31 Tyler Anbinder, “Ulysses S. Grant, Nativist,” Civil War History: A Journal of the Middle Period 43, no. 2 (June 1997): 130.
32 Dale T. Knobel, “Beyond ‘America for Americans’: Inside the Movement Culture of Antebellum Nativism,” in Immigrant America: European Ethnicity in the United States (New York: Garland, 1994), 10; Michael F. Holt, “The Politics of Impatience: The Origins of Know Nothingism,” Journal of American History 60, no. 2 (Sept. 1973): 313.
33 Knobel, “Beyond ‘America for Americans,’” 11.
34 Catholic Encyclopedia, http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/08677a.htm.
35 Stephen E. Maizlish, “The Meaning of Nativism and the Crisis of the Union: The Know-Nothing Movement in the Antebellum North,” in Essays on American Antebellum Politics, 1840–1860, ed. Stephen E. Maizlish and John J. Kushma (College Station: University of Texas at Arlington, [1982]), 166.
36 Maizlish, “Meaning of Nativism,” 187.
37 Gregg Cantrell, “Sam Houston and the Know-Nothings: A Reappraisal,” Southwestern Historical Quarterly 96, no. 3 (Jan. 1993): 326–43; Anbinder, “Ulysses S. Grant, Nativist,” 119–41. Both Cantrell and Anbinder note that biographers of Houston and Grant mute or ignore their subjects’ nativist enthusiasms.
38 Cantrell, “Sam Houston,” 330; Anbinder, “Ulysses S. Grant, Nativist,” 123.
39 Congressman William Russell Smith, 15 Jan. 1855, in Jeff Frederick, “Unintended Consequences: The Rise and Fall of the Know-Nothing Party in Alabama,” Alabama Review, Jan. 2002, p. 3.
CHAPTER 10: THE EDUCATION OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON
1 Robert C. Gordon, Emerson and the Light of India: An Intellectual History (New Delhi: National Book Trust, 2007), 21–23, and Ralph Waldo Emerson, Lectures and Biographical Sketches, 371–404, http://emersoncentral.com/mary_moody_emerson.htm.
2 Philip Nicoloff, “Historical Introduction,” in Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, vol. 5, English Traits (hereafter CWRWE, vol. 5, English Traits) (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994), xiv.
3 John Bernard Beer, “Coleridge, Samuel Taylor,” Encyclopædia Britannica Online, 24 Oct. 2005, http://www.search.eb.com/eb/article-1409.
4 See Phyllis Cole, Mary Moody Emerson and the Origins of Transcendentalism: A Family History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 5, 164, 170, 180, 242, 307.
5 Kenneth Marc Harris, Carlyle and Emerson: Their Long Debate (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978), 10, 11, 56.
6 Simon Heffer, Moral Desperado: A Life of Thomas Carlyle (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1995), 48, 52, 66.
7 Ibid., 129.
8 The articles by Carlyle that Emerson admired were “Jean Paul Friedrich Richter,” Edinburgh Review, 1827; “State of German Literature,” ibid., 1828; “Goethe’s Helena,” Foreign Review, 1828; “Goethe,” ibid., 1828; “Life of Heyne,” ibid., 1828; “Novalis,” ibid., 1829; “Signs of the Times,” Edinburgh Review, 1829; “John Paul Friedrich Richter Again,” Foreign Review, 1830; “Schiller,” Fraser’s Magazine, 1831; “The Nibelungen Lied,” Westminster Review, 1831; “German Literature of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries,” Foreign Quarterly Review, 1831; “Taylor’s Historic Survey of German Poetry,” Edinburgh Review, 1831; “Characteristics,” ibid., 1831. These essays and reviews directly preceded Carlyle’s writing Sartor Resartus and indicate his immersion in German literature. See Henry Larkin, Carlyle and the Open Secret of His Life (originally published 1886) (New York: Haskell House, 1970), 13. Larkin served as Carlyle’s research assistant and general factotum during the last ten years of Carlyle’s life.
9 Lawrence Buell, Emerson (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003), 15.
10 See Frederick Wahr, Emerson and Goethe (Ann Arbor: George Wahr, 1915), 79.
11 CWRWE, vol. 5, English Traits, 9–12; Robert E. Burkholder, “Notes,” ibid., 356.
12 Larkin, Carlyle, 59.
13 Wahr, Emerson and Goethe, 22.
14 Fred Kaplan, Thomas Carlyle: A Biography (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983), 232–33, 369; Townsend Scudder, The Lonely Wayfaring Man: Emerson and Some Englishmen (London: Oxford University Press, 1936), 29, 34–37.
15 Quote from 1849 in Harris, Carlyle and Emerson, 27.
16 Scudder, Lonely Wayfaring Man, 139. Ruskin quoted in Buell, Emerson, 328.
17 Matthew Guinn, “Emerson’s Southern Critics, 1838–1862,” Resources for American Literary Study 25, no. 2 (1999): 174–91, 186.
18 Phyllis Cole, “Stanton, Fuller, and the Grammar of Romanticism,” New England Quarterly 73, no. 4 (Dec. 2000): 556.
19 Jefferson quoted in Buell, Emerson, 370.
20 Nicoloff, “Historical Introduction,” xxi; L. P. Curtin Jr., Anglo-Saxons and Celts: A Study of Anti-Irish Prejudice in Victorian England (Bridgeport, Conn.: Conference on British Studies at the University of Bridgeport, 1968), 76.
21 Joan von Mehren, Minerva and the Muse: A Life of Margaret Fuller (Amherst, University of Massachusetts Press, 1994), 236.
22 Historians have taken note of the resemblances between Carlyle’s German nationalism and that of twentieth-century German National Socialists. See J. Salwyn Schapiro, “Thomas Carlyle, Prophet of Fascism,” Journal of Modern History 17, no. 2 (June 1945): 97–115.
23 Heffer, Moral Desperado, 52.
24 Quoted ibid., 165–67.
25 Quoted ibid., 197.
26 “Permanent Traits of the English National Genius,” in The Early Lectures of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Stephen E. Whicher and Robert E. Spiller, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1959), 241.
27 Early Lectures of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 233, 234–35; CWRWE, vol. 5, English Traits, 54.
28 CWRWE, vol. 5, English Traits, 71.
29 Carlyle to Emerson, London, 12 Aug., 1834, The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1834–1872, vol. 1, http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/1/3/5/8/13583/13583.txt; Harris, Carlyle and Emerson, 138.
30 Quoted in Kaplan, Thomas Carlyle, 249.
31 Carlyle to Emerson, Annan, Scotland, 18 Aug., 1841, http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/1/3/5/8/13583/13583.txt.
32 Quoted in Harris, Carlyle and Emerson, 147–48. See also Phyllis Cole, “Emerson, England, and Fate,” in Emerson—Prophecy, Metamorphosis, and Influence: Selected Papers from the English Institute, ed. David Levin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1975), 83–105.
33 Carlyle to Emerson, London, 24 June 1833, http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/1/3/5/8/13583/13583.txt.
34 Quotes in Scudder, Lonely Wayfaring Man, 153, 169.
35 CWRWE, vol. 5, English Traits, 170.
CHAPTER 11: ENGLISH TRAITS
1 Philip Nicoloff, “Historical Introduction,” in The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, vol. 5, English Traits (hereafter CWRWE, vol. 5, English Traits) (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994), xiii–xiv, notes Emerson’s playfulness and wit that convey the author’s “thorough delight in his subject.” Wallace E. Williams calls English Traits Emerson’s “wittiest book” in “Historical Introduction,” CWRWE, vol. 4, Representative Men: Seven Lectures (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987), xlix. See also Nell Irvin Painter, “Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Saxons,” Journal of American History 95, no. 4 (March 2009): 977–85.
2 The Early Lectures of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Stephen E. Whicher and Robert E. Spiller (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1959), 234–41, 248.
3 Nicoloff, “Historical Introduction,” xlviii–xlix, liii. The Princeton University library holds five editions of English Traits, from 1856, 1857, 1869, 1916, and 1966, in addition to versions that are part of collected works.
4 Journal entry for 30 Sept. 1856, in The Journals of Charlotte Forten Grimké, ed. Brenda Stevenson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 164, 191–92.
5 See Elisa Tamarkin, “Black Anglophilia: or, The Sociability of Antislavery,” American Literary History 14, no. 3 (Fall 2002): 447, 452, 455.
6 Several historians have thoughtfully analyzed the race-gender anxie
ties of white American men. The classic work is Richard Slotkin’s Regeneration through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600–1860 (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1973). C. Anthony Rotundo terms the idealization of primal virility the “masculine primitive” and notes a sense of the “perils of civilization.” Often these historians concentrate on crises at the turn of the twentieth century; however, Emerson, the great voice of American thought, expressed such notions in the antebellum era in phrases that carried over into the lexicon of late nineteenth-century Americans. For Emerson, the prime race in question was “Saxon,” as opposed to Celtic. By the mid-twentieth century, historians took to replacing “Saxon” or “Anglo-Saxon” with “white,” to sharpen the opposition to nonwhite and as though all three designations meant the same thing. But the black/white opposition suiting later generations of historians did not always conform to the meaning of those writing earlier. See E. Anthony Rotundo, American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern Era (New York: Basic Books, 1993), Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880–1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), Michael S. Kimmel, Manhood in America: A Cultural History (New York: Free Press, 1996), and John Pettegrew, Brutes in Suits: Male Sensibility in America, 1890–1920 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007).
7 “Permanent Traits of the English National Genius,” in Early Lectures of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 241. Michael S. Kimmel quotes a late nineteenth-century American calling for “a saving touch of old fashioned barbarism.” See “Consuming Manhood: The Feminization of American Culture and the Recreation of the Male Body, 1832–1920,” Michigan Quarterly Review 3, no. 1 (Winter 1994): 7–10, 13–16, 29.
8 CWRWE, vol. 5, English Traits, 23, 155.
9 Gildas, The Ruin of Britain (ca. 540), quoted in Bryan Sykes, Saxons, Vikings, and Celts: The Genetic Roots of Britain and Ireland (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006), 256–57.
10 CWRWE, vol. 5, English Traits, 23.
11 Emerson, “Permanent Traits of the English National Genius,” 242.
12 CWRWE, vol. 5, English Traits, 33. For the comparison of people to fruit trees, see CWRWE, vol. 4, Representative Men (1987), 56; Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson (hereafter Journals), vol. 11, 1848–1851, ed. A. W. Plumstead, William H. Gilman, and Ruth H. Bennett (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975), 8, 42, 131, 142, 152, 283, 357; Journals, vol. 10, 1847–1848, ed. Merton M. Sealts Jr. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1973), 5, 91, 99–100. See also Horace S. Kallen, Culture and Democracy in the United States: Studies in the Group Psychology of the American Peoples (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1924), 329.
13 CWRWE, vol. 5, English Traits, 32, 154.
14 Ibid., 36.
15 Ibid., 2.
16 In Journals, vol. 10, 221. On Greenough see F. O. Matthiessen, American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (1941, 1968), 140, 148, quoted in Robert D. Richardson Jr., Emerson: The Mind on Fire: A Biography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 539. See also “Horatio Greenough,” Smithsonian American Art Museum online, http://americanart.si.edu/search/artist_bio.cfm?ID=1935.
17 CWRWE, vol. 5, English Traits, 34.
18 Ibid., 18.
19 Ibid., 35.
20 Ibid., 169.
21 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.] See also Hannah Franziska Augstein, ed., Race: The Origins of an Idea, 1760–1850 (Bristol, UK: Thoemmes Press, 1996), 246.
22 CWRWE, vol. 5, English Traits, 118–19.
23 In Journals, vol. 13, 1852–1855, ed. Ralph H. Orth and Alfred R. Ferguson (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977), 83, 128–29.
24 Ibid., 39.
25 Ibid., 398.
26 CWRWE, vol. 2, Essays: First Series (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979), 33, 43. Journal AZ (1849), p. 20, in Journals, vol. 11, 192.
27 Journals, vol. 13, 1852–1855, 115–16, 248.
28 CWRWE, vol. 5, English Traits, 171.
29 See http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/source/magnacarta.html and “Magna Carta,” Encyclopædia Britannica Online, http://www.search.eb.com/eb/article-9050003.
30 See Hugh A. MacDougall, Racial Myth in English History: Trojans, Teutons, and Anglo-Saxons (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1982), 26–37, 56–62, 81–86, 91–92.
31 James A. Secord, “Behind the Veil: Robert Chambers and Vestiges,” in History, Humanity and Evolution, ed. James Moore (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 178, 182, 185–86. See also James A. Secord, Victorian Sensation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000).
32 Editor’s note, “Robert Chambers, Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (New York, 1845), in Emerson’s library,” in Journals, vol. 9, 1843–1847, ed. Ralph H. Orth and Alfred R. Ferguson (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971), 64, 211.
33 Robert Chambers, Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1st ed., 1844), ed. James Secord (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 306, from the Unofficial Stephen Jay Gould Archive online, http://www.stephenjaygould.org/ library/vestiges/ chapter16.html.
34 Chambers, Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, chap. 16; Milton Millhauser, Just before Darwin: Robert Chambers and Vestiges (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1959), 33, 118, 128, 147.
35 Millhauser, Just before Darwin, 5, 8–9, 22–28, 31–34.
36 Nicoloff, “Historical Introduction,” xxii, xxvi.
37 Millhauser, Just before Darwin, 32.
38 See Richardson, Emerson, 518. Also xxii–xxvi in CWRWE, vol. 5, English Traits, and Journal CO (1851), p. 81: “And Knox’s law of races, that nature loves not hybrids, & extinguishes them. That the race colony detached from the race deteriorates to the crab.” Note, “See Robert Knox, M.D., The Races of Men: A Fragment (Philadelphia, 1850), pp. 52, 86, 107, 317,” in Journals, vol. 11, 1848–1851, 392.
39 Knox, Races of Men (1850), 6.
40 Knox, Races of Men (1862), in Augstein, ed., Race, 248. For the controversy over Knox’s actual scientific influence, see Peter Mandler, “The Problem with Cultural History,” Cultural and Social History (2005): 101–2.
41 See Athena S. Leoussi, “Pheidias and ‘L’Esprit Moderne’: The Study of Human Anatomy in Nineteenth-Century English and French Art Education,” European Review of History 7, no. 2 (Autumn 2000): 16–188.
42 Knox, Races of Men (1850), 7, quoted in Cora Kaplan, “White, Black and Green: Racialising Irishness in Victorian England,” in Peter Gray, ed., Victoria’s Ireland?: Irishness and Britishness, 1837–1901 (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2004), 51. Knox, a southern Scot like Carlyle, also wrote in terms of “we Saxons.”
43 Emerson, CWRWE, vol. 5, English Traits, 28.
44 Ibid., 29.
45 Ibid., 32, 86, 91. With a somewhat different meaning from my own, Cornel West cites Emerson’s “double consciousness.” West notes that, for Emerson, historical circumstances cannot be understood apart from race. See West, The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 34, 39.
CHAPTER 12: EMERSON IN THE HISTORY OF AMERICAN WHITE PEOPLE
1 Sophia Peabody (later the wife of Nathaniel Hawthorne) wrote her intellectual sister about Emerson in 1838, before he had gained his greatest prominence. Quote from Robert D. Richardson Jr., Emerson: The Mind on Fire: A Biography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 524; see also 522–23.
2 Theodore Parker quoted in 1850 in Neil Baldwin, The American Revelation: Ten Ideals That Shaped Our Country from the Puritans to the Cold War (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2005), 61.
3 See, e.g., Joel Porte, Representative Man: Ralph Waldo Emerson in His Time (originally published 1979) (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 1, 8, 19.
; 4 The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, vol. 5, English Traits (hereafter CWRWE, vol. 5, English Traits) (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994), 24.
5 An example of Emerson’s depiction of black people as a piteous race of permanent enslavement appears in one of Emerson’s clearest antislavery statements: An Address delivered in the court-house in Concord, Massachussetts, on 1st August, 1884: on the anniversary of the emancipation of the negroes in the British West Indies (Boston: J. Munroe, 1844).
6 Journal V, pp. 62–63, in The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson (hereafter Journals), vol. 9, 1843–1847, ed. Ralph H. Orth and Alfred R. Ferguson (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971), 125.
7 Journals, vol. 11, 1848–1851, ed. A. W. Plumstead, William H. Gilman, and Ruth H. Bennett (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975), xv. Emerson’s comments on the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 take up pp. 343–65 of vol. 11 of Journals.
The History of White People Page 43