Horsman demonstrates that it was the merging of the Anglo-Saxon rhetoric with the experience of Americans conquering a continent that created a racialist philosophy. Two generations before the "new" immigrants began arriving in the late nineteenth century, Americans, in contact with blacks, Indians, and Mexicans, became vociferous racialists.

In sum, even before the Civil War, Americans had decided that peoples of large parts of this continent were incapable of creating or sharing in efficient, prosperous, democratic governments, and that American Anglo-Saxons could achieve unprecedented prosperity and power by the outward thrust of their racialism and commercial penetration of other lands. The comparatively benevolent view of the Founders of the Republic had turned into the quite malevolent ideology that other peoples could not be "regenerated" through the spread of free institutions.

Notes

Introduction

1. In discussing aspects of racial thought in the first half of the nineteenth century, I have used the terms racialism and racialist rather than the terms racism and racist. This is meant to draw some distinction between racist thought in the context of present knowledge of racial matters and racialist thought in the context of nineteenth-century knowledge. The terms racism and racist are charged with meanings that can cause confusion when applied to the thought of the first half of the nineteenth century.

1 Liberty and the Anglo-Saxons

1. Thomas D. Kendrick, British Antiquity (London: Methuen, 1950), p. 115; Fred J. Levy, Tudor Historical Thought (San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library, 1967), p. 79; Eleanor N. Adams, Old English Scholarship in England from 1566-1800 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1917), p. 11.

2. Adams, Old English Scholarship, pp. 16-23, 33-41; May McKisack, Medieval History in the Tudor Age (Oxford: Oxford University Press, Clarendon Press, 1971), pp. 26-49; Levy, Tudor Historical Thought, pp. 115-122; Kendrick, British Antiquity, pp. 115-116.

3. Adams, Old English Scholarship, p. 31; Levy, Tudor Historical Thought, pp. 95-101; Richard T. Vann, “The Free Anglo-Saxons: A Historical Myth,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 19 (April 1958): 261-262.

4. “The Trojans in Britain,” in George S. Gordon, The Discipline of Letters (Oxford: Oxford University Press, Clarendon Press, 1946), pp. 37-49; Kendrick, British Antiquity, pp. 3-14, 37; Levy, Tudor Historical Thought, pp. 53-68, 133; McKisack, Medieval History, pp. 98-103; Antonia Gransden, Historical Writing in England, c. 550 to c. 1307 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974), pp. 201-209.

5. Samuel Kliger, The Goths in England: A Study in Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Thought (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1952), pp. 33-66; Léon Poliakov, The Aryan Myth: A History of Racist and Nationalist Ideas in Europe, trans. Edmund Howard (New York: Basic Books, 1974), pp. 79-90.

6. Poliakov, Aryan Myth, pp. 90-91; Richard Foster Jones, The Triumph of the English Language: A Survey of Opinions concerning the Vernacular from the Introduction of Printing to the Restoration (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1953), pp. 215-218, 269-270.

7. Kendrick, British Antiquity, pp. 116-118; Levy, Tudor Historical Thought, p. 143; Jones, Triumph of the English Language, p. 220; Adams, Old English Scholarship, pp. 43-44; Kliger, Goths in England, pp. 115-119; Frank Edgar Farley, Scandinavian Influences in the English Romantic Movement (Boston: Ginn, 1903), pp. 8-9; Stuart Piggott, Celts, Saxons, and the Early Antiquaries (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1967), pp. 12-13.

8. McKisack, Medieval History, pp. 150-153; Kendrick, British Antiquity, pp. 119-120; Piggott, Celts, Saxons, pp. 17-18. Verstegen’s book went through five editions by 1673, Kliger, Goths in England, p. 115.

9. Jones, Triumph of the English Language, pp. 222-236; Kliger, Goths in England, pp. 1-2, 114-197.

10. Tacitus, Dialogus, Agricola, Germania (1914; reprint ed., London: W. Heinemann, 1963), pp. 269, 275, 277, 281, 289; Jones, Triumph of the English Language, pp. 214-215; Kliger, Goths in England, pp. 112-113, quotation (1689) from an English pamphleteer.

11. Levy, Tudor Historical Thought, pp. 137-138; Adams, Old English Scholarship, pp. 27-30. As early as 1568 William Lambarde had issued a collection of Anglo-Saxon laws, but much of the most influential work was published in the fifty years after 1590. For a discussion of the role of the Anglo-Saxons in seventeenth-century political controversy, see “The Norman Yoke,” in Christopher Hill, Puritanism and Revolution: Studies in Interpretation of the English Revolution of the 17th Century (London: Seeker & Warburg, 1958), pp. 50-122; J. G. A. Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law: A Study of English Historical Thought in the Seventeenth Century (1957; reprint ed., New York: W. W. Norton, 1967), pp. 16-17, 92-123. Also Adams, Old English Scholarship, pp. 42, 47-53, 67; McKisack, Medieval History, pp. 155-169; Herbert Butterfield, The Englishman and His History (1944; reprint ed., n.p.: Archon Books, 1970), pp. 31-38; Roberta F. Brinkley, Arthurian Legend in the Seventeenth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1932), pp. 26-33.

12. Butterfield, Englishman and His History, pp. 29-30, 41; Hill, “Norman Yoke,” pp. 58-59; Vann, “Free Anglo-Saxons,” pp. 265-266.

13. Hill, “Norman Yoke,” pp. 60-87; Vann, “Free Anglo-Saxons,” pp. 265-272; Butterfield, Englishman and His History, pp. 49-50, 69-73, 80-81; Pocock, Ancient Constitution, pp. 56-58, 125-136; Christopher Hill, Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, Clarendon Press, 1965), p. 257; Kliger, Goths in England, pp. 137-141.

14. See Caroline Robbins, The Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthman: Studies in the Transmission, Development, and Circumstance of English Thought from the Restoration of Charles II until the War with the Thirteen Colonies (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1959), pp. 91-94, 98-102, and passim.

15. David C. Douglas, English Scholars, 1660–1730, 2nd ed. rev. (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1951), passim; Adams, Old English Scholarship, pp. 70-81, 86-88; Farley, Scandinavian Influences, pp. 12-14.

16. The standard work concerning the impact of the Whig view of the Anglo-Saxons on eighteenth-century America is H. Trevor Colbourn, The Lamp of Experience: Whig History and the Intellectual Origins of the American Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1965). See also Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1969), pp. 11-23; Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, Belknap Press, 1967); Henry F. May, The Enlightenment in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), pp. 155-157; Lance Banning, The Jeffersonian Persuasion: Evolution of a Party Ideology (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1978), pp. 13-90.

17. See Colbourn, Lamp of Experience, pp. 3-56, for the colonial view of history and colonial reading. For Jefferson and Coke see Jefferson to John Page, Dec. 25, 1762, in Julian P. Boyd, ed., The Papers of Thomas Jefferson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1950-), I, 5; Jefferson to James Madison, Feb. 17, 1826, in Andrew A. Lipscomb and Albert E. Bergh, eds., The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, 20 vols. (Washington, D. C: Thomas Jefferson Memorial Association, 1905), XVI, 156.

18. Bernard Bailyn, ed., Pamphlets of the American Revolution, 1750–1776, vol. 1, 1750–1765 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, Belknap Press, 1965), p. 25; Colbourn, Lamp of Experience, pp. 25, 55.

19. Colbourn, Lamp of Experience, pp. 8, 31-32.

20. Ibid., p. 26; Paul Merrill Spurlin, Montesquieu in Amer...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Acknowledgments
• Contents
• Introduction
• I: European And Colonial Origins
• II: American Destiny
• III: An Anglo-Saxon Political Ideology
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Index