True Yankees: The South Seas and the Discovery of American Identity by Dane A. Morrison (review)

When it comes to the forging of an American identity, the frontier, overland exploration and expansion, and a rugged, individualistic character forged in the conquest of the West dominate popular imagination—and histories taught in school. True Yankees offers a corrective. Dane Morrison’s study of print culture and the writings of men and women who traveled the “Great South Sea”—the Indian and Pacific oceans—demonstrates the importance of Asia and the Pacific to an emerging national identity. The experiences and writings of Americans in the China Trade from the 1780s to the 1830s played a seminal role in producing a confident nation out of a decentralized republic of weak states.

Morrison traces the writings of five Americans to examine early articulations of national identity. The first generation, comprising merchant Samuel Shaw, mariner Amasa Delano, and explorer Edmund Fanning, carried republican values to the world from 1784 to the 1820s. Devoting a chapter to each individual, Morrison illustrates how these men portrayed themselves as genteel, educated, and refined citizens of the world. Trying to legitimize their new nation in the eyes of European expatriates, native Asians, and their own fellow Americans, the early generation showed Yankees to be products of the Enlightenment who exhibited ideals of scientific inquiry and tolerance of other peoples. But by the 1830s, as Americans grew more confident of their place in the world, their outlook shifted from cosmopolitan to parochial. The second generation of Americans in Asia was inspired by Jacksonian individualism—and racism. Reluctant expatriate Harriett Low and merchant Robert Bennet Forbes replaced the civic consciousness of the earlier generation with a competitive spirit that displayed intolerance for Asians and Europeans alike. Together, these writings “document an American identity that began as tentative and tolerant and grew into a national character both more confident and less empathetic” (xxii).

Between each profile is a brief “interlude” that provides analytical glue. While the chapters rely on close readings of memoirs, journals, and diaries, the interludes offer historical and historiographical context necessary to support the book’s larger argument about the East’s role in forging an American identity. For example, Morrison writes, while the published records of the Lewis and Clark expedition gathered dust on bookstore shelves, Americans avidly consumed news from the South Seas. “Maritime exploration attracted greater national interest than expeditions into the interior, and Americans imagined overseas discovery as an indicator of national progress” (139).

Ultimately, Yankee travelers and their readers back home positioned their country between perceived Asian “barbarism” and European decadence. Americans could thus “characterize the new nation as among the most civilized in the world” (xviii). Because representations of racial and national difference do occupy a prominent position, the book’s neglect of Orientalism is puzzling. While there is the briefest reference to Edward Said, John Kuo Wei Tchen’s work on American Orientalism in the early republic is absent. The oversight is unfortunate as Tchen’s work complements and strengthens Morrison’s. Nevertheless, True Yankees is a valuable contribution to our understanding of America’s early encounters with the world.