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

692 Pages·2012·37.955 MB·English

by  Winthrop D. Jordan

WHITE OVER BLACK
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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 i
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.
i. 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.
Ei85j6 68-13295
973'-°974'96
ISBN 978-0-8078-3402-2 (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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paper 16 15 14 13 12 5 4 3 21
TO P H Y L L IS
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F O R E W O RD
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 judg-
[vii]
[viii] FOREWORD
rnent perhaps should still stand. In the field of early American his-
tory, there is nothing else quite like it. The work endures, in part
because of the prose. Few modern historians of any subject have writ-
ten 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 at-
tempt to treat that early history of racial prejudice, not as a regional
story, but as a national story, the first attempt to link English percep-
tions 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 sub-
field, subfields that now have their own scholarly literatures and their
own questions. So ingrained is Jordan's work now, its novelty has be-
come more difficult to recognize with the passage of time. Some of
what was new in the book was absorbed into later historical scholar-
ship. 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 ex-
amples—scholars followed Jordan's lead only belatedly and, in many
instances, unawares. With respect to the principal theme, the mak-
ing of American identity, its contributions arguably remain largely
overlooked.
Ahead of its time in many ways, White over Black was no less a crea-
ture of its moment. The tumultuous politics of the civil rights and
Christopher Leslie Brown [ix]
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 19508 as much as it does the 19608.
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 success-
ful academic careers.1 Henry Donaldson Jordan taught modern Eu-
ropean history and for a time served as dean at Clark University in
Worcester, Massachusetts. The author of an influential work on Brit-
ish 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 fol-
lowed 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, remem-
bered 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 nour-
ished 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.
i. Biographical information is drawn primarily from "Winthrop D.Jordan, Historia
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.