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(In this review, Eric Foner has problems with Nicholas Guyatt's new book
that argues that our Founding Fathers were racist to the core. I have
heard through the grapevine that Foner has "no dog in this fight" when
asked how he stood on the Project 1619 controversy.)
Nicholas Guyatt’s ‘Bind Us Apart’
By Eric Foner
April 29, 2016
BIND US APART
How Enlightened Americans Invented Racial Segregation
By Nicholas Guyatt
Illustrated. 403 pp. Basic Books. $29.99.
Half a century ago, inspired by the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v.
Board of Education, historians embarked on an effort to identify the
origins of racial segregation. C. Vann Woodward insisted that rather
than existing from time immemorial, as the ruling’s opponents claimed,
segregation emerged in the 1890s. Others located its genesis in
Reconstruction or the pre-Civil War North.
Eventually, the debate faded. Now, Nicholas Guyatt offers a new
interpretation. Segregation and its ideological justification “separate
but equal,” he argues, originated in the early Republic in the efforts
of “enlightened Americans” to uplift and protect Indians and
African-Americans. After trying and abandoning other policies, these
reformers and policy makers concluded that only separation from whites —
removal of Indians to the trans-Mississippi West and blacks to Africa —
would enable these groups to enjoy their natural rights and achieve
economic and cultural advancement. Thus, almost from the outset, the
idea of separating the races was built into the DNA of the United States.
Guyatt, who teaches at the University of Cambridge, is the author of a
well-regarded book on the history of the idea (still very much alive
today) that God has chosen this country for a special mission. In “Bind
Us Apart” he addresses another theme central to our national identity:
Who is an American? To find an answer he offers a detailed account of
early national policies toward Indians and blacks.
By the somewhat anachronistic label “liberal” — usually applied, when
referring to the 19th century, to believers in limited government, free
trade and individual liberty — Guyatt means adherents of Enlightenment
values, including the repudiation of prejudice against others. These
people realized that the presence of subordinate racial populations
could not be reconciled with the affirmation that “all men are created
equal” in the Declaration of Independence. They assumed that what
appeared to be black and Indian inferiority resulted from oppressive
circumstances, not innate incapacity. With proper education and
training, these groups could become equal members of American society.
This belief led to a “civilizing agenda” whereby the federal government
encouraged Native Americans to form compact communities where they would
take up settled farming and abandon communal land holding for the
benefits of private ownership. The ultimate aim was that whites and
Indians would “become one people,” in the words of Thomas Jefferson.
One of Guyatt’s surprising findings is how many liberals believed that
the Indian population should be assimilated through intermarriage. “You
will mix with us by marriage,” Jefferson told an Indian delegation in
1808. “We shall all be Americans.” Not all whites agreed, of course. In
the 1820s “all hell broke loose” in Cornwall, Conn., when two young
Indian men who arrived to study at a religious school ended up marrying
local white women.
Despite the liberals’ vision of harmony, conflict reigned on the
frontier. After the War of 1812 broke the power of Indian nations east
of the Mississippi River, hundreds of thousands of white settlers poured
across the Appalachians, eyeing Native American land. Reformers feared
the Indians were destined for extinction. The only alternative, they
concluded, was for them to be transported far from the white presence.
In this interpretation, Andrew Jackson’s policy of Indian removal, which
produced the infamous Trail of Tears, reflected not so much a hatred of
Indians but a desire to ensure their survival.
When it came to African-Americans, the liberals’ preferred approach was
removal to Africa, a policy known as “colonization.” Guyatt is correct
to insist that historians have not taken the idea of colonization
seriously enough. It was hardly a fringe movement; statesmen from Thomas
Jefferson to Henry Clay and, as late as 1862, Abraham Lincoln saw
colonization as the only way to end slavery peacefully and with the
consent of slaveholders. It also attracted some support among blacks.
Most, however, strongly resisted; indeed their opposition to
colonization was a crucial catalyst for the emergence of radical
abolitionism, which demanded equal rights for blacks within the United
States.
Like Indian removal, Guyatt argues, colonization emerged after reformers
abandoned the idea that blacks could be assimilated into American
society. The first emancipation — gradual abolition in the Northern
states — was not coupled with colonization. Reformers assumed that
children born to slaves would find a place as free Americans after
serving apprenticeships that helped them overcome the “degradation”
caused by slavery (not by innate inferiority).
Guyatt makes clear that rather than being fixed, racial attitudes evolve
historically. The initial status of free blacks in the new nation was,
to say the least, confusing. The Naturalization Act of 1790, which
barred nonwhite immigrants from becoming citizens, envisioned a racially
exclusive Republic. Yet in the same decade the federal government issued
certificates of citizenship to black sailors as well as white to protect
them from impressment by the British Navy. Black men could vote in most
of the original 13 states. As the 19th century progressed, however,
prejudice steadily increased and free blacks’ rights were stripped away.
And intermarriage was even less of an option than with Indians. The
charge that abolitionists were promoting racial “amalgamation” helped to
spark anti-black riots, including one in New York City in 1834. With
racism becoming more and more intractable, many critics of slavery
(Lincoln among them) came to believe that the only way to rid the
country of the institution and secure blacks’ rights was by separating
the races.
Guyatt’s juxtaposition of attitudes and policies relating to Indians and
blacks yields important insights. But the book is not entirely
persuasive. For one thing, its structure seems at odds with its
argument. Chapters on Native Americans alternate with those on blacks,
creating a disjointed narrative that makes it difficult to find the
links between the two stories. Like many writers with a bold thesis,
Guyatt is prone to exaggeration. Given the fact that only a few thousand
black Americans ended up in Liberia, established in Africa by the
American Colonization Society, can we really say that “separate but
equal” was a “founding principle of the United States”?
Guyatt may be guilty of taking too seriously the claims by proponents of
separation that they were motivated by the best interests of blacks and
Indians. As recent studies suggest, colonizationists seemed remarkably
indifferent to the fate of those they sent to Africa. Long after it was
apparent that emigrants had a better chance of survival if they settled
at sites on higher ground, the society continued to deposit them at
Monrovia, Liberia’s low-lying, malaria-infested capital.
It is difficult to assess Guyatt’s claim that those he calls “liberal”
invented segregation. Many advocates of racial separation were hardly
free from prejudice. Some colonizationists seemed more interested in
ridding the country of free blacks than ending slavery or improving the
black condition. Indeed, the Colonization Society relentlessly opposed
efforts to uplift blacks in this country for fear of making them
reluctant to depart. Indian removal owed a great deal not to liberals
but to outright racists, including Southern planters who coveted Native
American land for the rapidly expanding Cotton Kingdom. Many reformers
strongly opposed the policy. Was Andrew Jackson an “enlightened
American” when it came to relations with the Indians?
Viewing the story fundamentally as a problem of race relations obscures
the crucial difference between the place of Native Americans and blacks
in the emerging national economy. The bottom line is this: To fulfill
their own aspirations, white Americans needed Indian land and black
labor. That is why Indian removal took place but black colonization —
apart from a few thousand souls — never did.
Eric Foner is the DeWitt Clinton professor of history at Columbia
University and the author, most recently, of “Gateway to Freedom: The
Hidden History of the Underground Railroad.”
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