Stamped From the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (20 page)

As freed Blacks proliferated in the 1790s and the number of enslaved Blacks began to decline in the North, the racial discourse shifted from the problems of enslavement to the condition and capabilities of free Blacks. The American Convention delegates believed that the future advance of abolitionism depended on how Black people used their freedom. Periodically, the convention published and circulated advice tracts for free Blacks. Abolitionists urged free Blacks to attend church regularly, acquire English literacy, learn math, adopt trades, avoid vice, legally marry and maintain marriages, evade lawsuits, avoid expensive delights, abstain from noisy and disorderly conduct, always act in a civil and respectable manner, and develop habits of industry, sobriety, and frugality. If Black people behaved admirably, abolitionists reasoned, they would be undermining justifications for slavery and proving that notions of their inferiority were wrong.
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This strategy of what can be termed
uplift suasion
was based on the idea that White people could be persuaded away from their racist ideas if they saw Black people improving their behavior, uplifting themselves from their low station in American society. The burden of race relations was placed squarely on the shoulders of Black Americans. Positive Black behavior, abolitionist strategists held, undermined racist ideas, and negative Black behavior confirmed them.

Uplift suasion was not conceived by the abolitionists meeting in Philadelphia in 1794. It lurked behind the craze to exhibit Phillis Wheatley and Francis Williams and other “extraordinary” Black people. So the American Convention, raising the stakes, asked
every
free Black person to serve as a Black exhibit. In every state, abolitionists publicly and privately drilled this theory into the minds of African people as they entered the ranks of freedom in the 1790s and beyond.

This strategy to undermine racist ideas was actually based on a racist idea: “negative” Black behavior, said that idea, was partially or
totally responsible for the existence and persistence of racist ideas. To believe that the negative ways of Black people were responsible for racist ideas was to believe that there was some truth in notions of Black inferiority. To believe that there was some truth in notions of Black inferiority was to hold racist ideas.

From the beginning, uplift suasion was not only racist, it was also impossible for Blacks to execute. Free Blacks were unable to always display positive characteristics for the same reasons poor immigrants and rich planters were unable to do so: free Blacks were human and humanly flawed. Uplift suasion assumed, moreover, that racist ideas were sensible and could be undone by appealing to sensibilities. But the common political desire to justify racial inequities produced racist ideas, not logic. Uplift suasion also failed to account for the widespread belief in the extraordinary Negro, which had dominated assimilationist and abolitionist thinking in America for a century. Upwardly mobile Blacks were regularly cast aside as unique and as different from ordinary, inferior Black people.

Still, from the perspective of White and Black abolitionists alike, uplift suasion seemed to be working in the 1790s. It would always seem to be working. Consumers of racist ideas sometimes changed their viewpoints when exposed to Black people defying stereotypes (and then sometimes changed back when exposed to someone confirming the stereotypes). Then again, upwardly mobile Blacks seemed as likely to produce resentment as admiration. “If you were well dressed they would insult you for that, and if you were ragged you would surely be insulted for being so,” one Black Rhode Island resident complained in his memoir in the early 1800s. It was the cruel illogic of racism. When Black people rose, racists either violently knocked them down or ignored them as extraordinary. When Black people were down, racists called it their natural or nurtured place, and denied any role in knocking them down in the first place.
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UPLIFT SUASION MOVED
neither segregationist enslavers nor assimilationist abolitionists away from their racist ideas. Not even Benjamin Rush,
the scion of abolitionism, could be moved. By the end of August 1793, he was up to his neck in yellow fever cases and using racist ideas to solicit assistance. Rush inserted a note in Philadelphia’s
American Daily Advertiser
in September telling Black people they had immunity to yellow fever, a conclusion he had reached based on his belief in their animal-like physical superiority. Quite a few Black nurses suffered horribly before Rush realized his gross error. In all, 5,000 people perished before the epidemic subsided in November and federal officials returned to the city.
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Thomas Jefferson used his time away from Philadelphia during the epidemic to spend money on scientific devices that he planned to use in retirement. His agony over Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton’s wheeling toward monarchy and financial speculation had set him to packing. We are “daily pitted in the Cabinet like two cocks,” Jefferson sobbed. In one of his last days as secretary of state, Jefferson received a patent application from Eli Whitney, a Yale-educated Massachusetts native looking for his fortune in Georgia. Whitney had invented a high-quality cotton gin that quickly separated cotton fibers from their seeds. Jefferson knew about the growing demand for American cotton abroad and the costly, labor-intensive process of manually removing the seeds. The introduction of steam power in England and waterpower in the northeastern United States drastically lowered the cost of making cotton into yarn and making yarn into fabric. Forward us a model of the gin and you will receive your patent “immediately,” Jefferson wrote to Whitney. Jefferson had retired by the time Whitney received his patent in 1794.
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Enthroning King Cotton, the cotton gin made the value of southern lands skyrocket and quickly dethroned rice and tobacco. King Cotton incessantly demanded more and more to stabilize its reign: more enslaved Africans, more land, more violence, and more racist ideas. Annual cotton production slammed through the ceiling of about 3,000 bales in 1790, reaching 178,000 bales in 1810 and more than 4 million bales on the eve of the Civil War. Cotton became America’s leading export, exceeding in dollar value all exports, helping to free Americans from British banks, helping to expand the factory
system in the North, and helping to power the Industrial Revolution in the United States. Cotton—more than anyone or anything else—economically freed American enslavers from England and tightened the chains of African people in American slavery. Uplift suasion had no chance of dethroning King Cotton.
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IN
1796,
BEFORE
the cotton gin had taken hold—feeding cotton production and the demand for more enslaved Africans—Benjamin Rush thought he had found the ultimate abolitionist cure. The good doctor believed he had found a way to cure captives of their abnormal Blackness. The two presidential candidates—Thomas Jefferson and incumbent vice president John Adams—shared the Philadelphia sunlight that summer with a free “white black man.” Henry Moss, unbeknownst to Americans, was suffering from vitiligo, a skin disease that causes the loss of skin color, making one’s dark skin lighten. Moss exhibited his forty-two-year-old whitened body in Philadelphia taverns and before members of the American Philosophical Society. Long before “Black-faced” White entertainers enthralled Americans, “White-faced” Blacks enthralled American believers and skeptics of the theory that Black skin could change to White. Moss became “almost as familiar to the readers of newspapers and other periodicals . . . as . . . John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, or Madison,” according to one observer. Like John “Primrose” Boby, who showcased his whitening body in the United Kingdom around the same time, Moss was a freak to some, but to others, such as Benjamin Rush, he was the future of racial progress. After 1796, history loses Henry Moss until 1803, when Providence abolitionist Moses Brown carefully examined him and saw “evidence of the sameness of human nature.” In 1814, Moss resurfaced again in the
New England Journal of Medicine and Surgery
, where he is described as a Black man “whose skin has nearly lost its native colour and become perfectly white.”
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President George Washington, Samuel Stanhope Smith, Benjamin Rush, and other dignitaries viewed Moss in the summer of 1796. “The parts that were covered and sweated advanced most rapidly in
whiteness, his face slowest,” Rush jotted down in his notes. “His skin was exactly like a white man. No rubbing accelerated it. The black skin did not come off, but changed.” Thomas Jefferson, apparently, did not see Moss. Jefferson did own a few “white Negroes,” and he called them an “anomaly of nature” in
Notes on the State of Virginia
. They were all “born of parents who had no mixture of white blood,” Jefferson wrote, careful to exonerate his peers and uphold his false stand against interracial sex. Jefferson probably knew the term “albino” came from the Latin
albus
, meaning an animal, plant, or person lacking pigment. But their skin color—“a pallid cadaverous white”—was different, Jefferson wrote, and their “curled” hair was “that of the negro.” No wonder Jefferson never took aim at physical assimilationists. He did not even concede the color change from Black to White.
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To Jefferson’s dismay, other American intellectuals did take whitening Blacks very seriously. On February 4, 1797, Benjamin Rush, the APS’s vice president, informed Jefferson that he was “preparing a paper in which I have attempted to prove that the black color . . . of the Negroes is the effect of a disease in the skin.” Rush gave the paper at a special APS meeting on July 14, 1797. He praised the “elegant and ingenious Essay” of fellow assimilationist Samuel Stanhope Smith, given a decade prior. Rush, however, disagreed with Smith on how to make Black people White again. He rejected climate theory and proclaimed that all Africans were suffering from leprosy. This skin disease explained why they all had ugly Black skin, Rush told APS members. And the whiter their skins became, the healthier they became.
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This skin disease was brought on by poor diet, he theorized, along with “greater heat, more savage manners, and bilious fevers.” He then listed other side effects of the skin disease: Blacks’ physical superiority, their “wooly heads,” their laziness, their hypersexuality, and their insensitivity to pain. “They bear surgical operations much better than white people,” Rush quoted a doctor as saying. “I have amputated the legs of many negroes, who have held the upper part of the limb themselves.”

Benjamin Rush projected himself as a friend of the Philadelphia Negro, a racial egalitarian, and an abolitionist. He attempted to uphold
his persona at the end of his address. “All the claims of superiority of the whites over the blacks, on account of their color, are founded alike in ignorance and inhumanity,” he stressed. “If the color of the negroes be the effect of a disease, instead of inviting us to tyrannise over them, it should entitle them to a double portion of our humanity.” Rush was upbeat about Black capability, about the future, and about potential remedies: Nature had begun to cure Black people. The famous assimilationist mentioned Henry Moss and his glorious “change from black to a natural white flesh color.” His “wool,” Rush announced with satisfaction, “has been changed into hair.”
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Benjamin Rush’s leprosy theory and Samuel Stanhope Smith’s climate theory were as popular among northern assimilationists and abolitionists as Thomas Jefferson was unpopular. Jefferson had lost the presidential election to Adams in 1796, but ran for president again in 1800. Federalist operatives and journalists tried to convince voters of Jefferson’s atheism and anti-Black views, using his
Notes
as evidence, just as they had done during the previous election. “You have degraded the blacks from the rank which God hath given them in the scale of being!” wrote one Federalist pamphleteer. Some of Jefferson’s defenders during the campaign were jailed by the Adams administration under the 1798 Sedition Act—namely, James Callender. Pardoned by Jefferson when he won the presidency in 1800, Callender apparently requested patronage as retribution for his services. President Jefferson refused. Incensed, Callender exposed Jefferson’s secret.
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On September 1, 1802, Richmond’s
Recorder
readers learned about the relationship between President Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings. “By this wench Sally, our president has had several children,” Callender wrote. The arrangement had begun in France, “when he endeavored so much to belittle the African race.” (Callender, ironically, belittled the African race too. “Wench” oftentimes meant a promiscuous woman, connoting the common idea that African women pursued White men.)
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If Callender thought his series of articles would destroy Jefferson’s political fortunes, then he was wrong. Callender’s reports did not surprise many White male voters, either in Virginia or around the nation.
If anything, Callender upset them, because some of them were having their own secretive affairs with Black women—or raping them—and they did not want such things publicly aired. Nationally, White male voters bolstered Jefferson’s party in Congress in the 1802 midterm elections, and they overwhelmingly supported his presidential reelection in 1804.

When Jefferson’s daughter Patsy showed him Callender’s article, Jefferson laughed. No words came from his lips to give the matter any credence. John Adams privately called it a “blot on his character” and the “natural and almost unavoidable consequence of that foul contagion in the human character, Negro slavery.” Jefferson may have privately justified his relations with Sally Hemings by reminding himself that everyone did it, or tried to do it. From teens ending their (and their victims’) virginity, to married men sneaking around, to single and widowed men having their longtime liaisons—master/slave rape or intercourse seemed “natural,” and enslaving one’s children seemed normal in slaveholding America.