Stamped From the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (16 page)

Britain’s chief justice, Lord Mansfield, went further than the Duke of Montagu and Selina Hastings and freed a Virginia runaway, James Somerset, overshadowing Gronniosaw’s pioneering slave narrative and Wheatley’s tribunal in Boston in 1772. No one could be enslaved in England, Mansfield ruled, raising antislavery English law over proslavery colonial law. Fearing Mansfield’s ruling could one day extend to the British colonies, the Somerset case prodded proslavery theorists out into the open and roused the transatlantic abolitionist movement. University of Pennsylvania professor and pioneering American physician Benjamin Rush anonymously issued a stinging antislavery pamphlet in Philadelphia in February 1773, using Phillis Wheatley’s work to push the abolitionist case in America.

Rush praised the “singular genius” of Wheatley (without naming her). All the vices attributed to Black people, from idleness to treachery to theft, were “the offspring of slavery,” Rush wrote. In fact, those unsubstantiated vices attributed to Black people were the offspring of the illogically racist mind. Were captives really lazier, more deceitful, and more crooked than their enslavers? It was the latter who forced others to work for them, treacherously whipping them when they did not, and stealing the proceeds of their labor when they did. In any case, Rush was the first activist to commercialize the persuasive, though racist, abolitionist theory that slavery made Black people inferior. Whether benevolent or not, any idea that suggests that Black people as a group are inferior, that something is wrong with Black people, is a racist idea. Slavery was killing, torturing, raping, and exploiting people, tearing apart families, snatching precious time, and locking captives in socioeconomic desolation. The confines of enslavement were producing Black people who were intellectually, psychologically, culturally, and behaviorally different, not inferior.

Benjamin Rush whacked down curse theory and pushed against a century of American theology, from Cotton Mather to Samuel Davies, in his pamphlet. “A Christian slave is a contradiction in terms,” he argued, demanding that America “put a stop to slavery!” Reprinted and circulated in New York, Boston, London, and Paris, Rush’s words consolidated the forces that in 1774 organized the Pennsylvania Abolition Society, the first known antislavery society of non-Africans in North America.
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TO FIND A
publisher for her
Poems on Various Subjects
, Wheatley had to journey to London in the summer of 1773—where she was greeted and paraded and exhibited like an exotic rock star. There, she secured the financial support of the Countess of Huntingdon. In thanks, Wheatley dedicated her book, the first ever by an African American woman and the second by an American woman, to the countess. The publication of her poems in September 1773, a year after slavery had been outlawed in England and a few months after Rush’s abolitionist pamphlet
reached England, set off a social earthquake in London. Londoners condemned American slavery, and American slaveholders resisted the Londoners. And then abolitionists on both sides of the Atlantic more firmly resisted the rule of slaveholders in the colonies. In December 1773, the Boston Tea Party set off a political earthquake, and then England’s Coercive Acts, and then the Patriots’ resistance to British rule in the colonies. As the American Revolution budded, British commentators slammed the hypocrisy of Bostonians’ boasts of Wheatley’s ingenuity while keeping her enslaved. The poet was quickly freed.
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George Washington praised the talents of Phillis Wheatley. In France, Voltaire somehow got his hands on
Poems on Various Subjects
. Wheatley proved, Voltaire confessed, that Blacks could write poetry. This from a man who a few years prior had not been able to decide whether Blacks had developed from monkeys, or monkeys had developed from Blacks. Still, neither Wheatley nor Benjamin Rush nor any Enlightenment abolitionist was able to alter the position of proslavery segregationists. So long as there was slavery, there would be racist ideas justifying it. And there was nothing Wheatley and Rush could do to stop the production of racist proslavery ideas other than end slavery.

In September 1773, Philadelphia-based Caribbean absentee planter Richard Nisbet attacked Benjamin Rush for peddling “a single example of a negro girl writing a few silly poems, to prove that the blacks are not deficient to us in understanding.” On November 15, 1773, a short, satirical essay appeared in the
Pennsylvania Packet
containing a rewritten biblical passage as evidence that God had fitted Africans for slavery. A few weeks later, someone released
Personal Slavery Established
. In attacking Rush (or satirizing Nisbet), the anonymous author plagiarized David Hume’s footnote and wrote of the “five classes” of “Africans”: “1st, Negroes, 2d, Ourang Outangs, 3d, Apes, 4th, Baboons, and 5th Monkeys.”
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THOMAS JEFFERSON WAS
spending even more time away from law in 1773 to oversee the building of his plantation, Monticello. But his mind, like the minds of many rich men in the colonies, remained on building
a new nation. They were reeling from British debt, taxes, and mandates to trade within the empire. They had the most to gain in independence and the most to lose under British colonialism. Politically, they could not help but fear all those British abolitionists opposing American slavery, toasting Phillis Wheatley, and freeing the Virginia runaways. Financially, they could not help but salivate over all those non-British markets for their goods, and all those non-British products they could consume, like the world-renowned sugar that French enslavers forced Africans to grow in what is now Haiti. Rebel Virginia legislators met in Williamsburg in 1774.

One of Virginia’s staunchest rebel legislators sent in a scorching freedom manifesto,
A Summary View of the Rights of British America
. “Can any one reason be assigned why 160,000 [British] electors” should make laws for 4 million equal Americans? His majesty, said the author, had rejected our “great object of desire” to abolish slavery and the slave trade, and thus disregarded “the rights of human nature, deeply wounded by this infamous practice.” Some politicians folded over in disgust as they took in Thomas Jefferson’s rhetorical gunshot at slavery. But “several of the author’s admirers” loved his clever turn: he had blamed England for American slavery. Printed and circulated,
Summary View
piloted Jefferson into the clouds of national recognition.
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The British (and some Americans) immediately began questioning the authenticity of a slaveholder throwing a freedom manifesto at the world. No one could question the authenticity of Phillis Wheatley’s 1774 words—“in every human Breast, God has implanted a Principle which we call love of freedom”—or the Connecticut Blacks, who a few years later had proclaimed, “We perceive by our own Reflection, that we are endowed with the same Faculties with our masters, and there is nothing that leads us to a Belief, or Suspicion, that we are any more obliged to serve them, than they us.” All over Revolutionary America, African people were rejecting the racist compact that asserted that they were meant to be enslaved.
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Edward Long watched the rising tidal wave of abolitionism and antiracism from his massive sugar plantation in Jamaica. He realized that a new racial justification was badly needed to save slavery from
being abolished. So, in 1774, he breathed new life into polygenesis by issuing his massive book
History of Jamaica
. Why did it remain so difficult to see that Black people constituted “a different species”? he asked. The ape had “in form a much nearer resemblance to the Negroe race, than the latter bear to White men.” Just as Black people conceived a passion for White people, apes “conceive[d] a passion for the Negroe women,” Long reasoned, as John Locke once had.

Long dedicated a full chapter to discrediting the ability of Jamaica’s old Francis Williams, with, he assured, “the impartiality that becomes me.” Williams’s talents were the result of “the Northern air” of Europe, he said. Long then contradictorily questioned Williams’s talents, quoting Hume’s footnote. Long assailed Williams for looking “down with sovereign contempt on his fellow Blacks,” as if Long did not share that contempt. Williams self-identified as “a
white
man acting under a
black
skin,” as Long described it. Williams’s proverbial saying, he said, was, “Shew me
a Negroe
, and I will shew you
a thief
.”
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Later that year, Lord Kames, a Scottish judge and philosopher and one of the engines of the Scottish Enlightenment, followed Long’s
History
with
Sketches of the History of Man
. The devastating treatise attacked assimilationist thinking and tore apart monogenesis, which assumed that all the races were one species. Kames’s book carried more force than Long’s. Few thinkers in the Western world had the intellectual pedigree of Lord Kames in 1774. He paraphrased Voltaire, another supporter of polygenesis, explaining, “There are different [species] of men as well as of dogs: a mastiff differs not more from a spaniel, than a white man from a negro.” Climates created the species, but they could not change one color to another, Kames maintained. Dismissing Adam and Eve, Kames based his multiple creations on the Tower of Babel story in Genesis.
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Polygenesists loved
Sketches
. Christian monogenesists bristled at its blasphemy. But the concept of different creation stories and different species started making sense to more and more people in the late eighteenth century as they tried to come to grips with racial difference. How else could they explain such glaring differences in skin color, in culture, in wealth, and in the degree of freedom people enjoyed?

If someone had told Lord Kames that a German doctoral student, fifty-six years his junior, would lead the initial charge against his theory of polygenesis, the old jurist would probably have laughed. And he was known for his sense of humor. Unlike Lord Kames, “I have written this book quite unprejudiced,” the audacious young Johann Friedrich Blumenbach claimed in
On the Natural Variety of Mankind
. Environment—not separate creations—caused the “variety in humans,” the German wrote in 1775. Blumenbach followed Linnaeus in allotting four “classes of inhabitants,” or races. “The first and most important to us . . . is that of Europe,” he theorized. “All these nations regarded as a whole are white in colour, and if compared with the rest, beautiful in form.”
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A full-blown debate on the origins of humans had exploded into the European world during the American Revolution. Backing up Blumenbach against Long and Lord Kames was none other than the German philosopher Immanuel Kant, soon to be widely heralded for his legendary
Critique of Pure Reason
. Kant lectured on “the rule of Buffon,” that all humans were one species from the “same natural genus.” Europe was the cradle of humanity, “where man . . . must have departed the least from his original formation.” The inhabitant of Europe had a “more beautiful body, works harder, is more jocular, more controlled in his passions, more intelligent than any other race of people in the world,” Kant lectured. “Humanity is at its greatest perfection in the race of whites.”
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American intellectuals followed this debate between monogenesis and polygenesis in the same way students would follow the debates of their professors. And in following the racist debate, American intellectuals followed the racist debaters. American enslavers and secular intellectuals most likely lined up behind Lord Kames and other polygenesists. Abolitionists and theologians more likely lined up behind Immanuel Kant and other monogenesists. But these American polygenesists and monogenesists had no problem coming together to inflame public sentiment against England and dismiss their own atrocities against enslaved Africans.

One man, Samuel Johnson, had no problem calling out Americans on this hypocrisy. Johnson was perhaps the most illustrious literary voice in British history. When he opined about public debates,
intellectuals in America and England alike paid attention. George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin were among those who admired Johnson’s writings. Johnson did not return the admiration. He loathed Americans’ hatred of authority, their greedy rushes for wealth, their dependence on enslavement, and their way of teaching Christianity to make Blacks docile: “I am willing to love all mankind, except an American,” he once said.
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Benjamin Franklin had spent years across the water lobbying English power for a relaxation of its colonial policies. He was arguing that England was enslaving Americans, and regularly using the analogy that England was making “American whites black.” All along, Samuel Johnson hated this racist analogy. As Franklin sailed back to America at the outbreak of the American Revolutionary War in 1775, Johnson released
Taxation No Tyranny
. He defended the Coercive Acts, judged Americans as inferior to the British, and advocated the arming of enslaved Africans. “How is it,” Johnson asked, “that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?” Someone in the colonies had to officially answer the great Samuel Johnson. That someone was Thomas Jefferson.
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CHAPTER 9

Created
Equal

ON JUNE
7, 1776, the delegates at the Second Continental Congress in Philadelphia decided to draft an independence document. The task fell to a thirty-three-year-old marginal delegate, who distinguished himself as a willing and talented writer as he carried out their instructions. The older and more distinguished delegates felt they had more important things to do: addressing the convention, drafting state constitutions, and wartime planning.
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