Race matters in the colonial South.

WHEN EUROPEANS BEGAN COLONIZING THE SOUTHERN STRETCH OF NORTH America in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, they had been thinking and writing about Indians and Africans for at least a hundred years. As Europeans hungered for Indian lands and African labor, their ethnocentric notions of cultural difference were transformed into ideas of immutable, inheritable, racial difference. From Jamestown to St. Augustine, Charleston to Santa Fe, North American colonizers drew upon ideas circulating throughout the early modern Atlantic world to identify and signify differences that were then used to organize and justify social hierarchies and determine access to economic, political, and social rights. While Europeans shared ideas about Africans and Indians, each of the various groups of Europeans had specific colonial goals, and the circumstances they encountered varied across the South. As a result, the racial orders that emerged by the end of the colonial period were quite distinct. And just as material realities influenced how officials and elites decided whether and, if so, how to incorporate Indian and African bodies into their social orders, North Americans of all ancestries similarly made pragmatic decisions about how race would shape their lives.

In recent decades we have learned much about racial ideas and their codification in law but far less about how race really worked on the ground. Focusing on representations of Africans and to a lesser extent Indians, histories of racial thought analyze how Europeans' ideas about differences between themselves and those who would become colonized others developed as Europeans found themselves increasingly involved in transatlantic ventures that depended upon the exploitation of Africans and Indians. (1) This process of racial formation began long before individual colonists arrived in North America. Literary images and descriptions of Indian and African peoples--as well as travelers native to the Americas and Africa--circulated throughout Europe from the fifteenth century on. Part of a burgeoning print culture that grew up alongside Europe's expansion into the Americas, travel narratives spread images of the continents and their inhabitants throughout Europe, crossing national and linguistic boundaries with ease. (2)

While ideas about difference were a central motif of this literature, historians still--more than half a century after Oscar Handlin and Mary F. Handlin fired the opening shot of the origins debate--disagree about just when modern notions of race emerged in European thought. (3) At one extreme, James H. Sweet argues that Iberian racial thought of the fifteenth century, which he suggests formed the "roots of American racist thought," contained "[b]iological assumptions" that would be familiar to nineteenth-century slave owners in the Americas. (4) At the other, David S. Jones claims that environmental and cultural explanations continued to compete with biologized, racialized ones into the nineteenth century. (5)

These disagreements continue in part because some historians are looking for the first crystallization of racial ideas while others seek the moment that racial idioms supplanted other criteria of differentiation, including religion, culture, and class. In addition, not all agree on what counts as racial. Does, for instance, any mention of skin color indicate racial thinking? Is biology always necessarily implicated in references to blood? Despite these continuing disagreements, however, most historians concur that it was during the eighteenth century that environmental and cultural explanations for difference declined in importance as naturalized and increasingly biologized ones rose and that economic and political changes played a pivotal role. (6) It is not necessary to argue that slavery preceded racism to acknowledge that the entrenchment of racialized slavery, the development of Enlightenment science, and the rise of natural rights philosophy engendered significant developments in the ideological, legal, and everyday practices of race.

In addition to a continuing emphasis on finding race's originary moment, another problem inherent in approaching race via the history of ideas is that it necessarily focuses on what Europeans thought about Africans and Indians. The very best of these studies contextualize the cultural production of representations by examining the authors' goals, in particular their expectations of Africans and Indians, as well as how the latter's actions could influence--in a kind of subaltern feedback--the development of racial ideologies. As Karen Ordahl Kupperman has demonstrated, "the depth of natives' commitment to their own culture and traditions" and their refusal to convert to Christianity or emulate English culture led the English "to regard Indian differences from Europeans as fundamental and fixed" rather than malleable, as they previously had believed. (7)

This was true not just in the case of Indians, about whom Europeans often had more ambivalent ideas, but also in some places with regard to Africans. Based on her analysis of French missionaries in the Antilles, Sue Peabody argues that not only did Caribs' resistance to religious conversion cause these missionaries to change their understanding of the meanings of Indian-European differences, as Kupperman's Englishmen did, but also enslaved Africans' embrace of Christianity triggered a converse transformation: from "virulent[ly] anti-black characterizations" in the 1630s and 1640s to "more gentle, nuanced, and sympathetic--if paternalistic--portraits" after 1660. Taking place precisely at the time that African slavery became central to Antillean economies, this transformation seems, as Peabody notes, counterintuitive. But if viewed from the perspective of the missionaries and their own particular goals--the conversion of "a 'heathen' people" to Christianity--and the responses of Indians and Africans to missionary efforts, then the increasingly degraded and essentialized depictions of Caribs and the concurrent move toward portraying potential "black parishioners as fully human, capable of admirable sentiments and actions," make sense. (8) While Kupperman's and Peabody's analyses of European ideas about Indians confirm a generally accepted shift from cultural to racial understandings of difference--i.e., from malleability to rigidity--Peabody's findings suggest that this teleological thrust was not always the case.

Racial ideologies drew upon and in turn shaped other ideologies of difference, especially class, gender, and sex, which at the time explained and justified naturalized orders of hierarchy. Early racial stereotypes of Africans often mimicked derogatory attitudes toward peasants, while ideas of nobility often influenced early descriptions of Indians. (9) By the end of the colonial period, race was well on its way to supplanting class as the principal criterion of social organization throughout much of the southern tier of North America, as African Americans were almost exclusively serving as racialized, landless laborers, Indians had been excluded from, or at least marginalized within, colonial societies, and political rights were being increasingly extended to most Euro-American men.

While class served as a template for emerging colonial racial hierarchies, gender and sex were at the heart of both how Europeans perceived Indians and Africans as different and how the Europeans first encoded those differences into law. Believing that their own system of gender was natural, indeed God-given, many Europeans emphasized the ways in which Africans and Indians organized labor and power differently and judged them as inferior if not unnatural for doing so; the Europeans judged sexual mores and practices in similar terms. (10) Not all did so, however, demonstrating that once again we must be attentive to the specific contexts of cultural production. Kupperman found that at least some early English commentators saw similarities across the "gender frontier," while Juliana Barr argues that in Spanish Texas both "Europeans and Indians latched onto gender in a search for similarity." (11) Whether Europeans emphasized gender differences or similarities, however, it is clear that gender and sex were important mechanisms for codifying racial distinctions. As Kathleen M. Brown notes, the first Virginian law to distinguish between Europeans and Africans marked African women, but not European ones, as taxable, thus assuming that the former were field laborers. Throughout colonial North America, it was often through the regulation of sex that racial categories were first defined and, by criminalizing interracial sex, efforts to maintain racial boundaries were made. (12)

It has become almost commonplace to assert that gender was also significantly implicated in laws that defined slave status as passing through the mother, thus disrupting English ideas about patrilineality and constituting a significant moment in the degradation of Africans by equating their reproduction with that of livestock. However, as legal historian Thomas D. Morris has noted, English colonists did in fact have a legal principle that allowed them to enslave the children of enslaved mothers without challenging patrilineality or relying upon the principle of partus sequitur ventrem (which had traditionally dictated that animals' offspring belonged to the owner of the mother). Under inheritance laws, children born outside marriage inherited their mothers' status and had no legal claims to their fathers' names, status, or property. For English slave owners, then, bastardy law complemented property law in this instance. Where racialization does enter the process is not that colonial legislators rejected English law to justify the enslavement of generations of African Americans but rather that they assumed that all children born of enslaved women would be born outside lawful marriage, an assumption they made a reality by denying the legal validity of slave marriages. (13)

Racial ideologies--what Europeans thought they knew about Africans and Indians--certainly were important in that they formed the template from which colonizers created specific socioracial orders. But colonial social orders did not simply mirror racial ideologies. Rather, colonizers drew upon what Peabody has called an "image archive" and manipulated it to suit their own purposes. (14) One way of moving beyond the level of representations is to focus on racial projects. As defined by sociologists Michael Omi and Howard Winant, "Racial projects connect what race means in a particular discursive practice and the ways in which both social structures and everyday experiences are racially organized, based upon that meaning." Ranging from the formal to the informal and including the cultural, political, legal, and social, so-called racial projects "do the ideological 'work' of making [the] links" between the "image archive" and the structural manifestations of race. (15)

Focusing on racial formation as a compilation of racial projects--the ongoing construction, contestation, and formulation of race--encourages us to avoid treating racial ideologies as disembodied, floating discourses and instead grounds us in historical and geographic specificity. (16) It also forces us to pay attention to the disjuncture between ideology and practice and enables us to see that there were always competing ideas about how the social order should be structured and precisely how race should be used to that end. Racial formation was not a teleological process, steadily heading toward a predetermined end. Rather, competing interest groups authored and promoted their own ideas about what race should mean. These disagreements expose that race was always contested, even among those who had the most to gain.

One significant set of racial projects during the colonial era was the codification of race in law and the social order. Analyzing how elites accomplished this task reveals much more about how race actually worked in the colonial South than histories of racial thought do. (17) Racial ideologies informed but did not determine how the process developed. Colonial elites drew upon these ideologies selectively as they gained experience from their encounters with Africans and Indians and, more importantly, adapted racial ideas to their specific needs in particular colonial circumstances.

A particularly rich literature on the economic roles of enslaved and free African Americans demonstrates just how contested racial formation was. Legal proscriptions on interracial exchange were clearly more often honored in the breach, suggesting that non-elites rejected the racialized dictates of their social betters at least in the economic sphere, if not in others as well. Not only did slaves sell their time, produce, and on occasion purloined articles in violation of the law, but Euro-Americans also were frequently complicit in these illicit activities. While some shopkeepers' and tavern keepers' very livelihoods depended upon exchanges with slaves, some slave owners also had a vested interest in permitting their slaves to violate the law, for it relieved the owners from the responsibility of providing fully for their slaves. (18) We still have much to learn about the extent to which non-elites of all ancestries respected, internalized, ignored, or rejected ideas authored by elite white men, whether in philosophical treatises, legal codes, or private papers. (19) Reconstructing everyday practices is difficult, yet as these historians and others have demonstrated, it is certainly possible to do so. The archives still have much to reveal about even the most marginalized of early American subjects, but it requires patient and diligent research to reconstruct their stories from the most fleeting of evidence. (20)

Almost three decades ago, T. H. Breen and Stephen Innes criticized historians' tendency "to substitute classificatory categories for real human beings." Based on their reconstruction of free black life in mid-seventeenth-century Virginia, they concluded that "the closer we examine specific biracial communities, either in the present or the past, the more we discover that gross generalizations about race are misleading, if not altogether incorrect. We find ourselves confronted with too many exceptions, with blacks and whites who stubbornly refuse to behave as blacks and whites are supposed to behave." (21) The colonial South was a complex, multiethnic, multicultural place, and we must avoid the temptation to simplify matters by categorizing its inhabitants and then reaching conclusions about beliefs and behaviors based on those categorizations. (22) In Captives and Cousins, James F. Brooks resists just such a move and, by focusing on the complex ties that bound colonial inhabitants together, reminds us of how fluid, and even messy, identities were in the colonial era. (23)

In addition to not reducing complex lives to simplistic racial labels, we must also assume neither that labels used in the historical record had any static meanings nor that they accurately represented ancestry, let alone self-identity, for any given individual. (24) Breen and Innes, for instance, discovered individuals who were marked as having African ancestry in some records but were unmarked by race in others. This is particularly significant for those of Indian ancestry who suffered from what Ruth Wallis Herndon and Ella Wilcox Sekatau have called "documentary genocide" when colonial officials increasingly lumped Indians alongside African Americans as generalized people of color. (25) It is only by scouring all the available records that we can discover what Latin American historians have called "racial variability" or "racial drift," as the same individual might be marked with different racial labels in documents recorded at different points in his or her life. (26) Analytic scrutiny of such individuals might reveal that those who labeled them took status, wealth, residency, and occupation into account in addition to phenotype and perceived ancestry. (27)

It is not that race did not matter by the end of the colonial era. To a great extent it did determine identity, legal status, rights, privileges, and obligations as well as influence everyday interactions. But it might not have mattered as much as we think it did. As Joyce E. Chaplin cautions, our "current conceptions of [race] may hamper our understanding of how it mattered (or didn't matter) in the past." (28) The emphasis on racial thought and the continuing search for that elusive moment when ethnocentrism was transformed into racism threaten to blind us to other factors that sometimes complemented, sometimes contradicted, and always complicated the development of colonial racial orders. It is only by linking the disembodied discourses that float through Richard Hakluyt and Samuel Purchas's early travel narratives with their codification in law and their embodiment in the daily lives of colonial subjects that we will be able to evaluate the explanatory power of race.

(1) The literature here is vast. Among the classics and more recent works are David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (Ithaca, 1966); Winthrop D. Jordan, White over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550-1812 (Chapel Hill, 1968); William B. Cohen, The French Encounter with Africans: White Response to Blacks, 1530-1880 (Bloomington, 1980), 1-99; Anthony Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man: The American Indian and the Origins of Comparative Ethnology (Cambridge, Eng., 1982); introduction and eight articles in a special issue titled "Constructing Race: Differentiating Peoples in the Early Modern World," William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 54 (January 1997); Kathleen Brown, "Native Americans and Early Modern Concepts of Race," in Martin Daunton and Rick Halpern, eds., Empire and Others: British Encounters with Indigenous Peoples, 1600-1850 (Philadelphia, 1999), 79-100; and Guillaume Aubert, "'The Blood of France': Race and Purity of Blood in the French Atlantic World," William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 61 (July 2004), 439-78.

(2) Janet Whatley, "Introduction," in Jean de Lery, History of a Voyage to the Land of Brazil, Otherwise Called America, translated by Janet Whatley (Berkeley, 1990), xxiv; Jennifer L. Morgan, Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery (Philadelphia, 2004), 49.

(3) Oscar Handlin and Mary F. Handlin, "Origins of the Southern Labor System," William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 7 (April 1950), 199-222.

(4) James H. Sweet, "The Iberian Roots of American Racist Thought," ibid., 54 (January 1997), 143-66 (quotation on p. 166).

(5) David S. Jones, Rationalizing Epidemics: Meanings and Uses of American Indian Mortality since 1600 (Cambridge, Mass., 2004).

(6) Kathleen M. Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia (Chapel Hill, 1996), 1; Kirsten Fischer, Suspect Relations: Sex, Race, and Resistance in Colonial North Carolina (Ithaca, 2002), 1-2; Joyce E. Chaplin, "Race," in David Armitage and Michael J. Braddick, eds., The British Atlantic World, 1500-1800 (Basingstoke, Eng., 2002), 154-72.

(7) Karen Ordahl Kupperman, "Presentment of Civility: English Reading of American Self-Presentation in the Early Years of Colonization," William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 54 (January 1997), 193-228 (quotations on pp. 227-28). See also Masarah Van Eyck, "'We Shall Be One People': Early Modern French Perceptions of the Amerindian Body" (Ph.D. dissertation, McGill University, 2001).

(8) Sue Peabody, "'A Nation Born to Slavery': Missionaries and Racial Discourse in Seventeenth-Century French Antilles," Journal of Social History, 38 (Fall 2004), 113-26 (first and second quotations on p. 114; third quotation on p. 116; fourth quotation on p. 119).

(9) David Brion Davis, Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World (New York, 2006); Michael J. Guasco, "Encounters, Identities, and Human Bondage: The Foundations of Racial Slavery in the Anglo-Atlantic World" (Ph.D. dissertation, College of William and Mary, 2000); Karen Ordahl Kupperman, Indians and English: Facing Off in Early America (Ithaca, 2000).

(10) Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs; Morgan, Laboring Women. Kirsten Fischer adds an additional nuance, showing how the existence of alternative gender arrangements within colonial society, in her case Quakers in North Carolina, complicated an easy self/other binary. Fischer, Suspect Relations, 15-16.

(11) Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs, 33 (first quotation); Kupperman, "Presentment of Civility," 218-19; Juliana Barr, "A Diplomacy of Gender: Rituals of First Contact in the 'Land of the Tejas,'" William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 61 (July 2004), 393-434 (second quotation on p. 397). Nancy Shoemaker also suggests that we have overemphasized European-Indian differences (in politics, gender, and ideas about land, among others) to the neglect of important similarities. Nancy Shoemaker, A Strange Likeness: Becoming Red and White in Eighteenth-Century North America (New York, 2004).

(12) Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs, 116-20; Fischer, Suspect Relations; Morgan, Laboring Women.

(13) Thomas D. Morris, Southern Slavery and the Law, 1619-1860 (Chapel Hill, 1996), 43-49.

(14) Peabody, "'A Nation Born to Slavery,'" 113.

(15) Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s (2nd ed., New York, 1994), 55-56 (quotations on p. 56).

(16) Barbara J. Fields, "Ideology and Race in American History," in J. Morgan Kousser and James M. McPherson, eds., Region, Race, and Reconstruction: Essays in Honor of C. Vann Woodward (New York, 1982), 143-77; Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs, 4; Peter Kolchin, "Whiteness Studies: The New History of Race in America," Journal of American History, 89 (June 2002), 154-73.

(17) Recent contributions to this approach include Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs; and Anthony S. Parent Jr., Foul Means: The Formation of a Slave Society in Virginia, 1660-1740 (Chapel Hill, 2003).

(18) Philip D. Morgan, Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry (Chapel Hill, 1998), esp. chaps. 5-7; Timothy James Lockley, Lines in the Sand: Race and Class in Lowcountry Georgia, 1750-1860 (Athens, Ga., 2001); Ellen L. Hartigan-O'Connor, "The Measure of the Market: Women's Economic Lives in Charleston, SC and Newport, RI, 1750-1820" (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Michigan, 2003).

(19) In the decade since the publication of Nancy Shoemaker's "How Indians Got to Be Red" (American Historical Review, 102 [June 1997], 62544), there has been a veritable explosion of scholarship on how southeastern Indians adapted and incorporated racial ideologies into their own conceptions of social order. See, for instance, Claudio Saunt, A New Order of Things: Property, Power, and the Transformation of the Creek Indians, 1733 1816 (New York, 1999); Theda Perdue, "Mixed Blood" Indians: Racial Construction in the Early South (Athens, Ga., 2003); Theda Perdue, "Race and Culture: Writing the Ethnohistory of the Early South," Ethnohistory, 51 (Fall 2004), 701-23; Tiya Miles, Ties That Bind: The Story of an Afro-Cherokee Family in Slavery and Freedom (Berkeley, 2005); Andrew K. Frank, Creeks and Southerners: Biculturalism on the Early American Frontier (Lincoln, Neb., 2005); Claudio Saunt, Barbara Krauthamer, Tiya Miles, Celia E. Naylor, and Circe Sturm, "Rethinking Race and Culture in the Early South," Ethnohistory, 53 (Spring 2006), 399-405; and Theda Perdue, "A Reply to Saunt et al.," ibid., 406. For an overview of this literature, see Joshua Piker, "Indians and Race in Early America: A Review Essay," History Compass, 3 (January 2005), 1-17, http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/ doi/full/10.1111/j. 1478-0542.2005.00129.x.

(20) For a model methodology that simultaneously analyzes how elites tried to construct a racialized social order and the extent to which it influenced non-elites' choices and opportunities in occupation, residence, and family formation, see R. Douglas Cope, The Limits of Racial Domination: Plebeian Society in Colonial Mexico City, 1660-1720 (Madison, Wisc., 1994). See also Ben Vinson III, Bearing Arms for His Majesty,: The Free-Colored Militia in Colonial Mexico (Stanford, 2001).

(21) T. H. Breen and Stephen Innes, "Myne Owne Ground": Race and Freedom on Virginia's Eastern Shore, 1640-1676 (New York, 1980), 22-23 (second quotation), 31 (first quotation).

(22) For a similar call to embrace the messiness of early America, see Piker, "Indians and Race in Early America."

(23) James F. Brooks, Captives and Cousins: Slavery, Kinship, and Community in the Southwest Borderlands (Chapel Hill, 2002).

(24) For an analysis that reaches conclusions based on the assumption that racial ancestry was accurately recorded in the sources used, see Thomas N. Ingersoll, Mammon and Manon in Early New Orleans: The First Slave Society in the Deep South, 1718-1819 (Knoxville, 1999), 216.

(25) Ruth Wallis Herndon and Ella Wilcox Sekatau, "The Right to a Name: The Narragansett People and Rhode Island Officials in the Revolutionary Era," in Colin G. Calloway, ed., After King Philip's War: Presence and Persistence in Indian New England (Hanover, N.H., 1997), 114-43 (quotation on p. 118).

(26) Patricia Seed, "Social Dimensions of Race: Mexico City, 1753," Hispanic American Historical Review, 62 (November 1982), 569-606 (first quotation on p. 596 and other pages); Robert McCaa, "Calidad, Clase, and Marriage in Colonial Mexico: The Case of Parral, 1788-90," ibid., 64 (August 1984), 477-501 (second quotation on p. 478 and other pages).

(27) Colonial Latin Americanists have generally been much more attentive to the continuing interplay of class and status with race. For an introduction to the caste versus class debate, see John K. Chance and William B. Taylor, "Estate and Class in a Colonial City: Oaxaca in 1792," Comparative Studies in Society and History, 19 (October 1977), 454-87; Robert McCaa, Stuart B. Schwartz, and Arturo Grubessich, "Race and Class in Colonial Latin America: A Critique," ibid., 21 (July 1979), 421-33; and John K. Chance and William B. Taylor, "Estate and Class: A Reply," ibid., 434-42. For the addition of gender to this debate, see Elizabeth Anne Kuznesof, "Ethnic and Gender Influences on 'Spanish' Creole Society in Colonial Spanish America," Colonial Latin American Review, 4 (June 1995), 153-76; Sara Poot-Herrera, "Los Criollos: Nota sobre su identidad y cultura" [Creoles: A Note Concerning Their Identity and Culture], ibid., 177-83; Stuart B. Schwartz, "Colonial Identities and the Sociedad De Castas," ibid., 185-201; Elizabeth Anne Kuznesof, "More Conversation on Race, Class and Gender," ibid., 5 (June 1996), 129-33; and Susan Kellogg, "Depicting Mestizaje: Gendered Images of Ethnorace in Colonial Mexican Texts," Journal of Women's History, 12 (Autumn 2000), 69-92.

(28) Chaplin, "Race," 154 (emphasis mine). See also Guasco, "Encounters, Identities, and Human Bondage," 3.

Ms. SPEAR is an assistant professor of history at the University of California, Berkeley.