Reginald Horsman exposes a darker side of the United States past when he concludes in this provocative study that by 1850, rather than after the Civil War, the great majority of white North Americans saw themselves as a separate, innately superior Anglo-Saxon people, successors to the Roman Empire, who were destined to bring good government, commercial prosperity, and Christianity to the Western Hemisphere and the world.
North Americans inherited the English tradition of ethnocentrism based on Anglo-Saxon superiority in the art of government. They also borrowed heavily from nineteenth-century European, especially German, “science” (philology and phrenology) and romanticism, which stressed that the descendants of the true Aryans would rule over the inferior peoples of the world. While these “racial” theories fell on fertile ground in the United States, North Americans made their own contribution as they fused them with older ideas of destiny, derived from the Puritans and the Revolutionary Era, the demonstrated growth and expansion of the United States, and the actual experience of dealings with Native Americans and Blacks. In the process, the special mission of the United States was transformed from the excellence of its republican institutions and virtues and its dedication to liberty to the “racial” superiority of the North American Anglo-Saxon. Nevertheless, this doctrine strongly and broadly permeated United States society, which, undergoing rapid change and dislocation of values, was seeking to justify its continental expansion and global ambitions. The confrontation with Mexicans in the Southwest, Horsman questionably argues, provided the catalyst for the overt adoption of racial Anglo-Saxonism.
Horsman succeeds admirably in tracing the origins of what he terms United States racialism and in analyzing how it infected society, cutting across political, sectional, and class lines. He is somewhat imprecise, however, in differentiating between doctrines of cultural superiority and “racialism.” He is also less than convincing in demonstrating how “racialism” affected the course of United States expansion. For, as Albert K. Weinberg and Frederick Merk have shown, there were other elements that constituted Manifest Destiny and there were other fears shared by North Americans at mid-century. Still, this extremely well written book is a valuable contribution to the understanding of nineteenth-century ideology in the United States.
