analysis of slavery

8/22/2019 Analysis of Slavery

1/15

Rethinking the "Unthinking Decision":Old Questions and New Problemsin the History of Slavery and Racein the Colonial South

By REBECCA ANNE GOETZ

I N RECENT DECADES, HISTORIANS OF EARLY NORTH AMERICA HAVEexplored the em ergence of the institution of black chattel slavery. Theyhave also investigated ideas of heritable physical differences and infe-riorities that justified and defended slavery concepts that modernshave called race. Chattel slavery and race were critical to the forma-tion of the Atlantic colonial enterprise, even as they were simulta-neously the products of it. Unsurprisingly, given the importance of thetopic, the mechanism s by which both slavery and race became so firmlyentrenchedho w, when, where, and why remain hotly debated ques-tions. The outpouring of scholarship on these questions reveals aston-ishing regional variations in slavery and in the experiences of enslavedpeople, as well as the chronologically and geographically uneven devel-opment of racial ideologies. The resulting profusion of scholarship isboth exciting in its complexity and daunting in its numbers. This isespecially true of the region encompassing today's United States South,where understanding slavery and race has been critical to understand-ing the antebellum South and the so-called New South of the post-Civil War period, yet those nineteenth-century experiences cannot beconveniently applied to comprehending the sixteenth, seventeenth, andeighteenth centuries. In addition, the very complexity of the colonialSouth's experiences of slavery and race is difficult to assess syntheti-cally, especially in the context of three European colonial powers, vig-orous Indian groups, and free and enslaved blacks.

The historiographical problem of slavery and race in the colonialSouth is in part numerical: scholarly interest in human bondage grewsteadily throughout the first half of the twentieth century, exploded


2/15

600 T H E J O U R N A L O F S O U T H E R N H I S T O R Y1,500 titles annually, and at the moment the database contains approxi-mately 25,000 items. Even though not all of these entries deal withAtlantic slavery from 1500 to 1800, the sheer profusion of availableresearch is overwhelming, making it difficult for historians of slav-ery to construct a coherent whole out of the thousands of fragments ofknowledge available.' Scholars continually add to what we know byreaddressing old questions, finding new evidence, turning new meth-odologies on familiar evidence, and asking entirely new questions.Indeed, sometimes it seems as if we know too much about race andslavery, rather than too little.

The appearance in 1998 of two synthetic works brought order outof chaos for historians of North American slavery. Ir Berlin's ManyT housands Gone: The First T w o Centuries of Slavery iri N orth A mericatracked the developm ent of slavery and the experience of enslaved blacksin four comers of British North Am erica (the North, the Chesapeake, theLowcountry, and the lower Mississippi Valley) across three temporaldivisions that Berlin labeled charter generations, plantation generations,and revolutionary generations. Berlin also concluded that the conceptof race itself was a product of slavery: "the slaveholders' explanationof their own domination generally took the form of racial ideologies."Philip D . Morgan's Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture iri the E ighteenth-Century C hesapeake and L ow country focused on two plantation regionsof the British American South, comparing each region's geography,environment, and demographics to outline the processes by whichblack cultures formed and reformed in the early South. Morgan alsonoted the early fluidity of race relations in both the Chesapeake and theLowcountry, in the early and late seventeenth century, respectively.^Berlin's and Morgan's syntheses gave scholars of slavery coherentnarratives to follow when teaching the topic (I give lectures to under-graduates using Berlin's generational schema). Yet synthesis has leftthe false impression that two core issues about the colonial history ofrace and slavery are settled: that there is scholarly consensus on theorigins of the institution of slavery itself and that th origins of theideological underpinnings of chattel slavery are clearly defined and


3/15

COMMEMORATING SEVENTY-FIVE YEARS 601understood as products of the Enlightenment and eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century experiences. The books shared the Bancroft Prizein 1999, a sign of how seriously Americanists took both the books'synthetic approaches and their conclusions. More than a decade later,however, the questions of the origins of race and slavery continue toexcite scholars, who are offering new and different solutions to these oldproblems. The question of origins has two separate but related spheres:one pertaining to the origins of slavery and the other to the origins ofrace. I will consider them first separately and then together.

When Oscar and Mary F . Handlin fired the opening salvo in 1950 inwhat came to be known as the origins debate, they made the startlingclaim that blacks in the English colonies were not initially slaves forlife and legally were probably treated in most instances as indenturedservants. Virginia blacks lived in a world where unfree labor of variouskinds was normal and expected; indeed, the Handlins argued, the wordslave merely connoted "a low form of servant." The transformation torecognizable chattel slavery took place in the last quarter of the sev-enteenth century, when "[c]olor . . . emerged as the token of the slavestatus."^ That chattel slavery was not in and of itself an immediate fea-ture ofthe Am erican South became a widely accepted view, though his-torians debated the particulars. W inthrop D. Jordan famously labeled themove to black chattel slavery an "unthinking decision" predicated ondeeply embedded English racism that responded almost automaticallyto the tobacco planters' dire need for labor. In Jordan's model, slav-ery in Virginia solidified after 1660. In contrast, Anthony S. Paren t Jr.has argued that the legal construction of institutionalized slavery wasthe result of deliberate, premeditated moves on the part of Englishplanters in Virginiahardly an "unthinking decision.'"* Historians havewavered between these two poles of thought, assigning various degreesof premeditation and varying timelines in the move to black chattelslavery, with Virginia and Maryland remaining the preferred labora-tories for examining the problem.^ Gradual transformation remains an

' Oscar and Mary F. Handlin, "Origins of the Southern Labor System," William and MaryQuarterly, 3rd ser., 7 (April 1950), 199-222 (first quotation on 206; second quotation on 216).* Winthrop D. Jordan, White over Black: American A ttitudes Toward the Negro, 550-1812


4/15

602 T H E J O U R N A L O E S O U T H E R N H I S TO R Yaccepted part of the standard explanation for the emergence of chattelslavery, and most scholars would agree that Virginians committed toslavery sometime between 1660 and 1690.Berlin's synthesis adopted a formulation similar to the Hand lins' earlyview: Berlin's charter generations included a group of people he referredto as "Atlantic creles": black men and wom en who used the fluidity ofslavery and the "blurred racial lines" of the period prior to 16 75 to nego-tiate lives as free people in a land not yet dependent on chattel slavery.''An exemplar of the Atlantic crele was Emanuel Driggus, who, thoughprobably considered enslaved when he first appeared in Virginia'scounty court records in 1645, eventually bought his freedom, married anEnglishwom an, and thrived for a brief time in the 16 50s and 166 0s as aplanter on Virginia's Eastern Shore. Driggus and other members ofthefree black community on the Eastern Shore such as Anthony Johnson,Francis Payne, and Tony Longo offer historians an attractive scenariofor a past that might have been a colonial South not dependent on chat-tel slavery and in which slavery played only an incidental role.''

Yet that alternate past, no matter how appealing it might be to asociety that now wants to think of itself as postracial, did not come topass. Emanuel Driggus himself was not living independently in his lastappearances in the Northampton County court records; he was deeplyin debt and listed as a tithable on John C ustis 's 1674 tax list, suggestingthe possibility of some form of reenslavement for an elderly man whohad fought to maintain his freedom and that of his farhily.* Driggus'sstruggles coincided with the Chesapeake region's growing attachmentto plantation agriculture, England's headlong plunge ihto the transat-lantic slave trade, and the declining flow of indentured migrants fromEngland, which when combined with the political and social upheavalsof Bacon 's Rebellion (16 75-16 76 ) led to a late-seventeenth- and early-eighteenth-century boom in the slave trade and a new commitment'Berl in, Many Thousands Gone, 2 9. Some recent work has questioned the validity ofth e ideaof the Atlantic crele. See, for example, James H. Sweet, "African Identity and Slave Resistancein the Portuguese Atlantic," in Peter C. Mancall, ed., T he A tlantic World an d Virginia, 1550-1624(Chapel Hill , 20 07), 2 2 5 ^ 7 , esp. 246 .'O n Emanuel D riggus, see Deeds, Orders, and Wills, III, May 2 7, 16 45, folio (hereinafterfol.) 82 ; Orde rs, VII, Octob er 1, 16 6 1, fol. 113; and Orders , V ll, April 2, 166 2, fol. 116, all in


5/15

COMMEMORATING SEVENTY-FIVE YEARS 603on the part of planters to chattel slavery. This is the conventionallyaccepted historical wisdom that has emerged through vigorous schol-arly conversation on the origins of slavery in Virginia.So powerful is this viewpoint that many historians would contendthat there is little left to say on the origins of slavery in Virginiascholars seem to agree on the broad outlines and currently are contestingonly the details of the narrative. Forthcoming work by John C. Coom bs,though, suggests that the gradualist explanations for the emergence ofslavery in Virginia have been based on limited evidence. Employinga systematic study of probate and land records culled from the deeds,orders, and wills held in Virginia's county court records. Coombs pro-poses that historians view the "transformation of the colony's laborforce as a complex process, with multiple phases and significant sub-regional diversity, in which the timing and extent of investments inslave labor varied widely according to wealth, location, and economicneed." Coombs's interpretation of the data suggests that a significantnumber of Virginia gentry owned enslaved blacks by 1650 and thatby 1670 Virginia's planter elite had thoroughly accepted slaverytheoft-recounted ructions of the late seventeenth century had nothing todo with it. Coombs argues that politically powerful English plantersapproached the grim work of making slavery with malice aforethoughtand much earlier than historians have previously recognized. The earlyflexibility experienced by Berlin's Atlantic crelessuch as EmanuelDrigguswas probably possible only on the Eastern Shore. Historians,Coombs writes, have "aggressively extrapolated" misguided conclu-sions from the unusual experiences of Afro-Virginians like Driggus.'^Coombs's conclusions will not only remake the origins debate but alsogive it surprising new life.

The new findings may also fuel the obsession early Americanistsseem to have with using Chesapeake evidence to pose and answer ques-tions about slavery in the colonial South (I include myself in the numberof Virginia enthusiasts). Virginia has remained the standard labora-tory for works on the institutionalization of slavery in the early South,in part because Virginia has the longest written history (in English)of any southern colony and because it has a surfeit of documentary


6/15

604 T H E J O U R N A L O F S O U T H E R N H I ST O R Yevidence that can be mined to answer fundamental questions about theorigins and nature of slavery (as Coombs's work aptly demonstrates).But Virginia's centrality in the origins debate also deflects attentionfrom other areas of the colonial South and other experiences of slavery,most especially those of enslaved Indians. i

Enslavement of Tidewater Algonquians, the remnants of Po whatan 'speople, was not lawful in Virginia. The Virginia General Assemblyrepeatedly attested that it was illegal to enslave the colony's nativepopulation, and it also insisted that its laws on Indian indenture, whichlimited the time of servitude allowable for T idewater Indians, be strictlyfollowed.'"Though the legisla ture's continued protestations indicate thatsuch laws were probably frequently and flagrantly violated, Virginia'sstatus as the place to study early slavery and the paucity of sourceson enslaved Indians there have meant that Indian slavery has playedlittle or no role in the origins debate. Though all aspects of black chat-tel slavery are currently objects of intense scholarly scrutiny in south-ern history, the participation of native people in slavery and the slavetrade, both as beneficiaries and as victims, has only recently attractedthe attention it deserves. In order to fully comprehentl the extent ofIndian enslavement, historians involved in the origins debate will haveto broaden its scope to explicitly include Indians and will need to m ovethe scholarly laboratories south of the Chesapeake.

Beriin's and Morgan's synthetic works of 1998 address slaveryalmost exclusively as a black phenomenon, and generally when schol-ars think about slavery, they think about enslaved blacks. Yet recentwork suggests that south of Virginia, Indian enslavement rather thanblack enslavement was the rule. Alan Gallay 's T he Indian S lave Trade:T he R ise of the English E mpire in the A merican S outh, 1670-1717(2002) brings Indian enslavement in Carolina into sharp focus. Gallayargues that Indian slavery was essential to the geopolitics of the Southand that the institution was critical to the establishment of Great Britainas the premier colonial power there. The slave trade was also the deter-mining factor in Anglo-Indian relationships, and it secured Britisheconomic power in the region. The Indian slave trade, Gallay reports,caught up as many as 51,000 Indians during the years of its operation,


7/15

COMMEMORATING SEVENTY-FIVE YEARS 605people than it imported." (Some of these enslaved Indians wereexported to Virginia, whe re. Coombs argues, they helped make up laborshortfalls during the 1670s; Indian enslavement was legal for nonlocalIndians.'^) The demographic situation was similar in Louisiana, whichrelied on small numbers of Indian slaves and no African slaves early inthe eighteenth century.'^ Indian enslavem ent w as foundational for earlySouth Carolina (and for Louisiana) in a way that it was not for Virginia,suggesting the necessity of reexamining the origins debate in light ofthe late-seventeenth-century Carolina experience. Since understandingslavery is intrinsic to understanding the American experience, histori-ans must recognize that many different peoples were ensnared in theslave trade and that in the Southeast, slavery's beginnings were not anexclusively black phenomenon.Thinking about the Indian slave trade also brings two other, relatedproblems into sharp relief. First, the study of the origins of slavery isundoubtedly enhanced and transformed by understanding the role thatthe Spanish and the French played in the colonial Southeast. Indeed,Gallay argues that the presence of the Spanish and the French con-sistently enhanced the power of southeastern Indians vis--vis theEnglish. In thinking about slavery, southern historians have a regretta-ble tendency to concentrate on Anglophone sources, yet paying stricterattention to the interaction of the three imperial powers in the Gulf ofMexico might illuminate the origins debate in interesting and reveal-ing ways. How and when did slavery begin in the Southeast? How didthe experience of enslavement and the slave trade under Spanish andFrench authority differ from that under English control? If scholarsapplied Coombs's method of close examination of elites to Carolina,what would we learn about the practice and timing of enslavement?Moreover, how did enslaved people, Indian and black alike, negotiateaccess to freedom? It may be that although Ira Berlin's synthetic cat-egory of the Atlantic crele has been consistently and perhaps convinc-ingly called into question for Virginia, it may have more currency whenapplied to the Southeast. Spanish Florida boasted large communities offree. Christianized blacks; perhaps the Afro-Virginian Atlantic creleEmanuel Driggus had more in common with the residents of Gracia


8/15

606 T H E J O U R N A L O F S O U T H E R N H I ST O R YReal de Santa Teresa de Mose than he did with blacks on the Virginiamainland.'"

The second problem relates to the nature of slavery in the IndianSoutheast. Europeans were able to take advantage of preexisting formsof involuntary servitude employed by Indians there. These forms ofslavery did not have the capitalist content of European slavery, andIndians were not dependent on enslaved rivals for labor; however,indigenous slavery served as a sign of status for captors and signaledthe importance of kinship ties. Europeans stepped into this atmosphereand were able to quickly excite interest in the notion of human bodies asvaluable commodities and gain Indian participation in the trade.'' Thiswas true of not only the Southeast but also west of Louisiana into Texasand the vast, poorly controlled Spanish province of New M exico . JamesF . Brooks, in Captives and Cousins: Slavery, Kinship, and Communityin the Southwest Borderlands (2002), argues for the existence of anindigenous slavery that was not unlike that of the Southeast: it was noteconom ically vital, but it was widely employed to enhance the status ofwarriors and captors. Captives were often absorbed into their new soci-eties, both indigenous and Spanish New Mexican, through the mecha-nisms of kinship, becoming "agents of conflict, conciliation, and culturalredefinition." Though the Southwest's slave system was, unlike theSoutheast's, largely isolated from the Atlantic slave economy. Brookswrites that "[t]o explore this region's slave economy is to complicateand enrich our understanding of North Am erican slavery."""

How might the nature of the origins debate change if it took intoaccount slavery across the South, broadly defined? When viewed fromthe vantage point of New Mexico, Virginia slavery begins to lookincreasingly exceptional. Juliana Barr has suggested that examiningslavery with a continental perspective makes the black chattel slaveryof the eighteenth-century Southeast appear anomalous.'' ' Indeed, if weaccept Brooks's challenge to complicate our understanding of NorthAmerican slavery, we are left with the sense that the two regions forwhich we know the most about slavery, Virginia and Carolina, werequite different from the rest of the continent. Their slavery modelbecame the dominant one in the antebellum United States South, but


9/15

COMMEMORATING SEVENTY-FIVE YEARS 607in the two centuries before the American Revolution, their slave sys-tems were precariously situated on a continent where other forms ofslavery and other assumptions about unfree labor predominated. Partof this exceptionalism might lie in Virginia's and Carolina's proximityto the Caribbean and their close ties to the Atlantic economy, althoughJohn Coombs suggests that Virginia's seventeenth-century Caribbeanconnections have been overemphasized.'^ Moreover, French Louisianacertainly was an active participant in the Atlantic economy withoutdeveloping a slave system that resembled that of Virginia or Carolina(indeed, slavery as we know it did not flourish there until after theLouisiana Purchase). When one takes a continental perspective, Indianslavery seems to have been the norm in New France as well: 55 percentof eighteenth-century New France's 1,200 or so enslaved people wereIndians (many of them Pawnees captured and sold to tbe French afterconflicts on the Great Plains).'^ Slavery was not just an Atlantic matterbut also a continental phenomenon.

Also requiring a broad perspective is the question of how Europeanplanters justified slavery ideologically. Where did the idea of "race"come from? Winthrop Jordan has argued that even prior to their NewWorld experiences, the English broadly conceived of themselves assuperior to Africans. The English, Jordan wrote, saw blackness as acolor deeply associated with evil, which predisposed them to form racialideologies. Yet others have taken the opposite position, contending thatracial ideologies did not come into being until after the slave systemwas firmly entrenched. Slavery and the slave trade were the productsof economic necessity, and Europeans later turned to race as an exp lan-atory scheme for a system they had already designed. In 1996 IvanHannaford surveyed the intellectual history of Western Europe, con-cluding that a firm idea of race, meaning "the biological transmissionof innate qualities," was not in place among Europeans until the lateeighteenth or the early nineteenth century. In other words, race was amodern idea based on a scientific understanding of heredity that had lit-tle place in the story of European colonization of the New World.^ The

'"Coombs, "Beyond the 'Origins Debate."'" Peter Moogk, Ixi Nouvelle F rance: The Making of French CanadaA Cultural History (East


10/15

608 T H E J O U R N A L O F S O U T H E R N H I ST O R Y \I

two positions thus represent the chicken-and-egg nature of the schol-arly debate: which came first, slavery or race? Did planters first insti-tutionalize slavery and then create race to justify the inhuman qualitiesof bondage, or did preexisting ideas of race lead to slavery?The circularity of argum ents regarding race and slavery constitutes adifferent kind of origins deba te: from whence cam e that singularly dam-aging idea of race? As with the origins of slavery, Virginia has been his-torians' favorite place to examine the emergence of race. For Virginia,Alden T. Vaughan has suggested a point of agreement aniong historianswho study the issue: that English planters exhibited sonie signs of rac-ist beliefs about blacks in the seventeenth century but that full-fledgedracial ideologies did not emerge until later.^' Virginia's Wealth of writ-ten resources offers again in this instance both the curse of uncertaintyand the hope of salvation. Virginia's black population remained smallprior to the 1660s and 1670s, and much of the evidence advanced toshow planters' racial ideologies (or lack thereof) is suggestive ratherthan conclusive. Yet the basic question remains: when did Virginia'sEnglish planters express their reservations about blacks in terms histo-rians can positively identify as racial rather than as ethijocentric? Thequestion matters because it can help scholars understand the nature ofearly modem ideas about difference and how those ideas did (or per-haps did not) contribute to the Atlantic system of slavery. As with theproblem of the origins of slavery, the scholarly dialogue is more helpfulwhen viewed from beyond the confines of Virginia, in an Atlantic con-text populated by Europeans, Indians, and Africans.

If Europeans did not have a coherent racial ideology from whichthey constructed their slave systems, then what did Europeans thinkabout bodily difference? James H. Sweet's exploration of the Iberianexperience of race following the Reconquista concludes that "[b]iologi-cal assumptions that were familiar to a nineteenth-century Cuban slave-owner would have been recognizable to his fifteenth-century Spanishreach a different co nclusion on this point, however, finding w idespread evid ence of suspicion andcontempt for Africans. See Vaughan and Vaughan, "Before Othello: Elizabetlian Representationsof Sub-Saharan Africans," ibid., 19^4 . For opposing positions, see Robin Blackburn, T he Makingof N ew W orid S lavery: Erom the Baroque to the Modem , 1492-1800 (London, 1997), 329. The


11/15

COMMEMORATING SEVENTY-FIVE YEARS 609counterpart." The claim is startling, because it supposes a Europeanunderstanding of race before there was a modern vocabulary to describethe phenom enon. Sweet argues thatlberian racial idiom only strengthenedthrough slavery.^^ Though Sweet confnes his analysis to views ofAfricans in the Iberian Atlantic, the idea of "racism before race" is apowerful indicator of European ideas of bodily difference. Joyce E.Chaplin also fnds the presence of racial idiom in the English encounterwith Indians in North America. Observing rampant Indian death fromEuropean disease, the English began to describe their bodily superi-ority to Indians as a way of justifying their occupation of the landEnglish bodies were better suited to North America than Indian bodies.Chaplin notes that these descriptions "gestured toward racial identifi-cations of the body" without being a fully developed ideology.^^ Suchinchoate racial thinking, while lacking the pseudoscientific sophistica-tion of racial ideologies in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth cen-turies, changed to fit the circumstances Europeans encountered in theNew Worid. Sweet and Chaplin suggest that rather than approachingthe problem of race as a chicken-and-egg conundrum, scholars shouldexamine the ways in which interactions among Europeans, Indians, andAfricans shaped and were shaped by nascent ideas of race.

How, then, did "racism before race" assist in the construction of anotion of hereditary suitability for dispossession and/or lifelong enslave-ment? If race grew from protobiological assumptions about the natureof heredity and lineage that were employed to defne and describeAfricans' and Indians' permanent inferiority to Europeans, then under-standing what those assumptions were and how they acted upon emer-gent racial ideologies and the concomitant construction of slavery willserve scholars well. Some historians have turned to examining dis-courses of class, gender, and power to explain the emergence of andchange in ideas of race. There is consensus on the role that Europeancultural definitions of gender and, among the English especially, res-ervations about interracial sexual activity and marriage played in con-structing and maintaining racial boundaries over the long seventeenthcentury. Gendered systems of slavery and race seem to have been mutu-ally reinforcing: as slavery became legally codifed, legislators enacted


12/15

610 T H E J O U R N A L O F S O U T H E R N H I S T O R Yalso be slaves. In other words, gender and race constructed one anotherin an intricate dance that took place over several generations.^" But evenas historians have exam ined gender ideologies and their effects on race,they have overlooked or subordinated to gender and class o ther culturalfactors that also contributed to making racial ideologies.

This is especially true of religion. Early modem Europeans viewedtheir world through the lens of their religious beliefs even more thantheir notions of gender; their worldviews were based to a certain ex tenton religious conflict between Catholics and Protestants and on suspi-cions of non-Christians. The encounter with Indians and Africans con-stituted a clash of different religious outlooks: the certainty of EuropeanCatholics and Protestants collided with the relativism and syncretismof Indians and Africans.^' What role did religion play in constructingracial ideologies in the Americas? European religious beliefs affectedhow Europeans categorized human difference and how they ascribeddifference to inherited characteristics. The large and growing litera-ture on the curse of Cham (or Ham) offers evidence of how Europeansexplained both different skin colors and the cultural diffrences amongEuropeans, Indians, and Africans. The biblical Noah's sons, Shem,Cham, and Japhet, were the progenitors of modem humans, accord-ing to Genesis. Conventional wisdom held that Japhet was the ancestorof Europeans, Shem (Sem) was the ancestor of Semitic peoples, andCham, who, according to some interpretations of Genesis, had beencursed with blackness and perpetual servitude by his father, was theancestor of Africans. (There was a heated dispute as to the origins ofIndians: were they Japhetan or Sem itic?) Thus, in debates over the con-struction of Noacbic genealogies, Europeans began to define humandifference as sanctioned by scripture, even as the Bible seemed to alsopoint to the common ancestry and therefore the common humanity ofEuropeans, Indians, and Africans.^*^ Sixteenth-, seventeenth-, and eveneighteenth-century ideas of race were not monolithic; rather, race wasan oft-disputed construct in the Atlantic world, and Christian belief and

^^ Morgan, Laboring Women; Brown, Good Wives. N asty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs;Kirsten Fischer, Suspect Relations: Sex. Race, and Resistance in Colonial North Carolina (Ithaca,


13/15

COMMEMORATING SEVENTY-FIVE YEARS 611biblical exegesis simultaneously resisted and reinforced the emergenceof race.

As Colin Kidd has put it, not only was race a "Scripture problem,"but also it is unsurprising that "the dominant feature of western culturallifeChristianityshould have exerted an enormous influence on its[race 's] articulation." Christianity was a factor in both the constructionand the mitigation of raceChristianity's effects were varied and oftencontradictory, yet few European commentators could convincinglyaddress the obvious problems of human difference in the seventeenthand eighteenth centuries without referencing the Bible, entrenchedEuropean belief systems, or Noachic genealogies. Though slaveryremained, to a large extent, theologically unproblematic until the emer-gence ofthe abolitionist movement at the end ofthe eighteenth century,Christian believers, according to Kidd, seem to have found race moredifficult to justify.^''

This piece of the problem of race demands further scholarly inquiry.Using religion as a category of analysis in the construction of race andslavery could have interesting implications for both aspects of the ori-gins debate. Far from making an "unthinking decision" to adopt theconcept of race, Europeans clearly spent a great deal of time thinkingabout race and human variety, and their competing explanations for cul-tural and physical differences among people manifested themselves inthe New World. And indeed, whatever role religion played in makingrace, it is also clear that by the early nineteenth century, religion wasbeginning to play a dual role in both justifying slavery and condem ningit. ** The patterns of proslavery Christianity and abolitionist Christianitythat are so familiar to scholars of the antebellum South have their ori-gins in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuriesanother importantreason for historians to more closely engage the complicated relation-ship between Christian belief and race.

The wealth of scholarship that has been published in the last decadeon the origins of slavery and race should provide impetus for newsynthetic scholarship. In reworking both prongs of the origins debate,this new synthesis must include continental as well as Atlantic per-spectives, while still remaining sensitive to immense geographical


14/15

612 T H E J O U R N A L O E S O U T H E R N H I ST O R Yand chronological variations in the emergence of race and slavery.Scholars are now concluding that slavery became entrenched much ear-lier than we have previously supposed, as the enduring debates aboutslavery in Virginia indicate. Even inchoate ideas of race racial idiomseemingly emerged earlier than we have thought and apparently did notrequire either institutionalized slavery or the Enlighteriment to attaintheir full articulation. The early commitment to slavery and the earlyemergence of race suggest the mutuality of both categories: they cre-ated, sustained, and justified one another in incredibly complex waysthat scholars are only just beginning to understand. By avoiding thepolarities of the origins debate, we may come to a deeper understandingof how emergent European racial ideology interacted with the institu-tion of slavery. The tragedy, though, as we know from modern his-tory, is that racial ideology has long outlasted legalized- slavery in theAmericas.


15/15

analysis of slavery

Documents