The concept of race remains an issue that
remains a constant topic in American life. No issue is quite as explosive and
sensitive as race in American society. Many assume that the idea of race traces
back long before the first European settlers arrived on American shores. Any
examination of American history reveals the central role race-based slavery
played in leading to the Civil War. At the same time, much of the twentieth
century remains occupied with Jim Crow segregation. The recent headlines
instigated by the 1619 Project brought the history of race and slavery to the
attention of Americans, who typically give little thought to history. The words
of Jefferson in his Notes on the State of Virginia reveal an attitude commonly
identified as racist today,
I advance it
therefore as a suspicion only, that the blacks, whether originally a distinct
race, or made distinct by time and circumstances, are inferior to the whites in
the endowments both of body and mind. It is not against experience to suppose,
that different species of the same genus, or varieties of the same species, may
possess different qualifications. Will not a lover of natural history then, one
who views the gradations in all the races of animals with the eye of
philosophy, excuse an effort to keep those in the department of man as distinct
as nature has formed them? This unfortunate difference of color, and perhaps of
faculty, is a powerful obstacle to the emancipation of these people.
Reading
Jefferson’s words leads one to assume that Jefferson and the Founders held to
racist views more akin to ‘Nazi-like, "pure-race" beliefs.’ One might conclude that
the very foundation of the United States rested upon racism and white
supremacy,
It doesn't take
much effort to sing the nationalistic-religious hymns of praise to our
virtually divine Founding Fathers. But it does take some effort to confront the
contradictions of those Fathers.....the "warts and all" part. Ours
has been a nation of white supremacy from the beginning. A nation of white male
control. A nation formed with white male superiority as a given. A nation built
on racism.
The idea that the United States was a
nation built on racism assumes a static definition of racial ideology. Early
American settlers and colonists had a pre-existing formula of the different
racial groups that placed Africans and Native Americans at a lower status than
whites. But, a deeper investigation reveals that race during the colonial
period is a more nuanced and complex topic than many assume. The purpose of
this paper is to examine the debate around race in seventeenth Virginia through
the historiography of the scholarship. I will discuss the historical debates
and examine the questions raised by historians of colonial Virginia. Virginia
remains a vital starting point since, as the first colony, the standard set by
Virginia impacted other colonies. Virginia
was the first English colony in North America and the first to introduce
African labor. Which came first, slavery or racism? Did ingrained attitudes
toward Africans lead planters to employ African slave labor, or did racism only
rear its head after slavery became the primary labor system?
Before probing colonial Virginia, it’s
worth noting that two factors need consideration when examining the debate of race
in America. First, science in recent years points to the fact that there is no scientific
basis for racial classifications. Scientific advances in Genetics confirm that
racial differences in humanity are illusory and race is a social construction
rather than a biological difference.
There are no
genetic characteristics possessed by all Blacks but not by non-Blacks;
similarly, there is no gene or cluster of genes common to all Whites but not to
non-Whites. One's race is not determined by a single gene or gene cluster, as
is, for example, sickle cell anemia. Nor are races marked by important
differences in gene frequencies, the rates of appearance of certain gene types.
The data compiled by various scientists demonstrates, contrary to popular
opinion, that intra-group differences exceed inter-group differences.
Many
historians today assume that the category of race is a creation of the early
modern Europeans as they encountered Native Americans and began to use African
labor to cultivate their lands in the Western Hemisphere. But in recent years some
medieval historians have claimed that racial thinking and racial formation
developed before a vocabulary of race emerged. Previously, early medieval
historians have argued that race is not a helpful concept for the early Middle
Ages, instead believing that ethnicity better fit medieval thinking. Nicole
Lopez-Jantzen argues that race is a useful tool for analysis, especially for
the Mediterranean region. Her analysis of legal evidence, charters, and visual
culture sheds light on characterization, which bears great similarity to racial
categories and possibly serves as a bridge to the early modern era.
The
arrival of Africans in 1619 as the first introduction of slavery in British
North America was an accepted presupposition for most historians before the
twentieth century.] Historian and abolitionist William Goodell stated the
assumption of slavery brought into Virginia in 1619, “Soon after the settlement
of the British North American Colonies, Africans were imported into them, and
sold and held as slaves .” Journalist and historian
Richard Hildreth, best known for his six-volume history of the United States,
also indicates his opinion that slavery began in 1619,
By the free
consent and co-operation of the colonists themselves, another and still more
objectionable species of population was introduced into Virginia, not without
still enduring and disastrous effects upon the social condition of the United
States. Twenty negroes, brought to Jamestown by a Dutch trading vessel, and
purchased by the colonists, were held, not as indented (sic) servants for a
term of years, but as slaves for life.
Politician and historian Henry Wilson also argued that
the first Africans arrived into Virginia in a state of unending slavery,” In
the month of August, 1620, a Dutch ship entered James River with twenty African
slaves. They were purchased by the colonists, and they and their offspring were
held in perpetual servitude.”
In 1892, Historian George Bancroft also supported the
beginning of slavery in 1619, but also supported the idea that racism arrived
concurrently,
In the month of
August, 1619, five years after the commons of France had petitioned for the
emancipation of every serf in every fief, a Dutch man-of-war entered James
river and landed twenty negroes for sale… But the Ethiopian and Caucasian races were
to meet together in nearly equal numbers beneath a temperate zone. Who could
foretell the issue? The negro race, from its introduction, was regarded with
disgust, and its union with the whites forbidden under ignominious penalties.
Phillip Alexander Bruce goes further, claiming that
white settlers viewed Africans as less than human,
Not only were
there sincere doubts in the minds of many Englishmen as to whether the place of
the negro was higher than that of the horse or the ox, but there was a belief
that if he belonged to a race of men who, as the descendants of Ham, had been
cursed by God himself, and so branded for all time as servants of superior
races, without claim to the fruits of their own arduous labor.
The new
consensus regarding African slavery in 1619 began when James C. Ballagh argued
that the early Africans were indentured servants, not slaves. He contended that
the status of blacks remained that of indentured servants until the adoption of
the slave laws of the 1660s and 1670s changed the status of imported Africans
to being enslaved.
The first negroes
introduced into the North American Colonies, that is, those early brought to
the Bermudas and to Virginia, do not seem to have been slaves in the strict sense
of the term… The
masters of the Dutch and English privateers, therefore, had no rights of
ownership which they could legally exercise or transfer over the negroes
imported until rights were recognized by the law of England or of the Bermudas
and Virginia.
Using an argument based upon early seventeenth laws,
Ballagh assumed that the role of Africans in Virginia was that of a servant and
not as slaves. Substantiating his argument was the fact that there existed
within Virginia free blacks, which leads Ballagh to conclude that all blacks
within Virginia before the introduction of slaves laws must be servants.
The primary steps
in the institutional development which culminated in slavery are then to be
found in the legislation, customary and statutory, that defined that condition
of persons legally known as servitude. Servitude not only preceded slavery in
the logical development of the principle of subjection, standing mid-way
between freedom and absolute subjection, but it was the historic base upon
which slavery, by the extension and addition of incidents, was constructed.
Developed itself from a species of free contract -labor, by the peculiar
conditions surrounding the importation of settlers and laborers into the
English-American colonies, servitude was first applied to whites and then to
negroes and Indians…Negro and Indian servitude thus preceded negro and Indian
slavery, and together with white servitude in instances continued even after
the institution of slavery was fully developed.
Ballagh’s argument attracted attention, leading many
historians in the twentieth century to rethink slavery in the early seventeenth
century.
Among
the first to consider the arguments of Ballagh was John H. Russell in his volume,
The Free Negro in America. Russell
points out the fact that sectional division drove many of the conclusions
regarding slavery in the nineteenth century. Russell contends that
while custom likely kept numerous blacks enslaved, he points out the large
number of free blacks as recognition that the law was far from settled.
The truth is that
no attempt was ever made to supply legal grounds for holding negroes in a
status of slavery. Custom supplied all the authority that appeared to be
necessary, and legislation at first merely performed the part of resolving some
uncertainties concerning a well-established institution.
Russell takes notice of the number of free blacks in
Virginia, noting that statutes, county court records, and church records
distinguish between free and slave until the passage of slave laws. He believes that the
slave laws justify Ballagh, pointing out how free blacks make the status of
blacks unclear; he contends that Ballagh overestimates the impact of the
legislation in changing the status of blacks.
An
expansion of Ballagh’s understanding continued in 1918 with historian Ulrich
Phillips in his influential American Negro
Slavery. Phillips also maintains that the legal status of the first
Africans prevented their status as slaves while the law remained unclear.
The first comers
were slaves in the hands of their maritime sellers; but they were not fully
slaves in the hands of their Virginian buyers, for there was neither law nor
custom then establishing the institution of slavery in the colony.
Like Ballagh, Phillips maintains that the first
Africans were not enslaved due to the absence of a law placing them into
permanent servitude, but unlike Russell, Phillips argues that the custom was not
fully established. Echoing Russell, Phillips argues that the earliest blacks
were indentured servants because the laws establishing slavery were yet a
reality.
“Free persons of
color” were an unintended but inevitable by-product of the recourse to Negro
labor. Brethren to the slaves, and some of them unacknowledged half-brethren of
the whites, they were an increasing complication. A few Negroes attained
freedom in early Virginia because the first comers, imported before definite
slavery was established, were dealt with as if they had been indentured
servants.
The
ideas begun by Ballagh and carried forward by Phillips continued to have limited
influence among scholars of American slavery. Susie Ames took on
Ballagh and argued against Ballagh that the earliest station of blacks was that
of indentured servitude. She claimed that Ballagh’s thesis contradicted the
evidence, arguing that most free blacks resulted from manumission or freedom as
the mulatto children of slave owners as the law of 1662 had yet to establish
slave status based upon the mother’s position. Ames argued that slavery was a
“custom well established,” similar to English Caribbean colonies when laws were
firmly established in Virginia.
This
argument received expansion through the scholarship of Wesley Frank Craven in
his 1949 book Southern Colonies in the
Seventeenth Century. Craven acknowledges that there are examples of free
blacks in the early years of colonial Virginia but argues that while “there
were cases of Negroes freed at the end of a fixed term, but there is danger in
generalizing too much from the relatively few cases recorded.” Craven also points to an early statute passed
by the Bermuda Assembly in 1623 with the purpose to restrict "the
insolences of the Negroes." While the legislation was
new in the English speaking world, Craven maintains that it demonstrates
prejudice that likely previously existed. But Craven maintains caution against the
“modern assumption that prejudice against the Negro is largely a product of
slavery.”
However Eric Williams in his book, Capitalism
and Slavery maintained that racism was the fruit of slavery rather than
slavery born of racism, “Here, then is the origin of Negro slavery. The reason
was economic, not racial; it had to do not with the color of the laborer, but
the cheapness of the labor.” Williams goes on to
explain how slavery led to racist characterizations that justified the enslaved
status of Africans,
The features of
the man, his hair, color, and dentifrice, his “subhuman” characteristics, so
widely pleaded, were only the later rationalizations to justify a simple
economic fact: that the colonies needed labor and resorted to Negro labor
because it was cheapest and best.
According to Williams, slavery met an economic need,
while racism justified the use of enslaved Africans. When compared to Craven’s
position that racism existed before slavery became seen as a necessity appears
to be the chicken and egg debate. Which was first, slavery or racism?
In
1950, Oscar and Mary Handlin published an article in The William and Mary Quarterly, revisiting the interpretation of
Ballagh. The Handlins pointed to geography as a reason for the divergence in
the difference of agriculture and labor between the North and South. The soil
and climate of the South led to agriculture favoring staples, requiring a
larger workforce. There were no inherent qualities within Africans that led to
slavery but “emerged from the adjustment to American conditions of traditional
European institutions.” The authors described
that the traditional distinction between slave and servant bore less importance
at the beginning of the seventeenth century than it would during the eighteenth
century. The Handlins pointed to the existence of the villein, a servile
position that once existed in England, and lingered on in Scotland into the
eighteenth century. The villien was a servile position often transmitted from
father to son, and the Handlins contended that in this light the first arrivals
of African slaves needed to be viewed. They go to explain,
Through the first
three-quarters of the seventeenth century, the Negroes, even in the South, were
not numerous; nor were they particularly concentrated in any district. They
came into a society in which a large part of the population was to some degree
unfree; indeed in Virginia under the Company almost everyone, even tenants and
laborers, bore some sort of servile obligation. The Negroes' lack of freedom
was not unusual. These newcomers, like so many others, were accepted, bought and
held, as kinds of servants. They were certainly not well off. But their
ill-fortune was of a sort they shared with men from England, Scotland, and
Ireland, and with the unlucky aborigenes held in captivity. Like the others,
some Negroes became free, that is, terminated their period of service. Some became
artisans; a few became landowners and the masters of other men." The
status of Negroes was that of servants; and so they were identified and treated
down to the I66o's
The Handlins claimed that the status of blacks changed
to slavery because Africans were the most vulnerable labor source. The social
realities of life in Virginia gave way because among the throng of immigrants
to journey to Virginia, the English colonists “longed for in the strangeness
for the company of familiar men and singled out those who were most like
themselves.”
Attracting more English settlers required offering attractive terms of service,
while the Africans needed no placating. Like Eric Williams the Handlins that
prejudice and therefore racism was a byproduct of slavery,
Color then emerged
as the token of the slave status; the trace of color became the trace of
slavery. It had not always been so; as late as the 166o's the law had not even
a word to describe the children of mixed marriages. But two decades later, the
term mulatto is used, and it serves, not as in Brazil, to whiten the Black, but
to affiliate through the color tie the offspring of a spurious union with his
inherited slavery.
The
position on slavery put forth by the Handlins became very influential and
demonstrated its impact through scholarship, college textbooks, and graduate
school lectures.
But, after almost a decade, the interpretation put forth by the Shandlins
received a challenge from an article by Carl Degler titled “Slavery and the
Genesis of American Race Prejudice.” Degler strongly argued that the condition
of early African arrivals was degraded from the beginning. Degler directly
attacks the thesis of the Handlins, that
the status of blacks was as servants and received treatment as servants until
the 1660s. He gives two primary objections to their interpretation and argument.
First of all,
their explanation, by de- pending upon the improving position of white servants
as it does, cannot apply to New England, where servants were of minor
importance. Yet the New England colonies, like the Southern, developed a system
of slavery for the Negro that fixed him in a position of permanent inferiority.
The greatest weakness of the Handlins' case is the difficulty in showing that
the white servant's position was improving during and immediately after the
1660’s.
Asking the question of whether slavery or
discrimination appeared first, leads Degler to make an interesting observation
as to why slavery in the English colonies led to a caste system while receiving
different treatment in former Spanish and Portuguese colonies. Degler contends
that blacks never experienced treatment “as an equal of a white man, servant or
free.” Degler continues to
maintain that there was always a distinction made between servant and slave,
this being a distinction begun in the Spanish and Portuguese slave trade. The
treatment meted out to Indians further supports Degler’s thesis that blacks
experienced an inferior rank as soon as they arrived in the new world. The argument that the pressure from the
rising number of blacks and the demand for cheap labor supply led to slavery
and then discrimination remains challenging to maintain once one looks at the
New England colonies. The northern colonies received a small number of Africans
compared to Virginia; discrimination against blacks predated their slave
status.
Northern colonial regulations and discriminatory laws passed to control blacks
demonstrate that Africans possessed an inferior status.
Thus, like the colonists
to the South, the New Englanders enacted into law, in the absence of any prior
English law of slavery, their recognition of the Negroes as different and
inferior. This was the way of the seventeenth century; only with a later
conception of the brotherhood of all men would such legal discrimination begin
to recede; but by then, generations of close association between the degraded
status of slavery and black color would leave the same prejudice against the
Negro in the North that it did in the South. It would seem, then, that instead
of slavery being the root of the discrimination visited upon the Negro in
America, slavery was itself molded by the early colonists' discrimination
against the outlander.
For
the Handlins, the debate became personal, and hostile scholarly exchanges
passed between the Handlins and Degler. Winthrop Jordan enters the debate without joining either
side in his article, “Modern Tensions and the Origins of American Slavery.”
Jordan implies that the historical arguments are often shaped by the prevailing
culture, in addition to the condition of racial relations when the arguments
appear. Jordan points to the difficulty of the debate,
For the crucial
early years after 1619 there is simply not enough evidence to indicate with any
certainty whether Negroes were treated like white servants or not. No historian
has found anything resembling proof one way or the other. The first Negroes
were sold to the English settlers, yet so were other Englishmen. It can be
said, however, that Negroes were set apart from white men by the word Negroes,
and a distinct name is not attached to a group unless it is seen as different.
The earliest Virginia census reports plainly distinguished Negroes from white
men, sometimes giving Negroes no personal name; and in 1629 every commander of
the several plantations was ordered to "take a generall muster of all the
inhabitants men woemen and Children as well Englishe as Negroes."' Difference,
however, might or might not involve inferiority.
Jordan admits that there exist contradictory arguments
for both sides of the debate with the appearance of both slavery and
discrimination appearing very close together, making complete assurance very
difficult. His conclusion navigates between both sides saying,
But what if one
were to regard both slavery and prejudice as species of a general debasement of
the Negro? Both may have been equally cause and effect, constantly reacting
upon each other, dynamically joining hands to hustle the Negro down the road to
complete degradation.
But
by the end of the 1960s, Jordan took a different direction in the debate, stressing
the innate prejudice the English felt toward Africans. He contends that his
earlier viewpoint resulted from an incomplete understanding of the “origins of
American slavery.” Looking at medieval and
sixteenth-century English sources and travel accounts, Jordan points out the
English propensity to identify darkness and black with evil and filth, relating
Africans with apes and describing Africans as controlled by unrestrained sexual
passions. All these attitudes existed before the colonization of Virginia,
leading Jordan to determine that these preconceived attitudes followed the
colonists to America when first encountering Africans.
Embedded in the
concept of blackness was its direct opposite— whiteness. No other colors so
clearly implied opposition… White and black connoted purity and filthiness,
virginity and sin, virtue and baseness, beauty and ugliness, beneficence and
evil, God and the devil.
Jordan
admits that the English borrowed many of these presuppositions from the Bible,
Shakespeare, Milton, and other literary sources harking back hundreds of years.
The English were predisposed to treat Africans as inferior based upon their
color, physical differences, and religious differences. As non-Christians, the
Africans were heathens and merited a distinction from those Europeans from
Christian nations.
The slave was
treated like a beast. Slavery was inseparable from the evil in men; it was
God's punishment upon Ham's prurient disobedience. Enslavement was captivity,
the loser's lot in a contest of power. Slaves were infidels or heathens. On
every count, Negroes qualified.
However, Jordan continued to recognize the
mutualistic relationship that slavery and racism had with each other. This
appears to be Jordan veering slightly from what appears to be a retraction of
his argument given in “Modern Tensions.” In his second chapter, Jordan argues,
From the surviving
evidence, it appears that outright enslavement and these other forms of
debasement appeared at about the same time in Maryland and Virginia.
Indications of perpetual service, the very nub of slavery, coincided with
indications that English settlers discriminated against Negro women, withheld
arms from Negroes, and—though the timing is far less certain—reacted unfavorably
to interracial sexual union. The coincidence suggests a mutual relationship
between slavery and unfavorable assessment of Negroes. Rather than slavery
causing "prejudice," or vice versa, they seem rather to have
generated each other. Both were, after all, twin aspects of a general
debasement of the Negro. Slavery and "prejudice" may have been
equally cause and effect, continuously reacting upon each other, dynamically
joining hands to hustle the Negro down the road to complete degradation.
Instead
of seeing this as Jordan retrenching to an earlier position, it’s best to
observe that Jordan is struggling with the difficulties and close relationship
between racism and slavery. Slavery and racism existed in close proximity to
each other, but Jordan clearly points to the fact that without race, the
horrors visited upon blacks were far less likely to occur. On the same page as
the previous quote, Jordan makes the relationship between race and slavery
clear.
If slavery caused
prejudice, then invidious distinctions concerning working in the fields,
bearing arms, and sexual union should have appeared after slavery's firm
establishment. If prejudice caused slavery, then one would expect to find these
lesser discriminations preceding the greater discrimination of outright enslavement.
Taken as a whole, the evidence reveals a process of debasement of which
hereditary lifetime service was an important but not the only part. White
servants did not suffer this debasement. Rather, their position improved,
partly for the reason that they were not Negroes.
Alden T. Vaughn, in his article, “Blacks
in Virginia: A Note on the First Decade,” concentrates on the 1620s and
endorses the position of Degler. Despite the scarcity of source material
after 1619, it’s apparent that the English colonists viewed Africans as
inferior at first encounter. Vaughn also suggests that blacks were enslaved in
permanent bondage. Vaughn examines the census records and determines that while
white and black servants both suffered degradation, the records of 1625
indicate that blacks were a different category of labor than servants. The
records mention residents by their surname and first name, yet none of the
twenty-two Africans are listed with a surname. Only twelve individual blacks
are listed with first names, while other entries read, “A Negars woman” or
“negors.” Governor George Yeardly’s will of 1627 also indicates a perception of
inferiority toward blacks in Jamestown,
To his heirs Sir
George left "goode debts, chattels, servants, negars, cattle or any other
thing." The "negars" may of course have been
"servants" too, but a separate category for them as distinct from his
other servants suggests at the very least that Governor Yeardley considered blacks
apart, and presumably inferior, and certainly a species of property.
In
a biography of Captain John Smith, Vaughn argued that white Virginians
displayed from the beginning a well-established distaste to people Smith
derided as, “those fryed Regions of blacke brutish Negers.” The scorn towards
Africans from the English appears to have arrived with them before the founding
of Jamestown.
Edmund S. Morgan, continued the
debate in his article, “Slavery and Freedom: An American Paradox.” Morgan
proposes that the founding of Virginia presents a puzzle or a paradox, for
while the first colonists believed in establishing liberty, they also held to
inherently racist principles.
We may admit that
the Englishmen who colonized America and their revolutionary descendants were
racists, that consciously or unconsciously they believed liberties and rights
should be confined to persons of a light complexion. When we have said as much,
even when we have probed the depths of racial prejudice, we will not have fully
accounted for the paradox.
But
in his article, Morgan remains unclear as to the implications of racism before
Virginia passed slave laws. Free blacks possibly possessed the same rights as
English Virginians, but Morgan hesitates to go deep into the period previous to
the slave laws.
It seems clear
that most of the Africans, perhaps all of them, came as slaves, a status that
had become obsolete in England, while it was becoming the expected condition of
Africans outside Africa and of a good many inside. It is equally clear that a
substantial number of Virginia's Negroes were free or became free. And all of
them, whether servant, slave, or free, enjoyed most of the same rights and
duties as other Virginians. There is no evidence during the period before 1660
that they were subjected to a more severe discipline than other servants.
Morgan
returns to the debate in his influential book, American Slavery, American Freedom. Morgan implies that overt
racism appeared when Africans became a large labor force.
Although a degree
of racial prejudice was doubtless also present from the beginning, there is no
evidence that English servants or freedmen resented the substitution of African
slaves for more of their kind. When their masters began to place people of
another color in the fields beside them, the unfamiliar appearance of the
newcomers may well have struck them as only skin deep. There are hints that the
two despised groups initially saw each other as sharing the same predicament…
In Virginia too, before 1660, it may have been difficult to distinguish between
race prejudice from class prejudice. As long as slaves formed only an
insignificant minority of the labor force, the community of interest between
blacks and lower-class whites posed no social problem. But Virginians had
always felt threatened by the danger of a servile insurrection, and their fears
increased as the labor force grew larger and the proportion of blacks in it
rose.
Central
to Morgan’s thesis is the uprising involving both blacks and whites during
Bacon’s Rebellion. The rebellion left the ruling class worried about retaining
power and the fact that eighty blacks and twenty English servants refusing to
surrender near the end contributed to their concerns. As Africans became a
cheaper form of labor and the white servant class decreased, it became evident
strict laws were necessary to control black labor. Morgan argues that as the
labor force grew, so did new methods used to discipline and control the
population of the enslaved, methods which Morgan admits reeks of “racial
contempt.”
Legislation passed that barred free Christian blacks or Indians from owing
Christian servants. In 1680, the punishment of thirty lashes on the bare back
was prescribed, “if any negroe or other slave shall presume to lift up his hand
in opposition to any christian.” In 1691, the assembly
prevented masters from freeing the enslaved unless they provided transportation
out of the colony, and later the assembly prohibited freeing slaves, unless
granted permission by the governor and council.
Negroes, mulattoes
and Indians already free did manage to stay in the colony and to cling to their
freedom. But it was made plain to them and to the white population that their
color rendered freedom inappropriate for them.
Aspects of the origins debate
continue to march onward. In the anthology volume, Early Modern Virginia, John C. Combs in his essay, Beyond the
“Origins Debate,” challenges the timing and causes of the Virginian colony
toward enslaved labor. He believes that a closer examination of wills and
probate records should reveal more about the development of slavery. Combs
contends that the slave society expanded swiftly in the earlier years. The rise
of slavery began in the first decades after the settlement of Jamestown, and steadily
grew. After Bacon’s Rebellion, Combs argues that the planter class “were not
men on the verge of turning to slavery; they already had.”
The chicken and the egg debate or
slavery and racism debate accelerated in recent years with the appearance of
the 1619 Project, published by the New
York Times in observance of the four hundredth anniversary of Africans
arriving to the Virginia colony. Nikole Hannah-Jones sets the stage for the
Project with her article, “Our
democracy’s founding ideals were false when they were written. Black Americans
have fought to make them true.” At
first sight, it is apparent that the 1619 Project is a personal effort for
Hannah-Jones when she begins with the story of her family and her father’s
lifetime of racism in a country he served and loved.
The Project sought to reframe the debate over American formation by focusing
1619 as the true founding of the United States as a nation beginning with
slavery as the foundation. The Project’s statement about America’s founding
became the central focus of a historical debate from a variety of historians.
The World Socialist Web Site still features a number of interviews with
historians with criticisms while the site accuses the Project of, “politically
motivated falsification of history.”[56]
The issue surrounding the 1619 Project
demonstrates that the debate over racism and slavery remains very much alive.
As American society grows and changes, this debate shall continue.
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