American exceptionalism reconsidered: Anglo-saxon ethnogenesis in the "universal" nation, 1776-1850

Journal of American Studies

Volumn 33, Issue 3, 1999, Pages 437-457

  Kaufmann, Eric ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHAMPTON   (United Kingdom)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 7444265892     PISSN: 00218758     EISSN: 14695154     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0021875899006180     Document Type: Article

References (103)

1. This article is based upon a paper delivered at the British Association of American Studies Annual Conference held at the University of Birmingham, 4-7 April 1997.
2. See, for example, George E. Pozzetta, Nativism, Discrimination and Images of Immigrants (New York, 1991);
3. Thomas J. Curran, Xenophobia and Immigration 1820 - 1930 (Boston: Twayne, 1975);
4. Barbara M. Solomon, Ancestors and Immigrants: A Changing Nw England Tradition (Cambridge, Mass, 1956: John Wiley & Sons)
5. or John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860-1925 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1955).
6. Baker, Newton Diehl, Carlton J. H. Hayes, and Roger Williams Straus, eds. The American Way: A Study of Human Relations Among Protestants, Catholics and Jews (Chicago & New York: Willett, Clark & Company, 1936), 94, emphasis added.
7. This opinion has been expressed by Linda Bosniak in her essay, "'Nativism' the Concept: Some Reflections," in Juan F. Perea, ed., Immigrants Out!: The New Nativism and the Anti-Immigrant Impulse in the United States (New York, N.Y. & London: New York University Press, 1997), 279-299
8. Dale T. Knobel, "America for Americans": The Nativist Movement in the United States (New York: Twayne, 1996), xiii.
9. E. K. Francis, Interethnic Relations (New York: Elsevier, 1976), 6.
10. A. D. Smith, National Identity (London: Penguin, 1991), 69.
11. National Identity, Ibid., 39.
12. The sense of national territory embraced by the Anglo-Americans was, in the first instance, regional, and was also elastic - tending to advance with the frontier. Even so, there was a generalized appreciation of the grandeur and fertility of the American landscape, which, during the nineteenth century, was believed to be a source of national invigoration and a hedge against European decadence. See Merle Eugene Curti, The Roots of American Loyalty (New York: Columbia University Press, 1946), 37-38.
13. The Daniel Boone/Pathfinder myth, which dated from the 1820s, though largely narrated by New England writers, concerned the frontier from Tennessee to Pennsylvania, and can arguably be treated as a national image, "the embodiment of an America as rooted as the soil, as primordial as the Germany that gave birth to Siegfried." See Miller, Perry, Nature's Nation (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967), 10.
14. David Hackett Fischer, Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America (New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 787.
15. This is, of course, a contentious thesis. Fischer's critics tend to accuse him of overgeneralization: they grant that he has identified important cultural forces, but insist that the cultural regions (both British and American) which he denotes are more complex than he imagines. Local variation within cultural regions, and non-core ethnic/regional fragments are fingered as dimensions of this complexity. Critics also claim that several groups other than the English (notably the Fenno-Scandinavians and native Indians in the backcountry and the blacks in the lowland south) have had a major impact on American folkways. See reviews by Wilbur Zelinsky, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 81: 3 (September 1991), 526-31;
16. Kenneth Morgan, Social History, 16: 3 (October 1991), 373-75;
17. Jack Greene, Journal of Social History, 24: 4 (Summer 1991), 909-11;
18. Colin Brooks, Journal of American Studies, 25: 2 (August 1991), 275-278
19. Richard A. Easterlin, "Economic and Social Characteristics of the Immigrants" in Richard A. Easterlin (et al.), Immigration (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1982), 56.
20. Wilbur Zelinsky, The Cultural Geography of the United States (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall Inc., 1973), 13.
21. Richard Brookhiser, The Way of the WASP (New York: Free Press 1991), 26;
22. Wade Clark Roof and William McKinney, American Mainline Religion: Its Changing Shape and Future (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1987), 31.
23. For example, the Congregational Church was disestablished in Connecticut in 1708 as a result of the colony's toleration acts. This did not occur in Massachusetts until 1733. See Terry Alan Baney, Yankees and the City: Struggling over Urban Representation in Connecticut, 1880 to World War I (Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, the University of Connecticut, 1989), 5.
24. Linda Colley, Britons. Forging the Nation 17107-1837 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1992), 40-42.
25. Ray Allen Billington, The Protestant Crusade, 1800-1860: A Study of the Origins of American Nativism (New York, N.Y.: Macmillan, 1938), 9, 21.
26. James H. Dormon, The People Called Cajuns: An Introduction to an Ethnohistory (Lafayette, La.: Center for Louisiana Studies, 1983), 16-17.
27. Ernest Lee Tuveson, Redeemer Nation: Tie Idea of America's Millenial Role (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), 103-6, 110-111
28. John Armstrong, Nations Before Nationalism, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982), 201-203
29. Wilbur Zelinsky, Nation Into State: Tie Shifting Symbolic Foundations of American Nationalism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1988), 226.
30. Solomon, 2.
31. Richard Merritt has documented this trend with a content analysis of major journals in both the North and the South from 1735. See Richard L. Merritt, Symbols of American Community, 1735-1775 (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1966), 66-74.
32. Early nineteenth-century men of letters like William Cullen Bryant, James Fenimore Cooper, Washington Irving, and Edgar Allan Poe resided in New York, and exchanged ideas via literary journals like Knickerbocker Magazine and the Democratic Review in the 1820s and 1830s. See Thomas Bender, New York Intellect: A History of Intellectual Life in New York City, from 1750 to the Beginnings of Our Own Time (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987), 141.
33. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Introduction by Alan Ryan (London: David Campbell Publishers, 1994. First published 1835), 33.
34. Notwithstanding Tocqueville's monocausal explanation, New England's influence was mediated by that of other regions. The South, especially the lowland South, was a particularly important source of divergence, with its relatively hierarchical division of white labour, its dearth of large urban areas, and its plantation slavery system. Differences between North and South must be placed in context, however - the South participated in many of the social changes that gripped the north between 1800 and 1850. Indeed, the narration of southern distinctiveness, to say nothing of nationalism, was a feature of the late antebellum period. Common adherence to the Yeoman ideal and western expansion (Jefferson and Jackson were exemplars) and a keen interest in the nature of American national identity were part of the shared cultural orientation of both North and South, though tension between the Yeoman and Cavalier motifs emerged in Southern discourse by the 1830s. See William R. Taylor, Cavalier and Yankee: The Old South and American National Character (New York: George Braziller, 1961), 16, 316-317
35. Robert Burchell discusses the connections between post-Revolutionary English and American upper-class culture in "The Role of the Upper Class in the Formation of American Culture, 1780-1840," in R. A. Burchell, ed., The End of Anglo-America: Historical Essays in the Study of Cultural Divergence (Manchester & New York: Manchester University Press, 1991), 184-212.
36. For more on the same theme, see Brooks, review in Journal of American Studies, 278.
37. For more on Canada's American Tory legacy, see Kaufmann, Eric, "Condemned to Rootlessness: The Loyalist Origins of Canada's Identity Crisis," Nationalism and Ethnic Politics, 3: 1 (1997).
38. Richard M. Burkey, Ethnic and Racial Groups: The Dynamics of Dominance (Menlo Park: Cummings, 1978), 158
39. and W. Stewart Wallace, United Empire Loyalists: the Beginnings of British Canada (Toronto: Glasgow, Brook and Co., 1921), 13.
40. Oscar Handlin, Race and nationality in American Life (Boston: Little, Brown, 1957), 130.
41. Rogers Smith, "American Conceptions of Citizenship and National Service", in Amitai Etzioni, ed., New Communitarian Thinking (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1995), 237-239
42. Hamilton, Alexander, The Papers of Alexander Hamilton, Vol.I, ed. Harold C. Syrett (New York & London: Columbia University Press, [1775] 1961), 170, 175.
43. See Armstrong, Nations, 81-90 for discussion of the antemurale/ghazi concept. Armstrong's analysis of the crusade - jihad spiral of holy war on pages 59-61 is also instructive as is Conor Cruise O'Brien's, in God: Land: Reflections on Religion and Nationalism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988), 23-42.
44. Anthony D. Smith, The Ethnic Origins of Nations (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), 175.
45. Not all American Protestants were British, of course. The Protestant unity to which I refer was most explicit among the mainline British denominations, but can be seen to encompass larger numbers through both the Protestant inflection of the secular culture and the pan-Protestant assimilation process - which is treated later in this article.
46. Hutchison, William R. ed., Between the Times: The Travail of the Protestant Establishment in America, 1900-1960 (Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 4, 303.
47. Sidney E. Mead, The Lively Experiment: The Shaping of Christianity in America (New York, 1963), 55-71.
48. Timothy Smith, "Protestant Schooling and American Nationality, 1800-1850," The journal of American History (March, 1967), 680-83, 694-695
49. Knobel, "America for Americans," 57-58.
50. Ruth Miller Elson, Guardians of Tradition: American Schoolbooks of the Nineteenth Century (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1964), 47-53, 105, 121-123
51. Knobel, 52-134
52. The fcc was conceived with the anti-Catholic plank still in its platform. However, liberal movements within ecumenical Protestantism led to the removal of anti- Catholicism from the Council's list of concerns by 1910 (Cavert, Samuel McCrea, The American Churches in the Ecumenical Movement: 1900-1968 (New York, NY: Association Press 1968), 54-56).
53. Philip D. Jordan, The Evangelical Alliance for the United States of America, 1847-1900: Ecumenism, Identity, and the Religion of the Republic (New York, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, 1982), 34, 42;
54. Roof & McKinney, American Mainline Religion 85-87;
55. Robert A. Schneider, "Voice of Many Waters: Church Federation in the Twentieth Century," in Hutchison, ed., Between the Times, 99-100.
56. H. Trevor Colbourn, Lamp of Experience: Whig History and the Intellectual Origins of the American Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press 1965), 30, 183-184, 194-98 is a particularly good source for American Anglo-Saxonism.
57. See also Allen J. Frantzen & John D. Niles, eds., Anglo-Saxonism and the Construction of Social Identity (Gainesville: University Press of Florida 1997)
58. or Caroline Robbins, The Eighteenth- Century Commonwealthman (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1959).
59. Reginald Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo- Saxonism, (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Anglo-University Press, 1981), 12.
60. Liah Greenfeld, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992), 409.
61. Horsman, 22.
62. Thomas Frank Gossett, "The Idea of Anglo-Saxon Superiority in American Thought, 1865-1915" (Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Minnesota, 1953), 82;
63. Dorothy Ross, "Historical Consciousness in Nineteenth Century America," American Historical Review, 89: 4 (1984), 909-28. Gossett and Ross discuss the nature of the American adaptation of the Teutonic-Whig germ theory which connected the ancient Anglo-Saxons to the Magna Carta, the Glorious Revolution, and other events. In the American interpretation, the United States was seen to represent the culmination of the Whig theory of history.
64. Anita Haya Goldman, "Reconciling Race and Rights: Emerson and the Construction of Nationality" (Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard University, 1992), 246.
65. Ross, 917; Gossett, 201-203
66. Edward N. Saveth, American Historians and European Immigrants, 1875-1925 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1948), 112-13, 137-140
67. A notable exception occurred in parts of the South where the white population knew itself to be merely "white" or "American."
68. Milton M. Gordon, Assimilation in American Life: Tie Role of Race, Religion and National Origins, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964), 89;
69. Will Herberg, Protestant, Catholic, Jew: An Essay in American Religious Sociology, Garden City, N.Y.: Country Life Press, 1955), 34.
70. For instance, in 1778, no more than 39 per cent of Hungary's population was of Magyar stock. However, during the next century, Magyarization policies managed to assimilate much of Hungary's non-Magyar population to the ethnic core. See Francis, Interetinic Relations, 93-94.
71. Lucy Eve Kerman, "Americanization: the History of an Idea, 1700-1860" (Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, U.C. Berkeley, 1983), 8, 36.
72. Fischer, Albion's Seed 423.
73. Jon Butler, The Huguenots in America: A Refugee People in New World Society (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983), 71, 198.
74. Richard Conant Harper, The Course of the Melting pot Idea to 1910 (New York: Arno Press, 1980), 52.
75. Gordon, 86-87;
76. Brookhiser, The Way of the WASP, 117.
77. Jay is quoted in Benjamin Schwarz, "The Diversity Myth: America's Leading Export," Atlantic Monthly (May 1995), 62.
78. Immigration was somewhat higher in the 1780s than in later decades, when war raged in Europe.
79. Richard M. Burkey, Ethnic and Racial Groups: The Dynamics of Dominance (Menlo Park: Cummings, 1978), 170.
80. Walker Connor notes that, in 1971, the majority of nation-states had populations in which ethnic minorities comprised over 25 % of the population. Furthermore, most analysts would agree that nations are modern and, as one of the first integrated mass participation polities, that the US was one of the world's first nations. Thus the free population of the 1820 United States should be considered a nation with above-average ethnic homogeneity. See Walker Connor, "A Nation is a Nation, is a State, is an Ethnic Group, is a...", in John Hutchinson and Anthony D. Smith, eds., Nationalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994).
81. Donald L. Horowitz, Ethnic Groups in Conflict (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 64-70;
82. Connor, 214-215
83. See Fredrik Barth, ed., Ethnic Groups and Boundaries: the Social Organisation of Culture Difference (London: Allen and Unwin, 1969), 20-25;
84. Connor, 215-16 or Francis, 28-31 (Zulus) and 93-94 (Magyars).
85. The Americans' founding date (1607) differs little from that of the Ulster Protestants, Québécois, and Afrikaners.
86. Curti, Roots, 202.
87. Anita Haya Goldman, "Reconciling Race and Rights: Emerson and the Construction of Nationality" (Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard University, 1992), 242-244
88. John E. Bernbrock, "Walt Whitman and 'Anglo-Saxonism'" (Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of North Carolina, 1961), 42, 190.
89. David S. Reynolds, Beneath the American Renaissance: The Subversive Imagination in the Age of Emerson and Melville (New York: Aldred A. Knopf, 1988), 65, 142-143
90. Tocqueville, Democracy 173-74.
91. For the comments of theorists of American exceptionalism, see Seymour Martin Lipset, The First New Nation: The United States in Historical and Comparative Perspective (London: Heinemann, 1968), 2
92. Greenfeld, Nationalism, 399
93. and Zelinsky, Nation into State, 236.
94. O'Brien, God: Land:, 4-6.
95. Goldman, 284.
96. Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: the Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 361.
97. Hans Kohn, "Western and Eastern Nationalisms", in A.D.Smith and John Hutchinson, eds., Nationalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 165.
98. A. D. Smith, Ethnic Origins, 161.
99. Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny, 23.
100. Race and Manifest Destiny, Ibid., 235.
101. Ian Stuart Marshall, "Mountains to Match the Man: National Identity and the Mountain in American Literature" (Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Delaware, 1988), 269.
102. Bernard K. Johnpoll and Lillian Johnpoll, The Impossible Dream: a Century and a Half of the American heft (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1981), 119.
103. A. D. Smith, Ethnic Origins, 192.