Friday, December 15, 2023

Slavery and Race: Historiographical Examination

 

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.[1]

 

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.’[2] 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.[3]

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?[4]

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.[5]

            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.[6]

            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.[7Historian 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 .”[8] 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.[9]

 

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.”[10]

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.[11]

 

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.[12]

 

            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.[13]

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.[14]

 

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.[15]

 

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.[16] 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.[17]

 

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. [18] 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.[19]

 

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.[20]

 

            The ideas begun by Ballagh and carried forward by Phillips continued to have limited influence among scholars of American slavery.[21] 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. [22]

            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.”[23]  Craven also points to an early statute passed by the Bermuda Assembly in 1623 with the purpose to restrict "the insolences of the Negroes."[24] 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.”[25] 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.”[26] 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.[27]

 

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.”[28] 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.[29] 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[30]

 

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.”[31] 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.[32]

            The position on slavery put forth by the Handlins became very influential and demonstrated its impact through scholarship, college textbooks, and graduate school lectures.[33] 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.[34]

           

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.”[35] 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.[36]  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. [37] 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.[38]

 

            For the Handlins, the debate became personal, and hostile scholarly exchanges passed between the Handlins and Degler.[39]  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.[40]

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.[41]

 

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.”[42] 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.[43]

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.[44]

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.[45]

 

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.[46]

 

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.[47]

 

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.[48]

 

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.[49]

 

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.[50] 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.”[51] 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.” [52] 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.[53]

            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.”[54]

            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.[55] 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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Jordan, Winthrop D. White over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro,1550-1812. 2nd ed. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968. https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5149/9780807838686_jordan.1.

 

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Lopez-Jantzen, Nicole. "Between empires: Race and ethnicity in the early Middle Ages." Literature Compass 16, no. 9-10 (December 29, 2019): 1-12. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1111/lic3.12542.

 

Morgan, Edmund S. American Slavery- American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1975.

 

Morgan, Edmund S. “Slavery and Freedom: The American Paradox.” The Journal of American History 59, no. 1 (1972): 5–29. https://doi.org/10.2307/1888384.

 

Phillips, Ulrich B. American Negro Slavery: A Survey of the Supply, Employment, and Control of Negro Labor, as Determined by the Plantation Regime. New York: D. Appleton and Co, 1918. https://archive.org/details/americannegrosla00phil.

 

Phillips, Ulrich B. Life and Labor In The Old South. Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1929. https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.229114.

 

Russell, John Henderson. The Free Negro in America, 1619-1865. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1913. https://ia601602.us.archive.org/0/items/freenegro00russrich/freenegro00russrich.pdf.

 

“The New York Times’ 1619 Project,” The World Socialist Web Site, November 4, 2021. https://www.wsws.org/en/topics/event/1619

 

Vaughn, Alden T. "The Origins Debate: Slavery and Racism in Seventeenth-Century Virginia." The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 97, no. 3 (July 1989): 311-54. https://doi.org/https://www.jstor.org/stable/4249092.

 

Vaughn, Alden T. "Blacks in Virginia: A Note on the First Decade." The William and Mary Quarterly 29, no. 3 (July 1972): 469-78. https://doi.org/https://www.jstor.org/stable/1923875.

 

Williams, Eric. Capitalism and Slavery. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1944. https://glc.yale.edu/sites/default/files/pdf/capatlism_and_slavery.pdf.

 

Wilson, Henry. History of the Rise and Fall of the Slave Powers in America. Vol. I. Boston: James R. Osogood and Company, 1872. https://ia800203.us.archive.org/30/items/historyofrisefal01wils/historyofrisefal01wils.pdf . 


Endnotes

[1] Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, Documenting the American South. https://docsouth.unc.edu/southlit/jefferson/jefferson.html.

[3] "America Founded On Racism," Akron Beacon Journal, December 6, 2014.

[4] Kathleen M. Brown, "Beyond the Great Debates: Gender and Race in Early America," Reviews in American History  26, no. 1(March 1998): 2. https://www.jstor.org/stable/30030876.

[5] Ian F. Haney Lopez, "The Social Construction of Race: Some Observations on Illusion, Fabrication, and Choice." Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review 29: 11-12. https://doi.org/https://lawcat.berkeley.edu/record/1115043/files/fulltext.pdf.

[6] Nicole Lopez-Jantzen, . "Between empires: Race and ethnicity in the early Middle Ages," Literature Compass 16, no. 9-10 (December 29, 2019): 7. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1111/lic3.12542.

[7] Alen T. Vaughn, “The Origins Debate: Slavery and Racism in Seventeenth-Century Virginia,” The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 97, no. 3 (July 1989): 312. https://www.jstor.org/stable/4249092

[8] William Goodell, Slavery and Anti-Slavery: A History of the Great Struggle in Both Hemispheres; with a View of the Slavery Question in the United States, (New York 1853): 10. https://play.google.com/books/reader?id=5P1KAAAAYAAJ&pg=GBS.PP6&hl=en

[9] Richard Hildreth, The History of the United States of America. Vol. II, (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1871):119. . https://archive.org/details/historyunitedst25hildgoog.

[10] Henry Wilson, History of the Rise and Fall of the Slave Powers in America. Vol. I, (Boston: James R. Osgood and Company, 1872): 2. https://ia800203.us.archive.org/30/items/historyofrisefal01wils/historyofrisefal01wils.pdf

[11] George Bancroft, The History of the United States of America. Vol. II, (New York: D Appleton and Company, 1888):126. https://archive.org/details/historyoftheunit037605mbp

[12] Phillip Alexander Bruce, Economic History of Virginia in the Seventeenth Century. Vol. II., (New York: The Macmillian Company, 1895): 65. https://archive.org/details/economichistoryo0002phil/page/64/mode/2up

[13] Vaughn, “The Origins Debate,” 312.

[14] James Curtis Ballagh, A History of Slavery in Virginia. (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1902):28.  

[15] Ballagh, 31-32.

[16] John Henderson Russell, The Free Negro in America, 1619-1865, (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1913): 16-18.  https://ia601602.us.archive.org/0/items/freenegro00russrich/freenegro00russrich.pdf.

[17] Russell, 21.

[18] Russell, 37.

[19] Ulrich Bonnell Phillips, American Negro Slavery: A Survey of the Supply, Employment, and Control of Negro Labor, as Determined by the Plantation Regime,( New York: D. Appleton and Co, 1918):75.  https://archive.org/details/americannegrosla00phil.

[20] Ulrich Bonnell Phillips, Life and Labor In The Old South, (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1929): 170. https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.229114

[21] Vaughn, “The Origins Debate,” 314.

[22] Vaughn, “The Origins Debate,” 315.

[23] Wesley Frank Craven, The Southern Colonies in the Seventeenth Century, 1607--1689: A History of the South, (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1949): 218.  https://muse-jhu-edu.libezp.lib.lsu.edu/book/45498.

[24] Craven, 219.

[25] Craven, 219.

[26] Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1944): 19. https://glc.yale.edu/sites/default/files/pdf/capatlism_and_slavery.pdf.

[27] Williams, 20.

[28] Oscar and Mary Handlin, “Origins of the Southern Labor System,” The William and Mary Quarterly 7, no. 2 (April 1950): 199. https://doi.org/https://www.jstor.org/stable/1917157.

[29] Oscar and Mary Handlin, 200.

[30] Oscar and Mary Handlin, 202-203.

[31] Oscar and Mary Handlin, 208.

[32] Oscar and Mary Handlin, 216.

[33] Vaughn, “The Origins Debate,” 318.

[34] Carl N. Degler, "Slavery and the Genesis of American Race Prejudice," Comparative Studies in Society and History 2, no. 1 (October 1959): 51. https://doi.org/https://www.jstor.org/stable/177546.

[35] Degler, 51.

[36] Degler, 54.

[37] Degler, 62.

[38] Degler, 64-65.

[39] Vaughn, “The Origins Debate,” 320.

[40] Winthrop D. Jordan, . "Modern Tensions and the Origins of American Slavery" The Journal of Southern History 28, no. 1 (February 1962): 22. https://doi.org/https://www.jstor.org/stable/2205530.

[41] Jordan, “Modern Tensions,” 29.

[42] Winthrop Jordan, White over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro,1550-1812, 2nd ed. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968): 599. https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5149/9780807838686_jordan.1.

[43] Jordan, White over Black, 7.

[44] Jordan, White over Black, 56.

[45] Jordan, “White over Black, 80.

[46] Jordan, “White over Black, 80.

[47] Alden T. Vaughn, "Blacks in Virginia: A Note on the First Decade," The William and Mary Quarterly 29, no. 3 (July 1972): 477. https://doi.org/https://www.jstor.org/stable/1923875.

[48] Edmund S. Morgan, “Slavery and Freedom: The American Paradox,” The Journal of American History 59, no. 1 (1972): 7. https://doi.org/10.2307/1888384.

[49] Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery- American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia, (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1975): 327-328.

[50] Morgan, American Slavery-American Freedom, 269-270.

[51] Morgan, American Slavery-American Freedom, 316.

[52] Morgan, American Slavery-American Freedom, 331

[53] Morgan, American Slavery-American Freedom, 337.

[54] John C. Combs, “Beyond the ‘Origins Debate’: Rethinking the Rise of Virginia Slavery,” In Early Modern Virginia: Reconsidering the Old Dominion, edited by John C. Coombs and Douglas Bradburn, 239–78. (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2011): 249. http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt6wrm6x.13.

[56] “The New York Times’ 1619 Project,” The World Socialist Web Site, November 4, 2021. https://www.wsws.org/en/topics/event/1619

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