America’s Founding Failures and the Doctrine of Discovery

How Far Back Do We Go to Face Racism?

This country was founded on slavery and genocide — Sherri Mitchell, Weh’na Ha’mu Kwasset

America, we are all six degrees of separation from genocidal assholes — Bill Maher

OK, I’ll start: While my family came to the U.S. (in steerage) in the 1920s, my name is Stadtmueller. I’m probably two degrees from genocidal assholes back in the Fatherland. (Meanwhile, I grew up on Lenni-Lenape land. Evidently a peacemaking tribe. Unusual for New Jersey.)

So was the U.S. founded on slavery and genocide? I used to think that was rhetoric. But I’ve been reading more American history than usual to educate myself, and slavery and genocide appear pretty much baked in, thanks to the beliefs of Europeans who came here and took over. What helped them do that, materially, mentally, and spiritually, was the Doctrine of Discovery.

This punishing, enduring doctrine started out in the 15th century with three papal bulls granting kings of Spain and Portugal the right to “capture, vanquish and subdue the Saracens, pagans and other enemies of Christ…and put them into perpetual slavery and to take all their possessions and their property.” In turn, they would be Christianized and civilized, even if “justifiably” against their wills. (See Part 1 for more detail) Post-Reformation Protestant English monarchs adopted the Doctrine and added charters embedding Native and African slavery into their Atlantic colonies, starting with New England and Virginia.

Living within “wilderness” takes patience, skill, strength, and wisdom, as indigenous people of the Americas have known for eons. Conquering a wilderness takes back-breaking labor, a lust for profit, and a profound sense of separation from anyone in the way.

It helps if a colonizer’s religion encourages that conquest. Even better if the religion justifies enslaving others to handle the back-breaking labor. And both Catholic and Protestant colonizers had that help from the top of their cultural and religious heaps.

With time and use, the Doctrine normalized the concept that some humans are “more human” than others, and that such hierarchies are the God-given order of things. Those marks are still visible in how the U.S. treats people of color today.

Protestants Using Papal Tools

For the English, later arrivals to the Americas than Spain and Portugal, royal charters amplified the Doctrine’s original call for conquest: King Henry VII’s charter issued to John Cabot and sons in 1496; Elizabeth I’s charters to Henry Gilbert in 1583 and Walter Raleigh in 1584, James I’s charters to the Virginia Company of 1606 and 1609, and further charters as English interests expanded.

Once the English monarchs were elevated to “Defender of the Faith and Supreme Governor of the Church of England,” their royal charters carried on the earlier papal warnings about the “heathens,” “barbarous nations” and “infidels” living in the New World in spiritual error, whose lands the English were entitled “to conquer, occupy and possess.”

Despite religious justifications, the profit motive is clear. The Catholic Church and the French and Iberian crowns were already amassing wealth from the silver, gold, pelts, and timber wrested from the New World. The English monarchs went so far as to declare their 20 percent cut of the explorers’ profits, to name the hundreds of noble investors, and to include a wish list of booty (“Soils, Grounds, Havens, and Ports, Mines…Gold and Silver, as other Minerals, Pearls, and precious Stones, Quarries, Woods, Rivers, Waters, Fishings, Commodities…”)

Early 20th century Historian Frederick Turner commented about the awe-inspiring lands these explorers encountered and their tragic indifference to it:

The land often announced itself with a heavy scent miles out into the ocean…. The men of Henry Hudson’s Half Moon were temporarily disarmed by the fragrance of the New Jersey shore, while ships running farther up the coast occasionally swam through large beds of floating flowers. Wherever they came inland they found a rich variety of color and sound, of game and luxuriant vegetation. Had they been other than they were, they might have written a new mythology here. As it was, they took inventory.”

Why Africans?

The Spanish and Portuguese had concentrated on shipping captured Black Africans to their colonies, partially because Africans appeared less vulnerable to Eurasian disease than Natives. More important to the Spanish, most Black Africans were still just regular heathens, not Muslim infidels like many slaves in Spain. The Spanish were tired of fighting Muslims in Europe and didn’t want to risk that faith spreading to the New World and upending Catholic missionary efforts.

The later English settlers in Jamestown, Virginia and in New England had initially preferred a labor force of indentured Europeans, who worked like slaves for a contract of years to earn their passage and their keep. Some historians suggest that about half of early European migrants arrived indentured, as did some Blacks.

But buying Africans began to make business sense when Virginians finally launched tobacco, that profitable but labor-intensive cash crop. The direct African slave trade was growing, and expansionist Virginians continued to slaughter Indians and overtake their fertile lands. Unlike the local tribes, Africans weren’t as hostile to field labor and couldn’t escape back into their wilderness homes.

The First Black Slave

What many historians consider to be the first “official” case of African slavery arose in 1640. A Black African man in Virginia, John Punch, reputedly an indentured servant, escaped with two European indentured servants. The three were captured and punished: the white Europeans were forced to labor four more years; John Punch was condemned to servitude for life.

A 1676 uprising that wasn’t about race or slavery pried open the spreading fissure between Black and white. Bacon’s Rebellion drew together white indentured servants, and Black servants and slaves, to protest the Virginia governor’s trade policies and lax protection from the Indians. Terrified of a united, surging lower class, white Virginia gave white indentured servants new, pacifying benefits. Says historian Edmund S. Morgan: “There was an obvious lesson in the rebellion. Resentment of an alien race might be more powerful than resentment of an upper class. Virginians did not immediately grasp it…”

But by 1705 they sure did. That year, the Virginia General Assembly passed the Slave Code, a detailed template for owning others. Just a sampling:

All servants imported and brought into the Country…who were not Christians in their native Country…shall be accounted and be slaves. All Negro, mulatto and Indian slaves within this dominion…shall be held to be real estate. If any slave resist his master…correcting such slave, and shall happen to be killed in such correction…the master shall be free of all punishment…as if such accident never happened.

Religious Nutters on the Loose

We head north. When the Pilgrims had arrived in 1620, they brought a striking indifference, even animosity, to the land they were trying to settle, and to the people who already lived there. Their profits, however, were to be heavenly ones. These were Protestant separatists, “religious nutters,” says one historian, seeking a “pure” form of worship beyond the Anglicans and purer than the Puritans.

William Bradford, a Mayflower chronicler and Plymouth governor, noted their godly focus: “They look up their eyes to heaven, their dearest country.” Evidently, holding that otherworldly gaze had sapped their common sense, because sailing the North Atlantic in the autumn while poorly provisioned was an epically stupid idea that most available sailors declined. It was winter in New England by the time the Pilgrims were finally able to leave the Mayflower, aboard which half of them had sickened and died while anchored for many weeks offshore.

Bradford wrote of their first forays onto winter land, “What could they see, but a hideous desolate wilderness with wild beasts and wild men…. A whole country full of woods and thickets.’” He repeatedly recalled the biblical warning God gave the Hebrews when they were losing faith: “Your carcasses will fall in this wilderness.”(Numbers 14:29). [Author’s note: I live in northern Vermont with wood heat. Let me emphasize to readers with thermostats how batshit crazy it is to show up in December on frozen ground with no dry firewood. No wonder the Natives thought white people were nuts.]

As Bradford explained, “They were longing for a better country — a heavenly one. Therefore God…has prepared a city for them.” Which is how they interpreted the ruined, skeleton-strewn Native village in which they settled. Two years before the Pilgrims arrived, a plague contracted from European fishermen had wiped out 50 to 90 percent of many local tribes, leaving no one left to tend the dead. That’s not how the Pilgrims saw it.

Tobias Vanderhoop, Chairman of the Wampanoag Tribe of Aquinnah, whose people died there, recalls in The Pilgrims: American Experience, “They [Pilgrims] believed their journey was ordained by God. They had a mission they were to fulfill…and the desolation was God’s providence. It was meant to be that way for them.”

Pilgrims were Separatists wanting to form their own select, holy society to obey God’s will. While they did believe the Natives (and later-arriving Blacks) had souls, they knew even superior English people were incapable of their devotion, so weren’t as driven as the Spaniards and Portuguese to convert heathens (and Protestants didn’t have the Jesuit, Dominican, and Franciscan shock troops). Pilgrims’ very mixed interactions with Natives included forming loose protective alliances with some tribes, with some trading and cooperation (that big Thanksgiving dinner probably never happened). Pilgrims also preemptively attacked and killed Natives when they felt threatened, and hoisted two Indian heads to rot on spikes over Plymouth for years: Wituwamat, a guy at the wrong trading post at the wrong time, and Metacomet, or King Philip, after losing his last-ditch fight to rid Native lands of the English. A friend in England wrote to Bradford: “How happy a thing had it been if you had converted some before you had killed any.”

New England Puritans of varying stripes had no problem wiping out Native villages and selling captives to deadly West Indies sugar plantations. Some kept Native slaves as well. Historian Elizabeth Pleck notes that “English colonial ideology may have ranked Indians, as a group, somewhere above Africans.” Some Puritan writings ask if Natives wouldn’t be almost white if they got less sun and didn’t grease their faces.

Natives were fungible. The first recorded shipment of Black slaves to Massachusetts landed in 1638, in exchange for defeated but still defiant Pequot Indians sold to the Caribbean.

Before long, Boston and Newport, Rhode Island became colonial hubs of the transatlantic slave trade, and Boston became home to a large population of African slaves.

Christian Slaves — and Liberty?

As affluent Puritans took African slaves into their homes (which is how slaves lived on New England’s smaller landholdings), the question arose whether they should be schooled in Christianity.

Cotton Mather, a prominent Puritan writer and minister, tried to answer that question in The Negro Christianized. An Essay to Excite and Assist that Good Work, the Instruction of Negro-Servants in Christianity (1706) (“Servants” was their preferred term for “slaves.”)

It’s important to note here that Mather is being radical for a Puritan (and most of his contemporaries) in believing the Africans have souls and reason.

“The State of your Negroes in this World, must be low, and mean, and abject; a State of Servitude. No Great Things in this World, can be done for them. Something then, let there be done, towards their welfare in the World to Come.”

“[You may] be the Happy Instruments, of Converting, the Blackest Instances of Blindness and Baseness, into admirable Candidates of Eternal Blessedness.”

Plus — Christian slaves were better slaves!

“It would render them exceeding Dutiful unto their Masters, exceeding Patient…, exceeding faithful in their Business, and afraid of speaking or doing any thing that may justly displease you.”

“Indeed their Stupidity is a Discouragement…,let us learn them as much as we Can.”

And lest slave owners worry that heavenly salvation would suggest earthly liberty:

“What Law is it that Sets the Baptised Slave at Liberty? Not the Law of Christianity : that allows of Slavery;”

Another prominent Puritan minister and theologian, Jonathan Edwards, shared Mather’s view, which mirrored the conversion concerns of many Southern slaveholders as well. Kenneth P. Minkema writes of Edwards’s Defense of Slavery that eternal souls or not, “The fallen world’s order, which included slavery, was still in place.”

How Do We Make It Right?

What I’ve learned by reading about these national origins ain’t pretty. Sure, there are nuances and details way over my pay grade. But can we start by saying: These are some of the founding failures. And Christianity played an outsized role in those failures. “Sorry” won’t cut it. How do we make it right?

References:

“Repudiate the Doctrine of Discovery.” Journal of the General Convention of…The Episcopal Church, Anaheim, 2009 (New York: General Convention, 2009).

Burns, Ric, writer and director: The Pilgrims, American Experience, PBS, 2015.

Casten, Timothy: “King Philip’s Shadow.” Historytime.org, 2016

Mather, Cotton. The Negro Christianized. An Essay to Excite and Assist that Good Work, the Instruction of Negro-Servants in Christianity (1706) via JStor

Minkema, Kenneth P. “Jonathan Edwards’s Defense of Slavery,” Massachusetts Historical Review, Vol. 4, Race and Slavery 2002. Via JStor.

Mitchell, Sherri, Weh’na Ha’mu Kwasset. Sacred Instructions: Indigenous Wisdom for Living Spirit-Based Change. North Atlantic Books, Berkeley CA. 2018.

Morgan, Edmund S. American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia. W.W. Norton, 1975 p. 207, quoted in Wikipedia.

Pleck, Elizabeth, “Slavery in Puritan New England” Journal of Interdisciplinary History, XLIX:2 (Autumn, 2018), 305–313 MIT Press Journals, Cambridge Mass.

The First Charter of Virginia; April 10, 1606. The Avalon Project, Yale Law School.

The Second Charter of Virginia; May 23, 1609. The Avalon Project, Yale Law School