C. Territoriality in the U.S. Constitution’s First Century
The one potential difference between the U.S. and European models was with regard to the external sovereign reach of the new U.S. Government. The Constitution strongly suggested that the national government had no sovereign power to act either internally or externally except where explicitly granted such power by the people and/or the States.[1] At the very least, this new model of governance begged the question of whether the constitutional limitations on U.S. Government power only limited its power vis-à-vis the American people and the States, or also limited its power vis-à-vis foreign sovereign entities. This question would come to be particularly important with regard to the acquisition of new territory. In 1803, while his Secretary of State James Madison was finalizing the Louisiana Purchase via a treaty with France, President Thomas Jefferson (who had penned the Bill of Rights) opined in a letter to John Dickerson that he didn’t think such purchase was constitutional:
The general government has no powers but such as the constitution has given it; and it has not given it a power of holding foreign territory, & still less of incorporating it into the Union. An amendment of the Constitution seems necessary for this. In the meantime we must ratify & pay our money, as we have treated, for a thing beyond the constitution, and rely on the nation to sanction an act done for its great good, without its previous authority.[2]
His proposed Constitutional amendments, of which he prepared multiple drafts, would have allowed the original state governments to deliberate over the acquisition of new territory, placed new “foreign” lands on equal footing with the original U.S. territory, and “clarify the relationship between new lands and peoples and the Constitution.”[3]
Jefferson’s anxiety about territorial acquisition was likely based on two factors. First, Jefferson’s view of the Constitution was that it was essentially a compact or treaty between States who had retained their sovereignty under the law of nations, with no real national polity pursuant to which the United States could act on its own behalf.[4] Second, and more crucially, he was concerned about the United States acquiring territory whose inhabitants were both numerous (unlike the Native Americans) and, unlike Anglo-Saxons, incapable of self-government. The inhabitants of the Louisiana territory were at the time described as a mass of “Creole ignorance.”[5] America’s Founding Fathers didn’t want to subjugate such people, given the Constitution’s anti-imperial roots, but neither did they want to have to treat them as equals.[6] Jefferson’s vision of an “Empire of Liberty” was “populated almost entirely by his ideal citizen, the self-governing yeoman farmer, who was most certainly white.”[7] This was a vision shared by many of Jefferson’s contemporaries, Benjamin Franklin, for example, who, unlike Jefferson, was opposed to the slave trade, opposed it because he wanted more “Saxons” to come to America: “And while we are…scouring our planet, by clearing America of woods, why should we…darken its people? Why increase the sons of Africa, by planting them in America, where we have so fair an opportunity, by excluding the blacks and tawneys, of increasing the lovely white[?]”[8]
James Madison, while aligned with Jefferson on many issues (including slavery), nonetheless disagreed with Jefferson’s constitutional theory,[9] and the treaty with France in the end received the overwhelming advice and consent of the U.S. Senate without constitutional amendment or further dialogue.[10] In 1823, the U.S. Supreme Court then explicitly affirmed that the U.S. Government had the power to acquire territories by treaty (in this case, the acquisition of Florida from Spain).[11] This decision solidified the bifurcation of the U.S. Government’s ability to project its power more expansively externally versus internally as a constitutional doctrine. In other words, on the international stage, the U.S. Government had the same range of powers as all of the sovereign entities of Europe (what Blackhawk refers to as “quotidian treaty law”), but internally, vis-à-vis the U.S. states, it was strictly limited by the U.S. Constitution.
This bifurcation became essential to the handling of the next great acquisition of U.S. territory, this time via the conquest of Mexico during the Mexican-American War (1846-1848). By the conclusion of hostilities, U.S. forces controlled not only the territory that now comprises Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, California, Utah, and part of Colorado, but also northern Mexico down to the capitol, Mexico City. There, “America’s soldiers found their first extended experience as an occupying army unsettling.” Lieutenant Ulysses S. Grant wrote to his fiancée, “The rich keep down the poor with a hardness of heart that is incredible. Walk through the streets of Mexico and you will see hundreds of beggars, but you never see them ask alms of their own people, it is always of the Americans that they expect to receive.”[12] Other Mexicans continued to resist U.S. rule, throwing rocks at U.S. soldiers, who were expected to break up riots and maintain public order amid widespread robberies.[13]
While the Southern Democrats had strongly supported the war effort, starting with the 1845 annexation of Texas that prompted hostilities, when given the opportunity to annex much of the rest of Mexico, the U.S. drew the line at incorporating too many Mexicans. As Senator John Calhoun opined,
We have conquered many of the neighboring tribes of Indians, but we have never thought of holding them in subjection, or of incorporating them into our Union. They have been left as an independent people in the midst of us, or have been driven back into the forests. Nor have we ever incorporated into the Union any but the Caucasian race. To incorporate Mexico, would be the first departure of the kind; for more than half of its population are pure Indians, and by far the larger portion of the residue mixed blood. I protest against the incorporation of such a people. Ours is the Government of the white man. The great misfortune of what was formerly Spanish America, is to be traced to the fatal error of placing the colored race on an equality with the white. That error destroyed the social arrangement which formed the basis of their society. This error we have wholly escaped; the Brazilians, formerly a province of Portugal, have escaped also, to a considerable extent, and they and we are the only people of this continent who have made revolutions without anarchy. And yet, with this example before them, and our uniform practice, there are those among us who talk about erecting these Mexicans into territorial Governments, and placing them on an equality with the people of these States. I utterly protest against the project.[14]
In the Treaty of Guadaloupe Hidalgo, Mexico ceded 55 percent of its territory to the United States—what is now Nevada, Utah, New Mexico, most of Arizona and Colorado, parts of Oklahoma, Kansas, and Wyoming, and of course California, minus the Baja peninsula—but U.S. troops subsequently withdrew from what is now considered northern Mexico. This raised the question of what status this area had during the period of U.S. military occupation, including, inter alia, the port of Tampico. Had it at any point been part of the United States, and if so, what was its status under the Constitution? Once again, the bifurcated approach to Constitutional power offered a solution. The U.S. Supreme Court determined that, while the U.S. military’s conquest of the port of Tampico rendered it “undoubtedly…subject to the sovereignty and dominion of the United States,” the area remained a “foreign country” for purposes of import duties. The Court explained its reasoning as follows:
It is true that when Tampico had been captured, and the State of Tamaulipas subjugated, other nations were bound to regard the country, while our possession continued, as the territory of the United States, and to respect it as such. For, by the laws and usages of nations, conquest is a valid title, while the victor maintains the exclusive possession of the conquered country. The citizens of no other nation, therefore, had a right to enter it without the permission of the American authorities, nor to hold intercourse with its inhabitants, nor to trade with them. As regarded all other nations, it was a part of the United States, and belonged to them as exclusively as the territory included in our established boundaries.
But yet it was not a part of this Union. For every nation which acquires territory by treaty or conquest holds it according to its own institutions and laws. And the relation in which the port of Tampico stood to the United States while it was occupied by their arms did not depend upon the laws of nations, but upon our own Constitution and acts of Congress.[15]
The one pre-Civil War Supreme Court decision that departed from this bifurcated approach, extending the full range of Constitutional rights to U.S. territories in a manner reminiscent of Jefferson’s vision, is today widely regarded as the worst decision in U.S. Supreme Court history: Dredd Scott v. Sanford, which held as unconstitutional the 1820 Act of Congress known as the Missouri Compromise—a controversy that, yet again, arose from territorial acquisition. The Act had provided that, with regard to the vast expanse of territory acquired from France in the Louisiana Purchase, Missouri would be admitted to the Union as a slave state, but slavery would be prohibited in the remaining territory above the 36º 30' latitude line. This law had arguably emancipated Mr. Scott, who had been enslaved in the slave state of Missouri but who had then resided in the “free” part of the Louisiana Territory for several years before returning to Missouri in 1843. For the Supreme Court, however, the primary Constitutional concern was whether a mere act of Congress could deprive the slave owner of his property, the slave, in violation of the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution.
The Dredd Scott opinion is today primarily known for its historically inaccurate, gratuitous and racially offensive reasons for finding Mr. Scott to lack the standing to even sue for his freedom in federal courts, concluding he was not one of the “people” envisioned by the Constitution’s framers.[16] This aspect of the opinion was effectively overturned after the Civil War by the 13th and 14th Amendments to the Constitution, which ended slavery, guaranteed U.S. citizenship to all those born or naturalized in the United States, and invalidated any property interests in human beings that might otherwise warrant due process for slave owners under the Fifth Amendment. However, the Court’s unique articulation of U.S. sovereignty has rarely been reexamined by the Court (except in the Insular Cases), or by very few scholars besides Kal Raustiala. This may be the only Supreme Court case in which the court asserted that the United States government,
although…sovereign and supreme in its appropriate sphere of action…does not possess all the powers which usually belong to the sovereignty of a nation. Certain specified powers, enumerated in the Constitution, have been conferred upon it, and neither the legislative, executive, nor judicial departments of the Government can lawfully exercise any authority beyond the limits marked out by the Constitution.[17]
Accordingly, the Court opined,
There is certainly no power given by the Constitution to the Federal Government to establish or maintain colonies bordering on the United States or at a distance to be ruled and governed at its own pleasure, nor to enlarge its territorial limits in any way except by the admission of new States….no power is given to acquire a Territory to be held and governed permanently in that character…
…no one, we presume, will contend that Congress can make any law in a Territory respecting the establishment of religion, or the free exercise thereof, or abridging the freedom of speech or of the press, or the right of the people of the Territory peaceably to assemble and to petition the Government for the redress of grievances. Nor can Congress deny to the people the right to keep and bear arms, nor the right to trial by jury, nor compel anyone to be a witness against himself in a criminal proceeding.
These powers, and others in relation to rights of person which it is not necessary here to enumerate, are, in express and positive terms, denied to the General Government, and the rights of private property have been guarded with equal care.[18]
Following the Civil War, the Reconstruction Amendments and the overturning of Dredd Scott, for the remainder of the 19th Century, none of the United States’ territorial acquisitions raised these thorny issues until 1898. This is largely because the United States became quite discerning and selective in its territorial acquisitions, again with an eye towards ensuring that its expansion would result in settlement and domination of these new territories by white people. Expansion remained “a vital part of the nation’s mythology,” its Manifest Destiny, and “[c]ontiguous expansion needed only to be praised and pursued, rarely justified.”[19] Between 1865 and 1912, twelve states joined the Union (most of them on the land wrested from Mexico in the Treaty of Guadaloupe Hidalgo), but these were all contiguous states on the North American continent.[20] The United States expressed some interest in acquiring Caribbean territories, in large part to keep European powers at bay pursuant to the 1823 Monroe Doctrine,[21] but these preliminary efforts typically foundered on the issue of race.
For example, between 1869 and 1870, President Grant tried furiously to convince Congress to annex Santo Domingo (what is now the Dominican Republic), believing both that the Bay of Samaná would make an excellent coaling station for the U.S. Navy and that the island might provide a safe haven for African-Americans away from white Americans “if Providence designed that the two races should not live together.”[22] But Grant could not obtain Senate advice and consent for the treaty signed between the United States and Santo Domingo providing for such annexation, with opponents in the Senate such as Prussian immigrant Carl Schurz, whose anti-imperialism was based on certain assumptions shared by many Americans at that time:
that racial homogeneity was the prerequisite characteristic of a republic; that white racial limitations, fixed by nature and dictated along the lines of climate separating the temperate and tropical zones, made Santo Domingo unsuitable for settlement by people of “Germanic blood” and therefore a worthless, wasteful acquisition for the United States; and that alien people of color could not be trusted with citizenship.[23]
During the Senate debates on the annexation treaty in March 1870, Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts—who in 1856 had been viciously beaten with a cane on the Senate floor due to his fervent opposition to slavery—delivered a speech to his colleagues in a closed-door executive session in which he explained that he opposed annexation because “the people [of the now-Dominican Republic] were a turbulent, treacherous race, indolent and not disposed to make themselves useful to their country or the world at large.” Many of his colleagues lauded the speech as “one of the most powerful ever made in the Senate.”[24]
Attempts to add Hawai’i to U.S. territory for a long time suffered the same fate. President Franklin Pierce looked into acquiring it as early as 1854, but not via a treaty that would have given Hawai’i sovereignty: “He knew that if Hawai’i was admitted as a state, with its multiracial populace, on the basis of equality, he would offend and potentially divide his party. Annexation collapsed as a result.”[25] When Congress finally approved annexation on June 15, 1898—by joint resolution, not by treaty, because a treaty would have required the support of two-thirds of the Senate, which President McKinley did not have[26]--this only occurred after white Hawai’ian residents had staged a coup against Queen Liliuokalani in 1893;[27] repeatedly assured Congress that the island would be ruled by whites and that the Native Hawai’ians were eventually going to be extinct,[28] exaggerated the percentage of “white” people within the population of Hawai’i, and committed to enforcing the U.S. Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.[29] Even then, annexation was still only approved because of fears that Japanese contract laborers were going to take over the archipelago as part of a long-term annexation strategy being carried out by Japan.[30]
Two changes had occurred between the early and mid-19th centuries that gave rise to these attitudes towards territorial acquisition. First, along with much of Europe, white Americans had come to embrace more overtly racist and biological, “scientific” explanations for their Erroneous Assumption, in further effort to explain why non-Western people appeared to them to be in a less “civilized” state and thus appropriate for subjugation and conquest.[31] Whereas Francisco de Vitoria in 1531 might have believed that these somehow deficient people could perhaps be uplifted through the civilizing influence of Christianity after a long period of white tutelage, and where the American revolutionaries might once have “sincerely believed that…ultimately most of the peoples of the world could be taught to share in the republican system of the new nation,”[32] Westerners had now hardened into the idea that certain races of people—in fact, all but one race—were simply irredeemable and not suited to republican government,[33] a convenient means of justifying exploitation and destruction. By mid-century, “America’s racial theorists were explaining the enslavement of blacks, the disappearance of Indians, and the defeat of the Mexicans in a manner that reflected no discredit on the people of the United States.”[34]
Second, the passage of the Reconstruction Amendments, particularly the 14th and 15th Amendment, led policymakers to believe that they now had no way of absorbing non-white people without giving them birthright citizenship and the right to vote.[35] This was also unacceptable; as one New York Herald correspondent complained about Hawai’i, “It would be a curious thing indeed to some day have a close election for President of the United States settled by the votes of semi-barbaric Sandwich Islanders, whose grandfathers were cannibals, aided by Chinese and Japanese and Papuan laborers.”[36] In order to help present their case, white advocates of annexation in Hawai’i, such as Hawai’i’s new president Sanford Dole, were advised to model Hawai’i’s governance after the Constitution of Mississippi, “which is said to have the effect of disenfranchising a majority of the negroes of that state.”[37]
By 1898, when the United States was deliberating over acquiring both Hawai’i and the multiracial Philippines following the Spanish-American War, public debate centered on “whether under our less flexible Constitution we can govern colonies effectively without running the risk incident to the admission of distant and alien peoples to full citizenship.”[38] The editors of The Nation concurred, noting that, since 1860, the United States had assumed “the most onerous responsibilities” by freeing the slaves. “To the negros we made the necessary gift of the suffrage, but not another thing” because
we know well that their ignorance and barbarism threaten our future…The sole thing that we do with alacrity for the negro is to burn him alive when he does very wrong. But it will not be so easy to burn the Tagals and other races. We shall not have men enough to lynch decently in 1,200 islands, if that be our national mode of reclaiming the erring.[39]
The Republicans in the Senate, who were supporting President McKinley in trying to get their Democratic colleagues on board with the annexation of the Philippines as set forth in the Treaty of Paris, tried their best to allay their colleagues’ fear that the 15th Amendment to the Constitution was going to guarantee all Filipinos the vote. Senator Platt argued that the citizen’s right to vote was invested in the state in which they voted, not by virtue of U.S. citizenship. Citizenship did not confer voting rights. “Women are citizens; they do not vote,” Platt explained. “Minors are citizens; they do not vote.” Senator Henry Teller joined his colleague:
We do not…allow everybody to participate in the affairs of government. We exclude the alien, we exclude the ignorant and vicious, we exclude women and infants—rightfully…the interests of the few must give way to the interests of the great mass; because it might be dangerous to the body politic to allow a certain class to participate in the affairs of government. The disabilities that exist must be disabilities that render them unfit and unsuitable for the discharge of political duties…[A]s they are now, nobody wants to take them into the body politics. Nobody wants to make Cuba or Porto Rico or the Philippines States of the Union.[40]
The Democrats responded with charges of hypocrisy, as it had been the Republican party that had championed Reconstruction and voting rights for Negroes in the South. Senator John McLaurin of South Carolina asked mockingly how the treaty’s supporters could justify a policy
“embracing races so nearly akin to the negro [i.e., denying Filipinos the rights of citizenship and representation, which differed] so radically from the policy adopted as to that race in the South?]” There could only be one answer,
and that is that they substantially admit, in light of a third of a century’s experience, that universal suffrage is a monumental failure…It is indeed comforting to hear some of those who in the past criticized us, now that the question is brought home, completely justify our methods in providing a scheme of colonial government.[41]
For all of these reasons, the United States’ acquisition of the Philippines in 1898 (which occurred almost simultaneously with the annexation of Hawai’i) was a stark departure from longstanding U.S. policies, one that raised novel Constitutional issues that the U.S. Supreme Court then had to resolve in the Insular Cases. The United States was quite keen on gaining access to non-Western marketplaces, particularly in the East Asia and Pacific region. But the United States much preferred to expand its influence via a legal mechanism pioneered by European imperial powers in order to facilitate their assertion of control more indirectly, in places like China and Japan, as explored in the next section.
[1] According to Jud Campbell, there were at least four distinct views, all based on social-contract theory, on whether U.S. sovereignty was based solely upon the consent of the States, or whether there were in fact a national “people” of the United States at all. Thomas Jefferson “denied national sovereignty” and believed that the U.S. states had “delegated sovereign power to a federal government without transferring sovereignty itself.” Jud Campbell, Four Views of the Nature of the Union, 47 Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy 13 (2024), at 20. John Marshall believed that the states, upon adopting the Constitution, had transferred part of their sovereignty to a national body politic. Id. at 30. James Wilson believed the States had become “one large state” going back to 1776. Id. at 31. James Madison took somewhat of a hybrid view, what Jud Campbell calls “quasi-nationalism.” Id. at 22-23.
[2] Letter from Thomas Jefferson to John Dickerson, August 9, 1803, available at http://jeffersonswest.unl.edu/archive/view_doc.php?id=jef.00004. Compare this to contemporaneous English legal interpretations at the time, such as Campbell v. Hall (1774), 1 Cowp 204, 98 ER 1045, regarding the validity of an English tax that had been imposed on all goods and sugars exported from the island of Grenada, shortly after France had ceded Grenada to England in 1763. The court held that a conquered country becomes part of the dominions of the king, and all inhabitants the king’s subjects. The king had the power to make laws for the conquered country without the concurrence of Parliament, with “Englishmen” having no privilege in the conquered country distinct from the other conquered inhabitants.
[3] Maggie Blackhawk, Foreword: The Constitution of American Colonialism, The Supreme Court 2022 Term, 137 Harv. L. Rev. 1, 36 (2023).
[5] Quoted in Eric T.L. Love, Race over Empire, Racism and U.S. Imperialism, 1865-1900 (North Carolina Press, 2004), at 21. Federalist Fisher Ames insisted that otters were more capable of self-government than Louisiana’s “Gallo-Hispano-Indium omnimum gatherum of savages and adventurers, whose pure morals are expected to sustain and glorify our republic.” Quoted in Bartholomew H. Sparrow, The Insular Cases and the Emergence of American Empire (University Press of Kansas, 2006), at 21.
[6] Accord Eric T.L. Love, at 20 (“Because of its anti-imperial, anticolonial roots and the requirements of its Constitution (as well as its silences), the majority conviction was that the United States could not hold land or govern its inhabitants in a colonial relationship. Therefore any land the nation annexed had to be incorporated into the Union.”)
[9] As observed by Campbell, Madison, unlike Jefferson, believed that the federal Union had national characteristics. Jud Campbell, at 22.
[10] As Blackhawk would put it, “Pragmatism pushed Jefferson away from the principles and process that governed the Constitution and toward a constitutionalism that allowed for quotidian treaty law—treaties formed with “civilized” governments, like the French, only—to incorporate borderlands and restrict citizenship by race.” Blackhawk at 37.
[11] American Insurance Company v. Canter, 26 U.S. 511 (1828).
[12] Quoted in Amy S. Greenberg, A Wicked War, Polk, Clay, Lincoln, and the 1846 U.S. Invasion of Mexico (Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2012), 359.
[16]Dredd Scott v. Sanford, 60 U.S. 393 (1856), at 407-08, finding no evidence that Africans had long been regarded by Europeans as
beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race either in social or political relations, and so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect, and that the negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit…This opinion was at that time fixed and universal in the civilized portion of the white race…The opinion thus entertained and acted upon in England was naturally impressed upon the colonies they founded on this side of the Atlantic. And, accordingly, a negro of the African race was regarded by them as an article of property, and held, and bought and sold as such, in every one of the thirteen colonies which united in the Declaration of Independence and afterwards formed the Constitution of the United States.”
[19] Eric T.L. Love, Race over Empire, Racism and U.S. Imperialism, 1865-1900 (North Carolina Press, 2004), at 30-31.
[20] These included Nebraska (1867), Colorado (1876), Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota and Washington (1889), Wyoming and Idaho (1890), Utah (1896), Oklahoma (1907), and Arizona and New Mexico (1912). Eric T.L. Love, Race over Empire, Racism and U.S. Imperialism, 1865-1900 (North Carolina Press, 2004), at 23.
[22] Simon, Papers of Ulysses S. Grant, 20: 74-75, quoted in Eric T.L. Love, Race over Empire, Racism and U.S. Imperialism, 1865-1900 (North Carolina Press, 2004), at 45.
[23] Eric T.L. Love, Race over Empire, Racism and U.S. Imperialism, 1865-1900 (North Carolina Press, 2004), at 55. In his correspondence with Grant, Schurz explained his opposition to the treaty as follows: “in short, acquisition and possession of such tropical countries with indigestible, unassimilable populations would be highly obnoxious to the nature of our republican system of government; it would greatly aggravate the racial problems we already had to contend with; those tropical island would, owing to their climatic conditions, never be predominantly settled by people of Germanic blood…this federative republic could not without dangerously vitiating its principles, undertake to govern them by force, while the populations inhabiting them could not be trusted with a share of governing our country.” Id. at 53-54 (quoting Schurz’s biography Reminiscences).
[28] Id., at 116-17 (describing how a white minority established a provisional government in Hawai’i and purposefully excluded Asian males, prompting two to three thousand Hawai’ian royalists to protest the constitutional convention); id., at 139 (describing how Hawai’ian president Sanford Dole counted 15,000 individuals of mixed Portuguese ancestry on Hawai’i as “white”).
[29] The first Chinese Exclusion Act enacted in 1882 (amended several times thereafter) prohibited the entry of Chinese laborers (though not Chinese businessmen) and denied naturalized Chinese citizenship to those already in the United States. Congressional support for this law was “overwhelming,” based on a widespread belief that the presence of an “’industrial army of Asiatic laborers’ was exacerbating the class conflict between white labor and white capital," coming on the heels of the armed clashes with striking railroad workers in 1877 and the “labor unrest that would shortly erupt in Chicago’s Haymarket Riot of 1886.” Ronald Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans (New York: Back Bay Books, 1998), 111. A treaty providing for the annexation of Hawai’i signed by the United States and Hawai’i on June 16, 1897, protected the Chinese Exclusion Act and ensured that no Chinese laborers in the Hawai’ian Islands would be able to come to any other part of U.S. national territory. Eric T.L. Love, at 133. See also Id. at 137 (address by the Hawai’ian branch of the Sons of the American Revolution (SAR), assuring that federal immigration and naturalization laws, once applied, would eliminate the contract labor system, forcing out the Asians).
[30]See Eric T.L. Love, at 145 (describing how, by the time the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations was deliberating over a joint resolution to annex Hawai’i on March 16, 1898, “[t]he Japanese threat had been moved to the top of the list of the committee’s ‘reasons in favor of the annexation of Hawaii,’ head of justifications based on military and strategic advantage and the role they would play in advancing American trade in East Asia.”). By this point, the Chinese population in Hawai’i was seen as “relatively powerless and unthreatening compared to the “aggressive Japanese,” evincing “little desire to use the ballot, from which they are excluded.” Id. at 146. See also Id., at 153 (noting that President McKinley warned Senator George Frisbie Hoar that “Japan has her eye on [the Hawai’ian islands. Her people are crowding in there. I am satisfied that they do not go there voluntarily, as ordinary immigrants, but that Japan is pressing them in there in order to get possession before anybody can interfere.”).
[31] Reginald Horsman, “Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism,” in Critical White Studies: Looking Behind the Mirror, Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic, eds. (Temple University Press, 1997), at 139-40 (referencing the works of French author Joseph Arthur de Gobineau on “scientific” or “biological” racism). Horsman notes,
By 1850 a pattern was emerging. From their own successful past as Puritan colonists, Revolutionary patriots, conquerors of a wilderness, and creators of an immense material prosperity, the Americans had evidence plain before them that they were a chosen people; from the English they had learned that the Anglo-Saxons had always been peculiarly gifted in the arts of government; from the scientists and ethnologists they were learning that they were of a distinct Caucasian race, innately endowed with abilities that placed them above other races; from the philologists, often through literary sources, they were learning that they were the descendants of those Aryans who followed the sun to carry civilization to the new world.
Id. at 141. See also Brian Vick, “Imperialism, Race, and Genocide at the Paulskirche,” in German Colonialism and National Identity, Michael Perraudin and Jurgen Zimmerer, eds. (Taylor & Francis Group, 2010), at 16, who explains that, in Germany as well,
a shift in terminology occurred in the manner of referring to African peoples, with travelers from the 1840s and even as late as the 1870s still tending to use terms like ‘states,’ ‘kingdoms’ and Nationen, while later on, one increasingly heard only of Stämme or ‘tribes’ in need of education (if thought to be capable of improvement) or of control (if thought incapable of it)….[In the first half of the century] racial discourse also typically still emphasized common humanity and the potential for improvement; it was indeed later in the century that a shift seems to have occurred, to a more biologically determinist view of racial difference as something that could not be changed.
[33] See, e.g., Eric T.L. Love at 94 (“Blaine believed that the Chinese were unsuited to be citizens, that they were incapable of meeting the grand responsibilities of republican government”); [ADD MORE]
[35] See, e.g., Eric T.L. Love at 186-87 (describing why Senator George Vest of Missouri introduced Senate Resolution 191 on 6 December 1898, stating that “no power is given to the Federal Government to acquire territory to be held and governed permanently in Congress.” He did so because he believed that annexation of the Philippines would result in Filipinos gaining citizenship rights. “Vest did not know if this would affect the adult population of the Philippines immediately, but he was certain that under the Fourteenth Amendment ‘all children born within our jurisdiction, no matter what the condition of the parents as to citizenship, are made citizens of the United States.”) Id. at 189 (describing the remarks of Senator Donelson Caffrey of Louisiana, citing Congressional Record, 55th Congr., 3rd sess., 20, 92).
[36] “Why Should We Annex Hawaii?” New York Herald, 23 February 1893, quoted in Eric T.L. Love at 103.
[37] Letter from W.D. Armstrong to Sanford Dole, 4 November 1893, quoted in Eric T.L. Love at 116. The sections of the Mississippi Constitution referenced included several provisions of article 12, which required that potential voters should be able to read and understand the state constitution “or he shall be able to understand the same when read to him, or give a reasonable interpretation thereof.”
[38] Eric T.L. Love at 181 (quoting Hannis Taylor in the North American Review 167 (November 1898).
[39] The Nation, 3 November 1898, 362, quoted in Eric T.L. Love at 181-82.
[40] Eric T.L. Love, at 188-89 (quoting Congressional Record, 55th Cong., 3rd sess., 295, 326, 327).
[41] Eric T.L. Love, at 190-91 (quoting Congressional Record, 55th Cong., 3rd sess., 639, 640). See also Senator Ben Tillman’s remarks at id., where he demands to explain why those “contending for a different policy in Hawai’i and the Philippines gave the slaves of the South not only self-government, but they forced on the white man of the South, at the point of the bayonet, the rule and domination of those ex-slaves. Why the difference? Why the change? Do you not acknowledge that you were wrong in 1868?”).
