Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America

by Ibram X. Kendi

She claimed that since docile Blacks made the best slaves, they made the best Christians. Since domineering Whites made the worst slaves, they made the worst Christians.

In order to become better Christians, White people must constrain their domineering temperament and end the evil outgrowth of that temperament: slavery.

Black Americans almost immediately made Uncle Tom the identifier of Black submissiveness,

Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Blacks fed up with the United States revitalized the colonization movement in the 1850s.

Antislavery societies, Delany charged, “presumed to think for, dictate to, and know better what suited colored people, than they know for themselves.”

Black male activists seemingly united in their distaste of Uncle Tom for disseminating the stereotype of the weak Black male. For some time, racist Black patriarchs had been measuring their masculinity off of the perceived controlling masculinity of White men, and they found Black masculinity to be lacking. They demanded control of Black women, families, and communities to redeem their masculinity from the “weak Black male” stereotype.

“When men oppress their fellow-men, the oppressor ever finds, in the character of the oppressed, a full justification for his oppression.”

This is “something extraordinary,” said Garrison sardonically, “that Jefferson should beget so many stupid children.”

When Henry Clay died in 1852, he became the first American to lie in state at the US Capitol.

No man was a greater enemy to Black people, William Lloyd Garrison insisted. Lincoln called Clay “my ideal of a great man.”

An Ohio Republican and a New England Whig had dissented.

Taney died the day Maryland abolished slavery in 1864).

and so far unfit that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.”

Dissenting Justice Benjamin Curtis revealed that upon the nation’s founding, Black men had possessed voting rights in at least five states—almost half the Union—sinking Taney’s argument against Black citizenship rights.

In the decades before the Civil War, race baiting had become a crucial campaign ploy, especially for the dominant Democratic Party. Douglas went on to say that America “was made by white men, for the benefit of white men and their posterity forever,”

warning that a Lincoln presidency would lead to integrated communities.

I mean in the longterm he was right. Lincoln definitely set the trajectory in that direction without intending to.

The disdain for violent Black revolutionaries lurked in the shadow of the praises for John Brown, however. Black slave rebels never became martyrs and remained madmen and madwomen.

In Principles of Biology in 1864, Spencer coined the iconic phrase “survival of the fittest.”

“nature versus nurture,”

Galton urged governments to rid the world of all naturally unselected peoples, or at least stop them from reproducing, a social policy he called “eugenics” in 1883.

South Carolina, the only state with a Black majority.

With their financial investments in the institution of slavery and their dependence on its productivity, northern lenders and manufacturers were crucial sponsors of slavery. And so, they pushed their congressmen onto their compromising knees to restore the Union.

Alexander Stephens, responded to Lincoln’s pledge in an extemporaneous speech. The Confederate government, he declared, rested “upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.” This “great… truth,” Stephens said, was the “corner-stone” of the Confederacy. The speech became known as his “Cornerstone Speech.”

There have always been individual truths to support every generalized racist lie. It is true that some Black opportunists sought favor if slavery persisted by supporting the Confederate cause. It is true that some starving free Blacks supported the rebels for lifesaving provisions. It is true that Black racists who believed that Black people were better off enslaved sometimes voluntarily aided the Confederacy. The number of voluntary Black Confederates? Probably not many. But no one can say for sure.

No matter what Lincoln did not say about slavery, and no matter what blame the Democrats put on abolitionists, to Black people and to abolitionists the Civil War was over slavery and enslavers were to blame.

“Let us see, in every slave, Jesus himself,”

First dozens, then hundreds, then thousands of runaways fled to Union forces in the summer of 1861. But Union soldiers enforced the Fugitive Slave Act with such an iron fist that, according to one Maryland newspaper, more runaways were returned in three months of the war “than during the whole of Mr. Buchanan’s presidential term.”

the Confiscation Act over the objections of Democrats and border-state Unionists. Lincoln reluctantly signed the bill, which said that slaveholders forfeited their ownership of any property, including enslaved Africans, used by the Confederate military. The Union could confiscate such people as “contraband.” Legally, they were no longer enslaved; nor were they freed. They could, however, work for the Union Army for wages and live in the abysmal conditions of the contraband camps. One out of every four of the 1.1 million men, women, and children in the contraband camps died in one of the worst public health disasters in US history. Only 138 physicians were assigned to care for them. Some physicians called contrabands “animals” and blamed their mass deaths on inherent Black debilities, not the extreme inadequacies of sanitation, food, and medical care.

The growing number of runaways proved that Confederate reports of contented captives was mere propaganda. This form of Black resistance—not persuasion—finally started to eradicate the racist idea of the docile Black person in northern minds.

Some of the Confederate deserters joined enslaved Africans to wage revolts against their common enemies: wealthy planters.

“The fact is,” Jones wrote in a secret antiracist circular, referring to the rich planters, that “these bombastic, highfalutin aristocratic fools have been in the habit of driving negroes and poor helpless white people until they think… that they themselves are superior; [and] hate, deride and suspicion the poor.”

the Second Confiscation Act, passed and sent to Lincoln on July 17. The bill declared all Confederate-owned Africans who escaped to Union lines or who resided in territories occupied by the Union to be “forever free of their servitude.”

Lincoln had finally opened up to the idea of proclaiming emancipation because it would save the Union (not because it would save Black people).

It was not their color that made “their presence here intolerable,” Garrison declared. It was “their being free!”

“My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery,” Lincoln replied

“If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do that. What I do about slavery, and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union.”

In his Message to Congress on December 1, 1862, Lincoln laid out a more detailed plan for gradual, compensated emancipation and colonization. Any slave state could remain or return to the Union if it pledged loyalty and a willingness to abolish slavery at any time before January 1, 1900. The US government would compensate such states for freeing their human property, but if they decided to reintroduce or tolerate enslavement, they would have to repay the emancipation compensation.

By the end of 1863, 400,000 Black people had escaped their plantations and found Union lines,

The Black-owned San Francisco Pacific Appeal detested this “halfway measure,” insisting that “every bondsman” should have been emancipated, and “every chain… broken.”

“negro, having shed his blood in defense of the country, has the right to regard it as his country. And hence deportation or forced colonization is henceforth out of the question.”

Lincoln addressed them, urging them to “improve yourself, both morally and intellectually,” while supporting Maryland’s new constitution, which prevented them from improving themselves socioeconomically. Maryland’s constitution barred Blacks from voting and from attending public schools. The constitution also sent thousands of Black children into long-term indentures to their former masters, against their parents’ objections. Lincoln seemed to follow in the footsteps of Thomas Jefferson. Pay lip service to the cause of Black uplift, while supporting the racist policies that ensured the downfall of Black people.

Slavery meant “receiving by irresistible power the work of another man, and not by his consent,”

Freedom was “placing us where we could reap the fruit of our own labor.” To accomplish this—to be truly free—we must “have land.”

Black people all over the South were saying this to Union officials: Do not abolish slavery and leave us landless. Do not force us to work for our former masters and call that freedom.

White settlers on government-provided land were deemed receivers of American freedom; Black people, receivers of American handouts.

“Slavery is dead,” announced the Cincinnati Enquirer. “The negro is not, there is our misfortune.”

“No Reconstruction without Negro Suffrage.”

“If you call this Freedom,” a Black veteran asked, “what do you call Slavery?”

It had always been amazing to enslaved people how someone could lounge back, drink lemonade, and look out over their fields, and call the bent-over pickers lazy.

“We used to support ourselves and our masters too when we were slaves and I reckon we can take care of ourselves now.”