lukescalone's review against another edition
4.0
This is probably the oldest truly great history of American slavery. However, on account of its age, it has since been surpassed by various other works published since 1968. Rather than function as a comprehensive study of slavery or race relations, Jordan's subject here is how white Americans saw black people--it's worth emphasizing "white" as Jordan's title seems to suggest that black people in early America weren't Americans, and I take issue with this (although the Dred Scott decision did affirm that they were not citizens during the time period under study, I find the legal interpretation much less useful than a social interpretation).
The period that the book covers precedes widespread black-English contacts, and instead starts with ideas that the English had about African people before that. Much of these ideas came from the Spanish and Portuguese, which in turn were acquired from Moors and Arabs. However, within English society, there was not the idea that black/African = slave. That was a conceptualization that emerged in the mid-17th century and was codified in the late 17th and early 18th centuries. Jordan has an interesting discussion on the ways that colonial legislators framed enslavement as being something that could only be done to non-Christians (except for subjects of the Ottoman Empire or ’Alawi Morocco). Yet, those who converted to Christianity were not guaranteed their freedom, directly violating scripture (which attests that Christians and Jews may not be enslaved). As a result there is an interesting rationalization of slavery on religious grounds that--in practice--became coterminous with race.
There is also a really important chapter on sex and reproduction in here, which I find to be crucial to making sense of this subject due to the importance of "liminality" and sexual violence. Sex theoretically jeopardized the entire institution of slavery on the grounds of race, as any offspring between the union of white and black people would be both black and white (or neither black nor white). As a result, a great many laws were established prohibiting interracial relationships in the eighteenth century. When children were produced (illicitly, usually between a white man in a position of power and a black, enslaved woman), they were given the race of their mother (almost always black), although informal categorizations like "mulatto" and "quadroon" were also used. In practice, this became the "one-drop rule," and a person could be as white as ash and still be classified as "black" due to generations of interracial sexual unions. Of course, Jordan does mention that relationships between black men and white women did occur (and more often than you'd think, mostly in New England), but Southern whites saw such relationships as fundamentally an abomination and relied on language that suggested the threat of predatory black men as a way to entrench their own position.
The last big point that I found interesting was the way that Jordan discusses the rise of white abolitionism as coming out of the Mid-Atlantic Society of Friends (the "Quakers") during the American Revolution as they tried to reconcile American claims that "all men are created equal" with the very real, tangible institution of slavery. By the end of the eighteenth century, this paradox was recognized by what seemed to be nearly every American in a position of leadership, but was often ignored for "practical" reasons. There's an adequate discussion of Thomas Jefferson's place in this debate, for instance, but I find Jordan to be far too sympathetic to that slaveholder's dismay that slavery exists while refusing to manumit his own slaves.
Anyways, I'd recommend other books for those diving into the history of American slavery for the very first time, but this book is chock-full of detail that does a great job supplementing other narrative histories. Recommend.
The period that the book covers precedes widespread black-English contacts, and instead starts with ideas that the English had about African people before that. Much of these ideas came from the Spanish and Portuguese, which in turn were acquired from Moors and Arabs. However, within English society, there was not the idea that black/African = slave. That was a conceptualization that emerged in the mid-17th century and was codified in the late 17th and early 18th centuries. Jordan has an interesting discussion on the ways that colonial legislators framed enslavement as being something that could only be done to non-Christians (except for subjects of the Ottoman Empire or ’Alawi Morocco). Yet, those who converted to Christianity were not guaranteed their freedom, directly violating scripture (which attests that Christians and Jews may not be enslaved). As a result there is an interesting rationalization of slavery on religious grounds that--in practice--became coterminous with race.
There is also a really important chapter on sex and reproduction in here, which I find to be crucial to making sense of this subject due to the importance of "liminality" and sexual violence. Sex theoretically jeopardized the entire institution of slavery on the grounds of race, as any offspring between the union of white and black people would be both black and white (or neither black nor white). As a result, a great many laws were established prohibiting interracial relationships in the eighteenth century. When children were produced (illicitly, usually between a white man in a position of power and a black, enslaved woman), they were given the race of their mother (almost always black), although informal categorizations like "mulatto" and "quadroon" were also used. In practice, this became the "one-drop rule," and a person could be as white as ash and still be classified as "black" due to generations of interracial sexual unions. Of course, Jordan does mention that relationships between black men and white women did occur (and more often than you'd think, mostly in New England), but Southern whites saw such relationships as fundamentally an abomination and relied on language that suggested the threat of predatory black men as a way to entrench their own position.
The last big point that I found interesting was the way that Jordan discusses the rise of white abolitionism as coming out of the Mid-Atlantic Society of Friends (the "Quakers") during the American Revolution as they tried to reconcile American claims that "all men are created equal" with the very real, tangible institution of slavery. By the end of the eighteenth century, this paradox was recognized by what seemed to be nearly every American in a position of leadership, but was often ignored for "practical" reasons. There's an adequate discussion of Thomas Jefferson's place in this debate, for instance, but I find Jordan to be far too sympathetic to that slaveholder's dismay that slavery exists while refusing to manumit his own slaves.
Anyways, I'd recommend other books for those diving into the history of American slavery for the very first time, but this book is chock-full of detail that does a great job supplementing other narrative histories. Recommend.
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