Writers casually project our current racial categories back in time, without even considering how our present-day categories mislead us when applying them to people who lived two hundred years ago. For example, for some years I have seen it reported that at the time of the American Revolution, twenty percent of the US population was "black." I had assumed that twenty percent included free blacks and other free persons of color. But I was wrong. A more recent report states that in that same time period,
another twenty percent of the U.S. population was Native American!
This means the U.S. started out with a population forty percent non-white, which is the same percentage it may reach again soon.
According to Jonathan Medrano, 11,000 blacks and 9,000 Indians* fought for the US cause in the Revolution. In fact, General George Washington could not have won the war without these collectively-called Colored troops, earning him a place in history.
DEFINING RACE AND NOT DEFINING RACE:
Some years ago I noted to an acquaintance that the US Constitution does not mention race at all, except by exclusion. For example, Article One (1790) orders that "adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to service for a term of years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three-fifths of all other persons." Confused? That "three-fifths of all other persons" are the slaves. (This is the so-called Three-fifths Compromise) But notice that the Constitution does not refer to them as "slaves", "negroes" or any other racial term. Also note that Indians "not taxed" are listed, the "not taxed" referring to Indigenous people still living on recognized tribal lands. Indians residing in urban areas or in white-dominated areas are apparently counted as free persons, assuming they were not enslaved or "bound to a term of service."
This same acquaintance, who is a very intelligent woman,
noted that the reason the Founding Fathers did not define who was "black," because they did not want to define who was "white." A strict geneaological or "blood quantum" reckoning of whiteness would no doubt have excluded people of mixed origins who were living as free persons.
After the Civil War, racial terms remain equally as vague in the Constitution. The 13th Amendment (1865), outlaws slavery and involuntary servitude, but it does not describe slaves by any racial terms.
The 14th Amendment (1868), nullifies the three fifths compromise by having all persons counted as one, though technically there were no slaves remaining to be counted anyway.
Not until the 15th Amendment (1870) is the word "race" even used. "The right of the citizen to to vote shall not be denied, on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude." It should be noted that the 14th and 15th amendments were what granted all free white men, even those lacking property, the right to vote for the first time! These amendments increased freedom for men of all "races," thereby revealing how unfree the United States could be for people of all colors.
THE LURKING SHADOW OF SERVITUDE
Note that Article One mentions persons "Bound to a term of years," but not slavery. In fact, most of the British subjects entering the 13 colonies were indentured servants, not free-wheeling adventurers, as our popular mythology would have us believe. The United Kingdom used indentured servitude as a method of disposing of unwanted people in its population. After the U.S. won its independence in 1783, the Brits established Australia as a new penal colony for the disposing of "undesirables." With this practice continuing even after the Revolution, its no wonder the quest for one's freedom became such an obsession in the American character.
BARBARY PIRATES KIDNAP EUROPEANS
The Barbary pirates operated from bases on the Muslim North African coast beginning around 1492. They operated for almost 400 years, pillaging coastal villages of Europe and West Africa, and taking captives back to the slave ports of North Africa. Even my college courses falsely portrayed "Europe" as one culturally unified and secure society from the days of the fall of Rome until the present.
In truth, Europe lived for centuries under the shadow of the more powerful Muslim empires. The Muslims were not expelled from Spain until 1492. The Ottoman Turks almost conquered Vienna in the 1600s, and held control of all or parts of the European countries of Bulgaria, Albania, Greece and Yugoslavia until the 1900s.
Europeans lived for centuries in fear of being conquered or enslaved by Huns, Mongols, Turks, or Barbary pirates. (Though Muslim slave traders always had Christian allies who helped them acquire European captives.) The fledgling United States fought two wars in 1801 and 1805, against the Barbary Pirates in order to stop paying the protection money to this efficient pirate force. The US Navy and Marine Corp were created for this very purpose.
SLAVERY, ABOLITION AND THE SECURING OF FREEDOM
In her now-classic online review of Dr. Lawrence Tenzer's, "The Forgotten Cause of the Civil War," AD Powell paints a convincing picture of northern whites who rightly feared the Confederate extention of slavery as a threat to their existence. Slavery would have undermined the wages of free people. It was widely known that there were already white people in U.S. slavery. Some of these were African descended persons who had been "whitened" by several generations of interracial sexual liasons (consensual and forced), as well as northern whites kidnapped under the pretext that they were "light-skinned negroes." (which could be anyone)
Christopher Hitchens writes in "Jefferson Versus the Muslim Pirates" that when the U.S. confronted the powerful Barbary enslavement machine, there must have been some planting of seeds of what became the Abolition movement to end all slavery.
I would add that the history of Barbary piracy, UK-sponsored servitude, and the kidnapping of northern whites were all lurking fears of US free people, and were in fact part of the memory of living persons at the time of the US Civil War. Since then, whiteness has been equated with a freedom stretching back in time, and blackness has been falsely projected back as the eternal slave. In fact, those equations collapse when one considers that at least some number of the Barbary pirates were black and many of their victims were white.
*Separating Revolutionary troops into "colored, "black" and "Indian" categories is somewhat problematic. Many of the "colored" soldiers were married into, or were born into, established Native Communities, particularly in New England. Also, many formerly enslaved Indians were classified as "negro," casting doubt on the accuracy of the terms even when used for observable, living people.
** Bacon's Rebellion in colonial Virginia was in part a revolt of white and black indentured servants against the master class and against the Indians who were paid to capture escaped white and black servants to their white masters. The Indians who suffered the most were actually peaceful local Indians who lived in white society, and not the so-called "hostiles" who were doing servant-catching for the colonial master class. Still, European use of Indian mercenaries against fugitive European servants, or against the colonial outposts of other European powers, demonstrates that "white"consciousness or white racial solidarity were not ironclad ideologies until the 1830s or later.
In the 1930s, Franco employed black African troops against his fellow white Spaniards, and the US employed black troops against white Europeans in World War Two. It seems white racial solidarity has never really taken absolute hold in European mindset.
***Because the newly-established states of the United States all claimed western territories--Massachusetts claimed land that later became western New York and Ohio, Virginia claimed the territory that became Tennessee--that were largely populated by Indians, this means that the Native American population of the United States (as defined by the States themselves, but not the Indians) was even more non-white than any census ever recorded.
Sources:
Jonathan A. Medrano, "Unsilencing History: Free Blacks, Slaves and Indians of the Revolutionary War" published in
Race, Roots and Relations, Chicago American Indian Center, 2005
AD Powell Review of "The Forgotten Cause of the Civil War."
http://www.interracialvoice.com/powell9html Christopher Hitchens, "Jefferson Versus the Muslim Pirates," published in
City Journal, spring 2007 http://cityjournal.org
United States Constitution
http://usconstitution.
J. Leitch Wright,
The Only Land They Knew: American Indians of the Southeast.
Jack D. Forbes,
Africans and Native Americans: the Language of Race in the Evolution of Red-Black Peoples
Lawrence R. Tenzer,
http://scholarspublishing.com
