Excluding Black people from the emerging democracy was excused as an inevitable product of nature. Thomas Jefferson elucidated this racist scientific thinking in his 1781 treatise Notes on the State of Virginia. He justified the exclusion of Black people from the democracy he and Franklin had helped to create based on “the real distinctions which nature has made.” He concluded: “This unfortunate difference in colour, and perhaps in faculty, is a powerful obstacle to the emancipation of these people.”
Quaker preacher John Woolman had already disagreed with this racist line of thought in the 1750s. He wrote a religious treatise, Some Considerations on the Keeping of Negroes, in 1746 but didn’t publish it until 1754, after abolitionist Anthony Benezet was elected to the Philadelphia yearly meeting press editorial board. Woolman urged his fellow Christians to see the evils of slavery by contesting enslavers’ rationales for denying the equal humanity of Black people. He advocated not only for ending enslavement but also for refusing to benefit from enslaved labor until abolition was achieved. Benjamin Franklin’s Pennsylvania Gazette advertised the publication of Some Considerations on the Keeping of Negroes. By the close of 1754, many Quakers had concluded that slavery was incompatible with Christianity and had begun to build an abolition movement. But the scientific understanding of race as a biological fact of nature was flourishing and would help to bolster slavery for decades to come.
Benjamin Franklin subscribed to the view not only that Black people were naturally distinct from white people but also that these distinctions necessitated differences in political status. In 1751 he authored Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind, which argued that Anglo-Saxons should expand into the Americas because Europe was overpopulated. Franklin’s claim depended in part on concerns about the “darkening” of certain parts of the Americas and its effect on the Anglo-Saxon inhabitants. “Who can now find the vacancy made in Sweden, France or other warlike nations, by the Plague of heroism forty Years ago; in France by the expulsion of the Protestants; in England by the settlement of her Colonies; or in Guinea, by one hundred years’ exportation of slaves, that has blacken’d half America?,” he wrote.
Franklin explained in terms of natural distinctions between races why he did not want more Africans brought to the America that he and his enlightened colleagues were building:
The number of purely white people in the world is proportionally very small. All Africa is black or tawny. Asia chiefly tawny. America (exclusive of the newcomers) wholly so. And in Europe, the Spaniards, Italians, French, Russians and Swedes are generally of what we call a swarthy complexion; as are the Germans also, the Saxons only excepted, who with the English make the principal body of white people on the face of the earth. I could wish their numbers were increased. And while we are, as I may call it, scouring our planet, by clearing America of woods, and so making this side of our globe reflect a brighter light to the eyes of inhabitants in Mars or Venus, why should we in the sight of superior beings, darken its people? Why increase the sons of Africa, by planting them in America, where we have so fair an opportunity, by excluding all blacks and tawneys, of increasing the lovely white and red? But perhaps I am partial to the complexion of my Country, for such kind of partiality is natural to Mankind.
Although Franklin supported abolishing the slave trade, he did not support Black people’s freedom and equal citizenship in the American polity until later in his life. Rather, his central objective was to include white people only in the new nation he and his “enlightened” peers were creating.
1754–1759
BLACKNESS AND INDIGENEITY
Kyle T. Mays
The dispossession of millions of Native Americans and the simultaneous genocide and enslavement of Indigenous Africans remain two intertwining and parallel events that have fundamentally shaped the United States. These historical travesties continue today in the form of rampant anti-Black racism and anti-Indigenous erasure from the national consciousness.
The year 1754 was instrumental in prerevolutionary America. In that year the French and Indian War—a conflict between the British colonies, New France, and a host of Native American nations fighting on each side—emerged, an event that would change the dominant European population east of the Mississippi and lead into the modern world’s first global conflict, the Seven Years’ War (1756–63). The war ended with the Treaty of Paris, in which France ceded all land east of the Mississippi to Britain. After France was defeated, kinship was no longer a major part of Native-British relations as it had been with the French: the “British were the conquerors; the Indians were the subjects.”
It was also a moment ripe with contradictions between freedom and unfreedom. For almost a century, Europeans had constructed Native North American peoples as savages in order to justify taking their land. Native people became central characters in how Europeans constructed their belonging to the “New World” as the original inhabitants of the land, thus erasing those Native people. In this way, they separated the European world from the Indigenous and African ones, creating a distinction between civilization and savagery, or human and nonhuman.
The population of this contested land comprised white men with property, indentured servants, enslaved Africans, and precariously placed Native peoples. As the British colonies and New France faced off, the combined power of anti-Black racism and African slavery became further entrenched in colonial society. For instance, between 1735 and 1750, Georgia was one of the few colonies that attempted to limit slavery, especially because of its close proximity to Spanish Florida. However, as Georgia’s rice economy increased, its planters desired more enslaved people from West Africa. Between 1750 and 1755, Georgia’s enslaved population increased nearly 3,500 percent.
Slavery became a further entrenched part of the colonies during the French and Indian War. In 1757 the Reverend Peter Fontaine of Virginia, the oldest of the original thirteen colonies, commented, “To live in Virginia without slaves is morally impossible.”
This period also brought more interactions between people of African descent and Native North Americans. Paul Cuffe, born on January 17, 1759, was an early person of mixed ancestry, with both Indigenous African and North American Indigenous roots, born to Kofi (Akan), who was sold into slavery as a preteen, and to Ruth Moses (Wampanoag). After the Revolutionary War, Cuffe became one of the wealthiest Black shipping merchants of his time and played a central role in trying to establish a colony in Sierra Leone for people of African descent from the new United States. However, what is often missed in his history is that he represents some of the earliest Afro-Indigenous people in the United States—those with a relationship not only to the mark of Blackness but also to U.S. Indigenous roots. Cuffe had attempted to assert his North American Indigenous roots during his earlier years, but because of the rampant anti-Blackness, he would later more strongly identify as Black. What we can learn from Cuffe and others like him is that the first enslaved Africans did not lose their Indigenous roots—they maintained them as best as they could. They also often found possibilities in their encounters with Indigenous peoples in the United States.