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Review Review Reviewed Work(s): White over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro, 1550-1812 by Winthrop D. Jordan Review by: Richard D. Brown Source: The New England Quarterly, Vol. 41, No. 3 (Sep., 1968), pp. 447-449 Published by: The New England Quarterly, Inc. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/363991 Accessed: 18-01-2018 19:16 UTC JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact
[email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://about.jstor.org/terms The New England Quarterly, Inc. is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The New England Quarterly This content downloaded from 128.32.10.230 on Thu, 18 Jan 2018 19:16:30 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms BOOK REVIEWS 447 University documents future professor Wilson has left us, notes of lectures, minutes of Seminars, a considerable, although scattered, commentary upon the process of publication (Congressional Gov- ernment) and of the job market. Like its two predecessors, this is a great and useful book. Thanks to Wilson, it is filled with lively fact and fancy about life and him- self; thanks to Arthur Link and his associates, it is superbly edited. It is also plain fun. Unlike most books of "Papers," this one can be followed with interest by anyone who loves the dignity and drama, the pettiness and passion of people. ALFRED B. ROLLINS, JR. White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, z550- 1812. By Winthrop D. Jordan. Published for the Institute of Early American History and Culture at Williamsburg, Virginia. (Chapel Hill, N. C.: University of North Carolina Press. 1968. Pp. xx, 651. $12.50.) In the opening sentence of his preface to White Over Black, Winthrop Jordan informs his readers that he has set out "to answer a simple question: What were the attitudes of white men toward Negroes during the first two centuries of European and African settlement in what became the United States of America?" But this modest, unpretentious manner of stating his purpose is misleading. For the "simple" question Jordan proposes is actually a multitude of enormously complex questions, and during the course of his exploration Jordan carries his readers far beyond mere description, offering painstaking, elaborate analysis and interpretation of white men's conceptions of themselves, mankind, and society. White Over Black, a study which spans two and a half centuries, the Brit- ish West Indies as well as the thirteen mainland colonies and states, which examines anatomical and anthropological ideas in England and the Continent, and which makes a vigorous, sophisti- cated effort to relate social attitudes and practices to social cir- cumstances, is an exceptionally ambitious undertaking. Jordan has at once attempted a synthesis of previous scholarship and a fresh pioneering venture into areas previously unexplored. He starts with a discussion of Englishmen's conceptions of them- selves and Africans in the late sixteenth century, and here lays the This content downloaded from 128.32.10.230 on Thu, 18 Jan 2018 19:16:30 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 448 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY foundation for a judicious, unhurried examination of the contro- versial origins of Anglo-American slavery. He finds that Eliza- bethan Englishmen, when they thought about Negroes at all, as- sociated them and their native land with heathenism, savagery, apes, Ham, and sexual offenses even before Africans were brought to the colonies. Then they were regarded as captives suitable for enslavement (in the Hispanic manner) in a status inferior to the common forms of bond servitude. Comparing the emergence of slavery in the various mainland colonies as well as the West Indies, Jordan is able to reveal the variations and complexities of seven- teenth-century development, furnishing the most nearly definitive treatment of slavery's origin in Anglo-America that we are likely to see. From here Jordan goes on to consider the eighteenth century, which occupies over four-fifths of the book. This, he says, was the century which saw the flowering of a variety of white attitudes in the context of slave establishments in every colony, while it was also the era in which attitudes and practices shifted to the point where slavery was abolished in the North and began to recede from the Chesapeake states. Jordan divides the century into three periods, "Provincial Decades, 1700-1755," "The Revolutionary Era, 1755-1783," and an unnamed period, 1783-1812, in which he considers the interrelations of society and social thought. The provincial years, Jordan maintains, were a time of rela- tively unself-conscious development in which colonial attitudes varied significantly owing to religious denominational as well as demographic circumstances such as the proportion of blacks in the community and the proportion of white women ("sex ratio"). Antislavery beliefs, insofar as they were visible at all, revolved around Christian concepts of brotherhood under God and spiritual equality in an age when social theory was far from being the col- onists' most immediate concern. It was the Revolution, Jordan argues, which proved the radical turning point. Concepts of liberty and equality overflowed racial boundaries, and the old religious ideal of racial equality became secularized by a generation deeply influenced by environmental explanations of human differences. But the post-Revolutionary decades did not witness the fulfill- ment of racial egalitarianism. Although slavery stood condemned, the antislavery forces gained only a pyrrhic victory in the national This content downloaded from 128.32.10.230 on Thu, 18 Jan 2018 19:16:30 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms BOOK REVIEWS 449 prohibition on slave imports in 18o8, since white antipathy toward Negroes would not down. Indeed Jordan finds that a trend toward racial separation coincided with the rising numbers of free Negroes after 1780. Black Revolution in the Caribbean, Jordan contends, reinforced a tendency already emergent; while Thomas Jefferson's contradictory faiths in liberty, equality, and Negro inferiority epitomize for Jordan the inherent tension and conflict in the mind of the new Republic. Ideology could not conquer generations of ethnocentric prejudices reinforced by the slavery experience. Ulti- mately the concept of environmentalism was eroded and the move- ment toward racial separation reached an apotheosis in the early nineteenth-century fantasy of Negro removal from the "White Man's Country." This brief sketch of Jordan's book cannot do it justice. It is a big, complicated work, in which the author's analysis often extends through several layers of meaning. Yet as might be expected in a work of this magnitude, it is not flawless. In spite of Jordan's heroic effort to control his vast body of material with an elaborate structure of five parts, sixteen chapters, and eighty-five subchapters, problems of organization remain. The reader is shuttled between passages of integrated social-intellectual history and more tradi- tional "history of scientific ideas" sections, sometimes without ade- quate preparation or justification; and in the last hundred pages the book's unity, which the author earlier sustains, diminishes. Jordan's methodology may also be challenged since he sometimes relies on limited evidence for large, intuitive generalizations. Par- ticularly in his discussion of sexual attitudes and behavior he ad- vances general psycho-social interpretations which are merely sug- gested, not sustained, by the evidence he provides. Generally, how- ever, one is impressed by Jordan's imagination and persuasiveness in arguing from fragmentary data. Some aspects of the book will doubtless be revised, as Jordan himself recognizes, but White Over Black will stand as a landmark in the historiography of this gener- ation. Its richness of information and insight, its sensitive, pene- trating analysis of the unspoken as well as the explicit, its union of breadth with depth, make it a brilliant achievement. RICHARD D. BROWN. This content downloaded from 128.32.10.230 on Thu, 18 Jan 2018 19:16:30 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Contents p. 447 p. 448 p. 449 Issue Table of Contents New England Quarterly, Vol. 41, No. 3 (Sep., 1968) pp. 323-479 Front Matter Wilbur Cross: New Deal Ambassador to a Yankee Culture [pp. 323-340] A Negro Boycott to Integrate Boston Schools [pp. 341-361] Theme and Method in Bancroft's History of the United States [pp. 362-380] Emerson's "Each and All" Concept: A Reexamination [pp. 381-392] Hawthorne and the Slavery Crisis [pp. 393-408] Memoranda and Documents Frederick Jackson Turner Visits New England: 1887 [pp. 409-436] Charles Francis Adams, Jr. and the Negro Question [pp. 436-438] Low Skies, Some Clearing, Local Frost [pp. 438-442] Book Reviews Review: untitled [pp. 443-445] Review: untitled [pp. 445-447] Review: untitled [pp. 447-449] Review: untitled [pp. 450-452] Review: untitled [pp. 453-454] Review: untitled [pp. 455-457] Review: untitled [pp. 457-459] Review: untitled [pp. 459-461] Review: untitled [pp. 461-463] Review: untitled [pp. 463-466] Review: untitled [pp. 466-467] Review: untitled [pp. 467-469] Review: untitled [pp. 469-471] Review: untitled [pp. 471-473] Review: untitled [pp. 474-475] Review: untitled [pp. 475-476] Review: untitled [pp. 476-477] Back Matter [pp. 478-479] Review Reviewed Work(s): White over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro, 1550-1812 by Winthrop D. Jordan Review by: Johnnetta B. Cole Source: American Anthropologist, New Series, Vol. 71, No. 4 (Aug., 1969), pp. 792-794 Published by: Wiley on behalf of the American Anthropological Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/670394 Accessed: 18-01-2018 19:10 UTC JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact
[email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://about.jstor.org/terms American Anthropological Association, Wiley are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to American Anthropologist This content downloaded from