English monarchs, and later British ones, had taken that title since Edward III in the 14th century. Obviously the fact of the matter was always in some considerable dispute. It was during George III’s reign that it was dropped, after the unification with Ireland in 1801.
You wrote a lot and I chose not to quote it, but consider this a response to the whole. The reality was always far more complicated than you portray, to the point where I don’t think this is a very clear way of thinking about American history.
First, the United States after the Revolutionary War did not, as far as I can determine, consider itself a “white” nation. An Anglo-Saxon one, yes, but race as such was not a major pre-occupation compared to culture, which included ideology, religious attitudes, language & etc. Race would not become a major form of national identify for several decades thereafter, and in fact for 15-20 years in the early Republic it looked as though slavery itself would likely be loosened to irrelevancy or wound up entirely. We know of course that this didn’t happen, but we shouldn’t force the view of some Americans in 1850 to all Americans in 1776, or for that matter in 1880. The source you list above is certainly accurate in the belief of the magazine’s writers at the time they wrote it, but what they state is… highly suspect.
One of the key points to understand is that the attitudes you describe were common, but often held by different groups. The people who were most strongly against Catholic immigration were also part of a broad coalition that strongly opposed slavery - which is basically why the Republicans expanded and the Know-Nothings vanished into irrelevance. Similarly, universe (white) manhood suffrage was a major point of the Democrats, but they were also much more accepting of immigrants and in fact were pretty open to the idea of incorporating much more Mexican land - or even anexxing all of it after the Mexican-American War. As an aside, it’s true that John C. Calhoun and his followers was a major factor in racial disharmony (and long may he receive his just reward if you take my meaning), but it’s also true that they were only a faction even with Southern Democrats.
[I’d get into the history of the United States concerning the American Indian civilizations, but this has gone long enough.]
Short version: Even if what you say is true - and it’s definitely true for a large number of Americans at some times - it’s not always true, and not even necessarily mostly true.
You shouldn’t conflate free-soilers and opposition to slavery, as a general principle, with abolitionism, and even less with beliefs about actual racial equality. On the eve of the Civil War, a small percentage of northern whites were abolitionists, and even fewer believed that blacks and whites were in any way racially equal.
Plenty of Democrats had no problem with Catholic immigrants bolstering their voting ranks, nor with taking plenty of land from Mexico. Still doesn’t mean that they saw Catholics as equal to Anglo-Saxon Protestants, and it definitely doesn’t mean they saw Mexicans as equal. Look at the treatment of Mexicans as America spread westward after the war.
It depends on what you mean by racially equal. The mid-century United States was really hung up on racial issues, which would persist for the next century or so. That said, there were a lot of people who might be racist to some degree, but who had no problems with African-Americans being universally free, owning property, or even voting. This was especially common in the very areas, and among the exact class, that went gung-ho for Know-Nothing-ism.
Of course I am aware of the history of Catholics in America. But that itself was a huge area where the very concept of “white” flexed with a curious precision to what was convenient at the time. “White” meant little or nothing more than what was useful to building a political powerbase. That could, and entirely did, mean that at one point Irish were not white - until they were. Germans were not “real Americans” - until they were. And in recent years is seems that many Hispanic or Asian-Americans may be considered “white,” to the point where the concept really doesn’t mean anything if it ever did.
Emphasis mine.
There were definitely many people who opposed slavery as a moral wrong, and believed that blacks should be free and allowed to own property. But many of these same people believed that freed blacks had no place in America. And this goes all the way back to the early Republic. Even those who believed, in the first couple of decades after the Revolution, that slavery would die out, generally also argued that this would also require sending blacks back to Africa. It’s no coincidence that some of the early proponents of this idea were also founders and members of the American Colonization Society, started for that very purpose. And later on, many free soilers made principled arguments against slavery while also explicitly maintaining that blacks were not, and should be not, the social equals of whites. Lincoln did this in his Peoria speech of 1854, and in his debates with Stephen Douglas in 1858, when he was at pains to point out that a black person “is not my equal in many respects—certainly not in color, perhaps not in moral or intellectual endowment.”
And that brings me to the part of your post I’ve highlighted, about voting. You said, in your previous post, that my 1851 article was “highly suspect” in terms of the accuracy of its description of American voting and politics as a white man’s prerogative, when it claimed that “the white males of age constituted the political nation” in the period of American democratization.
If you’re right, then why, at the precise time that the nation was becoming more democratic, expanding voting rights to basically all free white men, did a number of northern states go out of their way to actually remove pre-existing voting rights from black men? Four states—New Jersey, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Pennsylvania—eliminated black voting rights between 1807 and 1838, and New York effectively ended almost all black voting rights in 1821, maintaining a very high property qualification for blacks (but not for whites) that basically excluded all but a few black men in the state.
And why did new states entering the union in the first half of the nineteenth century have sections in their state constitutions that said things like:
and
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But I guess that 1851 article was wrong, right?