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CHAPTER ONE
The First Republic
Anglo-America
Picture North America in the year 2000 A.D., as Thomas Jefferson might have imagined it in 1800. As the twenty-first century dawns, the American ethnic nation -- defined as Americans of Anglo-Saxon descent, with infusions from closely related Western European groups -- accounts for the overwhelming majority of the inhabitants of North and South America and the islands of the Caribbean. In 1801 Jefferson had foreseen the day "when our rapid multiplication will expand itself...and cover the whole northern, if not the southern continent, with a people speaking the same language, governed in similar forms, and by similar laws" -- for this reason, Jefferson had opposed allowing emancipated blacks to settle in the west.
Although they form a single cultural nation, united by common race, language, and Protestant religion, the 500 million Anglo-Saxons of North America, in Jefferson's vision, are divided among a number of friendly sister republics. In addition to the United States of America, which retains the dimensions it acquired during Thomas Jefferson's lifetime, there is the Republic of Canada, the Republic of Texas, the Republic of California, and the Republic of Oregon (Jefferson told John Jacob Astor that his Columbia river settlement was "the germ of a great, free, and independent empire on that side of our continent.") Other North American countries retain their former names -- Mexico, Cuba -- but they have been thoroughly Anglicized, with predominantly Anglo-American populations, with English as the official language, and with common-law institutions in place of the Hispanic heritage.
Despite their great geographic diversity, the Anglo-American republics all have a family resemblance. If you take a slow-moving balloon-schooner from Mexico City to Oregon, you will see similar patterns in very different landscapes -- the small, square fields of yeoman farmers, cultivated by simple and yet ingenious labor-saving devices, spread like quilts around the small towns, each the capitol of a ward, or a section of a county, modeled on the ancient Anglo-Saxon "hundreds." If you fly low enough, you might even see the militia drilling in the parks none of the republics has significant standing armies, in this quartersphere of democracy, liberty, and peace. Each hamlet has its neoclassical town hall, in the Greek Revival style introduced by Thomas Jefferson, and its cluster of churches and temples -- Congregationalist, Deist, Masonic and Unitarian. To one correspondent Jefferson had written in 1822: "The pure and simple unity of the creator of the universe is now all but ascendant in the Eastern states it is dawning in the West, and advancing towards the South and I confidently expect that the present generation will see Unitarianism become the general religion of the United States." In the same year he wrote to another: "I trust there is not a young man now living in the U.S. who will not die an Unitarian."
Continuing your northward journey, you might join the pilgrimage of tourists to the spiritual capital of Anglo-America -- Washington, D.C. (District of Cherronesus). The District of Cherronesus is the peninsula between Lakes Huron and Michigan. In 1784 Thomas Jefferson proposed to give this region its name to commemorate the original Cherronesus, the region (now encompassing Danish Jutland and German Schleswig-Holstein) from which he believed the Saxon ancestors of the American people migrated to Britain after the fall of Rome.
The gleaming neoclassical city of Washington, D.C., buffeted by the cold winds from Lake Michigan, is full of monuments to Anglo-American ideals and history. One of them is American University, with its curriculum modeled on the one that Jefferson provided for the University of Virginia. Here, the "natural aristocracy" of North America, students from all classes selected by rigorous examination and admitted without any reference to family income, study in the hope of becoming leaders of their respective republics in the Pacific northwest, the California coast, the Canadian prairie. Their curriculum includes study of natural history, the hierarchy of races (with special emphasis on the hereditary mental and moral superiority of the Germanic peoples), the secular ethical philosophy of Jesus (in the edition of the Gospels prepared by Jefferson, with the miracles removed), and Anglo-Saxon laws and institutions, ancient and modern. Every graduate must be proficient in Anglo-Saxon, which, since its revival by Jefferson in the United States, has replaced Latin and Greek as the New World's learned tongue.
Many of the details in this vision are peculiar to Thomas Jefferson. However, the basic conception of the American people as a branch of the Anglo-Saxon tribe, whose members remained part of a single "race" no matter how many governments they were divided among, was the conception of American identity shared by most of the Founding Fathers of the United States and generations of later American leaders. Until the early twentieth century, for example, the major school of American history was devoted to the germ theory, which traced the evolution of American institutions through British roots to the customs of the ancient Germans. The idea that the United States is or should be "a nation of immigrants," not only non-Germanic but nonwhite, would have struck most Americans before World War II as bizarre. They would also have been puzzled by the idea that the American people was created in 1776. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Americans would not have confused the mere establishment of the American government in 1776 with the creation of the American nation (that is to say, the American branch of the millennia-old Anglo-Saxon race), and they would have been baffled by the mention of the "Judeo-Christian tradition," because everyone knew that the American nation was not only Christian but Protestant.
Such a way of thinking about American identity seems as alien to us today as the ideals and mores of a remote civilization. Indeed, in many ways, we modern Americans live in a new and different country. The United States of the 1990s differs far more from the United States of the 1790s than today's France does from that of Robespierre and Napoleon (for a start, the borders of France, and the composition of its population, have been far more stable than those of the United States). The continuities in the history of the French nation are disguised by the discontinuities in French constitutional history since 1789, France has had five republics, several empires and constitutional monarchies, a directory and a fascist dictatorship (Vichy). Americans are governed, at least on paper, under the same federal constitution that went into effect in 1789, and the name of the country has not changed since 1776. Constitutional continuity in America disguises the discontinuities in national history between what can be described as the three "republics" of the United States. We cannot understand our America, Multinational America, the Third Republic of the United States, without understanding its predecessors.
The First Republic of the United States (1789-1860) might be called Anglo-America. National identity in Anglo-America was a compound of three elements: an Anglo-Saxon national community, a common ethic of Protestant Christianity, and a federal-republican national political creed. These definitions of Americanness did not go unchallenged. Black Americans argued for a nonracial or multiracial conception of American identity. Irish immigrants and Catholic immigrants of varying ethnicities contested the equation of Americanness with Anglo-Saxon heritage and Protestant religion. The political creed of federal republicanism, particularly in its extreme Jeffersonian and Jacksonian variants, was challenged by Hamiltonian statesmen and intellectuals in the Federalist-National Republican-Whig tradition who emphasized a powerful central government actively promoting industrial and financial development. Although rivals of the prevailing formula sometimes won limited victories, the conception of the United States as a federal republic based on an Anglo-Saxon Protestant nation generally prevailed. Behind immigration law, Indian removal, black colonization, and annexation policy lay the ideal of the United States as a nation-state with a homogeneous population of Anglo-American Protestants.
The Origins of Anglo-America
The ultimate origins of the American nation are found in sixteenth-century England. The colonization of eastern North America by the English was a project pushed by a small circle of courtiers, businessmen and intellectuals around Sir Walter Raleigh, many of whom were also involved in the colonization of Ireland by Protestants. In his "Discourse of Western Planting" (1584) one of the leading members of this group, Richard Hakluyt, argued that colonization would increase England's military and commercial strength, as well as permit the English to unload their paupers and convert the North American Indians to true (that is, Protestant) Christianity. The visionary Hakluyt called for the settlement in eastern North America of "infinite nombers of the english nation." Attempts in 1584 and 1587 by Raleigh and his associates to found colonies in the Carolina Banks and the Chesapeake failed (the latter, cut off by Spanish-English war and presumably destroyed by Indians, passed into legend as the lost colony of Roanoke). The Raleigh circle turned to other projects, including colonization in Ireland after the 1585 Munster rebellion and a doomed effort to colonize Guiana.
The Virginia Company managed to found a permanent settlement at Jamestown in 1607, but the outpost, plagued by war with the local Powhatan Indians, starvation, internal dissent, and disease, was always on the verge of collapse. The Crown assumed responsibility from the Virginia Company in 1624, making Virginia a royal province not until late in the century, when it was reorganized as a tobacco-exporting plantation economy relying on black slave labor, did Virginia become more than a miserable wilderness outpost. (Virginia's future was shadowed in its beginning, when colonist John Rolfe, who married Powhatan's daughter Pocahantas, introduced the planting of tobacco, a Caribbean crop -- and noted the arrival, in 1619, of a Dutch warship bearing twenty African slaves). Despite the glowing propaganda of colonization proponents, conditions were so miserable in the New World that ordinary Europeans preferred to stay at home. The Puritans of New England, who established the most successful colonies in the seventeenth century, succeeded in large part because they were motivated by religious fervor.
In the period between 1607 and 1689, when the major British colonies were established, different colonies tended to be peopled by refugees from this or that side in English struggles -- Puritan refugees fleeing from Tudor absolutism populated New England, and a little later royalist gentry escaping from Cromwell's Puritan dictatorship founded some of the great dynasties of the Chesapeake. The English Americans also came from different parts of the British Isles -- the Puritans tended to come from East Anglia, the Southern gentry from the southern counties of England, the Quakers of the Delaware Valley emigrated from the British midlands, and the Scotch-Irish who populated the Southern backcountry in the early eighteenth century originated in Ulster, Scotland, and North Britain. In the New World, these different immigrant groups tended to preserve the dialects, customs, and folkways of the parts of Britain from which they had come their subcultures formed the basis of American regional cultures that persist to this day and are shared by millions of Americans with no English ancestors.
The diverse mainland colonies of seventeenth-century English America began to be knit together into a greater unity only in the era that followed the Glorious Revolution. When William of Orange deposed James II in 1688-89, colonists in Boston, New York, and Maryland overthrew their proprietary governments as well. Under the new rule of William and Mary, all of the colonies became royal colonies with elected assemblies, except for Connecticut and Rhode Island (which retained their corporate constitutions) and Pennsylvania and Maryland (which remained proprietary).
This standardization of colonial government, combining royal control with a high degree of colonial self-rule, was part of a general reorganization of the British empire by the Whig oligarchy that had come to power in the Glorious Revolution. The Whigs created Great Britain by incorporating Scotland in the Act of Union of 1701 a few years later, Ireland lost its independence from the jurisdiction of the London Parliament. The attitude of London toward the colonies tended to be one of benign neglect, an attitude the colonists elevated into a principle.
Throughout the seventeenth century, it never occurred to the Anglo-American majority in the colonies that they were anything other than Britons in America. In the first half of the eighteenth century, too, the American colonists for the most part identified themselves proudly as British Americans. In 1760, when Britain won the Seven Years' War (French and Indian War) with France, Benjamin Franklin declared, "No one can more sincerely rejoice than I do, on the reduction of Canada and this is not merely as I am a colonist, but as I am a Briton." He favored the annexation of French America, so that "all the country from the St. Lawrence to the Mississippi will in another century be filled with British people." Colonial Americans like Franklin considered themselves part of the English nation, the freest people in the world, living under an enlightened Whig constitution characterized by the proper mixture of monarchy, aristocracy and democracy, antipapist Protestantism, and a kind of de facto imperial federalism. Political and religious evil was represented for them by the Catholic absolutism of France and Spain, in which they saw the pattern of the despotism that the Stuarts had tried to impose on the freedom-loving British.
The sharp regional differences between the Anglo-American colonies declined in the eighteenth century. The recurrent wars against the French and Spanish and the Indians, economic integration, migration between colonies, and the standardization of legal and governmental procedures tended to create a common Anglo-American identity, notwithstanding persistent localism. Zealous Puritans and fiery royalist cavaliers were succeeded by Northern and Southern elites whose members shared common economic interests and often a common education at colleges like Princeton.
By the mid-eighteenth century, Anglo-American leaders had come to share a common Whig ideology, absorbed from English Whig writers like John Locke, John Trenchard, and Thomas Gordon, authors of Cato's Letters, and Catherine Macaulay. Whig theory held that freedom and self-government originated in the tribal customs of ancient German tribes. The Angles, Saxons, and Jutes who migrated from Germany and present-day Denmark to England (formerly inhabited by licentious Celts and despotic Romans) brought free institutions with them. Under wise kings like Alfred the Great, the Anglo-Saxons perfected the institutions treasured by later Anglo-Americans: the representative assembly, the jury system, the militia. When William the Bastard conquered England in 1066, however, he imposed "the Norman yoke," consisting of the twin evils of continental feudalism and Roman Catholic Christianity. The promulgation of Magna Carta, the Protestant Reformation, and the overthrow of the Stuart monarchs brought about the restoration of Anglo-Saxon liberty in England. This view of the past was challenged from the right, as it were, by Thomas Hobbes and David Hume, who knew it was historical mythology, and from the relative left by radical Real Whigs or Commonwealthmen who argued that the Glorious Revolution had not gone far enough toward restoring the ancient Saxon constitution. (Mainstream Whigs and Real Whig dissidents agreed that the Dark Ages in England had been in fact a Golden Age.)
Since war tends to promote centralization, a collision between British imperial statecraft and extreme Whig ideology as a result of geopolitical struggles was perhaps inevitable. The English colonists in North America were swept up in the four great wars against French hegemony fought by Britain and its European allies -- the War of the League of Augsburg (known in America as King William's War), 1689-1697 the War of the Spanish Succession (Queen Anne's War), 1702-1713 the War of the Austrian Succession (King George's War), 1745-1748 and the Seven Years' War (the French and Indian War), 1756-1763. The latter was a major struggle. More Americans died in the Seven Years' War, as a proportion of the population, than in any struggle apart from the Civil War and the Revolutionary War the Seven Years' War saw the fourth-highest rate of mobilization, after World War II, the Civil War, and the Revolutionary War. In the 1763 Peace of Paris, Britain gained control over all of the continent east of the Mississippi except for New Orleans, which the French transferred temporarily to their ally, Spain, along with Louisiana (then the name for the territory west of the Mississippi).
"With the triumph of Wolfe on the Heights of Abraham began the history of the United States," wrote the nineteenth-century historian John Richard Green, noting that the American War of Independence grew indirectly out of the Seven Years' War. The French foreign minister Choiseul prophetically warned the British ambassador to France that the colonies "would not fail to shake off their dependence the moment Canada should be ceded. With the French military threat neutralized, the English colonists were bound to feel there was less need for imperial military protection and to resent the taxes that paid for it. When the British government, upset by the expenses of the war and colonial inefficiency, made the rational decision to create a more centralized, authoritarian empire in which the colonists would pay their fair share, the colonists grew alarmed. Soon the Anglo-Americans were seeing the signs of incipient absolutism like that of the Stuarts in every action of the imperial government, such as the series of taxes that occasioned crises in relations with the Crown. When Indians revolted against British rule in 1763-64, London decided to temporarily minimize its defense costs by forbidding its American subjects to settle beyond a line. The colonists saw the hand of royal tyranny in that decree, just as they sensed a papal conspiracy in the decision by London to allow the French Canadians to retain Roman Catholicism as the official religion of Quebec.
From an administrative, military, and financial point of view, the centralization of the British empire made a great deal of sense. It made no sense politically, however. The Anglo-American colonists had grown accustomed to a high degree of self-government during the first half of the eighteenth century. Different aspects of the strategy of centralizing authorities in London offended different groups in British America -- frontiersmen were incensed by royal limits on western settlement Protestant dissenters in New England were horrified by the prospect of the establishment of Anglicanism in their colonies talk of an American aristocracy disturbed Southern gentry, long the masters in their region, who feared that they might be reduced to being political subordinates and social inferiors of titled fops from Britain. If the proponents of parliamentary absolutism had their way, local elites would lose not only political power, but social standing, as prestige in each colony would, they feared, be based on personal relationships to this or that English-born aristocrat. London's centralizing reforms thus managed to unite many Americans who had nothing else in common with one another into opposition to the empire.
Even so, Anglo-American leaders did not immediately envision independence as the result of their resistance to imperial innovation. Well after hostilities had begun, many Americans hoped that opponents of the regime in Britain, such as the radical Whigs, would bring about another Glorious Revolution throughout the empire, restoring local privileges in Ireland as in Massachusetts, and ending monarchical "corruption" of the London parliament. A number of Americans, including Thomas Jefferson, tried to save the empire by proposing constitutional reforms creating a bipartite empire linked by the crown. (Similarly, in the crisis leading to the Civil War, many politicans tried to save the Union by a variety of constitutional amendments mollifying the South.) British authorities in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, having learned a lesson from the loss of their first empire, would experiment with such divisions of authority, especially with the "white dominions." In the 1770s, however, their inflexible commitment to the dogma of absolute parliamentary sovereignty gave them only two alternatives, to subordinate the colonies or lose them.
When an empire-wide revolution, replacing centralism with some form of federalism, failed to occur, the colonists opted for secession as a second-best measure. The formative era of Anglo-America can be dated from 1774, when the Articles of Association among the twelve (later thirteen) British colonies signaled a de facto state of rebellion against the British crown. The formative period ended in 1789, when the first government elected under the 1787 federal Constitution met. Between 1774 and 1789 the former British population of the Atlantic seaboard went from being a group of rebellious colonies that still might have been reconciled to imperial federalism to an independent, federal nation-state with a weak but genuine central government.
The Anglo-American Nation
It is often said that after independence the American people were unsure of their national identity. This is a misperception, based on a confusion between political allegiance and ethnocultural nationality. The political allegiances of many Americans, between the Revolution and the Civil War, were frequently divided, because of the strength of state loyalties. Weak and often conflicting political loyalties, however, coexisted with a strong sense of common ethnocultural identity among the majority of Americans, a category that consisted throughout the nineteenth century of whites of British descent. Federalists and Anti-Federalists, Unionists and Confederates disagreed about many matters most, however, shared an understanding of themselves as members of an Anglo-Saxon diaspora in North America.
What might be called the Anglo-American national formula had three elements, defining the national community as the Anglo-Saxon race, the common ethic as Protestant Christianity, and the political creed as federal republicanism. To be an American in Anglo-America, according to the informal but established conception, was to be an Anglo-Saxon (or Teuton) in race, a Protestant in religion, and a republican in political principles. Commitment to political principles was an important part of Anglo-American identity, but it was less important, in the minds of most white Americans, than membership in a particular race and a particular religion.
THE ANGLO-AMERICAN RACE. Almost without exception, when the framers of the federal Constitution and their successors in the first half of the nineteenth century spoke of the American people, they meant white Americans of English descent, or immigrants from the British Isles and the Germanic countries who had lost their cultures and assimilated to the Anglo-American norm. White Americans viewed themselves, in the phrase of one historian, "as modified Englishmen rather than as a product of a European amalgam." The American geographer Jedediah Morse used the term Anglo-American as early as 1789, writing that "the greater part...are descended from the English and, for the sake of distinction, are called Anglo-Americans." The term Anglo-American was also used by foreign observers, including Alexis de Tocqueville, who wrote, "I consider the people of the United States as that portion of the English people who are commissioned to explore the forests of the new world. The United States was considered to be the first (though not necessarily the only) independent republic of Anglo-Americans in the western hemisphere.
In the nineteenth century, the poet John Greenleaf Whittier summed up the prevalent view of American nationality in a poem "To Englishmen":
O Englishmen! -- in hope and creed,
In blood and tongue our brothers!
We too are heirs of Runnymede;
And Shakespeare's fame and Cromwell's deed
Are not alone our mother's.'Thicker than water,' in one rill
Through centuries of story
Our Saxon blood has flowed, and still
We share with you its good and ill,
The shadow and the glory.
This predominant understanding of national identity in the early United States was inherited from the colonial period, when almost all of the Anglo-American colonists thought of themselves simply as Englishmen living in the New World. In 1690, Richard Eburne in A Plain Pathway to Plantations wrote "it be the people that makes the land English, not the land the people." Indeed, one of the causes of the disputes that led to the American revolution, it should be recalled, was the insistence that the colonists had all the rights of Englishmen because they were Englishmen.
Like many of their British cousins, most Anglo-Americans did not doubt that they belonged to a race superior to all others, though they were not quite sure how to define it -- as Anglo-Saxon, as broadly Germanic, or as even more broadly European or white. Many of the American founders believed, with Montesquieu and the Whig historians, that English liberty originated in the forests of ancient Germany. This notion of a Germanic race whose characteristics explained social and political history received an additional boost from the publication by William Jones in 1788 of his theory that the Indo-European or Indo-Aryan language families had a common ancestor in prehistory. From the fact of a widespread Indo-European language, German scholars like the brothers Grimm and Max Muller, an expert on Sanskrit, inferred the existence of an Aryan race that had long ago conquered the dark Dravidian peoples of India (where its descendants formed the upper castes). These Aryans, furthermore, were thought to be identical with the populations of Germany, Scandinavia, England, and Anglo-America.
One of the founders of American anthropology, Lewis Henry Morgan, a relatively sympathetic student of the Iroquois Indians, concluded his magnum opus, Ancient Society (1877) with these words expressing the consensus view:
It must be regarded as a marvellous fact that a portion of mankind five thousand years ago, less or more, attained to civilization. In strictness but two families, the Semitic and the Aryan, accomplished the work through unassisted self-development. The Aryan family represents the central stream of human progress, because it produced the highest type of mankind, and because it has proved its intrinsic superiority by gradually assuming the control of the earth.
Even Ralph Waldo Emerson, who at times held a more inclusive notion of American nationality, wrote in English Traits that "the Teutonic tribes have a national singleness of heart, which contrasts with the Latin races." He also wrote: "That which lures a solitary American in the woods with the wish to see England, is the moral peculiarity of the Saxon race -- its commanding sense of right and wrong, -- the love and devotion to that, -- this is the imperial trait, which arms them with the sceptre of the globe." Like many American advocates of the Teutonic definition of Anglo-American nationality, Emerson had little use for the Celtic Irish, whose appearance -- "deteriorated in size and shape, the nose sunk, the gum exposed" -- was evidence of "diminished brain."
This was not the view in the Anglo-American republic. The idea that white Americans, by the nineteenth century, were becoming a distinct and finished race was commonplace in the pseudoscience and popular journalism of the day. Alexander Stephens, a Georgia politician who became the vice-president of the Confederacy, described the Anglo-American inhabitants of the Texas Republic thus: "They are of the Americo-Anglo-Saxon race." In 1851 The Republic asked, "Who ever saw an American, reared on his native soil and under his country's institutions, that could not be recognized at a glance, and distinguished, in nine cases out of ten, from the men of any other Caucasian nation on earth?" One phrenologist in 1843 wrote that "though the primitive stock is English, the American head differs materially from the English." Josiah Nott, a leading anthropologist, identified an "Anglo-American nation" as a distinct race belonging to the "Caucasian Group."
Anglo-American racial nationalism was reflected in a white-only immigration policy. Although the attempt of the British ministry to limit (white) emigration to the American colonies was cited as an example of royal "tyranny" in the Declaration of Independence, most of the Patriot elite were opposed to immigration of non-Anglo-Saxons to the United States those who did call for immigrants had in mind Europeans, not blacks, Latin American mestizos, or Asians. In 1790, Congress passed the first naturalization act, which permitted the naturalization of those who had resided in the United States for more than two years and swore allegiance to the Constitution. There was a third and crucial qualification -- only "free white persons" could become naturalized U.S. citizens. Alarmed by the French revolution, the Federalists who pushed the Alien and Sedition Acts through Congress got the residency period extended first to five and then to fourteen years. Under Jefferson, the five-year waiting period was restored a seven-year period is in force today. And the restriction of naturalized U.S. citizenship to Caucasian immigrants lasted until the mid-twentieth century, making the 1790 Act one of the cornerstones of white supremacy in America.
PROTESTANT CHRISTIANITY. In addition to sharing a racial self-definition as Anglo-Saxons in America, the Anglo-American majority had a distinct common ethic. The predominant ethic in Anglo-America was the evangelical Protestant ethic, which prevailed in competition with Enlightened deism and the small but growing Catholic immigrant subculture. Although religion was formally disestablished by the federal government and all of the states by the early nineteenth century, evangelical Protestantism succeeded in becoming the informally established religion of the United States. According to Cincinnati Presbyterian evangelist Charles Boynton, "Puritanism, Protestantism, and True Americanism are only different terms to designate the same set of principles."
Evangelical Protestants divided on the question of whether Christ's Second Coming would occur before or after the millennium -- the thousand years of peace and justice which, according to the book of Revelation, will precede the final battle between God and Satan. Postmillennialism holds that Christ will return after the millennium
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Library of Congress subject headings for this publication: United States Civilization, Nationalism United States History, Pluralism (Social sciences) United States, Multiculturalism United States