Review
Review
Reviewed Work(s): White over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro, XXXXXXXXXXby
Winthrop D. Jordan
Review by: Richard D. Brown
Source: The New England Quarterly, Vol. 41, No. 3 (Sep., 1968), pp XXXXXXXXXX
Published by: The New England Quarterly, Inc.
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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 supe
ly 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 answe
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 ca
ies 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
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448 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY
foundation for a judicious, unhu
ied 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
ought
to the colonies. Then they were regarded as captives suitable fo
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, XXXXXXXXXX," "The Revolutionary
Era, XXXXXXXXXX," and an unnamed period, XXXXXXXXXX, in which he
considers the inte
elations 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
otherhood 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 py
hic victory in the national
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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 Cari
ean, 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
ief 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 Ove
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
eadth with depth, make it a
illiant achievement.
RICHARD D. BROWN.
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Contents
p. 447
p. 448
p. 449
Issue Table of Contents
New England Quarterly, Vol. 41, No. 3 (Sep., 1968) pp XXXXXXXXXX
Front Matte
Wilbur Cross: New Deal Ambassador to a Yankee Culture [pp XXXXXXXXXX]
A Negro Boycott to Integrate Boston Schools [pp XXXXXXXXXX]
Theme and Method in Bancroft's History of the United States [pp XXXXXXXXXX]
Emerson's "Each and All" Concept: A Reexamination [pp XXXXXXXXXX]
Hawthorne and the Slavery Crisis [pp XXXXXXXXXX]
Memoranda and Documents
Frederick Jackson Turner Visits New England: 1887 [pp XXXXXXXXXX]
Charles Francis Adams, Jr. and the Negro Question [pp XXXXXXXXXX]
Low Skies, Some Clearing, Local Frost [pp XXXXXXXXXX]
Book Reviews
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Back Matter [pp XXXXXXXXXX]
Review
Reviewed Work(s): White over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro, XXXXXXXXXXby
Winthrop D. Jordan
Review by: Johnnetta B. Cole
Source: American Anthropologist, New Series, Vol. 71, No. 4 (Aug., 1969), pp XXXXXXXXXX
Published by: Wiley on behalf of the American Anthropological Association
Stable URL: http:
www.jstor.org/stable/670394
Accessed: XXXXXXXXXX:10 UTC
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide
ange 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 XXXXXXXXXX.
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