Notes on Chapter 2: Drawing the Color Line

Summary of Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States

Chapter 2 of A People’s History of the United States titled “Drawing the Color Lines”, delves into not only the slavery but the racism against Black people in America. The term “the color line” was coined by W.E.B. Dubois in 1903 to describe racial segregation and racism that persisted after slavery and it’s effects still run deep in the U.S. today.  

The first Africans we know of to come to what is now known as the United States shores was in Jamestown in 1619 off a Dutch ship. There were 20 of them and they were listed as “cargo”. Were they meant to be servants like the European indentured servants that were sent here? If so, right from the get-go they were treated differently. Zinn writes, “Everything in the experience of the first white settlers acted as a pressure for the enslavement of blacks.”

Zinn offers up the “Starving Time”, which happened in the winter of 1609-1610, as to the desperation of the settlers to get workers to help gather enough food for them to eat. The Virginians also just learned to grow tobacco and in 1617 had sent their first shipload back to England. That was to be a very profitable business for them but they needed workers to bring in the crops. 

The English colonists were outnumbered by the Natives and they couldn’t force them to work. If they used their superior weapons against them, the Natives retaliated. Also, the peoples native to this land knew the woods much better than their invaders and could hide and wait in ambush. Nope, it was better to just bring slaves that had no ties to these lands and subjugate them.

One might ask why they didn’t work the lands themselves but Zinn mentions these were people with very little interest in toiling to the point, early on, John Smith had to basically force them to get the work done so they wouldn’t go through another starving season. Plus, they feared ridicule from the Natives who they felt were beneath them and “savage” but were able to feed their own. All their superior technology failed them, but if they just had control over another group of people they felt were inferior, everything would be alright.

Even though the regulation of slavery was decades off, by 1619, already a million Africans were brought to South America and the Caribbean as slaves so it just made sense to the Europeans to bring them to Virginia. 

Africa, at the time, had a sort of feudalism but not one that came out of the Greek and Roman model, like the Europeans’ system did, but from tribal living. So, even though there were hierarchies, there was still a sense of the communal. Whereas the Europeans valued private property and had harsh laws against theft (a child still could be hanged for stealing a rag of cotton as late as 1740), the Africans used fines and servitude as punishment. 

So, yes, Africans made slaves out of one another but more in the sense of the serfs of Europe. It was harsh but not with the absolute cruelty of how it was done in America. The slaves of Africa held on to rights that were stripped of the slaves that came to the Americas. They could marry and own property and sometimes ended up being adopted into the family they served. John Newton, a slave trader, noted that in Africa you were never allowed to draw blood even from a slave. This wasn’t so in the Americas.

Even before leaving Africa, the conditions were harsh for those people captured to become slaves in America. Zinn writes, “The marches to the coast, sometimes for 1,000 miles, with people shackled around the neck, under whip and gun, were death marches, in which two of every five blacks died.”

At the coast they would be examined, branded by the European company selling them, and left in cages for up to 15 days. On the ships, they were each packed into a space no bigger than a coffin. They were chained together and/or to the deck itself at the neck and ankles. Many times slaves suffocated due to the cramped space and shackles and often enough if they had the chance they would jump overboard to drown. About 1 in 3 Africans perished on the trip over.

By 1800, 10 to 15 million Africans had been transported to the Americas as slaves. It is roughly estimated that 50 million others had lost their lives and even so, it was a profitable business for most traders and owners involved.

In early documents, we can already see that there is a distinction being made between white and Black servants. They are denoted on documents separately and there was a difference of punishment doled out for the same offences. They are actually creating that line. The line that separates European whites from Black Africans. What Dubois dubbed “The Color Line”. 

As the plantation system grew, so did slavery. By 1763 in Virginia there were 170,000 slaves, which was about half the population and though Black people were easier to enslave than the Natives due to splitting up families and not being familiar with the land, from the start they rebelled. With only occasional organized insurrections, they ran away, and engaged in sabotage and slowdowns to show their refusal to submit. Even under the threat of mutilation and death they would show their resistance for the 246 years they were enslaved in the United States.

Zinn talks about how some historians would paint pictures that the slaves were “a society of helpless dependents” or “by racial quality submissive” by pointing toward the small amount of organized insurrections and that the South kept slavery going for over 200 years. However, if you look at how harsh the punishments were for running away and many still took that chance, Zinn writes, “looking at the totality of slave behavior, at the resistance of everyday life, from quiet noncooperation in work to running away, the picture becomes different.”

The slave owners feared rebellion. Laws were made to protect them. Maryland in 1723 allowed cutting off an ear for striking a white person and Virginia wrote in laws allowing dismemberment. For serious crimes, they were hanged and quartered and exposed. They used both psychological and physical abuse to keep the slaves in line. They would constantly tell them how inferior they were. They would separate slaves into “field” and “house” in order to pin them against each other. 

In 1712, the first large-scale rebellion happened in New York. Slaves were about 10% of the population there where the larger numbers weren’t needed like in the plantation states. About 25 slaves and 2 natives set fire to a building and killed 9 white men. Twenty one of them were executed. They were burnt or hanged. One was slowly roasted on a fire for 8 to 10 hours. This was all to send a message. 

Around the same time there were fires set in Boston. They did not have any clue who set them but they executed one slave for the crimes and set a rule that if more than 2 slaves were in a group together, they were to be whipped. 

In 1739 there was a rebellion in Stono, South Carolina where the slaves managed to steal arms and by the end about 80 slaves joined and 50 of them were killed along with 25 white militia men that were called in to stop them. 

Early on white indentured servants would work with Black slaves for freedom. In 1705 Virginia passed the slave codes which stated that any white man, including servants, were superior to Black people and that when they were no longer under contract, the white indentured servants would be given 50 acres. The slave owners knew this would quell many of the white servants from aiding the slaves from escaping. 

This “legal and social punishment of black and white collaboration” actually has aided this country and capitalism in keeping the poor white person believing there was hope in moving their status up knowing there would always be people struggling more under them. It broke class consciousness which helped the United States to quell the rise of a future threat to the capitalists, communism. 

Near the end of this chapter Zinn comments, “The point is that the elements of this web are historical, not "natural." This does not mean that they are easily disentangled, dismantled. It means only that there is a possibility for something else, under historical conditions not yet realized. And one of these conditions would be the elimination of that class exploitation which has made poor whites desperate for small gifts of status, and has prevented that unity of black and white necessary for joint rebellion and reconstruction.”