Stamped From the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (9 page)

From his British ministerial post in Kidderminster, Richard Baxter urged slaveholders across the ocean to follow God’s law in making slaves into Christians in his well-traveled treatise
A Christian Directory
(1664–1665). He told them to “make it your chief end in buying and using slaves, to win them to Christ, and save their Souls.” Be sure to “let their Salvation be far more valued by you than their Service.” Although he was at the head of the missionary movement, Baxter was not alone in proselytizing to African people. As early as 1657, English Dissenter George Fox prevailed on his newly founded Religious Society of Friends, or Quakers, to convert the enslaved. Eschewing church hierarchies, and preaching that everyone had access to the “inward light of God,” the Quakers seemed primed to one day produce abolitionists and antiracists.
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In an effort to square his Christian faith—or his nation’s Christian faith—with slavery, Baxter tried to argue that some kind of benevolent slavery was possible and would be helpful for African people. These assimilationist ideas of Christianizing and civilizing enslaved Africans were particularly dangerous because they gave convincing power to the idea that slavery was just and should not be resisted. And so Baxter, a nonconforming Puritan, conformed—and conformed his Puritan readers—to most, though certainly not all, of the racist policies of Charles II’s expanding slaveholding empire. People who have “forfeited life or liberty” can be enslaved, Baxter wrote. However, “to go as pirates and catch up poor negroes . . . is one of the worst kind of thievery in the world.” Enslavers “that buy them and use them as beasts and . . . neglect their souls, are fitter to be called incarnate devils than Christians.” Baxter naïvely believed there existed in bulk in the slave trade what he called a “voluntary-slave.” He tried to will into existence
a world where loving masters bought voluntary slaves to save their souls. Baxter’s world remained a heavenly dream crafted long ago by Gomes Eanes de Zurara. But even that dream world was seen as a threat by enslavers. American enslavers were still afraid to baptize Africans, because Christian slaves, like Elizabeth Key, could sue for their freedom.
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The colonies moved quickly to legalize the proselytizing demands of missionaries like Richard Baxter, and to hush the freedom cries from Christian slaves. In 1667, Virginia decreed that “the conferring of baptisme doth not alter the condition of the person as to his bondage.” New York did the same in 1664, as did Maryland in 1671. “May more” masters, the Virginia legislators inscribed, “carefully endeavor the propagation of Christianity” to slaves. Masters were supposed to care for the resisting souls of their captives. But what about their resisting bodies? In 1667, the English Parliament empowered masters to control the “wild, barbarous and savage nature” of enslaved Africans “only with strict severity.” And in 1669, the personal physician of Lord Anthony Ashley Cooper, one of the Lords Proprietor of the Province of Carolina, in his draft of the original
Fundamental Constitution of the Carolinas
, awarded the founding planters of the province “absolute power and authority” over their captives.
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WHEN JOHN LOCKE
moved to London in 1667 to become the personal physician of Lord Cooper, he had much more to offer the colonizing British politician than his medical expertise. He had studied at the feet of Robert Boyle after his educational tenure at Oxford, and he had ended up collecting more travel books than philosophy texts for his immense personal library. Lord Cooper asked Locke to draw up the Carolinas constitution and serve as the secretary of the Proprietors (and soon the Council of Trade and Plantations and the Board of Trade and Plantations). Not many Englishmen were more knowledgeable—or less compassionate—than Locke about British colonialism and slavery. “You should feel nothing at all of others’ misfortune,” Locke advised a friend in 1670.
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Between all his colonial and medical duties, by July 1671 Locke had written the first draft of his lasting philosophical monument,
An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding
. Over the next two decades, he revised and expanded the essay before its grand appearance in four books in 1689. That year, Locke also released his
Two Treatises of Government
, attacking monarchy, requesting a “government with the consent of the governed,” and distinguishing between temporary “servants” and “slaves, who being captives taken in a just war, are by the right of nature subjected to the absolute dominion and arbitrary power of their masters.” Just as Richard Baxter had pushed his “voluntary slave” theory to defend slavery in his free Christian society, John Locke pushed his “just war” theory to defend slavery in his free civil society.

In any society, the mind “at first . . . is rasa tabula,” Locke famously wrote in
An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding
. If people are born without innate intelligence, then there cannot be a natural intellectual hierarchy. But Locke’s egalitarian idea had a caveat. As Boyle and Newton painted unblemished light white, Locke more or less painted the unblemished mind white. Locke used the term “white paper” much more often than “blank slate” or “tabula rasa” to describe the child’s “as yet unprejudiced Understanding.”
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Locke also touched on the origin of species in
An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding
. Apes, whether “these be all Men, or no, all of human
Species
”, depended on one’s “definition of the Word Man,” because, he said, “if History lie not,” then West African women had conceived babies with apes. Locke thus reinforced African female hypersexuality in a passage sent round the English-speaking world. “And what real
Species
, by that measure, such a Production will be in Nature, will be a new Question.” Locke’s new “Question” reflected another new racist debate that most debaters feared to engage in publicly. Assimilationists argued monogenesis: that all humans were one species descended from a single human creation in Europe’s Garden of Eden. Segregationists argued polygenesis: that there were multiple origins of multiple human species.

Ever since Europeans had laid eyes on Native Americans in 1492, a people unmentioned in the Bible, they had started questioning the
biblical creation story. Some speculated that Native Americans had to have descended from “a different Adam.” By the end of the sixteenth century, European thinkers had added African people to the list of species descended from a different Adam. In 1616, Italian freethinker Lucilio Vanini said—as Locke suggested later—that Ethiopians and apes must have the same ancestry, distinct from Europeans. But no one made the case for polygenesis as stoutly as French theologian Isaac La Peyrère in
Prae-Adamitae
in 1655. Translated into English in 1656,
Men Before Adam
was publicly burned in Paris and banned from Europe (after Locke secured a copy). Christians tossed La Peyrère in prison and burned Vanini at the stake for defying the Christian monogenesis story of Adam and Eve. But they could not stop the drift of polygenesis.

To justify Black enslavement, Barbados planters actually “preferred” the polygenesis theory over the curse theory of Ham, according to eyewitness Morgan Godwyn. Godwyn made this revelation in a 1680 pamphlet that criticized racist planters for making “those two words,
Negro
and
Slave
”, synonymous, while “
White
” was “the general name for
Europeans.
” This Anglican brought his missionary zeal from Virginia to Barbados in the 1670s. He stood at the forefront of his denomination’s efforts to baptize enslaved Africans, aping a Quaker named William Edmundson.
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IN
1675,
A WAR
more destructive than the Great Hurricane of 1635 ravaged New England. Three thousand Native Americans and six hundred settlers were killed, and numerous towns and burgeoning economies were destroyed during King Philip’s War. In the midst of the carnage, William Edmundson, who had founded Quakerism in Ireland, arrived in Rhode Island, reeling from his failure to convert enslaved Africans in Barbados. When his failures continued in Rhode Island, he began to understand that slavery was holding back his missions, and he told slave-owning Quakers as much in a letter in 1676. Edmundson had an assimilationist vision, a vision to “restrain and reclaim” African people from “their accustomed filthy, unclean practices” in defiling each other. Quakers’ “self-denial” of human property could “be known to all.”

Abolitionist ideas blossomed again a dozen years later among the Mennonite and Quaker founders of Germantown in Philadelphia, this time, without Edmundson’s assimilationist ideas. Mennonites were an Anabaptist denomination born out of the Protestant Reformation in the German- and Dutch-speaking areas of Central Europe. During the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, orthodox authorities lethally persecuted the Mennonites. The Mennonites did not intend to leave behind one site of oppression to build another in America.

Mennonites therefore circulated an antislavery petition on April 18, 1688. “There is a saying, that we shall doe to all men like as we will be done ourselves; making no difference of what generation, descent or colour they are,” they wrote. “In Europe there are many oppressed” for their religion, and “here those are oppressed” for their “black colour.” Both oppressions were wrong. Actually, as an oppressor, America “surpass[ed] Holland and Germany.” Africans had the “right to fight for their freedom.”

The 1688 Germantown Petition Against Slavery was the inaugural antiracist tract among European settlers in colonial America. Beginning with this piece, the Golden Rule would forever inspire the cause of White antiracists. Antiracists of all races—whether out of altruism or intelligent self-interest—would always recognize that preserving racial hierarchy simultaneously preserves ethnic, gender, class, sexual, age, and religious hierarchies. Human hierarchies of any kind, they understood, would do little more than oppress all of humanity.

But powerful slaveholding Philadelphia Quakers killed the Germantown petition out of economic self-interest. William Edmundson had likewise suffered for promoting antislavery arguments a dozen years earlier. Slaveholding Quakers across New England had banished Edmundson from their meetings. The elderly founder of the American Baptist Church, Rhode Island’s Roger Williams, called Edmundson “nothing but a bundle of ignorance.” Not many New Englanders read Edmundson’s letter to slaveholding Quakers, and not many noticed its significance. Everyone was focused on King Philip’s War.
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In early August 1676, Increase Mather—the theological scion of New England with his father dead—implored God from sunup to
sundown to cut down King Philip, or Metacomet, the Native American war leader. The conflict had been worsening for a little over a year, and the Puritans had lost homes and dozens of soldiers. Less than a week after Mather’s prayer campaign, Metacomet was killed, more or less ending the war. Puritans cut up his body as if it were a hog’s. A nearly fourteen-year-old Cotton Mather detached Metacomet’s jaw from his skull. Puritans then paraded the king’s remains around Plymouth.
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Down in Virginia, Governor George Berkeley was trying to avoid a totally different war with neighboring Native Americans, in part to avoid disrupting his profitable fur trade. Twenty-nine-year-old frontier planter Nathaniel Bacon had other plans. The racial laws passed in the 1660s had done little to diminish class conflict. Around April 1676, Bacon mobilized a force of frontier White laborers to redirect their anger from elite Whites to Susquehannocks. Bacon’s mind game worked. “Since my being with the volunteers, the discourse and earnestness of the people is against the Indians,” Bacon wrote to Berkeley in triumph. Berkeley charged Bacon with treason, more worried about armed landless Whites—the “Rabble Crew”—than the Susquehannocks and nearby Occaneechees. But Bacon was not so easily stopped. By summer, the frontier war had quickly become a civil war—or to some, a class war—with Bacon and his supporters rebelling against Berkeley, and Berkeley hiring a militia of mercenaries.

By September 1676, a defiant Bacon had “proclaimed liberty to all Servants and Negroes.” For Governor Berkeley’s wealthy White inner circle, poor Whites and enslaved Blacks joining hands presaged the apocalypse. At the head of five hundred men, Bacon burned down Jamestown, forcing Berkeley to flee. When Bacon died of dysentery in October, the rebellion was doomed. Luring Whites with pardons and Blacks with liberty, Berkeley’s forces persuaded most of Bacon’s army to lay down their weapons. They spent the next few years crushing the rest of the rebels.

Rich planters learned from Bacon’s Rebellion that poor Whites had to be forever separated from enslaved Blacks. They divided and conquered by creating more White privileges. In 1680, legislators
pardoned only the White rebels; they prescribed thirty lashes for any slave who lifted a hand “against any Christian” (Christian now meant White). All Whites now wielded absolute power to abuse any African person. By the early eighteenth century, every Virginia county had a militia of landless Whites “ready in case of any sudden eruption of Indians or insurrection of Negroes.” Poor Whites had risen into their lowly place in slave society—the armed defenders of planters—a place that would sow bitter animosity between them and enslaved Africans.
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COTTON MATHER WAS
in college when he detached Metacomet’s jaw from his skull and heard about Bacon’s Rebellion. Back in the summer of 1674, Increase Mather crossed the Charles River to present an eleven-year-old Cotton Mather for admission as the youngest student in Harvard’s history. He was already well known in New England as an intellectual prodigy—or, from the Puritans’ standpoint, the chosen one. Cotton Mather was fluent in Latin, running through fifteen chapters of the Bible a day, and as pious as boys came.
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