Who Do We Think We Are? by Philip Yale Nicholson

Author:Philip Yale Nicholson [Nicholson, Philip Yale]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, General, Asia
ISBN: 9781317452058
Google: lgWoDQAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2016-12-05T17:27:38+00:00

Racial Anger

The harshness and rigidity of national and racial sentiments expressed by well-educated leaders of the scientific and literary community developed gradually. From the outset of overseas expansion and conquest, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, French, English, and American pronouncements about native subjects, colonial settlements, and slaves expressed a humanitarian and civilizing mission. Brutality was understood to be an unfortunate precursor to the uplifting process that would follow. Frontier excesses were justified or overlooked, and colonial leaders, royal imperial figures, and most enlightened intellectuals consistently voiced an aristocratic disdain for brutality. That humane tradition continued into the nineteenth century. Harriet Beecher Stowe opposed slavery in her sensationally popular Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the way many slaveowners themselves might have done a century earlier. Her racial views were the same as those of most slaveowners. The more they physically resembled their masters or the author, the more intelligent and capable her fictitious slaves appeared; the darker, the duller. Aside from the frontiers and among the rough burghers of the colonial outposts where it remained consistent, the racial attitudes of public leaders and authorities changed from a condescending humanitarian outlook in the early decades of the century to one of stem dominion.

Several important developments seem responsible for this change. Aristocratic and independent clerical influences on governing authorities faded quickly throughout this period in most of the great colonial powers. Andrew Jackson was not the same kind of man as George Washington or Thomas Jefferson. Jackson needed popular votes to be elected in a more democratic age, and he had to obscure any aristocratic pretensions he may have had. Democratic political changes elevated similar blunt social expressions of national or racial sentiment to open public discourse. Powerful leaders could promote the aggressive interests of farmers and businessmen and put aside the nonutilitarian niceties of aristocratic privilege or religious restraint. Napoleon III took a more popular aggressive approach toward the French empire in midcentury. Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881), the renowned philosopher and author, is an example of an intellectual with refined and enlightened views formed in one era who gave expression to the hard delineation and coercive categories of another. Carlyle, a Scotsman, was a close friend of Ralph Waldo Emerson and John Stuart Mill, two men noted for their expansive moral and humanitarian works. Mill ended the friendship after the publication in 1849 of Carlyle’s mean-spirited and racially arrogant essay, “Occasional Discourse on the Nigger Question,” in Fraser’s Magazine. Carlyle is well known for a series of lectures published in 1841, On Heroes, Hero Worship, and the Heroic in History, that was quite congenial to the forceful Jacksonian and Napoleonic (both uncle and nephew) political style.

The civilizing mission dimmed as uprisings and resistance toward colonial and racially oppressive power increased, along with public awareness of this rebelliousness. Nat Turner’s slave rebellion in 1831 put an end to criticism of slavery in the Old South. Angry defensiveness in response to abolitionist criticism included strident arguments on behalf of slavery. George Fitzhugh’s grim depiction of human nature in his

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