Racial Histories, Histories of Race: All or None of the Above?

John Wood Sweet. Bodies Politic: Negotiating Race in the American North, 1730-1830. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003. xii + 486 pp. Illustrations, notes, note on sources, and index. $49.95.

John Wood Sweet bites off more than most and chews it carefully, elegantly, and often profoundly for more than four hundred pages. Just to demonstrate that race in the early North—here, really, New England, and often mainly Rhode Island—can sustain such treatment is itself an accomplishment. Most scholars, not to mention laypersons, still see the North's story of colonialism, people-trading, and caste through the shrinking lens of regional comparison, despite reminders of northern racism of the sort C. Vann Woodward used to drop like a tarp (often to smother critiques of the South less measured or constructive than his own).¹ Like Woodward's musings on national history, Sweet's regional history points us away from northern exceptionalism and toward a more honest appraisal of colonialism and its legacies as a national phenomenon.

Historians and the public have been more apt to remember the national and pervasive character of racism in Native-settler relations. Sweet's history of race and races purposefully joins together black, red, and white to place African Americans in the colonial framework usually reserved for Indians, especially in the North. He begins with the story of the Narragansett of Rhode Island. The anglicizing strategies of their would-be sachem-king, Charles Ninigret, became one basis for recognition of tribal autonomy, but Charles' quest for gentility led him to sell off lands and accelerated the tendency for white government-appointed commissioners to acquire Indian tracts for themselves at bargain prices. Sweet makes clear that neither conflicts among tribe members over acculturation nor conflict between whites and Indians derived primarily from cultural differences congruent with "race." Rather, racial identities were a battleground in a colonial situation where the deck was stacked against Indians because any and all successful strategies required white allies. The very process of becoming more English—as with the faction of Christianizing native yeomen who opposed "King" Charles because they wanted to farm their own tracts—made Indians more conscious of being a distinct group. For the beholders and the beheld, racism—not culture—made race.

Race relations in New England had a structure, one that allowed for flexibility and intimacy without any real lessening of white power. Examining slavery, Sweet emphasizes the role of the public in sustaining the fiction of mastery as a private, patriarchal relationship. Slaves were imagined and often treated as if beyond the social contract, despite ample evidence to the contrary. Exaggerated stories of purposeless slave violence, like legal practices that made it impossible for slaves to testify or sue, kept slaves in a special category—except when public action was needed to police them. A special kind of denial of the very nature of the institution, a mix of myth and clarity about ends, sustained a peculiar institution not so much different from slavery elsewhere, except perhaps that slave owners were most likely to own just one slave, to see slaves' family ties as a problem rather than as a source of profit, and to hang on to their assets in (adult) slaves all the more tightly.

Closeness and intimacy in this late-colonial body politic, Sweet argues, repeatedly fueled the engine of racialization. His primary thematic examples are religion and sexuality. "Settlers parlayed the alleged responses of Africans and Indians to Christianity into stereotypes about racial natures," thus avoidingthe very real possibility that conversion would spell spiritual equality or legal citizenship (p. 106). The more that prominent Christians like Samson Occam and Phillis Wheatley demonstrated Christian cultural skills, the more they were defined, and came to see their own worlds, racially. In the end, despite the fact that evangelical and even high-church ritual created syncretic openings for Africans and natives, religion as a site...