Read the attached to this week 2 (FILES) “Color Line.PDF” file from Peoples History of the United States by H. Zinn and  respond with 280. words  to the following questions: 
Discussion Forum Topic for week 2: Why was slavery so perpetual in Colonial and later American society? What were some of the mechanisms that enabled this process to continue way into the XIX century! Provide evidence-based examples and analysis.
Chapter 2
Drawing the Color Line
From A People’s History of the United States By Howard Zinn
There is not a country in world history in which racism has been more important,
for so long a time, as the United States. And the problem of “the color line,” as W. E. B.
Du Bois put it, is still with us. So it is more than a purely historical question to ask: How
did it start?-and an even more urgent question: How might it end? Or, to put it
differently: Is it possible for whites and blacks to live together without hatred?
If history can help answer these questions, then the beginnings of slavery in North
America-a continent where we can trace the coming of the first whites and the first
blacks-might supply at least a few clues.
In the English colonies, slavery developed quickly into a regular institution, into
the normal labor relation of blacks to whites. With it developed that special racial feelingwhether hatred, or contempt, or pity, or patronization-that accompanied the inferior
position of blacks in America for the next 350 years: that combination of inferior status
and derogatory thought we call racism.
Everything in the experience of the first white settlers acted as a pressure for the
enslavement of blacks.
The Virginians of 1619 were desperate for labor, to grow enough food to stay
alive. Among them were survivors from the winter of 1609-10, the “starving time,” when,
crazed for want of food, they roamed the woods for nuts and berries, dug up graves to eat
the corpses, and died in batches until five hundred colonists were reduced to sixty.
They needed labor, to grow corn for subsistence, to grow tobacco for export. They had
just learned from the Indians how to grow tobacco, and in 1617 they sent off the first
cargo to England. Finding that, like all pleasurable drugs tainted with moral disapproval,
it brought a high price, the planters, despite their high religious talk, were not going to
ask questions about something so profitable.
They couldn’t force Indians to work for them, as Columbus had done. They were
outnumbered, and while, with superior firearms, they could massacre Indians, they would
face massacre in return. They could not capture them and keep them enslaved; the
Indians were tough, resourceful, defiant, and at home in these woods, as the transplanted
Englishmen were not.
There may have been a kind of frustrated rage at their own ineptitude, at the
Indian superiority at taking care of themselves that made the Virginians especially ready
to become the masters of slaves. Edmund Morgan imagines their mood as he writes in his
book American Slavery, American Freedom:
…If you were a colonist, you knew that your technology was superior to the Indians’. You knew that you were civilized, and they were
savages …. But your superior technology had proved insufficient to extract anything. The Indians, keeping to themselves, laughed at
your superior methods and lived from the land more abundantly and with less labor than you did …. And when your own people
started deserting in order to live with them, it was too much …. So you killed the Indians, tortured them, burned their villages, burned
their cornfields. It proved your superiority, in spite of your failures. And you gave similar treatment to any of your own people who
succumbed to their savage ways of life. But you still did not grow much corn…
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Black slaves were the answer. And it was natural to consider imported blacks as
slaves, even if the institution of slavery would not be regularized and legalized for several
decades. Because, by 1619, a million blacks had already been brought from Africa to
South America and the Caribbean, to the Portuguese and Spanish colonies, to work as
slaves. Fifty years before Columbus, the Portuguese took ten African blacks to Lisbon:
this was the start of a regular trade in slaves. African blacks had been stamped as slave
labor for a hundred years. So it would have been strange if those twenty blacks, who had
been forcibly transported to Jamestown and sold as objects to settlers anxious for a
steadfast source of labor, were considered as anything but slaves.
Their helplessness made enslavement easier. The Indians were on their own land. The
whites were in their own European culture. The blacks had been torn from their land and
culture, forced into a situation where the heritage of language, dress, custom, and family
relations was bit by bit obliterated except for the remnants that blacks could hold on to by
sheer, extraordinary persistence.
Was their culture inferior-and so subject to easy destruction? The
African civilization was as advanced in its own way as that of Europe. In certain ways, it
was more admirable; but it also included cruelties, hierarchical privilege, and the
readiness to sacrifice human lives for religion or profit. It was a civilization of one
hundred million people, using iron implements and skilled in farming. It had large urban
centers and remarkable achievements in weaving, ceramics, and sculpture.
European travelers in the sixteenth century were impressed with the African
kingdoms of Timbuktu and Mali, already stable and organized at a time when European
states were just beginning to develop into modern nations.
Africa had a kind of feudalism, like Europe, based on agriculture, with hierarchies of
lords and vassals. But African feudalism did not come, as did Europe’s, out of the slave
societies of Greece and Rome, which had destroyed ancient tribal life. In Africa, tribal
life was still powerful, and some of its better features-a communal spirit, more kindness
in law and punishment-still existed. And because the lords did not have the weapons that
European lords had, they could not command obedience as easily.
In England, even as late as 1740, a child could be hanged for stealing a rag of
cotton. But in the Congo, communal life persisted, the idea of private property was a
strange one, and thefts were punished with fines or various degrees of servitude. A
Congolese leader, told of the Portuguese legal codes, asked a Portuguese once, teasingly:
“What is the penalty in Portugal for anyone who puts his feet on the ground?”
Slavery existed in the African states, and it was sometimes used by Europeans to
justify their own slave trade. But, as Basil Davidson points out in The African Slave
Trade, the “slaves” of Africa were more like the serfs of Europe–in other words, like
most of the population of Europe. It was a harsh servitude, but they had rights that the
slaves brought to America did not have, and they were “altogether different from the
human cattle of the slave ships and the American plantations.”
African slavery lacked two elements that made American slavery the most cruel form of
slavery in history: the frenzy for limitless profit that comes from capitalistic agriculture;
the reduction of the slave to less than human status by the use of racial hatred, with that
relentless clarity based on color, where white was master, black was slave.
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In fact, it was because they came from a settled culture, of tribal customs and
family ties, of communal life and traditional ritual, that African blacks found themselves
especially helpless when removed from this. They were captured in the interior
(frequently by blacks caught up in the slave trade themselves), sold on the coast, then
shoved into pens with blacks of other tribes, often speaking different languages.
The conditions of capture and sale were crushing affirmations to the black African
of his helplessness in the face of superior force. The marches to the coast, sometimes for
a thousand miles, with people shackled around the neck, under whip and gun, were death
marches, in which two of every five blacks died. On the coast, they were kept in cages
until they were picked and sold.
Then they were packed aboard the slave ships, in spaces not much bigger than coffins,
chained together in the dark, wet slime of the ship’s bottom, choking in the stench of their
own excrement.
On one occasion, hearing a great noise from below decks where the blacks were chained
together, the sailors opened the hatches and found the slaves in different stages of
suffocation, many dead, some having killed others in desperate attempts to breathe.
Slaves often jumped overboard to drown rather than continue their suffering. To one
observer a slave deck was “so covered with blood and mucus that it resembled a
slaughterhouse.”
Under these conditions, perhaps one of every three blacks transported overseas died, but
the huge profits (often double the investment on one trip) made it worthwhile for the
slave trader, and so the blacks were packed into the holds like fish.
First the Dutch, then the English, dominated the slave trade. (By 1795 Liverpool
had more than a hundred ships carrying slaves and accounted for half of all the European
slave trade.) Some Americans in New England entered the business, and in 1637 the first
American slave ship, the Desire, sailed from Marblehead, Massachusetts. Its holds were
partitioned into racks, two feet by six feet, with leg irons and bars.
By 1800, ten to fifteen million blacks had been transported as slaves to the
Americas, representing perhaps one-third of those originally seized in Africa. It is
roughly estimated that Africa lost fifty million human beings to death and slavery in
those centuries we call the beginnings of modern Western civilization, at the hands of
slave traders and plantation owners in Western Europe and America, the countries
deemed the most advanced in the world.
With all of this-the desperation of the Jamestown settlers for labor, the impossibility of
using Indians and the difficulty of using whites, the availability of blacks offered in
greater and greater numbers by profit seeking dealers in human flesh, and with such
blacks possible to control because they had just gone through an ordeal that, if it did not
kill them, must have left them in a state of psychic and physical helplessness-is it any
wonder that such blacks were ripe for enslavement?
And under these conditions, even if some blacks might have been considered servants,
would blacks be treated the same as white servants?
The evidence, from the court records of colonial Virginia, shows that in 1630 a
white man named Hugh Davis was ordered “to be soundly whipt … for abusing himself …
by defiling his body in lying with a Negro.” Ten years later, six servants and “a negro of
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Mr. Reynolds” started to run away. While the whites received lighter sentences,
“Emanuel the Negro to receive thirty stripes and to be burnt in the cheek with the letter R,
and to work in shackle one year or more as his master shall see cause.”
This unequal treatment, this developing combination of contempt and oppression,
feeling and action, which we call “racism”-was this the result of a “natural” antipathy of
white against black? If racism can’t be shown to be natural, then it is the result of certain
conditions, and we are impelled to eliminate those conditions.
All the conditions for blacks and whites in seventeenth-century America were powerfully
directed toward antagonism and mistreatment. Under such conditions even the slightest
display of humanity between the races might be considered evidence of a basic human
drive toward community.
In spite of preconceptions about blackness, which in the English language
suggested something “foul … sinister” (Oxford English Dictionary), in spite of the special
subordination of blacks in the Americas in the seventeenth century, there is evidence that
where whites and blacks found themselves with common problems, common work, a
common enemy in their master, they behaved toward one another as equals.
The swift growth of plantation slavery is easily traceable to something other than
natural racial repugnance: the number of arriving whites, whether free or indentured
servants (under four- to seven-year contracts), was not enough to meet the need of the
plantations. By 1700, in Virginia, there were 6,000 slaves, one-twelfth of the population.
By 1763, there were 170,000 slaves, about half the population.
From the beginning, the imported black men and women their enslavement, under
the most difficult conditions, under pain of mutilation and death. Only occasionally was
there an organized insurrection. More often they showed their refusal to submit by
running away. Even more often, they engaged in sabotage, slowdowns, and subtle forms
of resistance, which asserted, if only to themselves and their brothers and sisters, their
dignity as human beings.
A Virginia statute of 1669 referred to “the obstinacy of many of them,” and in
1680 the Assembly took note of slave meetings “under the pretense of feasts and brawls”
which they considered of “dangerous consequence:’ In 1687, in the colony’s Northern
Neck, a plot was discovered in which slaves planned to kill all the whites in the area and
escape during a mass funeral.
Slaves recently from Africa, still holding on to the heritage of their communal society,
would run away in groups and try to establish villages of runaways out in the wilderness,
on the frontier. Slaves born in America, on the other hand, were more likely to run off
alone, and, with the skills they had learned on the plantation, try to pass as free men.
In the colonial papers of England, a 1729 report from the lieutenant governor of
Virginia to the British Board of Trade tells how “a number of Negroes, about fifteen …
formed a design to withdraw from their Master and to fix themselves in the fastnesses of
the neighboring Mountains. They had found means to get into their possession some
Arms and Ammunition, and they took along with them some Provisions, their Cloths,
bedding and working Tools …. Tho’ this attempt has happily been defeated, it ought
nevertheless to awaken us into some effectual measures
In 1710, warning the Virginia Assembly, Governor Alexander Spotswood said:
… freedom wears a cap which can without a tongue, call together all those who long to shake off the fetters of slavery and as such an
Insurrection would surely be attended with most dreadful consequences so I think we cannot be too early in providing against it, both
by putting our selves in a better posture of defence and by making a law to prevent the consultations of those Negroes…
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Indeed, considering the harshness of punishment for running away, that so many blacks
did run away must be a sign of a powerful rebelliousness. All through the 1700s, the
Virginia slave code read:
…If the slave is apprehended … it shall … be lawful for the county court, to order such punishment for the said slave, either by
dismembering, or in any other way … as they in their discretion shall think fit, for the reclaiming any such incorrigible slave, and
terrifying others from the like practices ….
Fear of slave revolt seems to have been a permanent fact of plantation
life. William Byrd, a wealthy Virginia slaveholder, wrote in 1736:
…We have already at least 10,000 men of these descendants of Ham, fit to bear arms, and these numbers increase every day, as well
by birth as by importation. And in case there should arise a man of desperate fortune, he might with more advantage than Cataline
kindle a servile war … and tinge our rivers wide as they are with blood.
It was an intricate and powerful system of control that the slave owners developed
to maintain their labor supply and their way of life, a system both subtle and crude,
involving every device that social orders employ for keeping power and wealth where
they are.
The system was psychological and physical at the same time. The slaves were
taught discipline, were impressed again and again with the idea of their own inferiority to
“know their place,” to see blackness as a sign of subordination, to be awed by the power
of the master, to merge their interest with the master’s, destroying their own individual
needs. To accomplish this there was the discipline of hard labor, the breakup of the slave
family, the lulling effects of religion (which sometimes led to “great mischief,” as one
slaveholder reported), the creation of disunity among slaves by separating them into field
slaves and more privileged house slaves, and finally the power of law and the immediate
power of the overseer to invoke whipping, burning, mutilation, and death.
Still, rebellions took place-not many, but enough to create constant fear among white
planters.
A letter to London from South Carolina in 1720 reports:
I am now to acquaint you that very lately we have had a very wicked and barbarous plot of the designe of the negroes rising with a
designe to destroy all the white people in the country and then to take Charles Town in full body but it pleased God it was discovered
and many of them taken prisoners and some burnt and some hang’d and some banish’d.
Herbert Aptheker, who did detailed research on slave resistance in North America for his
book American Negro Slave Revolts, found about 250 instances where a minimum of ten
slaves joined in a revolt or conspiracy.
From time to time, whites were involved in the slave resistance. As early as 1663,
indentured white servants and black slaves in Gloucester County, Virginia, formed a
conspiracy to rebel and gain their freedom. The plot was betrayed, and ended with
executions.
In New York in 1741, there were ten thousand whites in the city and two thousand
black slaves. It had been a hard winter and the poor-slave and free–had suffered greatly.
When mysterious fires broke out, blacks and whites were accused of conspiring together.
Mass hysteria developed against the accused. After a trial full of lurid accusations by
informers, and forced confessions, two white men and two white women were executed,
eighteen slaves were hanged, and thirteen slaves were burned alive.
Only one fear was greater than the fear of black rebellion in the new American
colonies. That was the fear that discontented whites would join black slaves to overthrow
the existing order. In the early years of slavery, especially, before racism as a way of
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thinking was firmly ingrained, while white indentured servants were often treated as
badly as black slaves, there was a possibility of cooperation.
And so, measures were taken. About the same time that slave codes, involving
discipline and punishment, were passed by the Virginia Assembly, Edmund Morgan
writes:
Virginia’s ruling class, having proclaimed that all white men were superior to
black, went on to offer their social (but white) inferiors a number of benefits previously
denied them. In 1705 a law was passed requiring masters to provide white servants whose
indenture time was up with ten bushels of corn, thirty shillings, and a gun, while women
servants were to get 15 bushels of corn and forty shillings. Also, the newly freed servants
were to get 50 acres of land.
Morgan concludes: “Once the small planter felt less exploited by taxation and began to
prosper a little, he became less turbulent, less dangerous, more respectable. He could
begin to see his big neighbor not as an extortionist but as a powerful protector of their
common interests. ”
We see now a complex web of historical threads to ensnare blacks for slavery in
America: the desperation of starving settlers, the special helplessness of the displaced
African, the powerful incentive of profit for slave trader and planter, the temptation of
superior status for poor whites, the elaborate controls against escape and rebellion, the
legal and social punishment of black and white collaboration.
The point is that the elements of this web are historical, not “natural.”
This does riot mean that they are easily disentangled and dismantled. It means only that
there is a possibility for something else, under historical conditions not yet realized. And
one of these conditions would be the elimination of that class exploitation which has
made poor whites desperate for small gifts of status, and has prevented that unity of black
and white necessary for joint rebellion and reconstruction.
Around 1700, the Virginia House of Burgesses declared:
The Christian Servants in this country for the most part consists of the Worser Sort of the people of Europe. And since … such
numbers of Irish and other Nations have been brought in of which a great many have been soldiers in the late wars that according to
our present Circumstances we can hardly governe them and if they were fitted with Armes and had the Opertunity of meeting together
by Musters we have just reason to fears they may rise upon us.
It was a kind of class consciousness, a class fear. There were things happening in early
Virginia, and in the other colonies, to warrant it.
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