Foul Means
Foul Means: The Formation of a Slave Society in Virginia, 1660-1740. By Anthony S. Parent Jr. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004. Frontispiece, acknowledgements, introduction, illustrations, tables and figures, maps, appendixes, notes, index. Pp. xiv, 291. $18.95, paper; $49.95, cloth).
Examining the relations of class, group status, cultural attributes, and the material interests that flow from economic conditions, Foul Means attempts to fill part of the historical gap after Bacon’s Rebellion (1676), and to comprehend slavery’s role in the formation of Virginia. Analyzing slavery vis á vis the Old Dominion’s social formation from 1660 to 1740, Parent challenges that which he characterizes as “the generally accepted belief” that racialized slavery was an “unthinking decision,” a term popularized by Winthrop D. Jordan (White Over Black) in 1968. Contrary to Jordan’s argument that slavery was a rational but unconscious consequence of a wide variety of aspiring planters responding to market and labor forces, Parent argues that it was instead a small emerging class of great planters with large landholding and political connections who brought racial slavery to Virginia, and that the racialization of slavery was a wholly deliberate operation.
In the great scholarship that studies the enslavement of Africans in America, there has lingered a historiographic version of “the chicken or the egg” question: which came first—racism or slavery? But the idea that slavery could have been established in the colonies without a practiced ideology of white supremacy has always challenged basic logic; after reading Parent, the idea is rendered altogether untenable. He supports his argument by addressing the conclusive but rarely-expressed reality that the “English had a cultural predisposition to view blackness as a thing dirty and evil.” Too many scholars avoid that reality when discussing whether racism or slavery came first. Parent not only confronts it, he settles the debate once and for all. Carrying their “inherited prejudice into the wilderness,” he writes, “anxious settlers found the Africans’ animism, blackness, and customs threatening. . . . This racism figured significantly in their decision to enslave Africans and to eschew the possibility of enslaving Europeans or Native Americans, even through Ireland and the Powhatan Confederacy, for example, provided alternatives for forced labor.” Skin color was slavery’s determining factor.
The book’s title comes from William Byrd II’s observation that “Foul means must do what fair will not,” “a confession of guilt,” writes Parent, which demonstrated that “the great planters were not only aware of the moral cost of slavery, but they were willing to pay the price.” Of course, it was enslaved Africans and African Americans who paid the highest price, and who suffered the white planters’ hegemony that was buttressed by “an ideology of patriarchism and a strategy of slave proselytism.”
Parent majestically argues that the choice to enslave Africans was “deliberate, odious and foul.” And this is what makes Foul Means an indispensable contribution to the history of slavery. Parent does not pretend to be an objective analyst, and his scholarship speaks with greater clarity because of his passionate commitment. When those “great planters” later became the architects of American Freedom, they carried with them an equally passionate commitment that has become “romanticized in our national narrative.” It was from those whom they enslaved that those architects learned the passionate, “the desperate need for liberation.” By liberating that narrative, Foul Means does history a service; for, as Parent accurately observes, it cannot breathe “until slavery and its persistent legacy in racism confront freedom’s romance.”
Reviewed for The North Carolina Historical Review, July 2005, pp. 389-390.
In the great scholarship that studies the enslavement of Africans in America, there has lingered a historiographic version of “the chicken or the egg” question: which came first—racism or slavery? But the idea that slavery could have been established in the colonies without a practiced ideology of white supremacy has always challenged basic logic; after reading Parent, the idea is rendered altogether untenable. He supports his argument by addressing the conclusive but rarely-expressed reality that the “English had a cultural predisposition to view blackness as a thing dirty and evil.” Too many scholars avoid that reality when discussing whether racism or slavery came first. Parent not only confronts it, he settles the debate once and for all. Carrying their “inherited prejudice into the wilderness,” he writes, “anxious settlers found the Africans’ animism, blackness, and customs threatening. . . . This racism figured significantly in their decision to enslave Africans and to eschew the possibility of enslaving Europeans or Native Americans, even through Ireland and the Powhatan Confederacy, for example, provided alternatives for forced labor.” Skin color was slavery’s determining factor.
The book’s title comes from William Byrd II’s observation that “Foul means must do what fair will not,” “a confession of guilt,” writes Parent, which demonstrated that “the great planters were not only aware of the moral cost of slavery, but they were willing to pay the price.” Of course, it was enslaved Africans and African Americans who paid the highest price, and who suffered the white planters’ hegemony that was buttressed by “an ideology of patriarchism and a strategy of slave proselytism.”
Parent majestically argues that the choice to enslave Africans was “deliberate, odious and foul.” And this is what makes Foul Means an indispensable contribution to the history of slavery. Parent does not pretend to be an objective analyst, and his scholarship speaks with greater clarity because of his passionate commitment. When those “great planters” later became the architects of American Freedom, they carried with them an equally passionate commitment that has become “romanticized in our national narrative.” It was from those whom they enslaved that those architects learned the passionate, “the desperate need for liberation.” By liberating that narrative, Foul Means does history a service; for, as Parent accurately observes, it cannot breathe “until slavery and its persistent legacy in racism confront freedom’s romance.”
Reviewed for The North Carolina Historical Review, July 2005, pp. 389-390.