1.4 Class, Race, and the New Republic

The first immigrants departed England for America, in large part, for three reasons: to seek wealth or property of their own, to obtain religious freedom, or to escape poverty or prison. Mirroring the dangers of urban living, ship travel at the time was perilous. Early ships had two passenger options—first class and steerage. Those in steerage had to supply their own food. Such a task often proved difficult for those passengers fleeing poverty. During the Irish potato famine (1845–1861), for example, so many people died while trying to escape their impoverished country that boats became known as “coffin ships” (Zuelow, 2016, p. 45). The lack of jobs and overcrowding that began to degrade life in Europe for the working classes, led 1.7 million Europeans to immigrate to the New Republic from 1841–1850. Among these were 780,000 Irish. As it continues to do today, the spike in immigration fueled hostility. Catholic Irish, in particular, became political targets, eventually spurring the party known as the “Know-Nothings” which “called for restrictions on immigration, the exclusion of the foreign-born from voting or holding public office in the United States, and for a 21-year residency requirement for citizenship” (Editors of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, 2025).

Unlike Europe, where lands were long settled, the New Republic was founded, in large part, as a means of escaping the social, political, and economic hierarchies that divided the Old World’s landed gentry from the laboring classes. As a result young American men often experienced their rite of passage into manhood through self-propelled adventure, both overland and at sea. One such figure was Herman Melville, who set sail for the Pacific aboard an American whaling ship at the age of 21. Unlike elite British Grand Tourists who traveled with scholars and hobnobbed with European aristocrats, Melville bunked with sailors and traveled to Indigenous-held lands.

At the time Melville joined the crew of the ship Acushnet, American whalers had become the world’s best, sailing from 20 ports to such far-flung places as the coasts of Africa and Japan. At its 19th-century peak, American whaling ships were mobile factories. A ship’s crew processed whales while at sea in the brick tryworks, where they rendered the blubber and spermaceti, the substance contained in a sperm whale’s massive head, which provided the cleanest source for lamp oil. Hardworking, underpaid, mistreated, and poorly fed sailors bonded, swapped stories, and shared terrifying, life-changing adventures. Many were illiterate. Some suffered from alcoholism, syphilis, or tuberculosis. Of the 26 original crew that boarded the whaler Acushnet with Melville, only 8 sailed home aboard the ship. Five died at sea, and the remainder, like Melville, deserted.

Unhappy with the captain of his whaling vessel and irresistibly drawn toward the unknown, Melville deserted when Acushnet anchored off the Marquesas Islands in Polynesia. He fled into the forests, injured his leg, and was eventually captured and held captive in the Typee Valley. His captivity proved far more pleasurable than his time as a sailor. Hand-fed, bathed, rubbed with oils, and entertained by beautiful women, Melville found himself steeped in a sensual paradise. From this bizarre vantage point, the young American began to draw comparisons between the suffocating rules of Victorian America and the sensual paradise that surrounded him in Polynesia. He also began to question the American drive to conquer and eradicate Indigenous cultures. Comparing Americans with Polynesians, Melville began to see his nation from a disturbing distance. From afar, he spied his nation’s many vices—greed for material wealth built on the enslavement of laborers, insatiable hunger for land and dominion over all its creatures, and a penchant to rationalize violence and other evils inherent in man, all in the name of Manifest Destiny. Those same traits that drove the rise of mass tourism as a thriving American industry were not, in young Melville’s eyes, without vice.

Having sailed away from his home country and lived in Polynesia and worked in Hawaii on his journey home, Melville saw what Humboldt had back in 1804 when the Prussian naturalist first set foot in what would become the United States. Eager to end his journey to the Americas with a trip to the New Republic, Humboldt set sail from Havana for Philadelphia, then the largest city in the nation with a population of 75,000. On landing, Humboldt wrote to President Thomas Jefferson and to Secretary of State James Madison to ask if he might visit with them. He was warmly received. Jefferson, who considered himself a farmer with a keen interest in the botanical sciences and who enjoyed exploring himself, was delighted to converse with Humboldt, and Madison threw a party in the explorer’s honor. Humboldt supplied the statesmen with details about Mexico, a country about which Jefferson was eager to know much more but was unable to gather much intelligence. Humboldt, who had traveled through Mexico under permission of the Spanish crown, was delighted to share the knowledge he had learned.

Humboldt gave a strong critique of Spanish colonialism, which he described as driven by greed. He also decried the wholesale Spanish destruction of Indigenous cultures and spoke passionately about the devastation wrought by Spanish mining, which ravaged the lands and native peoples. Jefferson and Humboldt conversed about imperialism, ecology, agriculture, and nature, agreeing amicably on most topics with one glaring exception—the issue of slavery. As Wulf (2015) explains, “for Humboldt colonialism and slavery were basically one and the same, interwoven with man’s relationship to nature and the exploitation of natural resources” (p. 123). During his travels, Humboldt had witnessed the vicious cruelty of slavery. Wulf (2015) surmises:

Unlike Jefferson, who believed that black people were a race ‘inferior to the whites in the endowment both of body and mind’, Humboldt insisted there were no superior or inferior races. No matter what nationality, colour or religion, all humans came from one root. Much like plant families, Humboldt explained, which adapted differently to their geographical and climactic conditions but nonetheless displayed the same traits of ‘a common type’, so did all the members of the human race belong to one family. All men were equal, Humboldt said, and no race was above another, because ‘all are alike designed for freedom’. (p. 125)

Some three decades later, Herman Melville would voyage far enough from his own country to come to the same conclusions.

As the technology needed to transport masses of Americans from one place to another in comfort developed, a growing tension took hold in the young nation. On the one hand, Americans were fiercely proud of their sublime vistas and “untamed” landscapes. On the other hand, they wished to dominate nature and believed this domination made them exceptional peoples who marched westward as part of Manifest Destiny. American eagerness to dominate and tame nature, the appropriation of the lands of Native Americans, and the labor of immigrants and African Americans proved essential to the development of the U.S. tourism industry. At the same time, rising violence against Chinese immigrants, many of whom worked and died building the first transcontinental railroad, led to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which banned laborers from entering the United States. The next decade, Plessy v. Ferguson, passed in 1896, upheld the segregation of people of color in public facilities, including the National Parks, restaurants, buses, railcars, and hotels that flourished across the nation.