The History of White People

by Nell Irvin Painter

  De Staël also reiterates Villers’s definition of romanticism, but in better French; she preferred to speak of enthousiasme. Villers had so thoroughly Germanicized himself that he expresses his contempt for the French language by speaking of “la Romantique,” a suspiciously German turn of phrase. The French romantisme is a masculine noun; the German Romantik is feminine. De Staël Villers’s view that German romanticism has grown out of a native national literature based on medieval chivalry and Christianity—never mind the definition of Germans as people who had resisted the Romans and their Christian religion. This she contrasts with Greek and French classicism.19

  The theme of French/German opposition resonated throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, in belles lettres, anthropology, war, and peace. Until the turn of the nineteenth century, the genealogy of European genius and the source of its power had run directly back through the French Enlightenment and the Italian Renaissance to Greco-Roman antiquity. Villers, de Staël, and their followers took another path. In their view it was medieval northern European paganism that fueled the fire of nineteenth-century greatness.* Paradoxically, perhaps, enthusiasm for the Dark Ages and its pagan barbarians increased as northern Europe grew richer and more powerful.

  For the most part, Charles de Villers’s influence on On Germany remains in the background, much like his colleague Christoph Meiners’s near-invisibility in the anthropological work and Caucasian theories of Johann Friedrich Blumenbach. By contrast, another rising leader of German letters stands at the forefront of On Germany’s text.

  NORTHERN GERMAN genius needed an iconic figure to make the Meiners-Villers-de Staël race theory work, and it found one in the person of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. On Germany contains a chapter on Goethe’s intellect, additional chapters on his principal writings, and excerpts from his work. De Staël concludes, “Goethe alone can represent the whole of German literature,” for he “possesses all by himself the principal traits of German genius.”20 Goethe, as we have seen, was closely associated with the town of Weimar in eastern Germany, and the German cultural renaissance was centered in Saxony. For the purposes of the present book, we need to keep in mind the existence of three different Saxonys. One Saxony, important for Europeans, would remain anchored in this eastern German province bordering Poland, with Dresden and Leipzig prominent as central Europe’s richest cultural and mercantile cities. Another, western Lower Saxony produced the Hanoverian kings of England and the University at Göttingen. The third Saxony, the mythical homeland of the medieval Saxons of England, lay on the western side of the Germans lands, off between Denmark and the Netherlands on the North Sea. This third, obscure Saxony towered in importance only in the minds of British and American Anglo-Saxonists.

  De Staël had admired Goethe’s work since the publication of The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774), praising its “sublime combination of thoughts and feelings, enthusiasm and philosophy.” In return, Goethe had reviewed Delphine positively.21 Yet their personal relationship did not run smoothly when de Staël came to Weimar in 1807 to work on her German book. Goethe avoided her as long as possible. When she finally caught up with him, he found her hard to take, despite respecting her as a celebrated French intellectual at a time when the French led the world intellectually. She talked too much; she clung too fiercely to her own convictions (she let it be known that Goethe spoke most brilliantly only after finishing off a bottle of champagne); she did not, in short, defer to him sufficiently.22 In the end, however, On Germany pretty well satisfied Goethe as a means of increasing German national self-esteem after its Napoleonic manhandling in 1806–07 and perpetual intellectual subservience to the French—and, doubtless, as a very nice puff piece for himself.

  De Staël’s admiration of Goethe as the quintessence of German genius contained serious contradictions. On the one hand, she conveyed his Winckelmann-inspired fascination with ancient Greece into the nineteenth century. On the other, however, she accepted Villers’s depiction of romanticism as quintessentially German, stemming from medieval Christianity. On Germany promotes romanticism (briefly) and depicts classicism (at length) without ever solving the long-standing ancient-medieval contradiction.* Greeks and Germans frequently appear together in De l’Allemagne, as though modern Germans descended from ancient Greeks. They stayed together in the nineteenth century, as On Germany soared in influence.

  The cosmopolitan American abolitionist author Maria Child reckoned that de Staël did “more than any other mortal to give foreigners a respect for German literature, and German character.”23 And, indeed, de Staël did. London’s first edition of 1813 sold out in three days. French and German editions appeared in 1814. Positively and internationally reviewed in 1814, On Germany inspired at least five pamphlets within a year and remained the most traveled route into German thought—the bible of the romantics—well into the 1830s.24

  DE STAËL not only introduced German thinking to Westerners who did not read German; she clearly located German genius in northern, not southern, Germany. She found energy and imagination in the north, whereas Vienna, the cultural capital of Germany, seemed stuck in a monotonous, Frenchified past. In this way de Staël replaced Vienna with Saxon Weimar, Dresden, and other northern German intellectual centers where the identification between Germans and ancient Greeks flourished. She made German genius Saxon.

  It was by virtue of such influences that, by the nineteenth century, virtually all Western belletrists echoed de Staël’s and Villers’s location of worthiness in the north and frivolity in the south. German theory thus inspired writers in English, and English thinkers, in turn, passed along to Americans German theories of racial meaning. With German assumptions at its base, Anglo-American thought thoroughly incorporated notions of personal beauty as an index of inner worth and of ancient Greeks as perfect beauty’s singular representation.

  And that was important because, while lofty themes of ancient Greek beauty and German theories of race originated worlds away from the muddy facts of American life, by the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Western intellectuals were recognizing the United States as an important white outpost. Race theory there fell on fertile ground, for the emergence of class as a dimension of race thought was already underway across the Atlantic.

  8

  EARLY AMERICAN WHITE PEOPLE OBSERVED

  North America’s unique jumble of peoples appealed to Western intellectuals as a test case for humanity. Who are the Americans? What are they like? Might the United States, so far across the western sea, reveal mankind’s future? Or at least Europeans’ future? Some observers saw Americans as white and egalitarian; others perceived a multiracial assortment of oppressors and oppressed. Meanwhile, the government of this new republic went about its own mundane business, answering its own questions by counting its people according to its own devices.

  In article 1, sections 2 and 9, of the Constitution, the United States created a novel way of apportioning representation and direct taxation: a national census every ten years. The first U.S. census, taken in 1790, recognized six categories within the population: (1) the head of each household, (2) free white males over sixteen, (3) free white males under sixteen, (4) free white females, (5) all other free persons by sex and color, and (6) slaves.1 U.S. marshals conducted this first census, recording results on whatever scraps of paper lay at hand. The effort required eighteen months and counted 3.9 million people, incidentally a number George Washington called too low. The first undercount.

  Three terms parsed the only race mentioned—white—and two categories demarcated slave and free legal statuses. (See figure 8.1, U.S. census, 1790.) Unfree white persons, of whom there were many in the new union, seem to have fallen through the cracks in 1790, though the fourfold mention of the qualifier “free” by inference recognizes the nonfree white status of those in servitude. Had all whites been free and whiteness meant freedom, as is often assumed today, no need would have existed to add “free” to “white.” The 1800 census fixed this
problem through an enumeration of “all other persons, except Indians not taxed.”* For these early censuses, “free” formed a meaningful classification not identical with “white.”

  Fig. 8.1. “Schedule of the whole Number of Persons within the several Districts of the United States…” (1790).

  Census categories kept changing every ten years, as governmental needs changed and taxonomical categories shifted, including taxonomies of race. Throughout American census history, non-Europeans and part-Europeans have been counted as part of the American population, usually lumped as “nonwhite,” but occasionally disaggregated into black and mulatto, as in the censuses of 1850 and 1860.

  Counting free white males by age sprang from a need to identify men eligible for militia service, the only armed service of the time. To calculate each state’s congressional representation, Congress counted all the free persons (women, too, although they did not have the vote) and three-fifths of “others,” that is, indentured laborers and slaves. Later on, realities behind the census’s careful separation of bondage and race changed, calling for new categories. As politics freed all white people and ideology whitened the face of freedom, “free white males” seemed a useless redundancy.†

  DURING THE early nineteenth century, when “free white males” was losing its usefulness because fewer and fewer whites were not free, another phrase was coming into use, one with a much longer life: “universal suffrage.” The United States was the first nation to drastically lower economic barriers to voting. Between 1790 and the mid-1850s the ideology of democracy gained wide acceptance, so that active citizenship was opened to virtually all adult white men, including most immigrant settlers. Mere adult white maleness thus replaced eighteenth-century requirements of a stake in society (property ownership, tax paying) and political independence (one’s own steady income) before a man could vote. With the vote came inclusion in public life, so that the antebellum period associated with the rise of the Jacksonian common man witnessed the first major extension of the meaning of what it meant to be American.2

  All women, people ineligible to become citizens (Native American Indians and Asians), the enslaved, and free people of African descent outside New England continued to be excluded, as well as paupers, felons, and transients such as canal workers and sailors. (Even today, children, noncitizens, and most convicted felons cannot vote. People who cannot meet residency requirements and do not register prior to voting are also disenfranchised.) In this situation, “universal suffrage” meant adult white male suffrage, though from time to time the definition of “white” came into question. Were men with one black and one white parent or three white and one black grandparent “white”? Did “white” mean only Anglo-Saxons, or all men considered Caucasian, including those classed as Celts?*

  The abolition of economic barriers to voting by white men made the United States, in the then common parlance, “a white man’s country,” a polity defined by race and limited to white men. Once prerequisites for active citizenship came down to maleness and whiteness, poor men could be welcomed into the definition of American, as long as they could be defined as white—the first enlargement of American whiteness.

  WE CAN date the pairing of “American” with descendants of Europeans to the quickly translated, widely read, and endlessly quoted Letters from an American Farmer of 1782, by the French soldier-diplomat-author Michel-Guillaume-Jean de Crèvecoeur (1735–1813). Crèvecoeur inaugurated a hardy tradition, that of contrasting class-riven Europe, the land of opulent aristocrats and destitute peasants, with the egalitarian United States, home of mobility and democracy.

  Crèvecoeur’s road to fame meandered far and wide. After immigrating to Canada and fighting on the French side during the Seven Years’/French and Indian War of 1754–63, he moved to New York and changed his name to J. Hector St. John. The gratifying picture of Americans in Letters from an American Farmer and Crèvecoeur’s subsequent success as a French diplomat in the United States raised him high, earning election to the exclusive American Philosophical Society, plus many a local honor. The Vermont legislature so revered Crèvecoeur that it named a town St. Johnsbury after him; it became the largest city in Vermont’s impoverished and deeply conservative northeast region.

  Crèvecoeur’s letter 3 asks, “What then is the American, this new man?”—and answers,

  He is either an European or the descendant of an European, hence that strange mixture of blood, which you will find in no other country. I could point out to you a family whose grandfather was an Englishman, whose wife was Dutch, whose son married a French woman, and whose present four sons have now four wives of different nations. He is an American who, leaving behind him all his ancient prejudices and manners, receives new ones from the new mode of life he has embraced, the new government he obeys, and the new rank he holds…. Here individuals of all nations are melted into a new race whose labors and posterity will one day cause great changes in the world…. From involuntary idleness, service dependence, penury, and useless labor [in Europe], he has passed to toils of a very different nature, rewarded by ample subsistence.—This is an American.3

  In addition to a willingness to innovate and to think new thoughts, heterogeneous—but purely European—ancestry characterizes the American.

  This “new man” escapes old Europe’s oppression, embraces new opportunity, and glories in freedom of thought and economic mobility. Now a classic description of the American, Crèvecoeur’s paragraph constantly reappears as an objective eyewitness account of American identity. But letter 3 is only one part of the story. When other classes, races, sexes, and the South entered Crèvecoeur’s picture, all sorts of revisions became necessary. For instance, poor and untamed white people, particularly southerners, continued to occupy a separate category well below the American. While the American and the poor white might both be judged white according to American law, poor white poverty and apparent wildness kept him at a remove from the charmed circle. Such complexity ensured that the who question could not be answered clearly. But European and American observers never stopped pursuing it.

  Crèvecoeur conceded the existence of other Americans—other white Americans—who do “not afford a very pleasing spectacle.” He offers a hope that the march of American progress would soon displace or civilize these drunken idlers; meanwhile, white families living beyond the reach of law and order “exhibit the most hideous parts of our society.” Crèvecoeur cannot decide whether untamed frontier families represent a temporary stage or a degeneration beyond redemption: “once hunters, farewell to the plow.” Indians appear positively respectable beside mongrelized, half-savage, slothful, and drunken white hunting families.

  Concerning slavery, ugly scenes in Charleston, South Carolina, break Crèvecoeur’s heart, but his pessimism arises most from the shock of his hosts’ callousness. The rich slaveholders entertaining Crèvecoeur are the “gayest” people in America—but gay at the cost of their humanity: “They neither see, hear, nor feel the woes” of their slaves or the blood-curdling violence of their social arrangements. Crèvecoeur can only marvel at such insouciance. In their situation, he says,

  never could I rest in peace; my sleep would be perpetually disturbed by a retrospect of the frauds committed in Africa in order to entrap them, frauds surpassing in enormity everything which a common mind can possibly conceive…. Can it be possible that the force of custom should ever make me deaf to all these reflections, and as insensible to the injustice of that [slave] trade, and to [slaves’] miseries, as the rich inhabitants of this town seem to be?4

  Face-to-face with the realities of southern slavery, Crèvecoeur becomes the first to predict slave insurrection as an inevitable consequence of “inveterate resentment” and a “wish of perpetual revenge.” This is a European thinking in terms of rampant poverty and obscene wealth and seeing the enslaved as the poor, not simply as a race of people. Thus Crèvecoeur’s America is split as much by class as by race, a society in contrast with the sunny, democratic
image of his more popular pronouncement.

  WRITING A few years after Crèvecoeur, Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) missed the class dimension that so alarmed Crèvecoeur. Born and raised in Virginia, Jefferson never questioned that American society was structured according to race, not class; to him, the poor people who served, including most prominently his slaves, belonged to a naturally servile race. By taking note of black people, he did not concede them status as Americans, who are “our people.”

  Like many other intellectuals, Jefferson held that slavery harms whites more than blacks. “Query XVIII: Manners,” in Notes on the State of Virginia (1787), reflects upon the “unhappy” influence of slavery on the slave-owning class, scarcely mentioning the suffering of the enslaved. Rather it dwells on the price paid by the South’s white slave owners. Slave-owning children mimic their parents’ abuse of the people they own, coarsening their character and, thereby, their society. The white child, “thus nursed and educated, and daily exercised in tyranny,” Jefferson warns, “cannot but be stamped by it with odious peculiarities. The man must be a prodigy who can retain his manner and morals undepraved by such circumstances.”5

  In apportioning the injuries of slavery, Jefferson and Crèvecoeur mostly agreed. But their theories of American ancestry conflict, for the eloquent Jefferson rejected any idea of a mongrel American, even though he fathered seven of them with Sally Hemings, a woman he owned. He also rejected Crèvecoeur’s “Dutch” man—probably meaning a deutsch man, or German—as essential to the American family tree. Jefferson’s family tree was of sturdy oak, the Saxons of England.