Ralph Waldo Emerson's Saxons.

The article discusses "Anglo-Saxonism," or glorification of the Anglo-Saxon heritage of Americans, in the thought of 19th-century American writer and philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson. The evolution of racial or proto-racial thinking about whiteness and white people in the United States is discussed, beginning with U.S. president Thomas Jefferson's admiration for the Anglo-Saxons of England, as well as mention by Emerson's mentor, Scottish writer Thomas Carlyle, of the bonds of Anglo-Saxon kinship between Britons and Americans. Emerson's book "English Traits" (1856), lauding the strong masculine characteristics of the English, said to be inherited from their Saxon ancestors, is also discussed.