Stamped From the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (14 page)

Every traded African ethnic group was like a product, and slave traders seemed to be valuing and devaluing these ethnic products based on the laws of supply and demand. Linnaeus did not seem to be part of a grandiose scheme to force-feed ethnic racism to enslaved peoples to divide and conquer them. But whenever ethnic racism did set the natural allies on American plantations apart, in the manner that racism set the natural allies in American poverty apart, enslavers hardly minded. They were usually willing to deploy any tool—intellectual or otherwise—to suppress slave resistance and ensure returns on their investments.

VOLTAIRE, FRANCE’S ENLIGHTENMENT GURU
, used Linnaeus’s racist ladder in the book of additions that supplemented his half-million-word
Essay on Universal History
in 1756. He agreed there was a permanent natural order of the species. He asked, “Were the flowers, fruits, trees, and animals with which nature covers the face of the earth, planted by her at first only in one spot, in order that they might be spread over the rest of the world?” No, he boldly declared. “The negro race is a species of men as different from ours as the breed of spaniels is from that of greyhound. . . . If their understanding is not of a different nature from ours it is at least greatly inferior.” The African people were like animals, he added, merely living to satisfy “bodily wants.” However, as a “warlike, hardy, and cruel people,” they were “superior” soldiers.
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With the publication of
Essay on Universal History
, Voltaire became the first prominent writer in almost a century daring enough to suggest polygenesis. The theory of separately created races was a contrast to the assimilationist idea of monogenesis, that is, of all humans as descendants of a White Adam and Eve. Voltaire emerged as the eighteenth century’s chief arbiter of segregationist thought, promoting the idea that the races were fundamentally separate, that the separation was immutable, and that the inferior Black race had no capability to assimilate, to be normal, or to be civilized and White. The Enlightenment shift to secular thought had thus opened the door to the production of more segregationist ideas. And segregationist ideas of
permanent Black inferiority appealed to enslavers, because they bolstered their defense of the permanent enslavement of Black people.

Voltaire was intellectually at odds with naturalist Georges Louis Leclerc, who adopted the name Buffon. Buffon headed the moderate mainstream of the French Enlightenment through his encyclopedic
Histoire naturelle
(Natural history), which appeared in forty-five volumes over fifty-five years beginning in 1749. Nearly every European intellectual read them. And while Voltaire promoted segregationist thinking, Buffon remained committed to assimilationist ideas.

The argument over Voltaire’s multiple human species versus Buffon’s single human species was one aspect of a larger scientific divide during the Enlightenment era. Their beloved Sir Isaac Newton envisioned the natural world as an assembled machine running on “natural laws.” Newton did not explain how it was assembled. That was fine for Voltaire, who believed the natural world—including the races—to be unchangeable, even from God’s power. Buffon instead beheld an ever-changing world. Buffon and Voltaire did agree on one thing: they both opposed slavery. Actually, most of the leading Enlightenment intellectuals were producers of racist ideas
and
abolitionist thought.
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Buffon defined a species as “a constant succession of similar individuals that can reproduce together.” And since different races could reproduce together, they must be of the same species, he argued. Buffon was responding to some of the first segregationist denigrations of biracial people. Polygenesists were questioning or rejecting the reproductive capability of biracial people in order to substantiate their arguments for racial groups being separate species. If Blacks and Whites were separate species, then their offspring would be infertile. And so the word
mulatto
, which came from “mule,” came into being, because mules were the infertile offspring of horses and donkeys. In the eighteenth century, the adage “black as the devil” battled for popularity in the English-speaking world with “God made the white man, the devil made the mulatto.”
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Buffon distinguished six races or varieties of a single human species (and the Khoi people of South Africa he placed with monkeys). He positioned Africans “between the extremes of barbarism and of
civilization.” They had “little knowledge” of the “arts and sciences,” and their language was “without rules,” said Buffon. As a climate theorist and monogenesist, Buffon did not believe these qualities were fixed in stone. If Africans were imported to Europe, then their color would gradually change and become “perhaps as white as the natives” of Europe. It was in Europe where “we behold the human form in its greatest perfection,” and where “we ought to form our ideas of the real and natural colour of man.” Buffon sounded like the foundational thinker of modern European art history, Johann Joachim Winckelmann of Germany. “A beautiful body will be all the more beautiful the whiter it is,” Winckelmann said in his disciplinary classic,
Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums
(
History of the Art of Antiquity
) in 1764. These were the “enlightened” ideas on race that Benjamin Franklin’s American Philosophical Society and a young Thomas Jefferson were consuming and importing to America on the eve of the American Revolution.
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PETER JEFFERSON ACQUIRED
around twelve hundred acres in Virginia’s Albemarle County and went on to represent the county in the House of Burgesses, Virginia’s legislative body. Shadwell, his tobacco plantation, sat about five miles east of the current center of Charlottesville. The Jefferson home was a popular rest stop for nearby Cherokees and Catawbas on their regular diplomatic journeys to Williamsburg. The young Thomas Jefferson “acquired impressions of attachment and commiseration for them which have never been obliterated,” he reminisced years later.
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While Thomas was raised on the common sight of distinguished Native American visitors, he commonly saw African people as house workers tending to his every need as well as field workers tending to tobacco. In 1745, someone brought a two-year-old Thomas Jefferson out of Shadwell’s big house. Thomas was held up to a woman on horseback who placed him on a pillow secured to the horse. The rider, who was a slave, took the boy for a ride to a relative’s plantation. This was Thomas Jefferson’s earliest childhood memory. It associated slavery with comfort. The slave was entrusted with looking after him, and
on his soft saddle he felt safe and secure, later recalling the woman as “kind and gentle.”
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When he played with African boys years later, Thomas learned more about slaveholding. As he recalled, “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 his worst passions, and thus nursed, educated, and daily exercised in tyranny, cannot but be stamped by it with odious peculiarities.”
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In his home, no one around him saw anything wrong with the tyranny. Slavery was as customary as prisons are today. Few could imagine an ordered world without them. Peter Jefferson had accumulated almost sixty captives by the 1750s, which made him the second-largest slaveholder in Albemarle County. Peter preached to his children the importance of self-reliance—oblivious of the contradiction—to which he credited his own success.

Peter did not, however, preach to his son the importance of religion. In fact, when Virginia’s First Great Awakening reached the area, it bypassed the Shadwell plantation. Peter did not allow Samuel Davies, who almost single-handedly brought the Awakening to Virginia, to minister to his children or his captives. It is likely that Peter believed—like many of his slaveholding peers—“that Christianizing the Negroes makes them proud and saucy, and tempts them to imagine themselves upon an equality with the white people,” as Davies reported in his most celebrated sermon in 1757. Some American planters had been sold on Davies’s viewpoint that “some should be Masters and some Servants,” and more were open to converting their captives than ever before. But not enough of them to satisfy Cotton Mather’s likeminded missionaries, who agreed with Davies that “a
good Christian
will always be a
good Servant
.” Enslavers commonly “let [slaves] live on in their Pagan darkness,” fearing Christianity would incite their resistance, observed a visiting Swede, Peter Kalm, in the late 1740s. Twenty years later, irritable Virginia planter Landon Carter fumed about Blacks being “devils,” adding, “to make them otherwise than slaves will be to set devils free.”
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Not all Christian missionaries were protecting slavery by preaching Christian submission in the mid-eighteenth century. In 1742, New
Jersey native John Woolman, a store clerk, was asked to write a bill of sale for an unnamed African woman. He began to question the institution and soon kicked off what became a legendary traveling ministry, spreading Quakerism and antislavery. After his first Quaker mission in the harrowing slaveholding South in 1746, Woolman jotted down
Some Considerations on the Keeping of Negroes
.
¹⁷

“We are in a high Station, and enjoy greater Favours than they,” Woolman theorized. God had endowed White Christians with “distinguished Gifts.” By sanctioning slavery, America was “misusing his Gifts.” Woolman planted his groundbreaking abolitionist tree in the same racist soil that proslavery theologians like Cotton Mather—preaching divine slavery—had used a century ago. Their divergences over slavery itself obscured their parallel political racism that denied Black people self-determination. Mather’s proslavery theological treatises proclaimed masters divinely charged to care for the degraded race of natural servants. Woolman’s antislavery treatise proclaimed Christians to be divinely charged with “greater Favours” to emancipate, Christianize, and care for the degraded slaves. But whether they were to be given eternal slavery or eventual emancipation, enslaved Africans would be acted upon as dependent children reliant on White enslavers or abolitionists for their fate.
¹⁸

John Woolman bided his time before submitting his essay to the press of the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting. Woolman knew the history of Quakers quarreling over slavery, of abolitionists disrupting meetings and being banished. He cared just as much about his Quaker ministry and Quaker unity as he did antislavery. In 1752, when abolitionist Anthony Benezet was elected to the press’s editorial board, Woolman knew the time was right to publish his eight-year-old essay. By early 1754, Benjamin Franklin’s
Pennsylvania Gazette
was advertising the new publication of
Some Considerations on the Keeping of Negroes
.

By the end of the year, some Quakers had started to move like never before against slavery, pushed by Benezet and Woolman and the contradictions of Christian slavery. Benezet had edited Woolman’s essay. If Woolman thrived in privacy, Benezet thrived in public, and the two reformers made a dynamic duo of antislavery activists. In
September 1754, the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting approved for publication the
Epistle of Caution and Advice Concerning the Buying and Keeping of Slaves
. In the
Epistle
, antislavery reformers struck a compromise, urging Quakers to buy no more slaves. The writers evoked the Golden Law on the sixty-sixth uncelebrated anniversary of the Germantown Petition. Benezet initiated the writing of the
Epistle
and incorporated input from Woolman. Hundreds of copies were shipped to the quarterly meetings in the Delaware Valley. The front door of American Quakerism had officially been opened to antislavery. But Quaker masters quickly slammed the doors to their separate rooms. Seventy percent refused to free their captives. Woolman learned firsthand of their dogged refusal when he ventured into Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina in 1757.
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Slavery’s defenders spewed many racist ideas, ranging from Blacks being a backward people, to them living better in America than in Africa, to the curse of Ham. It “troubled” Woolman “to perceive the darkness of their imagination.” He never faltered in shooting back, in his calm, compassionate way. No one is inferior in God’s eyes, he stressed. They had not imported Africans for their own good, as demonstrated by their constant abuse, overwork, starvation, and scarce clothing.
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In 1760, Woolman traveled to the Rhode Island homes of some of colonial America’s wealthiest slave-traders. Their “smooth conduct” and “superficial friendship” nearly lured him away from antislavery. He ventured back home to New Jersey as he had done from the South years earlier—dragging a heavy bag of thoughts. In arguing against slavery over the years, he found himself arguing against African inferiority, and thus arguing against himself. He had to rethink whether White people were in fact bestowed a “high Station.” In 1762, he updated
Considerations on Keeping Negroes
.
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We must speak out against slavery “from a love of equity,” Woolman avowed in the second part of the pamphlet. He dropped the rhetoric of greater “Favours” in a racial sense, although it remained in a religious sense. His antiracism shined. “Placing on Men the ignominious Title SLAVE, dressing them in uncomely Garments, keeping
them to servile Labour . . . tends gradually to fix a Nation in the mind, that they are a Sort of People below us in Nature,” stated Woolman. But Whites should not connect slavery “with the Black Colour, and Liberty with the White,” because “where false Ideas are twisted into our Minds, it is with Difficulty we get fair disentangled.” In matters of right and equity, “the Colour of a Man avails nothing.”
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