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Thomas Hart Benton and the Destiny of Race: The Oregon Speech of 1846

On the floor of the United States Senate, in the last days of May 1846, a senator from Missouri stood up to talk about a boundary line in the Pacific Northwest and ended up explaining the future of the human species. Thomas Hart Benton was sixty-four, in his fifth Senate term, loud, and certain. The country was arguing over Oregon, over how much of it the United States should claim against Britain, and Benton was for taking as much as the geography would give. But he did not argue the way a lawyer argues a border. He reached past the treaty maps and the trade routes and made a case from what he took to be a law of nature. The continent was passing into the hands it was meant for. The people already on it were passing out.

The Oregon question, and the year it came to a head

To understand why a boundary debate became a lecture on the future of the species, it helps to know what was on the table in 1846. For years the United States and Britain had shared the Oregon Country, the wide stretch of the Pacific Northwest lying above California, under a standing arrangement that let citizens of both nations settle and trade there without a fixed border. By the mid-1840s that truce was fraying. American emigrants were pouring west over the Oregon Trail in numbers the old agreement had never imagined, and the boldest expansionists wanted the whole region up to the line of 54°40′, the southern edge of Russian Alaska. The slogan of the moment, "fifty-four forty or fight," made a boundary survey sound like a national dare.

The doctrine had a name by then. The year before, a magazine editor had coined the phrase "manifest destiny" to describe the country's supposed right to overspread the continent, and the words traveled fast because they gave a comfortable shape to something the government was already doing. Benton rose inside that atmosphere. Within weeks of the speech, President Polk's administration would settle the Oregon question by agreeing with Britain to split the difference at the 49th parallel, the line that still divides the United States from Canada. And in the same month Benton spoke, Congress had declared war on Mexico, the war that would deliver California. So the senator stood at the exact hinge of the thing itself, narrating in real time the acquisition of a continent and reaching for a reason large enough to cover it.

What Benton actually said in the Oregon speech of 1846

The speech was delivered across three sittings, May 22, 25, and 28, and printed in the Congressional Globe for that session. Read the surviving fragments and the structure is plain. Benton was building a theology out of an expansion policy. Of the people streaming over the mountains toward the coast, he wrote:

Since the dispersion of man upon earth, I know of no human event, past or present, which promises a greater, and more beneficent change upon earth than the arrival of the van of the Caucasian race (the Celtic-Anglo-Saxon division) upon the border of the sea which washes the shore of the eastern Asia.

The word that does the work there is van, short for vanguard, the front of an advancing army. White settlers, in this telling, were the leading edge of an advancing force, and the force had a direction and a destiny. A few lines on, Benton stated the engine of the whole thing in one sentence:

It would seem that the white race alone received the divine command, to subdue and replenish the earth!

"Subdue and replenish the earth" is lifted from Genesis. Benton had read the command out of the Bible and assigned it to a single race. Everything else in the passage follows from that move. The people who already lived on the land had not received the command, so their leaving became, in his telling, a clause in a divine contract being executed on schedule rather than a crime anyone would answer for.

Look closely at how the command is narrowed. In Genesis the words are spoken to the first human beings, to humankind as such, with no mention of color or nation. Benton took a blessing given to everyone and reissued it to one branch of one race, the Caucasian, and inside that the "Celtic-Anglo-Saxon division." That parenthetical is doing quiet, ugly work. It borrows the vocabulary of natural history, of species and types and divisions, and drapes it over a claim that is really about who gets the land. By calling white settlers a "race" with a scientific-sounding pedigree, Benton made a political preference sound like a fact of biology, the kind of thing a man discovers in nature and reports back. The pseudo-science of the age, which sorted humanity into ranked types, supplied the words. Scripture supplied the authority. Together they let a policy of taking wear the costume of a natural law.

The cost, accounted for and waved off

What is chilling in the speech is not that Benton ignored the disappearance of Native nations. He named it. He simply filed it under providence. The Atlantic coast had been cleared, he observed, and the same clearing was working its way west:

The Red race has disappeared from the Atlantic coast; the tribes that resisted civilization met extinction.

He could place this beside Christianity, beside Washington and Franklin and Jefferson, beside the Capitol he was speaking in, and feel no contradiction. The wigwam had given way to the Capitol and the savage to the Christian. This was the order of things, and a man could not, as he put it elsewhere in the speech, murmur at the effect of a divine law. The violence had already happened, on the Atlantic side, and was scheduled to happen again on the Pacific side, and Benton's sentences metabolized all of it into a single calm word: disappeared. As though the nations of the eastern seaboard had wandered off rather than been killed, removed, and starved out of existence.

It is worth being exact about why this language matters and not treating it as a period curiosity. These are the words of the doctrine we now call Manifest Destiny, stated by one of its most powerful authors with the religious machinery showing. Benton is not coding the racism or hiding it inside economics. The Thomas Hart Benton "destiny of race" argument is the racism, laid out as the premise from which the policy is derived. When the rhetoric of expansion is studied today, the Benton Caucasian race speech is one of the cleanest specimens we have, because the man left nothing to inference.

The grammar of "disappeared"

The single most revealing word in the whole speech is the one Benton reaches for to describe the killing off of whole nations: disappeared. It is worth slowing down on the grammar, because the grammar is the argument. The Red race, he says, "has disappeared from the Atlantic coast." That sentence has no one in it who acts. Nobody drives, nobody burns, nobody signs the removal order. A people simply stops being present, the way weather clears. Read that way, the destruction of the eastern nations becomes an event that happened rather than a thing that was done, and once it is only an event, no one is answerable for it. This is the deepest function of Benton's rhetoric and of the doctrine behind it. It turns human choices into natural processes.

Benton did not invent this habit of mind. It was so common in his century that it had become nearly invisible, the belief that Native peoples were a doomed and vanishing race, fading before civilization by some inner law of their own. Writers of the period made the "vanishing Indian" a stock figure, mourned in poems and paintings even as the removals that produced the vanishing were carried out by living men with wagons and rifles and government contracts. The sentiment flattered everyone who held it. It let a nation feel wistful about a loss it was actively causing, and it moved the blame for that loss from policy onto fate. Benton took this ambient idea, gave it the dignity of the Senate floor and the cadence of scripture, and stated out loud the assumption most people were content to leave unspoken. That candor is what makes his version so useful to read now.

From the Senate floor to the wagon road

Benton also worked the machinery behind the words. His son-in-law was John C. Frémont, the army officer whose expeditions mapped and advertised the routes west, and Benton used his Senate influence to fund and protect Frémont's career. The expeditions were real surveying. They were also a sales campaign, and the closing chapter of the second one ran straight through California a few years before the conquest. We treat that turn in the conquest of California and Kit Carson's part in it, and the long fall of Frémont's career in the Frémont court-martial.

The reports that made Frémont famous were shaped at the writing desk by Benton's daughter, Jessie Benton Frémont. She took her husband's field notes and turned them into narrative, adding the human-interest texture that made the documents read like adventure rather than survey. The federal government printed the 1844 report on the second expedition as a Senate document in an edition of ten thousand copies, and it sold commercially on top of that. So the family operated at both ends of the same idea. The father supplied the theology on the Senate floor. The daughter supplied the story that put thousands of readers in motion toward the country he had promised them. The dream Benton justified in the abstract was the dream Jessie made concrete and exciting, and the wagons followed the books.

The paperwork that made it lawful

There is a second machinery under the first one, quieter and more lasting, and it is the one the novel keeps circling. A doctrine like Benton's does its real work only once it is written down in the ordinary forms of government. The speech itself is a document, entered into the Congressional Globe and preserved as the official record of what the Senate said. Frémont's expeditions produced maps and reports that Congress ordered printed and sent out across the country. Behind the emigration came surveys, land claims, treaties, and the later treaties that unmade the earlier ones, each a piece of paper that turned a taking into a transaction. This is how the abstraction on the Senate floor reached the ground, as ink and official seal and a line drawn on a chart by a man who would never meet the people living inside it.

The effect of all that paper is to launder the violence. A killing on a lakeshore is a crime, with a victim and a perpetrator standing a few feet apart. Run the same event through a report, a boundary line, a printed speech, and it comes out the far side as settlement, as progress, as the orderly working out of a policy. The documents keep every fact and quietly change its meaning, until the burned camp becomes a cleared district and the dead become a race that "disappeared." Benton supplied the master text for that process, the sentence that told everyone downstream how to describe what they were doing. The clerks and surveyors and officers who came after him had only to fill in the forms.

The speech against the ground

Here is the gap that the novel The Renegade Enos: Witness to the American West is built to hold open. In May 1846, while Benton was on the floor explaining that the white race alone had been told to subdue and replenish the earth, the subduing was already underway in the country he was talking about. That spring, near Klamath Lake, Frémont's party was on the ground in the homeland of real people, and the encounter there was killing, not a clause in a contract. The conquest of California that followed was carried out by men, against men, women, and children who had names and families and a claim to the land older than the republic. Our 1846 timeline sets those events beside each other in order.

The speech is clean. The ground was not. Benton could call a people's destruction a disappearance because he was eight hundred miles away in a marble room, and because the words "subdue and replenish the earth" let him keep his hands off the particulars. The whole grammar of his sentences is built to put distance between the policy and the body it falls on. Enos closes that distance. It does not invent atrocity to make a point; the documented record of Klamath Lake and the California conquest is more than enough, and we keep the history and the fiction clearly marked apart. What the novel does is refuse the senator's trick. It will not let "disappeared" stand for what was done. It puts the reader in the room where the destiny of race was being recited and then walks them out to the lakeshore where the destiny was being enacted, and asks them to hold both at once: the eloquence in the marble room and the burned camp on the lakeshore.

This is the difference the novel keeps its eye on. A witness is someone who was present, who can testify to the particular, the name and the face and the exact hour. Benton's whole method depends on there being no witness in the room where the policy lands, only a record written afterward by the people who gained from it. Enos supplies the witness the record leaves out. It follows the doctrine down out of the marble and onto the trail and the lakeshore, into the company of the men who carried the rifles and the man who guided them, and it keeps asking the question the speech was built to make unaskable: who did this, to whom, and on what particular day. Those are the questions a witness exists to answer, and the ones the record was built to bury.

Benton believed he was reading the future correctly. In the narrow sense he was. The continent did pass into the hands he said it would. What his speech cannot survive is being read next to its results. The rhetoric was designed to prevent exactly that, and the history insists on it.

Sources & further reading

• Thomas Hart Benton on Manifest Destiny, excerpts from the 1846 Oregon speech (University of Oregon), citing Congressional Globe, 29:1 (1846), 917–18.
• Speech of Mr. Benton, of Missouri, on the Oregon question, delivered in the Senate of the United States, May 22, 25 & 28, 1846 (HathiTrust catalog record).
• Thomas Hart Benton (politician) (Wikipedia), on his Senate career and expansionism.
• Jessie Benton Frémont (Wikipedia), on her authorship of the Frémont expedition reports.
• Manifest Destiny, overview (Wikipedia).