Race and Class in U.S. History: Anglo-Saxon Ideology, 1776–1865
This paper examines the intertwined roles of race and class in shaping American domestic policy from the founding of the Republic in 1776 through the Civil War in 1865. Drawing primarily on Reginald Horsman's Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism, the paper traces how Thomas Jefferson's idealization of Anglo-Saxon purity informed early political culture, how that ideology evolved into the doctrine of Manifest Destiny, and how scientific racism and Romantic literature mutually reinforced white Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) supremacy. The paper also addresses the persistence of racial and class hierarchies in the South, the pseudo-scientific justifications for slavery, and the ultimately unresolved tensions that culminated in the Civil War.
- Introduction: Founding Ideals and the Problem of Race: Jefferson's racial ideology at America's founding
- Jefferson's Anglo-Saxon Vision and Manifest Destiny: Anglo-Saxon purity myth and Manifest Destiny's origins
- Scientific Racism and the Justification of Slavery: Pseudo-science used to justify racial hierarchy and slavery
- Literature, Pseudo-Science, and WASP Propaganda: Writers and scientists mutually reinforcing WASP supremacy
- The South, Expansion, and the Road to Civil War: Southern racism, westward expansion, and federal conflict
- Conclusion: An Unresolved Legacy: Race and class problems persisting beyond the Civil War
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What makes this paper effective
- The paper anchors its argument consistently in a single scholarly source — Horsman's Race and Manifest Destiny — and deploys direct quotations to support each major claim, giving the analysis textual grounding throughout.
- It traces a clear chronological and causal arc, connecting Jefferson's founding ideology to Manifest Destiny, then to antebellum scientific racism, and finally to the Civil War, showing how one set of ideas compounded over time.
- The paper effectively identifies the mutual reinforcement between literary/historical writers and the pseudo-scientific community as a structural mechanism that entrenched WASP supremacy.
Key academic technique demonstrated
The paper demonstrates source-driven historical argumentation: rather than making broad unsupported claims, it consistently introduces a claim and then immediately supports it with a cited passage from Horsman. This technique, common in undergraduate history writing, shows how to use a secondary source as the evidentiary backbone of an interpretive essay.
Structure breakdown
The paper opens with Jefferson's founding mythology and moves logically through the concept of Manifest Destiny, then to antebellum racial science and popular literature, then to Southern politics, and finally to the Civil War as the unresolved crisis of race and class. A brief conclusion synthesizes the argument and gestures toward the policy's long-term persistence. The structure is broadly chronological with thematic layering.
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).
Works Cited
Horsman, Reginald. Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism. Harvard University Press, 1981. Print.
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