Race and racial conflict

Despite its common usage, the concept of “race” is elusive, slippery, and elastic. While scholars mostly now agree that race is not a valid human category, a belief in race and racial differences played a decisive and critically important role in the development of colonial North America’s human interactions. Before British contact with the peoples who inhabited the African and North American continents, the term race was inconsistently applied to a variety of social groups now conceived of as nations or ethnic groups. Race in the British North American colonies was an idea that acquired strength once contact occurred. The term then assumed meanings that suited the interests of the colonizer, not the colonized; the enslaver, not the enslaved.

Africans and Native Americans did not invent the concept of race; Europeans did. The concept functioned to organize and mediate differences among groups of people who occupied overlapping territories. The term’s content derived from relations of power that frequently resulted in conflict. Indeed, ideas of race and racial conflict are mutually dependent upon each other, and this was especially true in the British colonies of North America.

While most scholars have adopted the view that the concept of race is socially constructed, some historians have enlarged on this idea. For them, the concept of race is not fixed in time or space. Its meaning is historically specific as well as socially constructed. Historian Ira Berlin sums up this point: “Race, no less than class, is the product of history, and it only exists on the contested social terrain in which men and women struggle to control their destinies.” The idea of race gave birth to the reality of racial conflict.

The concept of race has a long history that stretches back to well before British colonization of North America or the later enslavement of people who inhabited the African continent. Before contact with the indigenous peoples of North America, the English maintained simultaneous but contradictory views about Native Americans—that they were friendly and ingenuous on the one hand, but treacherous and savage on the other. The negative notions of race were used against Native Americans when white colonists demanded their land. Even in those instances in which initial contact had been relatively benign, conflict nearly always ensued.

British ideas about Africans constituting a distinct race were equally vague and imprecise before the middle of the 17th century, that is, before their participation in the slave trade. The earliest exchanges suggest that Africans were considered both civil and hospitable. Once England became a major power in the slave trade, however, ideas about the racial inferiority of Africans crystallized. Although historians disagree about whether the slave trade resulted from ideas about race or from the economic necessity for an inexpensive and permanent labor force, the concept of race served as the foundation for the belief that people of African ancestry were ideally suited for slavery. Slave revolts and other forms of resistance to enslavement are the most blatant examples of Africans’ opposition to, and hence conflict about, designations that resulted in what was intended to be permanent subjugation based on their “race.”

Despite different and changing perceptions by Europeans of Africans and Native Americans, there was one characteristic in common: Each group came to be described in terms of its “color.” It is, of course, possible to distinguish people by color. However, it was not the color in itself that determined a group’s fate. Rather, color was used in conjunction with an assigned status, such as savage, slave, or civilized. Red, black, and white became insidious shorthand for designating status and power.

Given the circumstances that brought the British into contact with Native Americans and Africans, it was probable that conflict among the groups would ensue. Simply put, the English demanded land from Native Americans and labor from Africans. Although the primary contestants in British North America were the English against Native Americans and Africans, the latter two groups variously joined forces or fought against each other. The reasons that Native Americans and Africans fought each other during the colonial era, however, rarely included racial considerations of the sort that defined both of them as subjugated groups.

Ideas about race were important in the colonial era and have had a lasting influence on American history. Only rarely, however, have American historians considered how Africans and Native Americans thought about groups other than their own before they encountered the British. Historians have greater knowledge of European than non-European ideas about race, and with few exceptions have little understanding of or concern with the ways that non-Europeans conceived of themselves. Moreover, most American historians have been more concerned with the idea of race than with the conflicts it promotes, although racial conflict is more easily documented than are ideas about race. Their concerns suggest that the very definition of fields of historical inquiry in America is still dominated by unequal relations of power between Western and nonWestern worldviews. Arguably, the enterprise of historical writing about race in America is itself a continuation of racial conflict by other means.

Further reading: Thomas F. Gossett, Race: The History of an Idea in America (New York: Schocken, 1967); Francis Jennings, The Invasion of America: Indians, Colonialism, and the Cant of Conquest (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1975); Winthrop D. Jordan, White over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro, 1550-1812 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968); Gary B. Nash, Red, White & Black: The Peoples of Early North America (Upper Saddle River, N. J.: Prentice Hall, 1974, 2006); Audrey Smedley, Race in North America: Origin and Evolution of a Worldview (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1993); Ian K. Steele, Warpaths: Invasions of America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994); Alden T. Vaughan, Roots of American Racism: Essays on the Colonial Experience (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995).

—Leslie Patrick

Randolph, Edward (1 632-1 703) government official Edward Randolph, an English colonial official, was born in Canterbury, England, the son of a physician. After some legal training and several minor government positions he was led toward a career in the American colonies by marriage into the family of Robert Tufton Mason, claimant to the proprietorship of New Hampshire. In 1676 Mason secured Randolph’s appointment to carry a royal letter to Boston concerning Mason’s claims and to bring back information on New England’s condition and its people’s loyalty to the Crown. On his return Randolph charged the Massachusetts government with abuse of its charter powers, tolerance of illegal trade, and tyranny over its neighbors. Later he proposed plans for royal intervention. His detailed reports were essential to the Crown’s eventual 1684 annulment of the Massachusetts charter of government.

Randolph returned to Boston in 1679 as the king’s collector of customs in New England. With a small group of colonists he identified as willing to collaborate with the Crown, he planned the new form of government, the Dominion of New England, created in 1685 to replace the Puritan regime in Massachusetts. Within the dominion Randolph held office as councilor, secretary and register, deputy postmaster, surveyor of woods, and deputy auditor general. His sweeping proposals to regulate trade, reissue land titles, and further the cause of the Anglican Church were intensely unpopular. In April 1689 popular discontent exploded into revolt. Randolph and other members of the dominion government were seized and imprisoned before being sent back to England. There, he received new employment in October 1691 as surveyor general of customs throughout the American colonies.

Between 1692 and 1695 Randolph traveled to almost every eastern port between Maine and North Carolina, uncovering illegal trade and criticizing local officials. Back in England he worked with the customs commissioners and Parliament to enact a 1696 law that tightened London’s regulation of colonial trade. Following another stay in North America he pressed unsuccessfully to bring all the American colonies under direct royal government. In 1702 he traveled once more to America—his 17th transatlantic voyage—and died in Virginia.

Randolph represented a new kind of immigrant to North America, one of men who joined their own advancement to that of royal authority. He was exceptional in his unbending zeal, in his grasp of larger issues of policy, and in the rigor and accuracy of his countless letters and reports. No English official of his time played a larger role in extending royal authority in colonial America.

See also Acts of Trade and Navigation; Andros, Sir Edmund; Dudley, Joseph.

Further reading: Michael G. Hall, Edward Randolph and the American Colonies, 1676-1703 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1960).

—Richard R. Johnson