Race and Class in U.S. History: Anglo-Saxon Ideology, 1776–1865

Introduction: Founding Ideals and the Problem of Race

Race and class have played a significant role in the formation of American domestic policy. This paper uses Reginald Horsman's Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism to examine how race and class issues affected the economic, social, and political dimensions of U.S. history from 1776 to 1865.

It would not be remiss to suggest that the American founders were deeply preoccupied with the issues of race and class as they laid the foundation of the 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 feudal classes. Economic and social policies found their voice in politics throughout his writings from the earliest period. For Jefferson, matters of race and class were fundamentally a problem of culture — specifically, medieval Catholic culture. That culture had ended politically in 1648 with the Peace of Westphalia, but more than a century later the American founders 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).

Jefferson's Anglo-Saxon Vision and Manifest Destiny

By 1825, Jefferson was still clinging to his vision of Anglo-Saxon purity prior to Norman contamination. He 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 founders saw themselves fed directly into the emerging concept of "Manifest Destiny" — a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) idea from the start. This was the conviction that Americans were somehow akin to God's chosen people and that the world was theirs for the taking.

John L. O'Sullivan gave more to the world in 1845 when he coined the term "Manifest Destiny" than merely another way of describing annexation. What he put into words was the pragmatic philosophy that dominated WASP culture: the natural right of Americans, by virtue of their indomitable Protestant spirit, to pursue land as far as they saw fit. Manifest Destiny evolved out of a domestic policy and into a foreign one. If America had ever been isolationist, it would never be so again — and the expansionism of the 1890s established that fact conclusively.

Ironically, the problem of slavery and social inequality existed directly beneath the noses of the very men who saw themselves as symbolic Israelites. 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).

Scientific Racism and the Justification of Slavery

The fact that enslaved Africans had been shipped into the United States as chattel did not alleviate the problem; it was one of fundamental racism and a sense of racial superiority rooted in the prevailing English worldview. This worldview embedded itself so deeply into the American psyche that an opposing trend exploded in the form of the Abolitionist Movement — yet that movement was itself filled with religious fervor. The political and social view of the race problem was expressed "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 in this assertion lay the seeds of the policy that would become known first as eugenics and later as "population control."

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 placed the problem of race and class on the shoulders of Black Americans themselves: "In four thousand years, the authors argued, the Negroes had not advanced a single step from their savage state" (Horsman 136). Of course, Black Americans were not the only group that failed to meet WASP standards in the estimation of these authors: the American Indian fared no better. This judgment helped absolve the WASP of his sins as he pushed westward and seized the frontier through any and all means from the very peoples who had inhabited it for centuries. All of this was done in the name of the WASP's god — 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 was therefore fueled by religious ideology even as it claimed to be founded on religious liberty. Religious liberty was, in practice, a poor compromise in the face of genuine religious and cultural differences. As Horsman illustrates, the American upper class was simultaneously obsessed with elitism and a sense of entitlement: the WASP, like the biblical Israelite, was entitled to the Promised Land — and that land was all around him. Unfortunately, so were the "undesirable classes."

Conclusion: An Unresolved Legacy

Issues of race and class were ingrained into the American fabric from the very beginning, when founders like Thomas Jefferson envisioned an America that was mythological and pure. The Republic grew up on foundations that were both racist and idealistic. Jefferson sought to erase the recent past and build a nation on the principle of Anglo-Saxon superiority. Slavery and the suppression of the "undesirable" classes failed to move the founding generation — or the generations that followed — in any direction other than toward war. And even then, the underlying problems were never truly addressed.

Works Cited

Horsman, Reginald. Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism. Harvard University Press, 1981. Print.