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February 18, 2021 - July 12, 2023
Indeed, Christianity would only make slaves more docile.
“The Seat” of human pigmentation “seems to be but the thin Epidermes, or outward Skin,” he wrote.
In 1661, Boyle’s council made its first formal plea to planters in Barbados, Maryland, and Virginia to convert enslaved Africans. “This Act… shall [not]… impead, restrain, or impair” the power of masters, the council made sure to note.
Missionaries endeavored to grow God’s kingdom as planters endeavored to grow profits. The marriage of Christian slavery seemed destined. But enslaved Africans balked. The vast majority of Africans in early America firmly resisted the religion of their masters. And their masters balked, too. Enslavers would not, or could not, listen to sermons to convert their slaves. Saving their crops each year was more important to them than saving souls. But of course they could not say that, and risk angering their ministers.
“make it your chief end in buying and using slaves, to win them to Christ, and save their Souls.”
As early as 1657, English Dissenter George Fox prevailed on his newly founded Religious Society of Friends, or Quakers, to convert the enslaved.
Baxter tried to argue that some kind of benevolent slavery was possible and would be helpful for African people. These assimilationist ideas of Christianizing and civilizing enslaved Africans were particularly dangerous because they gave convincing power to the idea that slavery was just and should not be resisted.
Enslavers “that buy them and use them as beasts and… neglect their souls, are fitter to be called incarnate devils than Christians.” Baxter naïvely believed there existed in bulk in the slave trade what he called a “voluntary-slave.” He tried to will into existence a world where loving masters bought voluntary slaves to save their souls.
In 1667, Virginia decreed that “the conferring of baptisme doth not alter the condition of the person as to his bondage.” New York did the same in 1664, as did Maryland in 1671.
Not many Englishmen were more knowledgeable—or less compassionate—than Locke about British colonialism and slavery. “You should feel nothing at all of others’ misfortune,” Locke advised a friend in 1670.
Assimilationists argued monogenesis: that all humans were one species descended from a single human creation in Europe’s Garden of Eden. Segregationists argued polygenesis: that there were multiple origins of multiple human species.
Ever since Europeans had laid eyes on Native Americans in 1492, a people unmentioned in the Bible, they had started questioning the biblical creation story. Some speculated that Native Americans had to have descended from “a different Adam.” By the end of the sixteenth century, European thinkers had added African people to the list of species descended from a different Adam.
Mennonites therefore circulated an antislavery petition on April 18, 1688.
The 1688 Germantown Petition Against Slavery was the inaugural antiracist tract among European settlers in colonial America. Beginning with this piece, the Golden Rule would forever inspire the cause of White antiracists.
Human hierarchies of any kind, they understood, would do little more than oppress all of humanity.
Rich planters learned from Bacon’s Rebellion that poor Whites had to be forever separated from enslaved Blacks. They divided and conquered by creating more White privileges.
they prescribed thirty lashes for any slave who lifted a hand “against any Christian” (Christian now meant White). All Whites now wielded absolute power to abuse any African person.
a group of enslaved Africans formed a “Religious Society of Negroes” in Boston. It was one of the first known organizations of African people in colonial America.
counseled by someone “wise and of English” descent, and they were not to “afford” any “Shelter” to anyone who had “Run away from their Masters.”
The Religious Society of Negroes did not last. Few Africans wanted to be Christians at that time (though that would change in a few decades). And not many masters were willing to let their captives become Christians because, unlike in other colonies, there was no Massachusetts law stipulating that baptized slaves did not have to be freed.
In the 1680s, enslaved Africans eclipsed White servants as the principal labor force. In 1698, the crown ended the Royal African Company’s monopoly and opened the slave trade. Purchasing enslaved Africans became the investment craze.
One lady inquired, “Is it possible that any of my slaves should go to heaven, and must I see them there?”
As for imported Africans, lawmakers announced, “the gross bestiality and rudeness of their manners, the variety and strangeness of their languages, and the weakness and shallowness of their minds, render it in a manner impossible to make any progress in their conversion.”
in 1701, he organized the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (SPG). King William approved, and an all-star cast of ministers signed up to become founding members of the Church of England’s first systematic effort to spread its views in the colonies.
Well known as one of the first Salem witch trial judges to publicly apologize, Sewall courageously took another public stand when he released The Selling of Joseph on June 24, 1700. “Originally, and Naturally, there is no such thing as Slavery,” Sewall wrote.
Meanwhile, the enslaved population continued to rise noticeably, which led to fears of revolts and then, in 1705, new racist codes to prevent revolts and secure human property up and down the Atlantic Coast. Massachusetts authorities forbade interracial relationships, began taxing imported captives, and, over Samuel Sewall’s objections, rated Indians and Negroes with horses and hogs during a revision of the tax code. Virginia lawmakers made slave patrols compulsory for non-slaveholding Whites; these groups of White citizens were charged with policing slaves, enforcing discipline, and guarding
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New England churches routinely gifted captives to ministers.
From their arrival around 1619, African people had illegally resisted legal slavery.
In all of the fifty suspected or actual slave revolts reported in newspapers during the American colonial era, resisting Africans were nearly always cast as violent criminals, not people reacting to enslavers’ regular brutality, or pressing for the most basic human desire: freedom.
No matter what African people did, they were barbaric beasts or brutalized like beasts. If they did not clamor for freedom, then their obedience showed they were naturally beasts of burden. If they nonviolently resisted enslavement, they were brutalized. If they killed for their freedom, they were barbaric murderers.
New York lawmakers stripped free Blacks of the right to own property, and then they denigrated “the free negroes of the colony” as an “idle, slothful people” who weighed on the “public charge.”
This form of inoculation—a precursor to modern vaccination—was an innovative practice that prevented untold numbers of deaths in West Africa and on disease-ridden slave ships to ports throughout the Atlantic. Racist European scientists at first refused to recognize that African physicians could have made such advances. Indeed, it would take several decades and many more deaths before British physician Edward Jenner, the so-called father of immunology, validated inoculation.
More fervently than any American voice since the 1680s, Mather had urged slaveholders to baptize enslaved Africans, and enslaved Africans to leave the religions of their ancestors. Moving slowly and carefully uphill, he had made strides over the years.
All of Britain’s religious, political, and economic power now united to free missionaries and planters from having to free the converted, thus reinvigorating proselytizing movements and dooming calls for manumission.
First Great Awakening around 1733. In awakening souls, passionate evangelicals like Edwards spoke about human equality (in soul) and the capability of everyone for conversion.
South Carolina authorities reprimanded Bryan. They wanted evangelists preaching a racist Christianity for submission, not an antiracist Christianity for liberation.
Hugh Bryan was an exception in the missionary days of the First Great Awakening,
Cotton Mather led the way in producing the racist idea of Christianity simultaneously subduing and uplifting the enslaved African.
normalized and rationalized the expansion of colonialism and slavery.
As America’s first great assimilationist, Cotton Mather preached that African people could become White in their souls.
James Blair, died sixteen days after Thomas’s birth, marking the end of an era when theologians almost completely dominated the racial discourse in America.
“Enlightened” thinkers started secularizing and expanding the racist discourse throughout the colonies, tutoring future antislavery, anti-abolitionist, and anti-royal revolutionaries in Thomas Jefferson’s generation.
Only the poorest of African people did not wear an upper garment, but this small number became representative in the European mind. It was the irony of the age: slave traders knew that cloth was the most desired commodity in both places, but at the same time some of them were producing the racist idea that Africans walked around naked like animals.
The slave ships traveled from Africa to the Americas, where dealers exchanged at another profit the newly enslaved Africans for raw materials that had been produced by the long-enslaved Africans. The ships and traders returned home and began the process anew, providing a “triple stimulus” for European commerce (and a triple exploitation of African people). Practically all the coastal manufacturing and trading towns in the Western world developed an enriching connection to the transatlantic trade during the eighteenth century. Profits exploded with the growth and prosperity of the slave trade
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Enlightenment intellectuals produced the racist idea that the growing socioeconomic inequities between England and Senegambia, Europe and Africa, the enslavers and enslaved, had to be God’s or nature’s or nurture’s will. Racist ideas clouded the discrimination, rationalized the racial disparities, defined the enslaved, as opposed to the enslavers, as the problem people. Antiracist ideas hardly made the dictionary of racial thought during the Enlightenment.
Carl Linnaeus, the progenitor of Sweden’s Enlightenment, followed in the footsteps of François Bernier and took the lead classifying humanity into a racial hierarchy for the new intellectual and commercial age. In Systema Naturae, first published in 1735, Linnaeus placed humans at the pinnacle of the animal kingdom. He sliced the genus Homo into Homo sapiens (humans) and Homo troglodytes (ape), and so on, and further divided the single Homo sapiens species into four varieties. At the pinnacle of his human kingdom reigned H. sapiens europaeus: “Very smart, inventive. Covered by tight clothing.
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Enslaved Africans in North America were coming mainly from seven cultural-geopolitical regions: Angola (26 percent), Senegambia (20 percent), Nigeria (17 percent), Sierra Leone (11 percent), Ghana (11 percent), Ivory Coast (6 percent), and Benin (3 percent). Since the hierarchies were usually based on which ancestral groups were thought to make the best slaves, or whose ways most resembled those of Europeans, different enslavers with different needs and different cultures had different hierarchies. Generally, Angolans were classed as the most inferior Africans, since they were priced so
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Making hierarchies of Black ethnic groups within the African kingdom can be termed ethnic racism, because it is at the intersection of ethnocentric and racist ideas, while making hierarchies pitting all Europeans over all Africans was simply racism.
Whenever a Black person or group used White people as a standard of measurement, and cast another Black person or group as inferior, it was another instance of racism.
Voltaire became the first prominent writer in almost a century daring enough to suggest polygenesis.
