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The Intellectual Origins of American Slavery The Intellectual Origins of American Slavery The Harvard community has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters Citation Harpham, John Samuel. 2019. The Intellectual Origins of American Slavery. Doctoral dissertation, Harvard University, Graduate School of Arts & Sciences. Citable link http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:42013111 Terms of Use This article was downloaded from Harvard University’s DASH repository, and is made available under the terms and conditions applicable to Other Posted Material, as set forth at http:// nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:dash.current.terms-of- use#LAA The Intellectual Origins of American Slavery A dissertation presented by John Samuel Harpham to The Department of Government in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the subject of Political Science Harvard University Cambridge, Massachusetts September 2019 © 2019 John Samuel Harpham All rights reserved. Professor Eric Nelson John Samuel Harpham The Intellectual Origins of American Slavery Abstract The aim of this dissertation is to recover the context of moral and political ideas in which slavery in America began. The focus is English culture during the early-modern period or from around 1550 to 1700. During this time the English commerce in enslaved persons from Africa helped to establish slave systems from Barbados and Jamaica to Carolina and Virginia. What most strikes the modern observer is the ease with which the English accepted the rise of slavery. Very few writers felt a need to defend it as right and almost none protested that it was wrong. For the most part a thought that seems to us unthinkable appears to have required little sustained reflection from them. This dissertation inquires into how that came to be the case. Chapter One examines the ideas of slavery that were current in early-modern England and argues that these were informed by the account of slavery that had been set down in the legal texts of the Roman Empire. Chapter Two observes that the English often refused to trade in slaves from Africa during the first three quarters of a century after their traders arrived on the western coast and explains why this was so. Chapter Three traces a shift in English perceptions of Africa during this same period. Chapter Four explores the manner in which this shift allowed English observers to see slavery as a distinct product of the state in Africa and the slave trade as legitimate in the terms of the Roman legal """! tradition. Chapter Five considers English attitudes toward the black skin of African peoples and finds that slavery and skin color were most often regarded as separate subjects in early-modern thought. An extended epilogue describes the transition in eighteenth-century American culture to an understanding of slavery founded upon a certain conception of race. The close historical work presented here is animated throughout by the hope that, if we are able better to understand this particular subject, then we will gain insight as well into such more general themes as the relation between slavery and modernity, the manner in which ideas shape practices and practices inform ideas, and the limits of moral perception. ! "#! TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract iii Table of Contents v Acknowledgments vi Chapter One. From Freedom to Slavery 1 Chapter Two. The Sources of African Slavery, I 30 Chapter Three. The English Image of Africa 54 Chapter Four. The Sources of African Slavery, II 109 Chapter Five. The Causes of Complexion 166 Epilogue. The Transition to America 206 Appendix One. Supplementary Figures 229 ! #! ACKNOWLEDGMENTS When I began graduate school, I never imagined that I would write a dissertation like this one; but over time, this came to seem like the only dissertation I could imagine writing. As I did so, I incurred many intellectual debts, which are indicated as much as possible in the text and footnotes. My greatest such debt is to my advisor, Eric Nelson, who gently suggested a number of years ago that a young Americanist look into Roman law. I also owe a great deal to the other members of my dissertation committee: to Nancy Rosenblum, who was always willing to talk, and to Richard Tuck, who always wanted to know more. One other thing that I never imagined I would do in graduate school was to write a dissertation that sprang from a footnote in a book by my advisor. But of course that is almost exactly what I have done, since the central argument developed here is at least suggested in an aside in Tuck’s Natural Rights Theories. On what is perhaps a more personal note, I want to thank five members of the faculty who did not serve on my committee: Jim Engell, Jill Lepore, Russ Muirhead, John Stauffer, and Cheryl Welch. Each one has now been a mentor and indeed friend to me for a long time. It is possible that this dissertation could have been finished without their friendship, but not likely; and regardless the life of its author would not have been quite so nice as it has been for knowing them. To John in particular—from the moment we met, it has been one of the great privileges of my life to know you. I have not dedicated this dissertation to anyone: I would like to save that task for the book; and I suppose that this will supply one more reason to work quickly. But the ! #"! most important people to me are my mother and my father. In very different ways, they have made me who I am. One lesson that I learned early on as I worked on this project was that I could always depend upon the kindness of librarians. For consistent kindness and crucial guidance, I would like to thank the librarians of the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Duke University; the Special Collections & Archives in the Davis Family Library at Middlebury College; and most of all the Houghton Library, Widener Library, and Harvard Map Collection at Harvard University. For financial support that allowed me the time required to conceive of such a project, I would like to thank the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History, the Center for American Political Studies, the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics, and the Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard University. ! #""! CHAPTER ONE From Freedom to Slavery In early-modern Europe, two traditions of slavery survived from the ancient world. The first was derived from the Politics of Aristotle, which held that some men were fitted by nature to be ruled as slaves, regardless of their actual status. The second was drawn from the Roman law, as compiled under Justinian in what had come to be known as the Corpus Juris Civilis, which maintained that all men were free by the law of nature, but that some men were legitimately made slaves as a result of their actions or choices. As the influence of Aristotle declined, the theory of natural slavery was widely rejected; but the Roman theory of slavery was received and re-fashioned in the long European Reception of Ro- man law and in the classic early theories of natural rights. Historians who have searched for the origins of American slavery have often grounded their accounts in the develop- ment of racial prejudice toward the natives of Africa; and in turn, scholars of American racial attitudes have frequently suggested that these contain the true sources of American slavery.1 But in the seventeenth century, when slavery in the English colonies took root, !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 1 The principal work on these subjects remains Winthrop D. Jordan, White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550-1812 (Williamsburg, V.A., 1968). Although Jordan once suggested that “rather than slavery causing ‘prejudice,’ or vice versa, they seem rather to have generated each other,” the general tenor of his argument was that the debasement of Africans in English culture preceded, and would eventu- ally enable, their enslavement (80). For historians of American slavery who have similarly identified race as the root of slavery, see for example Wesley Frank Craven, The Southern Colonies in the Seventeenth Century, 1607-1689 (Baton Rouge, L.A., 1949); Carl Degler, “Slavery and the Genesis of American Race Prejudice,” in Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 2, No. 1 (Oct., 1959), 49-66; Robin Black- burn, The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern, 1492-1800 (New York, 1997); and David Eltis, The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas (New York, 2000). For historians of race whose accounts have run along a parallel path, see for example, in addition to Jordan, Thomas F. Gossett, Race: The History of An Idea in America (Dallas, T.X., 1963); Alvin O. Thompson, “Race and Colour Prejudices and the Origin of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade,” Caribbean Studies, Vol. 16, No. 3/4 (Oct., 1976 – Jan., 1997), 29-59; Ronald Sanders, Lost Tribes and Promised Lands: The Origins of American ! "! the idea of race was only just beginning to emerge, and the most important theory of slav- ery in England was a fundamentally Roman view premised on the natural freedom of all mankind. These facts suggest an original account of the intellectual origins of American slavery—one in which the perception of racial difference was only one facet in a complex network of beliefs, and in which a certain notion of slavery grew instead out of a certain notion of freedom. The Roman law of slavery was as vast and intricate as Roman law itself, and the passages Aristotle devoted to slavery have seemed to generations of scholars profoundly to express his entire sense of the political world.
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