Garden Variety White Supremacy in the Nineteenth Century

Cora L. V. Hatch

It's common knowledge that modern racism in the United States comes from the forced enslavement of millions of Africans who were stolen from their homes and brought to a place that was totally unfamiliar, only to work long hours for no compensation, and to cope with the social and cultural implications of it. The rationalization of this monstrous institution was twofold: 1) They were human, but subhuman; and 2) Bringing them to the new world introduced them to Christianity. It is also known (by anyone who actually pays attention) that racism existed and continues to exist across our country. 

The undercurrent of racism, I believe, was (and is) a belief that white Americans often feel they are superior to people of color, and they are blind to the privilege that this gives them.

White Americans are made very uncomfortable by this assertion, and will often say that they do not have special privilege. What they don't understand is that it isn't just a matter of economics, but of opportunity. And protection. For example: as a white American man I do not have to fear for my life if I am stopped by police. Black Americans do. Every. Single. Time. That's privilege, or the lack thereof.

In the nineteenth century the undercurrent of white supremacy was out in the open and was agreed upon by many white Americans.  The general belief was that Americans of certain ethnic groups were superior in terms of intelligence, culture, and physical appearance. The pseudo-science of phrenology was hitched to the wagon of white supremacy in the 1840's and 50's and used as evidence of this belief.

Oddly, Spiritualism factored into this as well. Spiritualism was the belief that people who placed themselves in an attitude of receptiveness could communicate with the dead. Mary Todd Lincoln, wife of the US President by the same last name, regularly held seances to attempt to talk to her two deceased sons. Abraham Lincoln went along but generally appears to have been less than convinced of its genuineness.

One Spiritualist author, Cora L.V. Hatch, toured across New England in the mid-late 1850's promoting her craft with the aid of a medium. She felt that phrenology was a way to establish who was closest to God in general terms, and that of course meant New England natives of Anglo-Saxon background.

You didn't see that coming, did you?

I offer a couple of excerpts from a lecture on phrenology that express this view:

But in all those qualities which make the human an embodiment of the divine, the Anglo-Saxon comes next in the scale; and we may venture to say, without egotism or flattery, that the Anglo-Saxon race is the most perfect, phrenologically and anatomically, which exists upon the globe; not that Anglo-Saxon which exists under monarchical governments, which is ground down by the heel of despotism, but that which is manifested in New England, in free America--free, except as you bind yourselves in party politics--which is manifested throughout your whole country, springing up as the embodiment of science, religion, and virtue, which you see all around you, varied in manifestation, but perfect in its results.....the American, the Anglo-Saxon, is more spiritual, more intellectual, more perfect as regards the whole. (Cora L.V. Hatch, Discourses on Religion, Morals, Philosophy, and Metaphysics ( New York, 1858), p. 117

The Irish have strong social and religious powers, quick of wit, but enfeebled in judgment; they are to the world what the blacks are to the southern states of America. But the American brain is distinct and positive in its characteristics; and an American can never be mistaken for any other nationality on the face of the earth. Those who live in free America--free as far as theory is concerned; those whose political and religious lives are free--except bound by party spirit--become the true types of material phrenological development...(p. 119)

"The Irish....are to the world what the blacks are to the southern states of America." Wow. As in, good for manual labor and nothing else? And this, less than a decade after the Potato Famine that killed millions of Irish and brought them to our shores?

It's important to remember that the tensions over immigrants from Ireland and Germany caused Protestant Americans (so they claimed) to fear for their jobs. Sound familiar? The Know Nothing Party, officially the American Party, sought to restrict immigration by instituting a 21 year residency requirement prior to citizenship, and keeping the foreign born and Catholics from becoming involved in politics. Fortunately the party disappeared by 1860, but the undercurrent remained, coming to the surface periodically as with today's politics.

This may seem like a digression but it isn't. So, let's take a very brief look at Phrenology.

For those not familiar with Phrenology, it was a pseudo science that developed in Germany. The basic idea was that the contours of a person's skull would indicate important factors in their intellect and personality.  Porcelain heads with the different areas lined out showed practitioners what to look for and where. Reproductions are readily available. I have one as a curiosity. In this system, a larger section in a particular area could indicate a higher intellect or greater sensitivity to differing factors in society. This "science" is now universally recognized as a fake science, relegated to the same dustbin of history that holds eugenics. But at the time it was considered a valid way of looking at the human mind. And it quickly became a tool to generate “scientific” evidence to support the belief that people of Northern European descent were superior to others. 

This new layer of racist justification was laid over the general belief that Africans and their descendants were culturally and spiritually inferior, and enslavement and exposure to Christianity and civilization was a benefit to them. Now there was a way to prove this with scientific theory. By the 1850’s plates with profiles of people from different parts of the world appeared in books and periodicals to demonstrate that people who had sloping foreheads and other undesirable traits (that were not northern European) were less intelligent. This is the forerunner of eugenics.

 

Bear in mind that these categories were not just used for people of African descent. They were used to categorize people of all racial backgrounds. The common denominator was that they were from low circumstances.

 

What I'm describing here is the common form of racism that didn't involve burning crosses. and wearing white robes with pointed hoods. This sort of racism was in the groundwater. You could easily argue that it still is. But this sort of racism was so prevalent because it wasn't as overt. This was the racism of the northern United States, which is more difficult to weed out because the roots are so deep. This was the racism that helped white New Englanders rationalize owning a slave or two in the colonial period and early Republic. They rationalize that they treated them well. What is lost, of course, is it was still involuntary servitude.

This was also the racism held among a good number of abolitionists, although not universally. Many in the North during the Civil War either objected to the war becoming an attempt to end slavery, because they did not see those in bondage as equals. Even Abraham Lincoln did not see African Americans as equal to people of European descent. This did not compromise his hatred of slavery and the injustice of it, but it did nuance it to a great extent.

The assumption that some make today is that once slavery ended (although it continued in all but name under sharecropping) there was no more need for concern about racism. The United States has gone through successive waves of movements toward and away from racism. The rest of the nineteenth century was a long, unified period of discrimination and terrorism against black Americans through lynching, Jim Crow, and other forms of domestic terrorism.

 

We still bear the scars of racism in our public institutions. There isn't enough space to go into detail, but the racial profiling that officially happens (not officially) plagues inner cities.

So, here we are. Our present situation under the current administration (regime) is to roll back the rights gained at so high a price, such as the right to vote. The recent gutting of the Voting Act of 1965 is evidence enough of that.

It's hard to say what the solution is. I'm not an expert. But I can at least acknowledge that racism still exists and will continue to exist as long as wealthy white Americans exert the vast privilege at the cost of others.