The Racism of America’s Founding Fathers

by Zoltanous

Introduction

In contemporary political discourse, discussion of the American founding is routinely distorted to serve present ideological ends. From the moral certainties of liberal orthodoxy to the abstractions favored by libertarians, the Founding Fathers are recast through selective narratives that smooth over inconvenient realities. Historical figures, events, and institutions are stripped of context and reduced to symbols, while primary sources, enacted laws, and institutional design are ignored or selectively quoted. The result is a prelapsarian fantasy in which the founding is either purified beyond recognition or flattened into caricature, obscuring genuine understanding. Before these ideas ever took shape in America, they were inherited from England itself. British political culture had long been structured around hierarchy, land, lineage, and inherited authority rather than equality as a governing principle. The worldview did not imagine society as a collection of interchangeable individuals, but as an ordered organism composed of distinct classes with defined social functions. This predated race as a modern scientific category and relied instead on class, bloodline, and cultural inheritance as markers of fitness for rule. When English settlers crossed the Atlantic, they did not abandon this tradition; they reproduced it under new conditions.

Modern ideological camps fragment this inheritance in different ways. Libertarians emphasize abstract liberty divorced from social cohesion or historical constraint. Liberal narratives often focus on moral condemnation while avoiding sustained engagement with the institutional logic of the early republic. On the radical fringes of the New Left, portrayals of the Founders as unrepentant white supremacists and slaveholding tyrants gesture toward real xenophobic practices but rely heavily on caricature and symbolism rather than rigorous historical analysis. These depictions may approach accuracy in outcome, yet they substitute spectacle for explanation. More significantly, this framing is often mobilized not to clarify the Founders’ worldview, but to repudiate it wholesale in service of a later ideological project: the Jew Israel Zangwill’s vision of the “melting pot.” That concept, presented as the moral culmination of American history, rests on the assumption that the nation was intended as a boundless amalgam of disparate peoples unified only by abstract ideals. This vision stands in direct tension with the historical record. The Founders did not conceive of the United States as a universal receptacle for the world’s populations, but as a culturally and ethnically bounded polity whose stability depended on continuity, cohesion, and inherited social norms. The “melting pot” was not the fulfillment of the founding vision, but a later reinterpretation imposed retroactively, transforming exclusionary historical realities into moral indictments while recasting a deliberately bounded republic as an unfinished cosmopolitan project.

“To describe America as a ‘nation of immigrants’ is to stretch a partial truth into a misleading falsehood, and to ignore the central fact of America’s beginning as a society of settlers.”

— Samuel P. Huntington, Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity

When one compares the spiritual and cultural assumptions embedded in Zangwill’s vision of America with those held by the Founding generation, it becomes evident that a decisive rupture occurred in the nation’s self-understanding. At some point, the question of what America was gave way to a new insistence on what America ought to become. Within roughly a century, and with accelerating force after the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, the United States shifted from a society oriented around settlement, production, land cultivation, and civic continuity toward an increasingly urbanized, cosmopolitan order organized around consumption, abstraction, and demographic flux. This transformation cannot plausibly be reconciled with the worldview of the Founders, who consistently framed the republic as a bounded political community grounded in inherited culture, shared norms, and long-term social cohesion. The early American project emphasized the cultivation of land, the reproduction of civic character, and the maintenance of a stable population capable of sustaining republican institutions across generations. By contrast, the later “nation of immigrants” narrative recasts America as a permanent zone of arrival rather than a civilization to be maintained, redefining belonging as a matter of legal admission rather than cultural continuity.

“Language, faith, culture, and history—and, yes, birth, blood, and soil—produce a people, not an ideology.”

— Patrick Buchanan, State of Emergency

The result is the emergence of two competing conceptions of America. One understands the nation as the outgrowth of a specific Anglo-European civilizational tradition, shaped by inherited customs and historical experience. The other treats America as an open, universal space detached from ancestry, memory, or bounded identity, unified only by procedural ideals. These two visions are not merely different policy preferences but incompatible understandings of what a nation is and how it endures. The tension between them defines the modern American condition and frames the conflict that runs throughout the remainder of this analysis.

The first generation of Italian immigrants vs the first generation Somalis immigrants

One must therefore ask whether this is the society the Founding Fathers intended to create. A nation defined by dense industrial and post-industrial agglomerations, where economic life is increasingly detached from production and rooted instead in consumption, speculation, and transient labor. A society in which civic purpose is reduced to individual gratification, public spaces deteriorate, and social trust erodes amid persistent racial disorder. Urban environments marked by infrastructure decay, rampant homeless settlements, and chronic minority crime stand in stark contrast to the productive, religious, and community-oriented republic envisioned by those who framed the nation’s institutions.

Is it plausible that this trajectory reflects the Founders’ design. Can any serious reading of their writings, laws, and policies support the claim that the United States was meant to function as an open-ended zone of permanent demographic replacement, unmoored from inherited culture or long-term cohesion. The gap between the early republic’s assumptions and the modern “nation of immigrants” narrative is not a matter of degree, but of principle. This article examines that rupture directly. Drawing on primary sources, statutory law, political theory, and institutional practice, it reconstructs the Founders’ worldview as it actually existed, rather than as it is retroactively portrayed in contemporary education and popular discourse. What follows is an analysis grounded in documented evidence, tracing how the early American republic defined citizenship, continuity, and political order, and how those definitions diverge sharply from the left wing intersectional syphilis that dominates modern interpretations of America today.

The Racism of America’s Founding Fathers

While later amendments and acts, such as the Naturalization Act of 1870 which extended rights to persons of African descent and the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 which removed racial barriers entirely, superseded the original 1790 law, the intent of the Founders remains clear from their writings and actions: America was conceived as a nation primarily for “free white persons” of European descent, with strict controls on citizenship and immigration to preserve cultural and racial homogeneity.

“Free white persons of good character” refers to the eligibility criteria in the Naturalization Act of 1790

This conception did not emerge in isolation. By the eighteenth century, Britain had already developed a mature imperial ideology for governing subject populations, most notably in India. Colonial administrators routinely framed domination as stewardship and as a civilizing obligation, treating hierarchy as a prerequisite for order and stability. Populations were classified, regulated, and excluded according to perceived cultural and biological suitability, normalizing the management of difference through surveillance, differential law, and institutionalized inequality. In this rationale, unequal rights could be presented as rational governance rather than overt tyranny. The Founders inherited this logic largely intact. In the American context, race operated as an extension of an older English class system, adapted to colonial conditions in which land acquisition, labor control, and population management were inseparable. This preexisting Anglo repertoire for justifying hierarchy through law, culture, and administration was central to the American project. The novelty lay not in a preference for hierarchy itself, but in its specific fusion with chattel slavery, settler expansion, and formal citizenship policy.

This foundational ethos is echoed in later interpretations emphasizing America’s deep European lineage. In Re-Forging America, written in the aftermath of the 1924 Immigration Act, Lothrop Stoddard argued that the nation’s character derived from Nordic, meaning Northern European, lineages, which he described as a cohesive Anglo-Saxon stock (also known as Old-stock Americans or WASPs) weakened by unrestricted non-Nordic immigration. He advocated re-forging the nation through eugenics and strict immigration controls, warning that foreign elements diminished the biological vitality and innovative capacity of the early settlers. Similarly, David Hackett Fischer’s Albion’s Seed identifies four British cultural strains, Puritan, Cavalier, Quaker, and Borderer (Scots-Irish), that settled distinct regions of the United States and continued to shape American political and social life within a broader white European basis. These patterns, rooted in regional differences within Britain itself, present the American founding as a direct extension of British cultural inheritance, marked by caution toward non-European incorporation. Grady McWhiney’s Cracker Culture advances a related argument through the Celtic thesis, tracing Southern pastoral traditions, honor codes, and social organization to migrants from the Celtic fringes of Britain. While emphasizing internal variation among Europeans, McWhiney nonetheless situates these differences within a shared white cultural boundary.

“The United States of America must be regarded racially as a European colony, and owing to current ignorance of the physical bases of race, one often hears the statement made that native Americans of Colonial ancestry are of mixed ethnic origin. This is not true. At the time of the Revolutionary War the settlers in the thirteen Colonies were not only purely Nordic, but also purely Teutonic, a very large majority being Anglo-Saxon in the most limited meaning of that term. The New England settlers in particular came from those counties of England where the blood was almost purely Saxon, Anglian, and Dane.”

— Madison Grant, The Passing of The Great Race

Collectively, these interpretations reinforce the Founders’ emphasis on ethnicity as a structuring principle, reflecting a conscious effort to preserve a European-derived national identity against perceived erosion. A symbolic expression of this continuity can be seen in the colonies’ early embrace of Anglo-Saxon imagery. The Grand Union flag, combining thirteen red and white stripes with the British Union Jack, signaled enduring bonds to British ancestry. Although the Revolution severed political allegiance to the Crown, the symbolism of the banner illustrates how the emerging nation continued to invoke its Anglo-Saxon inheritance even as it rejected monarchical rule.

“The United States is a composite nation, the product of blending and amalgamating many races. But the original stock was Anglo-Saxon, the root and sap from which our national life has developed.”

— Lothrop Stoddard, Reforging America

The Continental Army flag

Contemporary liberal critiques often identify the Founding Fathers as white racists, but they frequently arrive at this conclusion through superficial markers rather than sustained engagement with primary sources. Such critiques tend to focus on symbolic features such as appearance, cultural aesthetics, or generalized associations, while neglecting the more consequential evidence found in statutes, correspondence, political theory, and policy design. As a result, the diagnosis is often correct but poorly substantiated, relying more on moral assertion than historical demonstration. Nonetheless, when examined through the Founders’ own writings and actions, it becomes clear that many of them did in fact envision the American polity as ethnoculturally bounded, rooted in the preservation of a European derived population rather than a universally inclusive society.

“Our laws, language, religion, politics, & 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 it’s origin.”

– Thomas Jefferson’ Letter to William Duane, August 12, 1810

Tracing this racialist logic to its deeper origins reveals a consistent historical pattern. The ideological foundations of these views extend beyond the American founding and can be traced back to the English Civil War. That conflict was not simply a contest between monarchy and parliament, but a struggle over how hierarchy itself should be structured and justified. Royalists defended a landed aristocracy grounded in inheritance and tradition, while Parliamentarians sought to reorganize authority around commerce, discipline, and productive labor. Neither side rejected hierarchy outright. They disputed its form, its moral justification, and the social order it was meant to sustain. These unresolved tensions crossed the Atlantic with English settlers and gradually crystallized into distinct regional cultures in North America. The Southern planter class, often associated with Cavalier folkways, preserved a landed elite identity that closely resembled Royalist defenses of inherited authority and social stratification. In contrast, Northern society, shaped more heavily by Puritan and Quaker moral discipline, increasingly framed slavery as incompatible with a labor system centered on white wage earners and independent farmers. The central disagreement was therefore not whether hierarchy should exist, but how it should be organized and which labor regime would best support it. In this structural sense, the American Civil War can be understood as a descendant conflict that echoes earlier English disputes over authority, production, and social order.

These assumptions were already visible well before independence. In 1751, Benjamin Franklin articulated explicit concerns about immigration and population composition in his essay Observations Concerning The Increase of Mankind. He expressed anxiety over the influx of non-English Europeans, particularly Germans, whom he regarded as culturally incompatible and feared would dilute what he viewed as the Anglo-Saxon character of the colonies.

“Why should Pennsylvania, founded by the English, become a Colony of Aliens, who will shortly be so numerous as to Germanize us instead of our Anglifying them, and will never adopt our Language or Customs, any more than they can acquire our Complexion.”

— Benjamin Franklin, Observations Concerning The Increase of Mankind

Franklin further elaborated on global racial demographics, noting the scarcity of “purely white People” and preferring the English and Saxons as the ideal stock for America:

“That the Number of purely white People in the World is proportionably very small. All Africa is black or tawny. Asia chiefly tawny. America (exclusive of the new Comers) wholly so. And in Europe, the Spaniards, Italians, French, Russians and Swedes, are generally of what we call a swarthy Complexion; as are the Germans also, the Saxons only excepted, who with the English, make the principal Body of White People on the Face of the Earth.”

— Benjamin Franklin, Observations Concerning The Increase of Mankind

These views, which favored a racially homogeneous white European society, shaped early immigration debates and laid the groundwork for later policy, aligning closely with the racial restrictions codified in the Naturalization Act of 1790. Franklin’s preference for Anglo-Saxon continuity anticipates later racialist interpretations such as those advanced by Stoddard, who characterized the early colonies as a Nordic achievement requiring protection from perceived dilution. Over time, these inherited English distinctions expressed themselves regionally within the United States. Northern society, influenced by Puritan and Quaker folkways, generally opposed slavery while simultaneously seeking to marginalize Black labor in order to elevate white wage earners and independent farmers. Southern society, shaped by Cavalier and Borderer traditions, preserved slavery as a visible instrument of aristocratic dominance rooted in land ownership. Both systems sustained racial hierarchy, but they differed in how that hierarchy was articulated and maintained.

Albion’s Seed situates Franklin within the Quaker folkway of Pennsylvania, a British cultural transplant that emphasized particularistic customs and resisted non-European, and at times even non-Anglo, incorporation. Cracker Culture further highlights intra-European distinctions, underscoring how commitments to white exclusivity persisted despite acknowledged differences between Celtic and Saxon stocks.

This posture articulated by Franklin finds a concrete expression in the diplomatic career of Rufus King, a framer of the Constitution whose actions anticipated later exclusionary immigration logic. In 1798, King lobbied the British government to discourage the migration of Irish “United Irishmen” to the United States, warning explicitly that such an influx would render the nation “less English” and therefore “less American.” His concern was not language alone, but political and cultural inheritance. Even fellow English speakers, in his view, could constitute a destabilizing presence if their traditions and loyalties diverged from the established Anglo-Saxon core.

King’s refusal to treat the republic as a cultural blank slate underscores that the Founders’ vision of the nation was not merely broadly European, but deliberately calibrated to preserve a particular British-derived social order. By privileging the maintenance of this “English” character over the admission of politically suspect European refugees, King articulated an early precedent for viewing American identity as a bounded inheritance rather than an open-ended project, one that required active management to prevent perceived dilution.

“As I have intimated to you would probably be the case, I perceive that numbers of the disaffected will be expelled and that they will be disposed to plant themselves among us. It was the practice of the Emigrants from Scotland, to bring with them Certificates from the religious Societies to which they belonged, of their honestly, sobriety, and generally of their good Character! Why should we not require some such Document from all Emigrants, and it would be well to add to the Testimonial that the person to whom it was granted was not expelled from his Country and had not been convicted of any crime. I am, I confess, very anxious upon this subject. The contrast between New England and some other Parts of the U. S. is in my view a powerful admonition to us to observe greater caution in the admission of Foreigners among us. If from the emigrations of past time we have suffered inconvenience and our true national Character has been disfigured, what are we to expect from the Emigrants of the present Day?”

— Rufus King, letter to Col. Pickering, written from London, England, July 19th, 1798

Building on this, Thomas Jefferson in 1785 articulated inherent racial differences in his Notes on The State of Virginia, holding complex but ultimately racialist views on blacks and slavery. While condemning slavery as a moral evil, he believed in biological distinctions between races and advocated for emancipation only if followed by colonization of freed blacks outside the United States to prevent mixing.

“Among the Romans emancipation required but one effort. The slave, when made free, might mix with, without staining the blood of his master. But with us a second is necessary, unknown to history. When freed, he is to be removed beyond the reach of mixture.”

— Thomas Jefferson, Notes on The State of Virginia

Jefferson detailed perceived physical and intellectual differences:

“The blacks, whether originally a distinct race, or made distinct by time and circumstances, are inferior to the whites in the endowments both of body and mind.”

— Thomas Jefferson, Notes on The State of Virginia

He proposed gradual emancipation and deportation, arguing coexistence would lead to conflict:

“Deep rooted prejudices entertained by the whites; ten thousand recollections, by the blacks, of the injuries they have sustained; new provocations; the real distinctions which nature has made; and many other circumstances, will divide us into parties, and produce convulsions which will probably never end but in the extermination of the one or the other race.”

— Thomas Jefferson, Notes on The State of Virginia

Jefferson’s advocacy of emancipation paired with removal illustrates this distinction with particular clarity. His opposition to slavery did not imply a commitment to racial equality or political incorporation, but rather a reorganization of society intended to preserve white cohesion by excluding Black Americans altogether. This logic did not end with the Founding generation. Throughout the nineteenth century, colonization proposals persisted among political leaders who opposed slavery yet did not envision a multiracial political community on equal terms. During the Civil War era, debates over emancipation often coexisted with proposals to relocate freed Black populations outside the United States, reflecting a longstanding belief that social stability depended on separation rather than integration. Even Abraham Lincoln, while moving decisively toward emancipation, at times entertained colonization schemes, illustrating how opposition to slavery could still coexist with exclusionary assumptions about citizenship and social order. In this sense, colonization was not a contradiction of anti-slavery thought but, for some actors, one of its anticipated outcomes.

Jefferson’s insistence on separation to preserve what he viewed as white endowments reinforced the racial exclusivity of citizenship, positioning Black Americans as external to the political community. This stance aligns with later racialist interpretations such as Stoddard’s call to re-forge an undiluted Nordic America, Fischer’s characterization of Virginian Cavalier folkways as a transplanted British aristocratic culture, and McWhiney’s depiction of Southern Celtic society as fundamentally incompatible with African integration. As the nation took institutional shape, similar assumptions appeared in the political theory of figures like John Jay, who in Federalist No. 2 emphasized ethnic and cultural unity, portraying the United States as a homogeneous people descended from common ancestors.

“With equal pleasure I have as often taken notice that Providence has been pleased to give this one connected country to one united people—a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs...”

— John Jay, The Federalist Papers

Jay’s providential language implicitly excluded non-Europeans and non-Christians, aligning with emerging racial restrictions and reflecting a broader ethnocultural conception of political membership common to the period. His emphasis on shared ancestry parallels later interpretations of Nordic unity, Fischer’s depiction of the four folkways as branches of a single British cultural inheritance persisting across American regions, and McWhiney’s treatment of Celtic contributions as significant yet bounded within a white European brotherhood. Taken together, these strands converge to present the American founding as a project rooted in European ancestry rather than universal inclusion.

Founding Father John Dickinson says the same thing:

“Where was there ever a confederacy of republics united as these states are... or, in which the people were so drawn together by religion, blood, language, manners, and customs?”

— John Dickinson, Letters of Fabius, Letter VIII 1788

These assumptions were not confined to political theory but were embedded directly in constitutional and statutory law. The U.S. Constitution, ratified in 1788, reflected acceptance of stratification through provisions such as the Three-Fifths Clause, which partially counted enslaved persons for representation while denying them rights, and the Fugitive Slave Clause, which mandated the return of escaped slaves. Just three years later, the Naturalization Act of 1790 formalized this ethos by restricting citizenship eligibility to “any alien being a free white person” after a specified period of residence, a law signed by George Washington on March 26. The racial criterion was retained in subsequent revisions, including the 1795 Act, which extended residency requirements while preserving the exclusion. Taken together, these measures demonstrate that racial limitation was not incidental or anomalous, but a deliberate and sustained effort to define the polity in ethnocultural terms..

A copy of the original HR.40 document bill 1790 Naturalization Act

A copy of the 1795 Naturalization Act nationalized by the Third Congress of the United States, being an extension and revision to the 1790 Naturalization Act

George Washington’s Annual Address to Congress on January 8, 1790, laid the groundwork, urging a “uniform rule of naturalization” for foreigners’ admission to citizenship.

“Various considerations also render it expedient, that the terms on which foreigners may be admitted to the rights of Citizens should be speedily ascertained by a uniform rule of naturalization.”

— George Washington, Address To Congress, January 8th 1790

In the same speech, he warned of foreign invasions threatening enlightenment:

“Nor am I less persuaded, that you will agree with me in opinion, that there is nothing which can better deserve your patronage than the promotion of Science and Literature. Knowledge is in every country the surest basis of public happiness. In one in which the measures of Government receive their impression so immediately from the sense of the Community as in ours it is proportionably essential. To the security of a free Constitution it contributes in various ways: By convincing those who are intrusted with the public administration, that every valuable end of Government is best answered by the enlightened confidence of the people: and by teaching the people themselves to know and to value their own rights; to discern and provide against invasions of them; to distinguish between oppression and the necessary exercise of lawful authority; between burthens proceeding from a disregard to their convenience and those resulting from the inevitable exigencies of Society; to discriminate the spirit of Liberty from that of licentiousness, cherishing the first, avoiding the last, and uniting a speedy, but temperate vigilance against encroachments, with an inviolable respect to the Laws”

— George Washington, Address To Congress, January 8th 1790

Washington’s agrarian vision of republican stability emphasized a cohesive and governable citizenry, one that he believed depended on the admission of assimilable Europeans rather than unrestricted migration. His correspondence and official statements on naturalization and foreign influence, preserved in the National Archives, reflect these concerns directly. Read in this context, later symbolic representations of the United States as an open refuge for the world’s dispossessed, such as the Jew Emma Lazarus’s The New Colossus, represent a retrospective reinterpretation rather than a reflection of founding era policy or intent.

“Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,

With conquering limbs astride from land to land;

Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand.

A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame

Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name

Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand

Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command

The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.

‘Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she

With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!’”

— Emma Lazarus, The New Colossus

The bronze plaque bearing Lazarus’s poem was not added to the Statue of Liberty until 1903, seventeen years after the statue’s dedication in 1886. This temporal gap is significant, because the poem reflects a later symbolic reinterpretation rather than the legal and political framing of the founding era itself. Early American law defined citizenship explicitly and restrictively. The Naturalization Act of 1790 limited eligibility to “free white persons,” a criterion reaffirmed in the 1795 revision, which extended residency requirements while preserving racial qualifications. In 1798, amid fears of foreign influence during escalating tensions with France, the Alien and Sedition Acts further lengthened the residency period to fourteen years, again retaining racial restrictions and reflecting anxieties about political loyalty, social cohesion, and ideological contamination. These measures were driven not only by concerns about war or diplomacy, but by the belief that certain foreign populations imported subversive political doctrines (anarchism and communism), criminal networks (the mafia is a later example), and factional allegiances incompatible with republicanism. This suspicion extended even to Europeans, particularly those associated with radical continental movements, revolutionary unrest, or organized criminality. George Washington articulated this outlook plainly in private correspondence during the Revolutionary War:

“I do most devoutly wish that we had not a single foreigner amongst us, except the Marquis de Lafayette, who acts upon very different principles from those which govern most.”

— George Washington, letter to Gouverneur Morris, July 24, 1778

Read alongside the Naturalization Acts and the Alien and Sedition Acts, Washington’s statement clarifies that early American exclusion was not merely racial but ideological and political, aimed at preventing the importation of foreign doctrines, criminal associations, and destabilizing loyalties. The early republic was conceived not as an open clearinghouse for European populations, but as a guarded Anglo Saxon polity that sought to exclude groups perceived as vectors of disorder, radicalism, or subversion, even when those groups were themselves European.

Although these statutes were later modified, extending naturalization to persons of African descent in 1870 and removing racial criteria entirely in 1952, the original racially based intent exerted a lasting influence on American immigration and citizenship policy for more than a century. Taken together, these developments show that the early republic conceived citizenship as a bounded legal status grounded in ethnocultural assumptions and concerns about political reliability, rather than as an open or universal category. This did not exist only in statute, but reflected broader founding-era anxieties about foreign influence, loyalty, and social order that shaped elite attitudes toward immigration and settlement.

Alexander Hamilton in 1802 advocated stringent naturalization to prevent foreign influence, supporting extended residencies in his Examination series.

“A denial of citizenship under a residence of 14 years, is a denial to a great proportion of those who ask it, and controls a policy pursued from their first settlement by many of these States, and still believed of consequence by a great part of the Union.”

— Alexander Hamilton, The Examination Number VII, January 7, 1802

Hamilton consistently expressed concern that recent immigrants could destabilize the political order if admitted too quickly or without sufficient assimilation. Writing in the early republic, he supported extended residency requirements and stricter naturalization standards, arguing that premature access to citizenship risked importing foreign loyalties and undermining republican cohesion. This position aligned closely with the logic behind the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, which reflected broader anxieties about internal security and foreign influence during a period of international tension. These assumptions persisted into the 19th century.

During debates surrounding the Missouri Compromise in 1821, Charles Pinckney explicitly denied the existence of Black citizenship at the founding, asserting that the Constitution had been framed for white people only.

“I say, that, at the time I drew that constitution, I perfectly knew that there did not then exist such a thing in the Union as a black or colored citizen, nor could I then have conceived it possible such a thing could have ever existed in it; nor, not withstanding all that has been said on the subject, do I now believe one does exist in it.”

— Charles Pinckney, To The House of Representatives on The Subject of Missouri’s Statehood, February 13, 1821

His statement did not advance a novel interpretation but instead articulated assumptions that many contemporaries regarded as implicit in earlier law and practice. Taken together, Hamilton’s caution toward immigration and Pinckney’s categorical denial of Black citizenship illustrate how concerns about cohesion, loyalty, and political membership continued to shape debates well beyond the founding generation. This reflected an exclusionary conception of citizenship that rejected Black inclusion as incompatible with the existing white society, an interpretation later challenged by the 14th Amendment but nonetheless indicative of prevailing understandings of original intent. Pinckney’s position is further reinforced by the writings of James Madison, who likewise expressed doubts about the feasibility of political and social integration between white Americans and Black populations.

“To be consistent with existing and probably unalterable prejudices in America, the freed blacks ought to be permanently removed beyond the region occupied by or allotted to a white population. The objections to a thorough incorporation of the two people, are with most of the whites insuperable and are admitted by all of them to be very powerful. If the Blacks, strongly marked as they are, by physical and lasting peculiarities, be retained amid the whites, under the degrading privation of equal rights political or social, they must be always dissatisfied with their condition as change only from one to another species of oppression; always secretly confederated against the ruling and privileged class and always uncontrolled by some of the most cogent motives to moral and respectable conduct.”

— James Madison, letter to Robert J. Evans, 15 June 1819

He continues:

“The character of freed Blacks, even where their legal condition is least affected by their colour, seems to put these truths beyond question, It is material also that the removal of the Blacks be to a distance precluding the jealousies and hostilities to be apprehended from a neighboring people stimulated by the contempt known to be entertained for their peculiar features - To say nothing of their vindictive recollections, or the predatory propensities which their state of society might foster.”

— James Madison, letter to Robert J. Evans, 15 June 1819

Madison’s support for deportation or overseas colonization of Black Americans reflected a broader current within early American anti-slavery thought. Similar views were held by prominent figures such as Abraham Lincoln, who at various points endorsed colonization schemes and expressed doubts about the ability of Black people to assimilate into white society. In this respect, Lincoln’s position was not a break from the Founding generation but a continuation of assumptions about racial hierarchy and social incompatibility that were embedded in early American political thought.

This continuity became even more visible in mid-nineteenth-century politics with the rise of the Know-Nothing movement, formally the American party, which emerged in the 1840s and 1850s amid increased Irish and German Catholic immigration. During this period, racialized and civilizational language was applied flexibly beyond Black-white relations. In debates over territorial expansion, war, and immigration, political rhetoric frequently depicted certain populations as alien, backward, or fundamentally incompatible with republican order. This pattern is significant because it demonstrates that race functioned as a portable political language for sorting populations and legitimizing hierarchy, rather than as a fixed attitude directed at a single group. Echoing Franklin’s earlier anxieties about non-Anglo dilution, the Know-Nothings promoted nativist policies such as extending naturalization periods to twenty-one years and restricting immigrant voting rights, advancing these measures under the slogan “America for Americans.” Their objective was to preserve Protestant Anglo-Saxon dominance against groups they regarded as culturally unassimilable. Although the movement was short-lived, it represented a mass political expression of the same exclusionary assumptions embedded in earlier naturalization law, translating elite racial premises into popular mobilization. Judicial and extralegal developments reinforced these boundaries.

The 1857 Dred Scott decision drew on founding-era assumptions to deny Black Americans citizenship entirely, while figures such as Gouverneur Morris condemned slavery in principle yet accepted compromises that preserved racial hierarchy in practice. Following the Civil War, these assumptions reemerged violently in the first Ku Klux Klan (KKK), founded in 1865 to resist Reconstruction and intimidate freed Black populations and their allies. Although federal intervention suppressed the organization by the early 1870s, the logic it embodied did not disappear. That logic resurfaced on a broader scale in the early twentieth century with the revival of the KKK after 1915. The second KKK expanded its focus beyond anti-Black violence to include aggressive anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic, and anti-Jewish campaigns, framing these groups as threats to white Anglo Saxon Protestants. Through lobbying and political pressure, it contributed to the passage of the Emergency Quota Act of 1921 and the Immigration Act of 1924. These laws, influenced by progressive eugenicists, such as Madison Grant and Lothrop Stoddard, implemented nationality-based quotas designed to favor Northern European populations while sharply restricting others. The resulting policy, a direct descendant of the 1790 limitation of citizenship to “free white persons,” remained largely intact until the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 replaced it with a different organizing principle for immigration and citizenship.

This white supremacy was not merely incidental but foundational to the Founders’ conception of republican governance itself. As articulated in the Federalist Papers, the success of the American republic depended on a homogeneous people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, and professing the same religion. This was a clear prescription for ethnic and cultural uniformity among white Europeans, viewing diversity as a recipe for discord and dissolution. They warned that racial mixing would provoke a race war, advocating instead for separation to preserve white purity and republican stability. They argued for the removal of freed blacks, citing inherent biological and historical reasons that would breed inevitable hostilities in a diverse society. They even decried intra-European diversity, fearing that non-Anglo immigrants like Germans would dilute the “purely white people” essential to America’s character. These views were not outliers but were shared among proponents of liberal republicanism at the time, from thinkers like John Locke, who justified slavery despite his emphasis on natural rights, to other Founding Fathers such as George Mason and Patrick Henry, who criticized slavery in principle but owned slaves and supported systems that relied on racism to maintain social cohesion for self-government. Even the Declaration of Independence’s final text includes a racist grievance against King George III:

“He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.”

— Declaration of Independence, Congress, July 4, 1776

The anti-Indian language embedded in the Declaration of Independence was not rhetorical excess but a foundational assumption that reappears in Hamilton’s Federalist No. 24, where frontier conflict is used to rationalize standing armies and centralized authority.

“The savage tribes on our Western frontier ought to be regarded as our natural enemies, their natural allies, because they have most to fear from us, and most to hope from them.”

— Alexander Hamilton, The Federalist Papers

The point is not merely that the language was hostile, but that it reveals an early political template for defining the republic as a threatened white polity surrounded by internal and external populations deemed “dangerous.” That template reappeared repeatedly as a policy logic: sovereignty was consolidated by removing, subordinating, or neutralizing groups treated as incompatible with the political community. When the nineteenth-century United States pursued removal and territorial expansion, it was not inventing a new moral vocabulary so much as operationalizing earlier assumptions about who belonged, who could be governed as equals, and who could be displaced in the name of national development. Many future American presidents agreed with this fundamental view, even the beloved progressive Theodore Roosevelt.

“The most ultimately righteous of all wars is a war with savages, though it is apt to be also the most terrible and inhuman. The rude, fierce settler who drives the savage from the land lays all civilized mankind under a debt to him.”

— Theodore Roosevelt, The Winning of The West vol. III

Far from being random prejudice, these assumptions were institutionalized through law and policy. The 1790 Naturalization Act’s restriction of citizenship to “free white persons” defined the boundaries of political membership, while parallel doctrines governed the treatment of Indigenous nations. As legal historian Robert A. Williams Jr. argues in Like a Loaded Weapon, founding-era legal and political language consistently framed Native peoples as obstacles to security, sovereignty, and “civilized” progress. These assumptions culminated in formal federal programs such as the Indian Removal Act of 1830 and the subsequent Trail of Tears, where forced relocation, treaty abrogation, and mass death were justified as necessary measures for national consolidation and expansion. In this sense, Indian policy and Black policy were not separate moral stories but related instruments of state building: one expressed through chattel slavery and exclusion from citizenship, the other through dispossession, forced removal, and the systematic denial of Indigenous sovereignty.

This did not end with Indian removal. It was subsequently extended to justify expansion into territories inhabited by non-Anglo populations, most notably in Texas and during the Mexican–American War. The civilizational logic that cast Native nations as incompatible with republican order was readily adapted to Mexican and mixed-race populations in the Southwest. Territorial conquest was framed not as aggression against a sovereign nation, but as the extension of order into regions portrayed as misgoverned, backward, or racially unfit for self-rule. In this way, Manifest Destiny functioned as a flexible ideological instrument, translating founding-era assumptions about hierarchy, land, and political membership into justifications for continental consolidation. The rhetoric surrounding Texas and the Mexican–American War illustrates how explicitly racialized this framing was:

“A war of barbarism and despotic principles, waged by the mongrel Spanish-Indian and Black race, against civilization and the Anglo-American race.”

— Stephen F. Austin, The Austin Papers, vol. 3

Within American political rhetoric, westward expansion was cast as both historically inevitable and morally necessary, with conquest normalized as a civilizing process rather than acknowledged as a contingent political choice. It is in this context that historians have drawn comparisons between American settler expansion and 20th century programs of territorial acquisition and demographic engineering in Europe. Carroll P. Kakel and Edward B. Westermann note that National Socialist theorists and policymakers explicitly studied the American experience of westward expansion, Indigenous removal, and continental consolidation as precedents for their own eastward ambitions. Adolf Hitler and other Nazi ideologues repeatedly referenced the United States as a successful model of territorial expansion achieved through displacement, demographic restructuring, and the normalization of conquest under the language of civilizational progress. In this sense, Lebensraum functioned as a German analogue to Manifest Destiny, grounded in the shared belief that land, population, and race could be reorganized through state power in the name of national survival. The value of this comparison lies not in asserting moral equivalence, but in demonstrating how an established American expansionist tradition helped legitimize similar doctrines elsewhere.

This same logic, visible in Franklin’s anxieties over demographic dilution, Jefferson’s advocacy of racial separation, and Jay’s emphasis on ancestral cohesion, persisted through constitutional compromise, 19th century nativist movements such as the Know-Nothings, the Dred Scott decision, the violence of the Civil War era, and the extralegal enforcement of racial order by the Ku Klux Klan. It reached its most formalized expression in the Immigration Act of 1924, whose quota system favored Northern European populations and was shaped by racial theorists such as Grant and Stoddard. The post-1965 reforms of the Hart-Celler Act marked a decisive rupture with this tradition, replacing an ethnocultural conception of the polity with a civic and universalist framework that the Founding generation neither anticipated nor endorsed.

Crucially, this universalist turn did not emerge organically from Anglo-American political development. It arose as a contested ideological reorientation advanced by a relatively narrow intellectual and political milieu, many of them foreign-born or trained in European radical traditions, who rejected inheritance, historical particularity, and bounded political membership in favor of abstract universalism. This strain of American radical republicanism drew heavily from Marxist thought, which treated nations and inherited identities as transient constructs subordinate to class, humanity, or universal rights. The retroactive elevation of Lazarus’s poem at the Statue of Liberty exemplified this shift, functioning as a symbolic intervention that imposed a universalist moral narrative onto a national monument whose original purpose was unrelated to immigration. To preservationists, this transformation represented not an evolution of American principles but an ideological rupture, one that dissolved established boundaries of the political community through abstraction rather than continuity.

Preservationist logic therefore did not disappear in the modern era but adapted to new constraints. Once slavery became politically and economically untenable, segregation emerged as its functional successor within the Union, preserving hierarchy through legal and social mechanisms rather than property relations or colonization schemes. The form changed, but the function remained the same. What emerges from this record is not accidental or episodic racism, but a coherent political worldview inherited from Britain, refined through imperial governance, and institutionalized in American law. From English class hierarchy and colonial racial administration to the unresolved authority disputes of the English Civil War and the later American sectional conflicts, the same underlying question repeatedly surfaced: who constitutes the political community, and on what basis? The Founders answered this question with striking consistency, embedding their white nationalist assumptions into institutions that shaped American policy for more than a century. Whether expressed through slavery, segregation, eugenics, or back to Africa proposals, white supremacy functioned as the fundamental organizing logic of American state formation. Attempts to dismiss this continuity by isolating slavery as an aberration, or by reframing the Civil War through sentimental Lost Cause narratives, fail to account for the broader structural pattern. Even the Union’s post-war logic of preservation ultimately resolved itself not in universal equality, but in Jim Crow and segregation, demonstrating continuity rather than rupture.

Grant and Stoddard illustrated this clearly. Although opposed to slavery, they grounded their arguments in racial preservation rather than universal abstraction, reflecting a broader ideological tradition that interpreted American history as a mandate for continuity of hierarchy rather than egalitarianism. This worldview did not require full endorsement of Nazism or importing it to America. It rested on long-standing Anglo-American assumptions about race, order, and governance. Denying this continuity renders modern interpretations fundamentally incoherent, as they attempt to separate American political development from the very logic that produced it.

“‘America is not an experiment in government.’ Ours is not a tentative plan of governmental organization, subject to variation and modification or even criticism by new comers.

Our form of government... was fixed and settled more than a hundred years ago, and the principles formulated at the time of its foundation are far older, extending back throughout English history. Our institutions are Anglo-Saxon.”

— Madison Grant, America For The Americans

“It all comes down to a question of self-preservation. And, despite what sentimentalists may say, self-preservation is the first law of nature. To love one’s cultural, idealistic, and racial heritage; to swear to pass that heritage unimpaired to one’s children; to fight, and, if need be, to die in its defense: all this is eternally right and proper, and no amount of casuistry or sentimentality can alter that unalterable truth.”

— Lothrop Stoddard, The Rising Tide of Color