New England during Colonial times and long afterward was far more Nordic than old England; that is, it contained a smaller percentage of small, Pre-Nordic brunets. Any one familiar with the native New Englander knows the clean cut face, the high stature and the prevalence of gray and blue eyes and light brown hair and recognizes that the brunet element is less noticeable there than in the South.
The Southern States were populated also by Englishmen of the purest Nordic type but there is to-day, except among the mountains, an appreciably larger amount of brunet types than in the North. Virginia is in the same latitude as North Africa and south of this line no blonds have ever been able to survive in full vigor, chiefly because the actinic rays of the sun are the same regardless of other climatic conditions. These rays beat heavily on the Nordic race and disturb their nervous system, wherever the white man ventures too far from the cold and foggy North.
The remaining Colonial elements, the Holland Dutch and the Palatine Germans, who came over in small numbers to New York and Pennsylvania, were also largely Nordic, while many of the French Huguenots who escaped to America were drawn from the same racial element in France. The Scotch-Irish, who were numerous on the frontier of the middle Colonies were, of course, of pure Scotch and English blood, although they had resided in Ireland for two or three generations. They were quite free from admixture with the earlier Irish, from whom they were cut off socially by bitter religious antagonism and they are not to be considered as “Irish” in any sense.
There was no important immigration of other elements until the middle of the nineteenth century when Irish Catholic and German immigrants appear for the first time upon the scene.
The Nordic blood was kept pure in the Colonies because at that time among Protestant peoples there was a strong race feeling, as a result of which half-breeds between the white man and any native type were regarded as natives and not as white men.
There was plenty of mixture with the Negroes as the light color of many Negroes abundantly testifies, but these mulattoes, quadroons or octoroons were then and are now universally regarded as Negroes.
There was also abundant cross breeding along the frontiers between the white frontiersman and the Indian squaw but the half-breed was everywhere regarded as a member of the inferior race.
In the Catholic colonies, however, of New France and New Spain, if the half-breed were a good Catholic he was regarded as a Frenchman or a Spaniard, as the case might be. This fact alone gives the clew to many of our Colonial wars where the Indians, other than the Iroquois, were persuaded to join the French against the Americans by half-breeds who considered themselves Frenchmen. The Church of Rome has everywhere used its influence to break down racial distinctions. It disregards origins and only requires obedience to the mandates of the universal church. In that lies the secret of the opposition of Rome to all national movements. It maintains the imperial as contrasted with the nationalistic ideal and in that respect its inheritance is direct from the Empire.
Race consciousness in the Colonies and in the United States, down to and including the Mexican War, seems to have been very strongly developed among native Americans and it still remains in full vigor to-day in the South, where the presence of a large Negro population forces this question upon the daily attention of the whites.
In New England, however, whether through the decline of Calvinism or the growth of altruism, there appeared early in the last century a wave of sentimentalism, which at that time took up the cause of the Negro and in so doing apparently destroyed, to a large extent, pride and consciousness of race in the North. The agitation over slavery was inimical to the Nordic race, because it thrust aside all national opposition to the intrusion of hordes of immigrants of inferior racial value and prevented the fixing of a definite American type.