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Origins of Slavery and of Race
Contributing teacher:
Reiko Hillyer
Time period: 1600s–1700s
Point
Most Americans probably take race for granted as a fixed and eternal fact and regard slavery as simply the clearest example of American racism. Many students will be surprised to learn that historians generally agree the idea of race is a relatively modern invention. For decades, historians have been trying to identify the exact relationship between race and American slavery. Some have called this inquiry a "chicken-and-egg" debate: Which came first, slavery or racism? Or, to put it another way, was slavery the cause of white racism, or a result? It is important for students to consider what is at stake in this debate.
Eric Foner contends that the notion of race—the idea that humanity is divided by well-defined groups associated with skin color—is a modern concept that had not yet fully developed when the English began importing black Africans to the colonies as laborers. He argues that the main lines of division within humanity were thought to be civilization and barbarism, or Christianity and heathenism—and English and non-English. The English disdained all alien peoples, but this does not mean they saw all English people as equal to one another. England was a hierarchical society whose parts, it was generally believed, were justly and naturally separated into superior and inferior levels and whose members enjoyed varying degrees of freedom. We can see this exhibited in Foner's description of indentured servitude in the English colonies. However, Foner points out, Africans could be made slaves—a status that was permanent and heritable—whereas poor English people could not, because "black Africans remained outside the realm of British common law and, hence, ineligible for its protection of the individual rights that were beginning to be institutionalized in Britain." Foner claims that only after the American Revolution did the concept of race need to emerge "as an explanation for the existence of slavery in a land that proclaimed that all men were created equal." According to Foner, it was not racism but the demand for labor that led to slavery, and slavery in a democratic republic required racism as a justification.
Counterpoint
The debate over the relationship between American slavery and racial prejudice has generated a tremendous amount of scholarship in the past half century, and only a brief summary is possible here. Oscar and Mary Handlin, in a seminal article—"Origins of the Southern Labor System," William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 7 (1950): 199–222; reprinted in Oscar Handlin, Race and Nationality in American Life (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1982)—argue, as Foner does, that slavery was an afterthought of colonial development and that American racism was a result of the gradual economic and legal debasement of enslaved people, rather than the motivation for slavery. They point out that there was an abundance of "unfree" people among the English, including their colonists, and that the few Africans who arrived in the early Virginia colony held a status that was comparable to that of English indentured servants. In fact, African labor was considered less desirable in the early years of the colony than English labor. In the 1660s, however, in an attempt to attract English indentured servants to a colony that had a poor reputation and was short of labor, the Virginia legislature made terms of service as attractive as possible to English immigrants; in turn, the colony came to depend on African laborers, whom it did not need to placate and whom it could enslave for life: "Farthest removed from the English, least desired, [the African] communicated with no friends who might be deterred from following" (Race and Nationality, p. 16). Thus, the Handlins argue that the disdain of white Virginians for black people was a product, not the cause, of slavery. When Africans became fixed at the basest level of society and the need to control their labor resulted in a deterioration of their rights, Africans gradually came to be seen as an intrinsically degraded people.
Barbara Fields, in her influential article "Slavery, Race, and Ideology in the United States of America," New Left Review (May–June 1990), also argues that white Virginians had not yet developed a coherent ideology of race in the early colonial period. Like the Handlins, Fields stresses the degree of inequality among white people of English origin in the early seventeenth century in order to support the claim that Africans were neither uniquely nor inevitably bound for the deprivation of their freedom. She writes, "Whatever truths may have appeared self-evident in those days, neither an inalienable right to life and liberty nor the founding of government on the consent of the governed was among them. . . . Neither white skin nor English nationality protected servants from the grossest forms of brutality and exploitation" (102). Fields argues that the ideology of race emerged at a "discernable historical moment for rationally understandable historical reasons," and, like Foner, she identifies the American Revolution as this crucial moment: "American racial ideology is as original an invention as is the United States itself. Those holding liberty to be inalienable and holding Afro-Americans as slaves were bound to end by holding race to be a self-evident truth" (101). In their discussions of the relationship between the enslavement of African Americans and the development of American democracy, Fields and Foner echo the work of Edmund Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York: Norton, 1975). Morgan, Fields, and Foner all contend that slavery was not simply an exception to the development of democracy for white people; for the large numbers of Americans who supported the existence of slavery, the enslavement of black Africans was the very basis for the freedom of white people.
On the other hand, Winthrop Jordan, in White over Black: American Attitudes towards the Negro (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1968), emphasizes sixteenth-century travel accounts that reveal the English held a deep-seated prejudice toward Africans—on the basis of color as well as religion—before slavery began, and therefore from the very outset the English saw Africans as being particularly suited to slavery. While Foner, the Handlins, Fields, and Morgan interpret the laws of the 1660s and 1670s that codified slavery as evidence that the status of people of African descent remained fluid and ambiguous for almost fifty years, Jordan argues that such laws merely established de jure what had generally existed from the beginning of colonization. In Jordan's analysis, slavery and racial prejudice were equally a matter of cause and effect; racial prejudice predated slavery and was its crucial prerequisite.
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