The History of White People

by Nell Irvin Painter

  BEAUTY AND strength, strength and beauty. Entwined they thread through English Traits. On succeeding pages Emerson praises “the fair Saxon man” as “handsome” (three times) and associates him with “beauty” (four times). On one page, English and Scandinavians appear as “a handsome race” who “please by beauty” and are “distinguished for beauty” as “handsome captives” in Rome. In support, Emerson notes frequent references to the “personal beauty of its heroes” in the Heimskringla.

  A century earlier, the Swiss physiognomist Lavater had maintained that outer beauty betokens inner qualities, and Emerson repeats this conviction in English Traits. The “English face,” he says, combines “decision and nerve” with “the fair complexion, blue eyes, and open and florid aspect. Hence the love of truth, hence the sensibility, the fine perception, and poetic construction. The fair Saxon man, with open front, and honest meaning…is not the wood out of which cannibal, or inquisitor, or assassin is made, but he is moulded for law, lawful trade, civility, marriage, the nurture of children, for colleges, churches, charities, and colonies.”14 He does not explain how Norse assassins turn into loving fathers without losing their racial character of manly brutishness.

  Such enthusiasm for physical attractiveness recalls Johann Friedrich Blumenbach’s hymns to his lovely Georgian skull, although in Blumenbach’s case, the skull was female. Such a progression came naturally to Emerson, educated at the hands of the Germanicists Mary Moody Emerson, George Ticknor, and Edward Everett and immersed in Goethe, all enamored of ancient Greeks as paragons of beauty.*

  Likewise, Horatio Greenough, a young American artist living in Rome. Emerson had met Greenough in Florence in 1833 and gone on in English Traits to gush about his “face…so handsome, and his person so well formed,” truly “a votary of the Greeks,” and a good mind to go with his good looks.15 Steeped in things Greek, Greenough had written his own Artist’s Creed, musings on beauty à la Winckelmann, and he tutored Emerson on the Parthenon marbles in London and much else regarding Greek beauty. The friendship lasted nearly twenty years. Emerson had Greenough over for dinner shortly before the younger man died of brain fever in late 1852, at the age of only forty-seven.16

  Emerson never fetishized Greeks the way Greenough and many another did, but comments scattered throughout his published and unpublished work reveal an acceptance of Winckelmann’s ideals. In September 1855, for instance, he dedicated a new cemetery in Concord by praising the Greeks, who “loved life and delighted in beauty.” Bodily aesthetics were also central to German education and therefore to Emerson, but therein lay a problem. Blumenbach had coined the race name “Caucasian” as a concept of female beauty, full of feminine connotations of captive powerlessness.17

  Many earlier intellectuals, certainly Immanuel Kant, Edmund Burke, and the eighteenth-century Edinburgh philosophers, had associated beauty with smallness, weakness, and women. For Emerson this would not do. He set out to wrench Saxon beauty away from female captives, away from the odalisques of the white slave trade, and away from French academic painting. He wanted the concept of beauty for his bloodthirsty, virile Norsemen. This task he took up in English Traits, and it led him to practically homoerotic heights.

  Pondering, “Why England is England? What are the elements of that power which the English hold over other nations?” Emerson settles on race, history, and bodily might.18 Englishmen, he asserts, show “great vigor of body and endurance. Other countrymen look slight and undersized beside them, and invalids. They are bigger men than the Americans…. They are round, ruddy, and handsome; at least, the whole bust is well formed; and there is a tendency to stout and powerful frames…. [I]n all ages, they are a handsome race.”19 Such vigor leads naturally to a fine militarism echoing Thomas Carlyle’s image of the English “broad-fronted broad-bottomed Teutons…in solid phalanx foursquare to the points of the compass. They constitute the modern world….”20

  Such bluster may strike the reader as odd; certainly it is narrow, for no other race or nation makes much of an appearance in this book. Celts and the French emerge briefly as negative referents; American Indians make a fleeting appearance—as fast runners—in a dependent clause in chapter 2; Jews and Negroes peek through only once, as peoples defined by the concept of race. Alongside the Saxons, all others are lesser, gendered, and, by default, female.

  Behind these judgments lay a fear that Americans had already fallen away from their mother country’s—no, their fatherland’s—standard of greatness. Emerson did not originate this thought. George-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, led a school of European naturalists who contended that animals degenerated in the Americas. In volume 5 of his thirty-six-volume Histoire naturelle (1749–88) Buffon presents a theory of American degeneracy, asserting that nature in America is “weaker, less active, and more circumscribed in the variety of her productions.” This kind of slur cut deeply and cried out for refutation. Thomas Jefferson undertook the writing of Notes on the State of Virginia in the 1780s to disprove Buffon’s contention that American horses—and, by implication, American men—lacked the virility of their Old World counterparts. Jefferson even shipped the remains of an American moose to Paris as proof that American animals grew to heroic dimensions.

  As Emerson was composing English Traits, the Scots anatomist Robert Knox was disparaging stringy Americans: “Already the United States man differs in appearance from the European: the ladies early lose their teeth; in both sexes the adipose cellular cushion interposed between the skin and the aponeuroses [fibrous connecting tissue binding muscle to bone] and muscles disappears, or, at least, loses its adipose portion; the muscles become stringy, and show themselves; the tendons appear on the surface; symptoms of premature decay manifest themselves.”21

  Emerson shared the commonplace fear that civilization kills manhood, but Americans seemed particularly afflicted. Take his comparison of educated Englishmen and educated Americans. Weird though it seems, Emerson could see the English as more civilized and better educated than Americans, but simultaneously bigger, stronger, and tougher. In his chapter on universities, Emerson reports that at Oxford “diet and rough exercise secure a certain amount of old Norse power,” while “they read better than we, and write better.”22 Emerson returns to this anxiety several times over the years in his journals:

  1852: Englandishmen are pastureoaks; ours are pine saplings; large men here do not look architectural…but slight, ill-woven…23

  1853: I felt the extreme poverty of American culture beside English. A mere bag of bones, was the one, sticking out in forlorn angularity; the other was fat & unctuous, shining & cheerful.24

  1855: Tis clear that the European is a better animal than the American. Here you can only have Webster, or Parsons, or Washington, at the first descent from a farmer or people’s man. Their sons will be mediocrities but in England, you in Europe, the privileged classes shall continue to furnish the best Specimens. The Czars of Russia shall continue to be good stock.25

  Unwittingly, perhaps, Emerson connects the state of American masculinity to class. In “Self-Reliance,” his most often quoted essay, he steps out of his own Concord-and Boston-based, Harvard-educated history to identify with those less educated and to contrast the brute rage of the multitude of common people with the “decorous and prudent” anger of the timid, feminine, college-educated and “cultivated classes.” One rough, “sturdy lad from New Hampshire or Vermont” who tries everything and has no fear of failure is “worth a hundred of these city dolls,” and the brutes “at the bottom of society” easily overwhelm the “feminine rage” of their betters.26 Such philosophical noodling required a good deal of tortured analysis, even self-hatred. His definition of education, for instance, contains a regional dimension.

  Emerson began teasing out the characteristics of southerners in the 1840s, when southern belligerence over slavery began to roil the nation’s politics and those of his state of Massachusetts, divided as it was between upholders and opponents of slavery. Rising sectional te
nsions in the wake of the annexation of Texas as a slave state in 1845 and the immense territory acquired after the defeat of Mexico in 1848 pushed along Emerson’s perception of innate differences between northerners and southerners. Boston, indeed all of New England, serve as synecdoche for the North, in Emerson’s concept a smarter but weaker “race” than southerners. Southerners—meaning white male slaveholders—appear stronger and more brutal, but plainly lacking in intelligence.

  In terms of manhood, the balance between smart and strong tips against northern opponents of slavery. In 1852, even as Emerson deplores the success of proslavery forces, he surmises that “Democrats carry the country, because they have more virility: just as certain of my neighbors rule our little town, quite hon legitimately, by having more courage & animal force than those whom they overbear.”27 Once again, Emerson was undermining his own claim to manliness in the construction of this nutty but commonplace notion.

  Emerson may not have invented such stereotypes, but certainly his intellectual prestige lent them weight and longevity. That New Englanders were smarter and better educated than southerners appeared a reassuring fact in light of the looming conflict. But for Emerson southerners’ brute strength embodied a kind of savage masculinity.

  Westerners, those living beyond the Appalachian Mountains, did not figure in Emerson’s philosophy until his first western tour, in 1850. His eight lectures earned him $500 each, money that drew him west several times more and engraved western men in his consciousness as a special type of Saxon. In a way Emerson saw white western American men as a sort of southern American tribe writ large, one possessed of more vitality than the eastern tribe by dint of its closeness to the land.

  THE NOTION that Saxons were always free, like so many of Emerson’s ideas about England, is not true. When Emerson describes liberty and freedom as English or Saxon racial characteristics, he overlooks not only the slavery issue then roiling American politics but also recent history on both sides of the Atlantic. After all, American indentured servitude, one form of bondage, reached into his own lifetime, and English convicts were still being forced into exile overseas while Emerson studied at Harvard in the 1820s. Moreover, slavery remained the rule rather than the exception in British colonies when he began his ministry at Boston’s Second Church.

  Nonetheless, Emerson, like Jefferson, claims in English Traits that the “Saxon seed” carries an “instinct for liberty,” and he envisions freedom and liberty as crucial—and permanent—Saxon racial characteristics.28 In a turn that would become commonplace, Emerson turns political practices into racial traits: racial genius (not historic or economic developments) made Anglo-Saxons both respecters of freedom within their brotherhood and natural rulers of other races. Thus political power was assumed to be a trait of the English race, emblemized in the Magna Carta of 1215, the cornerstone of English common law, and the Somerset decision of 1772, outlawing slavery within England.

  The Magna Carta actually grew out of a struggle between church and state. England’s King John, an avid international adventurer, had imposed heavy taxes on his subjects to fund the Third Crusade and pay a ransom demanded by the Holy Roman emperor for release of John’s predecessor, Richard I, the Lionheart, taken prisoner near Vienna in 1192 as he wended his long way home from the Third Crusade. To gain Richard’s release, John imposed especially heavy burdens on the churches. Those levies provoked the archbishop of Canterbury to channel unrest among the aristocracy into a demand for a formal statement of liberties—liberties of the church and liberties of the barons, who between them controlled virtually all of Britain’s wealth.29 After revisions to a first draft in June 1215, the king and the barons signed the Magna Carta at Runnymede, on the Thames River near Egham, in present-day Surrey County. In translation from the Latin, the Magna Carta begins with a clause guaranteeing the freedom of the English church: “FIRST, THAT WE HAVE GRANTED TO GOD, and by this present charter have confirmed for us and our heirs in perpetuity, that the English Church shall be free, and shall have its rights undiminished, and its liberties unimpaired.” N.B.: It is a particular institution, “the English Church,” that is to be free.

  Use of the Magna Carta as proof of England’s Saxon heritage dates back to the early seventeenth century, when Sir Edward Coke in 1610 first linked notions of a Saxon past to the Magna Carta and to English freedom, and in 1640, when John Hare added the German twist: “There is no man understands rightly what an English man is, but knows withal that we are a member of the Teutonick Nation, and descended out of Germany….” David Hume and Edmund Burke lent their luster to the mix in the eighteenth century. Emerson’s own authority in English history, Sharon Turner, made his contemporary Englishmen the very same people as ancient Saxons. By Emerson’s time, the 1689 Bill of Rights following the Glorious Revolution of 1688–89 and the evolving English constitution (common law) had turned into talismans of English racial genius.

  Emerson took for granted a religious identity of the English or Saxon race, Protestantism, of course, in sharp contradistinction to Catholicism. The notion of a historic, Protestant English church separate from the Catholic Church began with a sixteenth-century personal struggle between Henry VIII and Pope Clement VII. Henry intended to annul his marriage to Catherine of Aragon and marry Anne Boleyn, who sympathized with the Protestant Reformation under way on the European continent. When the pope would not agree to an annulment, Henry married Boleyn anyway; the pope excommunicated him; Parliament validated the new marriage; and the conflict escalated.

  In addition to a power struggle over the royal marriage bed, the Catholic Church’s wealth made it a tempting target. Once Parliament declared Henry head of the church in England, possessions that had been Catholic became English. As English nationalism increased, Henry’s disagreement with the Catholic Church blossomed into a symbolic struggle between supposed descendants of French Catholic Normans and supposed descendants of Anglo-Saxon Protestants. Emerson picked up and amplified a chain of association linking Saxons and Protestants, Protestantism to the English church, the English church to the Magna Carta, and the Magna Carta to “liberty.”30

  The 1772 Somerset decision over slavery was also key. The case involved James Somerset, an African enslaved in the Reverend William Emerson’s Boston before the American Revolution. Somerset’s owner had taken him to Britain, then prepared to send him to the West Indies for resale. Here was an issue that attracted the British antislavery movement. Granville Sharp, a reformist leader, championed Somerset in the King’s Bench (the English functional equivalent of today’s U.S. Supreme Court), arguing before Lord Mansfield, the presiding judge, who ruled that Somerset could not be forcibly removed from Britain. Mansfield’s decision quickly acquired much broader meaning, for he supposedly added that “as soon as any slave sets foot upon English territory, he becomes free” or “the air of England is too pure to be breathed by a slave.”* Here was a notion pleasing to Emerson, that the air of England conferred freedom. It followed that American air would confer freedom as well—never mind the problem of existing slavery and American agitation against it. Emerson let English experts explain their history. For anthropology he also turned to Britain and Germany.

  BEFORE WRITING English Traits, Emerson read voraciously in the anthropology of his day. Although familiar enough with the work of Johann Friedrich Blumenbach to include the word “Caucasian” once in English Traits, Emerson did not find Blumenbach’s concept useful. Blumenbach’s broad term “Caucasian” lumped together Celts and Saxons, while Emerson preferred a finer means of distinction.

  In the 1850s, American race theory, never straightforward, was still chaotic. The well-regarded monogenesis of the English physician James Cowles Prichard, for instance, contradicted the hard-line racism and craniometric polygenesis of the American ethnologists Josiah Nott and George Gliddon. Nott and Gliddon published a very loose translation from the French of the splenetic Arthur de Gobineau’s then obscure Essay on the Inequality of Races. None of these reigning ex
perts pleased Emerson, especially not the mean-spirited, proslavery thought of Nott and Gliddon or that of their highly respected mentor, Samuel George Morton of Philadelphia. Instead, Emerson turned to Scottish scientists in vogue at the time.

  DURING THE early nineteenth century, the brothers William and Robert Chambers published Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal, a popular weekly magazine aimed at serious young men seeking to improve themselves through self-education. The Chambers boys had themselves risen the hard way after the failure of their father’s cotton factory, and they only slowly began to thrive in the publishing business. As Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal flourished in the 1850s, William Chambers stayed with the magazine, but Robert Chambers (1802–72) wrote a series of “courses” on various popular topics, such as Scottish biography, marine biology, and literature. By 1844 he was a fellow of London’s Geological Society, carrying on a scholarly correspondence of international reach.

  Robert Chambers realized early on that the geological record revealed an earth much older than the Bible posited, and also that living species had changed with the passage of time. “Evolution” as a term did not yet exist; rather, the theory was called “transmutation” and was associated with socialists, radicals, and Frenchmen.31 In 1844 Chambers published Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation anonymously, correctly fearing reaction against his radical explanation of transmutation in place of divine creation. His theory that forms of life evolve was fundamentally sound, but the text was uneven, combining solid science, hearsay, and long-disproved theories. Emerson noted in his journal in 1845, “Vestiges of Creation…Everything in this Vestiges of Creation is good except the theology, which is civil, timid, & dull.”32 Emerson the transcendentalist did not mind that Chambers contradicted Genesis; the problem with the text lay in its lack of conviction. Chambers did, in fact, state his assertions provisionally.