The First American Racial Awakening

Through the early years of the 19th century both religion and science confirmed Americans in the view that mankind consisted of one human species, that the obvious physical differences were the result of environment, and that the vast differences in the human condition and accomplishments stemmed from the same cause. This view was to radically change by 1850. That it did was partially the result of a general change in Western European and transatlantic thought, but the change also came about because of the peculiarities of the American experience. New racial ideas which influenced the whole of Western society in the first half of the nineteenth century fell on especially fertile ground in the United States. Ideas flowed both ways across the Atlantic in the formative years of the new ethnology. The American experience and the American conclusions from this experience helped to shape Western European attitudes. Racial differences were dramatized in the United States, for white, black, and red were thrust together from the earliest settlements.

Those Americans who lived on the eastern seaboard and thought in Atlantic and universal terms were able to separate the practical horrors and violence of border warfare from the theoretical problems of Indian relations. They often had a sense of perspective which enabled them to see the violence and faults of American frontiersmen and to observe that the Indians were fighting to protect their lands and families. American leaders, of course, did not want to stop the expansion westward, but in the post-Revolutionary years they wished to work out policies that by saving and transforming the Indians would show to the world that America was carrying out its announced mission. The leaders of the early 17^thcentury had seen the Indians as souls to be saved; the leaders of the post-Revolutionary generation saw the Indians as fellow human beings who could and would be raised on the scale of human society. Enlightenment theory was to be carried out in practice in America. Above all else America’s leaders wanted a prosperous, powerful, expanding America, for this they believed would be for the good of the world.

While American leaders of the post-Revolutionary generation incorporated the Enlightenment view of mankind as an integral objective of their Indian policy, there is ample evidence that this view was being rejected in America by those who were actually encountering the Indians. Long before science proved a rationale for rejecting the Indians as equal human beings, America’s empire builders regarded the Indians as “violent savages” and as much less than inherently equal members of the human species. As Southerners had come to accept the idea of blacks as inherently “different,” in spite of the assertions of an intellectual elite, Westerners built their own image of the Indian, which contrasted sharply with the 18^thcentury intellectual trans-Atlantic view. The practical groundwork for the rejection of ideas defending the inherent equality of all human beings had been firmly laid in the United States by the end of the 18^thcentury. American science after 1815 was to confirm for many Americans beliefs that they already held. The practical rejection of the Enlightenment view of mankind at an early date is obscured by the eagerness with which an American intellectual elite accepted it. 

Significantly, the first prominent literary figure of the trans-Appalachian West, Hugh Henry Brackenridge, reflected in his writings popular frontier hatred of the Indians rather than the more benign view of the Indians presented by the Enlightenment tradition. His novel Modern Chivalry achieved great popularity beyond the mountains, although it never won a comparable reputation along the eastern seaboard. Breckenridge was raised in York Country, Pennsylvania, and educated at Princeton, but a major part of his career was spent in Pittsburgh. It has been suggested that some of his anti-Indian prejudice possibly stemmed from witnessing Indian attacks in York County; certainly, his experience in Pittsburgh after 1781 confirmed his prejudices. Even before he moved to Pittsburgh he attacked the idea that the Indians should have a right “to a soil they have never cultivated” and wrote of the Indians “as sunk beneath the dignity of human nature,” though they “bear resemblance are seen in the shape of men.” His attacks took on a particular virulence, however, after he moved west.

When in 1786 Congress appointed a superintendent for the Indians north of the Ohio, Brackenridge commented that he doubted the Indian savages could be restrained by the giving of presents: “It would be for the good of the country,” he wrote, “if, when the blankets and leggings come, the superintendent would give them to some of the poor women and children whose husbands and fathers have been murdered in the war.” Brackenridge in the early 1790’s was prepared to take issue with those who wrote in praise of the Indians. “I consider men who are unacquainted with the savages, like young women who have read romances, and have as improper an idea of the Indian character in the one case, as the female mind has of real life in the other. The philosopher, weary of the vices of refined life, thinks to find perfect virtue in the simplicity of the unimproved state.”

-excerpt from “Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism” by Reginald Horsman (1981).