The History of White People

by Nell Irvin Painter

  Throughout his life Thomas Jefferson believed in the Saxon myth, a story of American descent from Saxons by way of England. He had conceived a fascination with it as a student at William and Mary College in 1762 and never wavered in it. Over fifty years of book collecting—his personal library formed the basis of the Library of Congress—Jefferson came to own the country’s largest collection of Anglo-Saxon and Old English documents.6

  As a founding father, Jefferson theorized Americans’ right to independence on the basis of Saxon ancestry. Laying out that claim in July of 1774, he makes English people “our ancestors,” and the creators of the Magna Carta “our Saxon ancestors.” Though the Magna Carta dates from 1215 and the Norman conquest from 1066, Jefferson maintains that the system of rights of “our ancestors” was already in place when “Norman lawyers” connived to saddle the Saxons with unfair burdens.7 He continued to associate Saxons with the liberal Whigs and Normans with the conservative Tories, as though liberal and reactionary parties had existed from time immemorial, almost as a matter of blood.8 For Jefferson, English-style Saxon liberty was not a trait to be found in Germans.

  Jefferson’s Saxon genealogy ignored a number of inconvenient facts. The oppressive English king George III was actually a Saxon and also the duke of Brunswick-Lüneburg as well as elector of Hanover in Lower Saxony. Furthermore, George III’s father and grandfather, Hanoverian kings of England before him, had been born in Germany and spoke German as a first language. It hardly mattered. To Jefferson, whatever genius for liberty Dark Age Saxons had bequeathed the English somehow thrived on English soil but died in Germany.*

  In the Philadelphia Continental Congress of 1776, Jefferson went so far as to propose embedding his heroic Saxon ancestors in the great seal of the United States. Images of “Hengist and Horsa, the Saxon chiefs from whom we claim the honor of being descended,” would aptly commemorate the new nation’s political principles, government, and physical descent.9* This proposition did not win approval, but Jefferson soldiered on. In 1798 he wrote Essay on the Anglo-Saxon Language, which equates language with biological descent, a confusion then common among philologists. In this essay Jefferson runs together Old English and Middle English, creating a long era of Anglo-Saxon greatness stretching from the sixth century to the thirteenth.

  With its emphasis on blood purity, this smacks of race talk. Not only had Jefferson’s Saxons remained racially pure during the Roman occupation (there was “little familiar mixture with the native Britons”), but, amazingly, their language had stayed pristine two centuries after the Norman conquest: Anglo Saxon “was the language of all England, properly so called, from the Saxon possession of that country in the sixth century to the time of Henry III in the thirteenth, and was spoken pure and unmixed with any other.”10 Therefore Anglo-Saxon/Old English deserved study as the basis of American thought.

  One of Jefferson’s last great achievements, his founding of the University of Virginia in 1818, institutionalized his interest in Anglo-Saxon as the language of American culture, law, and politics. On opening in 1825, it was the only college in the United States to offer instruction in Anglo-Saxon, and Anglo-Saxon was the only course it offered on the English language. Beowulf, naturally, became a staple of instruction. Ironically, the teacher hailed from Leipzig, in eastern German Saxony. An intensely unpopular disciplinarian, Georg Blaettermann also taught French, German, Spanish, Italian, Danish, Swedish, Dutch, and Portuguese. After surviving years of student riots and protests, Blaettermann was fired in 1840 for horsewhipping his wife in public.11

  JEFFERSON’S ENTHUSIASM for teaching Anglo-Saxon stayed confined to southern colleges until the 1840s, and his Essay on the Anglo-Saxon Language, a rambling 5,400 words composed mostly in 1798, did not appear in print until 1851.* Clearly, slavery and the characteristics of black people were stirring more passion than any American claim to Anglo-Saxon ancestry. By contrast, Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia (1784) immediately enjoyed a wide and impassioned readership. This eloquent, though very self-centered, summary of American (not just Virginian) identity, impugns the physical appearance of African Americans and makes them out to be natural slaves. Not that this insult toward an oppressed people inspired only approval. One of a multitude of critics resided at the most Virginian of northern colleges: the College of New Jersey.

  HANDSOME, ELEGANT Samuel Stanhope Smith (1751–1819) became president of the College of New Jersey (later Princeton College) at forty-three, its first alumnus president. (See figure 8.2, Samuel Stanhope Smith.) Both of Smith’s parents had strong Princeton connections: his mother’s father had been a founding trustee, and Smith’s father, a Presbyterian minister and schoolmaster, also served as a trustee. Smith graduated from Princeton with honors in 1769. As a tutor and postgraduate student with John Witherspoon, an eminent scholar from Scotland, Smith imbibed the “Common Sense” ideals of Scottish realism.

  Following an established Princeton trajectory, Smith went south to Virginia as a missionary and became rector and then president of the academy in Prince Edward County that became Hampden-Sydney College. His future secure, he married John Witherspoon’s daughter and bought a plantation, evidently intending to remain among his appreciative Virginia hosts. However, a Princeton professorship in moral philosophy lured Smith back to New Jersey.

  Ensconced once again in Princeton, Smith collected the young nation’s honors: Yale made him doctor of divinity in 1783, and in 1785 the American Philosophical Society took him into its membership. After Thomas Jefferson proposed a measure advocating widespread primary education in Virginia in 1788, he and Smith exchanged letters in its support. The measure did not pass, and the politics of the two men subsequently diverged. By 1801 Smith had turned politically conservative enough to deplore Jefferson’s presidential candidacy as likely to cause “turbulance [sic] & anarchy.”12

  By then Smith had succeeded his mentor Witherspoon as president of Princeton, and had turned into an intellectual maverick, downgrading the college’s classics and Presbyterianism in favor of science, thereby antagonizing its trustees.13 As Smith grew older and Princeton students more rowdy, he expelled three-quarters of the student body for rioting in 1807. When the Presbyterian Church established a theological seminary right inside the college’s Nassau Hall, Smith grasped just where his lack of orthodoxy was leading. In 1812 he was forced to resign the presidency, and he died seven years later.14 All that lay ahead in 1787, when he addressed the American Philosophical Society on differences in skin color, and his star was still ascendant.

  SMITH’S ADDRESS looked back to the polygenetic essay of a Scottish philosopher named Henry Home, Lord Kames, entitled Discourse on the Original Diversity of Mankind (1776). One of Kames’s main points was a rejection of biblical doctrine that traces the unity of humanity through descent back to a single originating couple. Smith disagreed with Kames. Every people did belong to the same species, and differences sprang from circumstance: “I believe that the greater part of the varieties in the appearance of the human species,” Smith declares, “may justly be denominated habits of the body.” Where people live, not their ultimate ancestors, explains variations in human skin color: “In tracing the origin of the fair German, the dark coloured Frenchman, and the swarthy Spaniard, and Sicilian, it has been proved that they are all derived from the same primitive stock.”15 All mankind descended from Adam and Eve, subsequently diverging though adaptation.

  Fig. 8.2. Samuel Stanhope Smith as president of Princeton College.

  Smith’s defense of biblical truth met so warm a reception that the lecture appeared immediately in print. Mary Wollstonecraft, the feminist pioneer, favorably reviewed Smith’s Essay in the London Analytical Review, welcoming his insistence on the unity of mankind. Smith’s distinguished physician-historian brother-in-law, David Ramsay, a Pennsylvanian living in South Carolina, pitched in. Ramsay seconded Smith’s views on skin color, lauded his criticism of Thomas Jefferson’s antiblack slurs, and agreed with Smith about the domin
ance of climate in shaping human culture. Writing directly to Jefferson, Ramsay noted that “the state of society” also plays a crucial part. In complete agreement with Crèvecoeur and Smith, Ramsay added, “Our back country people are as much savage as the Cherokees.”16* Jefferson seems not to have replied to Ramsay. But encouraged by support, Smith continued tinkering with his Essay.

  One influence was Blumenbach’s 1795 edition of De generis humani varietate nativa, which Smith read in its original Latin and incorporated into an enlarged 1810 edition of his lecture, An Essay on the Causes of the Variety of Complexion and Figure in the Human Species.17 Here Smith assumes that civilization, not barbarism, was humanity’s original condition; uncivilized people would have regressed on account of their harsh living conditions. Different climates, for instance, create differences in human skin color—not a new explanation. Beauty is not all that important, in any case, Smith goes on to say, citing the physical attractiveness of even some black people: “In Princeton, and its vicinity I daily see persons of the African race whose limbs are as handsomely formed as those of the inferior and laboring classes, either of Europeans, or Anglo-Americans.”

  A bit—but only a bit—of a cultural relativist, Smith recognizes more emphatically than Blumenbach or Camper the cultural specificity of beauty ideals: “Each nation differs from others as much in its ideas of beauty as in personal appearance. A Laplander prefers the flat, round faces of his dark skinned country women to the fairest beauties of England.”18 Meanwhile, as we have seen, anthropologists of the time were debating whether Lapps in the north of Sweden and Finland might count as Europeans at all. Linnaeus, the great taxonomist, for instance, said no; Blumenbach, Germany’s leading racial classifier, wavering, said yes. Eventually the question faded into insignificance as anthropology’s terms of analysis moved away from questionable attempts to rank order of physical beauty.

  We should note that Smith was no multiculturalist. His Americans, like Crèvecoeur’s, descend only from Europeans. While acknowledging the presence of Native Americans and Africans on American soil and occasionally comparing the height of Osage Indians to that of the ancient Germans, Smith had no intention of widening the category of American.

  Thomas Jefferson and Samuel Stanhope Smith had both prospered in a Virginia of many mixed-race people, some right in Jefferson’s own family. We do not know the makeup of Smith’s household in Virginia, but we do know that the two men figured the notion of purity differently. Jefferson somehow kept the rainbow people of Monticello beyond the reach of his race theory, allowing him to conceive of a platonic “pure and unmixed” Saxon ideal. For Smith there could be no such European thing, “in consequence of the eternal migrations and conquests which have mingled and confounded its inhabitants with the natives of other regions” in a continuing process of perpetual change.19 Smith and Jefferson found words for purity and mixture in Europe, even among Europeans in the New World. But the African-Indian-European mixing occurring right under their noses in eighteenth-century Virginia overwhelmed their rhetorical abilities. The leaders of American society could not face that fact squarely. For them mixing produced a unique new man, this American, but mixing only among Europeans.

  So if climate is paramount, what of the American climate, with its extremes of heat and cold and its stagnant waters? Not much good comes of it, Smith feels, for it imparts to Americans “a certain paleness of countenance, and softness of feature…in general, the American complexion does not exhibit so clear a red and white as the British, or the German. And there is a tinge of sallowness [paleness, sickliness, yellowness] spread over it.” Elevation and proximity to the sea also affect skin color. Hence the white people of New Jersey have darker skins than white people in hilly Pennsylvania. White skin darkens farther south. White southerners, especially the poor, living in a hot climate and at lower elevations, are visibly darker than northerners. Americans living in different climates look different, but, all in all, Americans look pretty much the same.20

  To justify his tortured climatic theories, Smith has to practice a sort of wild conflation of climate to skin color to savagery. Even when all their ancestors were European, Smith finds that lower-class southerners look very much like Indians and live in a “state of absolute savagism.” This idea, that living among Indians made white Americans resemble them in skin color, enjoyed wide currency in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Crèvecoeur exclaimed that “thousands of Europeans are Indians,” and others in colonial America testified to the tendency in Europeans living with Indians to come to resemble them in color as well as in dress. Moreover, such a life rendered their bodies so “thin and meagre” that their bones showed through their skin. Had poor southerners been discovered in some distant land, Smith surmises, polygenesists would display them as proof of multiple human origins.21 Echoing Crèvecoeur, Smith calls uncivilized poor southerners—“without any mixture of Indian blood”—a potential drag on American society.

  So much for the bottom of the American barrel. But Smith also demeans elite southern whites like Thomas Jefferson and his self-satisfied, privileged class. In Notes on the State of Virginia Jefferson had scorned the poetry of the Boston slave Phillis Wheatley as proof that the Negro could never demonstrate genius. Smith’s retort vindicates black people and insults southern whites: Jefferson was just plain wrong to deride the abilities of a race living so wretchedly, first in Africa, then in American slavery. “Genius,” Smith says, “requires freedom” and the educational and psychological conditions permitting creative thought. Not stopping there, Smith goes after the intellectual abilities of Jefferson’s own class, asking, “Mr. Jefferson, or any other man who is acquainted with American planters, how many of those masters could have written poems equal to those of Phillis Whately [sic]?”22 In all of this we can see that for a hundred more years, identity of the American would contain a contradiction: Americans look and act pretty much the same, but southerners are different—and inferior.

  AS LONG as observers thought only of European peoples as Americans, the country’s rosy egalitarian image glowed nicely. Always present, however, though little known, was a counterargument that calculated Americanness by experience rather than skin color. Though black authors often generalized about the character of white people, most of their commentary came in the form of asides embedded in work focused on people of African descent. David Walker and Hosea Easton represented their views, addressing their fellow Americans as critics of white supremacy.23

  In 1829 David Walker (1785–1830), a thoughtful and politically engaged African American living in Boston, published an eighty-page tract with a jaw-breaking title: David Walker’s Appeal: in four articles, together with a preamble, to the coloured citizens of the world, but in particular, and very expressly, to those of the United States of America.* Born free in Wilmington, North Carolina, Walker had moved to Boston around 1825 and made his living as a dealer in used clothing. Among his many activities, he wrote for and distributed the nation’s first black newspaper, Freedom’s Journal, and frequently delivered public addresses at black Bostonians’ celebrations—of Haitian independence, for instance, or a visit to Boston by an African prince recently emancipated from southern slavery. A Mason and Methodist (but a critic of black religiosity), Walker was well known and well respected as an activist among Boston’s black people, who numbered about one thousand, and within the antislavery community that surrounded William Lloyd Garrison. Garrison reviewed Walker’s Appeal positively in an early number of the Liberator, soon to become the nation’s most influential abolitionist periodical.

  Walker’s Appeal spread a wide net, excoriating “whites” and, indeed, “Christian America” for its inhumanity and hypocrisy. Over the long sweep of immutable racial history, Walker traces two essences. On one side lies black history, beginning with ancient Egyptians (“Africans or coloured people, such as we are”) and encompassing “our brethren the Haytians.” On the other lie white people, cradled in bloody, deceitful ancient
Greece. Racial traits within these opposites never change:

  The whites have always been an unjust, jealous, unmerciful, avaricious and blood-thirsty set of beings, always seeking after power and authority.—We view them all over the confederacy of Greece, where they were first known to be anything, (in consequence of education) we see them there, cutting each other’s throats—trying to subject each other to wretchedness and misery—to effect which, they used all kinds of deceitful, unfair, and unmerciful means. We view them next in Rome, where the spirit of tyranny and deceit raged still higher. We view them in Gaul, Spain, and Britain.—In fine, we view them all over Europe, together with what were scattered about in Asia and Africa, as heathens, and we see them acting more like devils than accountable men.*

  Murder, Walker concludes, remains the central feature of whiteness, though a sliver of hope for their future might reside in the American heritage of freedom—he ends by quoting the Declaration of Independence, which he exempts from white Americans’ wickedness. The English, for instance, had surmounted their history, turned their backs on slaving, and offered black people the hand of friendship. Once the English stopped oppressing the Irish, Walker opines, their regeneration would be complete.24 At bottom, David Walker’s Appeal speaks to “white Christians,” blaming, ridiculing, and threatening them with destruction in retribution for their mistreatment of blacks. Given white people’s moral and behavioral weaknesses, he wonders, coyly, just which is the inferior race: “I, therefore, in the name and fear of the Lord and God of Heaven and of earth, divested of prejudice either on the side of my colour or that of the whites, advance my suspicion of them whether they are as good by nature as we are or not.”25 This is not to say that Walker was ready to boast about the slaves: as for black people, “we, (coloured people of these United States of America) are the most wretched, degraded and abject set of beings that ever lived since the world began.” He aimed pointed criticism at free northern blacks: “some of them can write a good hand, but who, notwithstanding their neat writing, may be almost as ignorant, in comparison, as a horse.” Walker discerns “a mean, servile spirit” among the people he calls “my colour.” Only when black people organize and throw off the oppressor’s yoke will they “arise from this death-like apathy” and “be men!”26