race
The enslavement and racialization of Africans
Between 1660 and 1690, leaders of the Virginia colony began to pass laws and establish practices that provided or sanctioned differential treatment for freed servants whose origins were in Europe. They conscripted poor whites, with whom they had never had interests in common, into the category of free men and made land, tools, animals, and other resources available to them. African Americans and Africans, mulattoes, and American Indians, regardless of their cultural similarities or differences, were forced into categories separate from whites. Historical records show that the Virginia Assembly went to great extremes not only to purposely separate Europeans from Indians and Africans but to promote contempt on the part of whites against blacks. Recognizing the vulnerability of African labour, colonial leaders passed laws that increasingly bound Africans and their children permanently as servants and, eventually, as slaves. White servants had the protection of English laws, and their mistreatment was criticized abroad. Africans, however, had no such recourse. By 1723 even free African Americans, descendants of several generations then of free people, were prohibited from voting and exercising their civil rights. Colonial leaders thus began using the physical differences among the population to structure an inegalitarian society. In the island colonies of Barbados and Jamaica, the numbers of Irish and Indian slaves had also declined, and planters turned increasingly to Africans. Southern planters, who were in regular communication with these island communities, brought in large numbers of Africans during the 18th century and systematically developed their slave practices and laws. Christianity provided an early rationalization for permanent enslavement: Africans were heathens and slaves in their own lands; under English slavery, their souls would be saved.
The underlying reality was that their labour was needed to produce wealth for the colonies and for England’s upper classes. During the early decades of the 17th century, many Englishmen considered the Africans to be civilized. Unlike the Indians, whom they called “savages” and who were largely nomadic hunter-gatherers, the English knew the Africans in the colonies as sophisticated cultivators who understood how to grow foods and other crops in tropical soils. In this they surpassed the Irish who had been enslaved on plantations in the Caribbean; with no tradition of agriculture in tropical habitats, the Irish failed as producers of necessary goods. Some Africans were skilled metalworkers, knowledgeable about smelting, blacksmithing, and toolmaking. Many others were skilled in woodworking, weaving, pottery production, rope making, leatherwork, brick making, thatching, and other crafts.
Two additional factors made Africans more desirable as slaves: Africans were immune to Old World diseases, which caused Indians to sicken and die, and, most important, Africans had nowhere to run, unlike the Indians, who could escape from slavery into their own familiar territory. The Irish, who were also in an alien land, were perceived as unruly and violent. When they escaped, they often joined their fellow Catholics, the Spanish and the French, in conspiracies against the English.
Thus, Africans became the preferred slaves, not because of their physical differences, although such differences became increasingly important, but because they had the knowledge and skills that made it possible to put them to work immediately to develop the colonies. They were not Christian, they were vulnerable, with no legal or moral opposition to their enslavement, and, once transported to the New World, they had few options. Moreover, the supply of Africans increased as the costs of transporting them fell, and English merchants became directly involved in the slave trade.
Human rights versus property rights
Chattel slavery was not established without its critics. From the beginning, many Englishmen condemned the presence of slavery in English territories. They argued that theirs was a society of free men and of democratic institutions and that it was committed to the preservation of human rights, justice, and equality. For several hundred years, trends in English culture had been toward the expansion of human rights and the recognition of individual liberty. Slavery, many argued, was antithetical to a free society and subversive of Christian values.
Throughout the 18th century, however, another powerful value in English culture, the sanctity of property and property rights, came to dominate colonial concerns. When faced with growing antislavery arguments, planters in the southern colonies and Caribbean islands, where slavery was bringing great wealth, turned to the argument that slaves were property and that the rights of slave owners to their property were by law unquestionable and inviolable. The laws and court decisions reflected the belief that the property rights of slave owners should take precedence over the human rights of slaves.
Historians concur that the emphasis on the slave as property was a requisite for dehumanizing the Africans. Says the historian Philip D. Morgan, “The only effective way to justify slavery was to exclude its victims from the community of man.” Attitudes and beliefs about all Africans began to harden as slavery became more deeply entrenched in the colonies. A focus on the physical differences of Africans expanded as new justifications for slavery were needed, especially during the Revolutionary War period, when the rallying cry of freedom from oppression seemed particularly hypocritical. Many learned men on both sides of the Atlantic disputed the moral rightness of slavery. Opponents argued that a society of free men working for wages would be better producers of goods and services. But pro-slavery forces, which included some of the wealthiest men in America and England, soon posed what they came to believe was an unassailable argument for keeping blacks enslaved: the idea of black inferiority.
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- Top of article
- The many meanings of “race”
- “Race” as a mechanism of social division
- The difference between racism and ethnocentrism
- The history of the idea of race
- Hereditarian ideology and European constructions of race
- “Race” ideologies in Asia, Australia, Africa, and Latin America
- “Race” and the reality of human physical variation
- Modern scientific explanations of human biological variation
- The scientific debate over “race”
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