The Jeffersonian Autochthon: Pre-Civil War
The USA is/has a colonialist culture.
When Native American land is/was taken, the Anglocentric Blood and Soil myth is/was used to valorize autochthonous character as “savage”.
When the Native American presence is/was erased and the land "settled", the colonist is challenged to establish a character that befits its habitation of the land.
The colonist does not know the land; s/he projects upon it the content of their learning and culture, and desires (ie epistemology).
Over hundreds of years, the invader culture adapts to the conditions and assumes a nativist character; though not a first people, the nativist is a nationalist who is born from the soil.
The Anglos who invaded what's now called New England were fundamentalist Christians. They imagined they were the "New Israelites" entering a new Canaan to establish the land that had been promised to them. Their deity chose them, of all the peoples of the earth, to remove the natives from the land, completely.
History was repeating for them, these Anglos who founded Harvard and Yale, this time with them in charge. The Scriptures proved genocide was what the deity ordered, and those who did it, they were delivered from evil.
1676
The Anglo myth predates the USA (and deserves its own timeline). Solomon Stoddard of Northampton MA provides a fitting example of the colonist deeming indigenes as "savage" (circa ):
Increase Mather of Harvard , writing about the same genocidal terrorism against First Peoples:
we finde that the second Generation, of them who came out of Egypt whilst yet in the Wilderness having also a difficult undertaking before them, being to engage with their Heathen Enemies, and in other respects their state and case to be parallel with ours, they did most solemnly renew their covenant with God.
when the Canaanites fought against Israel, and took some of them Prisoners (just as it is with us) and Israel vowed a vow unto the Lord, and the Lord hearkened to the voice of Israel, and delivered up the Canaanites, Numb. 21.1,2,3.
1776
The year Anglo colonists become Anglo-Am nationalists. Americans distinguished their character from Anglos by claiming nativity to the land (they are taking from first peoples). The Boston Tea Party:
The Jeffersonian autochthon is a colonist-native who preaches and practices nativism.
Jefferson promoted a neo-classical approach to assuming autochthonous character that centered around the nativist figure of the yeoman farmer.
1783 Jefferson, from Notes on the State of Virginia Those who labour in the earth are the chosen people of God, if ever he had a chosen people, whose breasts he has made his peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue.
Note that Jefferson autochthon is Athenian (derived from the earth) and Israelite ("chosen"). Note also that though he was deist, he claims to be "chosen" like Mather the fundamentalist. (These Greek and Judaic associations are sources of "American Exceptionalism", the totalitarian, imperialist idea that the USA alone has been "chosen" to democratize the world.)
Along with the farmer, appears the pioneer, the frontiersman and, in areas where Native Americans have been dispossessed, .he indigenous figure of “Noble Savage” (Chingachgook for ex.). These charcaters express the colonial desire to be Native American, to blend Anglo and American. It inhabits a neo-classical dimension also: it inhabits the Arcadian imaginarium of a new Athenian democracy, the Early Republic. The Boston Tea Party Davy Crockett/"King of the Wild Frontier" character of a colonist who assumes indigenous character-traits becomes popular. Custer in buckskin:
In the Declaration of Independence, all humans are created free and equal, and have been endowed with the natural rights to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” by “Nature’s God” This national theology is not Judeo-Christian; it is a neoclassical and enlightenment theology, and a nationalist “work in progress”. (In it Locke’s natural right to “life, liberty, and estate” is retold as “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”)
1782
In Book III of “Notes of an American Farmer,” Michel-Guillaume Jean de Crèvecoeur explicates the character of the Jeffersonian autochthon, and its destiny in a new Athens/Arcadia:
Men are like plants; the goodness and flavour of the fruit proceeds from the peculiar soil and exposition in which they grow. Here you will find but few crimes; these have acquired as yet no root among us.
Europe contains hardly any other distinctions but lords and tenants; this fair country alone is settled by freeholders, the possessors of the soil they cultivate, members of the government they obey, and the framers of their own laws, by means of their representatives. … Every industrious European who transports himself here, may be compared to a sprout growing at the foot of a great tree; it enjoys and draws but a little portion of sap; wrench it from the parent roots, transplant it, and it will become a tree bearing fruit also.
In Book I, he describes his "holy communion" with the earth, his colonial identity becoming autochthonous:
I have composed many a good sermon as I followed my plough. The eyes not being then engaged on any particular object, leaves the mind free for the introduction of many useful ideas. It is not in the noisy shop of a blacksmith or of a carpenter, that these studious moments can be enjoyed; it is as we silently till the ground, and muse along the odoriferous furrows of our low lands, uninterrupted either by stones or stumps; it is there that the salubrious effluvia of the earth animate our spirits and serve to inspire us;
1812
While England attacks the USA to reclaim its colony, the 13 year yeoman farm boy William Cullen Bryant publishes Thanatopsis in the Daily Hampshire Gazette of Northampton, MA. It's a Greek Revival expression that harkens back to the Menexenus. The poem becomes a national favorite, and for Europeans the prime evidence of a distinct USA culture.. Bryant describes the union of flesh and soil—and spirit—that occurs after burial, and the meeting of other perhaps all spirits there: Earth, that nourished thee, shall claim
> The poem expresses the deracination ("pulling up of roots") anxiety the Anglo-Am colonists felt as they defended/stole a “new land” that they did not know and were intimidated by. In contrast to European lands, there were no established graveyards and, at each new settlement—like Bryant's Cummington—colonists interred themselves in land that had no Anglo ancestors planted in it. Bryant told Anglo-Ams not to fear the planting their bodies into “new land”. In his telling, the blood of Anglos and soil of America was peacefully united into a "long body" or superorganism. > This telling of the Blood and Soil myth is obviously from the colonist's Anglocentric perspective. The acts of slavery, genocide and theft characterizing environmental racism are not raised—because, with support from Judeo-Christianity, Locke and the Enlightenment, they are not considered to be issues in the Early Republic.
1832
Nathaniel Hawthorne publishes "Roger Malvin's Burial" that expresses the same colonialist anxiety of deracination Bryant expressed. Hawthorne's telling is tragic, however, and can be considered Thanatopsis's antithesis. Depicting the aftermath of the Battle of Pequawket, it registers unease with the racist and by then nationalist genocide of Native Americans. Hawthorne indicates that Anglos will never rest at peace in the soils of the lands they are stealing/have stolen. Though his perspective is colonialist, he reveals the "savage" character of colonists.
> If we look back, we can interpret his story as a recasting of the creation myth of the Sparti. In the last scene, at the burial spot of Malvin, the colonist dad mindlessly murders his son. In his telling, the blood of Anglos and soil of America are not united; they are alienated.
1836
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R W Emerson publishes "Nature," marking the appearance of American Transcendentalism. In it, he expresses the traditional Judeo-Christian beliefs that the “material is ever degraded before the spiritual,” and that “Nature is a symbol of spirit” which “receives the dominion of man as meekly as the ass upon which the Saviour rode.” Though Transcendentalism is popularly considered a "nature religion" it isn't, as these excerpts reveal.
In 1836 "twenty million acres sold for the all-time high of fifty-four million dollars", making it the most frenzied moment of colonialist expansion/real estate speculation yet in US history. The following year this real estate bubble pops, leading to an economic depression.
> American Transcendentalism provides the nationalist theology called for by the Declaration of Independence. Emerson's telling of the Blood and Soil myth places his individual ego on the green of Concord (where the Revolutionary War and construction of national identity begin). There he experiences apotheosis:
Standing on the bare ground,—my head bathed by the blithe air and uplifted into infinite space,—all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or parcel of God. The name of the nearest friend sounds then foreign and accidental: to be brothers, to be acquaintances, master or servant, is then a trifle and a disturbance.
> American Transcendentalism erases "nature" and history, producing wherever it is projected 'empty space' that is the perfect habitat for Anglo-Am colonizers/real estate speculators/"nature lovers". Locke, from the Second Treatise (1690):
whenever the Owner, who has given nothing but such a tacit Consent to the Government, will, by Donation, Sale, or otherwise, quit the said Possession, he is at liberty to go and incorporate himself into any other Commonwealth, or to agree with others to begin a new one, in vacuis locis, in any part of the World, they can find free and unpossessed The Declaration of Independence is the "agreement with others to build a new commonwealth" Locke forecasts. American Transcendentalism encourages colonists to imagine the indigenous lands they are stealing as "empty" "gardens of eden" where they are "Adams and Eves" consorting at the beginning of history with the deity that created and empowers them. > Looking ahead to the Nazi myth of Blood and Soil, it is telling that Nietzsche derived his "ubermensch" in part from from Emerson's solipsistic "transparent eyeball".
1845
“In The Peaceable Kingdom and Penn’s Treaty, [Edward] Hicks presents his subject in front of the awe-inspiring natural bridge in Virginia, providing an analogy between the Garden of Eden and the American wilderness.”
Painted the year Texas is taken by the USA from Mexico (which precipitates the Mexican-American War) Hicks' telling of the Blood and Soil myth intends to be redemptive. He does not ignore the colonialist crimes against indigenous people, but he places them within the Christian/Transcendentalist "garden of eden" and presents colonial/indigenous relations as a "peaceable kingdom" where their antagonism is reconciled.
In this expression of nationalist religion called forth by the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson's Natural Bridge presides over the event—signifying the presence of "Nature's God"—the chthonic source of human freedom and equality, and rights to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” It is a religious vision of redemption and salvation.
> Though this painting envisions the end of the Blood and Soil conflict between colonists and natives over land by making them all "Athenian" autochthons whose identities are naturally free and equal, it can't perform that miracle. The history that ensues is the opposite of what Hicks presents.
1855
Walt Whitman publishes "Leaves of Grass" that opens with a re-presentation of the Athenian autochthon: "My tongue, every atom of my blood, form'd from this soil". Completing the Platonic metonymy, he envisions Americans as perennial leaves of grass: "I guess the grass is itself a child, the produced babe of the
vegetation. .... The smallest sprout shows there is really no death,
And if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait at the end to arrest it,
And ceas'd the moment life appear'd.
All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses,
And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier." > Leaves of Grass is a response to Emerson's Nature. Where Emerson's transcendentalism erases nature and history by "rising above" and out of them, Whitman's animism erases them by incorporating them into himself, becoming a "kosmos" that is ubiquitous. Both national-religion visions provide colonists (who project them upon indigenous lands) with the transcendental power of "supremacy" over "nature" and "natives" that Locke's "labor theory of property" rationalizes.
D H Lawrence diagnoses the totalitarianism implicit in Whitman's ubiquitous self: "His poems Democracy, En Masse, One Identity, they are long sums in additions and multiplication, of which the answer is invariably MYSELF". As Whitman's perfectly "free and equal" vision is used by readers to make sense of the USA, the vision claims/consumes all of it, solipsistically—confirming and endorsing the Lockean behaviors of its industrializing capitalistic colonialists.
1862
Thoreau describes how a Jeffersonian Autochthon is produced:
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