Intellectual currents were affected by transcontinentalism, as a new idiom captured the public’s imagination. Advancing beyond Jefferson’s concept of a nation with no inherited aristocracy, Americans embraced an imperial destiny grounded in biological determinism. The new imperative held that as much as the Anglo-Saxon American’s racial stock was of superior characteristics, all that was left to do was outbreed all other races. According to the political arithmetic of 1851, the United States would surpass Europe in importance by 1870, “numbering 100,000,000 of free and energetic men of our own race and blood.” Those of “Anglo-Saxon descent, impregnated with its sturdy qualities of heart and brain,” would put Great Britain and the United States on a course of global dominance, “as representatives of this advancing stock.”7
Sheer demographic superiority was reinforced by the second ruling premise of the new thinking: national greatness rested on the laws of bloodlines and hereditary transmission. Learned traits such as a love of liberty, and racial exclusivity, were now assumed to be passed from one generation to the next. In the essay entitled “The Education of the Blood” (1837), one advocate asserted that the knowledge of one generation was literally retained in the atmosphere, and that the aptitude for learning entered the bloodstream and became “part of our physical constitution and is transmitted to our descendants.” Simply taking the savage from his mother in the forest and placing him in civilization would fail to convert him; his “blood must be trained and educated, generation after generation must accumulate receptivity as the Anglo-Saxon race has done.” The same author compared the phenomenon to the less attractive inheritance of insanity, passed on through the father’s line and “imbibed with our mother’s milk.” Bloodlines revealed everything: a nation was only as great as its pedigree. America’s destiny was determined by large land acquisitions and infused in its people’s blood.8
This fascination with blood was pervasive in antebellum literature. Southerners were enamored with horse breeding as reflected in the periodical American Turf Register and Sporting Magazine. In 1834, it recorded that “American blood” (i.e., “American thoroughbreds”) had achieved a quality of blood as excellent as any in the world. Avid readers knew the pedigree of the most celebrated American horses, learned the long list of sires, while breeders kept and published the records of the “American stud book” to avoid a spurious issue.9
Horses and humans were identical in this regard. Scottish physiologist Alexander Walker revived the debate between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson over whether human beings should breed to “improve the race.” In Intermarriage (1838), he strongly encouraged the practice of choosing spouses according to the same natural laws that applied to horse breeding. American health reformers such as Orson Squire Fowler, in Hereditary Descent (1848), recommended the breeding of children with desirable qualities. He emphasized the golden rule of animal breeders: attending to pedigree. No longer measured by wealth or family name, the only pedigree that mattered was long-lived ancestors and a sound physical constitution untainted with hereditary disease or “bad blood.” The rallying cry in this new advice literature extended to “hygienic” marriages: the selection of sexual partners with healthy skin, good teeth, well-formed and vigorous bodies. One had to steer clear of the “ill-born,” who produced nothing but “poor and feeble stock.” Could America’s future be derailed through the infusion of bad blood? A would-be wit put it this way: “Noble sires, we fondly think, only to be surpassed by us, their noble sons. With what reverence we revert to our parent stock! With what pride we talk of blood! With what jealousy we guard against its contamination!”10
Race and healthful inheritance were part of a single discussion. In 1843, the Alabama surgeon Josiah Nott declared that the mulatto, as a hybrid, was the “offspring of two distinct species—as a mule from the horse and ass.” Mulattoes were “faulty stock,” a “degenerate, unnatural offspring, doomed by nature to work out its own destruction.” They were doomed because, like mules, they were prone to sterility. (It was a ridiculous theory, of course.) He compared mulattoes to consumptive parents, assuming that they had inherited a defective internal organization. Not content to confine his remarks to a mixture of Anglo-Saxon and Negro, he echoed the words of the leading English authority on the subject, Sir William Lawrence, that “the intellectual and moral character of the European is deteriorated by the mixture of black or red blood.”11
A similar doctrine of hereditary suicide had already been applied to American Indians. Jefferson’s paternalistic projection of acculturated Natives was no longer endorsed by most Americans by the 1840s. A starker and dogmatic ideology took hold, arrogantly nationalistic. Native American tribes, a biologically degraded race, could no longer coexist with their Saxon superiors. In 1844, with a cold nonchalance, one writer captured the mood: “They retire before the axe and plough like the forests they once inhabited. The atmosphere of the white man is their poison. They cannot exist among us.” The “red man was doomed to utter and entire extinction.” This belief was not new, just more publically accepted. Henry Clay had privately voiced the same conclusion twenty years before as secretary of state.12
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Both Texas and California loomed large in fashioning the Anglo-Saxon fantasy. Jackson subaltern Sam Houston, the first elected president of Texas, was a charismatic promoter of the region’s freedom fighters. White Texans were, in his words, the embodiment of “Anglo-Saxon chivalry.” Though the real force behind independence came from a filibuster, a private army of young men directed by their greed for land, Houston saw victory in racial terms. Every Texan had “imbibed the principles from his ancestry,” his “kindred in blood,” and was spurred on by his “superior intelligence and unsubduable courage.” For many others like Houston, Texas independence was an epochal achievement; it symbolized the passage of the “scepter” from the Old to the New World, the purest flowering of the Anglo-Saxon race.13
Houston was actually a strange choice to carry this banner of racial pride. Between 1829 and 1833, before he became president, he lived with the Cherokees, took two Indian wives, and sat for a portrait in full Indian garb. His presidential successor had few qualms about cleansing Texas of Indians. In 1839, the aptly named Mirabeau Buonaparte Lamar, known for his flowery poetry, pursued what he called “an exterminating war” against the Cherokees and Comanches. The Texas national constitution explicitly denied citizenship to those of African or Indian descent. The Texas legislature passed its first antimiscegenation law in 1837. It was similar to laws in force in southern states prohibiting marriage between persons of European blood and those of African ancestry.14