The History of White People

by Nell Irvin Painter

  25 David Bindman, Ape to Apollo: Aesthetics and the Idea of Race in the 18th Century (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002), 219–20.

  26 Quotes in Zantop, “The Beautiful, the Ugly, and the German,” 28–29. See also Rupp-Eisenreich, “Des choses occultes en histoire des sciences humaines,” 151, and Dougherty, “Christoph Meiners und Johann Friedrich Blumenbach,” 103–4, Marino, Praeceptores Germaniae, 111–14.

  27 Léon Poliakov, The History of Anti-Semitism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 136; Baum, Rise and Fall of the Caucasian Race, 98.

  CHAPTER 7: GERMAINE DE STAËL’S GERMAN LESSONS

  1 J. Christopher Herold, one of her best-known biographers, entitled his book Mistress to an Age. See Mistress to an Age: A Life of Madame de Staël (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1958). Other useful de Staël biographies include Ghislain de Diesbach, Madame de Staël (Paris: Perrin, 1983), Maria Fairweather, Madame de Staël (New York: Carroll & Graf, 2005), and Francine du Plessix Gray, Madame de Staël: The First Modern Woman (New York: Atlas, 2008). De Staël’s portraitist, the rococo artist Élisabeth-Louise Vigée-Lebrun (1755–1842), one of the foremost figure painters of her time, was known for her portraits of European aristocrats. One of two women admitted into the Académie Royale de Painture et de Sculpture in 1783, she had to leave France during the revolution but returned during the reign of the first Emperor Napoleon.

  2 Tess Lewis, “Madame de Staël: The Inveterate Idealist,” Hudson Review 54, no. 3 (2001): 416–26.

  3 The quote is from Emile Faguet in Jean de Pange, Mme de Staël et la découverte de l’Allemagne (Paris: Société Française d’Editions Littéraires et Techniques, 1929), 9.

  4 Lydia Maria Child, The Biographies of Madame de Staël and Madame Roland (Boston: Carter and Hendee, 1832), 24.

  5 In Helen B. Posgate, Madame de Staël (New York: Twayne, 1968), 19.

  6 Child, Biographies, 90, 92.

  7 Ibid., 1, 16.

  8 Bonnie G. Smith, “History and Genius: The Narcotic, Erotic, and Baroque Life of Germaine de Staël,” French Historical Studies 19, no. 4 (Fall 1996): 1061.

  9 In Richmond Laurin Hawkins, Madame de Staël and the United States (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1930), 33–34, 72, 75.

  10 Ibid., 9–11, 14, 27–28, 65.

  11 Quoted ibid., 64.

  12 Quoted ibid., 4.

  13 De Staël, De l’Allemagne (Paris: Didot Frères, 1857), 9–10.

  14 Ian Allan Henning maintains that “it is not possible to speak of Madame de Staël as a mediator between France and Germany without talking about Charles de Villers.” Kurt Kloocke, editor of the letters between Villers and de Staël, finds Villers’s influence obvious, extending, perhaps, even to a measure of the inspiration of De l’Allemagne. See Henning, L’Allemagne de Mme de Staël et la polémique romantique: Première fortune de l’ouvrage en France et en Allemagne (1814–1830) (Paris: Ancienne Honoré Champion, 1929), 207, and Kloocke, ed., Correspondance: Madame de Staël, Charles de Villers, Benjamin Constant (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1993), 3.

  15 Ruth Ann Crowley, Charles de Villers, Mediator and Comparatist (Bern: Peter Lang, 1978), 17–19.

  16 De Staël, De l’Allemagne, 85.

  17 Emma Gertrude Jaeck, Madame de Staël and the Spread of German Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1915), 7.

  18 Henning, L’Allemagne de Mme de Staël, 210.

  19 Ibid., 211.

  20 De Staël, De l’Allemagne, 128, 130.

  21 Vivian Folkenflik, Major Writings of Germaine de Staël (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), 183.

  22 Henning, L’Allemagne de Mme de Staël, 240–43, 252–53.

  23 Child, Biographies, 82.

  24 Pange, Mme de Staël, 140–41.

  CHAPTER 8: EARLY AMERICAN WHITE PEOPLE OBSERVED

  1 Margo J. Anderson, The American Census: A Social History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), 9, 12–14; Frederick G. Bohme, 200 Years of U.S. Census Taking: Population and Housing Questions, 1790–1990 (Washington, D.C.: Bureau of the Census, U.S. Department of Commerce, 1989), 1.

  2 Alexander Keyssar, The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States (New York: Basic Books, 2000), xxii–xxiii, 20–34, 52–76, 102, and Sean Wilentz, The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005), 27–28, 82–83, 17, 485. Keyssar and Wilentz both note historians’ long neglect of the basic history of the right to vote, especially with regard to class. See also Wilentz, “On Class and Politics and Jacksonian America,” Reviews in American History 10, no. 4 (Dec. 1982): 45–48, 59.

  3 J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, Letters from an American Farmer and Sketches of Eighteenth-Century America (originally published 1782) AS@ UVA Hypertexts, Letter 3, 54, http://xroads.virginia.edu/ ~HYPER/CREV/letter03.html. Postindustrial St. Johnsbury now figures as Vermont’s capital of heroin addiction.

  4 Ibid., 170. Letter 9, 223–25, 229, http://xroads.virginia.edu/ ~HYPER/CREV/letter09.html.

  5 Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia (originally published 1787), AS@UVA Hypertexts, Query 18, http://xroads.virginia.edu/ ~HYPER/JEFFERSON/ch18.html.

  6 Stanley R. Hauer, “Thomas Jefferson and the Anglo-Saxon Language,” PMLA 98, no. 5 (Oct. 1983): 879, 881.

  7 Thomas Jefferson, “A Summary View of the Rights of British America” (July 1774), in The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Julian P. Boyd et al. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1950–), 1:121–35, http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/v1ch14s10.html.

  8 Dumas Malone, The Sage of Monticello: Jefferson and His Time, vol. 6 (Boston: Little, Brown: 1981), 202–3.

  9 John Adams to Abigail Adams, Philadelphia 14 Aug. 1776, in Charles Francis Adams, Familiar Letters of John Adams and His Wife Abigail Adams, during the Revolution, with a Memoir of Mrs. Adams (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1875), 210–11. See also Malone, Sage of Monticello, 6:202. For the other side of the seal, Jefferson suggested the children of Israel in the wilderness.

  10 Thomas Jefferson, Essay on the Anglo-Saxon Language, in The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Andrew A. Lipscomb, vol. 18 (Washington, D.C.: Thomas Jefferson Memorial Association of the United States, 1904), 365–66.

  11 Hauer, “Thomas Jefferson and the Anglo-Saxon Language,” 883–86, 891.

  12 Mark A. Noll, Princeton and the Republic, 1768–1822: The Search for a Christian Enlightenment in the Era of Samuel Stanhope Smith (Vancouver: Regent College, 2004), 68; Mark A. Noll, “The Irony of the Enlightenment for Presbyterians in the Early Republic,” Journal of the Early Republic 5, no. 2 (Summer 1985): 166.

  13 W. Frank Craven, from Alexander Leitch, A Princeton Companion (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), http:://www/hsc/edu/pres/presidents/samuel_smith.html, and Hampden-Sydney College website: www.hsc.edu/hschistory/images/smith.jpg.

  14 Winthrop D. Jordan, “Introduction,” in Samuel Stanhope Smith, An Essay on the Causes of the Variety of Complexion and Figure in the Human Species, ed. Winthrop D. Jordan (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1965), xi–xxvi, William H. Hudnut III, “Samuel Stanhope Smith: Enlightened Conservative,” Journal of the History of Ideas 17, no. 4 (Oct. 1956): 541–43.

  15 Smith, Essay on the Causes of the Variety, 29, 40.

  16 Mary Wollstonecraft, Analytical Review, vol. 2 (Dec. 1788): 432–39, 457–58, in The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, ed. Janet Todd and Marilyn Butler (London: Pickering, 1990), 50–55, and Ramsay Notes from New York Public Library, comp. Mary B. MacIntyre, New York, 1936 (New York Public Library APV/Ramsay: http://www.southern-style.com/ Ramsay%20Family%20Notes.htm).

  17 See Hudnut, “Samuel Stanhope Smith,” 544–46.

  18 Smith, Essay on the Causes of the Variety, 106, 157, 109.

  19 Ibid., 47.

  20 Ibid., 104.

  21 Ibid., 43–44, 199; James Axtell, “The White Indians of Colonial America,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 32, no. 1 (Jan. 1975): 57, 64.

 
; 22 Smith, Essay on the Causes of the Variety, 163.

  23 For sustained analysis, see Mia Bay, The White Image in the Black Mind: African-American Ideas about White People, 1830–1925 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000).

  24 David Walker’s Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World, ed. Peter P. Hinks (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002), xxxi–xxxii, 9–10, 19, 27, 58.

  25 Bay, White Image in the Black Mind, 32–36.

  26 David Walker’s Appeal, 9, 33, 65.

  27 Ibid., 12, 14.

  28 Ibid., xv–xl.

  29 Ibid., xli–xlii.

  30 See Bay, White Image in the Black Mind, 46–50, and George R. Price and James Brewer Stewart, “The Roberts Case, the Easton Family, and the Dynamics of the Abolitionist Movement in Massachusetts, 1776–1870,” Massachusetts Historical Review 4 (2002): The History Cooperative, 89–116.

  31 George R. Price and James Brewer Stewart, eds., To Heal the Scourge of Prejudice: The Life and Writings of Hosea Easton (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999), 71, 74, 80–81.

  32 Du système pénitentiaire aux Etats-Unis, et de son application en France; suivi d’un appendice sur les colonies pénales et de notes statistiques. Par MM. G. de Beaumont et A. de Tocqueville (Paris: H. Fournier jeune, 1833).

  33 Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America and Two Essays on America, trans. Gerald E. Bevan, ed. Isaac Kramnick (New York: Penguin Classic, 2003), 479, 4.

  34 Ibid., 440–41.

  35 Ibid., 408, 426.

  36 Ibid., 420.

  37 Ibid., 412, 720, 742.

  38 Ibid., 406–8.

  39 See Margaret Kohn, “The Other America: Tocqueville and Beaumont on Race and Slavery,” Polity 35, no. 1 (Fall 2002): 170, esp. note 3, and Thomas Bender, “Introduction,” Democracy in America (New York: Modern Library, 1981), xliii.

  40 Gustave de Beaumont, Marie, or Slavery in the United States (1835), trans. Barbara Chapman (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1958), 5. See also Nell Irvin Painter, “Was Marie White?: The Trajectory of a Question in the United States,” Journal of Southern History 74, no. 1 (Feb. 2008): 3–30.

  41 Beaumont, Marie, 13, 15.

  CHAPTER 9: THE FIRST ALIEN WAVE

  1 See Kerby A. Miller, “‘Scotch-Irish’ Myths and ‘Irish’ Identities in Eighteenth-and Nineteenth-Century America,” in New Perspectives on the Irish Diaspora, ed. Charles Fanning (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2000), 76–79, and Kerby A. Miller and Bruce D. Boling, “The New England and Federalist Origins of ‘Scotch-Irish’ Identity,” in Ulster and Scotland, 1600–2000: History, Language and Identity, ed. William Kelly and John R. Young (Dublin: Four Courts, 2004), 105, 114–18.

  2 Catholic Encyclopedia, http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/08677a.htm.

  3 Alexis de Tocqueville’s Journey in Ireland: July–August, 1835, ed. and trans. Emmet Larkin (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1990), 2.

  4 From Gustave de Beaumont, Ireland: Social, Political and Religious (1839), http://www.swan.ac.uk/history/teaching/teaching%20resources/An%20Gorta%20Mor/travellers/beaumont.htm.

  5 See David Nally, “‘Eternity’s Commissioner’: Thomas Carlyle, the Great Irish Famine and the Geopolitics of Travel,” Journal of Historical Geography 32, no. 2 (April 2006): 313–35.

  6 Thomas Carlyle, “The Present Time,” http://cepa.newschool.edu/ het/texts/carlyle/latter1.htm.

  7 Thomas Carlyle, Occasional Discourse on the Nigger Question (1853), http://cepa.newschool.edu/het/ texts/carlyle/odnqbk.htm.

  8 See Peter Gray, Victoria’s Irish: Irishness and Britishness, 1837–1901 (2004), and Robert Knox, The Races of Men: A Philosophical Enquiry into the Influence of Race over the Destinies of Nations (1862) [this is the 2nd edition of Races of Men: A Fragment, published in 1850], in Race: The Origins of an Idea, 1760–1850, ed. Hannah Franziska Augstein (Bristol, UK: Thoemmes Press, 1996), 253.

  9 Samuel F. B. Morse, Imminent Dangers to the Free Institutions of the United States (1835), http://www.wwnorton.com/college/history/ archive/resources/documents/ ch12_04.htm.

  10 Ray Allen Billington, The Protestant Crusade, 1800–1860: A Study of the Origins of American Nativism (originally published 1938) (Chicago: Quadrangle, 1964), 122–27; Bruce Levine, “Conservatism, Nativism, and Slavery: Thomas R. Whitney and the Origins of the Know-Nothing Party,” Journal of American History 88, no. 2 (Sept. 2001): 470.

  11 St. Joseph Messenger Online: http://www.aquinas-multimedia.com/stjoseph/knownothings.html.

  12 Marie Anne Pagliarini, “The Pure American Woman and the Wicked Catholic Priest: An Analysis of Anti-Catholic Literature in Antebellum America,” Religion and American Culture 9, no. 1 (Winter 1999): 99.

  13 Billington, Protestant Crusade, 99–104, 107–8. Monk’s confession first appeared serially in New York City’s Protestant Vindicator in 1835. See Rebecca Sullivan, “A Wayward from the Wilderness: Maria Monk’s Awful Disclosures and the Feminization of Lower Canada in the Nineteenth Century,” Essays on Canadian Writing 62 (Fall 1997): 201–23.

  14 See Susan M. Griffin, Anti-Catholicism and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

  15 Michael D. Pierson, “‘All Southern Society Is Assailed by the Foulest Charges’: Charles Sumner’s ‘The Crime against Kansas’ and the Escalation of Republican Anti-Slavery Rhetoric,” New England Quarterly 68, no. 4 (Dec. 1995): 533, 537, 545.

  16 Pagliarini, “The Pure American Woman,” 97.

  17 Campbell J. Gibson and Emily Lennon, “Historical Census Statistics on the Foreign-Born Population of the United States: 1850–1990,” U.S. Bureau of the Census, Washington, D.C., Feb. 1999, Population Division Working Paper no. 29, http://www.census.gov/ population/www/ documentation/twps0029/ twps0029.html. Included among the immigrants were 1,135 Asians, 3,679 Italians, 13,317 Mexicans, and 147,711 Canadians. In 1850 the foreign-born population represented 9.7 percent of the total population. See also Historical Statistics of the United States, part 1, 1975: 106–7.

  18 Kathleen Neils Conzen, “Germans,” in Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups, ed. Stephan Thernstrom (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980), 406–12; Library of Congress, European Reading Room, “The Germans in America,” http://www.loc.gov/rr/european/imde/germchro.html. Rough estimates put German immigrants at one-third Catholic and the other two-thirds predominantly Lutheran and Reformed. Comparatively small in numbers were German Methodists, Baptists, Unitarians, Pietists, Jews, and Freethinkers. “The German Americans: An Ethnic Experience,” http://www.ulib.iupui.edu/kade/adams/chap6.html.

  19 In Sir Richard Steele, Poetical Miscellanies, Consisting of Original Poems and Translations (London, 1714), 201; Oxford English Dictionary Online.

  20 Journal F No. I (1829?), pp. 113–14, in The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson, (hereafter JMNRWE) vol. 12, 1835–1862, ed. Linda Allardt (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976), 152, and Journal GO (1952), p. 233, in JMNRWE, vol. 13, 1852–1855, ed. Ralph H. Orth and Alfred R. Ferguson (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977), 112.

  21 Journal TU (1849), p. 171, in JMNRWE, vol. 11, 1848–1851, ed. A. W. Plumstead, William H. Gilman, and Ruth H. Bennett (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975), 148.

  22 Journal GO (1852), p. 105, in JMNRWE, vol. 13, 77.

  23 In Frank Shuffelton, A Mixed Race: Ethnicity in Early America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 181.

  24 Edward B. Rugemer, “The Southern Response to British Abolitionism: The Maturation of Proslavery Apologetics,” Journal of Southern History 70, no. 2 (May 2004): 221.

  25 For the electronic edition of Cannibals All!, go to Documenting the American South, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, http://docsouth.unc.edu/fitzhughcan/fitzcan.html#fitzix.

  26 Douglass quoted in Patricia Ferreira, “All but ‘A Black Skin and Wooly Hair’: Frederick Douglass’s Witness of the Irish Famine,” American Studies International 37, no
. 2 (June 1999): 69–83.

  27 O’Connell quoted in Gilbert Osofsky, “Abolitionists, Irish Immigrants, and the Dilemmas of Romantic Nationalism,” American Historical Review 80, no. 4 (Oct. 1975): 892.

  28 Ernest Renan, Poetry of the Celtic Races, VI, in Literary and Philosophical Essays, the Harvard Classics, 1909–14, http://www.bartleby.com/32/307.html.

  29 Matthew Arnold, On the Study of Celtic Literature. Complete Prose Works, vol. 3, ed. R. H. Super (Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 1960), 291–395.

  30 Ray Allen Billington, “The Know-Nothing Uproar,” American Heritage 10, no. 2 (Feb. 1952): 61; Billington, Protestant Crusade, 220–31.