Colonial Complexions: Race and Bodies in Eighteenth-Century America by Sharon Block (review)

On April 29, 1768, “Two English Convict Servant Men” ran away from their master’s place in Loudoun County, Virginia. Almost a week passed before William Carr Lane employed the services of Anne and William Green’s Maryland Gazette for help in securing his property. Both fugitives, the Chesapeake resident reported, were blacksmiths. John Benham had a “slender” build and “stoops in his Shoulders.” John Miller, by contrast, had a “short well-set” frame. The two men, as their master told it, robbed him not only of their labor, but also of several additional articles of clothing along with two horses. Perhaps the most striking part of their effort toward freedom had been their plan to steal away. In order to conceal their true identities, their master explained, the two men “black’d themselves . . . [with] some Coal and Tallow found in a Kettle of theirs.” It is in this vein that Sharon Block, in Colonial Complexions, explores the complex history of race in eighteenth-century America.

Drawing on “more than four thousand newspaper advertisements for runaway servants, slaves, and other missing persons issued between 1750 and 1775” (3), Block makes a compelling case about race as a social construction in early America. Race, as Block quotes historian Barbara Fields, “is not an idea but an ideology” (2). Over the course of the colonial era, notices for fugitives categorized groups into races. “[R]epresentations of bodily coloration,” Block explains, “homogenize[d] people of African descent while individualizing those of European descent. Categorical terms such as ‘Negro,’ ‘Mulatto,’ and ‘Indian’ were purposefully applied (or erased) to mark boundaries of slavery and freedom through descriptions of physical bodies” (7–8). Before the appearance of this codified racial language, notices reflected European ideas about humoral medicine, in which skin color signified physical health, emotional well-being, and personality traits. The darker one’s hue, many owners believed, the more imbalanced the runaway seemed to be with respect to their humors. These beliefs, however, changed with the advent of racial slavery in the New World. As Block writes, “Anglo-Americans’ focus on red and white as a sign of health” became “less prominent as Native Americans became red.” While property-owning whites “retained the label of whiteness,” African Americans “became increasingly categorized as black” (18). Despite the popularity of geo-humoralism and theories of monogenesis, colonial Americans developed racist views about Native Americans and African Americans to buttress their economic objectives.

Over time, these views would color the very language of runaway advertisements. Encoded in the physical descriptions about a fugitive’s age, height, or body type was a subtext that went far beyond the words appearing in print. For many indentured servants, their height came to represent “a proxy for strength, health, and the effect of life history on bodies” (37). For enslaved African Americans and some Native Americans, however, those same characteristics came to speak to those individuals’ productivity and thus their monetary value. These racialized expectations may explain why female bondservants of European descent were “never” referenced as being “well-made,” while enslaved African women who absconded were routinely described in such potentially hypersexualized terms. Viewed through the prism of color, words like “straight,” as in “straight-bodied” or “straight-limbed,” “lusty,” and “likely,” and even “pale,” were loaded racial terms that complicated a person’s intrinsic worth. Descriptions of fugitives’ hair, eye color, names, and speech also came to conflate race with status. In her deft analysis of these and other words and phrases used in advertisements printed for indentured servants, Native Americans, and African American slaves, Block demonstrates effectively how race mattered.

But Colonial Complexions is not without its flaws. Block does not consider, for example, the various ways in which runaways challenged the authority of their owners, thus confusing the context in which notices were composed. Nowhere does she fully address the rich oral traditions that underpinned the production, dissemination, and publication of runaway advertisements (145). To...