Historicizing Race in Early American Studies: A Roundtable with Joanna Brooks, Philip Gould, and David Kazanjian: Introduction

Introduction

In The House of the Seven Gables (1851) Nathaniel Hawthorne offers his fullest examination of the hold that the past has on the present and future and relates it to the prospects of democracy in the United States. For Hawthorne in this novel, as for William Faulkner some 75 years later, "race" is a concept that organizes the dangers that endogamy poses to a thriving social order. "It was evident that the race had degenerated, like many a noble race besides," he writes, "in consequence of too strict a watchfulness to keep it pure" (83). As Susan Castillo observes in her review essay elsewhere in this issue, race purity and race mixture are abiding concerns of American writers. That the "race" that Hawthorne refers to here is a family of heirloom chickens adds point to his critique of the meanings carried by the concept of race. The featherless bipeds who own this race of "feathered people" resemble them so closely that the peculiarly Orientalist turban suggestive of antiquated forms of hierarchy that Hepzibah Pyncheon wears becomes, in the eyes of her niece Phoebe Pyncheon, a double of the "crest of lamentably scanty growth" borne by the fowl. In this novel preoccupied with reflections and images and what they reveal, the mirroring of Hepzibah and her family of decrepit chickens evokes a set of reflections on the dynamics of heredity and human culture. The novel is importantly about "race" insofar as Hawthorne probes the relationship between history as the "course of time" (listed under the first meaning of "race" in the Oxford English Dictionary) and history as the facts of human reproduction and descent conceived through social institutions such as families (meaning 2a); tribes, nations or peoples (meaning 2b); or "the great divisions of mankind" (meaning 2d).

If the OED's genealogy can be trusted, the term "race" was first applied to a breed or stock of animals in 1580 and adapted to humans as early as 1600. The usages most familiar today first appear around 1774, during the age of democratic revolution. Hawthorne's usage of "race" in the passage on the chickens reflects a residual meaning of the term, then, one that was in the process of being displaced by the modern sense of "race" then being shaped by the pseudo science of ethnology. And yet it would be inaccurate to claim, as some have, that Hawthorne ignores the emergent meaning of "race" and the history of slavery, matters that were at the forefront of public consciousness in 1851 when the novel appeared. Hawthorne probes the relationship between the passage of time and racial hierarchies through the figure of Ned Higgins, the young consumer of gingerbread Jim Crows, whom he describes as "the very emblem of old Father Time, both in respect of his all-devouring appetite for men and things, and because he, as well as Time, after ingulfing thus much of creation, looked almost as youthful as if he had been just that moment made" (105). The image of the young white boy "ingulfing" the racial caricature of the black man, in a setting where commerce as exemplified by the Pyncheon cent shop has beneficently disrupted a superannuated and sterile concept of "race" tied to hierarchical forms of social organization, all suggest a sophisticated understanding on Hawthorne's part of how capitalism and commerce were tied to changing concepts of family and heredity, ideas about time, and understandings of race and slavery.

A decade ago the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture held a conference to explore the origins of modern ideas about race. The starting point of the conference was a consensus that had emerged among historians of the early modern period that racial thought did not take its modern form until later than had been claimed, perhaps not until the mid-nineteenth century. Many of the conference participants took issue with the assumption influentially articulated by Winthrop Jordan in White over Black: American Attitudes towards the Negro, 1550–1812 (1968) that racial communities were well defined in a binary...