18th century America
was, bluke asserts, "a very racist and prejudiced place," and he reminds us of "the anti-Irish sentiment, the anti-Chinese sentiment."
Two nits here. Anti-Irish and anti-Chinese "sentiments" did not become significant political elements until these groups began to arrive en masse the following century. The Chinese, in particular, were approximately as rare in the early Republic as Patagonians are in your neighborhood, and as such were likelier to be perceived as exotica rather than cheap labor and a threat to the urban proletariat, such as it was. It might also be observed that people in all societies and in all epochs are to varying extents unavoidably the captives, for good or for ill, of the cultures in which they are embedded. Conventional wisdom is a perishable commodity, and while we may be thankful not to share the reflexive xenophobia of some of our forebears, and comfortable with such tolerance as our own milieu has learned, we do ourselves no favors merely to indulge a facile condescension toward the attitudes of the past. The most enlightened among us (no, don't all stand up at once) might do well to scrutinize some of our own reflexive beliefs and consider that among them at least a few, however deeply held, however self-evidently true and just these may seem today, must inevitably strike posterity as outlandish at best.
cordially,
