Forum.RttP{What did America's heroes think about race?}

Until just a few years ago virtually all Americans believed that race was a profoundly important aspect of individual and national identity. They believed that people of different races differed in temperament and ability, and that whites built societies that were superior to those built by non-whites. They were repelled by miscegenation—which they called “amalgamation”—because it would dilute the unique characteristics of whites. They took it for granted that America must be peopled with Europeans, and that American civilization could not continue without whites. Many saw the presence of non-whites in the United States as a terrible burden.

Among the founders, Thomas Jefferson wrote at greatest length about race. He thought blacks were mentally inferior to whites, and though he thought slavery was a great injustice he did not want free blacks in American society: “When freed, [the Negro] is to be removed beyond the reach of mixture.” Jefferson was, therefore, one of the first and most influential advocates of “colonization,” or sending blacks back to Africa.

He also believed in the destiny of whites as a racially conscious people. In 1786 he wrote, “Our Confederacy [the United States] must be viewed as the nest from which all America, North and South, is to be peopled.” In 1801 he looked forward to the day “when our rapid multiplication will expand itself . . . over the whole northern, if not the southern continent, with a people speaking the same language, governed in similar forms, and by similar laws; nor can we contemplate with satisfaction either blot or mixture on that surface.” The empire was to be homogeneous.

Jefferson thought of the United States as only the latest outpost in the ever-expanding march of the Anglo-Saxon, the Saxon branch of which had originated in the Cimbric Chersonesus of Denmark and Schleswig-Holstein. He was thinking of the Saxons when he proposed a 1784 ordinance to create new states in the Mississippi valley, suggesting the name Cherronesus for the area between lakes Huron and Michigan. Its shape reminded him of Denmark. The race was not to forget its origins.

James Madison, like Jefferson, believed the only solution to the race problem was to free the slaves and send them away. He proposed that the federal government sell off public land to raise the huge sums necessary to buy the entire black population and ship it overseas. He favored a Constitutional amendment to establish a colonization society to be run by the President. After his two terms in office, Madison served as president of the American Colonization Society, to which he devoted much time and energy.

The following prominent Americans were not merely members but officers of the society: Andrew Jackson, Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, Stephen Douglas, William Seward, Francis Scott Key, Gen. Winfield Scott, and two Chief Justices of the Supreme Court, John Marshall and Roger Taney. As for James Monroe, the capital of Liberia is named Monrovia in gratitude for his help in returning blacks to Africa.

Abraham Lincoln considered blacks to be—in his words—”a troublesome presence” in the United States. During the Lincoln-Douglas debates he said:

”. . .I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will for ever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality. And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be a position of superior and inferior, and I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race.”

He, too, favored colonization and even in the midst of a desperate war with the Confederacy found time to study the problem and to appoint Rev. James Mitchell as Commissioner of Emigration. Free blacks were going to have to be dealt with, and it was best to plan ahead and find a place to which they could be sent.

Before Lincoln’s time, no President had ever invited a group of blacks to the White House to discuss public policy. On August 14th, 1862, Lincoln did so—to ask blacks to leave the country. “There is an unwillingness on the part of our people, harsh as it may be, for you free colored people to remain with us,” he explained. He then urged them and their race to go to a colonization site in Central America that his Commissioner of Emigration had investigated. Later that year, in a message to Congress, he even argued for the forcible removal of free blacks.

His successor, Andrew Johnson, did not feel differently: “This is a country for white men, and by God, as long as I am President, it shall be a government for white men. . . .” Like Jefferson, he thought whites had a clear mandate: “This whole vast continent is destined to fall under the control of the Anglo-Saxon race—the governing and self-governing race.”

Before he became President, James Garfield wrote, “[I have] a strong feeling of repugnance when I think of the negro being made our political equal and I would be glad if they could be colonized, sent to heaven, or got rid of in any decent way. . . .”

What of 20th century Presidents? Theodore Roosevelt thought blacks were “a perfectly stupid race,” and blamed Southerners for bringing them to America. In 1901 he wrote: “I have not been able to think out any solution to the terrible problem offered by the presence of the Negro on this continent . . . he is here and can neither be killed nor driven away. . . .” As for Indians, he once said, “I don’t go so far as to think that the only good Indians are the dead Indians, but I believe nine out of ten are, and I shouldn’t inquire too closely into the health of the tenth.”

William Howard Taft told a group of black college students, “Your race is adapted to be a race of farmers, first, last and for all times.”

Woodrow Wilson was a confirmed segregationist, and as president of Princeton prevented blacks from enrolling. He enforced segregation in government offices and was supported in this by Charles Eliot, president of Harvard, who argued that “civilized white men” could not be expected to work with “barbarous black men.” During the Presidential campaign of 1912, Wilson took a strong position in favor of excluding Asians: “I stand for the national policy of exclusion. . . . We cannot make a homogeneous population of a people who do not blend with the Caucasian race. . . . Oriental coolieism will give us another race problem to solve and surely we have had our lesson.”

http://www.amren.com/mtnews/archives/2008/09/the_racial_revo.php

Odd, because Wilson also favored ethnic self-determination?