In Between the World and Me, Ta Nehisi Coates declared that "Race is the child of racism, not the father," introducing many audiences to the notion that race in the United States has very real material and cultural manifestations despite being a social and historically contingent construction.1 This simple, though artful, turn of phrase distills the centuries-long effort of European colonists to categorize others as their subjects and slaves. While national and religious identities had long served to distinguish the civilized from the uncivilized, the Christian and the barbarian, New World colonization required a new organizing principle to determine just war, lawful conquest, and the terms of enslavement. This module links Spanish colonial documents from the turn of the sixteenth century to British colonial innovations in the seventeenth and early-eighteenth centuries, incorporating the work of historians of race and gender to demonstrate how European colonists developed a racialized hierarchy that justified the widespread enslavement of Africans and their descendants by the eighteenth century.
Spanish Constructions of Religious Conquest, 1493-1510
In light of Christopher Columbus's reports of boundless mineral and other natural resources held by supposedly guileless and unsophisticated people who could easily be enslaved, Spanish authorities acted quickly to establish legal claims to New World inhabitants and their lands. The 1493 Inter Caetera Papal Bull divided Latin America between the Spanish and Portuguese, primarily favoring Spain, and King Ferdinand issued orders to seize his new domain. Citing papal and royal legal authority, King Ferdinand's 1514 Proclamation and the 1510 Requerimiento express the philosophy of just war: should Indigenous Americans defy Spanish authority and deny Catholic conversion, they could be justly put to death and/or enslaved. The inhumane brutality, enslavement, and dispossession that followed are widely chronicled, but the notion that Indigenous people's rejection of forced Christian conversion and European subjecthood justified war and enslavement appealed to British colonizers as well.
British-Indigenous Diplomacy and the Racialization of Servitude and Slavery: Virginia, Massachusetts, and Maryland in the Seventeenth Century
A bit late to the New World colonization game, British officials and elites nonetheless invoked the Just War doctrine that Spain and Portugal used to claim Latin America. While Spanish authorities continued to complicate their legislative regulations of Indigenous and African servitude and slavery throughout the colonial period, our focus on U.S. Law & Race turns our close attention to the British colonies of Virginia, Massachusetts, and Maryland.
Between 1639 and 1691, Virginia Colony established a series of statutes that increasingly limited the rights of Indigenous and Black residents while expanding the rights of Europeans. Because British colonists lived and worked in close proximity to Black and Indigenous people in colonial Virginia, they also intermarried, and shared alliances and animosities. The Virginia Assembly passed a series of laws that sequentially minimized these inter-racial unions, perceiving them as a threat to British elite authority. These laws ranged from bans on Black and Native gun ownership to distinctions in penalties accorded to European and Black servants, and even bans on inter-racial marriage. Reading these bans closely reveals the slippage of language used to define unstable and opposing categories such as Christian slaves, English and black, slave and free negroes. As terminology in the statutes progressed to harden the distinctions between limited rights for Black Virginians and carved out privileges for English Virginians—even those facing enslavement as a criminal sentence.
These laws were not only racialized, but gendered. Virginians made slavery matrilineal, inherited from the status of mother, marking an exceptional departure from a patriarchal common law system, and designating stark penalties for women bearing inter-racial and extramarital children. Reading these codes closely reveals a rigorous effort to stabilize race in an unstable environment, and to shift social and legal practices to increasingly equate blackness with unfreedom and Britishness with privilege, all while attempting to keep unruly men and women of all backgrounds under authority of colonial elites.
Of course, Virginians were not alone in parsing out the rights and restrictions on Indigenous, African, and British subjects. Massachusetts established its Body of Liberties in 1641. Despite its appealing title, the statutes severely proscribed the rights of Black and Indigenous people and outlined the structures of slavery and servitude practiced in Massachusetts towns and homes. The liberties included the right of persons to sell themselves into slavery and distinguished between servants and slaves by limiting masters from transferring servant contracts to others, which could look a lot like selling a person. Despite this protection of servant dignity, masters could still extend servant contracts by claiming they had been unproductive or because of some infraction.
The Massachusetts Liberties also invoked just war, declaring that captives could be taken and enslaved as a result of conflict. Massachusetts elites weighed their coercive labor options among the Indigenous, African, and British people they knew in the mid-seventeenth century. In a 1645 letter to John Winthrop, Emmanuel Dowling suggested that because British servants could not be held in lifelong servitude and were increasingly expecting more liberties, Massachusetts should initiate a just war against the Narragansett with the aim of capturing women and children to be traded for African slaves. Dowling's speculations materialized. British merchants practiced a robust trade that exchanged Indigenous women and children out of Atlantic seaboard colonies for enslaved Africans transported through British Caribbean ports. The Body of Liberties sanctioned this slave traffic and Massachusetts began to incorporate gendered and racialized restrictions similar to those outlined in the Virginia Colony statutes as British colonists developed the linguistic and legal strategies necessary to racialize slavery and freedom.
As British colonial legal regimes increasingly relied on race to justify slavery, Indigenous and Black colonial residents leveraged what little access they had to the British colonial legal system. Even as it justified enslavement, the Massachusetts Body of Liberties promised due process to all, and Indigenous New Englanders took those rights seriously. Plymouth colonial court records between 1646 and 1675 reveal frequent claims by and against tribal members that did not always end in their favor, but occasionally did and nonetheless indicate Indigenous legal sophistication early in the colonial era. As Indigenous litigants sued British neighbors for damages and infractions, they increasingly found the courts ineffective, and individual grievances soon erupted into war—a war that served British colonial interests in gaining land and captives to exchange in the Atlantic slave trade.
That such conflicts occurred between Indigenous and British neighbors who shared meals and exchanged diplomacy, but also shared tensions and animosities is also clear in Maryland's treaties with Chesapeake tribes. The 1666 Treaty in our collection highlights the intimate familiarity of British colonists with particular tribal leaders, but also expresses a fear of unknown Native people, particularly those in traditional dress and adornment. Even as the treaty acknowledges Indigenous resource rights, it also requires Native people to throw up their arms and announce their alliances when they encounter British residents because the British could not distinguish between ally and enemy tribes. Such incapacity to distinguish Indigenous people by tribal and individual characteristics prompted the British to increasingly racialize Indigenous people as Indians, just as they would racialize African people as Black, ultimately equating both groups as other and lesser than themselves.
By the close of the seventeenth century, British colonists had synced their legal practices and terminology to institute a racialized slavery regime that made captives and slaves of Indigenous people who fought to maintain the lands and lives, and of Africans who could not document their freedom. The 1705 Virginia Act Concerning Servants and Slaves collates the practices of British colonies throughout the Caribbean and Atlantic seaboard. In these acts, they also policed women's reproduction, punishing British women who bore inter-racial and extramarital children, and sentencing enslaved Black women's children to generational, lifelong slavery. Reading these documents closely and in tandem demonstrates the codification of gendered and racialized restrictions published as liberties and legal codes. In each text, it is important to note the unstable categories of Christian and non-Christian (unstable because non-Christians can convert to Christianity); the slippage between foreigner, moor, African, negro, black, and slave; the increasing degrees of separation imposed between British, Black, and Indigenous residents; and the persistent monitoring of women's sexuality to discourage inter-racial progeny. These are the gestures that allowed the British to equate blackness with slavery, to wage a war on Indigenous people that they considered just, and to limit women's capacity to determine their own autonomy. This is how race became the child of racism in the United States.
Suggested Readings
Brooks, Lisa. Our Beloved Kin: A New History of King Philip’s War. Yale University Press, 2018.
Brown, Kathleen M. Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia. University of North Carolina Press, 1996.
Morgan, Jennifer L. Reckoning with Slavery: Gender, Kinship, and Capitalism in the Early Black Atlantic. Duke University Press, 2021.
Musselwhite, Paul, Peter C. Mancall, and James Horn, editors. Virginia 1619: Slavery and Freedom in the Making of English America. University of North Carolina Press, 2019.
Newell, Margaret. Brethren by Nature: New England Indians, Colonists, and the Origins of American Slavery. Cornell University Press, 2015.
Reséndez, Andrés. The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016.
Williams, Robert. The American Indian in Western Legal Thought: The Discourses of Conquest. Oxford University Press, 1992.
1. Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me (New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2015), 7.
The Bull Inter Caetera