White Over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro, 1550-1812

WHITE OVER BLACK

WHITE OVER BLACK

American Attitudes toward the Negro,

1550–1812

WINTHROP D. JORDAN

Second Edition

With new forewords by

Christopher Leslie Brown and Peter H. Wood

Published for the Omohundro Institute

of Early American History and Culture,

Williamsburg, Virginia,

by the University of North Carolina Press,

Chapel Hill

The Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture is sponsored jointly by the College of William and Mary and the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation. On November 15, 1996, the Institute adopted the present name in honor of a bequest from Malvern H. Omohundro, Jr.

© 1968 The University of North Carolina Press

Forewords © 2012 The University of North Carolina Press

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

The Library of Congress has cataloged the original

edition of this book as follows:

Jordan, Winthrop D.

White over black: American attitudes toward the Negro,

1550–1812 / Winthrop D. Jordan

p. cm.

Bibliography: p.

Includes index.

1. Slavery—United States—History. 2. African Americans—

History—To 1863. 3. United States—Race Relations. I. Institute

of Early American History and Culture (Williamsburg, Va.) II. Title.

E185.J6 68-13395

973'.0974'96

ISBN 978-0-8078-3403-8 (cloth: alk. paper)

ISBN 978-0-8078-7141-6 (pbk.: alk. paper)

The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.

The University of North Carolina Press has been a member of the Green Press Initiative since 2003.

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TO PHYLLIS

FOREWORD

Christopher Leslie Brown

I WISH I COULD RECALL NOW WHEN I FIRST ENCOUNTERED Winthrop Jordan’s White over Black. It must have been in graduate school, when writing my doctoral thesis—the book is cited there. I know, though, that I did not engage it in an extended way. I dimly recall believing that I knew much of what White over Black had to say. The table of contents presented a familiar list of subjects I once had studied in an excellent two-semester undergraduate course in African American history. We had discussed racial attitudes in early America in some detail, but with a rather different emphasis: I had learned to think of racism as principally a product of slavery from Edmund Morgan’s American Slavery, American Freedom. The work of George Fredrickson had taught me to see white supremacy in comparative perspective. I knew that White over Black had a different story to tell, that negative perceptions of Africans predated English settlement, that race had been there at the creation, so to speak. At the time, however, I was interested in late-eighteenth-century British attitudes toward slavery rather than the early seventeenth century, so neither the origins of race nor the beginning of colonial slavery mattered too much for my immediate purposes. This was a book, I decided, that one could know without actually taking time to read it.

That opinion depended upon knowing too little about it, too little about what the book said and too little about what it accomplished. I could not quite believe what I found when, at last, I decided to read White over Black properly a few years later. There was much that I did not anticipate. Even the familiar looked oddly new. The work was more varied, more subtle, less predictable than I had come to expect. One reviewer in 1971 had called White over Black one of the half dozen or so best books ever written in early American history (Jack P. Greene, review, Political Science Quarterly, LXXXVI [1971], 481). Forty years later, with all that has been written on the subject, that judgment perhaps should still stand. In the field of early American history, there is nothing else quite like it. The work endures, in part because of the prose. Few modern historians of any subject have written more gracefully at this length. It bears its elegance and erudition, rigor and wit, in near equal measure. That craftsmanship lightens the weight of Jordan’s immense learning and unusual breadth. This range, that comprehensive vision, distinguishes the work, both then and now. More than an argument, or a point of view, White over Black insisted upon a shift in historical perspective: to know the making of American culture meant understanding the place of racial slavery in it. To do this, Jordan digested and distilled the state of knowledge on the subject, such as it was in 1966. Even more, though, White over Black presented the first attempt to tell the story in full, the first attempt to treat that early history of racial prejudice, not as a regional story, but as a national story, the first attempt to link English perceptions of and experiences with Africans to broader themes in early American history.

Winthrop Jordan virtually originated the study of slavery and race in colonial America. The topic of almost every chapter became a subfield, subfields that now have their own scholarly literatures and their own questions. So ingrained is Jordan’s work now, its novelty has become more difficult to recognize with the passage of time. Some of what was new in the book was absorbed into later historical scholarship. On many subjects it would provide the first word but hardly the last. Increasingly, parts of the work came to stand in for the whole, as individual chapters or passages were excerpted for textbooks or anthologies in colonial and American history. When Jordan abridged his own work to publish The White Man’s Burden: The Origins of Racism in the United States in 1974, he perhaps encouraged readers to know his work for its principal claims rather than by its depth, nuance, and command of the sources. On some topics, such as the origins of race and slavery and the development of scientific racism, White over Black shaped the terms of debate for many years. On other topics—the pertinence of sexuality to the history of race, the relevance of Caribbean history to colonial North America, and the significance of the Haitian Revolution to the early Republic, to take just three examples—scholars followed Jordan’s lead only belatedly and, in many instances, unawares. With respect to the principal theme, the making of American identity, its contributions arguably remain largely overlooked.

Ahead of its time in many ways, White over Black was no less a creature of its moment. The tumultuous politics of the civil rights and Vietnam War era shaped its reception. Yet, as Jordan always insisted, correctly, the book was conceived and largely researched long before the crises of 1968 and after. In this way it reflects the cultural and political preoccupations of the 1950s as much as it does the 1960s. To know White over Black now is not only to know something about the writing of history, the history of race, and the making of American culture but also to learn about the origins of historical scholarship on race and slavery in early America.

His family background foreshadowed Winthrop Jordan’s path. His father and his paternal grandfather both enjoyed long and successful academic careers.¹ Henry Donaldson Jordan taught modern European history and for a time served as dean at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts. The author of an influential work on British opinion during the U.S. Civil War, he served during World War II in the Office of Strategic Services. Donaldson’s father, Edwin Oakes Jordan, had built a distinguished program in the emerging science of bacteriology at the University of Chicago. Jordan contemplated a medical career when he entered Harvard College in the fall of 1950 in part because of the family example. An aunt and an uncle had followed their father Edwin into medicine. His maternal grandfather, Frank Spooner Churchill, numbered among the first generation of doctors to train in the subfield of pediatrics. In the years before World War II, Frank Churchill would welcome to his home Jewish German and Austrian psychiatrists, refugees from Nazi Germany, who shared his interest in childhood development. Winthrop Jordan, privy to some of these conversations as a child, later remembered a youthful conviction that anti-Semites were bad people, just the way slave owners were bad people.

Jordan knew a good deal about slaveholders and the fight against slavery at an early age. His mother, Lucretia Mott Churchill Jordan, was a direct descendant of the pioneer New England activist Lucretia Mott. His grandmother, Lucretia Mott Hallowell Churchill, remembered bouncing on William Lloyd Garrison’s knee as a child. This connection to the antislavery struggle of the prior century was not only a matter of heritage; the family discussed, celebrated, and nourished the legacy. A photograph of the Boston Commons memorial to Robert Shaw, abolitionist and colonel of the all-black Massachusetts Fifty-fourth Regiment, sat on the mantelpiece in the family home. Keeper of the Mott papers, Lucretia Churchill would organize and donate the writings of the pioneer Quaker abolitionists to Swarthmore College during Winthrop Jordan’s adolescence. I grew up, he recalled, in a kind of abolitionist atmosphere. In retrospect, it would seem almost inevitable that Winthrop Jordan would pursue an academic career that placed particular emphasis on science, culture, and the history of American race relations.

Jordan showed no interest in the study of history, though, during his undergraduate career at Harvard. He certainly did not expect to follow his father into the historical profession. Jordan thought he knew history well enough, in part because of the rigors of his secondary school education at Phillips Academy at Andover in Massachusetts and Marlborough College in England. Harvard bored him, in fact. He was, in his own telling, an indifferent student. A near-failing grade in chemistry scotched his plans to become a doctor or psychiatrist. Jordan settled, then, instead on the new major in Social Relations, the loosest major, in his words, which allowed you to take a lot of other courses. Less than a decade old when Jordan entered, the Social Relations department offered an unusual interdisciplinary curriculum in the human sciences, especially in anthropology, sociology, and clinical and social psychology. That early exposure to social theory, to problems of individual and collective perception, to the power of cultural symbols, to the influence of sexuality upon the many dimensions of human behavior would shape the way Jordan would come to think about historical problems.

Particularly important to Jordan’s intellectual development was the graduate seminar Prejudice and Group Conflict that he took during his final semester in the spring of 1953. The instructors, Daniel Levinson and Gordon Allport, designed the course to further basic research in the field and to foster strategies for combating prejudice in contemporary society. Levinson, then a junior professor at Harvard, had contributed while a graduate student to the landmark 1950 text The Authoritarian Personality, which, among other conclusions, warned of the potential for the rise of fascism in the United States. That spring, in 1953, Gordon Allport completed The Nature of Prejudice (1954), a book that would exercise enormous influence on social psychology for many years after. Jordan would praise the work for its common sense and balance in his Essay on Sources at the conclusion of White over Black. One of only two undergraduates enrolled in the seminar, Jordan had been required to explain what previous work, study, or experience pertinent to the subject he possessed and describe any specific professional or other plans to utilize the study and training that the course would provide.² I’d sort of always been interested in racial prejudice, he would later recall.

The subsequent commitment to study American attitudes toward blacks first took shape in the months when he sat in the back corner of the seminar room listening to the two psychology professors and their Ph.D. students discussing the origins and character of prejudice. Just years after the end of World War II and the revelations of the Nazi death camps, most sessions took anti-Semitism as the principal test case as they worked through The Authoritarian Personality and The Nature of Prejudice. The seminar commenced, though, with Gunnar Myrdal’s American Dilemma, which famously concluded that the negro problem was, in fact, the white man’s problem, a verdict that Jordan would come to echo fifteen years later in White over Black. This course on the dynamics of prejudice marked Jordan deeply, as much for what it lacked as for what it offered. He doubted the emphasis that the social psychologists placed on cognition—more attention should be given to emotion and the irrational. He distrusted the self-satisfied conviction that prejudices could be expelled if one could learn to think differently. He thought that the emphasis on personality understated the importance of culture. And he suspected that there was a historical dimension to the problem that the social scientists too frequently overlooked. But the questions and concerns that arose in the course on prejudice would provide the initial seed for White over Black ("Reconnoitering Myrdal’s American Dilemma," Georgia Historical Quarterly, LXXII [1988], 290–295).

Jordan found his way into history because he wanted to teach. After an unsatisfying stint in management at the Prudential Insurance Company, he soon found a position at Phillips Exeter Academy as a replacement instructor in history. Colleagues at Exeter encouraged Jordan to earn a master’s in history if he intended to continue in teaching full-time. That advice led Jordan back to Worcester and Clark University. There he took a course with his father in modern English history and studied European intellectual history with the young Marc Raeff, who later would become one of the nation’s leading historians of Russia. Jordan treated the political work of an ancestor in his master’s thesis—Massachusetts and Manifest Destiny: Robert C. Winthrop and the Political Opposition to the Expansion of the 1840s. He had settled on pursuing a doctorate in history in the course of this program. Declined admission to Harvard, Jordan enrolled at Brown University in the fall of 1956.

White over Black originated as Jordan’s doctoral thesis at Brown. If he arrived in Providence with an interest in the history of prejudice and an inclination toward interdisciplinary study, the resources available to him at Brown shaped his course of study. He conducted most if not all of the research at the John Carter Brown Library and its broad and deep collections in the history of early America. That’s why I went into early American history, Jordan would explain, because of the sources. Initially he intended to write about European attitudes toward Native Americans and Africans, but he realized quickly that at that time almost nothing had been written on early opinion about blacks. The historian of science Donald Fleming supervised the dissertation. Fleming’s guidance, according to Jordan, led to the prominent place that scientific thought eventually found in the thesis. Working quickly, Jordan completed the dissertation in April 1960. He remembered Fleming telling him that there was a lot of good information . . . but it is going to sit in the archives and people will be mining it for good information for years.

The dissertation, titled White over Black, treated the attitudes of American colonists toward the Negro from the late sixteenth century to the close of the American Revolution, covering just one-half of the material that would appear in the published book eight years later. Although the titles of the individual chapters differ, the eight chapters of the dissertation track quite closely the first eight chapters of White over Black. The overview at the close confirms the hypothesis with which it opens: that both slavery and prejudice were cause and effect, and that the events which occurred may be better explained by considering their mutual interaction than by postulating the primacy of either. In its essentials, the first half of White over Black was in place when Jordan completed his dissertation in 1960.

Two years on a postdoctoral fellowship at the Institute of Early American History and Culture in Williamsburg, Virginia, allowed Jordan to recast and extend his work. The existing chapters were rewritten, extensively in some cases. Jordan dropped most references to the social science literature on the dynamics of prejudice as well as comparisons between antiblack racism and anti-Semitism that in the dissertation signaled his debt to the Harvard Department of Social Relations, and to the Allport and Levinson seminar in particular. More broadly, he abandoned an explicit effort to connect his historical research to contemporary American race relations. No historical problem, he had written in his dissertation, could have more current applicability. It bears not only on our thinking about the causes of racial prejudice but even more upon our current practical programs to be undertaken in the face of undeniable tension. Instead, he published some of these thoughts in the Journal of Southern History in 1962 in an essay titled Modern Tensions and the Origins of American Slavery (XXVIII, 18–30). There he suggested that the hope for improving American race relations during the 1950s had led some historians to understate the extent of racial antipathy in the very first years of colonial settlement. In preparing the book, though, Jordan excised all references to politics and policy debates of the era. He decided, as well, that the book would do no more than explain the debasement of the Negro in American culture. As a result, the emerging manuscript came to center upon the place of race in the making of American culture. It would be a book, therefore, not only about the making of inequality but about the creation of American identity.

To do this, Jordan had to take the story beyond American Independence, where the dissertation concluded. Ending there seemed to offer a misleadingly optimistic outcome, to suggest that by the late eighteenth century there were important movements challenging both slavery and the racial order that would bring their undoing. The history of antebellum America, of course, told a very different story. It remained, then, for Jordan to explain the failure to realize that promise. While working on his dissertation at Brown, he had completed much of the research that would allow him to extend his analysis into the early nineteenth century. In Williamsburg he would write eight additional chapters that became the second half of the book.

When Jordan left Williamsburg in the summer of 1963 for an assistant professorship at the University of California, Berkeley, the structure of the revised manuscript was in place, although Jordan had much rewriting and polishing to complete. His editor at the Institute, James Morton Smith, had suggested that he shorten the text that had swollen to nearly 200,000 words. Jordan, instead, lengthened the manuscript even more in the summer of 1965 by making significant extensions to the early chapters. In the original manuscript there had been only a few passing references to the English cultural heritage and its effects on English attitudes toward Africans and slavery, so it was necessary to probe the characteristics of Englishmen before rather than when they first encountered Africans. Consequently, he added an extensive review of the literary and cultural record of Elizabethan England in the first chapter and a substantial treatment of English concepts of the social order, service, and bondage in the second chapter. What had begun, in these early chapters, as an attempt to isolate first impressions would become, in the final draft, a wide-ranging study of cultural and historical experience preparing Englishmen to embrace slavery and racial inequality.

The Institute of Early American History and Culture received the final revisions in February 1966. For the publishers at the University of North Carolina Press, Jordan described the book as an essay on the American ‘mind.’ The focus, of course, was on the white man’s attitudes toward Negroes, but its aim was to illuminate the profound impact upon Americans of the uncertainties inherent in a venture of people into a new land. Throughout, it pursued the psychic urges of a people placed in a search to know who they really were. The ambition of the book and its relevance to current events bred anxiety and anticipation among its sponsors in almost equal measure. Parts of the book were bound to be controversial, especially the twelfth chapter, on the thoughts and deeds of Thomas Jefferson. There Jordan offered cautious support to those who thought Jefferson had a long romantic relationship with his slave Sally Hemings that produced as many as five children. This chapter caused considerable unease. In the spring of 1967, a year before the book’s publication, his new editor at the Institute, Stephen G. Kurtz, asked Jordan to double-check the sources for his conclusion, famously, that Jefferson was at [Monticello] nine months prior to each birth. The general interest monthly, American Heritage, considered and then declined an invitation to publish excerpts from the Jefferson chapter, in part because the subject matter was delicate to handle, both racially and sexually, and although with the care and thoroughness of Mr. Jordan’s handling, it comes out marvelously, condensation hurts the balance that he has achieved. And although White over Black would be a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 1969, what Jordan had suggested about Jefferson would hurt Jordan with at least two of the three jurors.³ At the same time, there was a general expectation at the University of North Carolina Press that White over Black would be a bestseller and a landmark in American historical scholarship. Director Lambert Davis believed it would merit the National Book Award.

The University of North Carolina Press published White over Black in the spring of 1968. C. Vann Woodward was the first to review the book, in the New York Times on March 31, 1968. Woodward gently chided Jordan on his title. American attitudes toward the Negro quietly assumed that all Americans were of European descent, that a Negro could not be an American. In this way, Woodward observed, Jordan was still stuck with the semantic consequences of the momentous exclusion that his book sought to explain. This was forgivable, though, for Jordan brought to his task a patience, skepticism, thoroughness and humility commensurate with the vast undertaking. The result is a massive and learned work that stands as the most informed and impressive pronouncement on the subject yet made. If Jordan left unsaid what his work implied for the contemporary struggle for black equality, Woodward addressed the issue explicitly in his review. Those who yearn for the eradication of racial prejudice, Woodward noted, prefer to see it as a late and superficial growth, not as an early or inherent antipathy, deeply rooted. Historians of this school, he continued, tend to explain racial prejudice as a result of enslavement and slavery as a gradual growth that fostered prejudice. White over Black will be cold comfort to those who think that racial prejudice is of relatively recent vintage. This suggested, in turn, that America’s history of racial prejudice would be more intractable, more difficult to overcome than many scholars had assumed and had wished. Four days later, on April 4, 1968, civil rights leader Martin Luther King was assassinated.

The ensuing crisis shaped the reception of White over Black. Even the scholarly reviews emphasized the book’s contemporary relevance. It deserves careful study, agreed David Brion Davis, by every American who seeks to understand the roots of our present and greatest crisis. It is the indispensable starting point, he added, for any new understanding of race relations in America. There is no better illustration of the supreme relevance of colonial and early national history to the most pressing concerns of the present (William and Mary Quarterly, 3d Ser., XXVI [1969], 110, 114). The author has laid bare the roots of racial prejudice in America and thereby created a potentiality for understanding, wrote Jack P. Greene. In doing so, he has put all Americans in his debt (Political Science Quarterly, LXXXVI [1971], 484). One wishes every American would read it, concluded Betty Fladeland (Journal of Southern History, XXXIV [1968], 591). To understand our prejudices surely is one necessary step in their eradication. To Johnnetta B. Cole, "White over Black is so keenly a book about the present racial crisis in America precisely because it is not a book about Negroes" (American Anthropologist, n.s., LXXI [1969], 794).

National awards for literary and scholarly distinction quickly followed: the Phi Beta Kappa Society, with the Ralph Waldo Emerson Award for the best scholarly study of the intellectual and cultural conditions of man; the Society of American Historians, with the Francis Parkman Prize for literary distinction in historical writing; the Bancroft Prize in history; and the National Book Award for History and Biography.

The book, its subject, and the nation converged at a pivotal moment in the country’s history. Readers purchased more than half a hundred thousand copies in the first two years, exceptional for an academic book. The urban riots and the backlash that followed seemed to confirm the less optimistic view of American race relations that Jordan’s work presented. Perhaps racial prejudice was America’s original sin, maybe even more than slavery. It no longer appeared that redemption was coming any time soon. Its careful investigation into those roots of American racism and the prognosis of its entrenchment in the culture established White over Black as a landmark in scholarship and in the history of its time.

NOTES

1. Biographical information is drawn primarily from Winthrop D. Jordan, Historian of Slavery and Race Relations in America, Professor at the University of California, Berkeley, 1963–1982, conducted by Anne Lage, 2004, Regional Oral History Office, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, 2009.

2. My discussion of the Allport and Levinson course draws from Frances Cherry, The Nature of the Nature of Prejudice, Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, XXXVI (2000) 489–498.

3. Stephen G. Kurtz to Winthrop Jordan, Feb. 21, 1967, Archives of the Omohundro Institute; Barbara Klaw to Lambert Davis, Aug. 16, 1967, Archives of the Omohundro Institute; Henry Commager to Ernest Samuels, Nov. 16, 1968, and Samuels to Commager, Nov. 22, 1968. Bruce Catton, the third juror, did not consider White over Black worthy of consideration as a finalist. Ernest Samuels (1903–1996) Papers, 1918–1995, Series 11/3/11/5, Northwestern University Archives, Evanston, Ill., box 8, folder 14.

FOREWORD

Peter H. Wood

LUCRETIA COFFIN, THE DAUGHTER OF A FLINTY NANTUCKET sea captain, became a major force in the American reform movements of the mid-nineteenth century. In 1821, at age nineteen, she married a fellow Quaker, James Mott, and they raised six children while becoming staunch leaders in the Anti-Slavery Crusade. How shall I describe to you Lucretia Mott, exclaimed Thomas Wentworth Higginson, the New England abolitionist who was thirty years her junior. In their initial encounter, he marveled at her formidable gaze. She has the most brilliant eyes, he wrote. Such a face, . . . and such a regal erectness! By comparison, Higginson mused, Nobody else ever stood upright before.

Historian Winthrop Jordan, born in 1931, was a direct descendant of this Quaker feminist, and tales of past achievements within the family passed down to him as a boy. He learned, for example, that, among Mott’s many accomplishments, she had become a founder of Swarthmore College in 1864, at age seventy-one. He knew that one granddaughter of the reformer, Anna Davis Hallowell, had edited James and Lucretia Mott: Life and Letters (1884), and another relative, Edward Needles Hallowell, had served as a white officer in the celebrated black Civil War unit known as the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts Infantry Regiment.

A family that took modest Quaker pride in past accomplishments also kept alive its venerable names. Jordan knew that Anna Davis Hallowell, his great-grandmother, had named her daughter after their ancestor, the famous activist. He remembered when this daughter, Lucretia Mott Hallowell Churchill, organized the abolitionist papers and scrapbooks her family had preserved, and donated them to Swarthmore in the mid-1940s. She too had named a daughter—his own mother—after the stalwart reformer. When Lucretia Mott Churchill married Henry D. Jordan, a respected historian at Clark University, it meant that their son Winthrop spent his childhood immersed in history and in the long, arduous progression of American debates over race. Growing up, he considered other callings, but his late twenties found him as a graduate student at Brown University studying intellectual history with American historian Donald Fleming. By the time Jordan passed away in 2007, at seventy-six, he had become a leading American scholar. He was, as many eulogies noted, one of the few historians to have won the prestigious Bancroft Prize on two occasions.

Thinking back, I wish that I had known Winthrop Jordan better, for I can safely say that I never drew so much from someone with whom I crossed paths so briefly. He was always gracious, friendly, thoughtful, and informed. I still have a vivid recollection of his slight frame and warm manner. I never studied with Professor Jordan or worked with him as a colleague. But two long-ago encounters with this generous and tenacious scholar—key moments in my own intellectual life—remain indelibly printed in my mind.

We first met in December 1962, when I was a junior at Harvard, his alma mater, and he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute of Early American History and Culture in Williamsburg, Virginia. I had just completed an exciting undergraduate course on early America, taught by Bernard Bailyn, and for the first time I was considering further work in history. I had a chance to visit Colonial Williamsburg with my parents during the Christmas holiday, so my adviser, John L. Thomas, suggested that I should look up his friend Win Jordan. They had become close as doctoral students in American history at Brown, and Thomas described with enthusiasm the ambitious dissertation that Jordan was turning into a book. As he described the scope and originality of this exciting project, I could tell it had become mythical among a group of young scholars, even though it had not yet appeared in print.

Needless to say, I was intrigued. Professor Bailyn’s class had included little on race or slavery. But Jack Thomas, as part of a younger cohort that had been in graduate school at the time of the Brown decision and the Montgomery bus boycott, was absorbed by the subject of race relations. He was completing a biography of William Lloyd Garrison that would earn the 1964 Bancroft Prize, the most prestigious award given to American historians. In profiling the powerful antislavery advocate, Thomas had made ample use of the Mott Papers at Swarthmore. He informed me, with admiration, that his historian friend was a direct descendant of Mott, Garrison’s strong-willed collaborator in the Abolition Movement.

When I reached Williamsburg, I found the old brick building in which the Institute was housed, and I climbed the narrow staircase, uncertain what to expect. Most of the best learning, even now, occurs in brief and unpredictable face-to-face encounters—no distractions, no cell phones. (A truism from the nineteenth century claimed that there is no better school than a mentor and pupil in easy conversation, seated at opposite ends of a log.) For me, what happened next represented this rare form of unobstructed learning, though for Jordan, twelve years my senior, it was no more than a brief distraction from a busy morning of work.

I have no idea what we said in that small, cluttered office. But I recall the occupant, with his genial smile and a distinctive overbite that was reassuringly like my own father’s. This young scholar took the inquiring undergraduate seriously; he was generous with his time and infectious in his enthusiasm. And if the writer appeared modest, his work looked imposing. I remember eyeing the thick, typewritten manuscript that sat on a table beside his desk. If he can do that, I thought, maybe I can tackle a senior honors paper next year on the Puritans’ relations with the Indians in New England.

Fast-forward ten years. We met again on April 6, 1972, at a meeting of the Organization of American Historians in Washington, D.C. I was several weeks away from defending my Harvard Ph.D. dissertation in American colonial history, and I had just acceepted a job in New York City at the Rockefeller Foundation. Professor Jordan was already halfway through his impressive stint on the faculty of the University of California at Berkeley, and he was working on The White Man’s Burden: Historical Origins of Racism in the United States, the provocative condensation of White over Black that would help spread his monumental research to a wider public audience when it appeared in 1974. We were to be participants in a well-attended OAH session on an unfamiliar topic: The Formative Years of Black History.

I had reason to worry, since Dr. Jordan was to be the chair and sole commentator. His extraordinary tome had won several of the highest accolades in the profession, including the National Book Award and the Bancroft Prize. In fact, he seemed destined to become the very embodiment of early American history. (After all, how were younger scholars to know that he had been named for a nineteenth-century ancestor, Robert C. Winthrop, and not for John Winthrop, the original Builder of the Bay Colony?) Moreover, at the last minute, the other presenter was unable to appear, so there would be no lack of time for comments and questions. Here we were again, at opposite ends of the proverbial log. But this time we were at a national meeting of American historians, something I had never seen before. Nonetheless, I had accepted a minor participating role, and, for better or worse, my essay would be the sole focus of Professor Jordan’s formidable intellect.

The paper was titled Slavery in Early South Carolina: The Herskovits Thesis Reconsidered. It was my first opportunity to present evidence from my dissertation, which later appeared as a book called Black Majority. Once again, what was a scary and momentous occasion for me must have seemed a minor interruption for Jordan. But, once again, he could not have been more generous, supportive, and interested. He gave me the high compliment of a careful reading and shrewd criticism. I left feeling encouraged and affirmed. If I ever became impatient with the world of philanthropy, there was clearly much challenging work yet to be done in the world of colonial history.

I tell these two personal stories partly because they epitomize the norm. Over many decades, scores of people had encounters—however brief or extended—with Winthrop Jordan that helped to shape their intellectual life and to nudge them in a positive and productive direction. For me, these early meetings also form bookends around another, much larger encounter that occurred in between, following the publication of White over Black in the tumultuous year of 1968. Needless to say, I shared this encounter with many thousands of inquiring people in the United States and beyond who never had the satisfaction of enjoying a friendly laugh or an informed discussion with Jordan himself.

As impatient U.S. history graduate students in the late 1960s, many of us cut our critical teeth by chewing on Jordan’s weighty tome about American Attitudes toward the Negro, 1550–1812. The thick hardback felt heavy and looked intimidating. The black cover seemed as serious as it was predictable. By my recollection, nearly every book on race published during the Civil Rights era received a dark binding and came wrapped in a black dust jacket, making it hard to tell a subtle volume by its literal-minded cover. But crack the spine of White over Black, and you were immediately immersed in a complex discussion ranging across more than two and a half centuries. Even as we talked back to Jordan’s absorbing argument and scrutinized his copious footnotes, we surely realized that the book would stand as an accessible scholarly monument for years. It would spark countless fruitful inquiries, large and small; more than a generation later, it still deserves frequent revisiting and serious reflection.

Jordan considered balanced criticism, whether bestowed or received, to be the highest compliment and the best way to move a discussion forward. So let me touch upon half a dozen of the things—three quite positive, three more negative—that most mattered, and still matter, to me about this remarkably important book. I begin by recalling some of my less generous reactions, not to get any negatives out of the way fast, but more to highlight the different expectations with which many in my cohort of younger, would-be historians greeted this much-anticipated study. Our years of graduate training during the 1960s were punctuated by tumultuous political events: marches, sit-ins, riots, and assassinations that made it difficult to stay put in the ivory tower. The historical invisibility of all those who were not white, not men, not privileged with wealth and education, was coming to an end. Different voices, both past and present, needed to be heard. Given the strange alchemy that always exists between current events and historical scholarship, these tectonic pressures would eventually give rise to a new, or at least a broadened and reinvigorated, American social history.

Therefore, naive as it may sound, I was disappointed almost from the beginning by the fact that this six-hundred-page tome was primarily about white people. Like David Brion Davis’s The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (also bound in black, of course) that had won the Pulitzer Prize the previous year, Jordan’s work was largely a labor in the intellectual history of Europeans, on both sides of the North Atlantic. He stated at the start, in a sentence that I marked vigorously: This is not a book about Negroes except as they were objects of white men’s attitudes. Duly forewarned, we initial readers quickly discovered that most of Jordan’s copious chapters dealt with Society and Thought (Part 4), or Thought and Society (Part 5), in which the changing beliefs and ideas of Caucasian writers and actors hold center stage.

Second, not only were Jordan’s protagonists white, but they were predominantly English. In retrospect this is hardly surprising, for in those days in most universities and textbooks early American history still concerned little more than the North American colonies of Great Britain. (Regarding the slow evolution of Spanish southwestern history, for example, recall that its great pioneer at Berkeley, Herbert Bolton, died ten years before Winthrop Jordan arrived there. The late David Weber did not publish The Spanish Frontier in North America until 1992, ten years after Jordan left California for the University of Mississippi.) Granted, Jordan did discuss, as the Shakespearean heading for one section indicates, The Practices of Portingals and Spanyards. And he explored, as another lead suggests, English attitudes toward The Un-English: Scots, Irish, and Indians. Simply by doing this, and by including documentary evidence from the Deep South and the Caribbean, he was more cosmopolitan and wide-ranging than many of his Ivy League mentors, from whom he inherited several generations of rich but parochial early American scholarship oriented toward New England. Jordan ended up teaching happily for twenty-two years in Oxford, Mississippi, a state most of them never visited, studied, or appreciated. (Jordan’s prize-winning final book, Tumult and Silence at Second Creek: An Inquiry into a Civil War Slave Conspiracy [1993], is set in Adams County, Mississippi, in 1861, and it grew from a forgotten document containing the testimony of accused slaves that he had discovered in the early 1970s.)

But my third and largest pang of anxiety related to something else. In examining more than ten generations of white, English-speaking subjects, Jordan intentionally intertwined the conscious and the subconscious, exploring the fancy ideas and off-hand notions of Caucasians, who, he argued, often projected their own conflicts onto Negroes in ways which are well known though not well acknowledged today. This book, Jordan wrote at the start, treats attitudes as existing not only at various levels of intensity but at various levels of consciousness and unconsciousness. White over Black, he observed, is written on the assumption that there is no clear dividing line between ‘thought’ and ‘feeling,’ between conscious and unconscious mental processes. I had read Lillian Smith, Killers of the Dream, and I found this approach suggestive, though at that stage in my life I was decidedly less inquisitive and astute about the subconscious than Jordan was. Still, in Part 1 (which he presented under the biblical heading: Genesis), something about the second chapter made me uneasy. Jordan’s all-important Chapter 2 focused, as he explained, especially on the origins of American Negro slavery. Understanding the way racial slavery began, he wrote, is both extremely difficult and absolutely essential to comprehension of the white man’s attitudes. Taken alone, this assertion seemed right on the money, and long overdue. Instead, I realized after a careful rereading that the chapter title itself prompted my unease.

Jordan called Chapter 2 Unthinking Decision: Enslavement of Negroes in America to 1700. The troubling word here was not Negroes—that remained the mainstream terminology of the time, and besides, it could readily be changed. No, it was the innocuous adjective Unthinking that seemed suspect. In this chapter, playing off an earlier essay by Oscar Handlin, Jordan became one of the first to attempt to describe a slippery slope that had gone unperceived by historians writing in Jim Crow America. In less than two generations, it now became clear, white American colonists had slid downward in their nascent racial politics from an era of occasional prejudice and mistreatment of Africans to a far more rigid system of hereditary race-based enslavement that had full legal and social sanction. But, in trying to underscore the complexity of variables and the subjectivity of unthinking European attitudes, Jordan occasionally gave the impression of exonerating the largest players in the game—the people with the fewest scruples and the most to gain.

We now know that, even if no narrow planter cabal was solely responsible for the late-seventeenth-century economic and intellectual transition, this backward and downward turn was far more conscious, calculated, and contested than Jordan implied. The continuing work of historians Ira Berlin, Tony Parent, Kathleen Brown, Barry Gaspar, Holly Brewer, John Coombs, Edward Rugemer, and others is showing that we still have much to learn on this score. But racial enslavement in North America certainly did not just grow, like Topsy, from earlier English prejudices and preconceptions. Instead, there was a complicated and extended power struggle in which prosperous slave traders and aspiring planters eventually triumphed. As John Wesley wrote to Philadelphia’s early antislavery activist, Anthony Benezet, in 1772, At length the voice of those villains prevailed who sell their country and their God for gold.

In the twenty-first century, we can hear such harsh and frank judgments more clearly than in earlier times. We feel less need to endorse or absolve those who benefited most from this momentous shift, which had such disastrous long-term effects for generations of black Americans, and indeed for the entire culture. This swift and subtle change came at a formative stage in American history, perpetrated over two generations during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Rather than representing an Unthinking Decision, it is better described as The Terrible Transformation. I find it encouraging that a new generation of scholars is beginning to use this more candid and less elusive terminology.

Clearly, in 1968 part of me was chafing that this impeccable, rich, expansive, and well-received book still seemed too white, too English, too exonerating. Dr. King and Robert Kennedy had been assassinated in quick succession, a rejuvenated Richard Nixon (with his own expedient priorities of white over black) won the White House, and a protracted war was raging in Vietnam. The My Lai Massacre occurred on March 16, and Americans would learn about it through pictures in Life magazine the following year. No wonder an idealistic generation that had come of age mesmerized by the election of John F. Kennedy was feeling disillusioned about current affairs and frustrated with the ways Americans told their own history. Although many characterizations feel oversimplified, most chroniclers of the late 1960s would agree that patience was not a dominant cultural trait of the moment.

Yet reading and rereading White over Black became one of the most important intellectual encounters of my graduate school years. There are few history books that I admire so much. On reflection, I find at least three broad reasons for this, and they are all deceptively simple. Each speaks to the high quality of Jordan’s scholarship, and each says something about the situation that faced numerous aspiring colonial historians who came of age in the Civil Rights era.

At the top, I would lump together the book’s size, its depth, and its elegant style. It is, above all else, beautifully written. What sets this book apart from so much of the historical literature, according to Jordan’s Berkeley colleague Leon Litwack, is the elegance of the prose. As Jordan put it, My exposure to the barbarous prose of the social sciences led to a determination on my part to write in language that at least attempted a measure of grace and clarity. This was no small part of the book’s impact. But the fact that this well-crafted volume was also so large, so rich, and so thoroughly documented was an added source of inspiration. If Jordan and Davis could say this much about European attitudes toward generations of Africans who were treated as objects, their work galvanized us early readers to think how much more could be said about the Africans themselves, when treated as subjects.

Second, and even more important, this book pushed the conversation on the history of race and slavery back by several centuries. Earlier discussions generally began roughly where White over Black left off, in the early nineteenth century. Colonial American history, far more than antebellum history, remained virtually lily white in those years, with the exception of a few significant authors and books. That Jordan chaired that 1972 OAH session The Formative Years of Black History is not surprising. Very few other members of that large organization were in a position to do so.

Jordan’s research made clear how much could be learned about shifting white racial attitudes in the early modern Atlantic world. Clearly, the many writers and thinkers he described were reacting to a large pre-1800 African presence in the Americas, and yet—remarkable as it sounds now—most white scholars had scarcely fathomed or acknowledged this diverse population or documented its existence. Consider the fact, for example, that anyone interested in the history of the slave trade had little more of a guide forty years ago than the four suggestive volumes of primary documents published by Wellesley scholar Elizabeth Donnan in the early 1930s and reprinted in 1969.

Now, in contrast, through an impressive collaborative research effort, students of black history have free access on the Web to a searchable Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database (www.slavevoyages.org) containing information on nearly thirty-five thousand separate Middle Passage voyages to the Americas—a resource for black history before 1800 that once seemed unimaginable. There is a long but nevertheless direct line from Donnan and Jordan to such current historians of the Black Atlantic as Vince Brown, Alex Byrd, David Eltis, James Gilroy, Michael Gomez, Herbert Klein, Frederick Knight, Marcus Rediker, Walter Rucker, Stephanie Smallwood, Hugh Thomas, James Walvin, and many others.

Finally, what I still appreciate most about White over Black is its quality of rumination and its general openness. Here was a candid and inquiring historian who was deliberate in dealing with his surprising material and cautious about framing his conclusions. Listen to Jordan at the outset, as he approaches his fragmented and difficult sources:

I have tried to read these sources with mind and eyes open and to listen with as much receptivity as possible to what men now dead were saying. Some readers will think that this book reads too much into what men wrote in the past. To this objection I can only say that an historian’s relationship with the raw materials of history is a profoundly reciprocal one and that I read in these materials for several years before I became partially aware, I think, of what meaning they contained, of what thoughts and feelings in their authors they reflected. This is in part to say that I became aware of the power of irrationality in men because and not before I read the source materials for this study.

Like all the best historians, he was not writing his preconceptions; instead, he was trying to go where the sources led him. In the end, he was as humble as he was provocative. He could live with uncertainty, and he urged us to do the same, even as we continue to search. I shall be enormously surprised—and greatly disappointed— Jordan wrote, if I am not shown to be wrong on some matters. And then he added, All of which means that this book ends where it begins, with the uncertainties inherent in a venture of a people into a new land.

So whether we are drawn to British colonial history or American intellectual history or African American history, or a rich blend of all these fields, we are all forever in the debt of Lucretia Mott’s gifted descendant. If Mark Twain was correct in defining a classic as a book that people praise and don’t read, then White over Black is something more, since it has earned repeated scrutiny. This handsome new edition—created with pride and care by its initial publisher, and presented with its iconic original black and white cover—makes an extraordinary text available to another generation. Thank you, Winthrop Jordan, for leading us forward by leading us back.

Hillsborough, North Carolina

July 2011

PREFACE

THIS STUDY ATTEMPTS TO ANSWER A SIMPLE QUESTION: What were the attitudes of white men toward Negroes during the first two centuries of European and African settlement in what became the United States of America? It has taken a rather long time to find out, chiefly because I have had to educate myself about many matters concerning which at the outset I was very ignorant. This book does something to answer the question, but I am aware that it affords only partial illumination. Like most practicing historians today, I have assumed the task of explaining how things actually were while at the same time thinking that no one will ever really know. Which is to say that this book is one man’s answer and that other men have and will advance others. I hope that mine is a reasonably satisfactory one, but I shall be enormously surprised—and greatly disappointed—if I am not shown to be wrong on some matters.

Some, but not too many. I have tried to read a good deal in the extant remains of a literate culture which, however greatly it influenced its current heirs, is no longer in existence. Some of the inherent biases in these remains are discussed in the Essay on Sources. I have tried to read these sources with mind and eyes open and to listen with as much receptivity as possible to what men now dead were saying. Some readers will think that this book reads too much into what men wrote in the past. To this objection I can only say that an historian’s relationship with the raw materials of history is a profoundly reciprocal one and that I read in these materials for several years before I became partially aware, I think, of what meaning they contained, of what thoughts and feelings in their authors they reflected. This is in part to say that I became aware of the power of irrationality in men because and not before I read the source materials for this study.

Some, but by no means all readers schooled in the behavioral sciences will discover a disgraceful lack of system in the approach taken here toward the way societies are held together and toward the way men think, act, and feel. There is, however, a certain sloppiness in the available evidence. If it were possible to poll the inhabitants of Jamestown, Virginia, concerning their reaction to those famous first twenty Negars who arrived in 1619 I would be among the first at the foot of the gangplank, questionnaire in hand. Lacking this opportunity, I have operated with certain working assumptions which some readers will detect as drawing upon some psychologies—the assumptions about how people operate—of the twentieth century and upon some of the psychological imagery of the eighteenth. I have taken attitudes to be discrete entities susceptible of historical analysis. This term seems to me to possess a desirable combination of precision and embraciveness. It suggests thoughts and feelings (as opposed to actions) directed toward some specific object (as opposed to generalized faiths and beliefs). At the same time it suggests a wide range in consciousness, intensity, and saliency in the response to the object. We are all aware that our attitude toward sex is not of precisely the same order as our attitude toward Medicare, and the same may be said of our attitudes toward the neighbor’s cat or Red China or rock-and-roll or the Ku Klux Klan—not, of course, that it is right to suppose that our various attitudes toward these objects are altogether unconnected with one another. This book treats attitudes as existing not only at various levels of intensity but at various levels of consciousness and unconsciousness; it is written on the assumption that there is no clear dividing line between thought and feeling, between conscious and unconscious mental processes. The book therefore deals with attitudes toward Negroes which range from highly articulated ideas about the church or natural rights or the structure of the cutis vera, through off-hand notions and traditional beliefs about climate or savages or the duties of Christian ministers, through myths about Africa or Noah or the properties of chimpanzees, down to expressions of the most profound human urges—to the coded languages of our strivings for death and life and self-identification.

Which is the way things are and—this book suggests—have been for a long time with white men. This is not a book about Negroes except as they were objects of white men’s attitudes. Nor is it about the current, continuing crisis in race relations in America. As a point of personal privilege I wish to state that work on this study was begun several years before Mrs. Rosa Parks got uppity on that bus. I might also say that at a later date when I first read some remarks by James Baldwin my first reaction was that he had plagiarized my unfinished and unavailable manuscript. I have attempted, indeed, to avoid reading widely in the literature of the present crisis because it is frequently so tempting to read the past backwards—and very dangerous. The relevance, if any, of this study to the present is left principally to the reader to determine, though I confess to having written two sentences on the subject. My assumptions about the value of historical study are the same as those of most historians. A comprehension of the past seems to have two opposite advantages in the present: it makes us aware of how different people have been in other ages and accordingly enlarges our awareness of the possibilities of human experience, and at the same time it impresses upon us those tendencies in human beings which have not changed and which accordingly are unlikely to at least in the immediate future. Viewed from a slightly different vantage point, an understanding of the history of our own culture gives some inkling of the categories of possibilities within which for the time being we are born to live.

To say this is, I suppose, to make something of a claim for the value of studying current attitudes toward Negroes by taking, as they say, the historical approach. What the historian contributes, inevitably, is a sense and appreciation of the important effect—perhaps even the great weight—of prior upon ensuing experience.

I embarked on this project without suspicion of how very strong this effect could be. I assumed that when Englishmen met Negroes overseas there would be attitudes generated, and I first looked for evidence in the writings of English voyagers to West Africa and of their readers at home. It only gradually dawned that I was oafishly cutting into the seamless web of time at just the wrong moment, that it was necessary to probe the characteristics of Englishmen before rather than when they first confronted Africans. But from the first the sources made evident that there existed certain traditions about these Africans which were already in existence elsewhere in Europe in the days when Englishmen painted themselves blue and were otherwise notorious savages. Some of these traditions are discussed in chapter I, and in both chapters I and II there are the results of my attempt to learn what Englishmen were like during the years immediately prior to first-hand contact with Africans and during the seventy-five years following while their contact remained infrequent and casual.

The second chapter focuses especially upon the problem of the origins of American Negro slavery. Understanding the way racial slavery began is both extremely difficult and absolutely essential to comprehension of the white man’s attitudes toward Negroes. For once the cycle of debasement in slavery and prejudice in the mind was underway, it was automatically self-reinforcing. It is so easy to see the dynamics of this cycle that most students of race relations in the United States have looked no further; they have assumed that the degraded position of the slave degraded the Negro in the white man’s eyes—without pausing to wonder why Negroes came to be slaves in the first place, a question which cannot be answered by thinking entirely in terms of the Negro’s condition since he was not fully a slave for Englishmen until they enslaved him.

Once the cycle was fully established, it is possible to obtain satisfactory answers as to the way it operated. From about 1700 until shortly after the middle of the eighteenth century, slaves were imported and worked by white men without effective challenge or even effective questioning of the rationale underlying what had rapidly become an important New World institution. It is therefore possible to treat this period as a unit, which in Part Two is discussed in four major aspects. It has seemed essential to deal first with the geographic and social patterns of the institution and with the problems generated by the necessity, as white men thought, of maintaining control over Negroes who no one thought would be lovable and happy and civilized and contented if left to themselves. The problem of maintaining control was in part a matter of white men controlling themselves, and a special aspect of this necessity is dealt with in the next chapter on interracial sex. It came to me as a surprise that many of the patterns of behavior, beliefs, and emotional tensions which are well known in the twentieth century were in existence more than two hundred years ago. The evidence suggests the great importance of demographic patterns in shaping white attitudes toward sexual intermixture, and it also shows that white men projected their own conflicts onto Negroes in ways which are well known though not well acknowledged today.

In the eighteenth century the role of explicitly religious ideas and impulses was of the utmost importance in shaping men’s attitudes. The injunctions of Christian belief placed the keepers of Negroes under the task of doing what they could or would not do, of converting Negroes and treating them as brothers at least in Christ. This made (and sometimes still makes) things difficult, and the results of this difficulty are treated in chapter V. But Negroes were for white men not merely souls, which by definition were the same before God, but also corporeal creatures whom the merest glance revealed to be different from white men. In conceptualizing this difference provincial Americans drew upon certain prevailing cosmological and scientific concepts, and they showed themselves pulled by opposing tendencies—the need to explain why