The period 1775 to 1865 marked the emergence of Anglo-Saxons, a group that claimed to be appointed by God, fate and life to spreading the principles of personal sovereignty, freedom, and democracy all over the world. Stephenson draws the sacred basis of the Anglo-Saxons to the Puritan restoration of the exodus account (3). Certainly, the Puritans, just like the Israelites, regarded themselves as God’s chosen people.
They said that they had an agreement with God that He would be on their side, and He would guide them to the promised terrain, as long as they adored Him only and kept his commandments. Anglo-Saxons left to a new world similar to how the Israelites left Egypt for Israel.
They claimed to be God’s outstanding folks who were distinct from others. As a result, they stimulated the growth of race and class in the United States, which particularly led to the enslavement of the inferiors. This paper discusses the role of race and class in America until the year 1865 by mainly examining the activities of the Anglo-Saxons.
The American Anglo-Saxons, being of a distinct race, seemed to be innately superior folks who brought sturdy Christianity, regime and commercial success to America and the entire world. The Anglo-Saxons belonged to the superior race, and inferior races faced condemnation to minor status or extermination.
The minority regularly inquired why the American Anglo-Saxons could so simply understand God’s intent for humanity and some cruelly but precisely asserted that there was nothing like the Anglo Saxon race (Horsman, 2).
In the first semi of the nineteenth century, many American communities were able to validate the enslavement of Africans and exclusion and possible termination of the Indians in the United States. The American academic society, furthermore, fed European racial desires with scientific theories stalking from the theoretical knowledge and scrutiny of Indians and blacks.
Alteration of the fable of the Anglo-Saxons took place in the period between 1815 and 1850. Pending the last part of the 18th century the principal use of the fable had been interior: in America to rationalize a revolt and the ending of an assumed royal dominion; and in England to oppose royal totalitarianism and the expansion of political privileges.
Formation of liberated and independent models of Anglo-Saxon organizations warranted contemporary emulation. However, in the early years of the 19th century, Americans and Englishmen increasingly weighed the Anglo-Saxon folks against others and arrived at the conclusion that blood, not surroundings or fate, contributed to their triumph.
The United States and England had divided their organizations, although both states were surging forward to places of unprecedented supremacy and affluence. The Anglo-Saxons argued that the justification lay not in the organizations but the innate nature of the race. The earth was falling under the control of the American and English brethren since nature herself had ordered it.
Year after year, the mounting supremacy of the United States and Great Britain took care of the formed Anglo-Saxon canons (Horsman 64). This was an era which the English law, English language and English organizations seemed set to control the whole world. The fresh racial ideas swiftly began to saturate American and English magazines and found eloquent and able orators.
The academic defense of natural racial disparities received a boost in the 1830s by the prevalent southern justification of slavery.
Southern supporters of the organization developed a range of arguments to show precise and enduring Negro inferiority (Horsman 122). The implicit assumptions of Negro disparities and inferiority which had infused the colonial era now for the first instance became fashioned into a rational racial theory.
It is a usual to indicate that the catalyst for the Southern guard of its organizations was the induction of a Northern abolitionist assault in the 1830s, and this stimulated dynamic southern refutations although, in a better sense, the Southerners were taking benefit of and sharing in the common shift towards racialist thoughts in the United States and Europe.
To validate far more than the southern organization of slavery, they employed the racialist philosophy. It sought to guard the termination or even extinction of non-European folks all over the world, and to clarify the ever-growing gulf in power and evolution, which alienated them from the folks they were discharging.
The construction of the apparent intellectual squabble for natural black inferiority occurred in America. Prior to the complete serge of abolitionism, it was not weird to those who desired to guard slavery, and no restrictions existed to the South in 1830s and 1840s.
Southerners whether trusting in alone or a number of human species were ready to state openly in the 1830s that the natural variations amid whites and blacks could be conquered neither by learning nor by surroundings. Black men’s predestination was eternal inferiority.
In describing their outlooks of racial disparity, the Southerners did not have to consider themselves as a beleaguered minority (Horsman 125). What they needed to fight was the assault on the organization of slavery, not wiles for racial parity.
The depressing satire from mid-1830s to the civil war for the South was that, as the Northern assault on slavery augmented force, northern racial theorists commonly concurred with the South that the colored races were ailing to join with the whites on any common ground.
In his earliest key contribution to the racial squabble, Nott asserted that the human race came from several original pairs, positioned by God in the most appropriate environments to their institution.
He added that racial interbreeding was a tragedy, for it resulted to crossbreeds less productive than their parents, to decline, and eventually to loss. By stressing that mulattoes were not as much fertile compared to the blacks or whites who had created them, Nott was able to put forward that there was further proof that whites and blacks were disconnected species. Nott aimed at defending the need for slavery.
In 1850, another theorist by the name Agassiz, yet arguing for man’s sacred and moral harmony under God, asserted that there were diverse human races. He argued that the genesis simply defined the source of one race; it offered a description of the divisions of the white race (Horsman 165).
In his work, Agassiz stressed that scientists had the freedom to consider matters of racial foundation without orientation to religion or politics.
To him, realism meant recognizing that there were greater and lesser races. He argued that history, established that dissimilar races were not physically equal and that educational courses for the inferior should be founded on the acknowledgment of the disparity of human races.
In conclusion, the American Anglo-Saxons, being of a distinct race, seemed to be innately superior folks who brought sturdy Christianity, regime and commercial success to America and the entire world. Formation of liberated and independent models of Anglo-Saxon organizations warranted contemporary emulation.
However, in the early years of the 19th century, Americans and Englishmen increasingly weighed the Anglo-Saxon folks against others and arrived at the conclusion that blood, not surroundings or fate, contributed to their triumph.
The United States and England had divided their organizations, although both states were surging forward to places of unprecedented supremacy and affluence. The Anglo-Saxons argued that the justification lay not in the organizations but the innate nature of the race.
These organizations stimulated the emergence of race and class in America, which played a key role in the enslavement of the blacks. In the first semi of the nineteenth century, many American communities were able to validate the enslavement of Africans and exclusion and possible termination of the Indians in the United States.
The American academic society, furthermore, fed European racial desires with scientific theories stalking from the theoretical knowledge and scrutiny of Indians and blacks. The Northern abolitionist sought to guard the termination or even extinction of non-European folks all over the world.
Prior to the complete serge of abolitionism, it was not weird to those who desired to guard slavery, and no restrictions existed to the South in 1830s and 1840s.
By 1830s Southerners were ready to openly state that the natural variations amid whites and blacks could be conquered neither by learning nor by surroundings. In America, the myth of Anglo-Saxons was rationalized a revolt and the ending of an assumed royal dominion.
Works Cited
Horsman, Reginald. Race and Manifest Destiny: the Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism. Harvard: Harvard University Press, 1981
Stephenson, Robert. Manifest Destiny. American Expansionism and the Empire of Right. New York: Hill and Wang, 1995.