Confederate "Heritage" Month 2023, April 12: Slavery and white racism evolve

“The word race as used in the 18th and 19th centuries generally meant what we mean by nationality today; thus people spoke of ‘the English race,’ ‘the German race,’ and so on.” - Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., 1991¹

Schlesinger was discussing a famous quotation from a French-American author, J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur (1735-1813), in his book Letters From an American Farmer (1782): "What then was the American, this new man?" Schlesinger noted parenthetically, “Twentieth-century readers must overlook 18th-century male obliviousness to the existence of women.“ (I’ll say parenthetically that, no, I don’t think we should overlook that.)

He provided a classic answer to his own question of what is this new man, the America: He is an American, who leaving behind him all his ancient prejudices and manners, receives new ones from the new mode of life he has embraced, the new government he obeys, and the new rank he holds. The American is a new man, who acts upon new principles. . . . Here individuals of all nations are melted into a new race ef men. [italics in original]

The evolution of “race” as a social concept

Before I return to more of the discussions that arose around The 1619 Project, I want to focus in this post on the fact that the concept of race in the United States was evolving relatively quickly in the last 18th and early 19th century.

There is extensive research on the notion of race, and our world’s understanding(s) of the concept continues to develop. The late 18th century was the era of the Enlightenment in the European world and in the Americas, including Crevecoeur’s “new race of men” in the new United States. The ideology that dominated the American Revolution and the creation of the Constitution was very much an Enlightenment perspective. One of Schlesinger’s contemporaries, the historian Henry Stelle Commager, discussed this in, for example, Jefferson, Nationalism, and the Enlightenment (1975).

Today, even dedicated liberals comparable to Schlesinger and Commager are likely to be more explicit about the contradictory nature of the Enlightenment than a few decades ago. Although to give Commager credit in the work just mentioned, he wrote in the book’s introduction of that era in the US:

Probably no other generation in our history has been so conscious of its obligation to the rest of the human race - or at least to the European portion of it - or more ready to fulfill that mission which they fondly believed History had imposed upon them; no other took more completely for granted that the obligation and the mission were to be fulfilled by moral precept and practical example.² [my emphasis]

He also argued that the Enlightenment tradition in America took a more democratic and egalitarian turn:

Progress, in the Old World, was a class concept, too, something the philosophes could formulate and the nobility and the intellectuals enjoy. Even the most ardent critics of the establishment - Church or state - confessed little interest in the lot of the lower classes, everywhere the overwhelming majority of the population; not Voltaire or Montesquieu, not Raynal or Rousseau, not Lessing or Kant or von Haller or Goethe. Struensee perhaps in Denmark, and Beccaria in Milan; and Tom Paine and Priestley in England but they fled to America.³ [my emphasis]

The Enlightenment had its own contradictions when it came to race. Immanuel Kant, who put human freedom at the center of his philosophy, had a debate with the naturalist and explorer Georg Forster over the concept of race. Forster had the more realistic position:

[Kant and Forster] engage[d] in a fierce debate over the scientific significance of skin color in the 1780s. Forster, having had first-hand experience of different peoples, and believing that grouping people would have to include studies of customs and language, itself a very complicated endeavor, took a position against any theory of race based on skin color. Forster appeared to win the debate, and seemed to have succeeded in muting Kant's future writings on the topic. Yet, despite its lack of scientific merit, Kant's work on a definition of race based solely on skin color was influential in his day. Indeed, this colonial fantasy, to use Zantop's words, of human races based solely on skin color has been woven into the western consciousness.⁴ [my emphasis]

This was a real contradiction in the Enlightenment understanding of the world. And it was a real-world contradiction with real-world consequences. In terms of the theoretical understanding, Kant didn’t reject the kind of natural science and empirical observation that Forster was making, quite the contrary. And Forster presumably had no objection to the basic concept of the centrality of human freedom that Kant articulated. Forster was not just a theoretical but a practical supporter of the French Revolution: “Sympathetic with the French Revolution, he championed the republican government in Mainz, occupied by the French in 1792, and in 1793 he went to Paris to negotiate on its behalf.“⁵

But Kant and Forster came to a very different understanding on the nature of human racial differences.

Georg Forster (1754–1794)

Schlesinger called attention to how the principles - and mythology, too, I would add - actually challenge the reality the country has experienced:

A century after Tocqueville, another foreign visitor, Gunnar Myrdal of Sweden, called the cluster of ideas, institutions, and habits "the American Creed." Americans "of all national origins, regions, creeds, and colors," Myrdal wrote in 1944, hold in common "the most explicitly expressed system of general ideals" of any country in the West: the ideals of the essential dignity and equality of all human beings, of inalienable rights to freedom, justice, and opportunity.

The schools teach the principles of the Creed, Myrdal said; the churches preach them; the courts hand down judgments in their terms. Myrdal saw the Creed as the bond that links all Americans, including nonwhite minorities, and as the spur forever goading Americans to live up to their principles. "America," Myrdal said, "is continuously struggling for its soul."⁶ [my emphasis]

Changes in racial attitudes toward African-Americans in the US

In this year’s series of anti-neo-Confederate posts, I’ve talked about the complicated status of slavery in the US around the time of the Revolution, in particular related to arguments that preserving slavery was a central goal of the Revolution.

Chattel slavery was already long since racialized in 1776. William Freehling describes the process that took place after the American Revolution in which Northern states began to free slaves by compensated emancipation and prohibiting people born after a certain date to be considered slaves. That process was not duplicated in the South, not least because of the world market reality that cotton became a much more valuable crop and much of it was produced using slave labor in Southern states with a climate amenable to cotton cultivation.⁷

Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin in 1793. It jump-started the cotton economy, which meant in the United States that it contributed to the growth and prosperity of slavery. As John Hope Franklin and Alfred Moss, Jr. write:

In the years immediately following the treaty of independence of 1783, the areas where slaves were concentrated experiencecl a severe depression. Tobacco plantations were plagued by two evils: soil exhaustion and a glutted market. Rice and indigo production brought little profit to the planters of these commodities. The price of slaves was declining, and there was reason to believe that the institution would deteriorate. ⁸ [my emphasis]

In that situation immediately after the Revolutionary War, it was an understandable assumption by opponents of slavery that it could eliminated as an institution in the gradual manner that Northern states were doing it. Whatever that might say about the level of passion or lack thereof for an end to slavery on the part of Northern whites, the boom in the cotton business, made possible in large part by the cotton gin, made that option mostly mute in the Southern states:

The invention of the cotton gin and the extension of the area of cotton cultivation ushered in a period of favorable economic change in the South. One of the most important manifestations of this change was the increased demand for black slaves. Not only was there now a great opportunity to use the slaves that many plantation owners had kept against their better judgment, but there was an opportunity to use even more slaves if they could be secured.

Eugene R. Dattel writes:

A quick glance at the numbers shows what happened. American cotton production soared from 156,000 bales in 1800 to more than 4,000,000 bales in 1860 (a bale is a compressed bundle of cotton weighing between 400 and 500 pounds). This astonishing increase in supply did not cause a long-term decrease in the price of cotton. The cotton boom, however, was the main cause of the increased demand for enslaved labor – the number of enslaved individuals in America grew from 700,000 in 1790 to 4,000,000 in 1860. Americans were well aware of the fact that the economic value placed on an enslaved person generally correlated to the price of cotton. Thus, the cotton economy controlled the destiny of enslaved Africans. ⁹ [my emphasis]

The cotton business that was made so much more profitable by the cotton gin also had effects of American Indian policy: “one of President Andrew Jackson’s motives for moving Native Americans out of the Southeast was to open up land for more cotton plantations.“¹⁰

And as the cotton business boomed and slavery with it, the white racist narrative also evolved. As Freehling describes at some length, the prominent justification for slavery for Black people had previously been that the white owners of slaves were lifting up the backward black race to a higher stage of civilization. This is the kind of position that Jefferson advocated. Freehling notes that this justification remained popular in Upper South states like Virginia, the more dominant narrative justifying Black bondage was that Black people were simply an inferior race, made by God and/or nature to be servants to the superior white race.

Bruce Franklin described this ideological evolution in 1978:

Slavery, as we now recognize, went through a fundamental change around 1830, completing its evolution from a predominantly small-scale, quasi-domestic institution appended to handtool farming and manufacture into the productive base of an expanding agricultural economy, utilizing machinery to process the harvested crops and pouring vast quantities of agricultural raw materials, principally cotton, into developing capitalist industry in the northern states and England. Prior to the 1830s, open assertions of the "permanent inferiority" of Blacks "were exceedingly rare." [George Fredrickson, 1971] In fact, many eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century apologists for slavery defended it as a means of "raising" and "civilizing" the poor, benighted, childlike Negro.

But in the 1830s there emerged in America a world-view based on the belief that Blacks were inherently a race inferior to whites, and as part of this world-view there developed a scientific theory of Blacks as beings halfway, or even less than halfway, between animals and white people. This was part of the shift of Blacks from their role as children, appropriate to a professedly patriarchal society which offered them the opportunity of eventual development into adulthood, into their role as subhuman beasts of burden, the permanent mainstay of the labor force of expanding agribusiness.¹¹ [my emphasis]

This argument was applied with pseudoscientific justifications, at least for more educated circles. Charles Darwin hadn’t yet published his evolution theory in the 1830s, and Social Darwinism was even farther in the future.

But the theory of white racism was hardening along with the profitability of the slave system. And its contradictions with the Enlightenment theories associated with the founding of the nation became more and more obvious.

1. Schlesinger, Jr., Arthur M. (1991): The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society. Knoxville: Whittle Direct Books.

2. Commager, Henry Steele (1975): Jefferson, Nationalism, and the Enlightenment, xvi. New York: George Braziller.

3. Ibid., 25.

4. Gray, Sally Hatch (2012): Kant's Race Theory, Forster's Counter, and the Metaphysics of Color. The Eighteenth Century 53:4, 395. <https://www.jstor.org/stable/23365038> Accessed: 2023-29-03).

5. Editors (2023): Georg Forster: German explorer and scientist. Britannica Online 01/08/2023. <https://www.britannica.com/biography/Georg-Forster> (Accessed: 2023-29-03).

6. Op. cit., 7-8.

7. Freehling, William (1990): The Road to Disunion-Secessionists at Bay 1776-1854-Volume I. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

8. Franklin, John Hope and Alfred Mose, Jr., Alfred (2003): From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African Americans (Eighth Edition), 99-101. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

9. Dattel, Eugene (2006): Cotton in a Global Economy: Mississippi (1800-1860). Mississippi History Now (Oct. 2006). <https://www.mshistorynow.mdah.ms.gov/issue/cotton-in-a-global-economy-mississippi-1800-1860> (Accessed: 2023-29-03).

10. Pierson, Parke (2009): Seeds of Conflict. HistoryNet 08/11/2009. <https://www.historynet.com/seeds-of-conflict/?f> (Accessed: 2023-29-03).

11. Franklin, H. Bruce (1978): The Victim as Criminal and Artist: Literature from the American Prison, 8-9. New York: Oxford University Press.