Stamped from the Beginning: Chapter 3: Coming to America Summary & Analysis

The majority of 16th century Europeans could not travel and were thus fascinated by stories of “exotic” distant lands and their inhabitants. Yet travel writers’ main motivation was usually to justify colonization and enslavement. In the late 1500s, the English travel writer George Best questioned the climate theory of Black inferiority after encountering dark-skinned Inuit in the far north of the globe. In its place, he proposed the curse theory, which cast Black people as the descendants of the “evil, tyrannical, and hypersexual Ham.” The conflict between these two positions was the first significant clash of racist theories in the English-speaking world.

By assigning negative traits to African people, Europeans also created the impression that they—white people—were morally pure and noble. Over time, travel writing began to explicitly call for Africans to be converted to Christianity. Slavery came to be characterized as a “civilizing” endeavor based on love. In his influential 1590 text Ordering a Familie, the Cambridge theologian William Perkins compared the relationship between masters and slaves to a “loving family relationship.”

It is into this assimilationist climate that Richard Mather is born in 1596. In 1600, Leo Africanus’ Geographical Histories of Africa is published in English translation for the first time, giving further credence to the curse theory, a segregationist view of Black inferiority. During this era, playwrights spread ideas about Blackness further than travel writing could, as literacy rates among the general public remain low. Plays like Shakespeare’s Othello and Ben Jonson’s The Masque of Blackness are written to satisfy an audience newly fascinated by the “exotic” and “sensational” idea of Africa. When The Masque of Blackness premieres, Queen Anne plays one of the characters, an African princess, in blackface.

Around this time, King James leads a vigorous mission to expand the British colonization of North America. In Virginia and New England, British settlers are already starting to “conceive of distinct races.” The first use of the word “race” in 1481 was to describe breeds of hunting dogs; during the ensuing century it was extended to humans, most often Africans. Over time, it became a way to collapse the ethnic diversity of Africans and Native Americans, making them seem like two internally homogenous (and animalistic) groups.

In the early colonial period, English opinion can be somewhat sympathetic to Native people—such as the “civilized savage” Pocahontas—but travel writing from the American colonies creates the impression that Africans are lazy and evil. In reality, these anti-Black ideas are not based in actual observation so much as a recycling of views represented in earlier travel narratives, plays, and texts by Spanish and Portuguese enslavers. 

By the time Richard Mather comes of age and starts preaching in England, the British slave trade is small but steadily growing. The first known slave ship to arrive in colonial America docks in Jamestown in 1619. That same year, John Pory—the English translator of Leo Africanus’ Geographical Histories of Africa—leads a meeting of Jamestown’s first group of elected officials. During this period, it becomes clear that a large amount of laborers are needed to grow tobacco, the colony’s main cash crop. While there are white indentured servants in the colony, they are considered to be in a distinct category from enslaved Africans. In 1630, a white man found having sex with a Black woman is sentenced to a whipping for “defiling his body” and dishonoring God.

Following the death of King James in 1625, the persecution of Puritans in England rapidly escalates, with the country’s political conflict reaching a climax in the English Civil War of 1642. In Virginia, meanwhile, society is arranged into a hierarchy that places wealthy planters, ministers, and merchants at the top and enslaved Africans at the bottom. In 1655, a biracial woman named Elizabeth Key sues the estate on which she is enslaved for not granting her the freedom that her white legislator father promised would be granted her at the age of 15. Key’s case poses a problem for the Virginia planters, as her enslavement cannot be justified by either her non-Christian status (she is a convert) or her father’s status (as he was a free white man).

Meanwhile, labor shortages and alliances between white servants and Black slaves are beginning to trouble the Virginia elite. They end up instituting extremely harsh punishments for white servants who run away with Black people. Furthermore, legislators stipulate that children derive enslaved status from their mothers—a break from English law that allows white men to materially benefit from raping enslaved women (and thereby producing more enslaved people). This practice is subsequently written into racist literature, which becomes filled with depictions of African women as hypersexual, aggressive, and animalistic. In doing so, white men make it seem as if African women are themselves to blame for being raped. At the same time, hysteria around Black men raping white women gains momentum.

During this period, there are some white men who openly admit to being attracted to Black women and frame this attraction using assimilationist ideas. Englishman Richard Ligon, for examples, writes about his attraction to a Black woman by emphasizing the beauty of her white teeth and eyes. In the same book, A True and Exact Historie of the Island of Barbadoes (1657), Ligon introduces the idea that Black people are naturally “docile” and that the enslaved should be allowed to convert to Christianity.

In 1660, the English scientist Robert Boyle argues that dark skin is an “ugly” corruption of the proper default of white skin, claiming that this argument is based in objective scientific observation. Boyle’s argument is widely read, including by Richard Mather’s son, Increase, who is an “unremarkable” Cambridge student. In 1661, the Council for Foreign Plantations begins actively recommending that planters convert enslaved Africans to Christianity. Neither planters nor the enslaved welcome this. But in the 1660s, missionaries began taking it upon themselves to save the souls of the enslaved—a movement in which Richard Mather’s son will come to play a vital role.