Habits of Whiteness: A Pragmatist Reconstruction

2 The Draft Riots of 1863 and the Defense of White Privilege

Between Rebellion and Riot People in America did not accept whiteness as a natural category right away, and people used the category in fairly disparate ways for a long time. It took a while for people to become habituated to the ideas of race and whiteness to the point that they took them as natural features of human biology. While whiteness was a legal designation that required concerted acts of propagation in order for it to take hold in the early colonial period, by the end of the eighteenth century people in America take its reality for granted to the point that it could be used to make significant decisions about citizenship and democratic government . So where the colonial era witnessed the forging of whiteness as a racial category, the post-Revolutionary era saw its deployment in the creation of the Union. It therefore evolved from a social distinction of dubious value for the mass of poor European laborers to a “natural” way of dividing humanity to a necessary condition for citizenship in the early republic. In his history of whiteness, Jacobson argues that 1790 was a watershed year for the development of whiteness because that was the year in which the first natwo The Draft Riots of 1863 and the Defense of White Privilege 44 · history tional Congress passed a unique immigration law that gave an unprecedented significance to being white. It states in part: “that all free white persons who, have, or shall migrate into the United States, and shall give satisfactory proof, before a magistrate, by oath, that they intend to reside therein, and shall take an oath of allegiance, and shall have resided in the United States for one whole year, shall be entitledtotherightsofcitizenship.”1 Thissimplelawwovetightlyintothetapestry of our civic life the idea of whiteness as a superlative and privileged racial group. Inonestroke,thislawconcretizedaracialhierarchythathadneverbeenassharply defined. It extended full citizenship to the poorest immigrant from Europe while casting people of Asian, African, and indigenous descent into a legal limbo where they were unable to represent their interests, regardless of how long they or their family had lived in America. This increase in the political significance of whiteness in the early republic had to do with the connection between whiteness and theideaof “fitnessforself-government.”Thatis,citizenshipwasreservedfor“free white persons” because they were the only people deemed “civilized” enough for self-government. Jacobson illustrates the degree to which the very idea of republicanism was determined by the idea of whiteness: “‘Fitness for self-government,’ a racial attribute whose outer property was whiteness, became encoded in a naturalization law that allowed Europeans’ unrestricted immigration and their unhindered (male) civic participation. It is solely because of their race, in other words, that they were permitted entrance.”2 In the early republican era, whiteness becameanormativecategorythat,whenconjoinedwithmaleness,wasequivalent tonormativecitizenship.Whitenesswasjustasmuchaboutwhocouldparticipate in the new nation as it was about who couldn’t because they were not fit for selfgovernment (people of African, Native American, Latino, and Asian descent). However, this simple idea of whiteness came under scrutiny in the nineteenth centurybecauseoftwointerrelatedevents:themassiveinfluxofIrishimmigrants to the United States starting in the 1840s and the New York City Draft Riots of 1863. These two events forced the Yankees of the young republic to redefine the idea of whiteness in order to separate themselves from the mass of European immigrants who were granted entrance into the country as white folk, but were nevertheless distinct from the Anglo-Saxon stock seen as the lifeblood of the United States. As immigration, war, and expansion changed the demographics of the republic, the republic, through laws, sermons, debate, and literature, changed the meaning of whiteness. The mid-nineteenth century witnessed a dramatic increase in European immigration to the United States. While fewer than 9,000 immigrants came to the United States in the year 1820, nearly a quarter of a million (234,968) immigrants made their way to its shores in 1847.3 “Black ’47,” as this year is still known in Ireland , was a pivotal time in the history of whiteness in the United States because it was the first year of the Great Famine, which in five years’ time claimed a million lives and forced as many to leave Ireland, ultimately cutting Ireland’s population The Draft Riots of 1863 and the Defense of White Privilege · 45 by one-quarter.4 Most who fled this calamity came to America. Jacobson points out that “by 1860 . . . the foreign born population...