Roots of American Racism: Essays on the Colonial Experience
Richard Vaughan
Reviewed by Amy Turner Bushnell
Summary (Book Review)
In this welcome volume of his collected
essays, Vaughan reveals his continuing
engagement with the history and historiography
of early Anglo-America and the interaction of
its diverse cultures.
In this welcome volume of his collected essays, Vaughan reveals his
continuing engagement with the history and historiography of early
Anglo-America and the interaction of its diverse cultures. All ten focus "on
the mental images that Euro-Americans fashioned to help [them] understand
Native Americans and African Americans and the colonial policies that
evolved from those perceptions" (x).
The two earliest pieces - "Pequots and Puritans: The Causes of the War of
1637," a work of historiography (1964), and "Tests of Puritan Justice"
(1965) - were contemporaneous with the author's New England Frontier:
Puritans and Indians, 1620-1675 (Boston, 1965; rev. ed. 1979). Like it, they
put a favorable gloss on Puritan Indian policy that Vaughan would later
qualify. His interests widened during the 1970s as he worked on American
Genesis: Captain John Smith and the Founding of Virginia (Boston, 1975). In
"Blacks in Virginia: Evidence from the First Decade" (1972), he argued that
Africans were objects of prejudice from the start, and, in "'Expulsion of
the Salvages': English Policy and the Virginia Massacre of 1622" (1978),
that events in Virginia created a lasting suspicion of Indians throughout
the English colonies.
The six essays published after 1980 reveal the author's growing interest in
cultural identity. In the first, "Crossing the Cultural Divide: Indians and
New Englanders, 1605-1763" (1980), he and Daniel K. Richter conclude from
quantitative data that few white adults were transculturated, a conclusion
reinforced by Vaughan and Edward W. Clark (eds.), Puritans among the
Indians: Accounts of Captivity and Redemption, 1676-1724 (Cambridge, Mass.,
1981). In a classic essay, "From White Man to Redskin: Changing
Anglo-American Perceptions of the American Indian" (1982), Vaughan shows
that the term "Indian" became a racial category only after the French and
Indian War; and in "Frontier Banditti and the Indians: The Paxton Boys'
Legacy, 1763-75" (1984), he documents the hardening of anti-Indian sentiment
on the Pennsylvania frontier.
In "The Origins Debate: Slavery and Racism in Seventeenth-Century Virginia"
(1989), another important historiographic piece, Vaughan again argues that
racism preceded slavery. "Early English Paradigms for New World Natives"
(1992) shows Indians being compared with wild men, monsters, the Irish, the
old Britons, and the Lost Tribes. "Slaveholders' 'Hellish Principles': A
Seventeenth-Century Critique," previously unpublished, analyzes a body of
antislavery tracts written by Morgan Godwyn, an Anglican clergyman who had
lived in Barbados and Virginia, and published in London between 1680 and
1708.
Assuming that readers are more interested in what an author now thinks than
in what he once thought (xi), Vaughan has revised his essays freely,
updating the historiography in his ninety pages of notes, deleting tables,
condensing text, rewriting large portions, and adding lengthy postscripts of
rebuttal and reinterpretation. The new version of "The Origins Debate," for
example, is shorter than the original and addresses a fresh fallacy, the
attribution of American racial ideology to the founding fathers; a long
postscript to "Pequots and Puritans" answers an attack on New England
Frontier made by Francis Jennings, the modern Bishop Bartolome de Las Casas,
in The Invasion of America: Indians, Colonialism, and the Cant of Conquest
(Chapel Hill, 1975).
In this revised edition of his essays, Vaughan has corrected his course
without abandoning his compass heading. Thirty years ago, he drew fire for
comparing the Indian policy of New England Puritans favorably with that of
other colonists; his work remains ideologically controversial for
concentrating on the colonists and refusing to submit their ideas and
behavior to present standards. Vaughan's scholarship stands as a necessary
counterweight to the pendulum of opinion, currently at the extreme of a
swing toward studies with an anticolonist, nonwhite perspective.
Amy Turner Bushnell College of Charleston
COPYRIGHT 1997 Massachusetts Institute of Technology
COPYRIGHT 1997 Information Access Company