“MY children,” Dr. Johnson used to say to his friends, “deliver yourselves from cant.” Every age has its cant, which, in some of the thousand forms of the thing, is the prevailing rage. That of our own time is Anglo-Saxon glorification. Not a day passes, but we read in print, or hear from the platform, the eternal, hackneyed boasting about our “manifest destiny,” — the same wearisome ding-dong about the Anglo-Saxon energy, and the rapidity with which the race is belting the globe, and supplanting the laws, manners, and customs of every other people. This cant has been echoed and re-echoed, — in newspaper articles, stump speeches, Congressional harangues, and even in works on ethnology, — till it has become a nuisance. We are as sick of it as ever Dr. Johnson was of the everlasting “Second Punic War.” “Who will deliver me from the Greeks and Romans?” cried in agony the classic-ridden Frenchman. “Who will deliver us from the Anglo-Saxon?” despairingly cry we.
There are in the United States some six or eight millions of people who are descended from the Anglo-Saxons, — and that is probably all. That population is to be found principally in New England, side by side with men of every clime and land; not a very stupendous item, is it, out of some forty-two millions of men, women, and children, who think and toil between the St. Croix River and the Bay of San Francisco? True, these forty-two 300 millions all, or nine-tenths of them, speak the language of Shakspeare and Bacon; but this no more proves them the descendants of that race which was first whipped by a few Scandinavian filibusters, and afterward thrashed, held by the throats, and ruled with a rod of iron when they complained, for century after century, by a handful of Normans, than the wearing of woolen proves a man a sheep, or drinking lager beer proves him a Dutchman.
Who are the men who have built up this nation and made it the great republic it is? Are they all, or nearly all, of Anglo-Saxon birth or descent? Not to speak of the Swiss, the Huguenots, the Dutch, and other minor peoples, let us look at the Irish contingent to American greatness. From the very first settlement of the country, in field and street, at the plow, in the Senate, and on the battle-field, Irish energy was represented. Maryland and South Carolina were largely peopled by Hibernians. Maine, New Hampshire, and Kentucky received many Irish immigrants. During the first half of the last century, the emigration from Ireland to this country was not less than a quarter of a million. When our forefathers threw off the British yoke, the Irish formed a sixth or seventh of the whole population, and one-fourth of all the commissioned officers in the army and navy were of Irish descent. The first general officer killed in battle, the first officer of artillery appointed, the first Commodore commissioned, the first victor to whom the British flag was struck at sea, and the first officer who surprised a fort by land, were Irishmen; and with such enthusiasm did the emigrants from “the Green Isle” espouse the cause of liberty, that Lord Mountjoy declared 301 in Parliament, “You lost America by the Irish.” We will not speak of the physical development of America, to which two generations of Irish laborers have chiefly contributed, but for the constant supply of which the buffalo might still be browsing in the Genesee Valley, and “Forty-second street” be “out of town” (speaking Hibernice) in New York: we will confine ourselves to the men of brain who have leavened the mass of bone and sinew by which our material prosperity has been worked out. Who were the Carrolls, the Rutledges, the Fitzsimmons, and the McKeans, of the Revolution? — whence came Andrew Jackson, Robert Emmet, J. C. Calhoun, and McDuffie, of a later day? — whence the projector of the Erie Canal, the inventor of the first steamboat, and the builder of the first American railroad? — whence two of our leading sculptors, Powers and Crawford? — whence our most distinguished political economist, Carey? — whence the Hero of Winchester, whom all the people of the North have delighted to honor? They were all Irish by birth or descent.
Even to the Welsh element in our population, our country is indebted in no small degree for its prosperity. Of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, eighteen had Welsh blood in their veins, and among them were Samuel Adams, John Adams, Stephen Hopkins, Francis Hopkinson, Robert Morris, B. Gwinnett, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Harrison, Richard H. Lee, and Francis H. Lee. Among our Revolutionary Generals, the brave Montgomery, who fell at Quebec, “Mad” Anthony Wayne, the fiery Ethan Allen, and David Morgan, together with Charles Lee, John Cadwallader, and many others, were of Welsh blood; and so were six of our Presidents, viz.: John 302 Adams, Jefferson, Monroe, J. Q. Adams, Harrison, and Buchanan. We may add that President Grant, to whom the Republic is indebted more than to any other man since Washington, is not of Anglo-Saxon descent, but of Norman, via Scotland.
If, leaving history, we look to the moral and physiological traits of the American people, we shall find them clearly distinguished from those of the Anglo-Saxons. The English people and the American differ widely in mind, feeling, temper, and manners: and these differences may be traced to the characteristics of nations who have mingled the stream of their life with the current derived from England. We have far quicker sensibilities than the English, both of affection and of wrath, being kindlier in our gentle mood, and more fiery when irritated. Along with this inflammable temper, we have an originality of invention, a discursiveness of inquiry, a keen quest of novelty, a fertility of expedients, a contempt for antiquated laws, customs and precedents, which strikingly contrast with the timidity and caution, the conservative and creeping policy of the English.
How we came to be infected by the Anglo-Saxon mania, it would be hard to tell. Even in England it is ridiculous enough; but there it is beginning to be laughed at by men of sense, who perceive the absurdity of Englishmen claiming to be Anglo-Saxons, when there is no such race in existence, and never was. Those who echo this boast, should read Defoe’s “True-born Englishman,” in which, at a time when it was customary to denounce King William as “a foreigner,” the author was at pains to instruct his countrymen how many mongrel races had conspired to form “that vain, ill-natured thing, an Englishman,” 303 and showed in limping verse, but unanswerable logic, that
“A True-born Englishman’s a contradiction —
In speech an irony, in fact a fiction;
A metaphor invented to express
A man AKIN to all the universe.”
Anything more motley and heterogeneous than the Anglo-Saxon blood, even before the Norman invasion, made up, as it was, from the veins of Britons, Romans, Saxons, Picts, Scots, and Danes, it would be hard to conceive. It began with Celtic, of which it was a dilution, — that very Celtic with which certain writers are fond of telling us it is in deadly antagonism and enmity; next comes the Roman blood, — a blood shared, more or less, by every people in Southern and Western Europe, to say nothing of parts of Asia and Africa, — and which, we know, was derived from a mingling together of all the races of ancient Italy and the ancient world; and then follows the blood of the Picts and Scots, the Jutes, Frisians, Angles, and Saxons, the Danes, and, last of all, the Normans, who, as Dr. Latham says, were, from first to last Celtic on the mother’s side, and on that of the father Celtic, Roman, and German, and hence brought over to England only the elements they had before, — Celtic, Roman, German, and Norse. All this shows plainly that the idea of an Anglo-Saxon race, composed of pure Anglian and Saxon elements, is sheer nonsense. It shows that the English Anglo-Saxon race is composed of the same constituents as the other leading European races, not excepting the French; and that hence it is simply absurd for Americans to call themselves Anglo-Saxons, when they have confounded, and are daily more and more confounding, the confusion of the English blood by infusions from the veins of all the other nations of Europe.
304The truth is, that, made up as we are, of so many nationalities, “pigging together, heads and points, in one truckle-bed,” we are as mixed, piebald, and higgledy-piggledy a race as the sun ever looked down upon. Compared with us, the Romans, who first comprised all the vagabonds of Italy, and finally incorporated into the empire all the semi-barbarians of Europe, were a homogeneous race. To plume ourselves upon our Anglo-Saxon extraction, is as ridiculous as the inordinate pride of ancestry rebuked by Defoe, which led the self-styled “True-born Englishmen” of his day to sneer at the Dutch:
“Forgetting that themselves are all derived
From the most scoundrel race that ever lived.
A horrid crowd of rambling thieves and drones,
Who ransacked kingdoms and dispeopled towns;
The Pict and painted Briton, treacherous Scot.
By hunger, theft, and rapine hither brought;
Norwegian pirates, buccaneering Danes,
Whose red-haired offspring everywhere remains;
Who, joined with Norman French, compound the breed,
From whence your ‘True-born Englishmen’ proceed.”
When we think how much we, in common with the English people, are indebted to the sturdy old Norman kings and barons for our liberties, we have still less reason for joining in the cant of Anglo-Saxonism. Who was it that established in England the right of trial by jury; that commuted personal service in the field for a fair scutage; that taxed nobles and commons alike, and struck the hardest blows at the tyranny of feudal lords over their vassals? Who was it that summoned the first English House of Commons; that gave England her judicial circuits; that opposed the stoutest and most effectual resistance to the encroachments of the Roman 305 See? In each case it was a Norman King. It was the Norman Kings who first forbade appeals to Rome, and denied to the Papal legates permission to be received as such within the realm; and it was the sturdy Norman barons who, when John Lackland stooped to resign his crown and kingdom into the hands of a Papal legate, and to receive it back as a Papal fief, rose against the coward, and forced the signing of the Magna Charta. If we are proud of our descent from the Saxons, let us not forget that we have also the blood of the old Scandinavian vikings in our veins, and that but for this infusion of Norse fire into their cold Saxon nature, the nation from which we have derived our political and religious liberties, might have bequeathed to us the same institutions that prevail on the Continent of Europe.
Out, then, upon this stereotyped laudation of the Anglo-Saxon race and its progress! There is nothing more dangerous to our political unity than this miserable cant about “races,” and especially this gabble about Anglo-Saxon blood, which we hear so often in the United States. It is just such talk as this which has caused many civil wars in Europe, — which in 1848 set the Germans and the different Slavic races to cutting each other’s throats; and it has led to similar horrors in our own country. It has already roused the jealousy of our South American neighbors, whom our demagogues are so fond of teaching us to regard as an inferior race, and therefore doomed to be our prey, — the victims of our “manifest destiny.” Those Americans who join in these vauntings, — proclaiming that we are a great people because we are of the same stock as the English, — forget that this self-stultification is anything but creditable to 306 them; that it detracts from rather than adds to the dignity of the American character. Instead of blushing or hanging down our heads on account of our mixed origin, we should be proud of it, for all history, ancient and modern, shows that it is by the fusion of race that all great and vigorous new races are made. All the powerful nations of Europe have been reconstituted, — made anew, — in this way, and those are the weakest which have received the least stimulus of admixture. “The purest populations of Europe,” says the distinguished ethnologist, Dr. Latham, “are the Basques, the Lapps, the Poles, and the Frisians,” — confessedly among the weakest and most insignificant tribes of Europe; and he adds that “the most powerful nations are the most heterogeneous.” The British are in many respects the most powerful people of Europe, and they are also the most heterogeneous. We are still more mixed, and every day blends new elements with our blood, making our pedigree more and more a puzzle. Considering how much Celtic, Scandinavian, and other blood runs in our veins, this Anglo-Saxon glorification in our republic is peculiarly invidious, exasperating, and misplaced. America is not Anglo-Saxon any more than it is Norman or Celtic; it is the grand asylum and home of humanity, where people of every race and clime under the whole Heaven may stand erect on one unvarying plane of political and religious equality, — feel that, despite “the lack of titles, power and pelf,” they are men “for a’ that,” — and bless Heaven that they have work to do, food to eat, books to read, and the privilege of worshipping God according to the dictates of their own consciences. Such may it ever remain!