Jefferson's Superior Race
THOMAS JEFFERSON'S SUPERIOR RACE
BY
DAVID ARTHUR WALTERS
Libertarians frequently identify their private or conservative interest in liberty with that of the founding fathers of the United States. Time and time again we have heard the doctrine that said fathers were not only Libertarians but were stalwart members of a "superior northern European culture" which must be protected and nourished in the United States because of its innate superiority.
A study of the signers of the Declaration of Independence reveals that the majority were well educated and prosperous. More than half of the southerners, including Thomas Jefferson, the author of the Declaration, were planters who owned slaves - over a quarter of the grand total were either planters or landed gentry. More than half of the signers were trained in the law although not all practiced the profession. Many were merchants and shippers. They were all traitors who risked their lives and fortunes for what they perceived to be better lives and greater fortunes - only ten percent of the colonial population favored revolution, including those patriots who actually fought in the War of American Independence.
It is claimed that the leading founding fathers as well as most of the signers of the Declaration had their racial roots in the "superior northern European culture" extolled by many Libertarians today. It is safe to say that the great white fathers thought highly of the white 'race' and of their protestant religion. In other words, they were stereotypical white, anglo-saxon protestants. The crucial contributions of this type were well rewarded over time, sometimes out of proportion to the merit of their descendants. Many puritan-minded people were famous for their frugality and notorious for their religious intolerance and economic stinginess - god helps those who help themselves, therefore unwarranted charity must not get in the way of self-help. Wherefore the device of inheritance allowed fortunes to accumulate to the point that 'WASPS' were referred to as a kept class with a vested interest in free income, an interest no longer dependent on production of tangibles but in simply making money. A vested interest is an interest in getting something for nothing; the more money one has to begin with, the better, for it takes money to make money.
The vestiges of the old order are still with us - our economic dinosaurs are not extinct. All sorts of people have great fortunes today. Our Neo-Darwinian evolution was not enough to keep up the superiority of the old kept class, confronted as it was by the immigrating "inferior" southern and eastern cultures. Nevertheless, certain Libertarians among us are feeling powerless and are wont to insist, even though they might themselves be descended in part from "inferior" southern and eastern stock, that we must at least faithfully adhere to the principles of the "superior northern European culture" our forefathers and foremothers seemingly revolted from. Since they were traitors to England and repudiated such political principles as the divine right of kings and birth right to superior status and wealth favored by other European states, we might wonder why we should be loyal to so-called northern European principles at all.
Libertarians like everyone else frequently cite Thomas Jefferson to support their fraction, hence they will not blame us for turning to him for illumination on this subject. We discover that Jefferson's superior race was the barbarian Anglo-Saxon race from northern Europe, the German race. The Germans had been raiding Britain during the last two centuries of the Roman occupation. When the Romans withdrew to defend their disintegrating empire, the Scots and Picts beset the Britons. The Scots were Celts who had originated in Ireland; the Britons were probably of mixed, Celtic and aborigine, descent; the Picts or painted people were pre-Celtic aborigines who lived in eastern and northeastern Scotland, from whence they had given the Romans a very bad time. The British chief, Vortigern, asked the Saxons in Germany for help to fight off the Scots and Picts. The Saxon brothers Hengist and Horsa were much obliged to do so, and, around the year 450, three troop ships landed on Thanet with 1600 men. They were reinforced with another 5000 men in seventeen ships. The Saxons liked what they saw in Britain, and decided to take it away from their British allies. Hengist's successes aroused the ambitions of two other German tribes of the same language and institutions, the Angles and Jutes. Hence the Saxons, Angles and Jutes invaded and conquered the Britons despite the legendary resistance of King Arthur. The Angles hailed from the Angelyn district in Schleswig between the Schlei inlet and Flensburger Forde, an area they abandoned to settle in Britain - Mercia, Northumbria, East and Middle Anglia. The Jutes were probably from Jutland, and they wound up Kent, Wight, and Hampshire. The Saxons were from northern German, and settled mainly in Kent.
The term "Anglo-Saxon" was used on the continent in the 8th century to distinguish "the English" from the "Old Saxons" on the continent. Some citizens of the British Empire employed "Anglo-Saxon" as a term of racial pride to counter the Teutonic furor of their kin in the would-be German Empire of the Second and Third Reichs - Kaiser Wilhelm II, whose mother was Queen Victoria's daughter, had always hoped England would stand down, and he was deeply disappointed when the Anglo-Americans joined the Allies. Today historians use the term "Anglo-Saxon" to refer to the Germanic peoples who ruled England from the 5th-century invasion to the Norman conquest in 1066. However, when used as an ethnic term, Celts as well as the invading Vikings and Danes are included Anglo-Saxons.
As for the Normans of France who conquered the Anglo-Saxons in 1066, they were also from the north. They were the Norsemen or Vikings - pirates from Denmark, Norway, and Iceland - who invaded and settled in northern France in the 9th century, gave up fleets in favor of calvary, and became famous and infamous on land for their reckless courage, cunning, outrageous treachery, ruthless rule, rapid military movement, brutality, love of money, imitation, adaptation, and whatnot.
According to Jefferson, the Normans were Tories and the Anglo-Saxons were Whigs. The Anglo-Saxons he admired in a letter to Major John Cartwright were not Christians - they were warrior pagans who followed the Norse religion - its principal god is Odin. Jefferson was delighted to receive John Cartwright's "valuable volume", The English Constitution. Jefferson, in his letter June 5, 1824, declared, "I have read this with pleasure and much approbation, and think it has deduced the Constitution of the English nation from its rightful root, the Anglo-Saxon." Jefferson had read that Anglo-Saxons drove out the former inhabitants, mere aborigines in comparison to Major Cartwright's superior Anglo-Saxon race, an invading Germanic race that "doubtless had a constitution" albeit largely unwritten, but there were fragments extant from which the nature of their constitution can certainly be inferred.
"Although this constitution was violated and set at naught by a Norman force," Jefferson continued, "yet force cannot change right. A perpetual claim was kept up by the nation, by the perpetual demand of a restoration of their Saxon laws until the final reconquest of their rights from the Stuarts. The destruction and expulsion of this (Norman) race broke the thread of this pretended inheritance, extinguished all regal usurpation, and the nation re-entered into all its rights...
"The Whig deduces his rights from the Anglo-Saxon source, and the Tory from the Norman," pens Jefferson, a traitor to his motherland, and he calls the English philosopher and historian David Hume, "the great apostle of Toryism... a desperate son of science, this traitor to his fellow man", for supposing that the people had illegitimately encroached on a valid Norman right to rule, instead of vice versa, the truth writ large of course by Cartwright, that "the commons established a principle, that the people are the origin of all just power."
The author of the Declaration of Independence goes on to justify the violent overthrow of his former (British) government, referring to the same inalienable principles Locke had previously employed to justify the Glorious Revolution in England a century prior. "Can one generation bind another, and all others, in succession forever? I think not. The Creator made the earth for the living, not the dead.... A generation may bind itself as long as its majority continues in life; when that has disappears, another majority takes its place, holds all the rights and power their predecessors once held, and may change their laws and institutions to suit themselves. Nothing then is unchangeable but the inherent and unalienable rights of man."
Furthermore, Jefferson, an enemy of judicial independence and a foremost friend of a wall of separation between church and state, writes: "I was glad to find in your book a formal contradiction, at length, of the judiciary usurpation of legislative powers; for such judges have usurped in their repeated decisions, that Christianity is a part of the common law. The proof of the contrary, which you have adduced, is incontrovertible; to wit, that the common law existed while the Anglo-Saxons were yet pagans, at the time when they had never yet heard the name of Christ pronounced, or knew that such a character had ever existed."
It was not long after their invasion of England that the Anglo-Saxons were converted to Christianity, the religion of their resident enemy, the Britons, who had been converted by the Romans long before. Saxon King Ethelbert had already received Christianity in the 6th century. David Hume writes in The History of England that it was highly unlikely that the British victims of the German invasion would be preaching Christianity to the cruel barbarians. He speculates that the Saxons were duly impressed by the progress of Christianity among their brethren on the continent, and that they wanted to associate with the universal spiritual power.
David Hume, Britain's beloved "Great Infidel", was no friend of any kind of superstition. He believed that the whole Christian story from the Fall to the Day of Judgment was a superstition. He railed against the ancient Celtic religion in his history of England, but he apparently believed it was preferable in some respects to the Saxon religion: "The superstitions of the Germans, particularly that of the Saxons, was of the grossest and most barbarous kind; and being founded on traditional tales received from their ancestors, not reduced to any system, nor supported by political institutions like that of the Druids, it seems to have made little impression on its votaries, and have easily resigned its place to the new doctrine promulgated to them.... They believed that if they obtained the favor of this divinity [Woden] by their valor (for they bade less account of the other virtues), they should be admitted after their death into his hall, and reposing on couches, should satiate themselves with ale from the skulls of their enemies whom they had slain in battle. Incited by this idea of paradise, which gratified at once the passion of revenge and intemperance, the ruling inclinations of barbarians, they despised the dangers of war, and increased their native ferocity against the vanquished by their religious prejudices."
Here we have an example of Hume's eloquent style, which was jealously referred to by both Jefferson and Adams as one that had allowed Hume to poison English and American minds with toryism. Jefferson's criticism was particularly caustic and even and slanderous at times. That is certainly a shame, for Jefferson had many ideas in common with Hume since studying his history as a youth, and was literally biting the hand that had fed him. Jefferson wrote from Monticello to Colonel William Duane, on August 12, 1810, as follows: "Our laws, language, religion, politics and manners are so deeply laid in English foundations, that we shall never cease to consider their history as a part of ours, and to study ours in that as its origin. Everyone knows that judicious matter and charms of style have rendered Hume's history the manual of every student. I remember well the enthusiasm with which I devoured it when young and the length of time, the research and reflection which were necessary to eradicate the poison it had instilled into my mind. It was unfortunate that he first took up the history of the Stuarts, became their apologist, and advocated all their enormities. To support his work, when done, he went back to the Tudors, and so selected and arranged the materials of their history as to present their arbitrary acts only, as the genuine samples of the constitutional power of the crown, and, still writing backwards, he then reverted to the early history, and wrote the Saxon and Norman periods with the same perverted view. Although all this is known, he still continues to put into the hands of our young people, and to infect them with the poison of his own principles of government."
Furthermore, Jefferson wrote from Monticello, on October 25, 1825, that "Hume's [history], were it faithful, would be the finest piece of history which has ever been written by man. It unfortunate bias may be partly ascribed to the accident of his having written backwards. His maiden work was the History of the Stuarts... the object of his work was an apology for them. He spared nothing, therefore, to wash them white, and to palliate their misgovernment. For this purpose he suppressed truths, advanced falsehoods, forged authorities, and falsified records. All this is proved on him unanswerably by Brodie. But so bewitching was his style and manner, that his readers were unwilling to doubt anything, swallowed everything, and all England became Tories by the magic of his art."
Hume's history was an exceedingly popular history, and had made him, as he put it, "opulent." John Adams complained to Jefferson on July 15, 1813, that his books would not share the same popularity: "The English commonwealth, the fate of Charles the First, and the military despotism of Cromwell, had sicked mankind with disquisitions on government to such a degree, that there was scarcely a man in Europe who looked into the subject. David Hume had made himself so fashionable with the aid of court and clergy. Atheist, as they called him, and by his elegant lies against the republicans and gaudy daubings of the courtiers, that he had nearly laughed into contempt Rapin, Sydney, and even Locke. It was ridiculous and even criminal in almost all Europe to speak of constitutions, or writers upon the principles or the fabrics of them. In this state of things my poor, unprotected, unpatronized books appeared; and met with a fate not quite so cruel as I had anticipated. They were at last, however, overborne by misrepresentations, and will perish in obscurity...."
Jefferson's was infuriated by what was merely a footnote, referred to above in reference to Jefferson's June 5, 1824 letter to Major John Cartwright: "Hume, the great apostle of Toryism, says in so many words, note AA to chapter 42, that, in the reign of the Stuarts, 'it was the people who encroached upon the sovereign, not the sovereign who attempted, as is pretended, to usurp upon the people.' This supposes the Norman usurpations to be rights in his successors. And again, in C, 159, 'the commons established a principle, which is noble in itself, but is belied by all history and experience, that the people are the origin of all just power.'"
Hume was a conservative. He believed in the abstract superiority of republican principles, but he did not believe "dangerous experiments" were appropriate for his troubled country at a time when its hard-won liberties were being threatened by radicalism. He believed that ideological and theological fanaticism was a threat to civilization. As a matter of fact, Hume had, as Jefferson knew very well, extended at some length customary praise to the Saxons in his history of England, repeating the racialist myth derived from the classical author. At least it is praise in the estimation of those who are not insulted by the barbaric, violent record of human civilization, and tend to find some justification for current revolution and war in it. "Of all the barbarous nations," quoth Hume, "known either in ancient of modern times, the Germans seem to have been the most distinguished both by their manners and political institutions, and to have carried to the highest pitch the virtues of valor and love of liberty; the only virtues which can have place among uncivilized people, where justice and humanity are common neglected. Kingly government... possessed a very limited authority; and though the sovereign was usually chosen from among the royal family, he was directed in every measure by the common consent of the nation.... In peace the civil union was in great measure dissolved, and the inferior leaders administered justice after an independent manner, each in his particular district. These were elected by the votes of the people in their great councils.... The warriors of each tribe attached themselves to their leader with the most devoted affection and most unshaken constancy.... To die for the honor of their band was their chief ambition; to survive the disgrace, or the death of their leader, was infamous. They even carried into the field their women and children, who adopted all the martial sentiments of the men.... The contributions which [the leaders] levied went not beyond a bare subsistence; and the honors acquired by superior rank were the only reward for the dangers and fatigues.... And the leaders, by annually distributing anew all the land among the inhabitants of each village, kept them from attaching themselves to particular possessions, or making such progress in agriculture as might divert their attention from military expeditions, the chief occupation of community."
Again, the tenor of this Anglo-Saxon myth based on the classical source is that of the Teutonic myth advanced by Prussian leaders who led Germany into two world wars. Which makes one wonder, Who were the Tories and who were the Whigs of that struggle for moral advancement? Jefferson thought the distinction would disappear in his revolutionary era. He sent a letter dated November 25, 1816 to John Adams at Poplar Forest: "(T)he distinctions of Whig and tory will disappear like chaff on a troubled ocean. Indeed, they have been disappearing from the day Hume first began to publish his history. This single book has done more to sap the free principles of the English constitution than the largest standing army which their patriots have been generous.... Hume has concentrated, in his fascinating style, all the arbitrary proceedings of the English kings, as true evidences of the constitution, and glided over its Whig principles as the unfounded pretensions of factious demagogues. He even boasts, in his life written by himself, that of the numerous alterations suggested by the readers of his work, he had never adopted one proposal by a Whig."
But John Adams disagreed with him in a letter dated December 16, 1816: "You think that 'in a revolution the distinction of Whig and Tory would disappear.' I cannot believe that. That distinction arises from nature and society; is now, and ever will be, time without end, among Negroes, Indians, and Tartars, as well as federalists and republicans. Instead of 'disappearing since Hume published his history,' that history has only increased the Tories and diminished the Whigs. That history has been the bane of Great Britain. It has destroyed many of the best effects of the revolution of 1688. Style has governed empire. Swift, Pope and Hume, have disgraced all the honest historians."
I must leave off here to consult my muse. I shall return soon enough if the gods are willing to examine my argument, that the English or the American constitution is not rooted in a particular race or its religion.
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