The History of White People (18 page)

Following the anecdote, Beaumont explains the deadly meaning of race prejudice in the United States. Echoing Crèvecoeur and Jefferson, he concludes that white supremacy in America corrupts white people by schooling them in “domination and tyranny,” while blasting Negro fate and engendering in them violent hatreds and resentments bound to provoke bloody crisis.
⁴⁰

Although as much an aristocrat as Tocqueville, Beaumont deeply disagrees with his friend over the nature of U.S. society. Tocqueville, it seems, can only see a virtuous democracy where Beaumont focuses on barriers as impassable as Europe’s. White Americans, Beaumont concludes, belong to a hereditary aristocracy by dint of a mythology driven by the notion of tainted blood and a belief in invisible ancestry. This fact alone suffices to destroy the possibility of a true democracy. David Walker’s indictment of hypocrisy reappears.

Beaumont’s mouthpiece Ludovic instructs a young traveler from France who is drawn to the United States by “the laws and customs of this country; they are liberal and generous. Every man’s rights are protected here.” Not so, advises Ludovic, who having lived with a family of color, knows that such impressions are mere “illusions” and “chimeras.”
⁴¹

T
HESE TWO
seminal books—very much two sides of the same coin—experienced contrasting fates in translation.
Democracy in America
was translated into English immediately upon publication in 1835, but
Marie
had to wait 123 years, until 1958, for its first English translation. An accessible paperback in English did not appear anywhere for 164 years, when published in 1999 by the Johns Hopkins University Press. One fact, a title change, says much about the elevation of Tocqueville at the expense of Beaumont: in 1938 George Wilson Pierson published
Tocqueville and Beaumont in America
, a scholarly analysis based on their notebooks and letters. When Johns Hopkins University Press republished Pierson’s book in 1996, its contents unaltered, Beaumont had disappeared from the title, now simply
Tocqueville in America
. Thus quietly but definitely, Beaumont and his troubled, multiracial United States ceded place to Tocqueville’s egalitarian, democratic, white male America.

Walker, Easton, and Beaumont, each in his own way, cast a wary eye on the myth of American democracy. Concurrently, another story was playing in the history of American whiteness.

T
wo centuries ago, Americans had already fallen into a number of thought patterns familiar to us. In a society largely based on African slavery and founded in the era that invented the very idea of race, race as color has always played a prominent role. It has shaped the determination not only of race but also of citizenship, beauty, virtue, and the like. The idea of blackness, if not the actual color of skin, continues to play a leading role in American race thinking.

Today’s Americans, bred in the ideology of skin color as racial difference, find it difficult to recognize the historical coexistence of potent American hatreds against people accepted as white, Irish Catholics. But anti-Catholicism has a long and often bloody national history, one that expressed itself in racial language and a violence that we nowadays attach most readily to race-as-color bigotry, when, in fact, religious hatred arrived in Western culture much earlier, lasted much longer, and killed more people. If we fail to connect the dots between class and religion, we lose whole layers of historical meaning. Hatred of black people did not preclude hatred of other white people—those considered different and inferior—and flare-ups of deadly violence against stigmatized whites.

By 1850, a prideful Saxon-American juggernaut was elevating Protestant Americans above Catholics of all classes and provenance. Obviously Irish Catholics were white, and, especially in the South, white enough to hold themselves above black and Chinese people in the name of whiteness. As Celts, however, the poor Irish could also be judged racially different enough to be oppressed, ugly enough to be compared to apes, and poor enough to be paired with black people.

Before about 1820, most Irish immigrants had been Protestants from the north of Ireland, fairly easily incorporated into American society as simply “Irish.” On the other hand, Irish Catholic immigration, while moderate before 1830, had now and then drawn Federalists and then Whigs toward nativist rhetoric, prompting the Protestant Irish to term themselves “Scotch Irish,” as distinguished from Catholics.
¹
And after 1830, as hardship in Ireland pushed the poor to America in growing numbers, opposition to them and their religion grew. To understand this antagonism we need some historical background.

A
NTI
-C
ATHOLIC LEGISLATION
had long existed in the British colonies, inherited from the anti-Catholic struggles of England, led most notably by Henry VIII in the mid-sixteenth century and Oliver Cromwell during the mid-seventeenth-century English Civil War against Charles I. Various American colonial statutes forbidding, for example, the practice of the Roman Catholic religion, endured long past their rigorous enforcement. Until 1821 New York denied citizenship to Catholics unless they renounced allegiance to the pope in all matters, political or religious. In Massachusetts, all persons, Catholic and Protestant alike, were taxed to support state-sponsored Protestant churches until 1833. New Jersey’s constitution contained anti-Catholic provisions until 1844.
²

When Ireland’s potato famine came to a crisis in the 1830s and 1840s, it turned the starving Irish into a sort of perverse tourist attraction. Intellectuals of all sorts, including Alexis de Tocqueville, Gustave de Beaumont, and Thomas Carlyle, sailed to Ireland to see for themselves whether such gut-wrenching reports could possibly be true. After their visit to the United States, Beaumont and Tocqueville toured Ireland and recorded their impressions. Tocqueville’s notes remained in manuscript until the mid-twentieth century, but Beaumont published his study as
L’Irlande sociale, politique et religieuse
(
Ireland: Social, Political and Religious
) in 1839.
³

Before his time in Ireland, Beaumont had figured that parallels between American people of color and the Irish poor would make good sense. Thinking he had seen unmatched degradation in the United States—he considered Indians and Negroes “the very extreme of human wretchedness”—he was astonished to see in Ireland the worst of both American worlds: the impoverished Irish lacked the freedom of the Indian as well as the slave’s relative security. Consequently, “Irish misery [formed] a type by itself of which neither the model nor the imitation can be found anywhere else.” At bottom, Ireland lacked other countries’ varied histories, in which poor and rich played a part. For Beaumont, as for many others unable to see beyond the famine, Ireland had only a single essence: “the history of the poor is the history of Ireland.”
⁴

Beaumont located the roots of the curse of Ireland in its history of pernicious British policy. Since occupying Ireland in the seventeenth century, Protestant English settlers had dispossessed the Catholic natives, depriving them of ownership or even unfettered use of the land, reducing them to abject poverty. Irish natives lived on potatoes, and when the potato blight destroyed this staple food, more than a million died of starvation. Twice that number emigrated, many to the United States. In the grimmest irony, while Irish people starved, Ireland was exporting food from settler-owned farms. Beaumont investigated this colonial history and drew his own conclusions. Blaming politics rather than the Irish themselves, he contradicted the prevailing assumption that inherent racial defects caused Irish wretchedness.

According to nineteenth-century popular wisdom and anthropological science, the Irish were Celts, a particular race separate from and inferior to the Anglo-Saxon English. Beaumont’s enlightened views would ultimately prevail, but at the time they found few supporters among the Western world’s theorists. Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881), the most influential essayist in Victorian England, held the racial-deficiency view, having fled Ireland’s scenes of destitution in disgust after brief visits in 1846 and 1849. In one cranky article he called Ireland “a human dog kennel.”
⁵

From his perch in London, Carlyle saw the Irish as a people bred to be dominated and lacking historical agency. He took it for granted that Saxons and Teutons had always monopolized the energy necessary for creative action. Celts and Negroes, in contrast, lacked the vision as well as the spunk needed to add value to the world. Pushing the analogy further, Carlyle played on the antislavery question “Am I not a man and a brother?” But whereas the abolitionist query stresses the brotherhood of man, Carlyle refashioned the question to denigrate the oppressed. In his essay “The Present Time,” the first of several splenetic
Latter Day Pamphlets
(1850), he asks, “Am I not a horse, and half-brother?” then juxtaposes “Black Jamaica” and “White Connemara” as “our Black West Indies and our White Ireland.”
⁶
The “sluttishly starving” Irish remind him of shiftless emancipated Negroes in the West Indies: “a
Black Ireland
; ‘free,’ indeed, but an Ireland, and Black!”
⁷

Carlyle was hardly singular in turning the Irish into animals. A younger British Teutonist, the Oxford professor Charles Kingsley, termed the poor Irish “white chimpanzees.” Robert Knox in Scotland considered intermarriage between Saxons and Celts as much contrary to natural law as unions between Saxons and Hottentots.
⁸

By the mid-1840s, as two million desperate Irish immigrants poured into the northern port cities of the United States, a backlash had developed. The Native American Party had appeared in New York City in 1835, and a number of anti-Catholic journals and organizations followed in New York and New England. Samuel F. B. Morse, father of the American telegraph, and Lyman Beecher, Yale-educated Presbyterian minister and father of the novelist Harriet Beecher Stowe and the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher, published slashing denunciations of Catholicism. Morse’s work carried windy titles:
Foreign Conspiracy against the Liberties of the United States
and
Imminent Dangers to the Free Institutions of the United States through Foreign Immigration and the Present State of the Naturalization Laws, by an American
. In it Morse evokes “the great truth, clearly and unanswerably proved,” that the Catholic monarchies of Europe, especially Austria and its allies the Jesuits, were sending “shiploads of Roman Catholic emigrants, and for the sole purpose of converting us to the religion of Popery.”
⁹
Beecher’s
Plea for the West
accused Europeans of trying to subvert the Protestant virtues of American democracy, also by flooding the country with Catholics. In Beecher’s view it was tragic that poor Catholics could vote and hold office just like white men. In New York City and many another northeastern city, bourgeois voices joined those of Morse and Beecher in deploring “the very scum and dregs of Human nature” and the “low Irishmen” who decided election outcomes.
¹⁰

In 1834, Beecher was heading the Lane Seminary in Cincinnati, a city housing a large number of Germans. From time to time, however, he returned to Boston, where he had lived during the 1820s. On one such occasion he preached three violently anti-Catholic sermons in a single day, and within twenty-four hours a mob had burned down the Ursuline convent school in neighboring Charlestown, setting off a wave of church burnings throughout New England and the Midwest.
¹¹
More obscenity was yet to come.

A
FTER SERIAL
publication in 1835, the sensational, pornographic
Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk: The Hidden Secrets of a Nun’s Life in a Convent Exposed
appeared in book form in 1836 and went on to sell some 300,000 copies by 1860. Second only to
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
,
Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk
became antebellum America’s most popular book.
¹²

A Canadian born in 1816, Monk begins her exposé by explaining, “One of my great duties [as a nun] was to obey the priests in all things; and this I soon learnt, to my utter astonishment and horror, was to live in the practice of criminal intercourse with them.”
¹³
Monk vividly describes priests’ rape of nuns, the murder of the offspring, and the beating to death of recalcitrant nuns. Monk’s story traced just one example of a favorite plot—the escaped nun’s tale—a more or less graphic depiction of a former Protestant girl seduced by a priest. Such books pictured the Catholic Church as inherently sexually immoral. Not only were Catholics not Protestant; they drank liquor, partied on the Sabbath, and had near-constant sex—especially in their convents and churches.
¹⁴

Although investigation quickly disproved Monk’s allegations, the book excited nativists as much as later abolitionist descriptions of sex between masters and slaves. Failing to capitalize on her literary fame, Monk disappeared into the urban underworld and died in 1839 a poor, obscure, and abandoned single mother.
¹⁵

While Monk’s ignominious end passed unnoticed, anti-Catholic hatred surged. Between 1830 and 1860, some 270 books, 25 newspapers, 13 magazines, and a slew of ephemeral publications carried on.
¹⁶
This plethora of anti-Catholic newspapers included New York City’s
The Protestant
, the
Protestant Vindicator
(which had published
Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk
in serial form), and the
Downfall of Babylon.

I
N TRUTH
, the era’s sociopolitical context had created much anxiety. The Western world was being buffeted by an extraordinary set of crises in the mid-1840s. In France, Germany, Italy, and central Europe, political unrest spurred by widespread unemployment and poverty culminated in revolution in 1848. Such uprisings crystallized the thinking of writers eager to interpret class conflict as race war. In France, Arthur de Gobineau wrote his
Essay on the Inequality of Races
, published in the mid-1850s. Robert Knox in London published his mean-spirited lectures on race in 1850 as
Races of Men: A Fragment
. The revolutionary year of 1848 also generated unrest among educated women and workers: the first conference for women’s rights took place in Seneca Falls, New York. In Great Britain, Chartists advocating workers’ rights and universal male suffrage presented their third (and last) People’s Charter to the House of Commons.
*
As Chartism was dying and revolutionary sentiment strengthened throughout Europe, the Irish situation grew ever more desperate.

Ireland attracted the most attention in English-speaking lands, but continental Europe, where background conditions were similar, was sending distressed immigrants to the United States from German-speaking lands. Central Europeans were fleeing reactionary politics and the poverty caused not only by industrialization’s displacement of hand workers but also by failed harvests of wheat, wine, and potatoes. Such an upsurge of hard-pressed immigrants alarmed the U.S. government. For the first time, it answered the need to tabulate just how many desperate people were entering the country.

The U.S. census of 1850 was the first to collect statistics on immigrants. In a total population of 23,191,876, some 2,244,600 were deemed immigrants; among them, 379,093 from Great Britain, 583,774 from Germany, and a whopping 961,719 from Ireland. In the years of hardship in western Europe, especially 1845–55, 1,343,423 came from Ireland and 1,011,066 from the German-speaking lands.
¹⁷