[CHAPTER ONE]

Self-Government, Democracy, and White Manhood

IN 1873, Charles Henry Pearson, an English historian of the Middle Ages, returned to his recently acquired farm in the colony of South Australia and wrote to his American friend, Charles Eliot Norton, about matters of national character: “You like myself have a sort of double nature your’s [sic] being the American-European as mine is the Australian-European.”1 In Pearson’s view, their double allegiance to New World democracy and Old World civilization provided a personal bond and distinctive perspective on their shared condition as colonizers of new lands.
In his discussions with Norton about the alarming social condition of England—the great gap between the rich and the poor—we can trace Pearson’s transformation from being “a liberal of the English type,” as he first described himself, to being a “democratic liberal” of the progressive type.2 In this he participated in the broader shift in Australian political culture toward what historians have called “social liberalism.” No longer preoccupied with political despotism or individual liberty, democratic liberals were more concerned with redressing broader inequalities in social and economic power.3
In the story of Pearson’s commitment to building a new society in Australia “along the lines of equality,” we can chart the ways in which the settler ideal of democracy, shaped by “memories of class rule and intolerable wrong in the old country” and intense land hunger in the new, also drove “the elimination of the native.”4 The progressive New World was understood as both prize and vindication of colonizing conquest, as Theodore Roosevelt observed in his review of Pearson’s National Life and Character: A Forecast.5 Progressivism justified the possession of new lands.
The democratic passion for equality expressed a repudiation of Old World hierarchies and privilege but led in turn to new oppressions, evident in the exclusion of indentured and “coolie” labor and “Asiatics” more generally, the expulsion of Pacific Islanders, the segregation of African Americans, and the destruction of indigenous communities, whose “inevitable disappearance” shaped dominant narratives of settler nations.6
Charles Eliot Norton was first cousin to Francis Parkman, the famous historian of the Oregon Trail and Indian wars, to whom Roosevelt dedicated Winning of the West, praising the popular writer as one to whom “Americans, who feel a pride in the pioneer history of their country are so greatly indebted.”7 Roosevelt wrote privately to Parkman: “Your works stand alone, and … they must be models for all historical treatment of the founding of new communities and the growth of the frontier, here in the wilderness.”8
In his several works of history, Parkman, though sympathetic to individual Indians and tribes, cast Native Americans in general as savages, locked in their barbaric past, always prone to treachery and deceit, and incapable of modernity.9 Parkman had asked Norton to help him convert his original essays on the Oregon Trail, first serialized in the Knickerbocker magazine, into one complete volume. Norton liked to recall the nights they met on the Boston wharf to work on “Parkman’s epic of the American West.”10
Five years after the publication of Winning of the West, Roosevelt reviewed Pearson’s National Life and Character, commending it as “one of the most notable books of the end of the century,” a work of “deep and philosophic insight into the world-forces of the present.”11 One of those historic forces was the spread of Western “civilization” across the globe, with its seeming corollary of the “dying out” of indigenous peoples. Pearson’s magnum opus was, in part, an elegy to those he called the “evanescent races” of North America and Australia, who, he observed in a classic discourse of disavowal, “died out as we approached.”12 Indigenous peoples, wrote Pearson, who as a traveler had personally witnessed the violence of the Plains Indian wars, seemed to “wither away at mere contact with the European.”13 In his characterization of encounters between settlers and indigenous peoples, Pearson, like most of his contemporaries, engaged in what might be described as “fantasy” serving as “protective fiction.”14 In the self-innocenting narrative of evolutionary progress that informed these national histories, the “red man” was “little more than a memory” even as the “white man” came into his rightful inheritance.15
Pearson and Norton became friends when the young English historian visited the United States in the late 1860s. Both men of learning and refinement, they were also passionate democrats, morally outraged at the political and social injustice institutionalized in aristocratic Britain. They shared the conviction that in the self-governing democracies of the New World, ordinary men—white men—might rescue their manhood.16 The cost of their redemption was substantial. As Christina Snyder has written, American democracy “sought to empower ordinary white men by colonizing Indian country and redistributing its resources that in the Jacksonian period had required the forced removal of 100,000 Indians.”17 Subsequent dispossession saw American Indians lose most of their land.
In his travels across the United States, Pearson was pleased to find that even workingmen in the great republic enjoyed a manly self-respect that eluded his fellow countrymen at home. Norton was pleased to agree.18 But not all men were so blessed. The manly right of self-government—that definitive rights-claim advanced by settler colonists—remained the preserve of “white men,” who alone were considered fit to govern themselves and others. As a radical liberal politician in Victoria, Pearson later defined democracy, somewhat tautologically, as “self-government by men educated up to a common low level and trained by the habit of self-government.”19 Francis Parkman used a similar logic in criticizing universal suffrage: it should apply “only to those peoples who by character and training are prepared for it.”20 Only Anglo-Saxons were thus trained and habituated. Others were cursed, in Parkman’s view, by “hereditary ineptitude.”21
In settler societies, it was the discourse on self-government that came to define contours of racial difference.22 In these societies, racial identity and claims to self-government were intertwined and mutually reinforcing.23 Colonists were always, already, “civilized,” but in their historic encounters with indigenous peoples and with African Americans, “Asiatics,” and Islanders, they came to define themselves more specifically as “white men”: democratic, upstanding, independent, self-governing, and the equals of fellow (white) men. This was the basis of their much vaunted “fellow feeling,” to invoke one of Theodore Roosevelt’s favorite conceits.24 Other races of men were thought to be inherently “dependent,” “docile,” “servile,” “supine,” or “degraded” and hence not fit for the responsibilities of self-government.25
When Pearson first met Norton, Boston was a favored destination for many English “lights of liberalism,” keen to offer their support for the cause of the North in the Civil War.26 For James Bryce, who would later write the great survey work The American Commonwealth, the Civil War was the crucial political struggle of the age, “a turning point, for good or evil, of the course of human affairs.”27 It was in Oxford and Cambridge “where the various fortunes of that tremendous struggle” were followed with such close interest and “the educated class sympathised to such a strong degree with the cause of the North.” Goldwin Smith led the group that took that view, “which included three quarters of the best talent in Oxford.”28
Goldwin Smith wrote to Norton to express his solidarity with the cause of the Union, deploring the “malignant exaltation” of the English upper class over the “misfortunes of the American Republic” and their support for the Confederates. The North did have friends in England, Smith assured Norton, even though “the aristocracy are against you almost to a man. The great capitalists are against you.… The clergy of the Establishment are against you as a Commonwealth founded in liberty of Conscience. The rich are mostly against you.”29 For his own part, Smith confided,
[I have] fairly thought my way out of social and political feudalism, and out of the State Church which is its religious complement.… My intellect and heart are entirely with those who are endeavouring to found a good community on the sounder as well as happier basis of social justice and free religious conviction.… Most likely I should be more in my element, in some respects, at Boston than I am at Oxford.30
The following year, Smith embarked on an American lecture tour, declaring that in the United States lay the “hopes of man.”31
In the stellar literary society of New England, these liberal Englishmen discovered manly company of a kind they relished: cultivated yet democratic, intellectual yet vigorous. In 1868, Pearson met Longfellow, Agassiz, Wendell Holmes, and Emerson, whose essay “The American Scholar” had been acclaimed by Holmes as “our intellectual Declaration of Independence.” James Russell Lowell, coeditor with Norton of the North American Review, displayed “a certain unfriendliness to Englishmen,” Pearson noticed, but it was understandable, for “any American might well be excused for some disgust towards the mother country after the conduct of our wealthy classes during the Civil War.”32
The topic of American manhood arose. Lowell told Pearson about the Maine lumbermen, “whose delight it was to drift over the rapids seated astride on pieces of timber, in constant peril of death, for the mere excitement of a plunge.”33 Norton would later eulogize Lowell as “the very best and most characteristic specimen of democratic manhood that New England has produced.”34 It was the vibrant manhood of these Americans that dazzled the English visitors, but it was Norton, the aristocrat in culture and democrat in politics, who, in Pearson’s eyes, outshone them all.
The descendant of a leading Puritan family, which had lived for two centuries on American soil, Norton was an art historian, a man of letters, a translator of Dante, and a friend of English literary figures, including Charles Dickens, Arthur Hugh Clough, Mrs. Gaskell, the Brownings, and John Ruskin. In the 1850s, he had traveled extensively in Italy, studying the paintings of Giotto and Fra Angelico as well as Gothic architecture, exemplified by the cathedral at Orvieto—the perfect expression, he thought, of pure and manly simplicity. In the spirit of Ruskin in The Stones of Venice, Norton tended to read architecture as an expression of national character. In Gothic cathedrals, he saw the “prevalence of the democratic element in society” before it was overcome by Renaissance pomp and worldliness and art forms he condemned as corrupt and false.35 The Vatican was to his mind characterized by vanity and gaudy spectacle. Norton praised the work of Michelangelo in the Sistine Chapel but criticized the Roman Catholic Church as “un-American.”36 “No theories of government and religion can be more diametrically in opposition than those prevalent at Rome and in America,” Norton declared. “As an American, born into the most unlimited freedom consistent with the existence of society … regarding feeling, thought, and speech as having a natural privilege of liberty … it is difficult, even at a distance, to regard the system of the Roman Church as being other than a skilful perversion of the eternal laws of right.”37 In his Notes on Travel and Study in Italy, Norton returned to the repressive effects of a totalitarian church, especially its inimical effect on the development of “manly character.” A modicum of liberty was essential for the development of literature and art. “When political and spiritual despotism combine,” Norton wrote, “a vacuum is produced in which thought and imagination die out, and all the qualities of manly character dwindle and decay.”38
Charles Pearson shared Norton’s obsession with the importance of manly character. He was born in 1830, in London, the son of Harriet Pearson and the Reverend John Norman Pearson and grandson of John Pearson, a member of the Clapham Sect, founder of the Bible Society, and an “intimate,” as he liked to recall, of “Wilberforce, Zachary Macaulay, and the whole connection of Stephens, Venns, Thorntons and Babingtons.”39 Pearson’s father was the oldest son of a family of seventeen children, of whom only seven survived infancy. A shy and timid man, he suffered, according to his ...