Ethnicity and Race in American Life
Perhaps the most persistent rhetorical question in our history is, What is an American? The most famous—and misleading—answer to that question was published in the year before the American Revolution ended. Its French author, a Norman petty nobleman, Michael-Guillaume-Jean de Crèvecoeur (1735–1813), is a most curious person for Americans to accept as a definer of their nationality, but it has become almost obligatory to do so. Crèvecoeur came to America with the French army and, after Montcalm’s defeat, toured extensively in the British colonies and settled and was naturalized in Orange County in upstate New York. A Loyalist during the Revolution, he abandoned the United States in 1780, although his book, published two years later under his American pseudonym, J. Hector St. John, was titled Letters from an American Farmer. In 1783 he returned to the United States as French consul in New York, where he stayed for seven years before returning permanently to France. In the most quoted passage in his book he asked:
What then is the American, this new man? He is either an European or the descendant of an European, hence that strange mixture of blood, which you will find in no other country. I could point out to you a family whose grandfather was an Englishman, whose wife was Dutch, whose son married a French woman, and whose present four sons have now four wives of different nations. He is an American, who, leaving behind him all his ancient prejudices and manners, receives new ones from the new mode of life he has embraced, the new government he obeys, and the new rank he holds. He becomes an American by being received in the broad lap of our Alma Mater. Here individuals of all races are melted into a new race of men, whose labours and posterity will one day cause great changes in the world.
Although even casual students of intellectual history will recognize that effusion as a product of French romanticism rather than American experience, it is easy to see why it became and has remained so popular. In the first place it was flattering—“will one day cause great changes in the world”—and, to later generations, the almost uncanny prefiguration of the myth of the melting pot makes Crèvecoeur seem prophetic. The polyethnic family he describes, while certainly possible, especially in New York, was clearly not representative. And the notion that an immigrant could shed his culture the way a snake sheds his skin is nonsense. More than a century later a lesser known immigrant from Romania, Marcus Eli Ravage (1884–1965) wrote a much more realistic analysis of the problem of acculturation.1
The alien who comes here from Europe is not the raw material that Americans suppose him to be. He is not a blank sheet to be written on as you see fit. He has not sprung out of nowhere. Quite the contrary. He brings with him a deep-rooted tradition, a system of culture and tastes and habits—a point of view which is as ancient as his national experience and which has been engendered in him by his race and his environment. And it is this thing—this entire Old World soul of his—that comes into conflict with America as soon as he has landed.
Neither of these nearly polar views is, of course, a substitute for modern social analysis. During the eighteenth century and before, there was an intermediate step between being a European and an American: It was being a colonial. Nicholas Canny and Anthony Pagden have analyzed what they call the development of “colonial identity in the Atlantic world” in the three centuries before 1800. They describe a process in which colonizing individuals and groups come to see themselves as distinct and different both from people back home and from indigenous persons in the place of settlement. Thus Lowland Scots transplanted to England’s first plantation in Ireland quickly differentiated themselves from stay-at-home Scots on the one hand and the native Irish on the other.2 Yet if we imagine two immigrant Ulstermen, one Presbyterian Scotch Irish and the other Catholic Irish, on the Carolina frontier in the 1760s, both would be likely to make primary distinctions, not between themselves, but between settlers and Indians, between settlers and slaves, and perhaps between backcountry people and coastal gentry.
This is not to say that there was no ethnic conflict in the colonies or that it was not important. Maldwyn Jones was correct in devoting an entire chapter of his survey, American Immigration (1960), to what he called “Ethnic Discord, 1685–1790.”3 But before we discuss and detail that discord, we must spend some time looking more closely at the attitudes of the most numerous ethnic group in the American colonies, the English.
English Attitudes
Toward the end of the seventeenth century, probably about 90 percent of all the settlers in British North America were of English birth or descent. The development of African slavery and the increased immigration of non-English groups caused this percentage to drop steadily, so that, as we have seen, by the first census a century later, that percentage was down to 48 percent of the total, 60 percent of the white population. In two of the original states, New Jersey and Pennsylvania, English were actually a minority of the white population, an estimated 47 percent in New Jersey and barely more than a third—35 percent—in Pennsylvania. There the minority English founded immigrant protective societies: In Philadelphia in 1772 self-conscious English residents founded the Society of Sons of St. George for the “Advice and Assistance of Englishmen in Distress,” emulating similar organizations founded there by Scots (1749), Irish (1759), and Germans (1766). Majorities, or those who psychologically feel themselves to be majorities, don’t really need to organize, and nowhere else in colonial America were such groups established by English people: Even in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, new English immigrants organized few such groups.
The dominance of English culture and institutions was even more overwhelming than that of English and English-descended persons: language, law, the predominance of English and later British economic power, were overwhelming, and have left indelible marks on American society. But very soon after settlement began native-born Americans—second-generation English Americans—came to outnumber the immigrant generation, the founding fathers and mothers. In New England, for example, the most English part of the American colonies, there was relatively little immigration from anywhere after the English Civil War of the mid-seventeenth century, and the tremendous population increase in New England from less than twenty-five thousand in 1650 to just over a million at the first census is almost entirely due to natural increase. All things considered there may have been as much or more emigration from New England as immigration to it in that period. Whole groups, as we have seen, went to Long Island (and to other parts of New York), some individuals, the most famous of whom was Benjamin Franklin, went to other colonies or to Great Britain and, in the aftermath of the Revolution, many Loyalist exiles found havens in Canada and England.
It is quite clear that, even before the Revolution produced a crisis in loyalty, there were conflicting claims of loyalty for most English Americans and a colonial identity was evolving. On the one hand, persons who had never seen it referred to England as “home,” and among the elite, education in England—at the Inns of Court, for example—and travel there, were common. On the other hand, the very different conditions of American life, differing views of what today we call national security, and, eventually, economic conflict all helped to produce an American, as opposed to an English American, outlook. These differences, as we shall see, came to a head during and after the American Revolution, which has been called the crucible of American nationalism. But less than twenty years before the Revolution a fourth-generation English American like John Adams (1735–1826) could refer to himself enthusiastically as a “British American,” a description he would avoid once the Revolution began.
But long before the Revolution began—in fact, from the earliest days of English colonization—there were conflicts between English and other groups and between non-English groups in the colonies. For convenience we can divide these into “race relations” and “ethnic relations.” The term race relations sounds modern and is in fact of twentieth-century coinage, but the fact of race relations, between English and Indians, between English and blacks, and, eventually, between all whites and Indians and blacks, was a fundamental if largely ignored aspect of colonial life.
Race Relations
The relationships between European settlers and Native Americans can be described in a very narrow spectrum. Early on, in Jamestown, Plymouth, and elsewhere, the settlers learned essential agricultural techniques from Indians, techniques that were probably crucial to their survival. Soon after the initial peaceful coexistence, conflict broke out, usually stemming from Indian resistance to white aggrandizement. The conflicts usually resulted either in the extermination of the Indians of a given locality or their expulsion to the west. In Massachusetts what we can call proto-Indian reservations—areas in which the remaining Indians were to be segregated—were developed as early as the mid-seventeenth century. The colonists called such places “Indian plantations,” “Indian villages,” or “praying towns.” As the last designation suggests, Christianization was often part of the “taming” process.
Until very recently, most of what writing there has been about Indian-white relations in the Colonial Era—and after—had assumed, implicitly or explicitly, that however brutal and rapacious most whites in direct contact with Indians had been, the purposes of the missionaries who went among them were benign and benevolent. The path-breaking work of Robert Berkhofer a quarter century ago has destroyed this notion: he, and a number of other scholars since, have shown clearly that Christian missionaries had little regard—to put it mildly—for the Indian’s culture and that they consciously advanced the political and economic goals of settler society.4 From John Eliot (1604–90), the Puritan “apostle to the Indians,” through the recently canonized Junipero Serra (1713–84), who established missions in California, the martyred Marcus and Narcissa Whitman (1847), missionary-settlers in Oregon, and the clerical reformers who helped the federal government run its reservations in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, there persisted one constant demand: that Indians cease being Indians, that they commit cultural suicide, or what has been termed ethnocide. This racial policy established a fateful pattern for American ethnic relations. In years to come this same kind of demand—what has been called the demand for Anglo-conformity—would be made of European ethnic groups: assimilate on the terms of the prevailing norms.
Not surprisingly, some Indians were enslaved, and although the subject has been little studied, Indian slavery in North America seems to have been practiced most extensively in South Carolina. Even there, however, it did not last long. Since Indian wars, smallpox, and other epidemics greatly reduced the available Indian population, the number of Indian slaves fell drastically after 1719, and African slavery came to dominate. Reliable data are hard to come by. One report of the governor and council in 1708 lists 4,080 whites—3,960 free and 120 servants; 4,100 Negro slaves—1,800 men, 1,100 women, and 1,200 children; and 1,400 Indian slaves—500 men, 600 women, and 300 children. Thus slaves were 57 percent of the population, and a quarter of the slaves were Indians. The leading student of the subject, John Donald Duncan, has counted the advertisements about slaves in the South Carolina Gazette for a period beginning in 1732. In the next ten years some 3,343 Negroes, 15 white servants, and only 4 Indians were advertised for sale; during 1732–52 the paper ran ads seeking the return of 678 runaway blacks, 191 whites, and 14 Indians. Clearly Indian slavery was no longer a statistically significant factor; nonetheless it had existed and is but another indication of the state of race relations in the American colonies.5
White-black race relations, of course, are even less ambiguous; Christian missionaries were not much interested in black souls, although most masters did see that their slaves became Christianized. Unlike Indians, who were largely sloughed off—the Constitution’s dismissive “excluding Indians not taxed” is typical—Negro slavery and thus white-black race relations were very much a matter of law. Although the English common law did not recognize slavery and in the celebrated Somerset case, Lord Mansfield, a British judge, ruled in 1772 that all slaves held in England must be set free, with the double standard that came to characterize British imperialism on racial matters, slavery in British colonies took on the full color of law.6 Slavery existed in the North and South from the seventeenth century, but only in the states from Delaware south were elaborate slave codes developed. While in the southern states slaves, whether red or black, were primarily rural and, as we have seen, of increasing and eventually paramount importance in southern agriculture, in the North slaves and free blacks were almost all urban residents. Only in very recent years have historians, most significantly Gary Nash, begun to explore the dimensions of black life in northern cities before the Civil War. In only one northern city, New York, was slavery well established. In 1740, when the city’s population was some 12,000 there were about 2,000 slaves, one-sixth of the population. New York’s brief slave code was nearly as strict as those of the Deep South, and it was in New York that the most appalling atrocity of northern urban race relations of the colonial period occurred: the so-called New York slave revolt of 1741. As a result of judicial proceedings that lasted more than a year, 150 slaves were imprisoned, 18 hanged, 13 burned, and more than 70 shipped to the West Indies; since the “conspiracy” supposedly involved a Negro-Catholic plot to take over the city, 25 whites were also imprisoned and four of them hanged. Was there a revolt? Probably not. The pioneer Negro historian George Washington Williams wrote in 1883 that it was “one of the most tragic events in all the history of New York or the civilized world.”7 Contemporary historical opinion is more likely to doubt the conspiracy while recognizing that there were criminal elements at work. Much of the evidence involved a series of arsons that were used as a cover for burglaries. As in most conspiracies, real and imagined, the testimony of coconspirators was vital. New York had had a real slave rebellion in 1712, in which nine whites were killed, which probably helped account for the degree of hysteria.8 But perhaps the most instructive thing about the 1741 slave revolt is the way in which this example of mass hysteria has been almost totally ignored, except by specialists, as opposed to the continuous examination and reexamination of the other great example of colonial hysteria—the Salem witchcraft trials of 1692—the details of which are known, as Macaulay would say, by every schoolboy. The American mythos does not include the notion of race relations in the colonial North, although religious hysteria is admissible.
No full account of the majority of black Americans in colonial cities who were not slaves can be given here, but their status can be summarized: They were neither slave nor free. In Massachusetts, where there may have been 1,300 blacks in a population of 62,000 in 1710—about 2 percent—a number of laws regulating black behavior had been enacted by then. Black slaves and servants—along with similarly enslaved Indians and mulattoes—were subject to curfew; interracial marriage and sexual intercourse between blacks and whites were forbidden, and free Negroes were forbidden to entertain or harbor nonwhite servants in their homes without the consent of the latter’s masters. Yet free blacks could testify in courts, own and transfer property, and were otherwise given status by the law. Since assimilationist pressures upon blacks were largely absent in both North and South, the direct analogy with treatment of European immigrants does not exist. But when, in the mid-nineteenth century, immigrants began to come from Asia in significant numbers, the same kinds of patterns of race relations developed in the Far West as had existed on the East Coast. It also seems clear that having long-established discriminatory legal codes of behavior to govern race relations made discriminatory ethnic relations seem more “natural.”
Ethnic Relations
During the era of the American Revolution—as in other great crises in our history—ethnic differences were played down. In the Federalist Papers, for example, John Jay was thankful that
Providence [had] been pleased to give this one connected country to one united people—a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs.
As we have seen, this was nonsense, and New Yorker John Jay (1745–1829) knew it better than most: He not only lived in the polyglot city but was himself of Huguenot ancestry. In the nearly two centuries before the Revolution, the attitudes of the predominant English Americans blew hot and cold about “foreign immigrants,” prefiguring an ambivalence that has continued to prevail in American society up to the present day.
We must not imagine that there was a uniform ethnic attitude among the English-descended colonists: Differences of geography and class were also important, as were differences of religion. Attitudes in Massachusetts were not the same as those in South Carolina; an employer of indentured labor would not have the same views as a wage earner. A member of a religious minority would often be more tolerant of “strangers” than would a member of whichever group happened to constitute the local majority religion.
But there were similarities, the most fundamental of which was an emergent and growing English nationalism, which, especially when mixed with militant Protestantism, produced an extreme cultural arrogance. While English Americans in the colonial period at one time or another expressed hostility toward every other European ethnic group present in North America, the greatest and most long-lasting animus was directed, not surprisingly, against the two largest such groups: the Irish and the Germans.
Prejudice against the Irish was more general, if for no other reason than the fact that Irish were distributed throughout the colonies and the Germans more concentrated. Even in Massachusetts, where 90 percent of the ethnically identifiable white people were believed to be of English descent, some 4 percent of the same population—fifteen thousand persons—were believed to be of Irish heritage. There were at most, twelve hundred persons of German origin or heritage in a state that had nearly three hundred seventy-five thousand inhabitants. The widespread prejudice against the Irish was, as we have seen, unmixed with distinctions about where in Ireland they hailed from: Persons who today would be classified as Scotch (or Ulster) Irish, southern Irish, or English Irish were all just Irish to eighteenth-century Americans. Yet we must understand that this prejudice was not reflected in statute law. Except for the anti-Catholic legislation, which at one time or another existed on the statute books of every colony—even, as we have seen, in Maryland—no legal distinctions were made among free white persons. We must also remember that much of the anti-Catholicism of colonial America was, by definition, rhetorical. Since there were by the end of the era only about twenty-five thousand practicing Catholics in the colonies—and almost all of those in Pennsylvania and Maryland—most Americans had never seen a Catholic, which perhaps made them all the more frightening when they did begin to come a couple of generations later.
Discrimination against Germans was another matter: Its focus was, naturally enough, in Pennsylvania, where Germans were a third or more of the population from the middle of the eighteenth century. John Higham has argued that “the first major ethnic crisis in American history” involved the Pennsylvania Germans whose settlements seemed to be an unassimilable alien bloc to many of Pennsylvania’s non-German majority. Included among the latter was Benjamin Franklin, who, it could be argued, was a founding father of non-religious American nativism. His complaints about “German boors” are notorious and his only-half-humorous suggestion that his fellow English-speaking Pennsylvanians learn German so that they would not become strangers in their native land sounds very much like the anti-Spanish arguments of the zealots of the contemporary organization called US English (discussed in chapter 16).
Franklin, who tried to boss colonial Pennsylvania politics, was angry with the Germans because, in one of the earliest examples of ethnic bloc voting in our history, they had voted the wrong way and supported his enemies in a series of elections. The Philadelphia German Lutheran leader, Henry M. Mühlenberg, described the marshaling of ethnic voters in one colonial election: Some six hundred German voters assembled at the German schoolhouse and then “marched in procession to the courthouse to cast their votes.”9 Franklin’s pamphlet, Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind (1751), shows him not only anti-German but, like so many of his fellow Americans, imbued with a broad racism.10
Why should the Palatine Boors be suffered to swarm into our Settlements, and by herding together establish their Language and Manners to the Exclusion of ours? Why should Pennsylvania, founded by the English, become a Colony of Aliens, who will shortly be so numerous as to Germanize us instead of our Anglifying them, and will never adopt our Language or Customs, any more than they can acquire our Complexion.
Which leads me to add one Remark: That the Number of purely white People in the World is proportionally very small. All Africa is black or tawney. Asia chiefly tawney. America (exclusive of the new Comers) wholly so. And in Europe, the Spaniards, Italians, French, Russians and Swedes, are generally of what we call a swarthy Complexion; as are Germans also, the Saxons only accepted, who with the English, make the principal Body of White People on the Face of the Earth. I could wish their numbers were increased. And while we are, as I may call it, Scouring our Planet, by clearing America of Woods, and so making this side of our Globe reflect a brighter Light to the eyes of Inhabitants of Mars or Venus, why should we in the Sight of Superior Beings, darken its people? Why increase the Sons of Africa, by Planting them in America, where we have so fair an Opportunity, by excluding all Blacks and Tawneys, of increasing the lovely White and Red? But perhaps I am partial to the Complexion of my Country, for such Kind of Partiality is Natural to Mankind.
Nor were Germans the only ethnic target group in Pennsylvania. The Quaker establishment, Gary Nash tells us, was particularly concerned, not about the Germans who were often its allies, but about the Scotch Irish, who they feared would take over the colony. Quaker pamphleteers attacked Presbyterians complaining of an almost global conspiracy, “a perpetual Presbyterian holy war against the mild and beneficent government of the Kings of England.”11 The Scotch Irish, in turn, attacked Germans and Quakers, as, among other things, being soft on Indians.
Other kinds of ethnic resentments found their way into the language: The phrase “Dutch treat”—meaning no treat at all—for example, describes the alleged stinginess of the Dutch and probably expressed resentment at their generally superior status—they had, after all, got in on the ground floor—in New York and New Jersey. That there was not more ethnic conflict than there was may well be attributable, as George Frederickson and Dale T. Knobel have suggested, to the fact that so many of the non-English were on the frontier: “Physical space effectively inhibited interethnic tension or at least impeded active discrimination against disapproved minorities.”12
In any event, John Jay’s propaganda about ethnic unity to the contrary, there was significant ethnic discord before the American Revolution. And although the Revolution is, quite properly, viewed as the crucible of American nationality, it also created important fracture lines not only in the American people but in every ethnic group in the new nation.
The most obvious evidence of these fractures is the incidence of emigration from the new United States, emigration being the most profoundly un-American act that one can imagine. Although American historians have enjoyed dwelling on the consensual nature of American society in general and the American Revolution in particular, proportionally speaking, the eighty to one hundred thousand persons who fled the country—mostly to Canada or Britain—were a larger segment of the American people than the perhaps half a million who left France after 1789 were of the French people. The American loyalists, in addition, helped to ensure that Canada would not be drawn into the political orbit of the new nation. As we have seen in the last chapter, loyalists came from many ethnic groups, and non-English or English-descended persons may well have been overrepresented among them. Very recent—post-1763—immigrants certainly were. Some twenty-eight thousand of various ethnicities went to Nova Scotia, most of them taken to Halifax by British ships. Scots Highlanders, from the Mohawk Valley and elsewhere, who had fought on the losing side, were settled en bloc in what they named Glengarry County in Ontario; smaller ethnic enclaves were created by Scots Presbyterians, Dutch, and Germans, who each settled along the Saint Lawrence or on the shores of Lake Ontario. There were Huguenot and Jewish loyalists as well; particularly notable were the De Lanceys of New York who fled to Canada and whose vast estates were seized.13
The revolutionaries not only tried to play down ethnic discord, but sometimes wrote as if no ethnic differences existed. Jefferson, in the Declaration of Independence, spoke blithely of “one people,” prefiguring Jay’s line in The Federalist, and in the Declaration of the Causes and Necessity of Taking Up Arms of a year earlier, which he coauthored with John Dickinson, a bald reference was made to “our forefathers, inhabitants of the island of Great-Britain.” (George Washington, in his 1796 Farewell Address, partially written by the West Indian-born Alexander Hamilton, was more circumspect: He used the “one people” line but carefully noted that Americans were either “citizens by birth or choice of a common country” and that, “with slight shades of difference,” they had “the same religion, manners, habits, and political principles.”)
Jefferson did make reference to immigration in the Declaration. Part of his bill of particulars against “the present King of Great Britain” was that “[h]e has endeavored to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws of Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migration hither.” He also commented on race relations, making it clear that his United States was a white man’s country, further charging that the king had excited “domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.”
Immigrants and the Constitution
The revolutionary consensus continued into the era of the Constitution. The Articles of Confederation, agreed to in 1777 and adopted in 1781, did not deal with the crucial questions of immigration, naturalization, and citizenship, but provided only in Article 4, that “the free inhabitants” of each state “shall be entitled to all privileges and immunities” in other states, “paupers, vagabonds and fugitives from Justice excepted.” (The right of poor migrants to cross state lines would not be fully established until the Supreme Court’s ruling in Edwards v. California in 1941.)
The Constitution, ratified in 1788, was more specific. Its only direct mention of immigration—and the only direct mention to date, as immigration is not discussed in any of the amendments—referred to a very special kind of migration, the slave trade. In Article 1, Section 9, dealing with the powers of Congress, it provided:
The Migration or Importation of such Persons as any of the States now existing shall think proper to admit, shall not be prohibited by the Congress prior to the Year one thousand eight hundred and eight, but a Tax or duty may be imposed on such Importation not exceeding ten dollars for each person.
The words slave and slavery do not appear in the original Constitution, although the subject was a bone of contention at the Constitutional Convention. In the famous three-fifths compromise, slaves are “other persons.” Gouverneur Morris (1752–1816), who did the final polishing of the language, did not approve of slavery and kept that word out. He did permit the word “Indian” to be used. “Slavery” only appears in the Thirteenth Amendment (1865), which abolished the institution. Congress did abolish the slave trade as quickly as it legally could, in March 1807. Jefferson had invited it to do so in his message of December 1806:
I congratulate you, fellow-citizens, on the approach of the period at which you may interpose your authority constitutionally to withdraw the citizens of the United States from all further participation in those violations of human rights which have been so long continued on the unoffending inhabitants of Africa!
As we have seen in chapter 3, despite the prohibition, perhaps fifty thousand slaves were illegally imported from Africa and elsewhere in the New World after the 1807 prohibition.
The Constitution also empowered Congress, in Article 1, Section 7, “to establish an uniform Rule of Naturalization” but provided no particulars, so that naturalization has been a kind of political litmus test of the national climate of opinion about immigrants and immigration. The Constitution made certain distinctions between native-born and naturalized citizens. In Article 1, Section 2, it ordained that “no Person shall be a Representative [in Congress] who shall not have . . . been seven Years a Citizen” and set the requirement higher for senators who had to have been “nine Years a citizen.” And Article 2, Section 1, barred any future immigrant from the presidency, restricting that office to “natural born citizens” and persons who were citizens at the time of the Constitution’s adoption. This provision, of course, applies to the vice-presidency as well. But rather than emphasizing the negative nature of these provisions, what should be noted is that the founding fathers not only expected immigration to continue but also enabled immigrants to hold all but the very highest office in the land. Immigrants have, in fact, held every office in the American government to which they are eligible, save only Chief Justice of the United States.
Changing Standards of Naturalization
The first Congress in 1790 took advantage of the specific constitutional empowerment and passed a naturalization statute. In keeping with the revolutionary consensus, which was still in effect, it was the most generous in our history, at least for white people who were not indentured servants. It provided that “free white persons” who had been in the United States as little as two years could be naturalized in any American court. However this meant that immigrant blacks—and later immigrant Asians—were not supposed to be naturalized; it said nothing about the citizenship status of persons who were not white and born here: their status, until 1870, would depend on the law in the individual states, as no national citizenship was created until that time. Whether free blacks were citizens or not depended on which state they lived in.14
Even more perplexing was the status of American Indians. From the time of Chief Justice John Marshall’s decision in the case of Cherokee Nation v. Georgia (1831), it was established that Indian tribes were, in Marshall’s words, “domestic dependent nations,” and that Indians therefore were aliens, and not citizens. Marshall based his ruling on the brief but potent commerce clause, part of Article 1, Section 8, which empowered Congress “to regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes.” And since Indians were not “free white persons,” they were aliens who could not be naturalized. In practice many states and localities treated acculturated Indians as if they were citizens—allowed them to vote, hold office, and so on—and, as early as the Grant administration, Eli Samuel Parker (1828–95), an American Indian and a former general in the Union Army, held office as commissioner of Indian affairs. In 1887 Congress, in the Dawes Act, conferred citizenship on acculturated Indians not living on reservations, citizenship that many western states and localities refused, in practice, to recognize. Finally, in 1924, Congress made all native-born American Indians citizens.
But the revolutionary consensus soon began to break down as American politics was polarized around those two archetypical figures, Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson, and our first political parties, the Federalists and what became known as the Democratic-Republicans. The Federalists perceived that many of the staunchest supporters of their opponents were recent immigrants from Ireland and France, immigrants who were essentially political exiles in the era of the French Revolution. It was not ordinary immigrants who most concerned the Federalists but, rather, distinguished ones who became anti-Federalist editors and pamphleteers. These included such men as the English scientist Joseph Priestley (1733–1804) and Jefferson’s friend Victor Marie Du Pont (1767–1827). The anti-immigrant feeling, which had arisen toward the end of Washington’s second term, came to a head during the administration of John Adams (1797–1801) and was exacerbated by the first undeclared war in our history, the so-called quasi war with France of 1798–1800—which was fought entirely at sea. The second Naturalization Act, in 1795, only five years after the first, increased the necessary period of residence to five years. Three years after that, as part of the package of bills known to history as the Alien and Sedition Acts, the now-desperate Federalists, realizing that they were about to lose political power, required an alien to file a declaration of intention to become a citizen at least five years before becoming a citizen and increased the period of residence to fourteen years. In addition, all aliens were required to register with federal officials. Other parts of the Alien and Sedition package, all of which were enacted in less than a month in the summer of 1798, included the Aliens Act, the Alien Enemies Act, and the Sedition Act (which need not concern us here, as it applied to everyone). The Aliens Act gave the president unlimited power to order out of the country any alien “whom he shall judge dangerous to the peace and safety of the United States.” The Alien Enemies Act, which would have gone into effect only if the United States had declared war, empowered the apprehension and confinement of male enemy aliens fourteen years of age and older.15
In the event, the Aliens Act was never enforced against anyone, although some who felt threatened left the country and others went into hiding. When the turn of the political tide put the Jeffersonians in power in 1801, they rolled back most, but not all, of the Federalist antialien legislation. The Naturalization Act of 1801 restored the residence requirements of 1795 (but not of 1790), and five years has remained the period of residence until this day. The registration requirements of that law were repealed and aliens did not have to register again until 1940, when the United States again felt threatened from abroad. The Aliens Act simply expired, as it had a two-year limit and was never renewed. Not until the passage of the Internal Security Act of 1950 was a president given power, in peacetime, to incarcerate persons, and that statute applied to citizens as well as aliens. Nor were the Jeffersonians immune from a xenophobia of their own. During the War of 1812, Congress amended the Nationality Act to provide that no British alien who had not declared the intention to become a citizen before the war began could be naturalized—a provision that was repealed after the war was over.
American Nationalism
One can make too much of the xenophobia and prejudice of the revolutionary era and the early republic. The victory in the Revolution produced in the new nation an overwhelming feeling of confidence that all battles could be won, all obstacles overcome. And most Americans were concerned, as Jefferson put it, with “the population of these states” and, to that end, welcomed immigration. When immigration was opposed, it was largely on ideological rather than ethnic or religious grounds. Federalists opposed radical immigrants from England, France, or Ireland; Jeffersonians in Congress, unduly concerned about the migration and settlement here of exiled nobility from France, got a provision put into the 1795 Naturalization Act requiring an applicant for citizenship to foreswear any hereditary titles of nobility.
The very circumstances of the Revolution tended to defuse religious prejudice, at least for a time. Not only were the Americans allied with Catholic France, but they wished to gain the support of French Catholic Quebec. Canada was given pride of place in the Articles of Confederation: It could join the new nation at any time. Any other new adherent was dependent on the agreement of nine states. When the Continental Congress sent a delegation to Canada in a vain attempt to get it to join in the Revolution, its leaders had the wit to persuade the only Catholic signer, Charles Carroll of Carrollton, to join it, and he persuaded his cousin, Father John Carroll, later to become the first American Roman Catholic bishop, to join them. The priest was reluctant, noting in a memorandum that:16
I have observed that when the ministers of religion, leave the duties of their profession to take a busy part in political matters, they generally fall into contempt, and sometimes even bring discredit to the cause in whose service they are engaged.
Later in the Revolution, when the French fleet used Philadelphia as a home port, priests became a common sight on its wharves and streets. On two occasions in Philadelphia, the French minister had Te Deums said in the small Catholic church to celebrate the third anniversary of the Declaration of Independence and the victory at Yorktown. Many members of Congress, even some from pope-hating New England, attended. If they were not more tolerant, at least their public demeanor was.
In addition, the natural-rights philosophy that inspired so many of the leaders of the revolution tended them toward tolerance and nonsectarianism. In the Declaration, Jefferson spoke of “Nature’s God”; the more politically minded draftsmen of the Articles of Confederation spoke of “the Great Governor of the World”; and Washington in his first inaugural spoke, appropriately enough for the Father of his Country, of “the benign Parent of the Human Race.” These statements by leaders were paralleled by legislative actions. The Virginia and Massachusetts Bills of Rights (1776 and 1780), the Virginia Statute of Religious Liberties (1786) and, above all the “no establishment” clause of the First Amendment (“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof”), all set a laudable and unprecedented standard of religious liberty—though it was one many or most Americans did not really believe in.
In the revolutionary period and the years immediately afterward, the tolerance and nonsectarianism engendered during and after the struggle for independence were not seriously challenged or put to the test. Relatively few immigrants came—perhaps an average of ten thousand a year from the time of Yorktown to the end of the War of 1812, and the vast majority of these were Protestant Britons. The rapid population growth of those years—it grew more than two and a half times between 1790 and 1820 (3.9 to 9.6 million)—was almost entirely due to natural increase. And, because the nation annexed so much territory during the period, the number of persons per square mile barely increased, going from 4.5 to 5.6.
In these circumstances early American nationalism could be, and was, almost entirely positive. It did not attack—as later aspects of it would—ethnic, national or racial groups or single out certain ideological strands as “un-American.” It was, as Philip Gleason has cogently argued, characterized by three elements: its ideological quality, its newness, and its future orientation. Because it was ideological, it did not stress national or ethnic origin or any denomination, although there was, both in rhetoric and in the laws of many states, a distinct bias toward Christianity. The obvious newness of American nationality—the closeness of most Americans to the great events of their past—lent it an essentially positive aspect, while its future orientation—the conviction of most Americans that the future would not resemble but greatly outstrip the past—only served to strengthen its positiveness.17
Much of this would change in the decades after 1820. Immigration would increase to reach its highest incidence in the mid-1850s. The bulk of that immigration would not be English but Irish and German, and much of it would be Catholic. In addition, the nation would face, in the 1860s, the greatest crisis of its existence. Under these pressures, one strain of American nationalism would turn ugly and produce, not the sporadic nativism and xenophobia of the colonial period, but a fullblown movement that exalted bigotry to a matter of principle.
Shortly after the end of the War of 1812, John Quincy Adams (1767–1848) caught the spirit of early American nationalism nicely. Writing to a European, Adams, who had as much intimate knowledge of Europe as any American of his generation, made this point:18
That feeling of superiority over other nations which you have noticed, and which has been so offensive to other strangers, who have visited these shores, arises from a consciousness of every individual that, as a member of society, no man in the country is above him; and, exulting in this sentiment, he looks down upon those nations where the mass of the people feel themselves the inferiors of the privileged classes, and where men are high and low, according to the accidents of their birth.
And we should not forget that such sentiments as Adams describes were not restricted to American natives. Many immigrants quickly took on the ideological accents of their adopted land. As my mentor, Theodore Saloutos, one of the pioneers of American immigration history, used to say, when an immigrant becomes an American patriot, he is often not satisfied to become a 100 percent American but tries to be a 200-percenter. Adams, in the letter quoted above, described how he thought immigrants should behave, echoing, in some ways, the remarks of Crèvecoeur at the end of the Revolution.
[Immigrants] must cast off the European skin, never to resume it. They must look forward to their posterity rather than backward to their ancestors; they must be sure that whatever their own feelings may be, those of their children will cling to the prejudices of this country.
This hyperassimilationist ideal, as we have seen, was never realistic; immigrants generally died in the skins they were born with. And, while most immigrants were, almost by definition, future oriented, their visions of both the present and the future would be modified significantly by the cultural environment of their past.