Civic Nationalism Series: The Founding Fathers

Civic nationalism is our topic this month.

What is civic nationalism? It is liberal nationalism. Specifically, it is a sense of nationhood and pride based on belief in liberal abstractions – freedom, equality, tolerance, individual rights, constitutionalism, citizenship – which is contrasted with nationalism based on shared race, ethnicity, culture, religion. Civic nationalism is based on a voluntary proposition – you agree with it or you don’t – as opposed to ascriptive categories which are inherited like race.

The American tragedy is that Americanism as an ideology was based on BOTH civic nationalism and racial nationalism. The Declaration of Independence talks about the self-evident truth that “all men are created equal” and “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.” A few paragraphs later, it condemns King George III as a tyrant for exciting “domestic insurrections amongst us” and endevouring “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.”

Thomas Jefferson was the embodiment of this contradiction. He was simultaneously both a broadminded liberal and ideological republican and a white supremacist and slaveowner. He believed in human equality and the racial inferiority of the black race. This species of American isn’t a combination which is commonly found today but it was far more common in the early years of the Republic. America unironically presented itself to the world as a beacon of freedom while building the world’s largest slave state.

From the beginning of the United States, Americans have wrestled with this contradiction. The US Constitution created by the Founding Fathers was a series of bitter compromises. It included the 3/5ths Compromise and the Fugitive Slave Clause which were bitter pills to swallow in New England. The Declaration of Independence originally indicted King George III on anti-slavery grounds but that was omitted and changed to inciting “domestic insurrection among us” in the final version.

The Naturalization Act of 1790 is commonly cited by White Nationalists as proof that the United States was founded as a White Nationalist country. In reality, the truth is that the Founding Fathers were of two minds about race. There were the Southerners led by Jefferson who clung to the older view that blacks were inferior and that America was a White country. There were the Northerners led by Benjamin Rush and Rev. Samuel Stanhope Smith (the president of Princeton) who argued in favor of racial equality.


SAMUEL STANHOPE SMITH

This is how Rev. Samuel Stanhope Smith put it in his response to Jefferson:

“I am inclined, however, to ascribe the apparent dullness of the negro principally to the wretched state of his existence first in his original country, where he is at once a poor and abject savage, and subjected to an atrocious despotism: and afterwards in those regions to which he is transported to finish his days in slavery, and toil. Genius, in order to its cultivation, and the advantages display of its powers, requires freedom: it requires reward, the reward at least of praise, to call it forth; competition to awaken its ardor; and examples both to direct its operations, and to prompt its emulation. The abject servitude of the negro in America, condemned to the drudgery of perpetual labor, cut off from every mean of improvement, conscious of his degraded state in the midst of freemen who regard him with contempt, and in every word and look make him feel his inferiority; and hopeless of ever enjoying any great amelioration of his condition, must condemn him, while these circumstances remain, to perpetual sterility of genius.”

Jefferson’s arguments about negroes weren’t uncritically accepted by his contemporaries:

BENJAMIN RUSH

Benjamin Rush argued that “Slavery is so foreign to the human mind, that the moral faculties, as well as those of the understanding are debased, and rendered torpid by it. All the vices which are charged upon Negroes in the southern colonies and the West Indies, such as Idleness, Treachery, Theft, and the like, are the genuine offspring of slavery, and serve as an argument to prove that they were not intended, by Providence for it.”

By the 1770s, many Northerners were denying the inferiority of blacks because it was inconsistent with civic nationalism. Benjamin Franklin thought that negroes were “not deficient in natural Understanding” and Alexander Hamilton believed “their natural faculties are probably as good as ours.” The typical argument that was that blacks weren’t racially inferior to Whites. They only seemed that way because Southern slave owners had oppressed and imbruted them. It was something for all Whites to feel guilty about. These arguments were made on the floor of the First Congress.

Benjamin Franklin’s last public paper was a defense of slavery by a Barbary pirate. He was arguing with James Jackson of Georgia and William Loughton Smith of South Carolina. The latter shot back that “It was well known that they were an indolent people, improvident, averse to labor: when emancipated, they would either starve or plunder.” Nathaniel Macon of North Carolina argued that “there was not a gentlemen in North Carolina who did not wish there were no blacks in the country. It was a misfortune – he considered it as a curse; but there was no way of getting rid of them. Instead of peace-makers, he looked upon the Quakers as warmakers, as they were continually endeavoring in the Southern States to stir up insurrections amongst the Negroes.”

Before the American Revolution, these arguments were never heard of except in the most radical Quaker anti-slavery circles. After the American Revolution when Locke’s arguments were seized on by New England propagandists in the 1770s (his Two Treatises of Government were unknown in the American colonies before then), they became the conventional wisdom in the Northeast. The blank slate mind of the negro was equal to Europeans and only slavery had brought about the inequality.

The slide down the slippery slope began with the American Revolution. Samuel Johnson had charged the Americans with hypocrisy in his famous quip, “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for freedom from the drivers of negroes?” Americans became mindful of the contradiction and before the Constitution was ratified slavery had been abolished in New England. Blacks were made into citizens in all the New England states except Connecticut and Pennsylvania abolished its anti-miscegenation law.

Civic nationalism isn’t just incompatible with monarchs and aristocrats. It was also incompatible with slavery and racial hierarchy and produced the world’s first White genocide.

About Hunter Wallace 12379 Articles
Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Occidental Dissent

36 Comments

  1. Very interesting and important choice of topic. I did not realize there were already, at the beginning influental voices for civic nationalism. I am looking forward to learn more about this, especially discovering powerful critique of civic nationalism.

    • Sam Adams is one of the more interesting studies in the contradictions. He so fervently believed in what he knew as the British Constitution that he plotted an ethnogenesis all of his own as a tax collector at the Boston Market.

  2. These changes taking our White Homelands away are being forced on us by a US government who’s authority has been usurped by alien jews. We have gone from ethnic nationalism that worked, to liberal nationalism and failing. They are destroying our country, and these policies have been orchestrated by many influencial jews, in government, media, and academia. These changes have taken place over the past 100 years in order to trick Whites into accepting that which will destroy them and the societies they had created. Make no mistake. It is the White Race that has been targetted for destruction, if not total elimination.

    The White men who were the founders and creators of this nation, understood the ideals of freedom, equality, and tolerance must be contained within a particular moral and cultural framework, a framework that enabled the pursuit of those values — but within any framework, there must be limits, but within this radical redefinition jews have foisted on us, there are none and has profoundly distorted our society.

    Let’s take Freedom. Freedom as defined by our Founders never meant absolute freedom to do whatever one liked, but ordered freedom set forth within the boundaries of our founding documents. Not freedoms that would be contrary to or lead to the destruction of our society. Obviously, bringing in tens of millions of third world nonwhite immigrants is extremely destructive to our society.

    And equality? Equality doesn’t mean every kind of equality as the jews have made it. Equality as understood by the Founders, never mandated any special treatment or rights in reference to skin color, IQ, sexual preference, as we have been forced to accept today. These practices are destructive to the order we once enjoyed. Equality as defined by our Founders specifically referred to the political equality of citizens under the law, which meant equal treatment for all citizens as prescribed by the law. Equality simply means equal rights for all, and demands, special rights for none. Liberals, both DIMocrats and RepubliCANTS demand special rights for minorities only, which is resulting in the physical displacement of Whites.

    And tolerance — we hear a lot about that one on the jewsmedia, but as we know, White Nationalists do not enjoy tolerance for a great many of their views if any at all. Only minority views are permitted. Only minority demands are considered. Whites need not bother. Tolerance never meant tolerance for everything as conniving jews have re-defined it, but as the Founders meant: tolerance for those things that would conform within the moral framework of our particular type of society and most importantly, not destroy it. Make no mistake about it. Jewish progressive liberalism and unfettered tolerance is destroying America, and that is exactly what jews desire more than anything.

    • You forgot the moral glue that holds all this together- credal, Augustinian orthodox Christianity. Without it, this social experiment would fail… as it has already done.

  3. Hunter,

    Have you looked at the biography of Sam Adams and his father Sam Adams Sr?
    The view of him published in Thomas Hutchinson’s Massachusetts Bay while partisan Tory is instructive.

    Adams was an old line Cromwellian/Puritan/Republican and in that you also have the contradiction. A racist who fervently believes in Democracy.

  4. Even if all the races were of equal intelligence, but still looked different, I don’t want them replacing me and my race. The Chinese make good cruisine and the Indians are happy to sit in 7/11’s all night serving customers-but I don’t want them replacing me. I don’t care what they can offer-I don’t want my race and culture replaced, and was never asked about it.
    Civic nationalism is a useless concept that at best,offers up this dangerous,naive argument that its ok for millions of Tyrones to reside in your nation, and possibly be a rapist or serial felon, as long as he repects the constitution and supports our troops abroad fighting ‘terror’.
    Tommy Robinson of the UK is one of these-opposes Islam taking over British cities, but then you check out his rallies-they’re stuffed full of nog marchers as if they’re as British as warm beer.
    Civic nationalism gives false hope to the masses and is lethal. Race and heritage matter. Never assume otherwise.

    • Environment can matter but only if you have a good genetic base. There are lots of Indian moped mechanics that would have done very well at MIT if they had grown up in a better environment.

  5. A very well done post Mr. Wallace. The contradictions of Jefferson on race and liberty are something that I have struggled with, and tried to explain in my “Untaught Truths About the Fourth of July” over at ID last July.
    Having struggled in the “American patriot movement” trenches for years, when I became a White Nationalist, I tried to recast the Founders as full-out White Nationalists, which all of them were not. I gave up on America over a year ago, but still tried to hold on to some of the mythology about the Founders, which is slowly fading from my mind.
    I believe that Jefferson, in late life, suggested intermarriage of Whites and Indians. I believe Patrick Henry sponsored a bill in the VA legislature to encourage such, though I have not researched the particulars on it.
    As far as I know, George Washington was solid on race. At this point in my studies, I see Washington, a former General and unapologetic slave owner, as a mild authoritarian leading the “right faction” of the Founders, while “enlightenment” tainted Jefferson was leading the vanguard for the “left” wing of the Founders. What do you think of that analysis?
    I am looking forward to the rest of the articles in this Civic Nationalism series.

  6. Hunter

    Weren’t anti miscegenation laws abolished because no one in their right mind would want to engage in race mixing?

    • @MAGAnomics

      They were abolished because the legislators in those states actually believed that Negroes were equal to Whites. It’s easy, however, to love Blacks, when you don’t have any. Or, in this case, they’re somebody else’s problem.

      Sans Puritanism, Quakerism and Yankeeism, slavery would have died a quiet death. The blacks would have been sold off to the Caribbean and South America. We wouldn’t have any if the problems we have today, except for Jews reimporting Blacks into the U.S., like they do in Europee, to use as political weapons against Whites.

  7. Including New England in the Union was the seninal mistake that condemned the rest of us to interminable political conflict, eventual war, and possible racial and cultural extinction.

    • @James Owen
      I think you are correct about New England. The Yankee, on fire to form all others into their own image, could never be at peace until he ruled all others. As I understand it, Yankees are not English, they are a group of ideological separatists who left England to form a perfect world based on *ideology*, not blood and soil. Thus George Washington, a Southerner of primary English lineage, saw the world and acted radically different than a Connecticut Yankee would have.

  8. As an aside, I notice that a great majority of what I call Neo-Yankees, those who keep stoking the animosity and bitterness between North and South, seem to be Jews or their useful idiots.

    • James Owen – WHY can’t you write “Jews”? You blame “Yankees” for EVERYTHING. But not Jews. Who in complete control of Western civilization, Have you ever BEEN to New England? EVER? The only “Yankees” left are the impoverished helots of the Jew. Are you a Jew, James? Jews blame others for their own crimes.

      • It is kosher country in the North from the Atlantic to the Misississippi, then it becomes low IQ Evangelicuck country. I think Detroit was the first major city to come completely under jewish control if you want to se our urban future.

      • @Denise

        What I’m trying to say, Ms Denise, is that I’m starting to see that the North vs. South dichotomy is another tool of the Jews.

        • Although I’d say that it is mostly the demonization of whites who live in more tropical climates that is the problem. The white southerner is in the same boat as white colonists in Rhodesia, Kenya, India, SA (((someone somewhere))) really doesn’t like having whites in power and settling where the weather is balmy, the rain falls in a gentle monsoon and the fields are abundant.

  9. Is there any other venue in the movement as prolific and articulate as Occidental Dissent?

    That is so crucial because Occidental Dissent is also home the only genuine route to security and prosperity for our people: forming a new nation out of the wreckage of the United States.

    MAGA, an angrier version of Take Back America, doesn’t war game the scenario of the demographic shift already being baked in the cake and the INEVITABLE swing back to the left at some point in the future. The only way to stabilize America would be through a bloodbath that would make the 20th Century look like a fist fight. Who would want to roll the dice on that? What kind of world would await us on the other side?

    We need to do what we were supposed to do after Trump won, which is to use this time wisely to advance our agenda, a new Nation, not squander it by holding Trump’s beer.

    • Unfortunately that bloodbath IS inevitable. There’s no way around and trying to form a new country out of part of the US isn’t viable either. Not until wars over anyways.
      The Jews set this up, and the White man was the idiot who sat back and did NOTHING to stop it. So who’s fault is it really?
      Any idiot knows that ANY nation that is occupied by atleast 50 different nationalities -ALL who have their own set of core beliefs and values are going to fight for political control of this country. I can’t say ethnic groups because Muslims have proven that they’ll murder the shit out of each other over their “cultural” differences though they’re the same ethnic group, they hold a different set of beliefs. This was a non issue until the White man allowed the Mexicans to recolonize the southwest and then some. We’ve brought literally millions of Muslims into America who hate everyone and are intolerant of all including each other. Africans – The Somalis will be in this as well.

      This war will happen whether you want it to or not. The ONLY thing all these groups have in common is their hatred of the White man. What a coincidence. Better that we have it out NOW while we still have a decent number of people in the fight. Every day the Jews import more of their soldiers and our position is weakened.

  10. New England had no use for slave labor, since they had no cotton, sugar cane or tobacco plantations. But they did rely on White children and females to work in their dark, dirty and dangerous textile mills and manufactories.

    • My understanding is that slaves up north tended to be butlers and valets rather than manual laborers anyway. Something more like Carson in Grantham Abbey than A farm hand. A status symbol.

  11. Whites should never be reduced to arguing propositionally for our right to exist as a race and in our nations. White America is a new nation – a confluence of White European nations on the continent of North America. It does not have a state or social order. Before it can have a state, it must have an order.

    At present White America is ruled by the Judaic Supremacy (a global supremacy) that is sovereign in terms of its ownership of the government of the old republic. The social order of the old republic was established on the basis of Masonic order (which has always served the Judaic Supremacy). And in this order all there is freedom for all religions – Judaism rules them all as at the top there is no separation between Synagogue and State.

    All the founding fathers were Freemasons and their positions represent the positions of different Lodges with respect to the Revolutionary Era inaugurated 1789 for the overthrow of every Christian European nation state (together with its colonial possessions) – beginning in France. The Grand Orient (which spawned Communism) is radically ‘equalist’ . The Grand United Lodge of England would be more nationalist, but a nationalism under the Judaic Supremacy – as England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland all separate nations have been under The Crown of the Judaic Supremacy and ruled from the sq mi of The City (state in London) since the War of the Succession 1688.

    In Europe and its former colonies, every nation state has been overthrown in the Revolution as both state and order (the Church or a nationalist church set up in the Reformation). They all were re-founded as Masonic republics or little kingdoms with a Jew Bank on top.

    There never has been and never will be a state without a sovereignty and foundational order. In the US republic, that order has always been Freemasonry and when the central bank got control the de facto sovereignty became non-separation of Synagogue and State.

    In the ancient regime, the basis of the social order was the Church, which had clear doctrines of the Kingship of the Lord Jesus Christ and the kingdom order for nations (the Church) in which nations were to be baptised and re-founded in terms of order. These nations which had crowned Christ as King had to legislate on the basis of the faith and morals of the Church.

    Since the baptism of the nation of England in the 5th century A.D., the Common Law tolerated the old indigenous traditions as folk ways and up until the Reformation. The freedom of highways and byeways, holy wells, forest sanctuaries where ‘the king’s writ did not run’ were observed. You had to be a Christian, however, to participate in the state. You could not be a Jew (by definition against Christ Law) or a pagan making peat bog sacrifices, drinking the blood of the dead etc and participate in the state.

    Since 5th century A.D. right up until Reformation, the social order of the Isles was the Christian faith under the Western Patriarchate in Rome. Magna Charta was ratified by the Pope. It provided for the Royal prerogative but not the Royal supremacy which was brought in under Henry VIII – when he broke Magna Charta and made himself head of Church and State and appropriated all the estates of the Church.

    The most famous memory of the period is probably the Vivian Forbes portrait of St Thomas Moore defending the Liberty of the House of Commons. The portrait hangs in St Stephen’s Hall , English Parliament, London.
    https://thomasmorestudies.org/g-b3.html

    The only social order that can avail for White nations against the Judaic Supremacy is the Kingship of Christ and his kingdom order for nations, the Church

    At present the Church is going through the greatest crisis in its history. Manifestly subverted and owned by its enemies, it is going through the Great Apostasy foretold by St Paul in II Thess. However, the promise of Christ for the Church still stands. The Church will be restored and when it is, nations can be renovated upon it. Meanwhile, nations that pray to come through this storm must act as Poland has acted, they must crown Jesus Christ as King. Nations that have ‘uncrowned’ Him must recrown Him and legislate on the basis of Christ Law as it stood up until the time the Revolution (inaugurated 1789) succeeded at the level of the hierarchy of the universal Church 1963 A.D. This is what will survive and endure the storm which the Bible calls the greatest ‘time of trouble since ever there was a natio’n: world revolution and war – of which the Islamic invasion of Western Europe is but a prelude.

    • @Lynda – I am an American of Welsh descent. I am a European. I am OVER all of this Semitic desert lunacy and EVIL. I want all of this – ALL of it – purged from MY world.

      • If you have ever been to Cymry, Denise you would know that every village has a church and several choirs. Everybody in Wales sings the old hymns and in ten part harmony. They have always been a Bardic culture. They have been a Bardic Christian culture since 5th century A.D. The opening scene of How Green Was My Valley is quite accurate.

        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oevNjFeWUyQ
        How Green Was My Valley – Cwm Rhondda.

        O bydded i’r heniaith barhau

      • @Denise, I’m with you. Death to the jooish sect named christianity. Europeans never needed the jooish desert delusion, imposed upon them by the sword.

  12. Imagine if a man invades your house and tells you that you are free but if you try to step outside the house then he will executive you. Or in a different scenario image your house still looks identical outside but inside an enemy has come and removed all your furniture, repainted you walks, and added art and furniture of his own choosing. Guess who the man is in both scenarios?

  13. Too bad someone did not come from the future and give the founders one piece of advice: “Pick you own cotton”

    • That was already baked in by the time of the revolution. Tempting to think that if the colonies had remained as joint stock companies ruthlessly exploiting things and people, the outcome would have been a little different.

      By the Founders might have just been reacting to a particular social evolution that stemmed from these commercial “plantations” and did so as best they could.

  14. First we need to understand that back in the founding days when the words, man or men, were used it did not mean every male on the planet. That term was strictly defined as white man or woman. Of course all of you should know by now who owned and financed the Atlantic slave trade with the main ports being Newport, RI and Charleston, SC. Most of the large plantations were also owned by these kikes. America was by no means the largest slave state that would be Brazil. Of course Arabs were trading slaves as early as 500BC. There is really no difference between a jew and an Arab as they have intermarried for well over 2500 years. Blacks were slaves to their tribal chiefs. You should read “Negroes in Negroland” by Hinton Rowan Helper to get an understanding of how these black savages actually lived.

  15. Most northerners in early America were opposed to both slavery on the one hand, and Black equality on the other – the Free Soil perspective.

    That is why free Blacks did not have the vote in most of the northeastern states before the Civil War.

  16. We whites are supposed to be racist and separate from these aliens. This charge of racism is kike/communist nonsense. Read the communist party program at cpusa.org

  17. Your race is your father, in particular.

    Anti-racism is memetic pathology.

    Hatred for your father is self-annihilating.

    A synthesis of “symbiotic regression.”

    “Universal equality” is true.

    Objective (S)upremacy is “false.”

    These are the radical’s fundamental axioms.

  18. The push for “radical autonomy” will inevitably give way to violently-divergent conceptions of The Master Race.

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