In 1619 Nobody was "White"

By Charlie Rosenberg

This book began with a study of prison labor in the United States, then the transportation of British prisoners for sale in early colonial America. That led me to Lerone Bennett Jr.'s groundbreaking "Before The Mayflower: A History of Black America." Bennett, named senior editor of Ebony magazine in 1958, and executive editor in 1987, first clued me in to the "equality of oppression" that characterized early middle Atlantic British North America. People didn't call themselves "white" or "black." They didn't think in those terms. The overwhelming majority were servants. From this beginning, the racial paradigms and plantation slavery we more commonly think of developed, over time, through many shifting decades. I would prefer that every American citizen read Bennett's book from beginning to end. I would prefer that every American had read all the other books I have relied on, including Rhys Isaac's "The Transformation of Virgina: 1740-1790," or Innes and Breene's "Myne Owne Ground: African American Land Ownership on Virginia's Eastern Shore." But most people don't have the time, or sometimes even the interest. So perhaps this modest work could be considered the reader's digest of early American history. This book is a good starting point to weave the work of many specialists into a comprehensive overview that updates the scope of our nation's early history. For those who want the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, this is an easy read that packs in the good, the bad and the ugly, in all its shining glory and sheer horror. But mostly, its a story of people stumbling around in the dark, looking out for themselves, trying to find their way to anything better than what is right in front of their nose. It is a patriotic account, that finds cause for real pride in the United States of America, but a patriotism that takes our history as it really was, warts and all. Its not always a pretty picture. Lofty ideals and ringing phrases have often been motivated by venal self-interest, but, somehow those ringing phrases have provided the foundation for every struggle to make liberty and "government of the people, by the people, for the people" a bit more real. I hope the spirit comes close to Langston Hughes's "Let America Be America Again" and Paul Robesobn's rendition of "Song for Americans." Without July 4, there would have been no Juneteenth. Each is an inseparable step in the same line of development. This book is not a polemic. Its a presentation of facts. Most of these facts are not commonly recognized, but badly needed if we Americans are going to understand who we are, what our nation is, where we came from, where we have any hope of going to. Putting these facts on the table will deconstruct many cherished myths, and a lot of paradigms and identities. But it is the truth, not the cherished myths, that will make us free.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Charlie Rosenberg
• Release date: Nov 15, 2021
• ISBN: 9781953114273

Charlie Rosenberg

I come from a long line of serfs. Some of my ancestors arrived in the 17th or 18th century, some came in the 1850s, others around 1905. Some were coal miners, some were farmers. My parents both went to college, the first generation in their families to do that. My mother's sisters did too. My father's brothers took on their parents' grocery store, which at the time paid better than teaching chemistry. One great grandfather was a local organizer with the United Mine Workers of America. A great-great-grandfather in a different branch of the family tree was a southern unionist, serving in the 11th Tennessee Cavalry, United States Army. His wife's brothers tried to kill him after the Civil War, and the Ku Klux Klan tried three times to burn his house down. I was born in Connecticut, on the exact day that the Viet Minh opened their first artillery salvo against the French colonial occupation army at Dien Bien Phu. I didn't know that at the time, but it became important after growing up in the midst of America's unfortunate attempt to fight another Vietnam War. I grew up in Wisconsin, and I've lived on both the east and west coasts, and in West Virginia, before spending a few years in SE Washington DC, and then ending up back in Wisconsin. I've knocked on thousands of doors building small storefront associations of low-paid workers, I've worked in temp office jobs, I've written for several encyclopedias, I drove a paratransit bus and joined the Amalgamated Transit Union. My past published work includes articles on Thomas Jefferson, Mao Zedong, and Climate Change, for the Encyclopedia of Social Justice, on British and American public opinion for the Encyclopedia of the American Revolutionary War, several articles in the Oxford Encyclopedia of African American History 1896-2008 (including articles on Racism, Haiti, Benjamin J. Davis, Socialism, Populism, Science and Scientists), and articles in the Encyclopedia of the Great Depression and the New Deal. I coach a chess team at a school on the north side of Milwaukee, and I do a lot of reading. Publishers refer to people like me as "independent scholars" because I have no academic affiliation. I remember what I read, and try to share what I know. I've fought successful battles with copy editors to keep the words "black" and "white" in quotation marks when referring to artificial racial paradigms. I'm a shade of brown, as is every human being. A very pale shade, but its all melanin. There are no red, white, black or yellow pigments. That's fundamental to my writing, my life and my world view.

Book preview

In 1619 Nobody Was White:

Getting Real about Race and Slavery

in Early American History

By Charlie Rosenberg

Copyright © Charlie Rosenberg 2021

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including photo copying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, author or illustrator.

Cover: Artist conception of aerial view of Jamestown 1614. Sidney King. 28 November 2016.

This work is in the public domain in the United States because it is a work prepared by an officer or employee of the United States Government as part of that person’s official duties under the terms of Title 17, Chapter 1, Section 105 of the US Code.

Name: Rosenberg, Charlie

Title: In 1619 Nobody Was White: Getting Real About Race and Slavery in Early American History

ISBN: 978-1-953114-27-3

Categories: 1. History / Early American / Slaves and servants

Published by EABooks Publishing, Inc. , a division of

Living Parables of Central Florida, a 501c3

www.eabookspublishing.com

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Contents

Introduction

Cash Crops and Slave Labor

Who Enslaved Whom?

Sugar and Spice Are Not Always Nice

Jamestown Was a Sad Little Colony

The First Africans Arrive in Virginia

Equality of Oppression—the Early Form of Middle Atlantic Servitude

The Mists of Time

Bacon’s Rebellion, 1676

Servants for a Term of Years or for Life

The Peak Years of the Slave Trade to North America, 1720–1780

South Carolina: The Barbados Connection

Georgia on My mind: a Failed Utopian Experiment

Association of Slavery and Servitude with African Descent and Complexion

Rising Tensions and Revolts

The Great Awakening—America’s Most Sustained Religious Revival

New Lights and Rebirth

Black and White and Read All Over

What is America to me? Many Responses to the American Revolution

A Period of Doubt

How Slavery in North America Was Unique

Ignorance about Africa, Excuses for Slavery

Are They Men? Then Make Them Citizens and Let Them Vote

Follow the Money—the Invention of the Cotton Gin

Gabriel’s Rebellion of 1800

Free People of Color

The Origin of Black Institutions

The War of 1812

Diversity in the Navy

What it Doesn’t Mean to be White

July Fourth and Juneteenth

Yes, Virginia, the Civil War was All About Slavery

The Judgements of the Lord Are True and Righteous Altogether

Endnotes

About the Author

Introduction

It is long past time that informed citizens take a direct role in shaping the education we and future generations receive on American history. Educators have a role, and academics have a role, but this country belongs to all of us—and we must be informed citizens. We need to come to terms with the good, the bad, and the ugly, the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, in depth and detail. This then is one citizen’s effort to put forth a more accurate timeline for the origins and nature of slavery and racism in North America. Slavery and racism are closely intertwined, but they are not the same thing. Either one can exist without the other. Neither one was inevitable and neither one was planned. They just grew, and it became very difficult to prune them back or eliminate them.

A fair question from any reader is, And how do you know that? I have included here and there the names and authors of books I have relied on in putting this story together. These are not formal academic citations, because this is not an academic book. But any reader who wants to check the facts or wants to know more depth and detail than I have squeezed into this little summary, is welcome, indeed encouraged, to look it up for themselves. If millions of people had read these books over the past twenty years, our nation would be in much better shape to face its past, deal with its present, and move confidently forward into the future. The crucial academic role in all this is to dig deeply into old archives, documents, and firsthand accounts to produce a more accurate, more detailed account of what really happened in any century or decade. The authors I reference here and there have done a magnificent job of that. Their work provides a foundation for We the People to see our history with all its ups and downs, swirls and eddies, inspiration and cold callous pursuit of ill-gotten wealth. It’s all there.

(Anna Julia Cooper Circle, Washington, DC.) A

South-east of the Howard University campus in Washington, DC, is an intersection named Anna Julia Cooper Circle. Not many people remember who she was or why she has a circle named for her. But she was probably the first to identify that Spain and Portugal developed the novel association of slavery with dark skin and African origins in the late 1400s. It wasn’t an American invention, even though it took some unique twists and turns during the first four score and seven years in the history of the United States as a nation. It was a late import to North America, after incubating for three centuries in the lucrative sugar plantations of Madeira, Brazil, and Barbados. An American of African descent, Cooper defended a Ph.D. thesis at the Sorbonne in Paris to make this point. Mass enslavement burst out of the Mediterranean world through the growing Portuguese empire. What made it all very profitable was the cultivation of sugar cane.

Cash Crops and Slave Labor

Cotton is the cash crop most commonly associated with slave labor