Essay on "Race and Class in U.S. History 1776-1865"

Essay 5 pages (1572 words) Sources: 1

[EXCERPT] . . . .

Race and Class in U.S. History 1776-1865

Race and class have played a large factor in the formation of American domestic policy. This paper will use Reginald Horsman's Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism to show exactly how race/class issues have affected the economic, social, and political aspects of U.S. History from 1776 to 1865.

It would not be remiss to suggest that the American forefathers were a little occupied with the issues of race and class at the laying of the foundation of the American Republic. Thomas Jefferson, for example, the man who penned the Declaration of Independence in 1776 idealized the "white" race and wished to abolish the concept of the feudal classes. Economic and social policies would find their voice in politics in many of his writings -- from the earliest. Indeed, economic and social policies -- or even matters of race and class -- were for Jefferson a problem of culture, specifically medieval Catholic culture. That culture had, of course, ended (at least politically) in 1648 with the Peace of Westphalia -- but more than a century later, the American forefathers wanted to etch the revolution in stone and return the world to a kind of Arthurian legend. As Horsman notes, "Even in his bill for religious freedom in Virginia, [Jefferson] thought he was helping to restore the purity of Anglo-Saxon England before 1066, for with William the Conqueror had come the priests who added religious to political tyranny" (22).

The problem, as Horsman notes, is that the ideal was as unreal as the legend: "This view of Anglo-Saxon England was in its way as unreal as those writings which depicted Arthur's England as Camelot of brave knights, fair ladies, and magic swords, but it persisted in English and American thinking long after Jefferson's death" (21). Indeed, by 1825, Jefferson was still clinging to his vision of Anglo-Saxon purity prior to Norman contamination. Jefferson had wanted all along a Saxon model of government (Horsman 21), and he related America's coming into being to "the children of Israel in the wilderness, led by a cloud by day and pillar of fire by night" (Horsman 22). The religiosity (and Romanticism) with which the forefathers saw themselves would feed right into the coming concept of "manifest destiny," a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) idea from the start: the concept that Americans were somehow akin to God's chosen people and that the world was theirs for the harvesting. John L. O'Sullivan gave more to the world in 1845 when he coined the term "manifest destiny" than just another way of describing annexation. What he put into words was the pragmatic philosophy that dominated the ranks of WASPhood. Manifest Destiny -- the natural right of Americans (by virtue of their indomitable Protestant spirit) to pursue land as far as they saw fit -- evolved out of a domestic policy and into a foreign policy. If America had ever been isolationist, it would never be again -- and the 1890s established that fact perfectly well. Manifest Destiny, in one sense, informed the New Expansionism of the 1890s

Ironically, the problem of slavery and social inequality existed right under the nose of the very men who saw themselves as symbolic Israelites. Melville's "Ishmael" would be the literary Everyman of American history at this time -- but what was more disturbing was the fact that "by the early 1850s the inherent inequality of races was simply accepted as a scientific fact in America, and most of the discussion now concerned either the religious problem of accepting polygenesis as an explanation of racial differences or the problem of exactly defining the different races" (Horsman 134).

The fact that Negroes had been shipped into the U.S. like chattel did not help alleviate the problem: it was one of fundamental racism and a sense of racial superiority stemming from the "English" worldview of the time. This worldview dug itself so deeply into the American psyche that an opposite trend exploded in the form of the Abolitionist Movement -- but it was filled with equally religious fanaticism. The political and social view of the race problem was summed up "in an extremely popular work on Negroes and slavery published in 1853, [by] New York physician John H. Van Evrie [which] erased all racial, national, and class distinctions among Caucasians in order utterly to condemn the blacks" (Horsman 135). The "colored races" according to Van Evrie "were capable of only limited development" -- and therefore the seeds of the policy that would become known first as eugenics and then as "population control" were sewn.

More literature found its way into the hands of the reading public on the heels of Van Evrie's treatise: Josiah C. Nott and George R. Gliddon produced a racist work that explicitly put the problem of race and class on the shoulders of the Negroes themselves: "In four thousand years, the authors argued, the Negroes had not advanced a single step from their savage state" (Horsman 136). Of course, the Negro was not the only race that failed to rise to the levels of the WASP in their estimation: the American Indian was just as poor. This fact helped absolve the WASP of his sins as he pushed westward and took the frontier through any and all means from the very people who had made their home there for centuries. All of this was done in the name of the god of the WASPs -- called The Creator: "The Creator has implanted in this group of races an instinct that…drives them through all difficulties, to carry out their great mission of civilizing the earth" (Horsman 136). American domestic policy, therefore, was fueled by religious ideology -- even as claimed to be founded on religious liberty. Religious liberty was, of course, a lie -- and it has proven throughout history to be a poor compromise in the face of religious differences. The fact is, as Horsman illustrates, the American upper class was at once obsessed with elitism and a sense of entitlement: the WASP, like the Israelite, was entitled to the Promised Land -- and that land was all around them. Unfortunately, so were the "undesirable classes."

Jefferson's vision of America as a kind of renewal of the ancient Arthurian legend was kept alive by a number of writers and magazines, such as the Massachusetts Quarterly Review -- which "stressed the 'inferior organization' of the Indians, and lauded the Anglo-Saxon…[who] would not mix 'his proud blood, in stable wedlock with another race'" (Horsman 150).

Such writings found their largest audience in the South -- not surprisingly: it was an area that cultivated racism and ordered its society on a slave-owner system. Not every Southerner was in agreement with such a view, of course, but the politics of the day were clear: the white was superior and held an upper class status. The Negro did not.

The writers of the day were bolstered by the "scientific" community as well. What one community stated, the other echoed, and in this way they both served each other's common interest, which was promotion of the WASP: "The creative writers and historians emphasized the special achievements of individual peoples, nations, and languages and were able to exalt the Anglo-Saxons over all other members of the Caucasian race" (Horsman 159). It was WASP propaganda to the core -- and it was bolstered by the WASP pseudo-science. The system of mutual reinforcement was in place from the beginning, but it really sprang into a river of torrential force in the early 19th century when Romanticism was flowering everywhere -- an idealistic reaction to the Age of Enlightenment, which had produced the Revolution in the first place: "The scientists used the historical and cultural descriptions of the Teutonic and Anglo-Saxon peoples… READ MORE

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