Anemone's Notes on Chapter Five

The Arrival of Africans and the Descent into Slavery

This chapter begins with an interesting summary of the brilliant African-American historian John Hope Franklin’s work that documents the historical fact that Africans were members of the crews of many of the earliest Spanish and Portuguese ships that explored the New World in the 15^th and 16^th centuries.   Hope also noted that “Negroes did not accompany the English on their explorations in the New World”.  The contrast between the English and the Iberian experience with Africans is again made here, as is the point that the role of Africans in the exploration of the New World has been mostly ignored by mainstream (=white) historians.

Francis Drake’s experience with the “Cimarrons” of Central America suggests that the earliest interactions between the English and Africans were not yet marked by the ideology of race and racism, and the historian Winthrop Jordan similarly argues that the English did not, at first, “prejudge(d) the Negro as a slave”.   Africans were different in many ways, in both biological and cultural traits, but “the earliest records do not suggest the more virulent image of savagery that was to come much later”.  But the English were quick studies and, following the example of 100 years of Spanish and Portuguese enslavement of Indians and Africans, they “showed little reluctance to ultimately accept Africans as slaves”.

The First Africans

The first African laborers were sold to the inhabitants of Jamestown in 1619 by a passing Dutch trading vessel.  In the coming decades Africans began to appear in New England and other parts of the colonies.  With the development of the tobacco industry in the late 17^th century, a steady stream of African workers and servants began to appear.  It seems clear that at this early stage, before slavery had been formalized into the legal structure of the colonies, African servants/laborers are better considered to have been indentured servants than slaves.  Beginning in the latter part of the 17^th century, economic, legal, and social changes began to harden the status of Africans into permanent chattel slavery.  See the last paragraph in this section (p. 97) for a nice summary of these changes and the role they played in the social construction of race.

The Descent into Permanent Slavery

Many historians have debated which came first: racism or slavery?  Both sides have interesting arguments.  Carl Degler and Winthrop Jordan are two of the prominent proponents of the position that the English were predisposed to be racist towards Africans even before they practiced the enslavement of Africans.  Jordan especially argues on the basis of linguistics, suggesting that language predisposed English towards racism.  Other historians argue that from an originally ambiguous position, the status of Africans in the New World gradually but inexorably deteriorated as the institution of slavery developed in the late 17^th and early 18^th centuries.  See Gary Nash’s description of “the descent into slavery” on p. 102.

Was There Race Before Slavery?

Jordan’s and Degler’s arguments for the origins of racism prior to slavery are critiqued in this section in the work of several historians.  Fredrickson finds little evidence that Africans were treated any differently from white servants before 1680.  Much historical evidence seems to support this position, that racism was not significant prior to the development of the institution of slavery.  Much evidence exists to suggest that intermarriage was common among the lower social classes during this period.  Free blacks were more similar in many respects to free whites of the same social class than to blacks of lower classes.  Smedley clearly sums up the argument in the last paragraph of this section on page 105, in which she supports the idea that racial antipathy was not in evidence in the late 17^th century, before the systematization of chattel slavery.

Why the Preference for Africans?

Classical reasons to enslave people in the ancient world did not really apply to Africans, so historians have asked why were Africans enslaved? Africans were neither taken as prisoners in war, not did they have land that the Europeans coveted.  They were usually agriculturalists with many trade specializations, rather than being nomadic herders.  They were of course heathens, but in all these other respects, they don't necessarily fit the mold of typical candidates to be enslaved. So why were they preferred as slaves?  The question is posed in this section, and answered in the next after stating that the answer “is complex and perhaps best understood in the broadest historical context, encompassing economic and material explanations along with those cultural and historical variables that are so important in human lives but, under recent trends in scholarship, are much too often ignored.

The Problem of Labor

The English needed labor to work the “abundance of rich lands” they were attempting to expand into, and the Indian population was “insufficient and ineffective as slaves”. So they turned to the poor and criminal classes from Britain, especially Catholics.  Vagabonds, destitutes, and convicts formed the ranks of the indentured servants, who were treated terribly but at least their term of service was not indefinite (or inheritable).  The historian Theodore Allen’s work is heavily cited in this section in arguing that the “chattelization” of English labor “constituted an essential precondition of the emergence of the subsequent lifetime chattel bond servitude imposed upon African-American laborers”.  Slavery was seen as a cheaper solution to European indentured servitude as more and more Europeans outlived their period of servitude and became free.  The growth of this unruly class with few opportunities for advancement in society led to social unrest, and to a very dangerous situation where white and black servant realized common interests: Bacon’s Rebellion of 1676 being an exemplar.  See what most frightened the planters at the bottom of page. 109 and the quote from Allen on the top of p. 110.  Other reasons that Africans were preferred as slaves…unfamiliarity with the country, linguistic and cultural differences, physical differences, immunity to Old World diseases, familiarity with agriculture. For all these reasons they were cheaper and easier to enslave than other Europeans or Indians.

A Focus on Physical Differences and the Invention of Social Meanings

Theodore Allen’s very important 2 volume The Invention of the White Race is discussed in this section.  Allen argues that the institution of slavery and its application to only those with black skin for the first time allowed white Europeans of all social classes to identify a set of common interests in distinction to those of blacks.  In this way, poor and lower class whites began to identify with rich, upper class whites and to eschew connections or sympathies with other down-trodden members of society with whom they did not share skin color.  Blacks deserved their slave status because they were heathens and inferior to whites, and in this way the social meanings of racial differences began to be formalized.  Allen argues that this new racial ideology functioned as a “social control mechanism”…”by dividing the laboring class along color lines, by allocating privileges and rights to poor European freemen, and by abrogating the rights of Negroes and by relegating them to permanent bondage, the bourgeois plantation owners diminished the possibility of the kind of “class warfare” that Bacon’s Rebellion had portended”.   Thus was born a racial consciousness that linked white people, poor and rich, laborers and landowners that, in effect, “created” the white race.