Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism

by Reginald Horsman

Overview

American myths about national character tend to overshadow the historical realities. Reginald Horsman’s book is the first study to examine the origins of racialism in America and to show that the belief in white American superiority was firmly ensconced in the nation’s ideology by 1850.

The author deftly chronicles the beginnings and growth of an ideology stressing race, basic stock, and attributes in the blood. He traces how this ideology shifted from the more benign views of the Founding Fathers, which embraced ideas of progress and the spread of republican institutions for all. He finds linkages between the new, racialist ideology in America and the rising European ideas of Anglo-Saxon, Teutonic, and scientific ideologies of the early nineteenth century. Most importantly, however, Horsman demonstrates that it was the merging of the Anglo-Saxon rhetoric with the experience of Americans conquering a continent that created a racialist philosophy. Two generations before the “new” immigrants began arriving in the late nineteenth century, Americans, in contact with blacks, Indians, and Mexicans, became vociferous racialists.

In sum, even before the Civil War, Americans had decided that peoples of large parts of this continent were incapable of creating or sharing in efficient, prosperous, democratic governments, and that American Anglo-Saxons could achieve unprecedented prosperity and power by the outward thrust of their racialism and commercial penetration of other lands. The comparatively benevolent view of the Founders of the Republic had turned into the quite malevolent ideology that other peoples could not be “regenerated” through the spread of free institutions.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780674948051
Publisher:	Harvard
Publication date:	10/15/1986
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	380
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.25(h) x (d)

Table of Contents

Introduction

I. European and Colonial Origins

1. Liberty and the Anglo-Saxons

2. Aryans Follow the Sun

3. Science and Inequality

4. Racial Anglo-Saxonism in England

II. American Destiny

5. Providential Nation

6. The Other Americans

7. Superior and Inferior Races

8. The Dissemination of Scientific Racialism

9. Romantic Racial Nationalism

III. An Anglo-Saxon Political Ideology

10. Racial Destiny and the Indians

11. Anglo-Saxons and Mexicans

12. Race, Expansion, and the Mexican War

13. A Confused Minority

14. Expansion and World Mission

Conclusion

Notes

Index

Editorial Reviews

The book offers an insightful perspective stressing the unity of racist thought… Well written and organized, Race and Manifest Destiny confronts an important subject in western history, yet never loses sight of the broader themes of the American past.

Western Historical Quarterly

The most lucidly written, comprehensive portrayal of antebellum racial thought to date.

The Yale Review

A well-documented, in-depth study of antebellum racial thought which challenges the older view of historians that racial Anglo-Saxonism was not intellectually ascendant in American thought before the Civil War… A very important contribution.

Indiana Magazine of History

A work of monumental scope. [Horsman] has permanently changed the accepted scholarly understanding of racial Anglo-Saxonism.

Reviews in American History

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