Two Competing U.S. Visions of “Whiteness”

A few weeks ago, I presented five reasons why race scholars discuss and analyze “whiteness.” Many have thanked me for this piece and asked if I’d provide other resources on “whiteness.” Happy to.

In this post, I’ll share an extended passage from Andrew Hartman’s essay “The Rise and Fall of Whiteness Studies” (2004). Hartman contrasts visions of whiteness championed by John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson and their political parties—Whigs and Democrats, respectively—before the U.S. Civil War. Hartman’s main conversation partner is Alexander Saxton, a fellow historian and one of the founders of whiteness studies. Note how both treat race, racism, class, political parties, U.S. expansionism, U.S. settler colonialism, and “whiteness.”

Hartman gets the long last word. Saludos y’all.

[Alexander] Saxton demonstrates the different constructions of whiteness by contrasting the racisms of John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson, who, as leaders of their respective political parties, came to represent the distinct forms of racism that emanated from contrary class alliances. Adams was a racist, yet his racism was markedly different from that of Andrew Jackson because whiteness was constructed in specific relation to class needs, and Adams’s class commitments were different from the class obligations of Andrew Jackson. Adams was the consummate National Republican and this shaped his racial ideology. Influenced by Thomas Jefferson’s racist Notes on Virginia, as were most National Republicans of his generation, Adams believed that blacks were inferior to whites. However, he was in principle against slavery: the institution of slavery was a violation of the basic tenets of republicanism. An orderly, republican society would have been better ensured with blacks as part of a lower class that included poor whites, and beneath a class of people who would rightfully govern the republic. This was the consensus view of race held by Quincy’s elitist north-easterners in the National Republican Party, which later became the Whig Party. Representing the commercial capitalists of the north-eastern seaboard, Whigs wanted to create order wherever they could – orderly commerce translated into expanded profits for themselves and their constituents. Adams and the Whigs eventually considered slavery a threat to order and thus a possible threat to their class position.

In contrast to Adams, the whiteness of Andrew Jackson, who came to power on a wave of universal white male suffrage, was characterized by Saxton as ‘white egalitarianism’. Jacksonian Democrats were fierce champions of white male upward mobility – mobility grounded in the westward expansion of white settlement at the expense of Indians and Mexicans, and in superiority to blacks, who were deemed biologically inferior to whites and thus naturally fitted for a life of slavery. The two forms of whiteness, although different, were, on occasion, indistinguishable in their politics. As James Monroe’s secretary of state, Adams was the most persistent promulgator of the Monroe doctrine, what Saxton refers to as ‘a gospel of continental nationalism grounded in whiteness’. As a result, Adams always supported Jackson’s violent incursions into Florida, in which Jackson – as a military commander –was putting white egalitarianism into action by killing the non-white Seminoles who stood on the land that represented white upward mobility. Furthermore, in the 1820s, Adams worked to ensure North-South compromise by accentuating whiteness and downplaying sectionalism. However, despite these commonalities, Saxton does not conflate Whig and Democratic whiteness. The differences between Whig and Democratic whiteness, however trivial they might seem, were real and the policies that stemmed from such differences were consequential.

For Adams, racial superiority, although necessary, was not sufficient in the creation of Indian policy. Order was to be created wherever the federal government could ensure it, a basic tenet of Whiggism. Thus, Adams supported Indian policies that would withdraw federal protection of Indian lands inside the states – a concession to white Georgians who wished to expel the Cherokees from their state – in return for the federalisation of the territories. Hence the Whigs proposed that the federal government become the benefactors of Indian land in the territories, an approach consistent with their continental nationalism and their fears of internal disruption. But to the Jacksonian Democrats, the Whig plan smacked of elitism, a perception that put the Whigs at a colossal political disadvantage in the new era of universal white male suffrage. Jacksonians proposed not only an end to federal protection of Indians inside the states, but also unlimited westward expansion; proposals that became the national policy of manifest destiny and a guarantor of white social mobility. Rather than maintaining a consistent federal policy regarding the Indians in the territories, Jacksonian Democrats preferred white settlers to be allowed to deal with the Indians as they saw fit, in much the same fashion as the Georgians ‘dealt’ with the Cherokees. Thus, the ‘white male egalitarian’ desire for the western territories was similar to the ‘state rights’ argument in relation to slavery: white southerners preferred to deal with slaves on their own terms, without national interference.

Jacksonian Democrats also wanted the federal government to support the westward expansion of slavery, a platform that Adams and the Whigs increasingly came to oppose by the late 1830s. Adams anticipated and guided the Whig ideological shift from a vague dislike of slavery to the Whig goal of excluding the planter class from power. This shift occurred as a result of a convergence of political and economic goals. Whigs and Democrats deviated on the vital issue of their day – slavery – because of the different conceptions of whiteness that accompanied their divergent class expectations. As opposed to the Democrats with their ‘hard’ racism, Whigs were what Saxton described as ‘soft’ racists. This distinction derived from three class-related realities: non-whites posed no conceivable threat to upper-class privilege; a racially divided labour force circumscribed the economic aggression of lower-class whites; and non-white populations could be used as tools of the establishment. Thus, paradoxically, Whig whiteness was less racist because of Whig class bias; Whigs’ ‘compassion’ for nonwhites was rooted in their lack of compassion for working-class and immigrant whites and, more broadly, in their class interests. This was exemplified by their desire for the federal regulation of westward expansion, which would place whites and non-whites alike under the same umbrella of an elite Whig order, and would thus serve to limit the ever-expanding power and resources of the constituents of the Democracy. A similar political struggle was occurring in the urban areas, where Whig resentment of immigrant working people was countered by the Democratic Party, which welcomed working-class white immigrants into the Jacksonian fold. Thus, if Saxton is correct, we can rightly assume that European immigrants defined their whiteness in accordance with the Democratic Party’s hard racism and in opposition to the Whigs, who opposed the existence of a politically empowered immigrant labour force. Hence European immigrants defined their whiteness according to political and class realities. However, this assumption runs counter to most of the whiteness studies scholarship, including [David] Roediger’s Wages of Whiteness and Noel Ignatiev’s How the Irish Became White, which both assume that European immigrants were not white on arrival. This assumption is considered by whiteness studies critics to be the second of three deficiencies in the field.