Ralph Waldo Emerson's Saxons

Home , Hengist and Horsa

Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Saxons Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/jah/article/95/4/977/713359 by guest on 23 September 2021

Nell Irvin Painter

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) towers over the American Renaissance but does not, though he should, reign as philosopher-king of American white-race theory. Widely hailed for his enormous intellectual strength and prodigious output, Emerson wrote the earliest full-length statement of the ideology later termed “Anglo-Saxonist.” His “Saxons” are not, most emphatically, the same as white Americans or white people.1 We ordinarily locate both white masculine gender panic and spread-eagle Anglo-Sax- onism at the turn of the twentieth century, but Emerson laid them out half a century earlier, in the 1850s. In an influential treatise and oft-repeated lectures, he portrayed the American as Saxon and the Saxon as manly man and separated the genealogy of the Amer- ican Saxon from that of the Celt. Deftly and subtly, Emerson elevated the Saxons and disappeared the Celts from the identity of the American. Emerson makes it crystal clear that “Saxon” (or, later, “Anglo-Saxon”) is not a synonym for “white,” even though the his- toriographical literature often seems to equate them. My remarks this evening come from my work in progress, The History of White People, which W. W. Norton will publish in the spring of 2010. The book offers a counterhistory of a prominent theme in Western thought, historicizing the notion of the white, rather than the nonwhite, races.2 Let me state categorically that I do not underestimate or ignore the overwhelming importance of black race in United States history. A truly gigantic literature exists to explain the meaning and importance of race when it means black, to prove that race-as-blackness really and truly does exist (and, more recently, to show that it is no more than a cultural construction). By concentrating on the white races, I do not overlook or downplay the fundamental nature of concepts of black race. After all, the United States as a nation was founded by and largely for the owners of African slaves. Over the course of some two hundred years, federal, state, and local governments labored to define black race, a history we

Nell Irvin Painter is the Edwards Professor of American History, Emerita, at Princeton University and currently an undergraduate student in visual art at the Mason Gross School of the Arts of Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. This article is a revised version of the presidential address delivered to the convention of the Organization of American Historians in New York, New York, on March 29, 2008. Readers may contact Painter at [email protected].

1 Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, vol. V: English Traits, ed. Robert E. Burk holder, Douglas Emory Wilson, and Philip Nicoloff (Cambridge, Mass., 1994). Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Anglo- Saxonist lectures include “Permanent Traits of the English National Genius” (1835), “The Genius and National Character of the Anglo-Saxon Race” (1843), and “Traits and Genius of the Anglo-Saxon Race” and “The Anglo- American” (both 1852–1853). 2 Nell Irvin Painter, The History of White People: Constructions of White Americans from Antiquity to the Present (New York, forthcoming). March 2009 The Journal of American History 977 978 The Journal of American History March 2009 Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/jah/article/95/4/977/713359 by guest on 23 September 2021

Ralph Waldo Emerson. Engraved and published in 1878 by S. A. Schoff from an original drawing by Sam W. Rowse. Courtesy Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, LC-DIG-ppmsca-07398. recognize all too well. We know also that concepts of black-race identity have changed over time, in terms of naming and of ostensible biological basis. So far this sophistication has only barely begun to extend across the color line.3 Statutory and biological definitions of white race remain notoriously vague—the leav- ings of what is not black. But that vagueness does not indicate disinterest. Quite the contrary. Another gigantic literature of race exists, much less known today, explaining the meaning, importance, and honest-to-God reality of the existence of white races— white, the now usually unraced race. We may be accustomed to alterations in the meaning of colored race; we hear the passage from “colored” to “Negro” to “black” to “Afri- 3 The vast literature on black race goes back to David Walker, David Walker’s Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World, ed. Peter P. Hinks (1835; University Park, 2000). For useful, though now dated, introductions to racial theory, see Kimberle Crenshaw et al., eds., Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings That Formed the Movement (New York, 1995); and Richard Delgado, ed., Critical Race Theory: The Cutting Edge (Philadelphia, 1995). The profession- alization of the field of black history began with Carter G. Woodson’s founding of the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History (now the Association for the Study of African-American Life and History) in 1915 and the founding of the Journal of Negro History (now the Journal of African American History) in 1916. Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Saxons 979 can American” as changing discourse. But with the field of critical white studies nearly a century younger than black studies, we are much less able to comprehend the less salient but equally mutable discourse of whiteness. I further say white “races” in the plural be- cause for the better part of a century Americans believed more than one European race existed.4 During the hundred years of heavy working-class European immigration (c. 1830–

1924), experts and laypersons labored to racialize people who were already considered Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/jah/article/95/4/977/713359 by guest on 23 September 2021 white in phenotypical and purely legal terms. This history of the meanings of white race can be harder to see now, for the concept prevailing today—of one capacious white race— can obscure a complex past. We need to keep in mind that wide-scale acceptance of the idea of one big white race dates back only to the middle of the twentieth century, becom- ing hegemonic during the New Deal and World War II. In the 1930s and 1940s, southern determination to keep the Negroes down permeated federal law, prohibiting their access to public services, notably through New Deal policies affecting housing. The war against German National Socialists delegitimized racist ideologies, and after the war a rising black civil rights movement defeated legal segregation and disfranchisement. It also elevated the salience of black/white difference. The emphasis on black and white transformed white races into white ethnicities, obscuring the earlier history of plural whitenesses.5 Here I want to go backward, back before the New Deal and World War II consolidated Euro-Americans into one white race, back before the early twentieth-century immigration of people from southern and eastern Europe inspired scholarly examination of the races of Europe, back to the time when impoverished, hardworking Irish immigrants were racialized as Celts. Back to the 1850s, when Ralph Waldo Emerson lent his golden pen to the ideology we know as Anglo-Saxonism. Although Emerson gave American Anglo-Saxonism its most eloquent presentation, he did not invent it. Thomas Jefferson, among other Americans and Britons, also believed in the Saxon myth, a story of American descent from Saxons by way of England. Jefferson’s fascination with the Saxons and Old English began during his student days at William and Mary College, and he carried a belief in Americans’ Saxon roots to his grave. I want very briefly to review Jefferson’s engagement with the Saxon myth, which in stressing politics differs from Emerson’s infatuation with masculine brutality and beauty.

Thomas Jefferson’s Saxons

For Thomas Jefferson, Saxon descent explained political differences between the patriots of the newly formed United States of America and the ruling class of Great Britain. He 4 The literature of critical white studies reaches back to the mid-twentieth century, to Lillian Smith, Killers of the Dream (1949; New York, 1961). But the recognized founding texts of the field are David R. Roediger,The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (London, 1991); and Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (New York, 1995). Other important books in the field include Theodore W. Allen, The Invention of the White Race: The Origin of Racial Oppression in Anglo-America (London, 1994); Grace Elizabeth Hale, Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890–1940 (New York, 1998); George Lipsitz, The Possessive In- vestment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics (Philadelphia, 1998); Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, Mass., 1998); and Thomas A. Guglielmo, White on Arrival: Italians, Race, Color, and Power in Chicago, 1890–1945 (New York, 2003). Useful anthologies include Ian Haney López, White by Law: The Legal Construction of Race (New York, 1996); and Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic, eds., Critical White Studies: Looking behind the Mirror (Philadelphia, 1997). 5 On the emergence of white race in the New Deal era and World War II, see Gary Gerstle, American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century (Princeton, 2001), 128–37; and Lizabeth Cohen, Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919–1939 (Cambridge, Eng., 1990), 251–89. 980 The Journal of American History March 2009 contrasted what he saw as the Saxon origins of positive English institutions to the Nor- man origin of the Tories. Laying out American claims in July 1774, Jefferson called English people “our ancestors” and the creators of the Magna Carta “our Saxon ancestors.” Though the Norman Conquest dates from 1066 and the Magna Carta from 1215, Jefferson maintained that “our ancestors’” system of rights was already in place when “Norman lawyers” connived

to saddle the Saxons with unfair burdens. In later writings Jefferson continued to associate Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/jah/article/95/4/977/713359 by guest on 23 September 2021 the Saxons with the Whigs and the Normans with the Tories, as though liberal and reac- tionary parties had existed from time immemorial, perpetuating themselves immutably, one generation after the other, as though coursing through the blood.6 For Jefferson, “Saxon” stood forEnglish liberty, not any trait particular to Germans. In ways that continually reappeared in American Anglo-Saxonism, Jefferson’s Saxon genealogy of laws and blood skips over the inconvenient existence of actual German Saxons—in western Lower Saxony (Niedersachsen, around Hanover) and in eastern Saxony (Sachsen, around the prosperous cities of Dresden and Leipzig). That the oppressive English king was, in fact, a Saxon seems not to have troubled Jefferson’s reasoning (or Emerson’s, for that matter). George III, king of England, was also elector and later king of Hanover.7 In the great Philadelphia Continental Congress of 1776, Jefferson proposed embed- ding his heroic Saxon ancestors “Hengist and Horsa, the Saxon chiefs from whom we claim the honor of being descended,” in the great seal of the United States. This proposi- tion did not win approval, but Jefferson’s pursuit of Saxons continued. In 1798 he wrote an “Essay on the Anglo-Saxon Language” that equated the transmission of language with biological descent, a confusion then quite common. With its stress on the concept of purity, Jefferson’s linguistic thinking sounds like race talk. He claimed not only that the Saxons stayed racially pure during the Roman occupation but also, amazingly, that their language remained pristine two centuries after the Norman Conquest.8 One of Jefferson’s last great achievements, the founding of the University of Virginia in 1818, institution- alized his interest in the Anglo-Saxon language. The University of Virginia was the only college in the United States offering instruction in Anglo-Saxon, and Anglo-Saxon was the only course it offered on the English language. By the mid-nineteenth century, Ameri- cans routinely spoke of “we Saxons.” Those using such phrases included the best-selling novelist Harriet Beecher Stowe; Sarah Josepha Hale, author of “Mary Had a Little Lamb” and editor of the women’s magazine Godey’s Lady’s Book; and the feminist Elizabeth Cady Stanton. And, of course, Ralph Waldo Emerson.9

6 Thomas Jefferson, “A Summary View of the Rights of British America,” in The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Julian P. Boyd et al. (34 vols., Princeton, 1950–), I, 121–35. 7 On George III and his grandfather and predecessor, George II, also elector of Hanover, see Encyclopaedia Bri- tannica Online, s.v. “George II” and “George III.” 8 For Thomas Jefferson’s remarks on Hengist and Horsa, see John Adams to Abigail Adams, Aug. 14, 1776, in Familiar Letters of John Adams and His Wife Abigail Adams, during the Revolution, with a Memoir of Mrs. Adams, ed. Charles Francis Adams (Boston, 1875), 210–11. For the other side of the seal, Jefferson suggested the children of Israel in the wilderness; see ibid. See also Dumas Malone, Jefferson and His Time, vol. VI: The Sage of Monticello (Boston, 1981), 202. Thomas Jefferson, “Essay on the Anglo-Saxon Language,” in The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Andrew A. Lipscomb (20 vols., Washington, 1904), XVIII, 365–66. This 5,400-word essay was not published until 1851, a quarter century after Jefferson’s death. It appeared with a postscript Jefferson had written in 1825. 9 Stanley R. Hauer, “Thomas Jefferson and the Anglo-Saxon Language,”PMLA, 98 (Oct. 1983), 883–86, 891; Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin: Or, Life Among the Lowly (Boston, 1852), 43, 75, 76, 302, 803; Nina Baym, “Onward Christian Women: Sarah J. Hale’s History of the World,” New England Quarterly, 63 (June 1990), 260–65; Susan M. Ryan, “Errand into Africa: Colonization and Nation Building in Sarah J. Hale’s Liberia,” ibid., 68 (Dec. 1995), 565. On Elizabeth Cady Stanton, see her woman suffrage speeches from 1867 and 1869 in His- Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Saxons 981

As for Emerson, the mid-nineteenth century’s foremost Anglo-Saxonist, it hardly seems necessary to underline his importance in American cultural life. One of his well- read contemporaries described him as “the most American of our writers,” the embodiment of “the Idea of America, which lies at the bottom of our original institutions.” Those views still resonate today.10 By the mid-1850s Emerson had already been reviewed an astounding 644 times.11

Today the Princeton University library holds 651 imprints with “Ralph Waldo Emer- Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/jah/article/95/4/977/713359 by guest on 23 September 2021 son” in their titles, including twelve volumes of Houghton Mifflin’s 1903–1904 Com- plete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Harvard University Press’s six volumes (as of 2003) of the Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, sixteen volumes of Emerson’s Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks, and innumerable volumes of Emerson poems, sermons, essays, and correspondence. Considering his prodigious output, Emerson seems to have sprung from Harvard College in 1821 fully formed, lecturing, and writing. In fact, much of his thought—Transcendentalist as well as Anglo-Saxonist—traces its roots to an education at the hands of his lifelong friend Thomas Carlyle.

Emerson and Thomas Carlyle

Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881), a reedy, six-foot-tall, stooped, lifelong hypochondriac, was usually half-sick with a cold. The twenty-four-year-old Emerson, also a tall, thin, narrow- shouldered hypochondriac, discovered Carlyle’s unsigned reviews in the Edinburgh Re- view and the Foreign Review in 1827 and hailed the British author as “my Germanick new-light writer.” It soon became clear that Carlyle’s take on German mysticism would lay the foundation for American Transcendentalism. Carlyle served as Emerson’s teacher of Transcendentalism, deepening the introduction Emerson’s aunt Mary Moody Emer- son had earlier furnished.12 One notion guiding both Carlyle and Emerson was their heroic figuration of what they termed the Saxon race and its transatlantic realm of Saxondom. In Carlyle’s first letter to Emerson after the American had visited him in 1833, Carlyle proclaimed senti- ments he attached to “all Englishmen, Cisoceanic and Transoceanic, that we and you are not two countries, and cannot for the life of us be; but only two parishes of one country, with such wholesome parish hospitalities, and dirty temporary parish feuds, as we see; both of which brave parishes Vivant! vivant!”13 tory of Woman Suffrage,vol. II, ed. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage (New York, 1882), 193, 353–55; and Nell Irvin Painter, Sojourner Truth: A Life, a Symbol (New York, 1996), 228–31. 10 Theodore Parker in 1850, quoted in Neil Baldwin, The American Revelation: Ten Ideals That Shaped Our Country from the Puritans to the Cold War (New York, 2005), 61. 11 Robert D. Richardson Jr., Emerson: The Mind on Fire (Berkeley, 1995), 522–23. 12 Emerson, quoted in Kenneth Marc Harris, Carlyle and Emerson: Their Long Debate (Cambridge, Mass., 1978), 10. For unsigned reviews written by Thomas Carlyle, see “Jean Paul Friedrich Richter,”Edinburgh Review, 46 (June 1827); “State of German Literature,” ibid. (Oct. 1827); “Signs of the Times,” ibid., 49 (June 1829); “Taylor’s Historic Survey of German Poetry,” ibid., 53 (March 1831); “Characteristics,” ibid., 54 (Dec. 1831); “Goethe’s Hel- ena,” Foreign Review, 1 (April 1828); “Goethe,” ibid., 2 (July 1828); “Life of Heyne,” ibid., 2 (Oct. 1828); “Novalis,” ibid., 4 (July 1829); and “Jean Paul Friedrich Richter Again,” ibid., 5 (Jan. 1830). These essays and reviews indicate Carlyle’s immersion in German literature and preceded Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus (London, 1836). See the work of his research assistant and factotum, Henry Larkin, Carlyle and the Open Secret of His Life (1886; New York, 1970), 13. Phyllis Cole, Mary Moody Emerson and the Origins of Transcendentalism: A Family History (New York, 1998), 5, 164, 170, 180, 242, 307. 13 Thomas Carlyle to Ralph Waldo Emerson, Aug. 12, 1834, in The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1834–1872, vol. I, ed. Charles Eliot Norton (http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/1/3/5/8/13583/13583 .txt); Harris, Carlyle and Emerson, 138. 982 The Journal of American History March 2009

Carlyle recognized the antithesis of the Saxon in the lower orders that included black people off in the Western Hemisphere, for whom he considered slavery the natural con- dition. And right in his own London, the local antithesis of Saxon was none other than the Celt. Carlyle termed the Irish “Human swinery.” The epithet played, of course, on the commonplace analogy between Irish people and pigs. Not only were the Irish believed to live with their pigs, but pigs were also considered quintessentially Irish, as in the say-

ing, “as Irish as Paddy’s pig.” Over in Concord, Massachusetts, where Irishmen labored Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/jah/article/95/4/977/713359 by guest on 23 September 2021 in mud and slept in shanties, Emerson saw no reason to dispute this libel. One of his rare comments on the districts of the poor, where he spent very little time, reveals his preju- dice: “In Irish districts, men deteriorated in size and shape, the nose sunk, the gums were exposed, with diminished brain and brutal form.” Like Carlyle in Chartism (1839), Em- erson sidestepped the issue of whether Celtic race in and of itself made the Irish ugly. By and large, both men managed to skirt the unpleasant topic of the Irish poor, concentrating instead on elevating the exemplary qualities of the Saxon.14 Emerson saw himself as a New Englander and therefore as virtually an Englishman and therefore, as he constantly repeated, a “Saxon.” From early in his career, he regularly inserted “we Saxons” language into his lectures, essays, and journals. An 1835 lecture, “Permanent Traits of the English National Genius,” begins by connecting Americans to the English: “The inhabitants of the United States, especially of the Northern portion, are descended from the people of England and have inherited the traits of their national character.” As for the French, whom Emerson saw as Celts, the unmanly vices of frivol- ity, corruption, and lack of practical know-how afflicted them. How else to view a people who invented the ruffle, while it took the English to invent the shirt? For manly practi- cality, look to the “English race.” For the childish, “singing and dancing nations,” look south. That North/South dichotomy, often word for word in Emerson’s lively formula- tion, would prove a durable theory, one Emerson repeated indefatigably and one followers such as the sociologist Edward A. Ross echoed in 1901.15 Another example appears in his classic 1841 essay “Self-Reliance,” which contains a typical, throwaway line identifying him and his readers as Saxons: Emerson exhorts his readers to wake up the “courage and constancy, in our Saxon breasts.” By 1853 Emerson was repeating a lecture entitled “The Anglo-American.” He might well have been preen- ing autobiographically in the lecture’s reference to the “godly & grand British race . . . it is right to esteem without regard to geography this industrious liberty-loving Saxon wher- ever he works,—the Saxon, the colossus who bestrides the narrow Atlantic.”16 While such people as Thomas Jefferson and Elizabeth Cady Stanton might look back to their putative Saxon ancestors and then move on, Emerson dedicated an entire book, 14 For the use of “human swinery” to describe the Irish, see Thomas Carlyle, “Carlyle in Ireland,” Century, 24 (June 1882), 251; and Thomas Carlyle, “Carlyle in Ireland,” ibid. (July 1882), 430. Emerson, Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, vol. V: English Traits, ed. Burkholder, Wilson, and Nicoloff, 170; Thomas Carlyle, Critical and miscellaneous essays (London, 1839); Thomas Carlyle,The French revolution: A history (London, 1837); Carlyle, Sartor Resartus; Thomas Carlyle, Chartism [London, 1840], 28–31. 15 Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Permanent Traits of the English National Genius,” in The Early Lectures of Ralph Waldo Emerson, vol. I: 1833–1836, ed. Stephen E. Whicher and Robert E. Spiller (Cambridge, Mass., 1959), 233, 234–35; Emerson, Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, vol. V: English Traits, ed. Burkholder, Wilson, and Ni- coloff, 54; Edward A. Ross, “The Causes of Racial Superiority,”Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 18 (1901), 67–89, esp. 79. 16 Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self-Reliance,” in Anthology of American Literature, ed. George McMichael et al. (New York, 1989), 1100; “The Anglo-American” is quoted in Harris, Carlyle and Emerson, 147–48. See also Phyl- lis Cole, “Emerson, England, and Fate,” in Emerson: Prophecy, Metamorphosis, and Influence; Selected Papers from the English Institute, ed. David Levin (New York, 1975), 83–105. Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Saxons 983

English Traits (1856), to the subject. Cobbled together as race history, it drew on the eighth-century English historian Bede, on Norse mythology, and on prevailing versions of English history, notably the historian-bookseller Sharon Turner’s wildly popular The History of the Anglo-Saxons, from their First Appearance above the Elbe, to the Death of Eg- bert. Digging deep into Old Norse literature, Turner lumped Saxons and Norse together to come up with a list of permanent “traits,” more temperamental than physiological, of

the English race. Turner proclaimed liberty the first and foremost of these traits, which Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/jah/article/95/4/977/713359 by guest on 23 September 2021 he believed persisted from the fifth-century Saxon/Norse conquest of England and endured in perpetuity. In English Traits New Englanders are the final product of a distilla- tion that had earlier turned Norsemen into Englishmen over the course of a millennium. Even more English than the English, New Englanders were, in Emerson’s terms, “double distilled English.”17

English Traits

Like all of Emerson’s books, English Traits collects various lectures delivered to various audiences. Part travelogue, part autobiography, and part historical ethnography, English Traits heightened Emerson’s fame as his wittiest book. Within three months of publica- tion, twenty-four thousand copies were in print in the United States and Great Britain, and the book was widely and positively reviewed. Its popularity endured well into the twentieth century, until its racial theories began to fall into disrepute.18 Saxon violence and manly beauty, both of which qualities he lacked, fascinated Emer- son. A housebound intellectual when not lecturing before appreciative audiences, Emer- son was infatuated with the primeval virility of outdoorsmen of physical strength. Many others shared similar anxieties and infatuations, enough to make scenes of frontier violence staples of popular entertainment in Britain and the United States. The core chapter of English Traits, called “Race,” begins in measured tones. Emerson enumerated the three components of the English population: first, the Celt, to whom he gave less than a paragraph; second, the German, also briefly noted; and third, the “North- men,” to whom Emerson devoted page after page. The balance of the chapter revels in an- cient Viking history. The “Scandinavian” traits of personal beauty and bloodthirst explain the physical attractiveness and energy of Emerson’s splendid English contemporaries.19 The “Race” chapter of English Traits expresses two thoughts rooted in anxieties over lack of virility and sex appeal Emerson shared with masses of Americans who relished his themes—two thoughts expressed as content and form. Brutality emerges as the chapter’s 17 Sharon Turner, The History of the Anglo-Saxons, from their First Appearance above the Elbe, to the Death of Eg- bert (London, 1799). On Sharon Turner’s book, see Hugh A. MacDougall, Racial Myth in English History: Trojans, Teutons, and Anglo-Saxons (Hanover, 1982), 26–37, 56–62, 81–86, 91–92; and Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Ge- nius and National Character of the Anglo-Saxon Race,” in The Selected Lectures of Ralph Waldo Emerson,ed. Ronald A. Basco and Joel Myerson (Athens, Ga., 2005), 7–18. 18 On the printing, circulation, reception, and wit of Emerson’s English Traits, see Philip Nicoloff, “Historical Introduction,” in Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, vol. V: English Traits, ed. Burkholder, Wilson, and Ni- coloff, xiii–xiv. For a description ofEnglish Traits as Emerson’s “wittiest book,” see Wallace E. Williams, “Historical Introduction,” in The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, vol. IV: Representative Men, ed. Wallace E. Williams and Douglas Emory Wilson (Cambridge, Mass., 1987), xlix. 19 Emerson, Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, vol. V: English Traits, ed. Burkholder, Wilson, and Ni- coloff, 24–40. On the book’s “almost countless” instances of racial thought, see Philip L. Nicoloff,Emerson on Race and History: An Examination of English Traits (New York, 1961), 120. For a twenty-first-century genetically based appraisal of the demographic role of Vikings in the British Isles, see Bryan Sykes, Saxons, Vikings, and Celts: The Ge- netic Roots of Britain and Ireland (New York, 2006), 173–75, 255–66, 277–88. 984 The Journal of American History March 2009 prized quality, with manly beauty its outward sign. As natural outgrowths of early Saxon qualities, bodily strength, vigor, manliness, and energy emerge as admirable traits. Nature made Saxons/Norsemen as savages so they might endow their English descendants, in turn, with an “excess of virility.”20 Homicidal history, synonymous to Emerson with gorgeous male energy, is embodied in his two quintessential “Norsemen,” the brothers Horsa and Hengist, legendary found-

ers of Saxon England, the same two whom Thomas Jefferson had sought to enshrine as Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/jah/article/95/4/977/713359 by guest on 23 September 2021 American forebears. According to Anglo-Saxonist legend, the mid-fifth-century British warlord Vortigern invited Horsa and Hengist into what is now Kent in the southeastern tip of England to wrest the island from its Celtic population and their Roman overlords.21 Today Horsa and Hengist are considered Jutes from what is now Denmark, but tradition claims them as founders of the Anglo-Saxon nation that King Alfred raised to greatness in the late ninth century. Emerson cared little for the geographical particulars and lumped together Norsemen, Jutes, and Saxons as marvelous Scandinavian pirates, “a rude race, all masculine, with brutish strength. . . . Let buffalo gore buffalo, and the pasture to the strongest!”22 Actual German Saxons hardly appear in English Traits. Making an exception for Jo- hann Wolfgang von Goethe, for whom he named the family cat, Emerson questioned Germans’ fitness to serve as models of any sort. Along with “the Asiatic races,” he had said back in 1835, Germans lacked the racial constitution for political greatness, sharing as they did Asians’ political impotence out of “a defect of will.” Norsemen rather than Ger- mans contributed the bonny figure of the Englishman-American’s ancestor.23 Scandinavia was another matter. It worked as the home of ultimate American whiteness, but the Scandinavia of the 1850s presented Emerson a dilemma: It was backward and quite poor—a little nothing beside the British behemoth. How could Emerson rec- oncile that fact with his need for Scandinavian racial, hence inherent and permanent, bril- liance? If the Norsemen endowed Britain with all its “Saxon” greatness, how could one explain the relative obscurity of contemporary Scandinavia? Why had Norwegians and Danes not invented the Industrial Revolution, grown rich on worldwide commerce, and colonized the globe? To explain Scandinavian deficiency, Emerson resorted to a favorite metaphor, that of the fruit tree. Scandinavia, he surmised, lost its best men during the Dark Ages—lost them to England and never recovered: “The continued draught of the best men in Norway, Sweden and Denmark to their piratical expeditions exhausted those countries, like a tree which bears much fruit when young, and these have been second- rate powers ever since. The power of the race migrated and left Norway permanently exhausted.”24 It is a lame theory, and Emerson did not lean on it heavily. For his purposes, the subse- quent history of his Norsemen in Scandinavia need not loom large. His early Norsemen 20 Emerson, Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, vol. V: English Traits, ed. Burkholder, Wilson, and Ni- coloff, 155. 21 Vortigern was said to have invited Hengist (stallion) and Horsa (horse) to come from Jutland, the southern part of Denmark, to England in 449 to help repulse attacks by the Picts and Scots. Vortigern gave them the southeastern Isle of Thanet in gratitude. Bede Ecclesiastical History of the English People 1.15. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle makes Hengist and Horsa joint kings of Kent. 22 Emerson, Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, vol. V: English Traits, ed. Burkholder, Wilson, and Ni- coloff, 23. 23 Emerson, “Permanent Traits of the English National Genius,” 242. 24 Emerson, Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, vol. V: English Traits, ed. Burkholder, Wilson, and Ni- coloff, 33. Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Saxons 985 function as a handsome set of ancestors oversupplied with manliness and bloodthirsti- ness: perfect traits for Englishmen, the world’s imperial rulers, and perfect traits for Em- erson’s Americans, aspiring rulers of the Western Hemisphere. Emerson and Carlyle said “Saxons,” but we know the ideology as Anglo-Saxonism and tend to locate it in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. But it is worth re- membering that Ralph Waldo Emerson fleshed out that notion in the 1850s. For Emer-

son and many nineteenth-century Americans, the stress on Saxon roots served to racialize Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/jah/article/95/4/977/713359 by guest on 23 September 2021 both the Americans and the impoverished Irish and to seal the Irish in a spoiled racial destiny that for Emerson remained mostly, but not entirely, beneath notice. Ordinarily taking the racial high road, Emerson preferred to elevate his beautiful, virile, bloodthirsty Saxons rather than detail the deficiencies of the Celts. For Emerson and his educated followers, to be American was to be Saxon. We recognize several exclusions from that identity: excluded were native Indian, black, and Asian Americans. Also excluded in the nineteenth century were the Irish. After Emerson died in 1882, however, successive waves of European immigrants at the turn of the twentieth century pushed Irish Americans into the American fold as northwestern European Nordics. But for Emerson in the 1850s, Saxon not only meant American, it meant not-Celt. With Emerson as the embodiment of the American Renaissance, his fascination with Saxons— at the expense of all the others, including Celts—remains embedded almost unnoticed in fundamental notions of what it meant to be an American, to belong within the notion of the American. For Emerson, among the kinds of white people—he would have thought in terms of white races—Saxons were the best. Emerson placed distinctions of race and genealogy at the foundation of Saxon-English-American racial temperament, leaving out many others we today consider white.