Race And Manifest Destiny Summary

In Race and Manifest Destiny, Reginald Horsman surveys the origins and progression of Anglo-Saxon racial ideology and examines its consequences in American history. Primarily a history of ideas, the book sets the developments of ideologies of post American Revolution and expansion of newly founded America. Anglo-Saxon supremacy allowed for the suppression of other peoples in American history—it justified their enslavement, domination, exclusion, and extinction.

In the early 1840s John L. O’Sullivan, editor of the Democratic Review, spoke of the term Manifest Destiny to describe American expansion. O’Sullivan described the nation’s expansion as inevitable and criticized those that imposed on that process "for the avowed object of thwarting our

policy, limiting our greatness and checking the fulfillment of our manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions."(219) Horsman writes that even though O’Sullivan invented the term manifest destiny, the concept was rooted in Anglo-Saxon heritage.

To add on to their myth of superiority, Anglo-Saxons created another myth that claimed they were descendants of a great Aryan nation. Just as their descendants centuries later, the Aryan nation, spread its civilization across Europe, and by the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the English laid claim to a superb racial heritage. British colonists in American also sided to the great myths. Scientists, scholars, historians, philosophers, poets, and writers on both sides of the Atlantic supported these myths of racial greatness. The English supporters of a chosen race respected their institutions as proof of a nation’s greatness and showed how concepts of liberty, natural rights and popular sovereignty translated over to the colonies. In the process, in both in Britain and America, a transformation occurred whereby the English shifted praise from their political institutions as Anglo-Saxonism became racialized which ultimately led to the submission and oppression of Native Americans, Blacks, and Mexicans. Horsman adds on to the manner in which Anglo-Saxon and the Aryan nation myths influenced racial thinking in England, he examines the oddness of American life

that gave proof to the chosen people concept. The success of the American Revolution added onto the American’s colonist’s devotion to freedom and just government. A sense of deep purpose and destiny spread through the Revolutionary generation, as they believed destined them for great things. During this period Americans believed in the Enlightenment ideas of equalism but interaction with black slavery and Native Americans gave way to new challenges to that view. In the late eighteenth century and the first part of the nineteenth century new ideas on racial thinking as well as close proximity and constant interaction with Indians and Blacks impacted American thinking on race. The confines of the new racial thinking justified how whites could treat and exploit certain groups and ultimately take control of some from their land, while others suffered extinction. As Americans thought in terms of empire, their thinking on the Native Americans and Africans changed and after 1815 a new racial theory evolved from all humans are equal in fundamental worth or social status to scientific theories of inferiority of such races such as Natives, Mexicans, and Africans. Between 1815 and 1850 there occurred a transformation in scientific racial thinking. By 1850 these theories provided a justification to push away or even the annihilation of inferior people. Science added to the American facts that differences between races were based on physical and mental factors of races. Furthermore, American writers and historians also had influenced racial thinking with their works, which supported and justified the oppression and conquering of inferior people that lived in the America. In addition, scientific writings concentrated on the physical differences among the races, American movement through the form of literature and arts concentrated on the special achievements of people, nations, and even the language a set of people used. The U.S. became an Anglo-Saxon republic that excluded nonwhites and used that argument to justify the annexation ethnic groups in areas they wanted control over for resources and expansion and to benefit economically from those areas inhabited with these inferior peoples who were incapable of democratic and structural governments.
In addition with constant run ins with Natives and Africans, confrontation between Mexicans and Whites in the Texas Revolution, the Mexican War, and the Southwest resulted in Americans clearly designating themselves as an Anglo-Saxon Race. They clearly categorized Mexicans not only as an inferior people that could not make any use of the land they had but also stood as a barrier for the expansion of the “superior” white man.
After the Mexican War Americans interpreted expansion in terms of economic expansion as well in order to compete in the world market. The new American Anglo Saxon ideology impacted American expansion. Racial belief sparked an expansion frenzy to capture the American Southwest, Mexico, Cuba and Central America. As the White man led the crusade for expansion, they believed that people that didn’t fit the criteria of what they considered superior were unfit for democratic and structural governments. While the nation’s foreign policy demanded economic insight of foreign markets, racism prohibited colonialism from happening as it posed as a threat to a homogenous people of that region.

Historian Reginald Horsman looks at the development of racial ideology in the United States during the age of Andrew Jackson, The author argues that the idea of Anglo-Saxonism in the United States emerges out of England and the English reform and is influenced by Enlightenment ideas.

He shows how, in the decades after the American Revolution, Americans as well as European people developed ideas about the racial inferiority of other “lesser” peoples to justify the eventual cruel and unjust treatment of these groups. Horsman notes that while many Americans in the early years of the colonies agreed all humans are descended from one pair of people and the differences in skin color are due to differences in environment, climate, and geographical location, but this changes in the early nineteenth century. (Horsman 99-101) This is due to the influences of the Romantic Movement and its emphasis on the distinct traits and uniqueness of that individual as well as the existence of slavery at the time in a country that some referred to as the world’s freest nation. Finally, Horsman traces how the idea of racial inferiority begins to solidify and gains momentum throughout the mid nineteenth century and is used as justification for not only slavery but also Indian removal and the Mexican

War.
Belief in racial destiny justified territorial expansion and suppression of “lesser” peoples. The belief in supremacy of the Anglo-Saxon paved the way for the furture supremacy of Anglo-Americans. This was the justification for the continued enslavement of Africans, the murder of Native American Indians, American expansion into Mexico, all of which justified a road of destruction and cruelty. By 1850, the American public and politicians believed that the Indians had an inevitable future of extinction due to their inferiority compared to the whites, and that the black population existed safely only because they were under the protection of their superior masters. The American expansion halted, in part, for the same reason it began—racial superiority dictated that the nation not be contaminated with the lesser races it had overcome. Instead, America would recreate the world in its image through economic expansion—not the acquisition of territory