Temat: The Origins of Racism in Colonial America

RED, WHITE, AND BLACK
The Origins of Racism in Colonial America
By Gary B. Nash
Racial attitudes in America have their origins in the culture of Eliza-bethan England, for it was in the closing decades of the sixteenth century that the English people, who were on the verge of creating an overseas em-pire in North America and the Caribbean, began to come into frequent contact with peoples whose culture, religion, and color was markedly dif-ferent from their own. In the early responses of Englishmen to Indians and Africans lay the seeds of what would become, four centuries later, one of the most agonizing social problems in American history--the problem of racial prejudice.
Englishmen did not arrive at Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607, or at Ply-mouth, Massachusetts, in 1620, with minds barren of images and precon-ceptions of the native occupiers of the land. A mass of reports and stories concerning the Indians of the New World, many of them based upon the Spanish and Portuguese experience in Mexico, Peru, and Brazil, were avail-able in printed form or by word of mouth for curious Englishmen crossing the Atlantic. From this literature ideas and fantasies concerning the Indians gradually entered the English consciousness.
These early accounts seem to have created a split image of the Indian in the English mind. On the one hand, the native was imagined to be a savage, hostile, beast-like creature who inhabited the animal kingdom rather than the kingdom of men. In 1585, prospective adventurers to the New World could read one description of the natives of North America which depicted them as naked, lascivious individuals who cohabited "like beasts without any reasonableness." Another account described them as men who "spake such speech that no men could understand them, and in their demeanor like to brute beastes."1 But Englishmen also entertained another more positive version of the New World native. Richard Hakluyt, the great propagandist for English colonization, described the Indians in 1585 as "simple and rude in manners, and destitute of the knowledge of God or any good laws, yet of nature gentle and tractable, and most apt to receive the Christian Religion, and to subject themselves to some good government."2 Many other reports spoke of the native in similarly optimistic terms.
This dual vision of the native matched the two-sided image of the New World refracted through the prism of the sixteenth-century European mind. In some ways prospective colonists fantasized the New World as a Garden of Eden, a land abounding with precious minerals, health foods, and exotic wildlife. The anti-image was of a barbarous land filled with a multitude of unknown dangers' a "howling wilderness" capable of dragging man down to the level of beasts.
In a rough way the two images of the Indian not only matched English visions of the New World, but coincided with the intentions of prospective settlers. In the early stages of colonization, when trade with the Indians was deemed important and the hope existed that the natives would lead the settlers to gold and silver--perhaps even to the fabled Northwest Pas-sage to the Orient--the Indians were seen as primitive but winsome, as ignorant but receptive individuals. If treated kindly, they could be wooed and won to the advantages of trade and cooperation with the English. Only a friendly or malleable Indian could be a trading or assisting Indian. Thus, when thoughts of conducting trade and exploration from small trading stations on the coast were uppermost in the English mind, as they were be-tween 1580 and 1610, the colonial leaders frequently portrayed the Indian in relatively gentle hues. Though the natives could be wary and "fearful by nature," wrote George Peckham in 1585, "courtesie and myldnes" along with a generous supply of "prittie merchaundizes and trifles" would win them over and "induce theyr Barbarous natures to a likeing and mutuaU society with us."3 A1so important in this optimistic view of the native was the need to quiet the fears of prospective colonists by assuring them that the indians were not waiting to destroy them or drive them back into the sea.
When permanent settlement became the primary English concern, however, and land the object of desire, the image of the Indian as a hostile savage became ascendant in the English mind. Beginning with the Jamestown settlement of 1607 and intensifying with the great Puritan migration of the 1630's, Englishmen coming to the New World thought less about Indian trade, the Northwest Passage, and fabled gold mines and more about land. As the dreams of E1 Dorado evaporated, English attention centered on the less glamorous goal of permanent settlement. Now land became all-important, for without land how could there be permanent settlement? The Indian, who had been important when trade and exploration were the keys to overseas involvement, became an inconvenient obstacle. One Englishman went to the heart of the difficulty in 1609: "by what right or war-rant can we enter into the land of these Savages, take away their right-full inheritance from them, and plant ourselves in their places, being unwronged or unprovoked by them?4 It was a cogent question to ask, for Englishmen, like other Europeans, had organized their society around the concept of private ownership of land. They regarded it, in fact, as an important characteristic of their superior culture. Colonists were not blind to the fact that they were invading the land of another people, who by prior possession could lay sole claim to the whole of mainland America. The resolution of this moral and legal problem was accomplished by an appeal to logic and to higher powers. The English claimed that they came to share, not appropriate, the trackless wilderness. The Indians would benefit because they would be elevated far above their present condition through contact with a richer culture, a more advanced civilization, and most importantly, the Christian religion. Samuel Purchas, a clerical promoter of English expansion, gave classic expression to this idea: "God in wisedome ... enriched the Savage Countries, that those riches might be attractive for Christian suters, which there may sowe spirituals and reape temporals." Spirituals, to be sown, of course, meant Christianity; temporals to be reaped meant land. Purchas went on to argue that to leave undeveloped a sparsely settled land populated only by a few natives was to oppose the wishes of God who would not have showed Englishmen the way to the New World if he had not intended them to possess it.5 Moreover, if the English did not occupy North America, Spain would; and the Indians would then fall victim to Catholicism.
Land was the key to English settlement after 1620. It was logical to assume in these circumstances that the Indian would not willingly give up the ground that sustained him, even if the English offered to purchase land, as they did in most cases. For anyone as property conscious as the English, the idea that people would resist the invasion of their land with all the force at their disposal came almost as a matter of course. Thus the image of the hostile, savage Indian began to triumph over that of the receptive, friendly Indian. Their own intentions had changed from establishing trade relations to building permanent settlements. A different conception of the Indian was required in these altered circumstances.
The image of a treacherous, uncooperative Indian caused great confu-sion in the English mind during the first years of the Virginia settlement when the Indians still entertained notions of profiting from the English presence. When Christopher Newport, the leader of the 1607 Jamestown expedition, made the first exploratory trip up the newly named James River, he was puzzled by what he encountered. The Indians, he wrote to his superiors in London, "are naturally given to treachery howbeit we could not find it in our travel up the river, but rather a most kind and loving people." 6 Every new act of generosity, there is much evidence that the Indians provided the food that kept the struggling settlement alive over the first winter, was taken as another indication of Indian guile and treachery. Hospitality, eagerness to trade, curiosity at the newcomers, and the desire of some tribal leaders to use English support to defeat their enemies were all taken as evidence of the sly, treacherous qualities inherent in Indians.
What we see here is a subconscious attempt to manipulate the world in order to make it conform to the English definition of it. The evidence also suggests that the English stereotype of the hostile savage helped assuage a sense of guilt which inevitably arose when men whose culture was based on the concept of private property embarked on a program to dispossess another people of their land. To type-cast the Indian as a brutish savage was to solve a moral dilemma. If the Indian was truly cordial, generous, and eager to trade, what justification could there be for taking his land? But if he was a savage, without religion or culture, perhaps the colonists' actions were defensible. The English, we might speculate, anticipated hostility and then read it into the Indian's character because they recognized that they were embarking upon an invasion of land to which the only natural response could be violent resistance. Having created the conditions in which the Indian could only respond violently, the Englishman defined the native as brutal, beastly, savage, and barbarian and then used that as a justification for what he was doing.
This concept had a self-fulfilling quality to it. The more violence was anticipated, the more violence occurred. This is not to argue that hostility would have been avoided if the settlers had seen the native in a different light, since opportunities for mutual mistrust and hostility abounded. But certainly the chances of conflict were greatly enhanced by misperceiving the intentions of the Indian as he struggled within his own society to adapt to the presence of the Europeans.
There was hostility. In Virginia, after a period of uneasy relations punctuated with outbreaks of violence, the Indians mounted a concerted attack on the white settlements with the intention of driving the white man back into the sea. The Massacre of 1622 wiped out one third of the Chesapeake colony. The Indian victory was costly, however, for it left the English colonists with the excuse to set aside the old claim, frequently mentioned in the early years of settlement, of devoting themselves to civilizing and 'converting the natives. After 1622, most Virginians felt at liberty to attack the natives at will. A no-holds-barred approach was taken to what became known as the "Indian problem." Whereas before, the settlers had engaged in reprisals against the natives whenever they had been attacked, the English now put aside all restraint. As a leader in Virginia wrote revealingly after the Indian attack of 1622,
Our hands, which before were tied with gentleness and faire usage, are now set at liberty by the treacherous violence of the Savages so that We may now by right of Warre and law of Nations invade the Country, and destroy them who sought to destroy us .... Now their cleared grounds in all their villages, (which are situate in the fruitfullest places of the land) shall be inhabited by us, whereas heretofore the grubbing of woods caused us the greatest labour.7
A note of grim satisfaction that the Indians had conducted an all-out attack Can be detected. Hereafter one was entitled to devastate Indian villages and take, rather than buy, the best land of the area. It was a policy so profitable that the Virginia Council in 1629 reneged on a peace treaty that had been recently negotiated and proclaimed that on second thought a policy of "per-petual enmity" toward the natives was best for the colony.
After 1622 the stereotype of the Indian became less ambivalent, Little in his culture was found worthy of respect, in fact, he was deemed almost cultureless. More and more abusive words crept into English descriptions of Indian society. Negative qualities were newly found and projected onto the natives. Whereas John Smith and other early leaders of the Virginia colony had written lengthy descriptions of the political organization, religion, and customs of the natives, Edward Waterhouse, writing after the Massacre of 1622, could only describe the Indians as "by nature sloath-full and idle, vitious, melancholy, slovenly, of bad conditions, lyers, of small memory, of no constancy or trust�by nature of all people the most lying and most inconstant in the world, sottish and sodaine, never looking what dangers may happen afterwards, lesse capable then children of sixe or seaven years old, and less apt and ingenious ....8 Samuel Purchas, writing in 1625 of the Virginia Indians, described them as "bad people, having little of Humanitie but shape, ignorant of Civilitie, of Arts, of Religion; more brutish then [sic] the beasts they hunt, more wild and unmanly then [sic] that unmanned wild Countrey which they range rather than inhabite; captivated also to Satans tyranny in foolish pieties, mad impieties, wicked idleness, busie and bloudy wickednesse ..... 9 After the Indian attack of 1622 Englishmen in Virginia no longer needed to restrain their impulses or remind themselves of their obligation to convert the Indian.
In New England, despite the many differences in motives and means of colonization, attitudes evolved in much the same manner. In the first two attempts at settlement, on the coast of Maine in 1607 and at Plymouth in 1620, Anglo-Indian relations followed a pattern of initial wariness by, the Indians, petty acts of violence and plunder by the white settlers, and then reciprocating and escalating hostility. When the great Puritan migration to New England began in 1630, the Indians were naturally apprehensive, though not hostile. John Winthrop, who led the Massachusetts Bay Colony throughout the 1630s, often mentioned the Puritans' obligation to convert the natives, giving the impression that he felt a real compulsion to "save their souls for Christ." But a careful reading of early New England literature suggests that with significant exceptions such as Roger Williams, the Puritans held the natives in contempt and would have preferred them all dead or removed from the region where they were building their "city on the hill." Winthrop remarked in his journal that the smallpox epidemic of 1617, communicated to the Indians by visiting fishermen, was God's way of "thinning out" the native population to make room for the Puritans. Another prominent puritan referred to the epidemic, which ravaged the New England natives, as a "wonderful Plague." Later Winthrop wrote that the Indians "are neere all dead of the small Poxe, so the Lord hathe cleared our title to what we possess." 10 Rather than civilize or proselytize the natives, it was easier to see them eliminated by European diseases and then to interpret this as God's wish.
In the Puritan mind there was always a tension between the inclusionist and exclusionist impulse, between the evangelical desire to convert the heathen and others who followed "false Gods," and the desire to keep the community pure by excluding deviant types. Despite many professions of concern for converting the natives, New England ministers made only a few perfunctory efforts in this direction. The same impulse which led to the expulsion of theologically deviant Puritans such as Anne Hutchinson, and Roger Williams, or to the persecution of Quakers in Boston in the 1650s, was at the heart of the unwillingness to assimilate the New England Indians, even on the few occasions when they were converted to Christianity. Before the end of the first decade of Puritan settlement, the Indian had come to stand for Satanic opposition to the divine experiment being conducted in the Bay Colony. An Indian, when he attacked a white man, indirectly attacked God whose hand the Puritans saw in all that they did. In this sense, the Indians came to represent followers of Satan, savages pitting themselves against the Puritans' "errand into the wilderness." With the drama of colony building invested with divine guidance, with the hand of God seen in every act, to kill an Indian who had demonstrated his resistance or opposition to the Massachusetts Bay Colony, was only to destroy an opponent of God. When hostility with the Pequot Indians flared in 1637, and spread into a general war, the Puritans again saw evidence of divine intervention. The climax of the war came when the Puritans surrounded 500 Pequot men, women, and children in Mystic Fort and burned them to death. The Massachusetts leaders, suffused with a sense of mission, recorded that God "had laughed at his Enemies ... making them as a fiery oven�Thus did the Lord judge among the Heathen, filling the Place [the fort] with dead bodies."11 To dehumanize the Indians was one means of justifying one's own inhumanity.
Two important concepts concerning the Indians were left in the English mind after the first period of painful confrontation. First, the image of the native as a hostile and inferior creature became indelibly printed upon the white mind. The Indian was noticeably different in color, though the colonists seemed to have made little of this. Far more important, be was uncivilized, and, it was generally concluded, incapable of civilization as Europeans defined it. As Roy H. Pearce has noted, the Indian was a constant reminder to the colonists of what they must not become. For men who were deeply concerned about the barbarizing effects of the wilderness, the Indian provided a means of measuring their own civility, culture, and self-identity. "The Indian became important for the English mind, not for what he was in and of himself, but rather for what he showed civilized men they were not and must not be."12 Not to control the Indian, therefore, was to lose control of one's new environment, and ultimately of oneself. This was the psychological importance of the Indian to the colonist.
At a more practical level was the problem of how to control the Indian. Defined as a savage, regarded in most cases as unassimilable, and inconveniently located in the path of English settlement, the Indian posed one of the colonists' most serious problems. At first colonial leaders had hoped that cultural interaction with the Indians would be possible. But it could only be on English terms. When the Indian threatened the white community, control and security became uppermost in the minds of the settlers. With the Indian now conforming to type, the colonists worked with grim determination to isolate this alien and dangerous subgroup and to control it strictly. A special status, inferior and subservient, was created for those Indians who wished to accept European culture and live within it on the white man's terms. The only other alternative for the native was to move out of the path of English settlement.
During the course of the seventeenth century thousands of Indians did choose to live within white society. Over the years they became dependent upon the iron-age implements of the European--the knife, gun, kettle, fish-hook and, most importantly, upon the white man's liquor. Gradually those Indians who chose to remain on the eastern seaboard lost their forest skills. Their culture slowly changed under the pressure of contact with a more technologically advanced society and their lot often was reduced to pathetic subservience as day laborers and sometimes as slaves. For these Indians--tamed, decultured, and utterly dependent--the colonist had only contempt. 'Unlike his brother on the frontier, the dreaded "savage," the domesticated Indian was looked upon as a despised menial.
The psychological calculus by which intentions governed attitudes can be illuminated further by studying the views of Anglo-Americans who genuinely desired amicable relations with the Indians. The Quakers of Pennsylvania and West New Jersey, who were the most important early practitioners of pacifism in the New World, threatened no violence to the Indians when they arrived in the Delaware River Valley in the last quarter of the seventeenth century. It was pacifism, not violence, that was on the Quaker mind. Though relations with the Indians would deteriorate in the eighteenth century, when Germans and Scotch-Irish streamed into Pennsylvania, it is significant to note that in the early years of settlement the pacifistic Quakers tended to view the Indian differently than their neighbors to the north and south. Though they regarded the native as backward and "under a dark Night in things relating to Religion," they also saw him as physically attractive, generous, mild-tempered, and possessed of many admirable traits. William Penn, the Quaker proprietor of Pennsylvania, revived old speculations that the Indians were the "Jews of America," the descendants of the Lost Tribes of Israel, and found their language "lofty" and full of words "of more sweetness or greatness" than most European tongues. 13
In other colonies, too, the image of the Indian began to change, at least within the reflective element of society, when the precariousness of the English position declined and when attacks on white communities subsided. In the first half of the eighteenth century a number of colonial observers began to develop a new image of the Indian. Unlike later writers from seaboard cities or European centers of culture, who sentimentalized the native into a "noble savage," these men knew of Indian life from first-hand experience as missionaries, provincial officials, and fur traders. Close to Indian culture, but not pitted against the native in a fight for land or survival, they developed clearer perspectives on aboriginal life. During the earlier period of hostility, the Indian had been regarded as virtually Cultureless. Now all of the missing elements in the Indian's cultural make-up government, social structure, religion, family organization, codes of justice and morality, arts and crafts--were discovered.
Thus, in 1705, thirty years after the last significant Indian attack in Virginia' Robert Beverley described the Indians in terms strikingly different from those employed by preceding generations, whose contacts, even in the best of times, had been highly abrasive. Beverley viewed the Indians not as savages, but as a cultural group whose institutions, modes of living, and values were worthy of examination on their own terms. He found aspects of Indian civilization reminiscent of classical Spartan life and much to be admired. In Beverley's view, the Indians' contact with European civilization, far from advancing their existence, was responsible for the loss of their "Felicity as well as their Innocence." 14
John Lawson, who traveled extensively among the southeastern tribes in the early eighteenth century, also dwelled on the integrity of native culture and took note of many traits, such as cleanliness, equable temperament, bravery, tribal loyalty, hospitality, and concern for the welfare of the group rather than the individual, that often seemed absent from English society. Like Beverley, Lawson concluded that the Indians of the southern regions were the "freest people from Heats and Passions (which possess the Europeans)." He lamented that contact with the settlers had vitiated what was best in Indian culture.15 Many other writers who did not covet the Indians' land or were not engaged in the exploitive Indian trade, agreed that the concept of community, which colonial leaders cherished as an ideal but rarely achieved, was best reflected in North America by the natives. As Pearce has noted, "the essential integrity of savage life, for good and bad, became increasingly the main concern of eighteenth-century Americans writing on the Indian."16
It was in an atmosphere emotionally charged by the tension between English settlers and Indians that the black man made his initial appearance in America. We know that the first Africans arrived in the colonies in 1619, though their status-whether slave or indentured servant--is uncertain. Not until the 1640s do we have any indications that Africans were being consigned to perpetual servitude and even then the evidence is scanty. But certainly by the 1660s, the indeterminate position of the African changed; hereditary slavery took root in the colonies. By the mid-eighteenth century, the black man in most colonies had been stripped of virtually all the rights accorded the white settler under the common law. In many colonies the black man was no longer defined as a legal person, but rather as chattel property--the object of rights, but never the subject of rights. A slave could neither appeal to nor testify in the courts; he had no rights to religion or marriage or parenthood; he could not own or carry arms; he could not buy or sell commodities or engage in any economic activity; he could not congregate in public places with more than two or three of his own race. Even education-the right to literacy--was forbidden slaves in many colonies, for it was thought that if the African was permitted to read, the germ of freedom might grow in him.
Much has been written concerning the evolution of this system of chat-tel slavery; and much has been learned by comparing it to slavery in the ancient world, where it was not based on race, and in the South American colonies of Spain and Portugal, where a less repressive and closed system of servitude developed than in British North America. But for our purposes the primary question concerns the effect of racial attitudes upon the evolution of slavery, and, conversely, the effects of slavery, once instituted, upon racial attitudes. Was racial prejudice against the African responsible for his consignment to slavery? Or were other factors, such as the great labor shortage in the New World, combined with the availability of Africans and the example of slave trading set much earlier by Spain, Holland, and Portugal, responsible for a system of slave labor which cast the black man in such an inferior and degraded role that racial prejudice against him developed?
Certainly there was little about the first impressions of Africans that Englishmen formed in the late sixteenth century which augured well for the status of the African in English colonial society. Winthrop D. Jordan shows in his recent book White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550-1812, which is the most probing historical account we have of racial attitudes in early America, that Englishmen responded negatively to Africans even when their contacts were of a casual and exploratory nature. To begin with, the African's blackness was strange, troublesome, and vaguely repugnant. Englishmen were already familiar with people of darker skin than their own, for they had traded with people of the Mediterranean world and come into contact with Moors and occasional traders from the Middle East and North Africa. But they had not met truly black men, though they had probably heard of them. When these Englishmen, among the lightest-skinned people in the world, came face to face with one of the darkest-skinned people of the world, their reaction was strongly negative. Unhappily, blackness was already a means of conveying some of the most ingrained values of English society. Black--and its opposite, white--were emotion-laden words. Black meant foul, dirty, wicked, malignant, and disgraceful. And of course it signified night--a time of fear and uncertainty. Black was a symbol signifying baseness, evil, and danger. Thus expressions filtered into English usage associating black with the worst in human nature: the black sheep in the family, a black mark against one's name, a black day, a black look, to blackball or blackmail. White was all the opposites--chastity, virtue, beauty, and peace. Women were married in white to symbolize purity and virginity. Day was light just as night was black. The angels were white; the devil was black. Thus Englishmen were conditioned to see ugliness and evil in black. In this sense their encounter with the black people of West Africa was prejudiced by the very symbols of color which had been woven into English language and culture over the centuries.
Englishmen also were struck by the religious condition of the African, or what was considered to be his lack of religion. To the English, the Africans were heathens--an altogether Godless people. In an age when religion framed the life of society, this was taken as a grave defect. Though the universalist strain in their own religion emphasized the brotherhood of all men, and though the book of Genesis stressed the point that all men derived from the same act of creation, Englishmen took the Africans' heathenism as an indication of an almost irreparable inferiority.
Englishmen identified a third characteristic interacting with blackness and heathenism--what they called cultural depravity or "savagery." Every new observation of African life added to their belief that the culture of Africans was vastly inferior to that of Europeans. The African's diet, for example, was revolting by European standards. He wore few clothes if any. His habitat was crude. He made war on his fellow men in what was deemed a hideously cruel way. All of this was imprinted on the English consciousness, as Jordan points out, and we find words like "brutish," "savage," and "beastly" creeping into English accounts of Africans. In almost all these respects the image of the African coincided with the image of the Indian after the first period of contact.
Strengthening and vivifying this impression of primitive men in a primitive setting was the extraordinary animal life of Africa. Englishmen were fascinated by the numerous subhuman species they encountered and none so fascinated them as the orangutan or chimpanzee. Though the English were familiar with monkeys and baboons, they had never encountered the tailless, anthropoid ape with his curiously human appearance and behavior, which still makes him a center of attention at zoos. When Englishmen came upon this strangely human creature they began to speculate about possible connections, as Jordan has indicated, between the "beastlike man" --the African--and the "manlike beast"--the orangutan. The logic was tor-tured, perhaps, but nonetheless Englishmen began discussing the possibility that the African was an intermediate specie between beast and man. To make matters worse, there were speculations about sexual unions between man and beast in Africa, a fantasy of overwrought English imaginations and an idea that probably suggested itself to Englishmen because promiscuity, bestiality, and sodomy were not uncommon in England at this time, and in fact were subjects of some concern. 17
Thus a number of African characteristics--real and alleged--strongly and negatively impressed English venturers as the New World was opening up: the African's blackness, his heathenism, his cultural inferiority, his sexuality, and his bestiality. Because religion and cultural achievement were the primary reference points for Europeans of this age, it is probable that in this early period of contact the African's skin color was more a matter of curiosity than damning concern. Those who have read sixteenth-century accounts of the Irish, whose ancestral lands were being invaded by the English in this period, will know that the vocabulary of abuse used to describe Africans was applied also to Irishmen. They too were seen as culturally inferior, Savage, brutish, and primitive. The blackness of Africans was an additional liability, given the connotations of color in the English mind, but perhaps not a crucially important one. Eventually, of course, blackness would be firmly linked with other negative qualities in the English anatomy of prejudice.
It is important to remember that these early observations of Africans, like those of the Indians, reflect as much about the observer as the observed. We know now from careful research that Africa was not what Englishmen saw and recorded in that age of discovery. West Africa lagged behind western Europe technologically, though the differences were not so great as is usually imagined, but the area had nurtured a highly developed civilization. If art, social organization, and cultural traditions are criteria of advancement, Africa in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was far from primitive and backward. Englishmen saw in Africa not what existed there, but what they were psychologically prepared to see. They compared African culture with their own, which they took to be a universal model.
Further insight into the English reaction to Africans and Indians can be gained by comparing it to Spanish and Portuguese attitudes. Though England's colonial competitors regarded the natives of Africa and North America as primitive and inferior, the image they represented in their psychic landscape was far less negative and emotional. Geography explains much of this, for whereas the English of the sixteenth century we noted for their insularity, the Spanish and Portuguese, situat6d astride Europe and Africa, had been in near continuous contact with peoples of different races and cultures for centuries.
Because of this, Portugal, and to a lesser degree Spain, had an ethnic and cultural diversity not to be found in England. Over the centuries, the Iberian peninsula had been breached again and again: by Muslims between 711 and 1212, by Jews, Berbers, and North African Moors. As usually happens in history, the conquerors and the conquered fraternized, inter-married, and interbred. By the time England was first exposing herself to Africa, her European competitors, especially Portugal, had already amalgamated their bloodstreams with people of darker color and different cultures. This produced a tolerance for diversity in the Spanish and Portuguese cultures that was absent in the English, who had for centuries been relatively isolated from the rest of the world.
It would be unwise to conclude that the long warfare between the Portuguese and Moors and the centuries of contact with a variety of darker-skinned people eliminated racial prejudice among the Spanish and Portuguese in Europe or in their New World colonies. Racial consciousness did exist among these people, and with racial consciousness came feelings of racial superiority. There can be little doubt that the lighter one's skin, the greater one's social prestige in Spain and Portugal and in their colonies--a pattern which still exists. And yet because of their ancient exposure to and intermixture with people of darker skin, the Spanish and Portuguese, unlike the English, regarded racial intermixture as inevitable and attached no great moral significance to it. This difference in attitude would lead toward a gradual assimilation of races which in turn increased the tolerance for racial diversity.
A second factor which helps to explain the unusually virulent English reaction to Air, cans and Indians, not duplicated in Spain and Portugal, was the internal stresses England was undergoing at the time she first exposed herself to the outer world. This period of the late Sixteenth and early seventeenth century, called the age of Puritanism, was a "time of troubles" for England--an era in which the traditional feudal society was giving way to a more modern social order. The beginnings of urbanization and industrialization, the breakup of the traditional church, the enclosure of land, and the decay of the guilds were all a part of this process. Englishmen of the late sixteenth century saw poverty and vagabondage on the rise, dries growing faster than they could absorb rural newcomers into the traditional close-knit scheme of life, alehouses and dens of prostitution multiplying, gangs of highwaymen and drifters roaming the country. England was experiencing not only rural dislocation but an associated "urban problem."
Puritanism, a religious reform movement bent on purifying the Church of England, must also be seen as a social response to this crumbling of the old order. Puritans were convinced that England was being threatened by dangerous currents of social change which encouraged the individual to free himself from the old institutionalized restraints. In religion, Puritans attempted to place the individual in a more direct relationship with his God by removing the traditional religious intermediaries--especially the Catholic Church. But individualism in other aspects of life was not greeted with similar enthusiasm, for it threatened to erode all the old symbols of authority, all the old instruments of corporate control in society--the church, the village community, the guild, even the father as patriarchal head of the family. Puritanism was the new religious and social doctrine which some men hoped would reestablish a morally secure and orderly world through new methods of social control, including a work-ethic which stressed industriousness as a way of serving God, and the formation of tight-knit Puritan congregations composed of people who would watch over and discipline themselves and each other. The keynotes of Puritanism were piety, discipline order, serf-restraint, and work.
The rise of Puritanism coincided with England's belated entry into the age of exploration. Puritans, and those around them, were simultaneously Participants in an age of self-restraint and social discipline and an age of adventure, exploration, and discovery. As Winthrop Jordan has said, Elizabethan England reverberated with "the twin spirits of adventure and control."18 Here was a society engaged in voyages of discovery and settlement overseas, as represented by Elizabethans such as John Hawkins, Francis Drake, Humphrey Gilbert, and Walter Raleigh, and simultaneously embarked upon attempts to reform themselves and society, as typified by such colonial leaders as William Bradford, John Winthrop, and Roger Williams.
In this vibrant atmosphere of discovery (a reaching outward) and self-scrutiny (a turning inward), Englishmen tended to use the newly found African black man, and later the Indian, as a foil. For men wh6"were attempting to open up the New World while reorganizing the Old, the African and "the Indian came to represent to the Englishman what he was fighting against in himself, what he must never allow himself to become. When we look at the English perceptions of Africans--their blackness, their nakedness, their sexuality--we begin to understand that Englishmen reacted emotionally and negatively because these strangers reminded them, at least at the subconscious level, of problems in themselves and their own society. A negative reaction to blackness stemmed both from the symbology of color in English culture and the awareness of "black deeds" at home; sexuality and bestiality were much on the English mind because of the Puritan emphasis on self-control and the guilt over licentiousness which were wide spread in England. When Englishmen called the African bestial and, savage, we may conjecture that they were unconsciously projecting onto black men qualities which they had identified and shrank from in themselves. More over, by contrasting themselves favorably to Africans or Indians, the English were better able to convince themselves of their own role as God's chosen people, destined to carry their culture and religion to all comers of the earth.
Of course not every settler who came to America in the early seventeenth century harbored deeply negative thoughts about Africans and Indians. Probably few of the Pilgrims and Puritans who colonized New England or few of the settlers in Virginia had met face to face with natives of Africa or North America or even thought very systematically about the culture and character traits of such people. But Africans and Indians did impress English adventurers of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries in certain ways, and these impressions were recorded in books which literate men read or knew about. Thus, ideas and attitudes concerning red and black men were entering the collective English consciousness at just that time when England was making its first attempts to compete with Spain, Portugal, Holland, and France for possession of the New World. These first impressions would change under the pressure of circumstances in the New World. But the colonists first met these men from other continents with ideas and notions already in their heads, though the images were vague and half formed. It is only with an understanding of these early attitudes and a knowledge of early Anglo-Indian relations that we can comprehend the connec-tion between prejudice and slavery. No doubt the early English image of the African as a heathen, primitive creature made it easier for Englishmen to cast him into slavery. However, the Indian also was depicted in unfavorable terms as were the Irish and even the dregs of white English society. But among those seen in such a light, it was the Africans who were most vulnerable to economic exploitation because only they could be wrenched from their homeland in great numbers, often with the active participation of other Africans. Moreover, they were unusually helpless once transported to a distant and unfamiliar environment where they were forced into close association with a people whose power they could not contest. Certainly a latent and still forming prejudice against people with black skin was partially responsible for the subjugation of Africans. But the chronic labor shortage in the colonies and the almost total failure to mold the Indians into an agricultural labor force were probably more important factors. Winthrop Jordan has taken a middle position on this vexing question, writing that "rather than slavery causing 'prejudice,' or vice versa, they seem rather to have generated each other�Slavery and 'prejudice' may have been equally cause and effect, continuously reacting upon each other, dynamically joining hands to hustle the Negro down the road to complete degradation." 19
The effect of slavery on racial attitudes is less complicated. Once institutionalized in the American colonies, slavery cast the Negro in such a lowly role that the initial bias against him could only be confirmed and vastly strengthened. It was hardly possible for one people to enslave another without developing strong feelings against them. While initially unfavorable impressions of Africans and economic conditions which encouraged their exploitation led to the mass enslavement of men with black skins, it required slavery itself to harden negative racial feelings into a deep and almost unshakable prejudice which continued to grow for centuries to come. A labor system was devised which kept the African in America at the bottom of the social and economic pyramid. By mid-eighteenth century, when black codes had been legislated to ensure that slaves were totally and unalterably caught in the web of perpetual servitude, no further opportunity remained to prove the white stereotype wrong. Socially and legally defined as less than a man, kept in a degraded and debased position, virtually without power in his relationships with his white master, the African became a truly servile, ignoble, degraded creature in the perception of white men. In the long evolution of racial attitudes in America nothing was of greater importance than the enslavement of Africans in a land where freedom, equality, and opportunity were becoming the foundations of a new social order.
Whereas the white colonist almost always encountered the black man as a slave after about 1660, and thus came to think of him as a slavelike creature by nature, the English settler met the Indian, especially after 1675 when the last large-scale Indian wars until the nineteenth century occurred, far less frequently. When he did interact with the Indian, it was rarely in a master-slave context. The English settler learned how difficult it was to enslave the native in his own habitat. Thus, if the Indian had survived the coming of white civilization, he usually maintained a certain freedom to come and go, and, more significantly, the capacity to attack and kill the white encroacher. Though he was hated for this, it earned him a grudging respect. The Anglo-Indian relationship in the eighteenth century was rarely that of master and slave, with all rights and power concentrated on one side.
In fact, the Indian and the white man were involved in a set of power relationships in which each side, with something to offer the other, maneuvered for the superior position. That the Indian was the ultimate loser in almost all these interchanges should not obscure the fact that for sever-al hundred years the Anglo-American confronted the native as an adver-sary rather than a chattel.
The Anglo-Indian economic relationship illustrates the point. In almost every colony the Indian trade was of importance to the local economy in the early stages of development. Trade implied a kind of equality; each side bargained in its own interest; and in each exchange agreement had to be reached between buyer and seller. The long-term effect of the trade was attritional for the Indians because it fostered a dependence upon alcohol and the implements of European civilization, especially the gun. But even while their culture was transformed by this contact with a technologically advanced society, and even though they often were exploited by unscrupulous traders, the Indians maintained considerable power in the trade nexus. Just as the provincial government of South Carolina could bring a recalcitrant tribe to terms by threatening to cut off trade, the Iroquois tribes of New York could obtain advantages from the English by threatening to transfer their allegiance and their trade to the French. New York and Pennsylvania competed for decades for the Indian trade of the Susquehanna River Valley, a fact of which the Indians were well apprised and able to use to their own advantage.
In land transactions, though the Indian was again the ultimate loser, power was also divided between red and white. The Indian, unlike the African, possessed a commodity indispensable to the English settlers. Throughout the colonial period, provincial governments acknowledged an obligation to purchase rather than appropriate land. For several hundred years the two cultural groups negotiated land purchases, signed treaties, registered titles, and determined boundaries. These transactions had symbolic as well as legal meaning for they served as reminders that the Indian, though often despised and exploited, was not without power.
As in matters of land and trade, so it was in political relationships. Between 1652 and 1763, North America was a theater of war in four international conflicts involving the English, French, Spanish, and Dutch. In each of these wars the Indians played a significant role since the contending European powers vied for alliances with them and attempted to employ them against their enemies. Whether it was the English and French competing for the support of the Iroquois in New York or the English and Spanish wooing the Creeks of the Carolina region, the Indians were entitled to the respect which only an autonomous and powerful group could command.
Thus throughout the colonial period, the Indians alternately traded, negotiated, allied, and fought with the English. In each case power was divided between the two parties and shifted back and forth with time, location, and circumstances. Though he was exploited, excluded, and sometimes decimated in his contacts with European civilization, the Indian always maneuvered from a position of strength which the African, devoid of tribal unity, unaccustomed to the environment, and relatively defenseless, never enjoyed. The African in America was rarely a part of any political or economic equation. He had only his labor to offer the white man and even that was not subject to contractual agreement. He was never in a position to negotiate with the colonist and was only occasionally capable of either retaliating against his oppressors or escaping from them. This relative powerlessness, as compared with the Indian, could not help but effect attitudes. Unlike the native, the African was uniquely unable to win the respect of the white man because his situation was rarely one where respect was required or even possible. Tightly caught in a slave-master relationship, with virtually all the power on the other side, the African could only sink lower and lower in the white man's estimation. Meanwhile, the Indian, though hated, was often respected for his fighting ability, his dignity, solemnity, and even his oratorical ability, American colonists may have scoffed at the Enlightenment portrait of the "noble savage," but their image of the Indian came to have a positive side. The sociology of red-white and black-white relations differed; and from these variations evolved distinct white attitudes, in both cases adverse, but in significantly different ways.
The sociology of red-white and black-white contact differed in another important way--and in differing gave further shape to white attitudes. This was the area of sexual contact. White attitudes toward the black man cannot be dissociated from the fact that sexual relations, especially between white men and black women, were frequent and coercive throughout the eighteenth century, as graphically illustrated by the large mulatto population in America by 1800. The classic case of racial intermixture in the British colonies was in the West Indies where blacks made up as much as 80 percent of the population and white women were relatively unavailable. But in the mainland colonies, especially in the South, black women also became the 'object of extensive sexual exploitation by white slaveowners.
As Winthrop Jordan has explained in detail, the acceptance of interracial sex and the degree of guilt it engendered depended very heavily upon the availability of white women and the stability of family life in a particular area. In the West Indies, where sugar planters came to make a quick fortune and then return to "civilized" life in England, sexual relations with black women were extensive, but conducted without much guilt. No West Indian colony banned extramarital miscegenation and only the tiny island of Montserrat prohibited racial intermarriage. A Jamaica planter summed up this unembarrassed view of interracial sex by writing in 1774: "He who should presume to shew any displeasure against such a thing as simple fornication [with a black woman], would for his pains be accounted a simple blockhead; since not one in twenty can be persuaded, that there is either sin; or shame in cohabiting with his slave." 20
In English America, however, the situation was different. Colonists had come to plant white civilization as well as money crops, and interracial sex, given the strong prejudice that had developed against the Negro, was seen as a danger to individual morality, family life, and cultural integrity. In South Carolina and Georgia, where white women were greatly outnumbered by white men in the early years and where black women were plentiful, miscegenation was practiced frequently. But as the white female population grew, such sexual liaisons became socially unacceptable. Farther north, where slaves were proportionately fewer and white women more available, interracial sex was practiced less and condemned more, By the time of the American Revolution all the colonies had banned interracial marriage, although it is significant that South Carolina was the last to do so. That, of course, did not stop sexual contact outside of marriage between white men and black women (the reverse was rare for obvious reasons). To ban racial intermarriage was a way of stating with legal finality, that the Negro, even when free, was not the equal of the white man. But by the same logic, to allow white men to exploit black women sexually outside of marriage was a way of permitting the white colonist to act out the concept of white social dominance. Racial intermingling outside of marriage, so long as it involved white men and black women, was no admission of equality but rather an intimate and often brutal proclamation of the superior rights of the white man.
The extensive sexual contact which white men had with black women, especially in the South, had no parallel in the case of Indian women. In the first place, they were not readily available except to an occasional fur trader or frontiersman in remote areas. Moreover, when accessible, it was not as a slave who was defenseless to resist the advances of a master with power of life and death over her. If an Indian woman chose to submit to a white man, it was usually on mutually agreeable terms. Thus the frequency and the nature of sexual relationships between white men and red women contrasted sharply with the liaison between the white man and black woman. In these differences we can find the source and meaning of a fear which has preoccupied white America for three hundred years, the fear of the black male lusting after the white woman. This vision of the "black rapist," so enduring in contemporary attitudes and literature, runs through the accounts of the slave uprisings which occurred sporadically from 1712, when slaves revolted in New York, to the 1830s when Nat Turner led the bloodiest of all black insurrections. In large part this fear of the black man seems to have stemmed from feelings of guilt originating in the sexual exploitation of black women and an associated fear of the black avenger, presumably filled with anger and poised to retaliate against the white man. White attitudes toward the Indian only occasionally contain this element of sexual fear. Guilt seldom was aroused by the occasional and noncoercive contact with Indian women; thus the white man, when he encountered the hostile Indian male, rarely pictured his adversary as a sexual avenger. In eighteenth century literature the Indian rarely is pictured as a frenzied rapist, lurking in the bush or stalking white women. Sometimes the Indian was viewed as a peculiarly asexual creature, which in turn created a confused image in the white mind of a hostile, and yet sexually passive, savage. It is further indicative of this fundamental difference in attiudes that in the colonial period miscegenation with Indians was prohibited only in North Carolina and briefly in Virginia, though sexual contact with Negroes was being banned everywhere in the colonies. A number of prominent colonial figures, including Robert Beverley, John Lawson, and William Byrd, publicly advised intermarriage of whites and Indians--a social policy unthinkable in the realm of black and white.
Arising from the fear of the black slave bent upon sexual revenge was the common perception of the Negro as a hypersexual creature, another view which has transited the centuries so enduringly as to suggest that it fills a need in the white psyche. In part, this myth originated in the vivid imprint which the African first made upon the English mind as a savage, naked, creature of the animal world where sexual urges went unrestrained. A century later in colonial America this image was intensified through the white settler's frequent sexual contact with black women. Little evidence can be found to show that the black woman was physiologically a more sexually responsive person. Instead, the white man made her into a symbol of sexuality because he could thus act out with her all of the repressed libidinal desires which were proscribed by his own moral code, and because by assigning to her a promiscuous nature he could assuage his own guilt that festered inevitably as a result of his illicit and exploitative activities.
Thus the degree and nature of contact between red and white and between black and white differed substantially in colonial America. In these differences lay the origins of distinct sets of attitudes toward the African and the Indian. The Englishman in America was constantly reminded by his contacts with the Indians of the advantages and the supposed superiority of his own civilization; likewise, he learned much about the control and coercion of a cultural subgroup within his midst. Through contact with the Indian, he worked out some of the problems of his own identity and destiny. Many of these lessons of control and many of these attitudes were transferred initially to the black African who began to t0ckle into the colonies in the 1620s. As the trickle broadened to a stream and new problems of control arose, the institution of chattel slavery hardened for Africans but not Indians, thus giving rise to new attitudes. The black man was consigned permanently to slavery; he was excluded from the rights upon which society in the New World was allegedly being built; he was incorporated into a system of close, intimate, servile, and inescapable contact. Because of this the black man became the object of a whole new set of attitudes that marked him off from the Indian with whom, initially, he had been loosely equated.
The American Revolution marked a turning point in tbe evolution of white racial attitudes. The radical patriot leaders were not greatly concerned about slavery in the colonies and did not initially plan to 'make its abolition a part of the revolutionary movement. Before the 1760s'only a handful of colonial figures, mostly Quakers, had opposed the institution or lamented its effects on white society. Their voices resonated only weakly in a society where slavery had become accepted as natural, inevitable, and sanctioned by God. But in developing a revolutionary credo, in thinking out an intellectual justification for revolution, in mounting propaganda attacks on mother England, colonial leaders inevitably found themselves asking questions about institutions and values which they had not intended to challenge at the outset.
The arguments of the revolutionaries about liberty and the consent of the governed, about the natural rights of man, about equality, and against tyranny, contained intellectual dynamite. These stirring phrases led toward regions where even the most radical patriot leaders had not intended to go. The quarrel of radical leaders was not with the condition of colonial society but with the threatening actions of Parliament and the King's ministers. When James Otis or John Adams attempted to arouse the people with fiery pamphlets about inalienable rights, or the dignity of all men, or the abuse of power, they were pointing the finger at the English government and its attempts, as they said, to terrorize and tyrannize freedom-loving Englishmen in America. But the more they used words like "slavery" and "tyranny" in reference to English actions and the more they dilated upon equality, consent of the governed, liberty, and natural rights, the more difficult it became to ignore domestic slavery, which by the 1760s embraced 20 percent of the population in the colonies. Men who wrote about inalienable rights and human dignity, about the natural equality of men, could no longer overlook the anomalous plight of the Negro, even though it had nothing to do with the issues dividing the colonies and the mother country. The contradiction between arguing that all men were born free and equal and supporting a brutalizing system of perpetual servitude became obvious. For those who could not see the contradiction, American Tories and English writers gladly pointed it out. How could Americans treat Negroes "as a better kind of cattle�while they are bawling about the Rights of human nature? asked one English official. 21
Thus, as the Revolution approached, many revolutionary pamphlets undertook a discussion of slavery in the colonies. Calls for its abolition became more and more frequent. A Baptist pamphleteer wrote in 1774: "How can we reconcile the exercise of slavery with our professions of freedom." Another patriot writer chided his countrymen:
Blush ye pretended votaries for freedom! ye trifling patriots! who are making a vain parade of being advocates for the liberties of mankind, who are thus making a mockery of your profession by trampling on the sacred natural rights and privileges of Africans; for while you are fasting, praying, nonimporting, nonexporting, remonstrating, resolving, and pleading for a restoration of your charter rights, you at the same time are continuing this lawless, cruel, inhuman, and abominable practice of enslaving your fellow creatures.22

The revolutionary emphasis on equality, liberty, and natural fights awak-ened Americans to the fact that slavery not only undergirded the economic structure of the colonies but was imbedded in their own minds. For the frist time many Americans recognized that slavery was not only related to economic need but also to their assessment of the African--in other words, to their own prejudices. The more the revolutionaries thought of this, or were reminded of it by pamphleteers, the harder it became to square slavery with the unique virtue they were assigning themselves in the course of justifying their attempt to separate from what they condemned as a corrupt, exploitive, and tyrannical mother country. Slavery was an insult to the principles far which they were fighting. "Oh the shocking, the intolerable inconsistence!�This gross, barefaced practiced inconsistence," cried Samuel Hopkins of Rhode Island in 1776 in his call for emancipation of all slaves.23 Slavery stood revealed in the era of the American revolution as a moral flaw, a violation of the ideology of equal fights, a contradiction of the American experience.
From this increasing awareness of white racial prejudice and the incompatibility of revolutionary principles with the position of the black slave in America came a movement to end the slave system. A number of northern colonies abolished the slave trade or taxed it out of existence before the Declaration of Independence was signed. In 1775, the Continental Congress promised to abolish it throughout the colonies. Slavery was by no means dead, but the rhetoric of revolt against England had brought an ugly aspect of colonial life before the public view for discussion and reflection. It was one example of the radical and unplanned character of the Revolution. The defense of political rights had carried over into a social territory which was not directly related to the revolutionary struggle. Men who had started with a concern over their liberties had been sensitized by their own rhetoric to turn to the emancipation of slaves as an integral part of refabricating society along new and more enlightened lines.
The introspection of white Americans in the revolutionary era also brought men to ask what moral and social effects slavery was having on white society. Was it possible that the enslavement of Africans was perverting the white man as much as it was brutalizing the black? Had white masters placed themselves and their children in chains as well as their slaves? Jefferson, with characteristic insight, defined the nature of the problem:
There must doubtless be an unhappy influence on the manners of our people produced by the existence of slavery among us. The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submissions on the other. Our children see this, and learn to imitate it; for man is an imitative animal. This quality is the germ of all education in him. From the cradle to the grave he is learning to do what he sees others do�The parent storms, the child looks on, catches the lineaments of wrath, puts on the same airs in the circle of smaller slaves, gives a loose to the worst of passions, and thus nursed, educated, and daily exercised in tyranny, cannot but be stamped by it with odious peculiarities. The man must be a prodigy who can retain his manners and morals undepraved by such circumstances.24

Slavery was not abolished during the Revolution of course. The bright possibility that the new nation would begin by extending the principles of the Revolution to all its people ended in a discouraging story of back-tracking, equivocating, and compromising. As the war against England wore on, the revolutionary idealism of the 1770s wore off. Men began to calculate their capital investment in slavery and to ask how a nation in a state of fiscal chaos could compensate slaveholders for their property if emancipation were decreed. Given the nearly universal belief in the inherent superiority of the white man, would it not be necessary to return all Negroes to Africa? Even Jefferson, a voice of conscience in the South, believed that the Negro must not be allowed to "stain" the blood of the white race. "When freed," he wrote, the African slave "is to be removed from beyond the reach of mixture."25 Other difficulties were found blocking the road to emancipation. The argument was put forward that while the War had been fought for inalienable human rights, it had als