Existing comment:
1600s: Indentured servitude:
Many who came to the colonies, both Africans and Europeans, arrive as indentured servants, bound to work for a set period -- usually four-to-seven years -- in exchange for meals and housing. The English force the poor and destitute, convicts and Irish prisoners of war, into service. It is a life of hard labor, little food and few rights. Many die before completing their time. In colonial Virginia until the late 1600s, indentured servitude -- not slavery -- is the dominant form of labor. In the colonies, white and black servants work side by side.
"[Black and white servants] ran away together, played together and revolted together. They mated and married, siring a sizable mixed population. In the process, black and white servants -- the majority of the colonial population -- created a racial wonderland ... The basic division ... was between servants and free people, and there were whites and blacks on both sides of the line."
-- Lerone Bennett, Jr., Before the Mayflower: A History of Black America (rev ed 1987)
1621: An African slaveholder:
Anthony Johnson arrives in Virginia as either a slave or an indentured servant. After some time, he earns his freedom, and soon becomes a respected member of the community, with a large farm, livestock and slaves of his own. In 1655, her successfully challenges a white farmer who has illegally taken one of his slaves, winning his case in the colonial courts.
1640: Unequal punishment:
As punishment for escaping, a black indentured servant, John Punch, is sentenced to servitude for life. But his two indentured white companions are ordered to serve only one additional year.
"[This is] the first definite indication of outright enslavement... No white servant in any English colony, so far as is known, ever received a life sentence."
-- Winthrop D Jordan, White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro , 1550-1812 (1968)
1675-76: King Philip's War:
Metacom, the chief of the Wampanoag Indians, (called King Philip by the English colonists) frustrated by growing competition over land and humiliating treatment by the colonists, declares war.. King Philip is defeated, tribes throughout the region are decimated, and colonists jail many neutral Indians who are Christian converts.
"When permanent settlement became the primary English concern... and land the object of desire, the image of the Indian as a hostile savage became ascendant in the English mind... To typecast the Indian as a brutish savage was to solve a moral dilemma. If the Indian was truly cordial, generous, and eager to trade, what justification could there be for taking his land? But if he was a savage, without religion or culture, perhaps the colonists' actions were defensible?"
-- Gary Nash, "Red, White and Black: Origins of Racism in Colonial America," in Gary Nash and Richard Weiss (eds.), The Great Fear: Race in the Mind of America (1970)
1675-76: Bacon's Rebellion:
In Virginia, impoverished blacks and whites -- servants, slaves, and free -- unite to rebel against unfair economic conditions and abuses of power in the colony. British troops quash the rebellion, but it reveals to wealthy white planters the danger of having poor whites allied with poor blacks.
"The answer to the problem ... was racism to separate dangerous free whites from dangerous slave blacks by a screen of racial contempt ... By a series of acts, the [Virginia] assembly deliberately did what it could to foster the contempt of whites for black and Indians."
-- Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (1975)
1758: Linnaeus on race:
The Swedish naturalist Carolus Linnaeus published the 10th edition of Systema Naturae, his comprehensive framework for sorting the natural world. Linneaeus classifies human beings as part of the animal kingdom. He designates four basic races of humans, as well as two additional types -- Monsters and Feral (or wild) people. He also specifies behavioral traits for the four races. Linnaeus's influence lingers in the racial categories still in use today.
"The eighteenth century was the great age of classification. The voyages of discovery had flooded Europe with new and strange specimens of plants, animals, and humans. Natural historians attempting to lay the grid of reason over the unwieldy stuff of nature sought new and simple principles that would hold universally."
-- Londa Schlebinger, Nature's Body: Gender in the Making of Modern Science (1993) |