Stamped From the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (8 page)

With this law in place, White enslavers could now reap financial reward from relations “upon a negro woman.” But they wanted to prevent the limited number of White women from engaging in similar interracial relations (as their biracial babies would become free). In 1664, Maryland legislators declared it a “disgrace to our Nation” when “English women . . . intermarry with Negro slaves.” By the end of the century, Maryland and Virginia legislators had enacted severe penalties for White women in relationships with non-White men.
²³

In this way, heterosexual White men freed themselves, through racist laws, to engage in sexual relations with all women. And then their racist literature codified their sexual privileges.
The Isle of Pines
, a bizarre short story published in 1668 by former English parliamentarian Henry Neville, gave readers one such ominous account. The tale purposefully begins in 1589, the year the first edition of Richard Hakluyt’s
Principal Navigations
appeared. Surviving a shipwreck in the Indian Ocean, George Pines finds himself alone on an uninhabited island with an English fourteen-year-old; a Welsh maidservant; another maidservant, whose Whiteness is clear and ethnicity is not; and “one Negro female slave.” For Pines, “idleness and Fulness of every thing
begot in me a desire of enjoying the women.” He persuades the two maids to lie with him, and then reports that the English fourteen-year-old was “content also to do as we did.” The Negro woman, “seeing what we did, longed also for her share.” One night, the uniquely sexually aggressive Black woman makes her move in the darkness while Pines sleeps.
²⁴

The Isle of Pines
was one of the first portrayals in British letters of aggressive hypersexual African femininity. Such portrayals served both to exonerate White men of their inhuman rapes and to mask their human attractions to the supposed beast-like women. And the portrayals just kept coming, like the slave ships. Meanwhile, American enslavers publicly prostituted African women well into the eighteenth century (privately thereafter). In a 1736 exchange of letters on the inextricable sexuality and service of “African Ladies,” single White men were counseled in the
South-Carolina Gazette
to “wait for the next shipping from the Coast of Guinny”: “Those African Ladies are of a strong, robust Constitution: not easily jaded out, able to serve them by Night as well as Day.” On their isles of pines in colonial America, White men continued to depict African women as sexually aggressive, shifting the responsibility of their own sexual desires to the women.

Of the nearly one hundred reports of rape or attempted rape in twenty-one newspapers in nine American colonies between 1728 and 1776, none reported the rape of a Black woman. Rapes of Black women, by men of all races, were not considered newsworthy. Like raped prostitutes, Black women’s credibility had been stolen by racist beliefs in their hypersexuality. For Black men, the story was similar. There was not a single article in the colonial era announcing the acquittal of a suspected Black male rapist. One-third of White men mentioned in rape articles were acknowledged as being acquitted of at least one charge. Moreover, “newspaper reports of rape constructed white defendants as individual offenders and black defendants as representative of the failings of their racial group,” according to journalism historian Sharon Block.
²⁵

Already, the American mind was accomplishing that indispensable intellectual activity of someone consumed with racist ideas:
individualizing
White negativity and
generalizing
Black negativity. Negative behavior by any Black person became proof of what was wrong with Black people, while negative behavior by any White person only proved what was wrong with that person.

Black women were thought to aggressively pursue White men sexually, and Black men were thought to aggressively pursue White women sexually. Neither could help it, the racist myth posited. They naturally craved superior Whiteness. Black women possessed a “temper hot and lascivious, making no scruple to prostitute themselves to the Europeans for a very slender profit, so great is their inclination to white men,” dreamt William Smith, the author of
New Voyage to Guinea
in 1744. And all of this lasciviousness on the part of Black men and women stemmed from their relatively large genitalia, the theory went. As early as 1482, Italian cartographer Jayme Bertrand depicted Mali emperor Mansa Musa almost naked on his throne with oversized genitals.
²⁶

SOME WHITE MEN
were honest enough to broadcast their attractions, usually justifying them with assimilationist ideas. Royalist Richard Ligon, exiled from parliamentary England in Barbados, sat at a dinner adoring the “black Mistress” of the colony’s governor. Barbados had become richer than all the other British colonies combined by the mid-1600s. Sugar was planted right up to the steps of homes, and the residents ate New England food instead of growing their own. To Ligon, the Black mistress had “the greatest beauty and majesty together: that ever I saw in one woman,” exceeding Queen Anne of Denmark. Ligon presented her with a gift after the dinner. She responded with “the loveliest smile that I have ever seen.” It was impossible for Ligon to tell what was whiter, her teeth “or the whites of her eyes.”

This was one of the many small stories that made up Ligon’s
A True and Exact Historie of the Island of Barbadoes
in 1657, the year Elizabeth Key’s case was finally settled. In one story, a submissive slave named “Sambo” tells on his fellows who are planning a slave revolt and refuses his reward. In another, Ligon informs a “cruel” master of Sambo’s
desire to be “made a Christian.” By English law, we cannot “make a Christian a Slave,” the master responds. “My request was far different from that,” Ligon replies, “for I desired him to make a Slave a Christian.” If Sambo becomes a Christian, he can no longer be enslaved, the master says, and it will open “such a gap” that “all of the planters in the island” will be upset. Ligon lamented that Sambo was to be kept out of the church. But at the same time, he gave enslavers a new theory to defend their enterprise: Blacks were naturally docile, and slaves could and should become Christians. Planters had feared the conversion of slaves because they believed that if their slaves were Christian, they would have to be freed—and Elizabeth Key’s successful suit showed that the laws supported this belief. Ligon’s distinction between making “a Christian a slave” and “a slave a Christian” turned this idea on its head. Though it took time, eventually it became the basis for closing the religious loophole Key had exposed. Ligon lifted the biblical law of converting the unconverted over British law barring the enslavement of Christians. He promoted the idea of baptizing enslaved Africans through the docile figure of Sambo, and planters and intellectuals almost certainly got the point: submissive, confessing Sambo desired Christianity, and he should be permitted to have it. Indeed, Christianity would only make slaves more docile. Ligon’s recommendation of Christianizing the slave for docility appeared during a crucial time of intellectual innovation. And as intellectual ideas abounded, justifications for slavery abounded, too.

ON NOVEMBER
28, 1660, a dozen men gathered in London and founded what became known as the Royal Society. Europe’s scientific revolution had reached England. Italians initiated the Accademia dei Lincei in 1603, the French L’Academie française was founded in 1635, and the Germans established their national academy, Leopoldina, in 1652. King Charles II chartered the Royal Society as one of the first acts of his restored anti-Puritan monarchy in 1660. One of the early leaders of the Royal Society was one of England’s most celebrated young scholars, the author of
The Sceptical Chymist
(1661) and the father of English
chemistry—Robert Boyle. In 1665, Boyle urged his European peers to compile more “natural” histories of foreign lands and peoples, with Richard Ligon’s
Historie of Barbados
serving as the racist prototype.
²⁷

The year before, Boyle had jumped into the ring of the racial debate with
Of the Nature of Whiteness and Blackness
. He rejected both curse and climate theorists and knocked up a foundational antiracist idea: “The Seat” of human pigmentation “seems to be but the thin
Epidermes
, or outward Skin,” he wrote. And yet, this antiracist idea of skin color being only skin deep did not stop Boyle from judging different colors. Black skin, he maintained, was an “ugly” deformity of normal Whiteness. The physics of light, Boyle argued, showed that Whiteness was “the chiefest color.” He claimed to have ignored his personal “opinions” and “clearly and faithfully” presented the truth, as his Royal Society deeded. As Boyle and the Royal Society promoted the innovation and circulation of racist ideas, they promoted objectivity in all their writings.
²⁸

Intellectuals from Geneva to Boston, including Richard Mather’s youngest son, Increase Mather, carefully read and loudly hailed Boyle’s work in 1664. A twenty-two-year-old unremarkable Cambridge student from a farming family copied full quotations. As he rose in stature over the next forty years to become one of the most influential scientists of all time, Isaac Newton took it upon himself to substantiate Boyle’s color law: light is white is standard. In 1704, a year after he assumed the presidency of the Royal Society, Newton released one of the most eminent books of the modern era,
Opticks
. “
Whiteness
is produced by the Convention of all Colors,” he wrote. Newton created a color wheel to illustrate his thesis. “The center” was “white of the first order,” and all the other colors were positioned in relation to their “distance from Whiteness.” In one of the foundational books of the upcoming European intellectual renaissance, Newton imaged “perfect whiteness.”
²⁹

Robert Boyle would not live to read
Opticks
. He died, after a long and influential life, in 1691. During his lifetime, he did not merely found chemistry, whiten light, power the Royal Society, and inspire Isaac Newton, the Mather clan, and throngs of intellectuals on both sides of
the Atlantic. Boyle sat on the original Council for Foreign Plantations in 1660, which was commissioned concurrently with the Royal Society to centralize and advise the vast empire that Charles II inherited.

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. The council’s pleas resounded louder and louder each year as the plantation economy surged across the Western Hemisphere, as a growing flock of powerful British ministers vied for submission of African souls, and as planters vied for submission of their bodies. 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. Enslavers routinely defended their inaction by claiming that enslaved Africans were too barbaric to be converted.

The racist debate over the cause of Blackness—climate or curse—had been joined by this new racist debate over Blacks’ capability for Christianity. The segregationist belief that enslaved Africans should not or could not be baptized was so widespread, and so taboo to discuss—as Richard Ligon found in Barbados—that virtually no enslaver took to writing to defend it in a major piece in the 1600s. That did not stop the assimilationists, who believed that lowly enslaved Africans, practicing their supposed animalistic religions, were capable of being raised to Christianity. In the 1660s, there emerged a missionary movement to publicize this divine duty to resistant slaveholders and slaves. Richard Mather’s grandson spent his adult life carrying this movement to the churches of New England. But Mather did not live to see it.

CHAPTER 4

Saving Souls, Not Bodies

WHEN CHARLES II
restored the English throne in 1660, he restored the religious persecution of Puritans. Roughly 2,000 Puritan ministers were forced out of the Church of England during the Great Ejection. In New England, Richard Mather had lost some hearing and sight in one eye. But he was still as defiant to the crown as he had been as a younger man, and he steered New England nonconformists as adroitly as he had done for three decades. His fellow theological captain, John Cotton, had died in 1652. Mather’s first wife had also died, and he had married Cotton’s widow, Sarah Hankredge Story Cotton. His youngest son, Increase Mather, married Sarah’s daughter—now his stepsister—Maria Cotton, further interlacing the ties between the famous Cottons and Mathers. As if to triple-knot the family tie, Increase and Sarah named their first son, upon his birth on February 12, 1663, Cotton Mather.

Richard Mather lived six years after the birth of his grandson. When he died, Increase Mather honored his father by writing his biography, putting in print Richard Mather’s providential deliverance from the Great Hurricane of 1635, a story as meaningful to the Mather lineage as any passage in the Bible. Increase Mather, who took the helm of John Cotton’s famed North Church of Boston in 1664, taught all ten of his eventual children that they were regular receivers of divine providence like their grandfather. Increase especially expressed this exceptionality to Cotton Mather. In time, Cotton would make his father a prophet. He combined the best of the Cottons and Mathers,
eclipsing them all in America’s historical memory. By the century’s end, African slavery sounded as natural to the colonists as the name “Cotton Mather,” and hardly any intellectual was more responsible for this binding than Cotton Mather himself. Cotton Mather was not the sole progenitor of such ideas, however. He was influenced by the books he read by his contemporaries. And few, if any, books influenced Cotton Mather’s racist ideas more than Richard Baxter’s
A Christian Directory
.