Even in death, Terry Prince was considered exceptional, and it is possible that she was exceptionally “strong” or stubborn.
A woman who held so many superlatives—the first to face off against the all-white and all-male supreme court, a vocal advocate for her child, and a town crier, a known eyewitness—likely occupied a fraught position, and we cannot underestimate how equally vulnerable and valuable her traits would have made her.
We need only to look to Anne Hutchinson—executed a century before Terry Prince’s song—or to Nina Simone’s “Backlash Blues” or to the case of Jacqueline Dixon for stories of “know-your-place aggression” and backlash against (Black) women who stood their ground. We cannot ignore the very real racial-sexual terror Terry Prince could have—and we don’t know if she did—experienced for her actions.
Thus I do not want to risk emblematizing Terry Prince to the point of losing her humanity. As bell hooks and others have warned us, the danger in the myth of the strong, assertive Black woman is its elision of our pain and vulnerability. To fully see Lucy Terry Prince is to contextualize the conditions that made her choose to survive. Her song itself signals ongoing trauma from the incidents she witnessed. Phrases like “dreadful slaughter” and “killed outright” paint a painful scene still vivid in the psyche. And it is very likely that the named trauma of the Bars incident—and the unnamed traumas she experienced while enslaved and later as the mother of six children—affected her daily life. To maintain her safety and the safety of her family, Terry Prince would have had to tread skillfully, codeswitching between assertiveness and (performing) “knowing her place,” as we have seen.
To that point, if we revisit the incident with Williams College, Terry Prince’s insistence on her son’s acceptance is actually in keeping with the cult of domesticity, which dictated that women took responsibility for the education of their children. It also helps that her magnum opus recounts the events of the Bars incident in a way that makes the white colonists look favorable and the Abenaki people the criminals. That her song was published posthumously and circulated orally during her lifetime rather than in print also makes it less a performance of gender or racial aberrance. When read another way, then, each of Terry Prince’s seeming transgressions against the expectations of her gender and race and time—with perhaps the exception of her property battle—might equally resituate her within them.
I say all this not to withhold praise from Terry Prince for her very real accomplishments but to suggest that the way she achieved them is what is most exceptional. By working both within and against a system that seldom rewarded women for acting out—and living to tell—Terry Prince demonstrates the performative dexterity often required of African American women across history to survive, to avoid singing the backlash blues.
Her legacy extends beyond “Bars Fight” to a complex figure who must have suffered as much as she succeeded. A trickster, both a “respectable lady” and a bold troublemaker, Lucy Terry Prince should be the subject of more study—and new ballads, new songs.
1749–1754
RACE AND THE ENLIGHTENMENT
Dorothy E. Roberts
In the 1700s, Europe experienced an intellectual movement, known as the Age of Enlightenment, that set the course of scientific theory and methods for the next three centuries. Leading thinkers embraced reason over superstition and shifted the basis of their conclusions about the universe from religious beliefs to secular science, giving science the ultimate authority over truth and knowledge. In many respects, the Enlightenment advanced ways of understanding the natural world and human behavior, but it was also the period when the modern scientific concept of race as a natural category was installed.
The expansion of the slave trade in the 1700s necessitated an expanding conceptual racial system of governance, spurring the change among European intellectuals from theological to biological thinking. During the Enlightenment, race became an object of scientific study, and scientists began to explain enslavement as a product of nature. Racial science was deployed to explain unequal outcomes in health, political status, and economic well-being as stemming from natural racial differences rather than from racist policies.
By 1749, European naturalists had begun to use race as a category for scientifically classifying human beings. The major groundwork for modern biological typologies was laid by Carl Linnaeus, whose twelve-edition catalog of living things, Systema Naturae, was published between 1735 and his death in 1778. Linnaeus divided Homo sapiens into four natural varieties—H. sapiens americanus, H. sapiens europaeus, H. sapiens asiaticus, and H. sapiens afer—linked respectively to the Americas, Europe, Asia, and Africa, and he ascribed innate physical, social, and moral characteristics to each group. Although Linnaeus, like the biologists who succeeded him, claimed these racial categories were based on objective observations of nature, they were far from neutral. Eighteenth-century classifications positioned races in a hierarchy, placing Europeans at the top with the most positive traits (“Vigorous, muscular. Flowing blond hair. Very smart, inventive. Ruled by law”), and placing Africans at the bottom and with the most negative features (“Sluggish, lazy. Black kinky hair. Crafty, slow, careless. Ruled by caprice”).
The Enlightenment is typically touted as a radical break from the Christian theology that preceded it. However, one aspect of its thinking transported from theology to science—the belief that some powerful force apart from human intervention divided all human beings into separate races. Many European theologians held that God created the races and made Europeans in His image. After the Enlightenment, with the Divine no longer an acceptable basis for scientific evidence, European scientists pointed to nature as producing innate distinctions between races. (A century later, after the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, scientists began attributing race to evolution.) Thus, the racist theological concept of race survived the Enlightenment transition from “supernaturalist to scientific explanations of human origins and potential.”
Benjamin Franklin, one of the most revered intellectuals of his day, was instrumental in importing Enlightenment thinking to the British colonies in North America. There, Enlightenment scientists’ understanding of race served a critical political function: the view that nature had created racial distinctions resolved the contradiction between the Enlightenment ideals of liberty, equality, and tolerance and the enslavement of African people. The shift to secular thinking reinforced the view that Black people were innately and immutably inferior as a race and therefore were subject to permanent enslavement. After chattel slavery ended, the biological concept of race continued to shape the social and biological sciences, medical practice, and social policies, forming a scientific foundation for eugenics, Jim Crow, and post–civil rights color-blind ideology that ignores racism’s persistent impact.
Excluding Black people from the emerging democracy was excused as an inevitable product of nature. Thomas Jefferson elucidated this racist scientific thinking in his 1781 treatise Notes on the State of Virginia. He justified the exclusion of Black people from the democracy he and Franklin had helped to create based on “the real distinctions which nature has made.” He concluded: “This unfortunate difference in colour, and perhaps in faculty, is a powerful obstacle to the emancipation of these people.”
Quaker preacher John Woolman had already disagreed with this racist line of thought in the 1750s. He wrote a religious treatise, Some Considerations on the Keeping of Negroes, in 1746 but didn’t publish it until 1754, after abolitionist Anthony Benezet was elected to the Philadelphia yearly meeting press editorial board. Woolman urged his fellow Christians to see the evils of slavery by contesting enslavers’ rationales for denying the equal humanity of Black people. He advocated not only for ending enslavement but also for refusing to benefit from enslaved labor until abolition was achieved. Benjamin Franklin’s Pennsylvania Gazette advertised the publication of Some Considerations on the Keeping of Negro
es. By the close of 1754, many Quakers had concluded that slavery was incompatible with Christianity and had begun to build an abolition movement. But the scientific understanding of race as a biological fact of nature was flourishing and would help to bolster slavery for decades to come.
Benjamin Franklin subscribed to the view not only that Black people were naturally distinct from white people but also that these distinctions necessitated differences in political status. In 1751 he authored Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind, which argued that Anglo-Saxons should expand into the Americas because Europe was overpopulated. Franklin’s claim depended in part on concerns about the “darkening” of certain parts of the Americas and its effect on the Anglo-Saxon inhabitants. “Who can now find the vacancy made in Sweden, France or other warlike nations, by the Plague of heroism forty Years ago; in France by the expulsion of the Protestants; in England by the settlement of her Colonies; or in Guinea, by one hundred years’ exportation of slaves, that has blacken’d half America?,” he wrote.
Franklin explained in terms of natural distinctions between races why he did not want more Africans brought to the America that he and his enlightened colleagues were building:
The number of purely white people in the world is proportionally very small. All Africa is black or tawny. Asia chiefly tawny. America (exclusive of the newcomers) wholly so. And in Europe, the Spaniards, Italians, French, Russians and Swedes are generally of what we call a swarthy complexion; as are the Germans also, the Saxons only excepted, who with the English make the principal body of white people on the face of the earth. I could wish their numbers were increased. And while we are, as I may call it, scouring our planet, by clearing America of woods, and so making this side of our globe reflect a brighter light to the eyes of inhabitants in Mars or Venus, why should we in the sight of superior beings, darken its people? Why increase the sons of Africa, by planting them in America, where we have so fair an opportunity, by excluding all blacks and tawneys, of increasing the lovely white and red? But perhaps I am partial to the complexion of my Country, for such kind of partiality is natural to Mankind.
Although Franklin supported abolishing the slave trade, he did not support Black people’s freedom and equal citizenship in the American polity until later in his life. Rather, his central objective was to include white people only in the new nation he and his “enlightened” peers were creating.
1754–1759
BLACKNESS AND INDIGENEITY
Kyle T. Mays
The dispossession of millions of Native Americans and the simultaneous genocide and enslavement of Indigenous Africans remain two intertwining and parallel events that have fundamentally shaped the United States. These historical travesties continue today in the form of rampant anti-Black racism and anti-Indigenous erasure from the national consciousness.
The year 1754 was instrumental in prerevolutionary America. In that year the French and Indian War—a conflict between the British colonies, New France, and a host of Native American nations fighting on each side—emerged, an event that would change the dominant European population east of the Mississippi and lead into the modern world’s first global conflict, the Seven Years’ War (1756–63). The war ended with the Treaty of Paris, in which France ceded all land east of the Mississippi to Britain. After France was defeated, kinship was no longer a major part of Native-British relations as it had been with the French: the “British were the conquerors; the Indians were the subjects.”
It was also a moment ripe with contradictions between freedom and unfreedom. For almost a century, Europeans had constructed Native North American peoples as savages in order to justify taking their land. Native people became central characters in how Europeans constructed their belonging to the “New World” as the original inhabitants of the land, thus erasing those Native people. In this way, they separated the European world from the Indigenous and African ones, creating a distinction between civilization and savagery, or human and nonhuman.
The population of this contested land comprised white men with property, indentured servants, enslaved Africans, and precariously placed Native peoples. As the British colonies and New France faced off, the combined power of anti-Black racism and African slavery became further entrenched in colonial society. For instance, between 1735 and 1750, Georgia was one of the few colonies that attempted to limit slavery, especially because of its close proximity to Spanish Florida. However, as Georgia’s rice economy increased, its planters desired more enslaved people from West Africa. Between 1750 and 1755, Georgia’s enslaved population increased nearly 3,500 percent.
Slavery became a further entrenched part of the colonies during the French and Indian War. In 1757 the Reverend Peter Fontaine of Virginia, the oldest of the original thirteen colonies, commented, “To live in Virginia without slaves is morally impossible.”
This period also brought more interactions between people of African descent and Native North Americans. Paul Cuffe, born on January 17, 1759, was an early person of mixed ancestry, with both Indigenous African and North American Indigenous roots, born to Kofi (Akan), who was sold into slavery as a preteen, and to Ruth Moses (Wampanoag). After the Revolutionary War, Cuffe became one of the wealthiest Black shipping merchants of his time and played a central role in trying to establish a colony in Sierra Leone for people of African descent from the new United States. However, what is often missed in his history is that he represents some of the earliest Afro-Indigenous people in the United States—those with a relationship not only to the mark of Blackness but also to U.S. Indigenous roots. Cuffe had attempted to assert his North American Indigenous roots during his earlier years, but because of the rampant anti-Blackness, he would later more strongly identify as Black. What we can learn from Cuffe and others like him is that the first enslaved Africans did not lose their Indigenous roots—they maintained them as best as they could. They also often found possibilities in their encounters with Indigenous peoples in the United States.
Dispossession and enslavement were foundational to prerevolutionary America. However, they also created connections between Black and Indigenous peoples that might not have otherwise happened. These histories should serve as our opportunity to think about what it might mean for Black Americans not only to remember their foundational role in shaping American democracy but also to reflect on how they have always found kinship with Native American peoples. What would an alliance between Black and Native Americans look like today, and how would that continue to fundamentally change this country so that it not only met the founders’ ideals of what democracy could look like but also radically reshaped them?
1759–1764
ONE BLACK BOY: THE GREAT LAKES AND THE MIDWEST
Tiya Miles
The resolution of armed conflict between British troops and a multitribal Indigenous fighting force in May 1763 depended, in part, on the ownership of one Black boy. Did the child believe his chances for staying alive and perhaps gaining freedom were greater in his current condition, as the property of a British officer? Or did he think he might fare better under the authority of the Indigenous political and military leader who sought to obtain him? Did he even know that his life was on the trading floor, as officials in the besieged fort town of Detroit negotiated a potential cease-fire in the altercation known as Pontiac’s War? Only a few words exist in the colonial archive to distinguish this child from any other in history: He was “a Negroe boy belonging to James [Kinchen]” desired as “a Valet de Chambre to Marshal Pontiac.”
Pontiac, the Ottawa-Ojibwe military strategist for whom this conflict was named, had risen as a leader of his people in the wake of the French and Indian War. This prolonged battle between Britain and France had erupted in 1754 over control of land and trade on the North American mainland. After the French scored several victories, the British finally prevailed, forcing the French into a surrender following the decisive Battle of Quebec in 1759. France and Grea
t Britain negotiated a peace treaty in Paris that officially ended the conflict in 1763, or so those representing these imperial powers thought.
French and British negotiators had failed to include members of the multiple Indigenous nations who occupied the Saint Lawrence River valley, Great Lakes, and Ohio River valley lands that they had contested. The new geopolitical order hampered Native American negotiating power, increased British settler presence, weakened Native traders’ economic position, and contributed to the subsequent loss of Indigenous lands and lives. The British now controlled the region’s military forts as well as the European side of the lucrative fur trade, and they treated Native trading partners with far less respect than had the French.
Some Native people refused to accept this dramatic change in circumstances. Pontiac counted himself as chief among them. Critically assessing the political landscape and embracing the bellicose message of the radical Delaware prophet Neolin, Pontiac organized a coalition of Ottawa, Ojibwe, Huron, Seneca, Delaware, Shawnee, and Miami defenders of the land. In addition to mounting surprise attacks on and seizures of British posts throughout the region, the coordinated plot included a siege of Detroit, a prosperous town and British stronghold on the western edge of European settlement, originally founded in 1701 by the French. Just as Pontiac held Detroit by the throat, blocking the residents’ source of supplies at the Detroit River and taking two British officers captive, he stated the terms of his withdrawal. Pontiac would release Detroit if the British retreated to their original colonies east of the Allegheny Mountains and also left for Pontiac’s exclusive use a certain “Negroe boy.”
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