Too Short for a Blog Post, Too Long for a Tweet 309
But a year before the Mayflower, in 1619, another ship dropped anchor on the eastern shore of North America. Its name was the White Lion, and it, too, would become one of the most important ships in American history. And yet there is no ship manifest inscribed with the names of its passengers and no descendants’ society. These people’s arrival was deemed so insignificant, their humanity so inconsequential, that we do not know even how many of those packed into the White Lion’s hull came ashore, just that some “20 and odd Negroes” disembarked and joined the British colonists in Virginia. But in his sweeping history Before the Mayflower, first published in 1962, scholar Lerone Bennett, Jr., said of the White Lion, “No one sensed how extraordinary she really was…[but] few ships, before or since, have unloaded a more momentous cargo.”
This “cargo,” this group of twenty to thirty Angolans, sold from the deck of the White Lion by criminal English marauders in exchange for food and supplies, was also foundational to the American story. But while every American child learns about the Mayflower, virtually no American child learns about the White Lion.
And yet the story of the White Lion is classically American. It is a harrowing tale—one filled with all the things that this country would rather not remember, a taint on a nation that believes above all else in its exceptionality.
The Adams and Eves of Black America did not arrive here in search of freedom or a better life. They had been captured and stolen, forced onto a ship, shackled, writhing in filth as they suffered and starved. Some 40 percent of the Angolans who boarded that ghastly vessel did not make it across the Middle Passage. They embarked not as people but as property, sold to white colonists who just were beginning to birth democracy for themselves, commencing a four-hundred-year struggle between the two opposing ideas foundational to America.
And so the White Lion has been relegated to what Bennett called the “back alley of American history.” There are no annual classroom commemorations of that moment in August 1619. No children dress up as its occupants or perform classroom skits. No holiday honors it. The White Lion and the people on that ship have been expunged from our collective memory. This omission is intentional: when we are creating a shared history, what we remember is just as revelatory as what we forget. If the Mayflower was the advent of American freedom, then the White Lion was the advent of American slavery. And so while arriving just a year apart, one ship and its people have been immortalized, the other completely erased.
The hypocrisy of white Christians who said their religion condemned darker-skinned people to perpetual slavery even as they worshiped a brown-skinned Jewish man who was put to death by an imperial power could hardly be starker, both then and now.
The most important part of the petition—the part that compelled historian Katharine Gerbner to describe it as “one of the first documents to make a humanitarian argument against slavery”—is the plain affirmation that Blacks are first and foremost human beings and not salable animals for toil and labor. A humanitarian argument is different from an argument based on inclusion and exclusion. Inclusion—in this case, being included as beneficiaries of the bounty of America—is important, but it is not fundamental because if the people who want to be included are not considered worthy or even really people at all, then your commitment to inclusion will evaporate. But if you start from the idea that Blacks are indeed human, then every commitment to equality after that will be unshakable. And that is the thing to be learned from the 1688 petition. Blacks do not need allies who fight for our inclusion; rather, we need people who are possessed of the basic belief that we are human and that any arguments that depend on rejecting that proposition are tyrannical, unjust, and to be fought.
This may seem to be a semantic point. After all, can’t allies do exactly that? Yes, but there’s more to consider. By their very nature, alliances are agreements, explicitly or implicitly, and usually the most essential part of an alliance is that it is made for mutual benefit and advantage. But think about that. What does it mean to rely on a system of racial support founded on people entering into that kind of pragmatic agreement?
The 1688 Germantown petition is a model of, if nothing else, a quality that Black people need in white Americans—the uncompromising belief that what is wrong with racism is not that it inhibits full access to American goods and treasures but that it is an affront to the human standing of Black Americans. Black people don’t need allies. We need decent people possessed of the moral conviction that our lives matter.
In the comfortingly distorted view of the past, American slavery came about in the passive tense. That’s just the way things were back then. Slavery was an inherited reality, a long-standing if unsavory fact of trade and war. In reality, colonial legislatures consciously conceived American chattel slavery at the turn of the eighteenth century, and they spelled out its terms in painstaking regulatory detail. Virginia’s slave codes contained forty-one sections and more than four thousand words.
The 1793 Fugitive Slave Act was one of the first federal laws to provide universal protection for slave owners against loss of property in enslaved people. It codified anti-Blackness and white supremacy because it signaled that a white person’s claim to stolen property was inherently more important than a Black person’s right to freedom and liberty. It reified that the United States was a nation divided, one that established freedom with whiteness and servitude with Blackness. Most critically for Black people, whether enslaved or free, the United States proved to be hostile to their freedom and hypocritical in its claims for justice and liberty.
The results of the 1840 census, which by the time of McCune Smith’s review in 1844 were under the ultimate control of Secretary of State John C. Calhoun, showed data on the health of both white and Black Americans, the latter of which were divided into categories of “free” and “enslaved.” According to these data, enslaved Black Americans enjoyed much better health than free ones, particularly mental health. Free African Americans were eleven times more likely than enslaved ones to be mentally ill, he found. Enslavement was therefore beneficial, according to the census data, and freedom could prove fatal.
Except for protests by one physician, antislavery activists offered only pallid rebuttals, while McCune Smith analyzed the data and found it rife with fraud and error. He demonstrated that many of the figures were specious or invented and that by every meaningful measure, from life expectancy to disease rates to mental health, free Blacks enjoyed far superior health than the enslaved.
McCune Smith presented his detailed report to the U.S. Senate in 1844. Former president John Quincy Adams, then serving in the House of Representatives, ordered an investigation, but Calhoun, a slavery advocate and former medical student, appointed a proslavery crony who pronounced the census flawless. Thus the 1840 census was never formally corrected, and enslavement was held to be necessary for African American health.
From the inception of her crusade, Wells-Barnett claimed that white hysteria about the rape of white women by Black men effectively masked violence against women—both Black and white. “To justify their own barbarism,” she argued, Southern white men “assume a chivalry which they do not possess.” Lynching, she explained, was not about protecting Southern womanhood but had everything to do with shoring up white men’s social, economic, and political power—in other words, white male supremacy. Desperate to control white women’s sexual behavior and maintain sexual control over Black women, Southern white men had created a scapegoat in the animalized figure of the Black rapist. Wells-Barnett argued that the focus and attention on the image of the Black rapist concealed lynching’s motives and masked violence against Black women who were victims of sexual assault and lynching.
Comments