Andrew S.

Terrell
HIST 6393: Atlantic History to 1750

Précis: Jordan, Winthrop D.. White Over Black: American Attitudes Towards the Negro,
1550-1812. Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1968.

In a successful effort to link social outlook to social circumstances, historian Winthrop

Jordan wrote his first monograph looking at the first two centuries of European and African
interaction in the forming of the United States. His study required anthropological and
psychological methodologies in order to form a base psyche of the Europeans and how they
viewed themselves. Jordan’s methodologies, especially in the 1960s, surely came under
scrutinization as he was part of the pioneering movement to use deductive reasoning in forming
his analysis of the human experience during the observed era. He provided adequate evidence in
creating the persona of the Elizabethan Briton that associated Negroes and their homelands with
heathenism, savages, and other socially deviant attributes. With their twisted view of another
human race, they defended the push for Negro captivity and defended it amid their enlightened,
moralistic view of the Anglo world and its inhabitants. The latter sixteenth and much of the
seventeenth centuries, Jordan argued, was an amalgam of negative and demeaning affiliations
toward the Negro race in order to vindicate the rapid proliferation of the slave trade that would
truly take off in the following century in the British thirteen colonies. Jordan set out to answer a
question he posed early on: “What were the attitudes of white men toward Negroes during the
first two centuries of European and African settlement in what became the United States of
America?” However, to sufficiently answer this, he had to expound on other questions of beliefs
originations, factors of social circumstance, and the ability to overthrow a two century old slave
system.
Jordan divided the eighteenth and early nineteenth century into three periods. The
provincial decades from 1700 to 1755 were filled with varying attitudes towards Negroes.
Reasons for such differing views largely fell to religious beliefs and the sex ratio of the
population in separate communities. Jordan convincingly showed how denominations and their
beliefs were the largest influence on social thought in Colonial America. Protestant affirmations
had concepts of brotherhood under God and expounded on innate equality of all mankind. The
Revolutionary era spanned from 1755 to the end of the American War for Independence in 1783.
In rhetoric and manuscript during this period, more colonists were introduced to ideas of liberty
and equality. Jordan again argued that one force, the pamphlet and other early news medium,
had a larger amount of influence on the people than any other; That the rapid growth and large
networks of pamphlets often times would allow aforementioned concepts to cross the racial
divide. Though this movement was largely secular in nature it had ties to the religious zeal and
teachings of the earlier period. A large let down, to be colloquial, for the Negroes came to pass
in the post-Revolutionary world. The rhetoric and predominantly sincere affirmations for
equality were no match for an enormous labor system and its chieftains. Jordan uses the case of
Thomas Jefferson and his seeming contradictory faiths in liberty, equality, and slavery to
illustrate the tensions in the early nineteenth century. In the end, ideology failed to conquer a
generational-engrained establishment.