Stamped From the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (15 page)

Woolman’s antiracism was ahead of its time, like his passionate sermons against poverty, animal cruelty, military conscription, and war. But Woolman’s antislavery in the 1750s and 1760s was right on time for the American Revolution, a political upheaval that forced freedom fighters of Thomas Jefferson’s generation to address their relationships with slavery.
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DR. THOMAS WALKER’S
remedies did not work, and when his patient, the forty-nine-year-old father of Thomas Jefferson, died on August 17, 1757, it was an unbelievable sight for all who had heard the family lore of Peter Jefferson’s strength. The fourteen-year-old Thomas had to run his own life. As the oldest male, he now headed the household, according to Virginia’s patriarchal creed. But by all accounts, the thirty-seven-year-old Jane Randolph Jefferson did not look to her fourteen-year-old son for guidance, or to Dr. Walker, the estate’s overseer. She became the manager of eight children, sixty-six enslaved people, and at least 2,750 acres. Jane Jefferson was sociable, fond of luxury, and meticulous about keeping the plantation’s records—traits she bestowed upon Thomas.
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In 1760, Thomas Jefferson enrolled in the College of William & Mary, where he thoroughly immersed himself in Enlightenment thought, including its antislavery ideas. He studied under the newly hired twenty-six-year-old Enlightenment intellectual William Small of Scotland, who taught that reason, not religion, should command human affairs, a lesson that would inform Jefferson’s views about government. Jefferson also read Buffon’s
Natural History
, and he studied Francis Bacon, John Locke, and Isaac Newton, a trio he later called “the three greatest men the world has ever produced.”

When Jefferson graduated in 1762, he entered the informal law school of Virginia’s leading lawyer, George Wythe, well known for his legal mind and taste for luxury. Admitted to the bar at twenty-four years old in 1767, Jefferson stepped into the political whirlwind of the House of Burgesses, representing Albemarle County like his father had. The Burgesses protested England’s latest imposition of taxes, prompting Virginia’s royal governor to close their doors on May 17, 1769. Jefferson had been seated all of ten days.
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Even after he lost his seat, Jefferson actively participated in the growing hostilities to England and to slavery. He took the freedom suit of twenty-seven-year-old fugitive Samuel Howell. Virginia law prescribed thirty years of servitude for first-generation biracial children of free parents “to prevent that abominable mixture of white man or women with negroes or mulattoes.” Howell was second generation, and Jefferson told the court that it was wicked to extend slavery, because “under the law of nature, all men are born free.” Wythe, the opposing attorney, stood up to start his rejoinder. The judge ordered Wythe back down and ruled against Jefferson. The law in the colonies was still staunchly proslavery, and racial laws were becoming staunchly segregationist. But then, suddenly, a Boston panel of judges reversed the ideological trend.
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CHAPTER 8

Black Exhibits

AS THOMAS JEFFERSON
supervised the building of his plantation near Charlottesville in October 1772, an enslaved nineteen-year-old woman up the coast gazed anxiously at eighteen gentlemen who identified publicly “as the most respectable characters in Boston.” They all had been instructed to judge whether she had actually authored her famous poetry, especially its sophisticated Greek and Latin imagery. She saw familiar faces: Massachusetts governor Thomas Hutchinson, future governor James Bowdoin, mega-slaveholder John Hancock, and Cotton Mather’s son Samuel, who is remembered as the last in the line of illustrious Mathers after Richard, Increase, and Cotton. Phillis Wheatley, the poet making her case before Samuel Mather and the other Bostonians, is now remembered as the first in the line of illustrious African American writers.
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Her enslavement story did not begin like that of many other African people. In 1761, Susanna Wheatley, the wife of tailor and financier John Wheatley, visited the newest storehouse of chained humanity in southwest Boston, not far from where Cotton Mather used to live. Captain Peter Gwinn of the
Phillis
had just arrived in Boston with seventy-five captives from Senegambia. Looking for a domestic servant, Susanna Wheatley scanned past the “several robust, healthy females” and laid her eyes on a sickly, naked little girl, covered by a dirty carpet. Some of the seven-year-old captive’s front baby teeth had come out, possibly reminding Wheatley of her seven-year-old daughter, who had died. Susanna Wheatley was mourning the ninth anniversary of Sarah Wheatley’s tragic death.
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Well before she became the most famous Black exhibit in the Western world, the young African girl was most likely purchased by Susanna and John to serve as a living reminder of Sarah Wheatley. Whatever name her Wolof relatives had given her, it was now lost to gray chains, bloody blue waters, and scribbled history. The Wheatleys renamed her after the slave ship that had brought her to them. From the beginning, Phillis Wheatley “had a child’s place,” suggested an early biographer, in the Wheatley’s “house and in their hearts.” Homeschooled, Phillis “never was looked on as a slave,” explained Hannah Mather Crocker, the granddaughter of Cotton Mather.
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About four years after her arrival, eleven-year-old Phillis jotted down her first poem in English. It was a four-line tribute to the 1764 death (from smallpox) of the seventeen-year-old daughter of the Thachers, a distinguished Puritan family. Phillis was moved to write the poem after overhearing the Wheatleys lament the tragic death of Sarah Thacher.

By age twelve, Phillis had no problem reading Latin and Greek classics, English literature, and the Bible. She published her first poem, “On Messrs. Hussey and Coffin,” in a December 1767 issue of the
Newport Mercury
. A storm had almost caused two local merchants to shipwreck off the Boston coast. The Wheatleys had one or both of the merchants over for dinner. Phillis listened intently as the merchant(s) told the story of “their narrow Escape.”

In 1767, the fifteen-year-old composed “To the University of Cambridge,” a poem that signified her longing to enter the all-White, all-male Harvard. She had already consumed the assimilationist ideas about her race that had probably been fed to her by the Wheatley family, saying, for instance, “’Twas but e’en now I left my native Shore / The sable Land of error’s darkest night.” Assimilationists were producing the racist idea of unenlightened Africa, and telling Wheatley and other Blacks that the light of America was a gift. The next year, Wheatley continued to marvel in her assimilation—and attack segregationist curse theory—in the poem, “On Being Brought from Africa to America.”

Some view our sable race with scornful eye,

“
Their coulour is a diabolical die
”,

Remember, Christians, Negros, black as Cain,

May be refin’d, and join th’ angelic train
.

In 1771, Phillis Wheatley began assembling her work into a collection, including a number of inspirational poems on the increasing tensions between Britain and colonial America in the 1760s, which became her claim to fame. The Wheatleys figured that prospective publishers and buyers would need to be assured of Phillis’s authenticity. This is why John Wheatley assembled such a powerhouse of Boston elites in 1772.
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Hardly believing an enslaved Black girl could fathom Greek and Latin, the eighteen men probably asked her to unpack the classical allusions in her poems. Whatever their questions were, Wheatley dazzled the skeptical tribunal of eighteen men. They signed the following assimilationist attestation: “We whose Names are under-written do assure the World, that the Poems specified in the following Page, were (as we verily believe) written by Phillis, a young Negro Girl, who was but a few Years since, brought an uncultivated Barbarian from Africa.”
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The Wheatleys were delighted. But even with this attestation in hand, no American publisher was willing to alienate slaveholding consumers by publishing her by now famous poems, which were entering the abolitionist literature of the Revolutionary era. Phillis Wheatley had auditioned and proven the capability of Black humanity to the assimilationist scions of Boston. But unlike the publishers, these men did not have much to lose.

PHILLIS WHEATLEY WAS
not the first so-called “uncultivated Barbarian” to be examined and exhibited. Throughout the eighteenth century’s race for Enlightenment, assimilationists galloped around seeking out human experiments—“barbarians” to civilize into the “superior” ways of Europeans—to prove segregationists wrong, and sometimes to prove slaveholders wrong. As trained exotic creatures in the racist circus,
Black people could showcase Black capacity for Whiteness, for human equality, for something other than slavery. They could show they were capable of freedom—someday. Few worked as passionately to provide this human evidence, or put up as much money to experiment, as John Montagu, England’s Second Duke of Montagu.

Early in the 1700s, the duke experimented on the youngest son of Jamaica’s first freed Blacks to see if he could match the intellectual achievements of his White peers. The duke sent Francis Williams to an English academy and Cambridge University, where Francis equaled in intellectual attainments his peers who were similarly educated.

Sometime between 1738 and 1740, Williams returned home, probably donning a white wig of curls over his dark skin and assimilated mind. He opened a grammar school for slaveholders’ children and penned fawning Latin odes to every colonial governor of Jamaica. His 1758 anti-Black poem to Governor George Haldane read: “Tho’ dark the stream on which the tribute flows, / Not from the skin, but from the heart it rose.”
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Celebrity Scottish philosopher David Hume learned about the Cambridge-trained Francis Williams. But neither Williams, nor the growing fashion of having Black boys as servants in England, nor Buffon’s climate theory could change his mind about natural human hierarchy and Blacks’ incapability for Whiteness. Hume declared his segregationist position emphatically. In 1753, he updated his popular critique of climate theory, “Of Natural Characters,” adding the most infamous footnote in the history of racist ideas:

I am apt to suspect the negroes and in general all the other species of men (for there are four or five different kinds) to be naturally inferior to the whites. There never was a civilized nation of any other complexion than white, nor even any individual eminent either in action or speculation. On the other hand, the most rude and barbarous of the Whites . . . have still something eminent about them. . . . Such a uniform and constant difference could not happen, in so many countries and ages, if nature had not made an original distinction between these breeds of men. . . . In Jamaica, indeed, they talk of one Negro as a man of parts and learning; but it is likely he is admired for slender accomplishments, like a parrot who speaks a few words plainly.
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Hume strongly opposed slavery, but like many other abolitionists of the Enlightenment period, he never saw his segregationist thinking as contradicting his antislavery stance. Ignoring his antislavery position, proslavery theorists over the next few decades used David Hume as a model, adopting his footnote to “Of Natural Characters” as their international anthem.
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SIMILAR EXPERIMENTS OF
educating young Black males were carried out in America, and while some segregationists began to accept assimilationist ideas and even oppose slavery, few White Americans rejected racist thinking altogether. On a visit home in 1763 during his nearly two decades of residence in Europe, Benjamin Franklin saw some Black exhibits at a Philadelphia school run by the Associates of Dr. Thomas Bray. The London-based educational group had been named in 1731 after the deceased organizer of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts. Assessing the pupils, Franklin gained “a higher opinion of the natural capacities of the black Race.” Some Blacks could “adopt our Language or Customs,” he admitted. But that seemed to be all Franklin could concede, probably recognizing that the production of racist ideas was essential to substantiating slavery. Seven years later, in lobbying the crown for Georgia’s harsh slave code, Franklin argued that the “majority” of slaves was “of a plotting Disposition, dark, sullen, malicious, revengeful, and cruel in the highest Degree.”
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For racists like Franklin, it proved difficult to believe that many Blacks were capable of becoming another Francis Williams or Phillis Wheatley. Racists often understood this capable handful to be “extraordinary Negroes.” Joseph Jekyll actually began his 1805 biography of popular Afro-British writer and Duke of Montague protégé Ignatius Sancho identifying him as “this extraordinary Negro.” These
extraordinary Negros supposedly defied the laws of nature or nurture that standardized Black decadence. They were not ordinarily inferior like the “majority.” This mind game allowed racists to maintain their racist ideas in the midst of individual Africans defying its precepts. It doomed from the start the strategy of exhibiting excelling Blacks to change racist minds. But this strategy of persuasion endured.
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After the Duke of Montagu died in 1749, Selina Hastings, known as the Countess of Huntingdon, replaced him as the principal shepherd of Black exhibits in the English-speaking world. If she had been a Puritan male, Cotton Mather would have adored this Methodist trailblazer, who promoted the writings of Christian Blacks as a testament of Black capability for conversion. Two years before her death, the countess sponsored Olaudah Equiano’s aptly titled
Interesting Narrative
of his Nigerian birth, capture, enslavement, education, and emancipation in 1789. Her first and potentially most rewarding campaign was shepherding the inaugural slave narrative of Ukawsaw Gronniosaw (James Albert) into print in 1772. The countess almost certainly adored Gronniosaw’s assimilationist plot: the more he conformed to slavery, superior European culture, and Christianity, and left behind his heathen, inferior upbringing in West Africa, the happier and holier he became. Since freedom had been colored white, Gronniosaw believed that in order to be truly free, he had to abandon his Nigerian traditions and become White.
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