An excerpt from another interesting book I am reading. I plan on spending less time in the future discussing Hitler and the Third Reich while I concentrate on researching the patriotic American racialist tradition. There is no need for anyone to discredit the American Neo-Nazis and like-minded fascist traitors who post on the internet, as no one takes them seriously anyway. This seems to be the approach that Jared Taylor is taking. I think he is also trying to revive this worldview as well. We are moving in the same direction, away from Fascism and insane conspiracy theories and back to the basics. Notice the role of religion and political liberty in this peculiar racial cocktail. -- FadeTheButcher

"The Anglo-Saxon blood could never be subdued by anything that claimed Mexican origin."
--James Buchanan, February 14, 1845

The decisive years in the creation of the new Anglo-Saxon political ideology were from the mid-1830s to the mid-1840s. In these years American politicians and the American population were overwhelmed by a variety of influences, both practical and theoretical, which inspired a belief that the American Anglo-Saxons were destined to dominate or penetrate the American continents and large areas of the world. Americans had faith that they would increase in suhc numbers that they would personally shape the destiny of other areas.

The catalyst in the overt adoption of a racial Anglo-Saxonism was the meeting of Americans and Mexicans in the Southwest, the Texas Revolution, and the war with Mexico. In confronting the Mexicans the Americans clearly formulated the idea of themselves as an Anglo-Saxon race. The use of Anglo-Saxon in a racial sense, somewhat rare in the political arguments of the early 1830s, increased rapidly later in the decade and became commonplace by the mid-1840s. The manner in which the Anglo-Saxon race was being isolated from other peoples was stated with clarity by Senator Benjamin Leigh of Virginia in January 1836 when opposing the abolitionist petitions. After pointing out that his fellow Congressmen had only to remember how the mobs of Cincinnati, Philadelphia, and New York had dealt with the few free Negroes in their midst to appreciate what would follow general emancipation, he candidly sketched the problem: "It is peculiar to the character of this Anglo-Saxon race of men to which we belong, that it has never been contented to live in the same country with any other distant race, upon terms of equality; it has, invariably, when placed in that situation, proceeded to exterminate or enslave the other race in some form or other, or, failing in that, to abandon the country."

The idea of the Anglo-Saxon race as a distinct, all-encompassing force was expressed with increasing frequency in the late 1830s. In February 1837 William Gilpin wrote to his father from New Orleans that while the town was still Gallic in character the "Anglo-Saxon is pushing aside the Frenchman and eating him up. The big steamers . . . are Anglo-Saxon, the huge stores and warehouses into which [goods] are piled have an Anglo-Saxon look and an Anglo-Saxon ship bears them hence. [Of] all the new part of the city, the only decent part is English." When Horace Bushnell, in August 1937, delivered an oration on the principles of national greatness, he used old and familiar arguments concerning America as a land saved for events of world significance; however, he used a new precision in writing of the origin of the people for whom the New World had been preserved. "Out of all the inhabitants of the world," he said, " . . . a select stock, the Saxon, and out of this the British family, the noblest of the stock, was chosen to people our country." In contrast, the Mexican state, he said, had started with fundamental disadvantages in the character of its immigrants. If the quality of the British people ws changed into that of the Mexican, "five years would make their noble island a seat of poverty and desolation." For Bushnell, God had reserved America for a special people of Saxon blood.

By the 183s the Americans were eagerly grasping at reasons for their own success and the failure of others. Although white Americans of Jacksonian America wanted personal success and wealth, they also wanted a clear conscience. If the United States was to remain in the minds of its people a nation divinely ordained for great deeds, then the fault for the suffering inflicted in the rise to power and prosperity had to lie elsewhere. White Americans could rest easier if the sufferings of other races could be blamed on racial weakness rather than on the whites' relentless search for wealth and power. In the 1830s and 1840s, when it became obvious that American and Mexican interests were incompatible and that the Mexicans would suffer, innate weaknesses were found in the Mexicans. Americans, it was argued, were not to be blamed for forcibly taking the northern provinces of Mexico, for Mexicans, like Indians, were unable to make proper use of the land. The Mexicans had failed because they were a mixed, inferior race with considerable Indian and some black blood. The world would benefit if a superior race shaped the future of the Southwest.

By the time of the Mexican War, America had placed the Mexicans firmly within the rapidly emerging hierarchy of superior and inferior races. While the Anglo-Saxons were depicted as the purest of the pure -- the finest Caucasians -- the Mexicans who stood in the way of southwestern expansion were depicted as a mongrel race, adulterated by extensive intermarriage with an inferior Indian race. Travelers delighted in depicting the Mexicans as an unimprovable breed and were particularly scathing about the inhabitants of Mexico's northern provinces. T.J. Farnham in 1840 wrote of Californians as "an imbecile, pusillanimous, race of men, and unfit to control the destinies of that beautiful country." No one argued who knew "the indolent, mixed race of California," he argued, could believe they would long populate much less govern, the region. The mixed white and Indian races of California and Mexico "must fade away; while the mingling of different branches of the Caucasian family in the States" would produce a race which would expand to cover all the northern provinces of Mexico. "The old Saxon blood must stride the continent," wrote Farnham, " must command all its northern shores . . . and . . . erect the altar of civil and religious freedom on the plains of the Californias."

The Mexican Californians were constantly attacked as shiftless and ineffective. Richard Dana though them "an idle, thriftless people" and asserted that nothing but the character of the population prevented Monterey from becoming a large town. "In the hands of an enterprising people," he said, "what a country this might be!" Lansford Hastings, in his famous emigrants' guide of 1845, characterized the Mexican inhabitants of California as "scarcely a visible grade, in the scale of intelligence, above the barbarous tribes by whom they are surrounded." This was not surprising, said Hastings. There had been extensive intermarriage and "as most of the lower order of Mexicans, are Indians in fact, whatever is said in reference to the one, will also be applicable to the other." Stereotypes that were to persist in American thinking long after the 1840s were firmly fixed in Hastings's work. A Mexican, he said, "always pursues that method of doing things, which requires the least physical or mental exercise [sic], unless it involves some danger, in which case, he always adopts some other method." Writing of soldiers who were brought into California in 1842, he commented that they were "mere Indians," and that it was "with these wild, shirtless, earless and heartless creatures, headed by a few timid, soulless, brainless officers, that these semi-barbarians, intend to hold this delightful region, as against the civilized world." The process of dehumanizing those who were to be misused or destroyed proceeded rapidly in the United States in the 1840s. To take lands from inferior barbarians was no crime; it was simply following God's injunctions to make land fruitful.

In the Southwest there was even a tendency for American travelers to praise the Pueblo Indians in order further to debase the "mongrel" Mexicans. George Kendall, who was on the Texas-Santa Fe expedition, commented in his account of that sorry affair that "the pueblos, or town Indians of New Mexico, are by far the better part of the population." Most Mexicans, he said, were content if they could satisfy their animal wants," and so they will continue to be until the race becomes extinct or amalgamated with Anglo-Saxon stock." Rufus Sage echoed Kendall: "There are no civilized people on the continent of America, whether civilized or uncivilized, with one or two exceptions, more miserable in condition or despicable in morals than the mongrel race inhabiting New Mexico."

Reginald Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1981), pp.208-212

"One is tempted to imagine that the Anglo-Norman race has received from Divine Providence a fee-simple conveyance of this planet, with the appurtenances thereunto belonging."
--J.D. Nourse, Remarks on the Past (1847)

While racial thought common to the whole of Europe gained a particular virulence among scientific writers in America by midcentury, those themes of Romantic particularism, nationalism, and emotion which had transformed European attitudes since the end of the eighteenth century also deeply permeated a variety of other areas in American thinking. American Romanticism, like its European counterpart, emerged in a variety of forms; American writers adopted literary themes and styles of European Romanticism; New England intellectuals developed their own optimistic transcendentalism under the influence of German and English mentors; American historians delved into the striking themes and great ideas which had inspired past nations; and American nationalists wove a variety of threads into a fervent cry for a greater America. Even in their call for a distinctive American literature, American writers gained strength from those German Romantics who saw literature and language as embodying the soul of a nation. Whatever the particular form taken by American Romanticism, it clearly represented a rejection of eighteenth-century reason and universalism in favor of intuition and particularism. The American Romantics were less interested in the features uniting mankind and nations than in the features separating them. Like the scientists, who shared many of their preconceptions, they looked for what was special and different, not what was general and alike.

The growth and acceptance of the Romantic movement in American literature parallels in time the growth and acceptance of the new scientific racialism. The watershed in both was the period from 1815 to 1830; after 1830 the new ideas quickly swept to success. In one sense, with all their emphasis on scientific measurement and physical comparison, the new scientific racial theorists were themselves responding to the changes in thought embodied in the general concept of Romanticism. Many of their scientific measurements in effect reinforced intuitive beliefs about racial peculiarities and uniqueness. There was never any sharp separation between a precise scientific racialism and literary racial nationalism, for scientists discussed culture and national attitudes in the most general and impressionistic of terms, while some nonscientific writers became interested in the physical basis of racial differentiation. By the 1840s the leading American periodicals often blended ideas on race from a variety of different sources: scientific treatises, monographs on history and philosophy, novels, and poems. Science provided a solid basis for the new assumptions, but the creative writers often gave dramatic expression to new beliefs of racial superiority and destiny even before the scientists provided specific proofs for what had been assumed.

The scientists for the most part emphasized the broad divisions within the human species and particularly enhanced the status of Caucasians at the expense of the others. The creative writers and historians emphasized the special achievements of individual peoples, nations, and languages and were able to exalt the Anglo-Saxons above all other members of the Caucasian race. Also, the two groups were mutually reinforcing, for the scientists used the historical and cultural descriptions of the Teutonic and Anglo-Saxon peoples as evidence to bolster their generalizations regarding inferior and superior races, while creative writers grew more confident in their assumptions when scientists gave physical reasons why some races had talents far above others.

In confusing nation, language, and race, American writers leaned heavily on European inspiration. While some French writers -- particularly Madame de Stael, Michelet, and Thierry -- were influential in transmitting European ideas across the Atlantic and in helping to create in the United States a sense of national racial destiny, by far the greatest influence was exerted by English and German writers. And even the German ideas were far more often known through English sources than directly from the German authors. The American attitude toward English authors remained ambivilant in the first half of the nineteenth century. American authors called for a distinctive American culture and for an end to the simple aping of European models, but they also emphasized a common Anglo-Saxon past, the virtues of the English language, and pride in a race which appeared to be winning control of much of the world. Politically the ambivilance was partially resolved by attacking the aristocratic English government while praising the innate qualities of the English people; but in the literary world English authors were read avidly throughout the United States and emulated by American writers, even while the movement for distinctiveness in American art forms grew in strength. The main British periodicals -- particularly the Edinburgh Review and the Quarterly Review -- were well known and read in the most influential American circles and probably exerted as much influence as the main American periodicals in the early decades of the nineteenth century.

All of the important English writers were read in America, but the two of particular importance in creating a sense of racial unity and destiny were Sir Walter Scott and Thomas Carlyle. Scott was by far the most popular of the English Romantics in America and, as in England, Scott did more than any other writer to bring the idea of the sturdy Anglo-Saxon past into the popular consciousness. In the South some emphasized a kinship with the aristocratic Normans, particularly in the years immediately prior to the Civil War, but Scott's impact generally was to bind Americans firmly to their English roots and to reinforce them in the idea that America, a country which in reality increasingly consisted of a blending of races, was the new bastion of an old and successful English people

Beginning with the publication of Waverley in 1814, Scott's novels swept through America. Already known for his poems, Scott achieved his true popularity only by the publication of the Waverley novels, particular Ivanhoe. Unprotected by copyright Scott's novels proved a lucrative source of income for American publishers. By 1823 some five hundred thousand volumes of Scott had been printed in the United States. At the end of the century John Hay commented that "I have heard from my father -- a pioneer of Kentucky -- that in the early days of this century men would saddle their horses and ride from all the neighboring counties to the principle post-town of the region when a new novel by the Author of Waverley was expected.

Although Scott was popular throughout America, the South received him with particular enthusiasm. Touring the South in 1829 Edward Everett found that Scott's characters were memorialized in the names of steamboats, barges, and stagecoaches, and that the small library on his Mississippi steamboat consisted mostly of Scott's novels. When the Waverley Hotel opened in Mobile in 1839 a local editor wondered what Sir Walter would have said and wished it the success "its namesake obtained from, and holds upon the world." Scott's "Southron" was a term quickly appropriated by American Southerners. When Willie P. Magnum was elected to the United States Senate in 1830, a writer commented that "he is a genuine & unblenching Southron in feeling & principle." Scott may well have helped inculcate Southerners with chivalric ideals, but he also helped convince them that they had a glorious racial lineage in a historical English past. Well into the middle years of the century Scott's novels continued to have great popularity, and even the most widely read new novelists were measured against him.

FadeTheButcher,

Great article, thanks for posting it.

Some more interesting excerpts:

"The philosophical and literary themes of European Romanticism were gaining general currency throughout the United States in the first three decades of the nineteenth century, but their reception varied in the different American regions. It was not simply a matter of the Americans aping Europe; it was more a question of the Americans selecting from a multitude of transatlantic ideas those that best confirmed and enhanced existing American tendencies. New England Romanticism took a particularly intellectual bent; the German philosophers, along with Carlyle and Coleridge, best suited the New England sense of moral and intellectual purpose. In the South there was a passion for Sir Walter Scott; his vision of knights, ladies, serfs, and chivlary was easily absorbed and used within the southern plantation tradition. Yet in both North and South, the ideas of Europe grafted onto, and seemingly confirming, American experience helped produce and overriding sense that the triumphant republic gained its inner force from the special inner charcteristics of the American people. Even while scientific writers were in the process of defining a variety of human races, the novelists, poets, and historians were beginning to write of the Americans as a dynamic force in world history.

No one phrase was used to describe this "American" race, but everywhere it was linked firmly to its supposed historic roots; these roots were usually thought of as Caucasian, Germanic, and Anglo-Saxon, and the Americans as a race were most often described as the most vigorous branch of the Anglo-Saxon people. Some nationalists, particularly those of Irish origin, preferred to think of the "American" as a distinctive race, a race in which was combined the best elements of the Caucasians. This "American" race, however, was usually given the historical attributes of the Anglo-Saxons. A more uncommon usage was that of Thomas Hart Benton, who in one speech referred to the "Celtic-Anglo-Saxon division" of the Caucasian race.

In the South there was eventually some confusion in terminology as Southerners sought to emphasize their aristocratic origins in contrast to the supposed plebian ancestry of the Northerners. Southerners became convinced between 1815 and 1850 that they belonged to a superior race emanating from England, but some preferred to use the term Anglo-Norman rather than Anglo-Saxon. They were describing the same race, the English, but by including Norman they were making sure that their connection to aristocratic forebears was clearly delineated. Carlyle and others had made it quite clear that the Normans, like the Saxons, were a Germanic people, and that whatever the political and class struggles following the Norman Conquest there was no racial split. Anglo-Norman became most popular in the South in the years immediately preceding the Civil War.

Before 1850 Southerners were often content to use Anglo-Saxon rather than Anglo-Norman when they described the American interaction with other races. As early as 1826, Henry Clay, in discussing the Indians, used Anglo-Saxon in a specifically racial sense. He described the Indians as "essentially inferior to the Anglo-Saxon race, which were now taking their place on this continent." South Carolinian Huge Legare, disappointed with France, wrote from Paris in 1832 that "I am more than ever inclined to think that liberty is an affair of idiosyncracy, and not destined to spread very far beyond the Anglo-Saxon race, if even they keep it very much longer." A new generation of Southerners was to keep legare's distinction between the Anglo-Saxons and the rest, his sense of malaise by stressing that the South, the Anglo-Saxons, and liberty could be preserved and enhanced in power by a vigorous policy of racial expansion."

Ibid., pp.164-165

The scathing denunciations of the Mexican race encompassed the inhabitants of central Mexico as well as its outlying provinces, and these denunciations were not confined to writers from any one party or one region in the United States. Waddy Thompson of South Carolina, who went to Mexico in 1842 as minister for the Whig administration, advanced the familiar stereotype in his Recollections, which was published in 1847. While condemning aggressive expansionism and the rapacious spirit of acquisition which was developing in the United States, Thompson had no doubt at all of the ultimate result of the meeting of the Anglo-Saxon and Mexican races. He objected to the means, not to the end. "That our language and laws are destined to pervade this continent," he wrote, "I regard as more certain than any other event which is now in the future. Our race has never yet put its foot upon a soil which it has not only kept but has advanced I mean not our English ancestors only, but that great Teuton race from which we have both descended."

To Thompson an essential element in Mexican weakness was the mixed population. Of seven million inhabitants, he wrote, only one million were white Europeans or their descendants. Of the others there were some four to four and one-half million pure-blooded Indians, and the rest of mixed blood. Thompson, like many others at this time, was easily able to envisage a mysterious disappearance of millions of people. "That the Indian race of Mexico must recede before us," he wrote, "is quite as certain as that is the destiny of our own Indians." Negroes in Mexico Thompson characterized as "the same lazy, filthy, and vicious creatures that they inevitably become where they are not held in bondage." The general Mexican population Thompson characterized as "lazy, ignorant, and, of course, vicious and dishonest."

The American dismissal of the Mexicans as an inferior, largely Indian race did not pass unnoticed in Mexico. Mexican ministers in the United States warned their government that the Americans considered the Mexican an inferior people. The Mexicans realized both that their neighbors to the north were likely to invade their northern provinces, and that they would claim that this was justified because they could make better use of the lands. Mexicans who served as diplomatic representatives in the United States were shocked at the rapid anti-Mexican attitudes and at the manner in which Mexicans were lumped together with Indians and blacks as an inferior race.

The Texas Revolution was from its beginnings interpreted in the United States and among Americans in Texas as a racial clash, not simply a revolt against unjust government or tyranny. Thomas Hart Benton said that the Texas revolt "has illustrated the Anglo-Saxon character, and given it new titles to the respect and admiration of the world. It shows that liberty, justice, valour -- moral, physical, and intellectual power -- discriminate that race wherever it goes." Benton asked "old England" to rejoice that distant Texas streams had seen the exploits of "a people sprung from their loins, and carrying their language, laws, and customs, their magna charta and all its glorious privileges, into new regions and far distant climes."

In his two terms as president of Texas, Sam Houston consistently thought of the struggle in his region as one between a glorious Anglo-Saxon race and an inferior Mexican rabble. Victory of the Texans and the Americans in the Southwest would mean that larger areas of the world were to be brought under the rule of a race that could make best use of them. Houston was less imbued with the harsh scientific racial theories that carried most Americans before them in the 1840s than with the romantic exaltation of the Saxons given by Sir Walter Scott and his followers.

Houston's inaugural address in October 1836 contrasted the harsh, uncivilized warfare of the Mexicans with the more humane conduct of the Texans. He conjured up a vision of the civilized world proudly contemplating "conduct which reflected so much glory on the Anglo-Saxon race." The idea of the Anglo-Saxons as the living embodiment of the chivalric ideal always fascinated Houston; the Mexicans were "the base invader" fleeing from "Anglo-Saxon chivalry." In fighting Mexico the Texans were struggling to disarm tyranny, to overthrow oppression, and create representative government: "With these principles we will march across the Rio Grande, and . . . ere the banner of Mexico shall triumphantly float upon the banks of the Sabine, the Texian standard of the single star, borne by the Anglo-Saxon race, shall display its bright folds in Liberty's triumph, on the isthmus of Darien."

While conceiving of the Texas Revolution as that of a freedom-loving Anglo-Saxon race rising up to throw off the bonds of tyranny imposed by a foreign despot, Houston was also fully convinced of the inevitability of general American Anglo-Saxon expansion. To him "the genius as well as the excitability" of the American people impelled them to war. "Their love of dominion," he said, "and the extension of their territorial limits, also, is equal to that of Rome in the last ages of the Commonwealth and the first of the Caesars." The people of the United States, he argued, were convinced that the North American continent had been bestowed upon them, and if necessary they would take it by force. He told one correspondent in 1844 that there was no need to be concerned about the population said to occupy the area from the 29th to the 46th latitude on the Pacific: "They will, like the Indian race yield to the advance of the North American population."

Ibid., pp.212-214

All of the important English writers were read in America, but the two of particular importance in creating a sense of racial unity and destiny were Sir Walter Scott and Thomas Carlyle.

I had the distinct impression that both were actually, ummm, Scottish.

But your point is taken.

I had the distinct impression that both were actually, ummm, Scottish. But your point is taken.

Yes, both of them were. Carlyle was a Germanophile as well. I'm fond of his work, both as an essayist and historian.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Carlyle

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Scott

Yes, both of them were. Carlyle was a Germanophile as well. I'm fond of his work, both as an essayist and historian.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Carlyle

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Scott
You may find this interesting. After all, Germanic does not equal Germany.

Has not every restitution of the ancient Saxon laws had happy effects? Is it not better now that we return at once into that happy system of our ancestors, the wisest and most perfect ever yet devised by the wit of man, as it stood before the 8th century?
-- Thomas Jefferson, August, 13, 1776

Although the concept of a distinct, superior Anglo-Saxon race, with innate endowments enabling it to achieve a perfection of governmental institutions and world dominance, was a product of the first half of the nineteenth century, the roots of these ideas stretch back at least to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Those Englishmen who settled in America at the beginning of the seventeenth century brought as part of their historical and religious heritage a clearly delineated religious myth of a pure Anglo-Saxon church, and in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries they shared with their fellow Englishmen an elaborately developed secular myth of the free nature of Anglo-Saxon political institutions. By the time of the American Revolution Americans were convinced that Anglo-Saxon England before the Norman Conquest had enjoyed freedoms unknown since that date. The emphasis was on institutions rather than race, but since the sixteenth century, both on the European continent and in England, the Anglo-Saxons had also been firmly linked to the Germanic tribes described by Tacitus.

The first enthusiastic English interest in Anglo-Saxon England was a product of the English Reformation. As early as the 1530s the Saxon church was studied to provide propaganda to justify Henry VIII's break with Rome. The main object of the research was to show that the English church was returning to the purer practices of the period before 1066. Supposed Anglo-Saxon precedents were used to support the argument that England had cleansed the Roman Catholic Church of the abuses introducted through the centuries of papal power.

The key figure in establishing a historical base for the new Anglican church that emerged under Elizabeth was Archbishop Matthew Parker. To justify the Elizabethan church settlement, Parker became a major patron of Anglo-Saxon scholarship, collecting manuscripts, encouraging the study of the Anglo-Saxon language, and publishing texts. Depending heavily on the help of his secretary, John Joscelyn, Parker effectively initiated the serious study of pre-Norman England. Although the object of Parker's group was to establish the antiquity of the customs of the new English church, his efforts also stimulated an interest and pride in general English history in the Anglo-Saxon period. John Foxe, in his Acts and Monuments (1563), emphasized the early development of English church practices, but he also stressed the uniqueness of the English and thier nature as "a chosen people," with a church lineage stretching back to Joseph of Arimathea and his supposed visit to England, and with John Wyclif as the true originator of the Reformation. The religious propagandists of the late sixteenth century defended a church that was particularly English in its inspiration. Whatever the errors of the rest of Europe, it was believed that the English had cleansed of corruption a church whose roots stretched back to shortly after the time of Christ.

The interest in Anglo-Saxon religious sources, which helped to justify the break with Rome, also eventually helped overturn the Arthurian legends, which had dominated medieval accounts of the origins of the English people. Rather than the traditional story of the settlement of England by Brutus, his Trojans, and Britons, which had been given its greatest elaboration by Geoffrey of Monmouth, emphasis now shifted to the Germanic tribes as colonizers of Anglo-Saxon England. In emphasizing the Germanic origins of the English, antiquarians of the early seventeenth century linked the English arguments to the general Germanic movement in Europe and ultimately to Tacitus.

Lauding the peculiar qualities of the Germanic people had been common on the Continent since the early years of the Reformation; German reformers drew an analogy between the earlier "Germanic" or "Gothic" destruction of the universal Roman Empire and the new destruction of the universal Roman Church. Theories were advanced which foreshadowed the ultra-Teutonism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In 1580 Goropius Becamus, a Flemish physician, argued that German was the first of all languages and had been spoken in the Garden of Eden by Adam. This argument was too outlandish even for most Teutons, but Goropius's emphasis on the great antiquity and excellence of the German language gained many followers in England as well as on the Continent. Throughout the seventeenth century Continental arguments in praise of the Germanic heritage were cited in English works on the origins and institutions of the Anglo-Saxons.

The linking of superior institutions to a particular people was given a major impetus in England by the writings of Richard Verstegen and William Camden. In 1605 Verstegen dedicated his Restitution of Decayed Intelligence to James I, "descended of the chiefest blood royall of our ancient English-Saxon Kings." Verstegen wrote with passion of England's Germanic and Anglo-Saxon past, the Germanic roots of the English language, and, surprisingly for this early date, the common racial origin of the Saxons, Danes, and Normans. Using Tacitus as his source, he described the courage and high principles of the Germanic tribes, and he emphasized that the English, like the Germans, were an unmixed race; the great invasions of England by the Danes and the Normans merely reunited old brethern. Discussions of the English as a perfect blend of the great northern peoples was not common until the nineteenth century, and Verstegen foreshadowed later racial interpretations of the German and Saxon past.

William Camden did not espouse the Germanic cause with the same vigour and consistency as Verstegen, but in his Britannia he helped to overturn medieval accounts of the English past by his attack on the theory of descent from Brutus and his Trojans. Later, in his Remaines concerning Britaine, he argued that the English were descended from a great German people, and he saw God's hand in the guiding of the Angles and Saxons to England. Both Verstegen and Camden were interested in the special characteristics of the English as a people as well as in the institutions of the Anglo-Saxon period.

The emphasis on the Anglo-Saxons and a vigourous branch of the sturdy Germanic tree continued as one thread in the political arguments of the seventeenth century. As yet, not all agreed that political liberty had been brought to England by the Anglo-Saxons (Sir Edward Coke traced English liberties back long before that time), but the emphasis on Anglo-Saxons as particularly able Germans now became a commonplace in writings on English history. The primary source for Germanic characteristics was Tacitus's Germania, which was constantly used over the following centuries to defend the idea of the Germans as a freedom-loving, noble race. "In the peoples of Germany," wrote Tacitus, "there has been given to the wrold a race untainted by intermarriage with other races, a peculiar people and pure, like no one but themselves." This "pure" race, he argued, had a high moral code and profound love of freedom and individual rights; important decisions were made by the whole community. These ideas were woven into seventeenth-century discussions of Anglo-Saxon political institutions; "some have sent us to Tacitus and as far as Germany to learn our English constitution" was the comment of an English pamphleteer.

In the first half of the seventeenth century the political and legal history of the Anglo-Saxons became a central issue in the growing rift between Parliament and the Crown. Parliamentarians found in the supposed antiquity of Parliament and of English common law a rationale for opposition to royal pretensions. The scholarly basis for the opposition to the king was often provided by the research or men associated with the Society of Antiquaries. Deeply involved in the basic work of the society were Sir Robert Cotton, John Selden, and Sir Henry Spelman: Cotton blamed the loss of the legal privileges of the Saxon period on the Norman Conquest; Selden praised Anglo-Saxon law in contrast to the later developments of royal absolutism; and Spelman emphasized the oppression of post-Conquest feudal tenures and bcame and ardent advocate of the Anglo-Saxon language.

As royal pretensions increased in the first decades of the seventeenth century, the parliamentarians defended English rights as rooted in the immemorial law and custom. Anglo-Saxon history was corrupted to provide a defence for parliamentary arguments. Two famous documents -- the Modus Tenendi Parliamentum and the Mirror of Justices -- whose true origins were late medieval were used to bolster the claims that King Alfred had instituted annual sessions of Parliament and universal male suffrage, and that the House of Lords had been a part of the English Constitution since the time of Edward the Confessor.

The most famous of the parliamentarians who used and developed a historical myth to resist the king was Sir Edward Coke. Coke stressed the antiquity of the common law, the common law courts, and the House of Commons, but he was not in the tradition of those like Verstegen who saw a Germanic origin for much that was best in England. Coke was more peculiarly English in his arguments; he traced the history of the common law of England back before the coming of the Anglo-Saxons to time immemorial.

Ultimately, sharp differences developed among those who opposed royal power. Coke believed that the common law had survived unscathed from the most distant times and should at all costs be protected; but the Levellers thought that the common law had been corrupted by post-Conquest tyranny, and that it should be swept away. The arguments of the Levellers and their successors were ultimately to be of more importance to the American colonists than those of Coke, though Coke did much to popularise the idea of the supreme abilities of the Anglo-Saxons. Like the later colonial revolutionaries, the Levellers believed that the excellent government which had existed before the Norman Conquest had to be restored by abolishing all the abuses that had crept into English law and government since that time. But, whatever the arguments as to the state of England prior to the Anglo-Saxons and on the condition of England after the Norman Conquest, there was general agreement that the England of the Anglo-Saxons had been a country in which the citizens were protected by good laws and in which representative institutions and trial by jury flourished. The myth of a pure Anglo-Saxon church, developed in the sixteenth century, was in the seventeenth century joined by a more powerful myth of free Anglo-Saxon government.

When in England the violence and turmoil of a half century subsided in the aftermath of the Glorious Revolution of 1688, there emerged a classic "Whig" view of the past. In this view a golden age of good government had existed in England prior to the Norman Conquest. The Conquest had eroded English liberties, but had been followed by a long struggle for the restoration of good government, of which the foundation had been the Magna Carta and the capstone the seventeenth-century victories over the usurpations of the Stuarts. As a result of these victories England was a nation with a continuity of law and institutions stretching back more than a thousand years, a nation inhabited by Anglo-Saxons who had always been freedom-loving, and who had always exhibited an outstanding capacity for good government.

Not all Englishmen accepted the classic Whig view. There were anti-Whigs, like Thomas Hobbes, who saw Anglo-Saxon society in a truer light, and there were also the "Real Whigs" or "Commonwealthmen," who believed that the struggles of the seventeenth century had failed to restore to England the liberties that had existed before the Norman Conquest. The Real Whigs were often more enthusiastic about the Anglo-Saxons than those who accepted the more general Whig interpretation of the past, for they were anxious to contrast the Anglo-Saxon government with the government accepted by modern Englishmen. The Real Whigs also wrote of the Germanic peoples from whom the Anglo-Saxons had sprung. Particularly influential was Robert Molesworth's Account of Denmark, published in the 1690s, which praised "the northern nations" for introducing the arts of good government and foreshadowed the eighteenth century interest in the Scandinavian peoples as part of a dominant Germanic family.

In the seventy years after 1660 the myth of Anglo-Saxon England flourished in English politics, and fascination with the period was heightened by a flowering of Anglo-Saxon scholarship, particularly at Oxford. In these years the study of the Anglo-Saxon language and sources was advanced by a whole group of prominent scholars, including Francis Junius, Edward Thwaites, George Hickes, and Humphrey Wanley. These scholars did nothing to correct the prevailing myths concerning Anglo-Saxon freedom, and their linguistic studies did much to expand the interest in links between the Anglo-Saxons and other Germanic peoples. The eighteenth-century English view of the Anglo-Saxons was a mythical one produced by two centuries of religious and political conflict and reinforced by the image of the Germanic peoples that originated with Tacitus and was elaborated by a whole serious of post-Reformation Continental writers.

As colonial Englishmen the settlers in America fully absorbed the mythical view of the English past developed between 1530 and 1730. They perceived the Anglo-Saxons only through the distortions of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century religious and political controversy and through its supporting scholarship. They imbibed the general Whig theory of history, but where they differed most sharply from the majority of Englishmen was in eventually accepting the minority English viewpoint that the English constitution had not been cleansed of the religious and political abuses that had emerged since the Conquest. In the mid-eighteenth century it was the English radicals, the Real Whigs, who appealed most strongly to Americans dissatisfied with their relationship to the English political establishment. For a time the colonials, like the English, were proud of their constitution as settled by the Glorious Revolution, but by the time of the American Revolution they wholeheartedly welcomed the views of those English radicals who were asking for a reform of the English system in order to restore its pristine Anglo-Saxon vigour.

The books which established a defended the Whig view of English history were readily available and popular in colonial America. Law, the training ground for so many Revolutionary politicians, was the most traveled route to Anglo-Saxon England. Colonial law students were weaned on the Institutes of Sir Edward Coke, particularly "Coke on Littleton," the standard first law text in the colonies. Jefferson admired "old Cooke" all his life, and shortly before he died expressed the view that while Coke had made good Whigs of American lawyers, the shift to Blackstone (whose first volume was published in England in 1765) had helpted to produce Tories in America as well as in England. The pamphlets of the Revolutionary era are filled with citations from Coke, yet Blackstone also believed in the freedom of the Anglo-Saxon period and stressed the merits of Tacitus's depcition of the early Germanic tribes.

American lawyers also learned of the supposed freedoms of pre-Conquest England from a variety of other texts on English land tenure. At the heart of the Whig writings on feudalism was the belief that the feudal system was introduced into England only at the time of the Norman Conquest. Anglo-Saxon England, according to this view, was a land of yeoman farmers. To many Americans the sweeping away of entail and primogenture after the Revolution eliminated the last remnants of the feudal system and restored the fredoms of the period before 1066. The works of Sir Henry Spelman and Sir John Dalrymple, which were well known in the colonies, depicted Anglo-Saxon England as a land free from the burdens of feudalism.

The colonists believed fully that the Anglo-Saxons were a particularly successful branch of the freedom-loving Germanic peoples described by Tacitus. Tacitus's Germania was readily available in colonial America, often in translation, and was enjoyed by many, including John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. Tacitus's ideas also reached the colonists through a variety of other books. When Montequieu, in L'espirt des lois, used Tacitus for his explanation of the influence of the Germanic peoples, he was following a trend rather thank breaking new ground. Montesquieu's popularity, however, helped confirm the view that the British political system could be traced to the woods of Germany.

More generally read than Montequieu was Paul de Rapin-Thoryas's History d'Angleterre, which was translated into English in 1726. Rapin was very popular in the colonies. He presented a thoroughly Whig view of English history, emphasizing that the Anglo-Saxons were Tacitus's Germans, creating the basis of English parliamentary government in a new homeland. The effect of Rapin's work was enhanced in the colonies on the eve of the Revolution by the publication of the English radical Catherine Macaulay's History of England. Again liberty was depicted as traveling with the Anglo-Saxons from the woods of Germany across the sea to England.

The flow of works across that Atlantic was particularly strong on the eve of the Revolution. A pamphlet which was subsequently woven into the very fabric of Revolutionary constitutonal argument was the Historical Essay on the English Constitution, published in London in 1771. This radical publication achieved considerable popularity in both England and the United States. It carried praise of Anglo-Saxon institutions to the extreme in discussing the origins of the English constitution. The Anglo-Saxon England described here was a democratic country of united local communities, meeting in an annual parliament and enjoying trial by jury: "if ever God Almighty did concern himself about forming a government for mankind to live happily under, it was that which was established in England by our Saxon forefathers." The Normans, the pamphleteer argued, had brought political and religious oppression to England and had inaugurated a long, continual struggle between Saxon freedom and Norman tyranny.

When in the early summer of 1776 Pennsylvania representatives were preparing to meet to draft their influential new constitution, an anonymous author in Philidelphia summarized the arguments of the Historical Essay, with his own comments, to guide the Pennsylvanian in their constitution-making. This pamphlet by "Demophilus" was entitled The Germanic Principles of the Ancient Saxon, or English Constitution. It was issued just after the printing of the Declaration of Independence, and the author included that document at the end of his own work. The Pennsylvanians, he argued, should need little convincing that "this ancient and justly admired pattern, the old Saxon form of government, will be the best model, that human wisdom, improved by experience, has left them to copy."

The extensive pamphlet and protest literature of the 1760s and 1770s revealed the extent to which hte colonists had learned the lessons taught by the Whig interpreters of English history and, in particular, by the eighteenth-century Real Whigs. The revolutionaries drew their precedents and principles from a wide variety of historical and contemporary sources, but whatever their various inspirations there was a strong, general belief that they were acting as Englishmen -- Englishmen contending for principles of popular government, freedom, and liberty introduced into England more than a thousand years before by the high-minded, freedom-loving Anglo-Saxons from the woods of Germany. The various ingredients in the myth of Anglo-Saxon England, clearly delineated in a host of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century works, now appear again in American protests: Josiah Quincy, Jr. wrote of the popular nature of the Anglo-Saxon militia; Sam Adams stressed the old English freedoms defended in the Magna Carta; Benjamin Franklin emphasized the freedom the Anglo-Saxons had enjoyed in emigrating to England; Charles Carrol depicted Saxon liberties torn away by William the Conquerer; and Richard Bland argued that the English constitution and parliament stemmed from the Saxon period. Patrick Henry was reputed to have been licensed to practice law after a month or two studying "Coke on Littleton" and a digest of the Virginia Acts, and he wrote his resolution against the Stamp Act on the fly leaf of Coke's famous work. George Washington admired the pro-Saxon history of Catherine Macaulay, and she visited him at Mount Vernon after the Revolution.

The vision of heroic, freedom-loving Anglo-Saxon England permeates the arguments of the Revolutionary generation, but it is in the writings of Thomas Jefferson that the theme appears most strongly, and he best reveals the form in which the myth was transmitted to future generations. Although Jefferson read deeply in the works of the classic parliamentary propagandists of the seventeenth century, his predeliction was not for Standard Whig interpretations of the period after 1688, but for those radical Real Whigs who argued that many of the corruptions introduced into the English constitution after the Norman Conquest still existed in the eighteenth century. The Anglo-Saxons, thought Jefferson, has lived under laws based on the natural rights of man; after 1066 these rights had been eroded by the impositions of kings, clerics, lawyers, and by the whole system of feudalism.

From one of my previous posts. This is taken from Henri Pirenne's Mohammad and Charlemagne:

"From whatever standpoint we regard it, then, the period inaugurated by the establishment of the Barbarians within the Empire introduced no absolute historical innovation. What the Germans destroyed was not the Empire, but the Imperial government in partibus occidentis. They themselves acknowledged as much by installing themselves as foederati. Far from seeking to replace the Empire by anything new, they established themselves within it, and although their settlement was accompanied by a process of serious degradation, they did not introduce a new scheme of government; the ancient palazzo, so to speak, was divided up into apartments, but it still survived as a building. In short, the essential character of "Romania" still remained Mediterranean. The frontier territories, which remained Germanic, and England, played on part in it as yet; it is a mistake to regard them at this period as a point of departure. Considering matters as they actually were, we see that the great novelty of the epoch was a political fact: in the Occident and plurality of States had replaced the unity of the Roman State. And this, of course, was a very considerable novelty. The aspect of Europe was changing, but the fundamental character of its life remained the same. These States, which have been described as national States, were not really national at all, but were merely fragments of the great unity which they had replaced. There was no profound transformation except in Britain.

There the Emperor and the civilisation of the Empire had disappeared. Nothing remained of the old tradition. A new world had made its appearance. The old law and language and institutions were replaced by those of the Germans. A civilisation of a new type was manifesting itself, which we may call the Nordic or Germanic civilization. It was completely opposed to the Mediterranean civilisation syncretised in the Late Empire, that last form of Antiquity. Here was no trace of the Roman state with its legislative ideal, its civil population, and its Christian religion, but a society which had preserved the blood tie between its members; the family community, with all the consequences which it entailed in law and morality and economy; a paganism like that of the heroic poems; such were the things that constituted the originality of these Barbarians, who had thrust back the ancient world in order to take it place. In Britain a new age was beginning, which did not gravitate towards the South. The man of the North and conquered and taken for his own this extreme corner of that "Romania" of which he had no memories, whose majesty he repudiated, and to which he owed nothing. In every sense of the word he replaced it, and in replacing it he destroyed it.

The Anglo-Saxon invaders came into the Empire fresh from their Germanic environment, and had never been subjected to the influences of Rome. Further, the province of Britain, in which they had established themselves, was the least Romanised of all the provinces. In Britain, therefore, they remained themselves: the Germanic, Nordic, Barbarian soul of peoples whose culture might almost be called Homeric has been the essential factor in the history of this country."

Henri Pirenne, Mohammad and Charlemagne (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd, 1954), pp.140-141

England's Germanic Culture

"It is apparent that little can be said in favour of the early Germanic legal process. Yet German law made one great contribution to western civilisation in its political implications. Roman law found origin in the will of the despotic emperor and favoured political absolutism. The king had no control over Germanic law; his only legal function was to see that the community courts met and decided cases, and even in this regard his contribution was negligable. Germanic law was based on the principle that law resided in the folk, that law was the custom of the community, and that the king could not change this law without the assent of the community. Because of this difference between Germanic and Roman law and because England, even in the High Middle Ages, remained relatively untouched by Roman law, the Victorian historians found the origin of English parliamentary institutions and the idea of the rule of law in the forests of Germany. Although it has been fashionable among twentieth century writers to scoff at this interpretation, there is an element of truth in it. The Victorians, with their organic conception of institutional development, erred in thinking that the great oak of English liberalism grew inevitably out of the acorn of German law. There was nothing inevitable about this development; in 1200 England appeared to be going in the direction of absolutism, and it took centuries of experience and political strife before the legislative supremacy of Parliament triumphed. But it is true that from German law England received a legal heritage of supremacy of the community over the king. All western European countries could have drawn upon the same legal tradition. But after 1100 the Roman principle of legal absolutism slowly won out on the Continent, whereas England alone preserved the early Germanic idea that law resides in the folk, rather than in the will of the king."

Norman F. Cantor, The Civilisation of the Middle Ages (New York: HarperPerennial, 1994), pp.98-99

More on England's Germanic culture and legal system:

"England was the only country whose legal system did not come heavily under the influence of the Justinian code. While the civil law was beginning to penetrate into the juristic systems of Germany and France in the twelfth century, English law went off in another direction, developing both institutions and principles that were remarkably different from the theory and procedure of Roman law. The departure had a profound effect on both the later government and law of England, and it constitutes one of the outstanding ways in which the intellectual changes of the twelfth century influenced th subsequent course of European history. Therefore, no study of the twelfth century can avoid the question of why England developed its own non-Roman legal system."

Ibid., p.315

You may find this interesting. After all, Germanic does not equal Germany.

Yes, I'm well aware of England's Germanic character, it is something which is part of my on-going research. Have you read Tacitus's Germania?

Some more info on American racialism. As I said before, we literally pioneered the concept. Ditto for Nordicism. The Nazis were simply crude imitators. The Third Reich was only around for twelve years. The United States was a racialist nation for over a century.

"You talk of carrying to all the races of the world your institutions, your religion, your arts and sciences. You can no more do it than you can give to all the races your color, form, and development."
--Senator John Pettit, February 23, 1855

In the years after the Mexican War some questioned the new racial assumptions, many were wary of force, and a majority did not want colonies, but most thought that American commerce could penetrate the world and that the Anglo-Saxons could outbreed other races. The supreme confidence in the racial strength of white America was accompanied by the desire that this special race and its government should not be tainted and weakened by any inferior peoples. What had once been merely felt was now backed by the best scientific evidence -- nations and peoples could lose their greatness by mixing with inferior races. Some of these inferior races were destined to serve, others to disappear. For races within the United States the degree to which these special ideas of progress had permeated American thinking was clearly revealed by the debates on slavery and on the status of the areas acquired from Mexico, and for races in the rest of the world by the debates and writings on the nature of American overseas expansion.

In defending slavery Southerners and their friends were able to draw on racial assumptions that were generally accepted throughout the United States. George Fitzhugh, in his Sociology for the South and in his earlier newspaper articles, carefully characterized the Anglo-Saxon as well as the African race. At the core of Fitzhugh's argument was the point that blacks freed from slavery would be destroyed by competition with the Anglo-Saxons. "It is the boast of the Anglo-Saxon," wrote Fitzhugh, "that by the arts of peace under the influence of free trade he can march to universal conquest." Whether or not that could be accompanied, it was known by everyone that when Englishmen or Americans settled among "inferior races" they soon became the owners of the soil and "gradually extirpate or reduce to poverty the original owners. They are the wire-grass of nations." The law of nature which "enables and impels the stronger race to oppress and exterminate the weaker" operated between the stronger and weaker members in every society. If the Negro continued to be property he could be saved, for no people on earth loved and cherished property more than the Anglo-Saxons.

Although Fitzhugh's basic purpose was to defend slavery, he was clearly casting his arguments within the framework of the new scientific and political "realism" regarding race. "The Indian, like the savage races of Canaan, is doomed to extermination," he wrote, "and those who most sympathize with his fate would be the first to shoot him if they lived on the frontier." Under God's direction some races were exterminated, some were enslaved: "This is all right, because it is necessary." Southern defenders of slavery were convinced that the free black population was falling prey to disease and mental illness. "Like the aboriginies of this country," said Representative Seaborn James of Georgia about the free Negroes in 1847, "they will dwindle into numerical nothingness before the onward march of the Anglo-Saxon race."

It was generally agreed that the blacks could be improved only by an admixture of white blood, and this was clearly unthinkable; existing miscegenation in the South was generally ignored. Charles Brown of Pennsylvania said in the House of Representatives that complete equality could be brought about only by amalgamation of the races, but this was not "desired by any sane member of the European branch of the American family. It is too monstrous to think of, and would lead to a degeneracy of the whole people of this country as, in a brief period, to cause them to fall before some invading, superior, and purer northern nation or people, in the same way the Indians have fallen, and the mixed breeds south of us must be certainly hereafter fall before us." Representative Orlando B. Ficklin of Illinois discussed the impossibility of a multiracial society's existing without slavery. Free Negroes should be sent to Africa, for in the United States they were overpowered by "a superior race." Ficklin had no hesitation in speaking of his whole region: "The people of my State, (Illinois,) and the people of Indiana, and other of the northwestern States, have no more desire to see th negroes raised to an equality with the whites than the people of South Carolinia, Louisiana, or the most ultra of the slaveholding States."

Since the 1830s the pervasive quality of antiblack feeling had become obvious throughout the free states, even among many people who opposed the institution of slavery. Tocqueville commented that race prejudice appeared far stronger in the free than the slave states and said it was strongest of all in those states where there had never been slavery. "In the United States," he said, "people abolish slavery for the sake not of the Negroes but of the white men." When in the 1830s abolitionists appeared to be advocating both the end of slavery and the incorporation of the blacks into white society, antiabolitionist violence swept the northern cities. Only when it became clear in the 1840s that opposition to slavery and to slave expansion did not have to mean a defense of black equality did the violence die down.

When the Free-Soil party developed in the late 1840s, it included some who wanted an expansion of Negro rights, but it was also strongly influenced by those who thought the blacks inferior and wished to preserve the territories for the free white working man. The Free-Soilers were able to achieve more general support by omitting from their platform planks calling for black equality. Many of the abolitionists within the Free-Soil party were unable to escape the now all-pervasive belief in a superior white race. While the movement opposing the extension of slavery gained ground in the late 1840s and early 1850s, racial discrimination against blacks increased in many northern states; and although the Republican party contained many who defended Negro rights, its general political appeal depended on separating the attack on slave expansion from the equality issue. Debates on slave expansion in the 1850s revolved as much around the issue of preventing blacks from degrading new white areas as they did around the issue of the evils of slavery.

Discussion of slavery and the territories in the 1850s also clearly revealed the extent to which the new scientific "proofs" of racial inequality had permeated the attitudes of members of Congress. They consciously rejected the egalitarianism of the Revolutionary era, used as their authority the findings of the new science, and argued that there was a fixed relationship between races. Senator John Pettit of Indiana commented that in the Declaration of Independence and other documents it was maintained that all men were created equal: "I hold it to be a self-evident lie." God elected some to everlasting life, some to eternal damnation. This applied to nations and races as well as to individuals: "Let the races have their run. Let them in their turn be swept from the face of the earth." Racial mixture was ruinous to a nation. Other races had to be enslaved, controlled or exterminated, not regenerated: "You talk of carrying to all the races of the world your institutions, your religion, your arts and sciences. You can no more do it than you can give to all the races your color, form, and development." Representative Thomas L. Clingman of North Carolina told his colleagues that there had been a "prodigious advance in knowledge" since Jefferson's time. The whole doctrine of Negro equality had been exploded, "not merely in the South, but throughout the United States." Almost all "the great men of science" now maintained that the Negro race was distinct. Lemuel D. Evans of Texas demonstrated a knowledge of Nott, Bodichon, Latham, and Malte-Brun in discussing slavery in America, and Andrew P. Butler of South Carolina told the Senate that "inequality pervades the creation of this universe."

The possibility of black equality or black participation in republican government was rejected by most Northerners as well as most Southerners in the 1850s. Only a bloody war, total victory, and the occupation of the defeated South temporarily brought blacks within the political system, and the degradation of the blacks after 1876 stemmed naturally from the assumptions of the prewar years.

The degree to which American republicanism was interpreted as white Anglo-Saxon republicanism was also made clear in the arguments over the territories acquired from Mexico in 1848. The condemnations of the "debased" population of New Mexico, which had been common before 1846, were reiterated after American troops occupied the region. In the Senate in March 1848 Daniel Webster lamented the uselessness of New Mexico and its people -- a people "infinitely less elevated in mind and condition that the people of the Sandwich Islands." Senator James D. Westcott of Florida was appalled that some might so interpret the treaty of cession from Mexico, which made the inhabitants of New Mexico and California citizens of the United States, as to include the colored races. Echoing Calhoun he said "our governments were governments of the white race," and the political inferiority of blacks and Indians was "a fundamental principle of the Government." He was obviously perturbed, as were many others, that the Mexicans had permitted mixed bloods to participate as citizens in the government of their northern provinces. He objected to the possibility of being "compelled to receive not merely the white citizens of California and New Mexico, but the peons, negroes, and Indians of all sorts, the wild tribe of Camaches, the bug-and-lizard-eating 'Diggers,' and other half-monkey savages in those countries, as equal citizens of the United States." It soon became apparent that many "Anglo-Saxons" were prepared to accept only a few inhabitants of the Spanish West and Southwest as white.

The creation in 1850 of the territory of New Mexico as part of the general sectional compromise of that year was regarded with many misgivings. Thomas H. Bayley of Virginia told the House of Representatives in July 1850 that he would never agree to the admission of New Mexico as a state until the character and numbers of its population made it possible. To many this would happen only when American Anglo-Saxons predominated in the region. Territorial Governor William Carr in December 1852 told his legislative assembly at Sante Fe that it should "obey the obvious dictate of common sense" and not resist American Manifest Destiny. They should "embark upon the Anglo-Saxon wave which is now rolling from East to West, across the Continent, and ultimately prosper, instead of attempting to resist it, and perish." Just how they were to ride the wave was unclear.

TBC

Some more interesting info here.

"Most revealing of the general American attitudes regarding Spanish-American peoples in general were the reactions of Delegate Richard H. Weightman of New Mexico. Weightman, who had been born in Washington, D.C. and who was educated in Virginia and at the United States Military Academy, resented the assertions that non-Anglo-Saxons were unfit to participate in the American government. When President Fillmore pointed out that it would be dangerous to take Cuba because of the differences in the race and character of the inhabitants, Weightman challenged the view that "differences of race, of differences of language, or any other sort of differences, were detrimental to us as a people." He went on to defend his constituents, arguing that though a large majority had Spanish and Indian ancestry mingled generations before, they had no need to be "ashamed of their blood." If he had wanted to convince the people of New Mexico that the government and the people of the United States looked upon them with "repugnance and contempt," he said, he would have acted as this administration had acted. Weightman understood well the racial ingredients in the discussions of American expansion, and he said it was worthy of remark that "the argument about 'kindred races,' while it cuts off Cuban and all Mexican annexation, favors Canadian annexation." The American mission was all too clearly restricted to pure Caucasians, preferably Anglo-Saxon.

The early history of California also exhibited to the full the manner in which most Americans were determined that their political system should be reserved for white, Anglo-Saxons. The deabtes in the California constitutional convention in 1849 demonstrated in practical form the nature of the fears surrounding the opposition to the All-Mexico Movement in 1847. A basic problem in the discussion was the question of who could vote, for "Anglo-Saxons" were considerably perturbed at the number of Mexicans with Indian blood who had previously participated as citizens. When it was recommended that all male citizens of Mexico who had become citizens of the United States could vote, this was quickly countered by an amendment which aimed to restrict the suffrage to "white" male citizens. The proposer argued that his object was to exclude "the inferior races of mankind" -- particularly blacks and Indians. Blacks had few defenders, there was even an effort to exclude free Negroes from the state, and the problem of which Californians were "white" caused a bitter debate. Some wanted to exclude "wild Indians" but would let mixed Spanish and Indians vote; some even spoke of the Indians as an old noble race and argued in earlier nineteenth-century terms of the desirability of civilization and assimilation. But the eventual compromise left the possibility in special cases Indians might vote if approved by a two-thirds legislative majority. In practice blacks and obvious Indians were excluded. Spanish-Americans, of whatever blood, usually found themselves grossly discriminated against.

While the ex-Mexicans and their converts were degraded, the "wild" Indians of California were, in the 1850s, treated with an unsurpassed brutality. In the previous twenty years the Indians had been dehumanized. The hunting down and the murdering of the Indians in California was made easier by the popular assumption that the elimination of the Indians was inevitable. In 1851 the United States commissioners met with the Indians and obtained much of the state of California, but left the Indians some eight and one-half million acres in reservations. The Californians bitterly objected to this policy. They wanted more. They wanted everything. The California Assembly asked that the Indians be removed from the state and requested the California senators in Washington to work toward this end. In a minority report of the California Senate, J.J. Warner pointed out that the Indians had nowhere to go, and that the Californians might leave the Indians where they lived "were it not for that spirit of occupation and appropriation so irresistable to our race." If the United States would not seek to elevate the Indians, said Warner, it should at least tolerate their existence: "Has the love of gold blotted from our minds all feelings of compassion or justice?"

It was to no avail. The United States Senate rejected the treaties with the Californian Indians and left the Indians at the mercy of the Californians. Eventually in the 1850s smaller reservations were worked out, but in the meantime the prophecy uttered by California Governor Peter H. Burnett in his annual message of 1851 rapidly became reality: "That a war of extermination will continue to be waged between the two races until the Indian race becomes extinct, mut be expected; while we cannot anticipate this result with but painful regret, the inevitable destiny of the race is beyond the power and wisdom of man to avert." In the California of the 1850s the rhetoric of the 1840s became reality: an "inferior" Indian "race" was hastened to its grave as part of the expansive mission of the Anglo-Saxon race.

The rejection of "inferior" races as equal participants in the American republican system, combined with the assumptions of constant Anglo-Saxon growth, permeated American discussions of their world role in the years after the Mexican War. A minority argued that this meant that Americans would have to settle other regions, act as a ruling elite, and create a colonial empire or sister republics, but the majority thought that a vigorous commerical penetration of the globe would create immense wealth while allowing the Anglo-Saxons to outbreed and replace a variety of other races. The most pressing dilemmas existed in regard to those regions that were possible areas for immediate United States expansion. It was much easier to dream of transformation in the distant Pacific, where there was not immediate problem of control, than in Cuba or South America, where the United States might suddenly find itself in the possession of regions heavily populated by "inferior" races.

TBC

If the Confederacy had survived, there is a very good chance it would have set about conquering Central America.

"In the 1850s there were only two main groups that were willing to accept actual American colonial rule over "inferior" populations: the ardent supporters of slave expansion and the Democratic "Young America" group. The colonialists were never in a majority and were badly hurt by the linking of colonialism with the expansion of slavery. The movement promoting expansion and rule over Central and South America and the whole Caribbean region were seen by some ardent Southerners as a means of giving greater strength to the South within the union or even as the basis for a distinct southern nation. Many of those who advocated such a movement, though willing to accept immediate colonialism, often incorporated the more general idea that the existing mixed races would eventually fade away before the Anglo-Saxons and their black slaves. The whole of Latin America, like Mexico, was viewed as an area that had been ruined by racial mongrelization and subsequent misrule. "The law of progress -- of national growth, of very necessity -- that has carried us to the Gulf of Mexico and to the Pacific Ocean, will continue to impel us onward," wrote Northerner John Van Evrie in his defense of slavery in 1853, "and to restore the rapidly perishing civilization of the great tropical center of the continent." Advocates of expansion southward thought of a new civilization emerging, a civilization that in population and culture would recreate the southern plantation states.

As in the case of the annexation of Texas in the 1840s, some Southerners were prepared to argue that expansion to the South would save rather than destroy the union and ultimately would solve the problem of slavery. A kew figure in this argument was the naval scientist Matthew F. Maury of the National Observatory in Washington, D.C. Beleiving that the acquisition of additional contiguous territory from Mexico would break up the union, Maury placed his hopes in the development of a great new republic along the Amazon and its tributaries and on the commerical development of the whole Caribbean region. Maury depicted the Gulf of Mexico as a future Mediterranean clustered about by a white ruling class and an African slave population -- and with an isthmian canal and highways linking the oceans and giving the United States the commerce of Europe and Asia. In this scheme the valley of the Amazon would become of vital importance, and Maury asked who would people it: "Shall it be peopled with an imbecile and indolent people, or by a go ahead race that has energy and enterprise equal to subdue the forest and to develop and bring forth the vast resources that lay hidden there?" When the United States government obtained the right to navigate the Amazon, nothing would prevent "American citizens from the free, as well as from the slave States, from going there with their goods and chattels to settle and to revolutionize and republicanize and Anglo-Saxonize that valley." The new republic would provide a safety valve for southern states overpopulated with slaves.

Maury attempted to promote his Amazon project by arguing that blacks would be siphoned off to the South, but some Southerners in their enthusiasm for expansion into the whole Caribbean region completely forfeited the possibility of general national support by ardently espousing the expansion of the slave system as an end in itself and even by supporting the reopening of the African slave trade. Mexico, Central and South America, Cuba, and the West Indies were all talked of as the likely beneficiaries of an expanding southern slave system, and a variety of southern opportunists either proposed or led filibustering expeditions to take over parts of Latin America for a possible recreation of the southern system.

More than any other area Cuba attracted southern interest in the 1850s, and though the issue of acquiring the island was dominated by the sectional split between North and South, the controversy was also revealing of the constraints placed on American expansion by the new racial ideas. Since early in the century Cuba had been viewed in the United States as the one noncontiguous area that clearly belonged with the American system. Some congressmen had suggested obtaining Cuba even before the Mexican War began, and in the spring of 1848 the cabinet seriously began to discuss the purchase of the island. As in the case of Yucatan, the danger of the island's falling into the possession of England was raised by Polk as a reason for its acquisition. Robert J. Walker, as usual, favored any new increase in territory, but immediately problems arose that went beyond the question of the extension of slavery. Cave Johnson, the postmaster general and a Tennessean, "had objections to incorporating the Spanish population of Cuba into our Union." After considerable discussion the cabinet decided to attempt secret negotiations to buy Cuba for one hundred million dollars. Secretary of State James Buchanan went along with this plan, although he had qualms both about the sectional implications of the purchase and about how the population of the island would be governed. His solution was that the island would have to "be Americanized, -- as Louisiana had been," but he never explained how he expected to get enough white Anglo-Saxon Americans to Cuba.

Polk's effort to buy Cuba failed -- the Spanish did not want to sell -- but there was considerable American interest in the acquisition of the island throughout the 1850s. Much of this interest was in the South, particularly after the Kansas-Nebraska Act preciptated vigorous debate on the subject of the expansion of slavery, but there was also northern support. In the North the massive stumbling block to the acquisition of the island was the enhancement of slave power, but in both North and South the presence of a numerous, supposedly unassimilable population brought resistance to expansion in that area. Northern Free Soiler James Sheperd Pike expressed a common opinion succinctly in 1853 when he wrote that the United States did not want a territory that was filled "with black, mixed, degraded, and ignorant, or inferior races." Northerners did not want a slave empire in Cuba, but they also had no desire to see fre Cubans as citizens of the American Republic.

Even in the South, where it could be seen that the acquisition of Cuba would provide a major addition to southern power, considerable doubt was expressed about annexing a free population unfit to enter the American union. It was argued in De Bow's Review in 1853 that although it might be necessary to take the island to forestall England or France, annexation should not be eagerly pursued. Cuba, the author said, "is unlike Texas in almost every respect. Texas was in great degree uninhabited. Cuba is densly populated." If Cuba were taken the North would insist on taking Canada. The author also challenged those who believed that the Anglo-Saxons could predominate on the island: "Cuba is now, and will perhaps always be, in the hands of the Spanish race, which can never be assimilated to our own." This last assumption was, in a later article, described as an "insuperable" obstacle to the acquisition of the island. Cuba was too densly populated to be "Americanized," and Americanization consisted not in changing institutions but in changing the racial characteristics of the population. Even if there had been no sectional quarrel in the 1850s, there would have been fundamental objections to the annexation of Cuba.

In his annual message, submitted in December 1852, President Millard Fillmore summed up the Cuban dilemma. He admitted the grave sectional implications of the acquisition, but he also went to the crux of the racial problem: "Were this Island comparatively destitute of inhabitants, or occupied by a kindred race, I should regard it, if voluntarily ceded by Spain, as a most desirable acquistion. But, under existing circumstances, I should look upon its incorporation into our Union as a very hazardous measure. It would bring into the Confederacy a population of a different national stock, speaking of different language, and not likely to harmonize with the other members."

While expansion to the south and the Caribbean posed questions of racial amalgamation or colonialism that were not solved by the ending of the slavery issue, there were practically no objections on racial grounds to the annexation of Canada. It was clearly understood that Canada could be integrated within the American system, and any undesirable French-Canadian elements overwhelmed by Americans who would move in to join their Anglo-Saxon brethren. Any drive to obtain Canada in the 1850s was, of course, slowed by southern fears of additions to the free states, but the ultimate problem was British power. Unfortunately for the Americans in the second half of the nineteenth century, the area that best fitted their ideal for future expansion -- sparsely populated with an existing Anglo-Saxon influence -- was held by the strongest power in the world. Here they had to put their faith in the inevitability of American progress and success in the growth of the American population.

Representative Hiram Bell of Ohio stated the case for Canada in 1853 when he opposed the annexation of Cuba. After pointing out the deficiencies of the Cuban population, he said that there "is a country and there is a people competant for self-government." This was Canada, an area of 2,652,000 people, "bone, as it were, of our bone, flesh of our flesh, deriving their origin from the same Anglo-Saxon source." Even De Bow's Review admitted that Canada offered much more for the United States than areas occupied by less desirable populations. One writer in the review in 1850 admitted that there would be a sectional problem if Canada were annexed for "free soilism," but he said that in general the South would support the masure if it were simply to extend our territory. "Aside from slavery and protection," he said, "we believe that a majority of the American people would be in favor of the annexation of Canada."

The Young Americans would have been happy to take Canada, but unlike most other Americans they would also have been happy to take a variety of other areas. In the early 1850s the Young Americans became a contentious group within the Democratic party. They poured scorn on "the old fogies," and stressed "sympathy for the liberals of Europe, the expansion of the American republic southward and westward, and the grasping of the magnificent purse of the commerce of the Pacific." Their main spokesmen were George O. Sanders of Kentucky and William Correy of Ohio, but the group also enlisted support from more prominent politicians, including Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois. Sanders, who ardently defended a militant expansionist position, took over the Democratic Review in 1852 and turned it into the organ of Young America. In the presidential race of that year the Young Americans placed their hopes in Stephen A. Douglas. They were sadly disappointed that Douglas did not win the Democratic nomination, and that they received no significant recognition after the Democratic victory.

The leaders of the Young Americans did not think of themselves as Anglo-Saxonists. They delighted in twisting the lion's tail and argued that British power should be reduced and that the United States should resist British pretensions. They did not want the Americans to be the supreme Anglo-Saxons, but a rather unique blend of European Caucasians; the Caucasus, said a writer in the Democratic Review in October 1852, was the "land of heroism and adventurous spirit, where man has attained the highest degree of external perfection, and whence the principal nations of Europe are supposed to derive their descent." Yet like others who defended a distinct "American" race while finding it difficult to accept pure Anglo-Saxonism, the Young American race all the attributes usually given to the Anglo-Saxons. George Fitzhugh saw the Young Americans, for all their talk of universal regeneration, as part of the Anglo-Saxon movement. He said that the congressional members of Young America "boast that the Anglo-Saxon race is manifestly destined to eat out all other races, as the wire-grass destroys and takes the place of all other grasses. Nay, they allege this competitive process is going on throughout all nature, the strong are everywhere devouring the weak; the hardier plants and animals destroying the weaker, and the superior races of man exterminating the inferior."

The Young Americans often used a rhetoric of republicanism and world freedom, but the general tone of the Democratic Review while it was under their influence revealed the extent to which the envisaged a world dominated by a white American race. Lip service was paid to old ideas of regeneration, but the arguments were blended with a hard-core belief in innate superiority and future American world dominance. That Americans needed to be fully aware of their strength was the theme of an article on Central America in the spring of 1853, for "it depends on them and them alone, whether the tide of Christianity, civilization and Liberty continues to advance on this great continent, or again recedes before the reaction of barbarism." Savages were fighting for dominion in Yucatan, and Indian and mongrel races greatly outnumbered the whites in the whole of Central and South America. These whites badly needed protection; such was their imbecility . . . such their indolence, weakness and degeneracy" that they needed to be shielded by "a more wise and energetic race." The key to the relative vigor and resources of nations, argued the author, was in their populations, not simply in numbers, but in "the moral, physical and intellectual qualities of a people that form the basis of their superiority." The British Empire was taken to task in the article because it was not "one people, of one race, one language and one God." The United States had the strength of racial, political, and religious unity: "they conquer to set free, and every accession of territory is only an extension of civilization and liberty.

My favorite Anglo-Saxon Nordicist, Lothrop Stoddard, on the racial dynamics of The Great War:

CHAPTER IX
THE SHATTERING OF WHITE SOLIDARITY

THE instinctive comity of the white peoples is, as I have already said, perhaps the greatest constant of history. It is the psychological basis of white civilization. Cohesive instinct is as vital to race as gravitation is to matter. Without them, atomic disintegration would alike result. In speaking of race-instinct, I am not referring merely to the ethnic theories that have been elaborated at various times. Those theories were, after all, but attempts to explain intellectually the urge of that profound emotion known to sociologists as the "consciousness of kind."

White race-consciousness has been of course perturbed by numberless internal frictions, which have at times produced partial inhibitions of unitary feeling. Nevertheless, when really faced by non-white opposition, white men have in the past instinctively tended to close their ranks against the common foe. One of the Great War's most deplorable results has been an unprecedented weakening of white solidarity which, if not repaired, may produce the most disastrous consequences.

During the nineteenth century the sentiment of white solidarity was strong. The great explorers and empire-builders who spread white ascendancy to the ends of the earth felt that they were apostles of their race and civilization as well as of a particular country. Rivalries might be keen and colonial boundary questions acute; nevertheless, in their calmer moments, the white peoples felt that the expansion of one white nation buttressed the expansion of all.

Professor Pearson undoubtedly voiced the spirit of the day when he wrote (about 1890) that it would be well "if European statesmen could understand that the wars which carry desolation into civilized countries are allowing the lower races to recruit their numbers and strength. Two centuries hence it may be matter of serious concern to the world if Russia has been displaced by China on the Amoor, if France has not been able to colonize North Africa, or if England is not holding India. For civilized men there can be only one fatherland, and whatever extends the influence of those races that have taken their faith from Palestine, their laws of beauty from Greece, and their civil law from Rome, ought to be matter of rejoicing to Russian, German, Anglo-Saxon, and Frenchman alike." (1 Pearson, pp. 14-15.)

The progress of science also fortified white race-consciousness with its sanctions. The researches of European scholars identified the founders of our civilization with a race of tall, white-skinned barbarians, possessing regular features, brown or blond hair, and light eyes. This was, of course, what we now know as the Nordic type. At first the problem was ill understood, the tests applied being language and culture rather than physical characteristics. For these reasons the early "Caucasian" and "Aryan" hypotheses were self-contradictory and inadequate. Nevertheless, the basis was sound, and the effects on white popular psychology were excellent.

Particularly good were the effects upon the peoples predominantly of Nordic blood. Obviously typifying as they did the prehistoric creators of white civilization, Nordics everywhere were strengthened in consciousness of genetic worth, feeling of responsibility for world-progress, and urge toward fraternal collaboration. The supreme value of Nordic blood was clearly analyzed by the French thinker Count Arthur de Gobineau as early as 1854 (His book "De l'Inégalité des Races Humaines" first appeared at that date.) (albeit Gobineau employed the misleading "Aryan" terminology) and his thesis was subsequently elaborated by many other writers, notably by Englishmen, Germans, and Scandinavians.

The results of all this were plainly apparent by the closing years of the nineteenth century. Quickened Nordic race-consciousnees played an important part in stimulating Anglo-American fraternization , and induced acts like the Oxford Scholarship legacy of Cecil Rhodes. The trend of this movement, though crosscut by nationalistic considerations, was clearly in the direction of a Nordic entente - a Pan-Nordic syndication of power for the safeguarding of the race-heritage and the harmonious evolution of the whole white world. It was a glorious aspiration, which, had it been realized, would have averted Armageddon.

Unfortunately the aspiration remained a dream. The ill-balanced tendencies of the late nineteenth century were against it, and they ultimately prevailed. The abnormal growth of national-imperialism, in particular, wrought fatal havoc. The exponents of imperialistic propagandas like Pan-Germanism and Pan-Slavism put forth literally boundless pretensions, planning the domination of the entire planet by their special brand of national-imperialism. Such men had scant regard for race-lines. All who stood outside their particular nationalistic group were vowed to the same subjection.

Indeed, the national-imperialists presently seized upon race teachings, and prostituted them to their own ends. A notable example of this is the extreme Pan-German propaganda of Houston Stewart Chamberlain (Especially as expounded in Chamberlain's chief work, "Die Grundlagen des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts" ("The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century").) and his fellows. Chamberlain makes two cardinal assumptions: he conceives modern Germany as racially almost purely Nordic; and he regards all Nordics outside the German linguistic-cultural group as either unconscious or renegade Teutons who must at all costs be brought into the German fold. To any one who understands the scientific realities of race, the monstrous absurdity of these assumptions is instantly apparent. The fact is that modern Germany, far from being purely Nordic, is mainly Alpine in race. Nordic blood preponderates only in the northwest, and is merely veneered over the rest of Germany, especially in the upper classes. While the Germania of Roman days was unquestionably a Nordic land, it has been computed that of the 70,000,000 inhabitants of the German Empire in 1914, only 9,000,000 were purely Nordic in character. This displacement of the German Nordics since classic times is chiefly due to Germany's troubled history, especially to the horrible Thirty Years' War which virtually annihilated the Nordics of south Germany. This racial displacement has wrought correspondingly profound changes in the character of the German people.

The truth of the matter is, of course, that the Pan-Germans were thinking in terms of nationality instead of race, and that they were using pseudo-racial arguments as camouflage for essentially political ends. The pity of it is that these arguments have had such disastrous repercussions in the genuine racial sphere. The late war has not only exploded Pan-Germanism, it has also discredited Nordic race-feeling, so unjustly confused by many persons with Pan-German nationalistic propaganda. Such persons should remember that the overwhelming majority of Nordics live outside of Germany, being mainly found in Scandinavia, the Anglo-Saxon countries, northern France, the Netherlands, and Baltic Russia. To let Teuton propaganda gull us into thinking of Germany as the Nordic fatherland is both a danger and an absurdity.

While Pan-Germanism was mainly responsible for precipitating Armageddon with all its disastrous consequences, it was Russian Pan-Slavism which dealt the first shrewd blow to white solidarity. Toward the close of the nineteenth century, Pan-Slavism's "Eastern" wing led by Prince Ukhtomsky and other chauvinists of his ilk, went so far in its imperialistic obsession as actually to deny Russia's white blood. These Pan-Slavists boldly proclaimed the morbid, mystical dogma that Russia was Asiatic, not European, and thereupon attempted to seize China as a lever for upsetting, first the rest of Asia, and then the non-Russian white world - elegantly described as "the rotten west." The white Power immediately menaced was, of course, England, who in acute fear for her Indian Empire, promptly riposted by allying herself with Japan. Russia was diplomatically isolated and militarily beaten in the Russo-Japanese War. Thus the Russo-Japanese War, that destroyer of white prestige whose ominous results we have already noted, was precipitated mainly by the reckless short-sightedness of white men themselves.

A second blow to white solidarity was presently administered - this time by England in concluding her second alliance-treaty with Japan. The original alliance, signed in 1902, was negotiated for a definite, limited objective - the checkmating of Russia's overweening imperialism. Even that instrument was dangerous, but under the circumstances it was justifiable and inevitable. The second alliance-treaty, however, was so general and far-reaching in character that practically all white men in the Far East, including most emphatically Englishmen themselves, pronounced it a great disaster.

Meanwhile, German imperialism was plotting even deadlier strokes at white race-comity, not merely by preparing war against white neighbors in Europe, but also by ingratiating itself with the Moslem East and by toying with schemes for building up a black military empire in central Africa.

Lastly, France was actually recruiting black, brown, and yellow hordes for use on European battle-fields; while Italy, by her buccaneering raid on Tripoli, outraged Islam's sense of justice and strained its patience to the breaking-point....

...
Source (http://www.churchoftrueisrael.com/stoddard/rtc_2-09.html)

Captain Ult... are you prodigal son?

The truth of the matter is, of course, that the Pan-Germans were thinking in terms of nationality instead of race, and that they were using pseudo-racial arguments as camouflage for essentially political ends. The pity of it is that these arguments have had such disastrous repercussions in the genuine racial sphere. This is very true. Its still true today. These people are not motivated so much by racialism as they are by national chauvinism.

Captain Ult... are you prodigal son?

Yes.

"Most were willing to tighten the general bonds of Caucasian unity when confronted by nonwhite races, but there were also indications that some would like to foster more exclusive Anglo-Saxon unity by ending the traditional rivalry with the government of Great Britain. If only England would change her policies, Representative Lemuel Evans of Texas said in 1856, then "the two grand branches of Anglo-Saxon stock, the one pressing from the Bay of Bengal, and the other from the golden gulf of California, would meet in some beautiful group of sunny isles in the Pacific ocean, and together clasp their united hands in love and peace around the globe." The same thought had been expressed in 1850 by the American minister in England, Abbot Lawrence. "If the Anglo-Saxons of Great Britain and the United States are true to each other, and to the cause of human freedom," he wrote, "they may not only give their language, but their laws to the world, and defy the power of all despots on the face of the Globe."

The hope that an Anglo-Saxon union would bring a new Roman age to the world was expressed regularly from the middle of the nineteenth century on. It never overcame the idea that the American Anglo-Saxon race would triumph over all other peoples, nor did it end with attacks on the British abuse of power, but many Americans took pride in English success as reinforcing the belief that race was all-important. One writer in 1850 defended the importance of a strong American navy and conjured up a dream of the "ANGLO-NORMAN RACE . . .with its transatlantic millions coming to the rescue of its German kindred and European liberty." In this dream the combined Anglo-Norman fleets swept the French and the Russians from the ocean and based peace on the principle "that no power on earth should build dockyards or support navies, except the Anglo-Norman race, its kindred and allies." The vision of an Anglo-American future did not prevent the writer from suggesting that the United States should eliminate British influence in the Caribbean by taking Cuba.

The most influential politician to discuss a future triumph of the combined English races at any length was Polk's ex-secretary of the treasury, Robert J. Walker, who in the 1850s still thought of himself as a future president. Walker visited England in the early 1850s and discussed the whole matter of Anglo-Saxon destiny in a series of letters with British imperialist Arthur Davies, who had become interested in the possible union of the United States and the British Empire. The correspondence was published as a pamphlet in London in 1852. Davies said he firmly believed in the sentiment that Walker had expressed in their conversations: "That a time shall come when the human race shall become as one family, and that the predominant of our Anglo-Celt-Sax-Norman stock shall guide the nations to that result." In his letters Walker quickly moved the center of power from Europe to the New World. There should be not question of the United States becoming part of the British Empire -- if an amalgamation took place it would be by the British becoming part of the American union. Such a merging "would unite in one confederacy, more than two hundred millions of people, each State by separate State legislation taking charge of its own local concerns, governed by a race speaking the same language, of superior intellect and energy, covering now nearly one half the territory of the globe, and diffusing itself gradually over the remainder." He quickly pointed out that such a country would secure the commerce as well as the peace of the world. In time "this great confederacy would ultimately embrace the globe we inhabit." Walker's tone in these letters was that of the Christian regeneration of the world, but what he was actually describing was the expansion and rise to supreme power of the Anglo-Saxons.

. . .

As the white gradually eliminated all other races from America, the new Roman age would be brought about by rapid expansion. Canada and everything down to the isthmus of Panama should be annexed quickly, although the non-Teutonic descent of some of the inhabitants of the former and the most mostly Indian population of the latter would present problems. This expansion was, however, only the beginning. Hawaii would soon be American, and the authors thought that Australia should be encouraged to become independent of England and enter th union by a "little stretch of the Monroe Doctrine." England and her colonies would also eventually be annexed to the United States, for the Anglican empire was essentially oceanic and America its natural center. Thus England, though she did not know it, was busily extending America's Anglo-Saxon empire. With the American continent and Australia united, the "annexation of the remaining countries will be a question of time, regulated by American convenience." English was to be the universal tongue: "Nothing is more certain than that the English language will extend all over the earth, and will shortly become the common medium of thought -- the language of the world."

Fade, if it were possible, would you annex Canada, or have a desire to do so? I thought Canada was basically an American province to begin with.

I would leave that up to them. Canada is a very dysfunctional country because of Quebec. That's one thing I noticed when I was in Canada. Everything was in French and English.

Being pan-British as I am in my geopolitical views, I think all anglosaxon countries should cooperate to a greater degree regarding foreign policy, military and economic strategies. I'm not interested in a political annexation into the current American sphere as it exists, but I would have no objection were America to serve as the centre for anglosaxon politics, by virtue of its numbers and various successes. We're all the same people at core, and there's no reason we can't work in unison toward the benefit of our collective expansion. Unlike similar inanities people routinely deliver substituting 'anglosaxon' for something like 'humanity', we actually do comprise a functional and mature community that can identify common cause at a very complex level.

I think there is also some value in distancing ourselves from the "American" popular culture which flourishes now: being able to point to it, and examine how far it's degenerated American society. The right wing in this country is for full cultural association with America, not for the reasons I am, but out of a sycophantic desire to be accepted. That is not a healthy way to go about the type of unity I'm after. Divorced from my longterm goals regarding said unity, I think it a good strategy in the meantime to point out that these rightwingers are not interested in the cultural health of their country, and only want to direct us that way to make things a bit easier economically. In short, we Americans and Canadians need to bolster our self-identification as anglosaxons independently before we can reach that level of effective unity.

I'm also for constitutional monarchy, but that issue can be left aside for now. I have more to say but not much time right now.

Some more info here on Jefferson's interest in the Anglo-Saxons.

"The vision of heroic, freedom-loving Anglo-Saxon England permeates the arguments of the Revolutionary generation, but it is in the writings of Thomas Jefferson that the theme appears most strongly, and he best reveals the form in which the myth was transmitted to future generations. Although Jefferson read deeply in the works of the classic parliamentary propagandists of the seventeenth century, he predeliction was not for standard Whig interpretations of the period after 1688 but for those radical Whigs who argued that many of the corruptions introduced into the English constitution after the Norman Conquest still existed in the eighteenth century. The Anglo-Saxons, thought Jefferson, had lived under laws based on the natural rights of man; after 1066 these rights had been eroded by the impositions of kings, clerics, lawyers, and by the whole system of feudalism.

Jefferson never lost the admiration for Anglo-Saxon England that he had gained studying law and politics in the 1760s and early 1770s. Throughout his life he was fascinated by the Anglo-Saxon language, and he wrote a simplified grammar in the hope of making it more accessible to American students. He included Anglo-Saxon as part of his curriculum for the University of Virginia, because, he wrote, "As the histories and laws left us in that type and dialect, must be the text-books of the reading of the learners, they will imbibe with the language their free principles of government." Jefferson's interest in the language continued throughout his life. As late as 1825, when he was eighty-one, he commented that the study of Anglo-Saxon "is a hobby whihc too often runs away with me."

The depth of Jefferson's reading can be seen not only from his later arguments and the cast of his mind, but from the overt evidence of his Commonplace Book. In these collections of quotations and extracts Jefferson goes beyond the English legal historians to display a fascination with the history of the northern nations in the years before the Anglo-Saxon settlement of England. This interest in the Teutonic peoples generally, which was becoming of increasing importance in England and on the Continent in the late eighteenth century, was eventually to be an important fact in transforming an emphasis on Anglo-Saxon society and institutions into an emphasis on the racial group to which the Anglo-Saxons supposedly belonged. Later in his life Jefferson referred to Tacitus as "the first writer in the world without a single exception," but Jefferson also delved deeply into Simon Pelloutier's Historie des Celtes, Robert Molesworth's An Account of Denmark, and Paul Henri Mallet's Historie de Dannemarc.

Jefferson was particularly intrigued by the problem of the actual location in Germany of the tribes that had invaded England, and he copied large sections from those authors who had attempted to describe specific homelands on the European mainland. When he read of the original Saxon homeland in the Cimbric Chersonesus of Jutland and Schleswig-Holstein, this was no idle reading and copying. Later, in 1784, when he proposed and ordinance to create new states in the Mississippi Valley, he suggested the name Cherronesus for the Denmark-like area between Lakes Huron and Michigan -- not a name of the new America but an echo of a name of the old Germanic tribes. In the time of the later Roman Empire, Jefferson believed, northern Europe was inhabited by tribes who lived close to nature and had a form of government that reflected the natural rights of man. Some of these tribes, generally known as the Anglo-Saxons, left northern Europe in the middle of the fifth century and established in England a form of government based on popular sovereignty. In his stress on the attributes of the particular peoples involved in creating Saxon free institutions, Jefferson was foreshadowing the later interest in the racial origin of Anglo-Saxon accomplishments.

Jefferson argued not for wholesale innovation but for a return to the principles of English government in the Anglo-Saxon period. He rejected Coke's view that the common law had survived unscathed and free since Anglo-Saxon times and maintained that the law itself had been corrupted by the Norman Conquest. The Conquest and subsequent oppression led to the curtailing of the natural rights that had once been protected by Anglo-Saxon law and institutions. Jefferson concluded that in a variety of areas, ranging from land tenures to political democracy, the English had failed in their efforts since 1066 to restore the freedoms that had existed before that date. His sources for this information were many and varied. Few of the main Whig and Real Whig accounts of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries escaped his attention. To the end of his life he believed Rapin's history of England was the best, and he also thought highly of Catherine Macaulay. From Scottish jurist Lord Kames, Jefferson imbibed the broad principles of a natural rights philosophy, and from Kames's British Antiquities he obtained yet another view of the nature of Anglo-Saxon democracy. This ideal view of Anglo-Saxon political democracy was reinforced and broaded by his reading of the works of Henry Care, Anthony Ellis, James Burgh, and a variety of other writers. Jefferson also readily accepted the arguments of Sir Henry Spelman and Sir John Dalrymple that feudalism came into England only with the Norman Conquest. To Jefferson this was of particular importance, for h came to believe that Anglo-Saxon freedom had been based on land held by innumerable farmers in fee simple. Nothing gave him more pleasure in Revolutionary Virginia than his work for the abolition of primogeniture and entail.

The ideal Anglo-Saxon England that Jefferson believed in was a land of small political units and a land in which local rule prevailed in most concerns. In its early form there was an elective king, annual parliaments, a system of trial by jury, and land held in fee simple. Even the clergy did not batten themselves upon society until a later date. Near the end of his life, in 1825, Jefferson contrasted the Saxon and the Norman conquests of England, "the former exhibiting the genuine form and political principles of the people constituting the nation, and founded in the rights of man; the latter built on conquest and physical force, not at all affecting moral rights, nor even assented to by the free will of the vanquished. The battle of Hastings, indeed, was lost, but the natural rights of the nation were not staked on the events of a single battle. Their will to recover the Saxon constitution continued unabated." This view of Arthur's England as a Camelot of brave knights, fair ladies, and magic swords, but it persisted in English and American thinking long after Jefferson's death.

Anglo-Saxon studies represented no abstract academic exercise for Jefferson. When in the years from 1773 to 1776 he established first and American and then a European reputation, his arguments impressed upon his contemporaries the extent to which he believed that the Saxon government and way of life should become a model for the new America. His Summary View of the Rights of British America, published in 1774, suggested that the king should be reminded than in coming to America the emigrants from England had exercised the same natural right under which "their Saxon ancestors" had left the woods of northern Europe and settled in England. Their mother country had exerted no claim on them in Britain, and there was nothing to distinguish the emigration of Englishmen to North America from that of the Saxons to England. Even the land in America was not held from the king. Land in America, like land in Saxon England, should be completely free from feudalism.

It should come as no surprise that a large section of Jefferson's Declaration of Independence echoed the old seventeenth-century argument that a usurping king had taken away immemorial liberties, and in the months following the Declaration Jefferson clearly revealed the historically based Revolution that he had in mind. In August 1776 John Adams told his wife about the work of the committee which was suggesting inscriptions for the Great Seal of the United States: "Mr. Jefferson," he wrote, "proposed the children of Israel in the wilderness, led by a cloud by day and pillar of fire by night; and on the other side, Hengist and Horsa, the Saxon chiefs from whom we claim the honor of being descended, and whose political principles and form of government we have assumed." On the previous day Jefferson had written: "Has not every restitution of the antient Saxon laws had happy effects? Is it not better now that we return at once into that happy system of our ancestors, the wisest and most perfect ever yet devised by the wit of man, as it stood before the 8th century?"

When in the summer of 1776 Jefferson returned to Virginia, he wanted to sweep away the vestiges of a feudal land system, establish religious freedom, set up a general system of education, and revise the entire legal structure. Here was Jefferson at his happiest, combing the law books of a thousand years to restore a system he thought had made men happier and freer. For Jefferson the abolition of entail and primogeniture was a sweeping away of Norman tyranny. Even in his bill for religious freedom in Virginia, he thought he was helping to restore the purity of Anglo-Saxon England before 1066, for with William the Conquerer had come the priests who added to political tyranny.

Late in his life, Jefferson wrote to thank English radical Major John Cartwright for his book on the English constitution. Cartwright, he said, had deduced the constitution from "its rightful root, the Anglo-Saxon." That constitution "was violated and set at naught by Norman force." Jefferson told Cartwright that he hoped Virginia would divide its counties into wards of about six miles square, for these "would answer to the hundreds of your Saxon Alfred." In each of these wards Jefferson wanted an elementary school, a militia company, a justice of the peace, a constable, responsibility for the poor and roads, local police, an election of jurors, and a "folk-house" for elections. "Each ward," wrote Jefferson, "would thus be a small republic within itself." His Anglo-Saxon dream stayed with him until the end of his life. In 1825 he wrote to an English member of Parliament regarding England and the United States that "these two nations holding cordially together, have nothing to fear from the united world. They will be the models for regenerating the condition of man, the sources from which representative government is to flow over the whole earth."

In the very act of revolution the Revolutionary generation believed they were reinforcing their links with their Anglo-Saxon ancestors while separating from the government of Great Britain. Jefferson was exceptional in the depth of his scholarly interest and belief in a free Anglo-Saxon past, but a belief in the free Anglo-Saxons was part of the common currency of political and constitutional arguments in these years. In this regard, as in so many others, Jefferson was able to distill in memorable language the essence of the general beliefs of his contemporaries.

When in 1790 James Wilson of Pennsylvania delivered a famous series of law lecture in Philidelphia, he revealed the extent to which the Anglo-Saxon myth had permeated American thought. Wilson was no ardent Saxonist like Jefferson. He believed that the common law had diverse origins -- Greek, Roman, British, Norman, Saxon -- but there was no escaping the Saxon interpretation of America's roots. His conclusion was that the original general frame of the British constitution, much altered in contemporary England, but "bearing . . . a degree of resemblance" to some o the constitutions lately formed in the United States, was "of Saxon architecture." All the respected contemporary scholarship in England and the United States supported this argument. American common law, he argued, more resembled that of Anglo-Saxon England than that of the Normans. American lawyer-politicians, a numerous and dominant breed, ensured that in the early years of the new nation the general historical belief in the free Anglo-Saxon past would be reinforced by numerous examples drawn from the roots of English and American law.

The religious and political struggles and the historical rewriting of over two hundred years had given the English and the Americans a historical perspective that left them particularly susceptible to racial explanations of the course of history. Both the English and the Americans believed that their ancestors had devised free political institutions over a thousand years before in England, and that even earlier a spirit of freedom had existed in the woods of Germany among the peoples from whom the Anglo-Saxons were descended. In explaining this phenomenon Jefferson and his contemporaries were restricted by an Enlightenment view of a general human capacity for progress. They admired the Anglo-Saxons, but they generally avoided making unfavorable comparisons with other peoples. Yet by the time of the American Revolution, a variety of new tendancies in European thought were preparing the ground for a whole new explanation for what appeared to be the remarkable persistence of free, democratic government among the Anglo-Saxons. The earlier explanations of the Germanic origin of the supposed Saxon love of freedom were now to receive extensive elaboration. The old Anglo-Saxon myth was ultimately to appear innocuous alongside an overpowering Aryan myth which helped transform respect for Anglo-Saxon institutions into a new racial interpretation of English and American success. The way for this new myth was being prepared in the second half of the eighteenth century; in the nineteenth century the Americans were to share in the discovery that the secret of Saxon success lay not in the institutions but in the blood.

Thank you for the choice articles fade. I'm tempted to go on in depth on some of the finer points made in them. However, I don't want to become a lounge lizard so I won't.

http://www.lplizard.com/lounge/chair.GIF


I'll just say I identify mostly with the Celto-Anglo(e)-Saxon-Norman or Anglo(e)-Celto-Saxon-Norman stock mentioned. Provided of course and undoubtedly with some ancient British dinstinctive potash in there.


"That a time shall come when the human race shall become as one family, and that the predominant of our Anglo-Celt-Sax-Norman stock shall guide the nations to that result."


Also, Benton's simplified Celto-Anglo-Saxon to some degree. I don't necessarily just identify as simply Anglo-Saxon. Whatever, I'm not up to splitting hairs to absurdity again here. It's pointless and redundant to keep parsing hairs in the lounge.


Benton style Allen Edmonds anyone ?


http://www.pinnacleshoes.com/image/dresscasual/benton.gif