David Urbano

History 6393

3 February, 2000

Reginald Horsman. Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxons. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981. 367 pp. Notes index.

In the early 1840s John L. O’Sullivan, editor of the Democratic Review, christened the "infamous" or "famous" term Manifest Destiny to describe American expansion. O’Sullivan described the nation’s expansion as inevitable and criticized those that impeded that process "for the avowed object of thwarting our policy, limiting our greatness and checking the fulfillment of our manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions."(219) Horsman writes that even though O’Sullivan coined the term manifest destiny, the concept was rooted in Anglo-Saxon heritage.

The concept of a chosen people on a westward mission originated when the English traced their roots to an Anglo-Saxon people who in the fifth century, along with other Germanic tribes, invaded England. English scholars proudly wrote how these Germanic people introduced the concepts of freedom, natural law, and popular sovereignty to England. Later, scholars classified these Anglo-Saxons as part of the Caucasian race and linguistically linked them to the family of Indo-European languages. To solidly their myth of greatness, Anglo-Saxons conjured another myth that claimed they were descendants of a great Aryan nation who fled across the mountains of Asia and settled in northern Europe. Just as their descendants centuries later, the Aryan nation, in its westward trek, also spread its civilization across Europe, and by the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the English laid claim to a superb racial heritage. British colonists in American also succumbed to the great myths. Scientists, scholars, historians, philosophers, poets, and writers on both sides of the Atlantic exacerbated these myths of racial greatness. The English proponents of a chosen race revered their institutions as proof of a nation’s greatness and showed how transmitted concepts of liberty, natural rights and popular sovereignty from the woods of Germany served to perpetuate those bastions of liberty. In the process, in both in Britain and America, a transformation occurred whereby the English shifted praise from their political institutions as Anglo-Saxonism became racialized which ultimately led to the subordination and oppression of "inferior people."

Horsman argues that in the United States by the mid-eighteen century, the concept of a chosen people underwent a radical transformation. Whereas Americans in the seventeenth century saw themselves as chosen people imbued with a spirit of egalitarianism, by mid-eighteenth century Americans justified Negro slavery, the extermination of indigenous people, and the despoliation of Mexican-origins people from their lands. Horsman explains that " by 1850 the emphasis was on American Anglo–Saxons as a separate superior people who were destined to bring good government, commercial prosperity, and Christianity to American continents of the world."(2) This racial group was the supreme and "inferior races" were in peril as America casts its foreign and domestic polices within the parameters of race.

After Horsman elaborates the manner in which Anglo-Saxon and the Aryan nation myths influenced racial thinkng in England, he examines the peculiarities of American life that gave ample proof to the chosen people concept. The success of the American Revolution amplified the American’s colonist’s devotion to freedom and just government. A sense of deep purpose and destiny permeated the Revolutionary generation, as they believed Providence destined them for great things. During this period Americans believed in the Enlightenment ideas of egalitarians but contacts with black slavery and Native Americans offered challenges to that view. In the late eighteenth century and the first part of the nineteenth century new ideas on racial thinking as well as close proximity to Indians and Blacks impacted American thinking on race. The confines of the new racial thinking justified exploitation and subordination of certain groups and ultimately dispossessed some from their land, while others suffered extinction. As Americans thought in terms of empire, their thinking on the Native Americans and Africans changed and after 1815 a new racial theory evolved from egalitarianism to scientific theories of inferiority. Between 1815 and 1850 there occurred a transformation in scientific racial thinking. By 1850 these theories provided a justification for subordination and annihilation of inferior people. Science bolstered American facts that differences between races were based on physical and mental factors. Furthermore, American literary writers and historians also influenced racial thinking with works, which espoused a romantic racial nationalism that justified the oppression and subjugation of inferior people. Whereas, scientific writing concentrated on the physical differences among the races, American Romanticism concentrated on the special achievements of nations, people, and languages and exalted the Anglo-Saxon over other members.

Between 1815 and 1850 American Anglo Saxon ideology protected the nation’s status quo and justified its economic and territorial expansion. Consequently, by the mid-1850s expansionist thinking solidified in this country. The U.S. became an Anglo-Saxon republic that excluded nonwhites and used that argument to justify the annexation of sparsely ethnic enclaves -but not large diverse populations- and to penetrate economically those areas inhabited with inferior peoples who were incapable of democratic and prosperous governments.

The confrontation between Mexicans and Anglos in the Texas Revolution, the Mexican War, and the Southwest resulted in Americans clearly designating themselves as an Anglo-Saxon Race. Anglos clearly categorized Mexicans not only as an inferior people unable to make use of the land but also as an obstruction to their westward march.

After the Mexican War Americans interpreted expansion in terms of economic penetration of world markets as opposed to colonialism. The new American Anglo Saxon ideology impacted American expansion. Racial doctrine sparked an expansion fervor to capture the American Southwest, Cuba, Mexico, and Central America. Merchants and farmers led the crusade for expansion, as some believed that people of the world were unfit for democratic and prosperous governments. While the nation’s foreign policy demanded economic penetration of foreign markets, racism forbade colonialism as it posed a threat to a homogenous people.

Horsman monograph is a provocative work written two decades ago but still provides a powerful argument on the role of race and manifest destiny. Even though Horsman makes a respectful attempt to divorce economic materialism from his argument it still creeps in at times, even though he implicitly tries to downplay it.

Unlike Horsman, Thomas R. Hietala monograph, Manifest Design: Anxious Aggrandizement in Late Jacksonian America, offers a completely different interpretation of American expansion. Hietala interprets American expansion in economic terms as a part of American foreign and domestic policy to protect and keep America’s institutions viable by having outlets for farm and business surpluses. It was expansion by design in an effort to protect American institutions from the economic, social, and political perils that afflicted the nascent republic. But as Hietala discerns, ironically expansion created some of the problems the leaders were trying to avoid. While some historians interpret the eve of the nineteenth century as the time America searched for markets abroad in its quest for oversees empire, Hietala provides a plausible argument for oversees expansion in the late Jacksonian period.