The History of White People

by Nell Irvin Painter

  Walker’s Appeal testifies to its author’s immersion in the classics of American and European culture as well as to his familiarity with current politics affecting the Irish, Jews, and Greeks. He strongly indicts white American hypocrisy as exhibited by the Declaration of Independence and the work of Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson had died in 1826, but Walker, like Samuel Stanhope Smith, felt that the insults from an American of Jefferson’s stature demanded a response. How could Jefferson, a man of enormous learning and “excellent natural parts,” stoop to judge “a set of men in chains.” Jefferson may have believed that black people wanted to be white, but in this he is “dreadfully deceived—we wish to be just as it pleased our Creator to have made us.”27

  An effective promoter, Walker spread his Appeal widely, even, via black and white sailors, into the slaveholding South, where it made its author well known and much hated. The incendiary pamphlet, addressed directly to African Americans, so alarmed Virginia’s upper classes that discussion of it took place in a closed-door session of the General Assembly. In New Bern and Wilmington, North Carolina, any black readers associated with Walker’s Appeal paid with their lives.28

  In 1830, at only forty-five years of age, Walker died of tuberculosis. That scourge of the nineteenth-century urban poor had, only days before, taken his daughter. A few months earlier, he had issued what became, by default, the final edition of Walker’s Appeal. Now, Boston’s Maria Stewart, the first American woman to publicly address “promiscuous” audiences (i.e., audiences including women as well as men), eulogized Walker as “most noble, fearless, and undaunted.” In the revolutionary year of 1848, the Reverend Henry Highland Garnet lauded Walker as a tireless fighter for freedom. Walker’s activism, Garnet concludes, “made his memory sacred.” Walker’s memory remained vivid among abolitionists well into the mid-nineteenth century, only to fade after the Civil War. But meanwhile, he had struck a strong blow against the notion that whiteness, throughout history, deserved to be judged positively.29

  THE REVEREND Hosea Easton (1799–1837) of Hartford, Connecticut, had been born into an activist family with a quintessentially American mixed background, but of a sort Crèvecoeur had not been able to see. Easton’s mother was of at least partial African ancestry, and his father, James, a veteran of the Revolutionary War, had descended from Wampanoag and Narragansett Indians. After the war James Easton had prospered as an iron manufacturer in North Bridgewater (now Brockton, Massachusetts). With his complicated lineage, Hosea identified himself as “colored,” effectively suppressing the Indian ancestry, probably in the interest of achieving undisputed citizenship.*

  Color lines were hardening in the first quarter of the nineteenth century in Massachusetts, with the result that the Easton family found itself rejected from the public sphere. After a long, spirited, dispiriting, and losing protest against enforcement of racial segregation in their local school and church, James Easton opened a school for colored youth in the mid-1810s.

  Becoming a minister and following in his father’s activist footsteps, Hosea Easton attended the first meeting of the National Convention of Free People of Color in Philadelphia in 1831, when he was thirty-two. Times were harsh for people of color, and a mob of angry white supremacists attacked Easton’s parishioners and burned down his church in Hartford in 1836. Not one to back off, Easton issued his response the following year in the form of A Treatise on the Intellectual Character and Civil and Political Condition of the Colored People of the U. States; and the Prejudice Exercised towards Them: with a Sermon on the Duty of the Church to Them.30

  Citing ancient and current history, Easton’s Treatise echoes David Walker’s Appeal by comparing the history of Africa—starting with Ham and ancient Egypt—to Europe’s from its roots in ancient Greece. A stout Afrocentrist, Easton maintains that black and brown ancient Egyptians taught the Greeks everything of value. Conversely, he considers European history one long saga of bloodletting, a particular irony since nineteenth-century Europeans and white Americans loudly proclaimed themselves superior in civilization:

  It is not a little remarkable, that in the nineteenth century a remnant of this same barbarous people should boast of their national superiority of intellect, and of wisdom and religion; who, in the seventeenth century, crossed the Atlantic and practised the same crime their barbarous ancestry had done in the fourth, fifth and sixth centuries: bringing with them the same boasted spirit of enterprise; and not unlike their fathers, staining their route with blood, as they have rolled along, as a cloud of locusts, toward the West. The late unholy war with the Indians, and the wicked crusade against the peace of Mexico, are striking illustrations of the nobleness of this race of people, and the powers of their mind.

  Five and a half pages of grisly wrongs perpetrated by Europeans through the ages close, “Any one who has the least conception of true greatness, on comparing the two races by means of what history we have, must decide in favor of the descendants of Ham. The Egyptians alone have done more to cultivate such improvements as comports to the happiness of mankind, than all the descendants of Japhet put together.”

  What white supremacists praise as the products of energy and enterprise, Easton describes as booty obtained

  by the dint of war, and the destruction of the vanquished, since the founding of London, A. D. 49. Their whole career presents a motley mixture of barbarism and civilization, of fraud and philanthropy, of patriotism and avarice, of religion and bloodshed…. And instead of their advanced state in science being attributable to a superior development of intellectual faculties,…it is solely owing to…their innate thirst for blood and plunder.31

  In a slight concession, Easton connects civilization to white people, but only as an outcome of violence rather than of innate intelligence. White people are not smarter; they are meaner.

  Despite their pungency, neither Walker’s Appeal nor Easton’s Treatise on the Intellectual Character ever truly penetrated the public consciousness at home or in Europe during the nineteenth century. The visibility of Walker’s Appeal grew in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, but never approached the reputation of the champion of foreign analysts.

  DEMOCRACY IN AMERICA must hold a record as the most quoted French text in the United States. The Princeton University Library holds thirty-one English editions of the originally two-volume work, published to great acclaim in 1835 and 1840. The reason for such popularity is not far to seek. Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–59) not only approved of the United States; he possessed a lineage Americans prized in their visiting friends. (See figure 8.3, Alexis de Tocqueville.)

  Tocqueville’s conventionally Catholic, conventionally conservative aristocratic family lived in Normandy. As a young man, he rose in the legal service of King Charles X, prospering in Versailles until the king’s abdication in the wake of the 1830 July Revolution. Such upheaval at the top of French management threatened Tocqueville’s future. So much so, it seemed a good moment for Tocqueville and a dear friend, Gustave de Beaumont, another aristocratic lawyer of progressive turn of mind, to take a sabbatical from France in the United States, ostensibly to study prison reform. In fact, Beaumont and Tocqueville did publish a report on prisons, in 1833.32 But it was Tocqueville’s subsequent study on the United States, Démocratie en Amérique (Democracy in America, 1835), which made him famous.

  Democracy in America is seldom cited as part of any tradition of racial thought, for Tocqueville ascribes American behavior to the whole of American society rather than to any racial trait. Society grows out of laws, governance, and economic opportunity. Finding an exceptional society in the United States, Tocqueville locates the source of this exceptionalism in American democracy. While American religion plays a role in American life, democracy trumps it, setting the tone in spheres both private and public. “Equality” provides the keyword.

  On its first page, Democracy in America mentions “the equality of social conditions” three times, and many of the following 800-plus pages elaborate that
basic point. The opening statements and the hundreds more pages label the United States a country populated by white people directly descended from the English. The phrase “the English race” appears repeatedly in headings and in the body of the text. In the conclusion to volume 1, Tocqueville glimpses “the whole future of the English race in the New World.” Chapter 3 of volume 2 bears the title “Why the Americans Show More Aptitude and Taste for General Ideas Than Their Forefathers, the English.”33*

  Fig. 8.3. Alexis de Tocqueville.

  The American of Democracy in America is primarily a northerner, usually a New Englander of British, Puritan descent. If he lacks brilliance and bores his guests, it is because he concentrates on making money. But the American’s heart is in the right place, right enough, at any rate, for him to be about building a country of certain future greatness. Tocqueville does not make slavery a crucial theme of analysis, for his the American is a citizen of Massachusetts, a quintessential free state. Therefore he nestles his discussion of slavery in the chapter on race—admittedly a topic he prefers to leave to his friend Beaumont—and thereby minimizes one of the core issues in American politics and culture.

  Only after 370 pages (in the Penguin Classic edition) does Tocqueville concede any racial heterogeneity to the United States, and with heterogeneity comes much unpleasantness. The following 100 pages, entitled “A Few Remarks on the Present-day State and the Probable Future of the Three Races Which Live in the Territory of the United States,” contrast sharply with the rest of volume 1. On the Lower Mississippi River, Tocqueville and Beaumont encounter Indians on the Trail of Tears, “these forced migrations” whose “fearful evils…are impossible to imagine…. I have witnessed evils,” Tocqueville admits a couple of paragraphs later, “I would find it impossible to relate.”* Regarding the plight of Indians in the United States, words practically fail Tocqueville.

  As for black people, they seem less fated for extinction than Native Americans, but their situation is nevertheless dire: black people, enslaved or free, “only constitute an unhappy remnant, a poor little wandering tribe, lost in the midst of an immense nation which owns all the land.” Such an assessment seems strange, if not ridiculous, to the twenty-first-century ear, since “this poor little wandering tribe” comprised more than two million people, more than 18 percent of the total population.

  Tocqueville very clearly realizes that slavery damages southern white people as well as the southern economy. Because of slavery, southern white people’s customs and character compare poorly with those of other Americans. Echoing Crèvecoeur and Jefferson, Tocqueville complains, “From birth, the southern American is invested with a kind of domestic dictatorship…and the first habit he learns is that of effortless domination…[which turns] the southern American into a haughty, hasty, irascible, violent man, passionate in his desires and irritated by obstacles. But he is easily discouraged if he fails to succeed at his first attempt.” While impatience robs southerners of the determination necessary to succeed, energy constitutes the American’s great talent: he goes about taming the wilderness and wrenching riches from the land. Not the southerner. “The southerner loves grandeur, luxury, reputation, excitement, pleasure, and, above all, idleness; nothing constrains him to work hard for his livelihood and, as he has no work which he has to do, he sleeps his time away, not even attempting anything useful.”34

  The severity of discrimination against African Americans alarms Tocqueville, prompting his prediction of an inevitable war of the races that will entail “great misfortunes”: “If America ever experiences great revolutions, they will be instigated by the presence of blacks on American soil; that is to say, it will not be the equality of social conditions but rather their inequality which will give rise to them.”35

  While the danger of “revolution” presses imminently in the South, the North enjoys no exemption. The specter of race war “constantly haunts the imaginations of [all] Americans like a nightmare,” but Tocqueville leaves his fears with that.36 Pursuing this line of thought would distort his egalitarian image of the United States. In truth, Tocqueville does not know what to do with the problem of slavery or how to integrate the South into his depiction of the United States. Revolutions do not arise on a level playing field, and he needs a level playing field to justify his sunny, democratic analysis. He solves his conundrum by cutting the South, slavery, and black people out of his theory, admitting, in a footnote in volume 2 that only Americans living in the free states conform to his image of a democratic, egalitarian society.37

  The Ohio River offers a convenient dividing line. In Ohio, the American, driven to succeed, achieves through ingenuity. South of the Ohio River in slaveholding Kentucky, the southerner disdains labor: “living in a relaxed idleness, he has the tastes of idle men; money has lost a part of its value in his eyes; he is less interested in wealth than excitement and pleasure…. Slavery, therefore, not merely prevents the whites from making money but even diverts them from any desire to do so.” Northerners own the ships that ply the nation’s rivers and seas, the factories that produce untold wealth, the railroads that deliver produce to market, and canals that link the continent’s great natural waterways.38 Only the North possesses these symbols of America.

  This long and tortured chapter seldom figures in the broadcast image of Tocqueville’s United States. Little read and less often heeded, it has even been omitted from abridged editions. Whether or not literally cleansed of anything pertaining to race war and the general American nastiness surrounding questions of race, Tocqueville’s America does not face all its racial facts.39* As he finally walks away from the topic of multiracial America, Tocqueville excuses the brevity of his own discussion by sending readers along to the novel of his friend Beaumont.

  GUSTAVE DE BEAUMONT (1802–66), Tocqueville’s fellow lawyer, roommate in Versailles in the 1820s, traveling companion, lifelong friend, biographer, and literary executor, accompanied him in travels across the United States and Ireland in 1835. (See figure 8.4, Gustave de Beaumont.) Beaumont, not so theory driven, took more interest than Tocqueville in slavery and the conventions of racial identity. His sociological novel, Marie, ou L’esclavage aux États-Unis, tableau de moeurs américaines (Marie, or Slavery in the United States, a Picture of American Manners) in fact made slavery an integral, rather than an incidental, facet of American society. Marie appeared in two volumes in 1835, the same year as the first volume of Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. Both books won the Prix Montyon of the Académie Française, and both authors were elected members of the Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques, but only Tocqueville was eventually inducted into the far more prestigious Académie Française, after an assiduous campaign for acceptance.

  In his novel, Beaumont’s protagonists are Ludovic, a French immigrant to the United States, and his beloved American, Marie, the daughter of parents who both look white: a Bostonian father and a mother who grew up in New Orleans. According to American mores, Beaumont says, the father really is white; the mother is not. Marie’s Louisianan mother, whose great-grandmother was a mulatto, transmits to Marie the invisible taint of black blood. Although Marie’s imperceptible mixed ancestry does not dissuade her French suitor Ludovic, Americans’ one-drop rule makes her black even in the so-called free North. Marie’s drop of blackness marks her marriage to the Frenchman as miscegenation, an infraction sufficient to inspire a riot in New York City.* The marriage cannot proceed. Ludovic and Marie seek peace in the wilds of Michigan. But before they can settle down, Marie dies. Ludovic remains an exile in the wilderness.

  Despite his novel’s grim message, Beaumont evinces a sly sense of humor. In the foreword to Marie, he relates an anecdote illustrating Americans’ preposterous racial rules. Although the theater was actually in New Orleans, Beaumont relates the incident as though taking place in Philadelphia:

  Fig. 8.4. Gustave de Beaumont, 1848.

  The first time I attended a theater in the United States [in October 1831], I was surprised at the c
areful distinction made between the white spectators and the audience whose faces were black. In the first balcony were whites; in the second, mulattoes; in the third, Negroes. An American, beside whom I was sitting, informed me that the dignity of white blood demanded these classifications. However, my eyes being drawn to the balcony where sat the mulattoes, I perceived a young woman of dazzling beauty, whose complexion, of perfect whiteness, proclaimed the purest European blood. Entering into all the prejudices of my neighbor, I asked him how a woman of English origin could be so lacking in shame as to seat herself among the Africans.

  “That woman,” he replied, “is colored.”

  “What? Colored? She is whiter than a lily!”

  “She is colored,” he repeated coldly; “local tradition has established her ancestry, and everyone knows that she had a mulatto among her forebears.”