Too Short for a Blog Post, Too Long for a Tweet 411

 

Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story," by Nikole Hannah-Jones.

 

We were not actors but acted upon. We were not contributors, just recipients. White people enslaved us, and white people freed us. Black people could choose either to take advantage of that freedom or to squander it, as our depictions in the media seemed to suggest so many of us were doing. 

The world revealed to me through my education was a white one. And yet my intimate world—my neighborhood, the friends I rode the bus with for two hours each day to and from the schools on the white side of town, the boisterous bevy of aunts, uncles, and cousins who crowded our home for barbecues and card games—was largely Black. At school, I searched desperately to find myself in the American story we were taught, to see my humanity—our humanity—reflected back to me.

Racist justifications for slavery gained ground during the mid-nineteenth century. The majority of the Supreme Court enshrined this thinking in the law in its 1857 Dred Scott decision, declaring that Black people, whether enslaved or free, came from a “slave” race. This made them permanently inferior to white people and, therefore, incompatible with American democracy. Democracy existed for citizens, and the “Negro race,” the court ruled, was “a separate class of persons,” one the founders had “not regarded as a portion of the people or citizens of the Government” and who had “no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” This belief, that Black people were not merely enslaved but a slave race, is the root of the endemic racism we cannot purge from this nation to this day. If Black people could not ever be citizens, if they were a caste apart from all other humans, then they did not require the rights bestowed by the Constitution, and the “we” in the “We the People” was not a lie.

Since Black women had no right to deny sex to their enslavers, they had no right to defend themselves against forced sex. Enslaved women who successfully fought off enslavers who tried to assault them were sold away from their families, gruesomely maimed, or executed.36 In 1850, within a year of his wife’s death, a white Missouri farmer named Robert Newsom purchased a fourteen-year-old girl named Celia for the purpose of having sex with her. He raped Celia for the first time on the journey home from the sale. Newsom put Celia up in a tiny cabin on his farm and there continued to rape her repeatedly over the course of five years. Celia gave birth to at least one child resulting from Newsom’s assaults. In the summer of 1855, Celia begged Newsom to stop because she was sick and pregnant and warned him that she would resist his advances. She began to keep a large stick in the corner of her cabin to protect herself. When Newsom ignored her pleas and came to her cabin on the night of June 23, 1855, Celia clubbed him twice over the head with the stick, killing him. 

Celia confessed to Jefferson Jones, who was sent by white citizens to interview her in her prison cell to find out if she had any accomplices. She was tried for first-degree murder before a jury composed entirely of white men, and Jones testified for the prosecution. Celia argued that she should be found not guilty under the state law of self-defense. An 1854 Missouri statute provided that women could defend themselves against “every person who shall take any woman, unlawfully, against her will, with intent to compel her by force, menace or duress…to be defiled” (emphasis added). But the presiding judge instructed the jury that the law didn’t apply to Celia, for Celia didn’t fall within the category of “any woman.” Instead, the judge considered Celia the chattel property of Newsom and therefore without any legal right to protect herself against him.38 The jury found Celia guilty of murdering Newsom. The judge delayed her execution so she could give birth to her third child, which would become the property of the Newsom family. But the baby was stillborn; Celia’s other two children were sold. Celia was hanged on December 21, 1855.

Most schoolchildren are taught the Declaration of Independence’s most famous lines: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” But relatively few children or adults today are as familiar with the right to revolt that follows: “Whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it…. When a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.”

When Thomas Jefferson penned those words, he owned hundreds of enslaved people. Yet he was acutely aware that Black people yearned for freedom no less than the white colonists who had waged the American Revolution and that no principle of justice could defend slavery. Even God, he later claimed, would likely side with enslaved people if they organized a successful revolt against their enslavers. In Notes on the State of Virginia, published in 1785, Jefferson admitted that rebellions were a legitimate, rational response to an immoral and inhumane system: “I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that his justice cannot sleep forever; that considering numbers, nature and natural means only, a revolution of the wheel of fortune, an exchange of situation, is among possible events; that it may become probable by supernatural interference!”

Jefferson’s anxious reflections were a kind of inheritance, something passed down from generation to generation among uneasy white enslavers. At the heart of slavery lay a terrifying conundrum—an epic struggle between the enslavers who sought to extract labor, loyalty, and submission from their human property and the enslaved people who longed for freedom and were willing to obtain their liberation by any means necessary. Jefferson, whose ancestors had been enslaving Africans on large Virginia plantations since the seventeenth century, understood this dilemma well. Slavery, he once quipped, was akin to having a “wolf by the ear”—white people could not release their grip on it, but they also knew that beneath the surface boiled a formidable Black rage that could not be fully contained.

From the founding of the original thirteen colonies, white people in the North and South lived in constant fear that the men and women they whipped, raped, and forced to work without pay would, if given the chance, rise up and take revenge on their white enslavers. This is why governmental surveillance and severe punishment of Black people began almost concurrently with the introduction of slavery itself. In 1669, the Carolina colony granted every free white man “absolute Power and Authority over his Negro Slaves.” Within decades, Carolina law drastically bolstered white authority, mandating that all white people ought to be responsible for policing all Black people’s activities. Any white person who failed to properly monitor suspicious Black activity would be fined forty shillings. This notion—that Black people were inherently devious and criminal, and that white people were required to monitor and police them—ultimately defined the nature of race relations in the United States. 

Convinced that the prevailing social and economic order could be preserved only if Black people were objects of perpetual surveillance and control, authorities across the colonies enacted slave codes, laws that governed Black people’s lives and denied them basic human rights, including the rights to move freely, to “resist” any white person, and to carry weapons of any kind. Failure to adhere to these restrictions resulted in brutal punishment. Early slave codes also legally empowered enslavers to beat, maim, assault, or even kill an enslaved person without penalty. And if found guilty of participating in insurrectionary activity, an enslaved person would automatically receive the death penalty. In many colonies, such as Virginia, the public treasury was even required to compensate enslavers if an enslaved person was killed while resisting or running away.

Legally free Black people, in both the North and the South, were subjected to similar forms of surveillance and terrorism. Lawmakers across the nation enacted legislation to ensure that free Black people would remain firmly in their place, at the bottom of the social order. Foreshadowing the “know your place” aggression that would dominate race relations in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, white politicians outlawed any Black behavior that was not immediately recognizable as labor or subservience. In Louisiana, for example, it was illegal for free people of color to “conceive themselves equal to the whites.” As the law explicitly stated, Black people should “yield” to white people “on every occasion, and never speak or answer them but with respect.” If legally free Black people failed to submit to white authority, they were subject to imprisonment.

The leaders of the tribal nations, and subgroups within them, that supported Great Britain were choosing the devil they knew. Although English settlers had often taken advantage of Native people with dire effect, the British government exercised greater control over the actions of its subjects than American statesmen seemed inclined to do. This was in large part an economic, not a humanitarian, calculation. During the colonial era, the colonists’ constant westward settlement financially strained the Crown, which was called upon to protect these incursions into Native territory with troops and forts. In 1763, King George III issued a royal proclamation asserting authority to oversee trade with Native Americans and forbidding the expansion of white settlement west of the Appalachian Mountains. Although there was no enforcement arm for this provision, its existence created a legal barrier that colonists resented, and Native leaders lauded. 

In fact, this tension was a contributing factor to the American Revolution. The colonies were growing rapidly in population and running out of fertile Southern plantation ground that would support the sons of landholders, as well as open territory that would satisfy the desire for upward mobility among the swelling yeoman farmer ranks, whose contentment was necessary for political stability. In addition, as the historian Jeffrey Ostler has elucidated, eastern elites such as George Washington held financial interests in these westerly lands that could not be exploited while the Proclamation of 1763 prevented freewheeling land sales. As Calloway succinctly put it in The Indian World of George Washington: “The Revolution was not only a war for independence and a new political order; it was also a war for the North American continent.”

It is little wonder, then, that Native people tended to side with the British. During the war American soldiers attacked hundreds of Native towns and British loyalist strongholds. Native soldiers also raided Patriot settlements. In 1777, a group of intransigent Cherokees called the Chickamauga warriors, led by Dragging Canoe, Doublehead, the Glass, Bloody Fellow, and others, began a series of guerrilla attacks on settlements. Sometimes Black people were taken captive, enslaved, or given to other Cherokees.

The Second Amendment, ratified in 1791, codified for white citizens the right to bear arms and to protect themselves. If there were any doubts about who these rights pertained to, they were put to rest in 1800, when Virginia governor James Monroe called out several regiments of the state’s militia to thwart, before it could begin, a widespread revolt planned by an enslaved man named Gabriel, and then to hunt him and the other participants down. As the historian Herbert Aptheker wrote in “American Negro Slave Revolts,” as word of Gabriel’s revolt spread, the “nation, from Massachusetts to Mississippi, was terror-stricken.” The response was to double down and make more explicit through legislation the prohibitions on Black people owning guns.47 One Virginian wrote in the local newspaper that “we must re-enact all those rigorous laws which experience has proved necessary to keep [slavery] within bounds. In a word, if we will keep a ferocious monster in our country, we must keep him in chains.”

According to a 2020 report by the Equal Justice Initiative, white Americans lynched at least 6,500 Black people from the end of the Civil War to 1950, an average of three every two weeks for eight and a half decades. (Since 2015, law enforcement has killed, on average, nearly five Black people a week.)