$24.95 paper
ISBN 0-8078-4550-7

Published: Fall 1995

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Copyright (c) 1995 by the University of North Carolina Press. All rights reserved.

Preface

This study attempts to answer a simple question: What were the attitudes of white men toward Negroes during the first two centuries of European and African settlement in what became the United States of America? It has taken a rather long time to find out, chiefly because I have had to educate myself about many matters concerning which at the outset I was very ignorant. This book does something to answer the question, but I am aware that it affords only partial illumination. Like most practicing historians today, I have assumed the task of explaining how things actually were while at the same time thinking that no one will ever really know. Which is to say that this book is one man's answer and that other men have and will advance others. I hope that mine is a reasonably satisfactory one, but I shall be enormously surprised—and greatly disappointed—if I am not shown to be wrong on some matters.

Some, but not too many. I have tried to read a good deal in the extant remains of a literate culture which, however greatly it influenced its current heirs, is no longer in existence. Some of the inherent biases in these remains are discussed in the Essay on Sources. I have tried to read these sources with mind and eyes open and to listen with as much receptivity as possible to what men now dead were saying. Some readers will think that this book reads too much into what men wrote in the past. To this objection I can only say that an historian's relationship with the raw materials of history is a profoundly reciprocal one and that I read in these materials for several years before I became partially aware, I think, of what meaning they contained, of what thoughts and feelings in their authors they reflected. This is in part to say that I became aware of the power of irrationality in men because and not before I read the source materials for this study.

Some, but by no means all readers schooled in the behavioral sciences will discover a disgraceful lack of system in the approach taken here toward the way societies are held together and toward the way men think, act, and feel. There is, however, a certain sloppiness in the available evidence. If it were possible to poll the inhabitants of Jamestown, Virginia, concerning their reaction to those famous first "twenty Negars" who arrived in 1619 I would be among the first at the foot of the gangplank, questionnaire in hand. Lacking this opportunity, I have operated with certain working assumptions which some readers will detect as drawing upon some "psychologies"—the assumptions about how people operate—of the twentieth century and upon some of the psychological imagery of the eighteenth. I have taken "attitudes" to be discrete entities susceptible of historical analysis. This term seemed to me to possess a desirable combination of precision and embraciveness. It suggests thoughts and feelings (as opposed to actions) directed toward some specific object (as opposed to generalized faiths and beliefs). At the same time it suggests a wide range in consciousness, intensity, and saliency in the response of the object. We are all aware that our "attitude toward" sex is not of precisely the same order as our "attitude toward" Medicare, and the same may be said of our attitudes toward the neighbor's cat or Red China or rock-and-roll or the Ku Klux Klan—not, of course, that it is right to suppose that our various attitudes toward these objects are altogether unconnected with one another. This book treats attitudes as existing not only at various levels of intensity but at various levels of consciousness and unconsciousness; it is written on the assumption that there is no clear dividing line between "thought" and "feeling," between conscious and unconscious mental processes. The book therefore deals with "attitudes" toward Negroes which range from highly articulated ideas about the church or natural rights or the structure of the cutis vera, through off-hand notions and traditional beliefs about climate or savages or the duties of Christian ministers, through myths about Africa or Noah or the properties of chimpanzees, down to expressions of the most profound human urges—to the coded languages of our strivings for death and life and self-identification.

Which is the way things are and—this book suggests—have been for a long time with white men. This is not a book about Negroes except as they were objects of white men's attitudes. Nor is it about the current, continuing crisis in race relations in America. As a point of personal privilege I wish to state that work on this study was begun several years before Mrs. Rosa Parks got "uppity" on that bus. I might also say that at a later date when I first read some remarks by James Baldwin my first reaction was that he had plagiarized my unfinished and unavailable manuscript. I have attempted, indeed, to avoid reading widely in the literature of the present crisis because it is frequently so tempting to read the past backwards—and very dangerous. The relevance, if any, of this study to the present is left principally to the reader to determine, though I confess to having written two sentences on the subject. My assumptions about the value of historical study are the same as those of most historians. A comprehension of the past seems to have two opposite advantages in the present: it makes us aware of how different people have been in other ages and accordingly enlarges our awareness of the possibilities of human experience, and at the same time it impresses upon us those tendencies in human beings which have not changed and which accordingly are unlikely to at least in the immediate future. Viewed from a slightly different vantage point, an understanding of the history of our own culture gives some inkling of the categories of possibilities within which for the time being we are born to live.

To say this is, I suppose, to make something of a claim for the value of studying current attitudes toward Negroes by taking, as they say, "the historical approach." What the historian contributes, inevitably, is a sense and appreciation of the important effect—perhaps even the great weight—of prior upon ensuing experience.

I embarked on this project without suspicion of how very strong this effect could be. I assumed that when Englishmen met Negroes overseas there would be "attitudes" generated, and I first looked for evidence in the writings of English voyagers to West Africa and of their readers at home. It only gradually dawned that I was oafishly cutting into the seamless web of time at just the wrong moment, that it was necessary to probe the characteristics of Englishmen before rather than when they first confronted Africans. But from the first the sources made evident that there existed certain traditions about these Africans which were already in existence elsewhere in Europe in the days when Englishmen painted themselves blue and were otherwise notorious savages. Some of these traditions are discussed in chapter I, and in both chapters I and II there are the results of my attempt to learn what Englishmen were like during the years immediately prior to first-hand contact with Africans and during the seventy-five years following while their contact remained infrequent and casual.

The second chapter focuses especially upon the problem of the origins of American Negro slavery. Understanding the way racial slavery began is both extremely difficult and absolutely essential to comprehension of the white man's attitudes toward Negroes. For once the cycle of debasement in slavery and prejudice in the mind was underway, it was automatically self-reinforcing. It is so easy to see the dynamics of this cycle that most students of race relations in the United States have looked no further; they have assumed that the degraded position of the slave degraded the Negro in the white man's eyes—without pausing to wonder why Negroes came to be slaves in the first place, a question which cannot be answered by thinking entirely in terms of the Negro's condition since he was not fully a slave for the Englishmen until they enslaved him.

Once the cycle was fully established, it is possible to obtain satisfactory answers as to the way it operated. From about 1700 until shortly after the middle of the eighteenth century, slavers were imported and worked by white men without effective challenge or even effective questioning of the rationale underlying what had rapidly become an important New world institution. It is therefore possible to treat this period as a unit, which in Part Two is discussed in four major aspects. It has seemed essential to deal first with the geographic and social patterns of the institution and with the problems generated by the necessity, as white men though, of maintaining control over Negroes who no one thought would be lovable and happy and civilized and contented if left to themselves. The problem of maintaining control was in part a matter of white men controlling themselves, and a special aspect of this necessity is dealt with in the next chapter on interracial sex. It came to me as a surprise that many of the patterns of behavior, beliefs, and emotional tensions which are well known in the twentieth century were in existence more than two hundred years ago. The evidence suggests the great importance of demographic patterns in shaping white attitudes toward sexual intermixture, and it shows that white men projected their on conflicts onto Negroes in ways which are well known though not well acknowledged today.

In the eighteenth century the role of explicitly religious ideas and impulses was of the utmost importance in shaping men's attitudes. The injunctions of Christian belief placed the keepers of Negroes under the task of doing what they could or would not do, of converting Negroes and treating them as brothers at least in Christ. This made (and sometimes still makes) things difficult, and the results of this difficulty are treated in chapter V. But Negroes were for white men not merely souls, which by definition were the same before God, but also corporeal creatures whom the merest glance revealed to be different from "white" men. In conceptualizing this difference provincial Americans drew upon certain prevailing cosmological and scientific concepts, and they showed themselves pulled by opposing tendencies—the need to explain why Negroes looked both the same as and different from white men and the twin senses that man both is and is not an animal.

While there were of course changes during the first sixty years of the eighteenth century, there was a remarkably sudden onset of self-examination among white Americans beginning with the Quakers about 1755 and among others during the gathering crisis which climaxed in the War for Independence. During the Revolutionary era Americans suddenly came to question not only the rightness of slavery but also to realize for the first time that they had a racial problem on their hands, that the institution which their ideology condemned was founded on perceptions of physiological differences which they thought they could do little or nothing about. The Revolution entailed upon Americans a dilemma of tragic proportions. It irreversibly altered the context in which "all men"—and hence Negroes—had to be viewed.

From the Revolutionary era on, there are greatly more abundant sources upon which investigation can be rested. It has seemed essential to concentrate first of all upon certain economic and ideological changes; new agricultural developments and the process of nation-building both created constant pressures upon white men. It is then possible to trace three interrelated strands of development during the twenty-five years following the Revolution. Since opposition to slavery was widespread and in some quarters intense, tracing its decline and virtual collapse after official abolition of the slave trade in 1808 affords one basic periodization of fundamental changes in American thought after the Revolution. In one important fashion, the Revolution perpetuated itself and thereby drove home to Americans the dangers of their own thinking. They watching fascinated alarm as their own magnificent principles spread, as they thought, to France, then to the black island of Santo Domingo, and then to their own slaves. Gabriel's slave rebellion in Virginia in 1800 was real, half-expected, self-justifying, and utterly dangerous. As much as any single event it caused the sons eventually to repudiate their founding fathers' principles. Given this overall pattern of retreat it is possible finally to sketch briefly the hardening of slavery and the separation of free and religious Negroes from the white community, processes whose timing was in virtual lockstep with economic changes, with the integration of the unified nation, with the course of antislavery, and with the pattern of response to slave rebelliousness.

Once these social and ideological developments become clear, there comes the chance to see how articulate white Americans dealt conceptually with the people who had become a standing problem. With one man only, though, is there opportunity to glimpse the interactions among deep emotions, intellectual constructs, long-accumulated traditions concerning the Negro, and the social problem of slavery in a free society. Thomas Jefferson combined, publicly and painfully, a heartfelt hostility to slavery and a deep conviction, inconsistently expressed, that Negroes were inferior to white men. He therefore has a dual role to play in this book. His remarks on the Negro were the most influential utterances on the subject, and they need to be considered as causally important. It was his comments concerning the Negro's lesser intellect which brought the sharpest challenge from defenders of the Negro's fundamental equality, and the resultant discussion, which coincided with the crisis concerning the existence of the new nation from 1787 to 1790, did a great deal to sharpen the distinctions which reign today in a still common if somewhat subterranean debate. At first sight the question of the Negro's mental ability would seem to have rather little to do with Thomas Jefferson's personal affective life, but it is precisely the connection between the two which requires emphasis. Here, in a different and more difficult arena of historical analysis, lies his other role. In seeking to understand the way his emotions interplayed with this ideas and his society I have not attempted to model feet of clay but rather to shed whatever light possible upon this interplay as a generic phenomenon. A great and good and admirable man, Jefferson like others of that description requires our comprehension and our sympathy, the second of which in this case flows from the first.

He discussed the Negro's nature within the confines of a specific intellectual milieu, as who does not. Two important traditions, the Chain of Being and Linnaean biological classification, did a great deal to shape the terms of his thinking and that of his fellow natural philosophers. It seems to me that such "ideas" have been too infrequently related by historians to the social milieu in which they found sustenance, and I have attempted to suggest that the prevalence of ordered arrangement and hierarchical imagery was connected with a feeling, which had been strengthening for more than a century, that the arrangement of society was becoming disorderly and quite the opposite of hierarchical. What seems particularly to make the debate on the Negro's nature different after the Revolution than before was the rapid growth in Europe and America after 1775 of interest in anatomical investigation of human differences. From the first voyages of discovery Europeans had seen these differences with their own eyes, but it is from the final quarter of the eighteenth century that we may date widespread interest in elucidating and characterizing these differences with scalpels and calipers. At the same time, men devoted to the ancient Christian ideal of human unity began to scent danger, partly because there was good reason to fear the effects of probing into physiological differences among men and partly because they rightly felt that the cause of revealed religion was otherwise undergoing challenge. In this age it was still possible for them to defend religion with the principles of science, a procedure which was to become in the nineteenth century rather more difficult.

Heightened interest in man as a physical creature meant that the long-standing puzzle of the Negro's color underwent intensified investigation or, rather, speculation. That the Negro's complexion had also become a social problem made for some extraordinary suggestions which were animated by the hope that his blackness would eventually go away. What American intellectuals did in the post-Revolutionary decades was, in effect, to claim America as a white man's country. The impulses behind this claim were as deep and powerful as any in American culture. They became evident in proposals for removing Negroes from the United States, and these proposals, which became common at the end of the eighteenth century, tell, as much as any body of historical material can "tell," how profound were American's feelings about Negroes. They reveal, especially in Virginia where the great turning point came in 1806 in the form of forcing emancipated Negroes to leave the state, that white men were scarred by fear of racial intermixture which they equated with Negro insurrection, with free Negroes, with their own freedom, and with their own lack of mastery and self-control.

All of which means that this book ends where it begins, with the uncertainties inherent in a venture of a people into a new land. It focuses narrowly upon the attitudes of only one of the European peoples who settled in the New World because the story seems worth telling in its own right and because comparison with the experience of other nations, while potentially fruitful, is frequently misleading, as is always the case with comparisons between the two unknowns. It deals with overseas English, including those in the Caribbean islands until the War of Independence when white men there began to slip protesting from their seats of mastery. It deals also with the American Indians, for it is impossible to see clearly what Americans thought of Negroes without ascertaining their almost invariably contrary thoughts concerning Indians: in the settlement of this country the red and black peoples served white men as aids to navigation by which they would find their own safe positions as they ventured into America.

There are other "themes" in this book, ones which derive from basic, long-term trends in Western culture, most notably the gradual secularization of thought and leveling of society. As much as these changes were important, they did not alter such fundamental constants as the opportunities offered by America, human avarice and exploitation, and the need of transplanted Englishmen to know who it was they were. This last constitutes the thread which I hope binds this study together. For white men had to know who they were if they were to survive. They had to retain control of themselves and of their liberties if they were to succeed in America. Whether they "succeeded" is a question of standards. This study seems to suggest that the success of white Americans was also their failure, that how it was with Negroes was how it was with themselves.