Stamped From the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (7 page)

The theater-loving Queen Elizabeth did not see
Othello
, as she did some of Shakespeare’s earlier plays. She died in 1603. When the deadly plague of 1604 subsided, her successor, King James I, arrived in London, and started making plans for his grand coronation. King James I and his wife, Queen Anne of Denmark, saw
Othello
. But King James I commissioned Shakespeare’s rival playwright, Ben Jonson, to produce an alluring international masque for his coronation, and to mark the end of Elizabethan self-isolation. Queen Anne proposed an African theme to reflect the new king’s international focus. Leo Africanus, travel stories, and Othello had sparked the queen’s interest in Africa. Satisfying his queen, Jonson wrote
The Masque of Blackness
.

Premiering on January 7, 1605, in the great hall of London’s sparkling Whitehall Palace, which overlooks the snowy banks of the Thames River,
The Masque of Blackness
was the most expensive production ever presented in London. Its elaborate costumes, exciting dancing, sensational choirs, booming orchestras, exotic scenery, and a luxurious banquet caused all in attendance to marvel at the spectacle. Inspired by climate theory, it was the story of twelve ugly African princesses of the river god Niger who learn they can be “made beautiful” if they travel to “Britannia,” where the sun “beams shine day and night, and are of force / To blanch an Æthiop, and revive a corpse.” Queen Anne herself and eleven court ladies played the African princesses in blackface, inaugurating the use of black paint on the royal stage.
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The Masque of Blackness
presented the imperial vision of King James I, Prince Charles, Richard Hakluyt, and a powerful lineup of English investors, merchants, missionaries, and explorers. And it helped renew British determination to expand Britannia to America. King James
chartered the London Company in 1606 with his eyes on North America—one eye on Virginia, another on New England. Although misfortune plagued the New England undertakings, Virginia fared better. Captain John Smith, a mentee of Richard Hakluyt, helped command the expedition of roughly 150 volunteers on the three boats that entered the Chesapeake Bay on April 26, 1607. Against all odds—and thanks to the assistance of the indigenous Powhatan Americans—North America’s first permanent English settlement survived. His mission accomplished, John Smith returned as a hero to England in October 1609.
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In colonizing Virginia (and later New England), the British had already begun to conceive of distinct races. The word
race
first appeared in Frenchman Jacques de Brézé’s 1481 poem “The Hunt,” where it referred to hunting dogs. As the term expanded to include humans over the next century, it was used primarily to identify and differentiate and animalize African people. The term did not appear in a dictionary until 1606, when French diplomat Jean Nicot included an entry for it. “Race . . . means descent,” he explained, and “it is said that a man, a horse, a dog or another animal is from good or bad race.” Thanks to this malleable concept in Western Europe, the British were free to lump the multiethnic Native Americans and the multiethnic Africans into the same racial groups. In time, Nicot’s construction became as addictive as the tobacco plant, which he introduced in France.
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Captain John Smith never returned to Jamestown. He spent the rest of his life as the greatest literary mentee of Richard Hakluyt, promoting British migration to America. Thousands crossed the Atlantic moved by Smith’s exhilarating travel books, which by 1624 included his tale of Pocahontas saving his life. Pocahontas, the “civilized savage,” had by then converted to Christianity, married an Englishman, and visited London. The English approved. Black people did not fare so well, in Smith’s estimation. Settlers read his worldly—or rather, racist—opinions, though, and adopted them as their own. In his final book, published the year of his death in 1631, Smith told “unexperienced” New England planters that the enslaved Africans were “as idle and as devilish as any in the world.” Apparently, Smith thought
this knowledge would be useful to planters, probably knowing it was only a matter of time before enslaved Africans were brought to New England.
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But Smith was only recasting ideas he had heard in England between
The Masque of Blackness
, the founding of Virginia, and the founding of New England, ideas English intellectuals had probably learned from Spanish enslavers and Portuguese slave-traders. “Men that have low and flat nostrils are as Libidinous as Apes,” cleric Edward Topsell explained in 1607 in
Historie of Foure-Footed Beastes
. King James made the common association of apes and devils in his 1597 book
Daemonologie
. In one of his last plays,
The Tempest
(1611), Shakespeare played on these associations of the ape and devil and African in crafting Caliban, the hypersexual bastard child of a demon and an African witch from a “vile race.” In 1614, England’s first famous working-class poet, John Taylor, said that “black nations” adored the “Black” Devil. In a 1615 address for the planters in Ireland and Virginia, the Reverend Thomas Cooper said that White Shem, one of Noah’s three sons, “shall be Lord over” the “cursed race of Cham”—meaning Noah’s son Ham—in Africa. Future Virginia politician George Sandys also conjured curse theory to degrade Blackness. In a 1620 paraphrase of Genesis, future politician Thomas Peyton wrote of Cain, or “the Southern man,” as a “black deformed elf,” and “the Northern white, like unto God himself.” Five years later, Clergyman Samuel Purchas released the gargantuan four-volume
Hakluytus Posthumus
of travel manuscripts left to him by his mentor, Richard Hakluyt. Purchas blasted the “filthy sodomits, sleepers, ignorant, beast, disciples of Cham . . . to whom the blacke darknesse is reserved for ever.” These were the ideas about African people circulating throughout England and the English colonies as African people were being hauled into Britannia on slave ships.
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IN 1619, RICHARD MATHER
began ministering not far from the future center of the British slave trade, the port of Liverpool. In those days, the British slave trade was minuscule, and Africans hardly existed in Britannia. But that would soon change. The vessels of slave traders were
cruising deeper and deeper into the heart of West Africa, especially after the Moroccans, armed with English guns, crushed the Songhay Empire in 1591. The vessels of English commerce were cruising deeper and deeper into Virginia, too, as English merchants competed with the Spanish, Portuguese, and rising Dutch and French empires.
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The first recorded slave ship to arrive in colonial America laden with African people was not originally intended for the English colonies. The Spanish ship
San Juan Bautista
departed Angola in July 1619 hauling 350 captives, probably headed for Vera Cruz, Mexico. Latin American slaveholders had used racist ideas to craft a permanent slavery for the quarter of a million Africans they held at that time. Two pirate ships probably attacked the Spanish ship in the Gulf of Mexico, snatching some 60 captives, and then headed east. Weeks later, in August 1619, the pirates sold 20 of their Angolan captives in Jamestown to Virginia governor George Yeardley, the owner of 1,000 acres.
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John Pory, the translator of Leo the African’s book into English, was Yeardley’s cousin, and he ventured to Jamestown in 1619 to serve as Yeardley’s secretary. On July 30, 1619, Yeardley convened the inaugural meeting of elected politicians in colonial America, a group that included Thomas Jefferson’s great-grandfather. These lawmakers named John Pory their speaker. The English translator of Leo the African’s book, who had defended curse theory, thus became colonial America’s first legislative leader.
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John Pory set the price of America’s first cash crop, tobacco, and recognized the need for labor to grow it. So when the Angolans bound for slavery arrived in August, they were right on time. There is no reason to believe that George Yeardley and the other original enslavers did not rationalize their enslavement of African people in the same way that other British intellectuals did—and in the same way that Latin American slaveholders did—by considering these African people to be stamped from the beginning as a racially distinct people, as lower than themselves, and as lower in the scale of being than the more populous White indentured servants. The 1625 Virginia census did not list the ages or dates of arrival for most Africans. Nor did the census list any of them—despite in some cases the fact that they had
resided in Virginia for six years—as free. Africans were recorded as distinct from White servants. When Yeardley died in 1627, he willed to his heirs his “goods debts chattles servants negars cattle or any other thynge.” “Negars” were dropped below “servants” in the social hierarchy to reflect the economic hierarchy. And this stratification became clear in Virginia’s first judicial decision explicitly referring to race. The court ordered a White man in 1630 “to be soundly whipt before an assembly of negroes & others for abusing himself to the dishonor of God and the shame of Christianity by defiling his body in lying with a negro.” The court contrasted the polluted Black woman and the pure White woman, with whom he could lie without defiling his body. It was the first recorded instance of gender racism in America, of considering the body of the Black woman to be a tainted object that could defile a White man upon contact.
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Richard Mather never saw a slave ship leave the Liverpool docks during his ministerial tenure in Toxteth in the 1620s. Liverpool did not become England’s main slave-ship station until the 1740s, succeeding London and Bristol. British slave-traders were slowly expanding their activities in the 1620s, unlike all those Anglican persecutors of Puritans. The death of King James and the coronation of his son, Charles I, in 1625 set off a persecuting stampede. William Ames, a disciple of William Perkins, who was exiled in Holland, steeled Richard Mather, John Cotton, and countless other Puritans with
The Marrow of Sacred Divinity
. Translated from Latin into English in 1627, the treatise described the sacred divinity of spiritual equality “between a free man and a servant”; the sacred divinity of “inferiors” owing “subjection and obedience” to their “superiors”; and the sacred divinity of “our blood kin” being “given more love than strangers.”
The Marrow
’s explanation became a guiding principle for Mather’s generation of Puritans settling the Massachusetts Bay area in the late 1620s and 1630s. Puritans used this doctrine when assessing Native American and African strangers, ensuring intolerance from the start in their land of tolerance.
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Beginning in 1642, Anglican monarchists and nonconforming parliamentarians locked arms in the English Civil War. As New England Puritans welcomed the nonconforming parliamentarians, Virginia’s
royalists prayed for their retreating King Charles I. But in 1649, he was executed. Three years later, Virginia was forced to surrender to the new ruling parliament.

The economic hierarchy that had emerged in Virginia resembled the pecking order that William Ames had proposed and that Puritans established in New England—although their political and religious allegiances differed. Large planters and ministers and merchants stood at the top—men like John Mottrom of Virginia’s Northern Neck, who used his power to acquire fertile land, solicit trade, procure labor, and keep legally free people—like Elizabeth Key—enslaved.
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Elizabeth Key was the daughter of an unnamed African woman and Newport News legislator Thomas Key. Before his death, Thomas had arranged for his biracial daughter to be freed at age fifteen. Her subsequent masters, however, kept her enslaved. At some point, she adopted Christianity. She birthed a baby, whose father was William Greenstead, an English indentured servant and amateur lawyer on Mottrom’s plantation. Upon Mottrom’s death in 1655, Key and Greenstead successfully sued the estate for her and her child’s freedom.

Virginia planters followed the Key case almost as closely as they followed the English Civil War. They realized that the English common laws regarding not enslaving Christians—and stipulating that the father’s status determined the child’s status—both superseded curse theory, climate theory, beast theory, evangelical theory, and every other racist theory substantiating Black and biracial enslavement. Elizabeth Key had ravaged the ties that planters had unofficially used to bind African slavery.
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For Virginia planters, the timing of the Key case could not have been worse. By the 1660s, labor demands had grown. Virginians had uprooted more indigenous communities to expand their farmlands. Landowners were looking increasingly to African laborers to do the work, since their lower death rates made them more valuable and more permanent than temporary indentures. At the same time, the bloody English Civil War that had driven so many from England to America had come to a close, and new socioeconomic opportunities in England slowed the flow of voluntary indentured migrants. The White servants
still arriving partnered with the enslaved Africans in escapes and rebellions, possibly bonding on similar stories of apprehension—being lured onto ships on the western coasts of Africa or Europe.
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Planters responded to labor demands and laborers’ unity by purchasing more African people and luring Whiteness away from Blackness. In the first official recognition of slavery in Virginia, legislators stipulated, in 1660 (and in stricter terms in 1661), that any White servant running away “in company with any negroes” shall serve for the time of the “said negroes absence”—even if it meant life. In 1662, Virginia lawmen plugged one of Key’s freedom loopholes to resolve “doubts [that] have arisen whether children got by an Englishman upon a negro woman should be slave or free.” They proclaimed that “all children borne in this country” derived their status from “the condition of the mother.” Trashing English law, they dusted off the Roman principle of
partus sequitur ventrem
, which held that “among tame and domestic animals, the brood belongs to the owner of the dam or mother.”
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