Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Stamped from the Beginning, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Discrimination, Racist Ideas, and Ignorance
Segregationists and Assimilationists vs. Antiracists
Media, Institutions, and the Transmission of Knowledge
The Invention of Blackness and Whiteness
The Illogic of Racism
Summary
Analysis
In 1689, 26-year-old Cotton Mather hosts a meeting in which he and fellow New Englanders plan to arrest a group of royalists at Boston Harbor. Their aim is not revolution, but merely a restoration of local power. This plan is successfully carried out, and Cotton Mather reads from a Declaration of Gentleman and Merchants to the assembled crowd. This text, which Mather likely wrote himself, asserts that “The people of New England were all slaves and the only difference between them and slaves is their not being bought and sold.” In reality Mather sees more affinity between Puritans and royalists than Puritans and the enslaved based on racial similarity. But he nonetheless believes that all people—including Africans—have the same “White” soul inside.
To Kendi, one of the most extraordinary things about American colonial history is the frequency with which white colonizers claim to be “enslaved” by the British—even while they are literally enslaving actual African people at the same time. This can again be seen as proof that on some level, American enslavers understand that what they are doing to the enslaved is unjust and wrong. Indeed, racist ideas are needed to justify the obvious injustice and hypocrisy.
Themes
Aphra Behn’s novel Oroonoko: or, the Royal Slave (1688) is the first English novel in which the phrases “White People” and “Negro” repeatedly appear. The novel portrays the titular character as a “noble savage” elevated by his proximity to whiteness—a classic assimilationist gesture. In 1689, Mather publishes Memorable Providences, Relating to Witchcrafts and Possessions, propelled by his increasingly fanatical fixation with witches and devils. This fixation is part of what eventually triggers the Salem Witch Hunt, a period of public hysteria in which the Puritan New Englanders begin routinely characterizing the devil as Black. White women accused of being witches blame the “Black Devil man” for the supposed errors in their ways.
Often people do not associate the famous Salem Witch Hunt with race but—as with almost everything that takes place in colonial America—it is actually a highly racialized historical event. The anxieties surrounding morality, violence, and evil that characterized the witch frenzy are also anxieties about race and gender. Indeed, it is significant that the white women accused of being witches choose to displace blame on to a “Black Devil man” in the hopes of saving themselves.
Themes
Even after the hysteria subsides, Cotton Mather clings to his role as the defender of white Puritanism against the dangers of “black” witches and devils. 1693, he writes up rules for the newly formed, Boston-based “Religious Society of Negroes.” These rules dictated that Black members submit to God via the authority of white people. Throughout the 1690s, Mather continues to assert that preserving the racial, gendered, and class-based social hierarchy is a Christian duty akin to renouncing Satan and honoring God. He insists that enslaved Black people are in a better situation than they would have been living freely in their homelands in Africa. His writing on slavery becomes enormously influential in the same period that the transatlantic slave trade booms.
Mather’s life and views provide a classic example of how ideas about race don’t have to make sense for them to be deeply felt. While it is impossible to understand the mind of a historical figure and know what they truly felt, it is nonetheless plausible that Mather truly does believe that enslaved people are better off in America than they would have been in Africa. At the same time, it is also plausible that he does not really believe this but instead only claims to in order to justify slavery.
Themes
For the moment, however, enslavers remain resistant to converting the enslaved to Christianity. In 1689 the Scottish minister James Blair is appointed commissary of Virginia; he uses profits from slavery to found the College of William & Mary in 1693. In 1699, he proposes ramping up the “Christian education” of Black and indigenous people. Yet enslavers by and large remain hostile to the idea of mass conversion and education.
Again, even those enslavers who believe (or pretend) that slavery is ordained by God for the “improvement” of African people have good reason to oppose allowing the enslaved to have access to education. With the tools of literacy and other forms of knowledge, enslaved people are much more likely to be able to successfully rebel.
Themes
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