Natural Philosophy and an Early Racial Idiom in North America: Comparing English and Indian
Bodies
Author(s): Joyce E. Chaplin
Source: The William and Mary Quarterly, Vol. 54, No. 1 (Jan., 1997), pp. 229-252
Published by: Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2953318
Accessed: 12-06-2015 06:39 UTC
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Natural Philosophy and an EarlyRacial
Idiom in North America:Comparing
English and Indian Bodies
Joyce E. Chaplin
N his history of East and West Florida, eighteenth-centurynaturalistand
cartographerBernard Romans carefully considered the different peoples
who lived in that part of the British empire and questioned how reasonable it was to designate the Indians as Americans. "We might call them
Americans,"Romans conceded, "as the inhabitants of the old world are each
distinguished by a name expressiveof, or relative to the quarters,from which
they respectively originate, but this would be confounding them with the
other natives, as well white as black, which i think by no means reasonable."
Published in I775, this astonishing statement is easily read too narrowly in
the context of the colonies' maturity and stirringsof independence. Romans's
words hint at the political and cultural primacy of the British immigrants
who had introduced themselves into the New World, and they were a part of
an emerging argument for an exceptional American cultural identity. Yet
Romans's assertion was also a concluding part of a long argument about the
exceptional nature of Anglo-Americancorporealidentity.1
Scholarship on American exceptionalism has usually focused on the cultural dimension of colonial history and not on the way English settlers constructed a physical identity for themselves.2 The settlers' physical identity
was eventually comprehensible as racism, though scholarship on race points
I
Joyce E. Chaplin is associate professor of history at Vanderbilt University. She wishes to
thank David Armitage, Joel Harrington, Matthew Ramsey, Daniel K. Richter, and Margaret
Humphreys Warner for their comments on this article as well as the participantsin the History
Seminar at The Johns Hopkins University and the Constructing Race seminar at the Institute of
EarlyAmerican History and Culture.
1 Bernard Romans, A ConciseNatural History of East and WestFlorida (London, 1775),
37-38. I use the word English rather than British because the period I am covering mostly antedates the 1707 Act of Union. English was the dominant language of those who went to what
became Great Britain's colonies, and it was the language they used to define themselves against
the native population.
2 Some scholars who have argued for an exceptional American character have discussed
colonists' attitudes toward nature, though they usually define it narrowly as wilderness; see
Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land: The American Westas Symboland Myth (Cambridge, Mass.,
1950); Richard Slotkin, Regenerationthrough Violence:The Mythologyof the AmericanFrontier,
i6oo-i86o (Middletown, Conn., 1973), esp. 25-222; Catherine L. Albanese, Nature Religion in
America:From the AlgonkianIndians to the New Age, in Martin E. Marty, ed., ChicagoHistoryof
American Religion (Chicago, 1990), 47-79; and Roderick Nash, Wildernessand the American
Mind, 3ded. (New Haven, i982).
The Williamand Mary Quarterly,3d Series, Vol. LIV, No.
i,
January1997
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230
WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY
to late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century science (especially after Darwin)
for the development of a truly biological definition of human types.3 But
English colonists began to assess bodies as superior and inferior even before
the eighteenth century. They did so by applying the tenets of naturalphilosophy, a specialized discourse on the material world, derived mainly from
classical sources, which initially explained bodily variation in nonracial,
environmental terms. According to this discourse, all humans are potentially
the same, and adult specimens differ owing to the physical and cultural
milieux in which they take final form. Natural philosophy nonetheless
stressed an underlying, universal human similarity, one to which English
interpretationsof North America deferred from the I550S to i640s. Physical
differences were acquired by accident of birth and could become deeply
rooted in individuals, but no variation among national groups was transmissible through parents. Inherited resemblanceamong humans was typical only
of smaller populations, such as families, perhaps villages, and occasionally
provinces-but not the larger, national populations that became the units of
racialistanalysis. If race in modern times signifies a fixed set of bodily traits,
purportedly specific to national or ethnic groups and transmitted through
procreation, it was not a coherent hypothesis in the early modern period.
Though not predicated on a modern concept of race, the language of
natural philosophy neverthelessgenerated statements that helped to create a
racial definition of humanity in America. Disease and Indian mortality were
key to this shift, first openly articulated in the i640s. Scholars have examined the historical consequences of post-Columbian epidemiology, mostly by
tracing the sharp decline of the native population that first encountered Old
World contagious diseases. Historians have paid less attention to contemporary European comprehension of the demographic catastrophe.4 English
explanations eventually posited that the native peoples were less resistant to
disease and that their susceptibility was natural to their bodily constitutions.
By the end of the seventeenth century, the English emphasized that their
own physical type thrived and persisted in its old form, despite its exposure
to an American milieu for more than a generation. By applying the language
3 Stephen Jay Gould, TheMismeasureof Man (New York, i98i), esp. chap. 2; Pat Shipman,
The Evolutionof Racism:Human Differenceand the Use and Abuse of Science(New York, 1994).
On the transition from nonbiological views of race see MargaretT. Hodgen, EarlyAnthropology
in the Sixteenthand SeventeenthCenturies(Philadelphia,i964); John G. Burke, "The Wild Man's
Pedigree: Scientific Method and Racial Anthropology," in Edward Dudley and Maximillian E.
Novak, eds., The Wild Man Within: An Image in Western Thoughtfrom the Renaissanceto
Romanticism(Pittsburgh, 1972), 281-307; and Ivan Hannaford, Race: The History of an Idea in
the West(Washington, D. C., and Baltimore, i996), pt. i.
4 J. H. Parry, The SpanishSeaborneEmpire (New York, i966), 213-28; Alfred W. Crosby,
Jr., The ColumbianExchange:Biological and Cultural Consequencesof i492 (Westport, Conn.,
1972), 35-63; Crosby, "Virgin Soil Epidemics as a Factor in the Aboriginal Depopulation in
America," Williamand Mary Quarterly,3d Ser., 33 (1976), 289-99; William H. McNeill, Plagues
and Peoples(GardenCity, N. Y., 1976), 199-234; Crosby,EcologicalImperialism:The Biological
Expansionof Europe,900-i900
(Cambridge,
i986), i96-2i6; HenryF. Dobynswith WilliamR.
Swagerty, TheirNumberBecomeThinned:Native AmericanPopulationDynamicsin EasternNorth
America(Knoxville, i983), esp. 8-45.
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NATURAL PHILOSOPHY AND RACIAL IDIOM
23I
of natural philosophy to Native American attrition and English vigor, the
colonists defined a new idiom: that the significant human variation in North
America was not due to external environment but instead lay within the
bodies of its Europeanand Indian peoples.
This was not an idea originally stated in Old World explication of
human bodies but instead emerged when it was applied to American phenomena. The new idiom thus gestured toward racial identifications of the
body without providing, yet, a theory that explained generational transmission of bodily variants. Examination of contemporary natural philosophy
and medical theory reveals that racial thought in North America has a long
past, even if its early manifestation was less coherent than its nineteenthcentury descendant. English settlers' interest in their own bodies and their
use of native bodies as a physical contrast were significant; as scholars of the
construction of "whiteness"have pointed out, belief in the dominance of the
white body was not a given but a labored creation of racial ideology.
Although much scholarship on early American race and racism emphasizes
the representationof cultural differences that prefigured, paralleled, or conveyed racial ideology, less has been done on the emergence of belief in physical difference. Yet even at the genesis of English colonization, corporeal
nature was a powerful mode of representation of human differences. The
English reinforced their colonial dominance by interpreting nature in the
New World as a materialsubstructurefor their power.5
This article examines only the English comparison between their own
bodies and those of North American Indians. Related and indeed important
questions-such as the influence of Iberian writing on English narratives,
the representationof the English body in the Caribbean,and the significance
of West African slaveryin the genesis of racism-are not addressed. Indians
have been neglected in interpretations of American racism; examination of
the denigration of all colonized peoples will be necessary for a full understanding of racism.6 The early racial idiom that the English applied to
5 Work on the construction of whiteness has focused on the i9th century. There is an
obvious need to employ these terms of analysiswithin examinations of the early modern period.
See the useful synthesis in Shelley Fisher Fishkin, "Interrogating 'Whiteness,' Complicating
'Blackness':Remapping American Culture," in Henry B. Wonham, ed., Criticismand the Color
Line: DesegregatingAmericanLiteraryStudies(New Brunswick, N. J., i996), 251-90. I am grateful to Teresa Goddu for this reference.
6 See especially Winthrop D. Jordan, White over Black: American Attitudes toward the
Negro, i550-i8i2 (Chapel Hill, i968), and Alden T. Vaughan, "The Origins Debate: Slaveryand
Racism in Seventeenth-Century Virginia," Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, 97
(i989),
311-54.
Both authorshavealso discussedNativeAmericans;
Jordan,White over Black,
22, 89, 241-42,
276-77,
477-81,
13-14,
505, 535; Vaughan, "From White Man to Redskin:
Changing Anglo-AmericanPerceptions of the American Indian,"AmericanHistoricalReview,87
(i982),
917-53.
These analysesfocus on the accretion of negative attitudes, at most tracing how
whites used skin color as a permanent marker of race. See also Edmund S. Morgan, American
Slavery,AmericanFreedom:The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York, 1975), chaps. 2-4 (on
Indians), i-i6 (on African slaves), for an analysis that emphasizesthe accumulation of negative
opinions and socioeconomic patterns of denigration. None of these studies examines racism
(prejudiceon the basis of presumed biological descent) against Indians before the late i8th century. They instead study attitudes and representationsthat were tangentially relevant to bodily
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232
WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY
Indians was distinctive because it declared that the natives lacked physical
ability to thrive in their homeland. Not only did English colonists adjust the
terms of natural philosophy to explain their own physical suitability to
America, they also used that explanation to usurp the very habitat of
America's pre-Columbian natives. It is also significant that this argument
about innate superiority and inferiority graduallyemerged (like the Spanish
debate on natural slavery) from an existing European discourse rather than
from a paradigmshift like the polygenetic hypothesis.7
The relatively unexamined topic of natural philosophy is important
because of its mutation into a racial idiom, the argument for English physical superiority to Native Americans. The paucity of scholarship on English
natural philosophy in America is striking (especially when compared to the
literature on Spanish America) and has imparted a sense that the English
understood their place in the New World in immaterial terms.8 By connectdifference. These are, nonetheless, essential studies for beginning to comprehend American
racism. Iberian discussions of Africans and innate bodily difference-especially related to disease-probably influenced debate about Indians in the Spanish and Portuguese colonies before
the North Americancolonies. Certainly, differentialresponse to disease shaped a proslaveryattitude towardAfricans,probablyas early as the i6th century. See Philip D. Curtin, "Epidemiology
and the Slave Trade," Political Science Quarterly,83 (i968), i98-211; Peter H. Wood, Black
Majority:Negroesin Colonial South Carolinafrom i670 throughthe Stono Rebellion(New York,
1975), 88-9i; and Joyce E. Chaplin, An Anxious Pursuit:AgriculturalInnovation in the Lower
South, i730-i8i5
(Chapel Hill, 1993), 117-22. Furtherresearchmay establish common causal patterns in racismagainstAfricansand Native Americans,especiallyon the interpretationof disease.
7 On natural slaverysee Anthony Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man: TheAmericanIndian
and the Originsof ComparativeEthnology,2d ed. (Cambridge,i986), esp. chap. 3. For an interpretation of the haphazard-and nondeliberated-connection between early modern intellectual
development and the spread of imperialismsee P. J. Marshalland Glyndwr Williams, The Great
Map of Mankind:Perceptionsof New Worldsin theAge of Enlightenment(Cambridge,Mass., i982),
299-303. Pre-1492European encounters with populations that were differentiallysusceptible to
disease probablyhelped shape post-1492 assessmentsof Native Americans. See Jerry H. Bentley,
Old WorldEncounters:Cross-CulturalContactsand Exchangesin Pre-ModernTimes (New York,
I993), i8i-84. Spanish assessmentsof disease in Americadoubtless also influenced the English.
8 Scholarshipon natural philosophy in Spanish America is more advanced. See Antonello
Gerbi, Nature in the New World:From ChristopherColumbusto Gonzalo Fernandezde Oviedo,
trans. Jeremy Moyle (Pittsburgh,i985). Most studies of the English colonies have examined the
growth of a European-basedempiricalscience, and most focus on the late i7th and i8th centuries;
there is less scholarshipon naturalphilosophy before the new science and the i6th and early i7th
centuries-the formativeperiod for the English colonies. Raymond Phineas Stearns,Sciencein the
BritishColoniesofAmerica(Urbana,Ill., 1970), has only a brief, dismissiveintroductorychapteron
natural philosophy; Brooke Hindle, The Pursuit of Sciencein RevolutionaryAmerica, i735-i789
(Chapel Hill, 1956),studies only the late colonial period. RichardHarrisonShryock,Medicineand
Societyin America,i66o-i86o (New York, ig60), studies late colonial medical theory. The essaysin
Philip Cash, Eric H. Christianson,and J. Worth Estes, eds., Medicine in ColonialMassachusetts,
I620-I820
(Boston, ig80), have slightly better chronologicalcoverage-especially C. Helen Brock,
"The Influence of Europe on Colonial MassachusettsMedicine," ioi-i6. Incredibly,PerryMiller
made no mention of naturalphilosophy, though he discussedthe new science in TheNew England
Mind: From Colonyto Province (Cambridge, Mass., 1953), 345-66, 437-46. Scholars who have
begun to look at natural philosophy include Ronald Sterne Wilkinson,
"'Hermes Christianus':
John Winthrop, Jr., and Chemical Medicine in Seventeenth-CenturyNew England,"in Allen G.
Debus, ed., Science,Medicine,and Societyin the Renaissance:Essaysto Honor WalterPagel (New
York, 1972), 221-41, and William R. Newman, GehennicalFire: The Lives of GeorgeStarkey,an
AmericanAlchemistin the ScientificRevolution(Cambridge,Mass., 1994).
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NATURAL PHILOSOPHY AND RACIAL IDIOM
233
ing the history of natural philosophy to that of racism, this article builds on
the point, well established by scholars of medieval and early modern Europe,
that the body was a site for the construction of identity; racial identity was a
logical if unintended outgrowth of earlierunderstandingsof corporealdifferences among people. Between the I55os and the I720s, from the first English
writings on America to the period when all continental regions had been settled and older regions had produced white creoles, English discourses of
nature and the human body were fundamental to their imperial project. The
proof was in the body.9
Natural philosophy was an amalgamation of intellectual traditions and
therefore somewhat eclectic in its focuses and methods of interpretation. It
was founded on Aristotle's libri naturales,and its students took most of their
questions from Aristotelian examination of sensible matter, the material entities knowable to the senses; natural philosophy included ideas about the physical construction of the cosmos from earth to heavens (described especially in
terms of the four elements-fire, air, water, earth), generation and corruption
of living material, and animal (including human) life. Accretions to this
Aristotelian base included Arabic science, rediscovered ancient atomistic philosophy, Ovidian metamorphosis, neoplatonic or Hermetic views of nature,
and newer empirical studies of nature such as those of Galileo, Vesalius, and
Harvey. Medicine, the study of the human body, had a close association with
natural philosophy. The Hippocratic tradition emphasized the relation
between the elements and the four bodily humors and instructed doctors and
patients to observe, describe, and treat the symptoms that a diseased body
exhibited. The Galenic tradition also related the elements to the bodily
humors, and elaborated a theory of the qualities (the hot, dry, wet, and cold
characteristics of the elements), and the faculties (principles of alteration that
the soul caused within the body itself). Both Hippocratic and Galenic traditions informed the bulk of medieval and early modern medicine. The most
important innovation came from the fifteenth-century doctor Paracelsus, who
rejected Aristotelian physiology, added to the four elements his four principles, and emphasized neoplatonic imagery along with renewed empiricism.1I
9 Leonard Barkan, Nature's Workof Art: The Human Body as Image of the World (New
Haven and London, 1975); Michel Foucault, Disciplineand Punish: TheBirth of the Prison,trans.
AlanSheridan(NewYork,I979),
3-31,
135-69;
CarolineWalkerBynum,HolyFeastandHolyFast:
TheReligiousSignificanceof Food to Medieval Women(Berkeleyand Los Angeles, i987), 48-69, 7693, 208-i8, 260-76; Peter Brown, TheBodyand Society:Men, Women,and SexualRenunciationin
Early Christianity(New York, i988); Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Genderfrom the
Greeksto Freud (Cambridge, Mass., i990); Lucy Gent and Nigel Llewellyn, eds., Renaissance
Bodies:TheHumanFigurein EnglishCulturec. i540-i660
(London,i990);
GailPaster,TheBody
Embarrassed:
Drama and the Disciplinesof Shame in the EarlyModernPeriod (Ithaca, 1993); and
Bynum, TheResurrection
of the Bodyin WesternChristianity,200-i336 (New York, 1995).
10 On natural philosophy see William A. Wallace, "TraditionalNatural Philosophy," and
Alfonso Ingegno, "The New Philosophy of Nature," both in Charles B. Schmitt and Quentin
Skinner, eds., The CambridgeHistory of RenaissancePhilosophy(Cambridge, i988), 20i-63. On
medical theories see Lester S. King, The Growthof Medical Thought(Chicago, i963), chaps. 1-4;
Debus, The English Paracelsians(New York, i965), esp. chap. I; Nancy Siraisi, Medieval and
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WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY
234
Medicine and natural philosophy were related but not coterminous.
Medicine was founded on philosophicalassumptionsabout matter, but only a
minorityof doctorswould have calledthemselvesnaturalphilosophers,and they
reliedon texts and practicesthat were of little interestto scholarsin the universities. Natural philosophy was certainly the larger and more diffuse body of
knowledge, one that sought to describea wider range of phenomena and was
accessibleto a broaderrangeof literatepeople. For this reason,naturalphilosophy rather than medicine was a strong element in European writing about
America.Englishtexts on the New World examinedthe bodies of the peoples in
the Western Hemispherebut used terminologyabout cosmographyand climate
in which medicalideaswere dependentratherthan independentlygenerative.11
Natural philosophy supplied a valuable modusexplicandifor early English
narrativeson America.The first analysesof Americannature relied on classical
notions of the division of the world into bands of climates and followed the
wisdom of the Hippocratictext Airs, Waters,Placesin its explicationof human
bodies within their climatic settings. Descriptions of the body referred,above
all, to climate and constitution or complexion.These were contemporaryterms
for environmentand human physical condition. The climate affected the constitution or complexion;the world had differentpeoples becausethe globe had
differentclimates. The classicaltraditionspecified that the world is positioned
beneathcelestialspheresand divided among sublunaryzones-temperate, tropical, polar-that have differentpropertiesbecausedifferentastralbodies affect
them. As RichardEden, naturalphilosopherand English translatorof the early
Europeanaccounts of America,explainedin I56i, "the miraculousmouinges of
the Planetes,Starres,and heauens"caused "the varietieof times and dyuersitie
of all naturallthynges, by naturallcauses."Each climate contained plants, animals, and even mineralspeculiarto it. Other forces,such as the natureof air or
soil, were indirectlylinked to the planetsand influencedearthlyregions.12Heat
was the great catalystof variety. The torrid zone was most affected by bright
starslike Venus and by the sun; "the Sunne and man, begette man."The tropics had the greatestvariation:they were teeming with animal populations,lush
plant life, a plethoraof mineralwealth, and an assortmentof diseases.13
Early RenaissanceMedicine:An Introductionto Knowledgeand Practice (Chicago and London,
i990), i-i6; and Hannaford, Race,144-46, i65-68.
11 On the connection between natural philosophy and medicine see Siraisi, Medieval and
Early RenaissanceMedicine, 2-7, and C. B. Schmitt, "Aristotle among the Physicians," in A.
Wear, R. K. French, and I. M. Lonie, eds., The Medical Renaissanceof the Sixteenth Century
(Cambridge, i985), 1-15. On the dearth of trained medical practitioners in the colonies before
1700 see Eric H. Christianson, "The Medical Practitioners of Massachusetts, i630-i800:
Patterns of Change and Continuity," in Cash, Christianson, and Estes, eds., Medicine in
49-67.
ColonialMassachusetts,
12 Siraisi, Medieval and Early RenaissanceMedicine, 79, 97-104,
Karen Ordahl
120-23;
Kupperman, "The Puzzle of the American Climate in the Early Colonial Period," AHR, 87
(i982),
1262-89; Hannaford, Race,chap. 6, esp. i83-84; Eden, cited in EdwardArber, "The Life
and Labours of Richard Eden," in Arber, ed., The First Three English Books on America
(Birmingham, i885), xlii. On Eden's natural philosophy see David Gwyn, "Richard Eden,
Journal,15 (i984),
SixteenthCentury
Cosmographer
andAlchemist,"
13-34.
Wayne Shumaker, The OccultSciencesin the Renaissance:A Study in IntellectualPatterns
(Berkeley, 1972), 170-86; Kupperman, "Fearof Hot Climates in the Anglo-American Colonial
13
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NATURAL PHILOSOPHY AND RACIAL IDIOM
235
Natural philosophy explained that climatic factors create bodily variation. In part, views of physical place referredto astrology (exposure to planetary influences), though secondaryand sublunaryinfluences were also greatly
stressed. "All the inhabitauntes of the worlde," Eden explained, "arefourmed
and disposed of suche complexion and strength of body, that euery [one] of
them are proportionate to the Climate assigned vnto them." Because all matter is composed of the same elements, all earthly entities (including humans)
are more or less related and the consequences of climatic changes superficial.
This was why alteration in humans was conceived of as complexionateidiosyncratic, and sometimes even temporary-not as a challenge to the fundamental similarity among all persons, who still had the same physical and
spiritual composition as their common ancestors, Adam and Eve. Nor did
material alteration proceed toward any final and permanent change. It was
the metamorphosisof Ovid ratherthan the evolution of Darwin.14
Discussions of human reproduction were, however, beginning to examine how characteristicsmight be transmitted generationally.During the early
modern period, theories of generation and of race began to converge, though
the convergence was not apparent until the eighteenth century. Before the
seventeenth century, the dominant theories of generation had been the
Aristotelian view that male seminal fluid operates upon female matter to
form an embryo and the Galenic theory that both male and female fluids
undergo coagulation and metamorphosis in the womb. Both theories
accounted for a child's resemblanceto one or both parents;both also complemented environmentalistviews of the affect of climate and maternal diet on
fetal development. The doctrine of maternal impressions (in which external
stimuli or the moral or emotional state of a pregnantwoman made an internal
impression on the fetus) was the cleareststatement of this environmentaltendency. But early modern views of generation were moving toward a more
fixed theory of transmission.After i65I, when William Harvey hypothesized
that human females-like avian females-produced eggs, theorists had an
Experience,"WMQ, 3d Ser., 41 (i984), 213-40. Quotation from Arber, ed., FirstEnglishBookson
America,xlii.
14Quotation in Arber, ed., FirstEnglishBookson America,xlii. On the human place within
nature see Hodgen, EarlyAnthropologyin the Sixteenthand SeventeenthCenturies,386-404. On
astrology see Siraisi, Medievaland EarlyRenaissanceMedicine, 135-36, and Brian P. Copenhaver,
"Astrology and Magic," in Schmitt and Skinner, eds., Cambridge History of Renaissance
Philosophy,264-300. By the early modern era, Christian doctrine, especially in Protestant countries such as Scotland and England, discouragedastrology because of its potential to overshadow
the doctrines of divine providence and human sin (or human charactermore broadly defined).
Sin, virtue, social status, gender, patterns of diet, and dress were all held to interact with astrological forces to create specific human characters. See Don Cameron Allen, The Star-Crossed
Renaissance:The Quarrelabout Astrologyand Its Influencesin England (New York, i966); Keith
Thomas, Religionand the Decline of Magic (London, i971), 335-458;Shumaker, OccultSciencesin
the Renaissance, i-II, i6-27, 42-53; Herbert Leventhal, In the Shadow of the Enlightenment:
America (New York, 1976), 13-65; Jon
Occultismand RenaissanceSciencein Eighteenth-Century
Butler, "Magic, Astrology, and the Early American Religious Heritage, i600-1760," AHR, 84
(i979), 317-46; and Patrick Curry, Prophecyand Power: Astrologyin Early Modern England
(Princeton, i989).
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236
WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY
importantway to representthe transmissionof fixed human types that survived
environmentaleffects on or moral states of parental bodies. After late-seventeenth-century microscopy confirmed the presence of human gametes, the
notion of species-specificinheritancegained more power. The preformationist
debate strengthened notions of racial fixity, especially during the eighteenth
century. Generationaldescriptions of human variation and resemblancewere
still, however, less satisfyingthan environmentaltheories.15
Just as individuals had characteristicconstitutions, human populations
had national complexions. Descriptions of national temperamentstended to
be chauvinistic-but such had been the case ever since the ancient Greeks.
Every Europeanpopulation sought a way to define itself as moderate or temperate. MediterraneanEuropeans insisted on their temperate nature; northern people contended that they too lay within a temperate zone and that
their cooler surroundings made them tougher than effeminate southerners.
The English, for instance, celebrated their adaptation to an island kingdom
of the north; they were temperate because they suffered neither the
Spaniards'hot climate nor the chill that shaped Scots and Danes. Travel to
other places brought bodily alteration. Transplanted to new regions, people
would either die or adapt to the planets, air, water, soil, and illnesses that
were specific to their new abodes. The English suspected that climates very
different from their own were unlikely to prove hospitable: neither arctic
nor tropic was a good adopted habitat. They were therefore concerned to
locate an optimal position in America'svarying latitudes. George Peckham,
in his I583 account of the New World, stressed that the recent discoveries
were of latitudes between thirty and sixty degrees, where the English found
"all thinges that be necessarie profitable, or delectable for mans life" in a
region "neithertoo hotte nor too colde." The elder Richard Hakluyt assured
settlers and investors that they needed neither "to pass the burnt lyne nor to
passe the frosen Seas"to find wealth in America. Thomas Morton compared
New England to old England, both of which lay in "a golden meane betwixt
two extreames: I meane the temperate Zones." William Wood agreed,
almost obsessively maintaining that New England agreed with "our English
bodies" and that "Englishbodies have borne out [the] cold" there. Even promotional literature on southern colonies stressed their relatively temperate
climates. To John Lawson in I709, Carolina's winter was sharp enough "to
regulateEnglish Constitutions."16
15 Elizabeth B. Gasking, Investigationsinto Generation,i65i-i828
(Baltimore, n. d.), chap.
(William Harvey and the ovist theory), chaps. 3-4, 9 (preformation);Laqueur,Making Sex,
38-43, 49-52, 54-6i, 99-103, 117-21, 142-48; Ulinka Rublack, "Pregnancy,Childbirth and the
Female Body in Early Modern Germany,"Past and Present,No. I5O (i996), 84-110 (on theories
of milieux and maternal impressions); Philip Sloan, "The Gaze of Natural History," in
Christopher Fox, Roy Porter, and Robert Wokler, eds., Inventing Human Science:EighteenthCentury Domains (Berkeley, 1995), ii6-17
(preformationist debate). Helkiah Crooke,
Microcosmographia
(London, i65I), i90-96, gave a classic (mostly Galenist) account of generation, conception, and fetal nourishment.
16 George Peckham, A True reporte,Of the late discoueries. ..
(1583), in David B. Quinn,
ed., New American World:A DocumentaryHistory of North America to I612, 5 vols. (London,
2
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NATURAL PHILOSOPHY AND RACIAL IDIOM
237
Disease was an especially dreadedcause of constitutional variation, while
the causes of disease remained a matter of debate. Contemporary medical
writing portrayed most maladies as bodily imbalances, often of the classical
four humors; a disease was a bundle of symptoms that manifested a particular imbalance. Commentators debated the causes of imbalance.
Temperamentalagitation might be internally caused by the naturals(Galen's
qualities and faculties); such illness was derived from a propensity or flaw
within a body. Other diseases resulted from exposure to external factors, the
somewhat confusingly named non-naturals(diet, exercise, temperature,sleep,
excretion) that triggeredchange within the body. Aristotelian ideas about climate and Hippocratic notions about the body's synchrony with geography
and meteorology each supported this second line of thought. As an anonymous physician wrote circa i68o about the fevers cured by cinchona, they
were not caused by the humors but by a "sominim febrile"from the "Atmossphere." Though these two hypotheses could be understood as competing,
they might also be related;certain bodies were more likely to respond poorly
to miasma, unfamiliardiet, hot climate, and so on.17
Two other views of disease informed these hypotheses. First, it was common to interpret disease as a judgment against its sufferers.This was another
way that human characterbecame apparent in complexion; individual temperament fostered a propensity for the illness, or individual behavior created
bodily imbalance. The supposedly American disease of syphilis was frequently interpreted in this manner. Early reports linked syphilis to the
American natives' sodomy, cannibalism, or general debauchery. Syphilis
retained its association with behavior, albeit with some modification. Lawson
said that Carolina's indigenous "pox" was acquired by several possible
actions, including drinking rum, failing to dry and warm one's wet feet, and
consuming pork. Second, some students of nature hypothesized that diseases
were independent, invasive entities. Though their idea had roots in ancient
medicine and atomistic theory, it was not yet widespread. Paracelsusinsisted
1979),
3:4I;
RichardHakluytthe elder,"Inducements
to the lykingeof the voyadgeintendedto
that parte of Americawhich lyethe betwene 34. and 36. degree"(ca. 1584), ibid., 62; Morton, New
English Canaan, or New Canaan (London, i632), II (quotation), i6 (New and old Englands);
Wood, New England'sProspect,ed. Vaughan(Amherst,Mass., I977)
27,
30;
Lawson,A New
Voyageto Carolina,ed. Hugh Talmage Lefler (Chapel Hill, i967), i68. On the elusive temperate
quality see also Mary Floyd-Wilson, "'Clime, Complexion, and Degree': Racialism in Early
Modern England"(Ph. D. diss., University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, i996), esp. chap. 6.
17 The quotation is from notebook of an anonymous physician (ca. i68os), p. 37, Ms.
Rawlinson c.4o6, Bodleian Library,Oxford. On conceptions of diseasesee Shryock,Medicineand
Societyin America,49-53; Christianson,"Medicinein New England,"in Ronald L. Numbers, ed.,
Medicinein the New World:New Spain, New France,and New England (Knoxville, i987), II0-II;
Siraisi, Medievaland EarlyRenaissanceMedicine, 104-06, 117; L. Deer Richardson, "The generation of disease: occult causes and diseases of the total substance,"in Wear, French, and Lonie,
eds., Medical Renaissanceof the SixteenthCentury,175-96 (for an unorthodox view); and Wear,
"Makingsense of health and the environment in early modern England,"in Wear, ed., Medicine
in Society:HistoricalEssays(Cambridge,1992), 119-47. See James C. Riley, TheEighteenth-Century
Campaignto Avoid Disease(New York, I987), on the late-I7th-centuryrevivalof Hippocratic theory about climate and its persistenceinto the i8th century.
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238
WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY
that most diseases were entities caused by particularseeds that could invade
the body under specific conditions and in certain places. But most commentators remained satisfied with the concept of diseases as manifest symptoms
of imbalance or disfunction, and they explained contagion without the need
for germs or seeds-disease could spread simply through the general quality
of the air or water. Observation of new diseases known to be infectious (such
as syphilis) and, by the late i6oos, interpretationof the microscopic evidence
of small organisms gradually strengthened the idea that a disease was an
invasive entity carried in distinct particles or animalcules, but this conclusion only appearedin the English colonies by the I720s.18
During the earliest period of colonization, English commentators
tended to prefer the Hippocratic method of explaining bodily change as the
result of environmental factors. The internally derived charactersof bodies
were, for the moment, of secondary concern, unless they predicted hardiness
under conditions of colonial deprivation. This concern with physical milieu
is unsurprising,as the topographicalview of differences in the natural world
would be most immediately useful in examinations of new territories. The
neo-Hippocratic revival led by Thomas Sydenham (i624-i689)
kept up the
prestige of the tradition through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
and even into the early nineteenth century. Nearly all naturalhistories of the
colonies took up the classically derived method of describing climates and
their effects on humans. American nature nevertheless tested old beliefs
about climate and constitution. Iberian exploration and settlement of southern America had exploded the classical notion that humans could live neither along the equator nor in the antipodes, but concern continued over
whether Europeans could thrive as well as survive in America. Some of this
fear reflected the belief that much of the New World was warmer than
England, but the hemispheric difference was on the whole more compelling
than latitudinal ones-that is, all of America (not just its southern parts) was
a place alien to Europeanbodies and matter.19
18 Lawson, New Voyageto Carolina, ed. Lefler, 25. For early modern germ theories see
Vivian Nutton, "The Seeds of Disease: An Explanation of Contagion and Infection from the
Greeksto the Renaissance,"
MedicalHistory,27
(i983),
1-34;
Debus,EnglishParacelsians,
30-31;
and Catherine Wilson, The Invisible World:Early Modern Philosophyand the Invention of the
Microscope(Princeton, I995), chap. 5. Cotton Mather was first in America to discuss the theory
of disease as caused by distinct germs or animalcules. See Mather, TheAngel of Bethesda(1724),
ed. Gordon W. Jones (Barre,Mass., 1972), 43-48. On syphilis see Anthony Grafton with April
Shelford and Siraisi, New Worlds,Ancient Texts: The Power of Tradition and the Shock of
Discovery(Cambridge, Mass., 1992), 176-93, and Winfried Schleiner, "MoralAttitudes toward
Syphilis and Its Prevention in the Renaissance,"Bulletin of the Historyof Medicine, 68 (I994),
389-410.
On the association of cannibalism and the pox see Edward Daunce, A BriefeDiscovrse
of the SpanishState (London, 1590), 28-29. On sodomy and the pox see William Clowes, A short
and profitable Treatise touching the cure of the disease called (Morbus Gallicus) by Vnctions
(London, 1579), preface (n. p.). For an interesting view of bodily differences within Europe
(especially in relation to syphilis) see Arthur H. Williamson, "Scots, Indians, and Empire: The
Scottish Politics of Civilization, 1519-i609," Past and Present,No. I50 (i996), 46-83.
19 On the Iberian arguments see Edmundo O'Gorman, The Invention of America: An
Inquiryinto the HistoricalNature of the New Worldand the Meaning of its History(Bloomington,
Ind., i96i), 54-56, 125-45.
On Hippocratic theory see Sydenham, Methodus Curandi Febres
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NATURAL PHILOSOPHY AND RACIAL IDIOM
239
Promoters of colonization had therefore to combat the apprehension
that new climates would damage or destroy English bodies. Early reports
about the New World had perhapsincautiously advertisedthe alien nature of
the place. Eden glossed the text of one translation by emphasizing that the
Indies had "Contagious ayre and extreeme heate" and that the new lands had
their stars "placed in other order" than in Europe. He also emphasized that
America "altereththe formes and qualities of [European]thynges"like wheat
and cattle. America's indigenous products were bad for European bodies,
which were suited to different foods and herbs. The best-known example of
this apprehensionwas the association among venality, illness, and tobacco, a
fear most famously held by James VI and l.20
Even seemingly inoffensive American products held possible danger.
Water was of particularconcern because, according to Hippocratic theory, it
could impart its region-distinct qualities to people, with disastrous consequences if they were not adapted to these properties. Because wells and
waterwaysmight become tainted, beer or cider were safer drinks. In the early
years of settlement, however, thirsty colonists were likely to have to resort to
water in the absence of cultivated grain or fruit. William Bradfordfeared that
the Pilgrims would, from "change of air, diet and drinking of water," fall
prey to "soresicknesses and grievous diseases."21
Similar debate occurredover food. Colonizers wondered whether Indians
could eat English foods or the English subsist on an Indian diet. Dionyse
Settle wrote of the Inuit whom Martin Frobisherkidnapped in I577 that, "as
yet," they "could not digest oure meate." In his influential I597 Herball,John
Gerardeven reasoned that tobacco grown in England was "betterfor the constitution of our bodies" than tobacco produced on American soil. Gerardalso
worried over the New World staple, maize. He believed the grain was hard to
digest and better suited to animals, "although the barbarousIndians which
know no better, are constrained to make a vertue of necessitie."22 But
Propriis Observationibus Superstructura (i666), ed. G. G. Meynell, trans. R. G. Latham
(Folkestone, Eng., i987), 21, 59, i67-73; Riley, Eighteenth-CenturyCampaignto Avoid Disease,
passim, and Porter, "Medical Science and Human Science in the Enlightenment," in Fox,
Porter, and Wokler, eds., Inventing Human Science, 65-68. On the hemispheric concern see
Wear, "Making sense of health and the environment in early modern England," 126-29;
and Joyce E. Chaplin, "Climate and Southern
Grafton, New Worlds,Ancient Texts, 159-94;
Pessimism: The Natural History of an Idea, i5oo-i8oo," in Don Doyle and LarryJ. Griffin,
eds., TheSouthas an AmericanProblem(Athens, Ga., 1995), 57-82.
20 Peter Martyr, The Decadesof the Newe Worldeof WestIndia, trans. Eden, in Arber, ed.,
First English Bookson America, 87, 104. On tobacco see Jordan Goodman, Tobaccoin History:
The Culturesof Dependence(London and New York, 1993), 45.
21 Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, i620-i647,
ed. Samuel Eliot Morison (New York,
1953),
26, 143.
On the continuingdebateoverthe Americanenvironmentsee GilbertChinard,
"Eighteenth-CenturyTheories on America as a Human Habitat," Proceedingsof the American
Philosophical
Society,91
(I947),
27-57.
Settle, A true reporteof the lastevoyageinto the Westand Northwestregions. .. by Capteine
Frobisher(London, 1577), C recto; Gerard, The Herball or GenerallHistorie of Plantes (London,
1597),
77 (maize), 286 (tobacco). The assessmentof native reactions to European foods began on
Columbus's first voyage when his crew kidnapped an Indian woman, fed and clothed her in
European fashion, and sent her back to her people. The account was printed in English in
22
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WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY
240
colonists (especially in the notoriously famished early settlements) doubtless
also found it a matter of necessity to eat the local produce. Thomas Hariot
cautiously stated in I588 that crops like maize were "fed upon by the naturall
inhabitants [of Virginia]: as also by us during the time of our aboad" there.23
Consuming American food became a rite of arrival. Early accounts stressed
that Englishmen "tasted" American meat and bread while offering the natives
some ship's provisions.24 Despite reports that settlers ate New World foods
with no ill-effect, suspicion evidently lingered. Sixty-five years after Gerard's
dismissive statement about Indian corn, John Winthrop, Jr., rebutted it in a
long letter to English scientist Robert Boyle. Winthrop assured Boyle that the
colonists "found by much Experience, that [maize] is wholsome." His emphasis on "much" experience indicated that English ability to live on corn was
counterintuitive and that, by taking up a native diet, settlers made a significant adaptation in their behavior and to local conditions.25
Just as they began to believe their bodies could adjust to America, so the
English gained confidence that America would prove benign to their animals
and plants. In Newfoundland, wrote Stephen Parmenius, "Nature seems
even to want to struggle towards producing corn [European grain]"-that is,
the soil yielded products that might metamorphose into varieties known in
the Old World.26 John Josselyn drew up an interesting typology of plants
and animals that could be transferred from England to New England, or the
reverse; he derived this method of inquiry from Jose de Acosta's attempt to
categorize American animals as to whether they "differ in kind, and essentially from all others, or if this difference be accidentall . . . as we see in the
linages of men"-the latter phrase emphasizing a reluctance to typologize
human variance as essential. By the end of the seventeenth century, it was
SebastianMUnster,A treatyseof the new India . .. (1553), trans. Eden, in Arber, ed., First English
Bookson America,28.
23 Hariot, A Brief and TrueReportof the New Found Land of Virginia...
(London, I588),
C recto. Hariot thought maize was native to Africa and the Middle East-"Guinney" and
"Turkie"-as well as America, which may have made him more hopeful of its edible qualities;
Martyr wrote that, according to the "principles of naturall philosophie," corn should be easier to digest in hot climates than wheat, in Decadesof the New Worlde,trans. Eden, ii8.
24 On the ritual of food gifts and exchange see Bernadette Bucher, Icon and Conquest:
A
Structural Analysis of the Illustrations of de Bry's Great Voyages,trans. Basia Miller Gulati
(Chicago, i98i), 65-85; Peter Hulme, Colonial Encounters:Europeand the Native Caribbean,
I492-I797
(London, i986), 147-52;
and, for a later period, Gananath Obeyesekere, The
Apotheosisof Captain Cook:EuropeanMythmakingin the Pacific (Princeton, 1992), 45. Quotation
from Petition to the PrivyCouncil for a Newfoundland Charter,Feb. 9, i6io, in Quinn, ed., New
AmericanWorld,4:131. See also Thomas Yong, "A breife Relation of a voyage lately made . . . " in
Albert Cook Myers, ed., Narratives of Early Pennsylvania, West New Jersey, and Delaware,
I630-I707
(New York, 1912), 38.
25
"Of Maiz,"Winthropto Boyle, July 27,
i662,
LetterBook 5.197,
fol. i99r, Royal
Society, London.
26 Parmenius to Hakluyt, Aug. 6, 1583, in Quinn and Neil M. Cheshire, eds., The New
Found Land of StephenParmenius(Toronto, 1972), 171. See also Robert Beverley, The History
and PresentState of Virginia(1705), ed. LouisB. Wright(ChapelHill, 1947), 293, and Crosby,
EcologicalImperialism,146-70.
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NATURAL PHILOSOPHY AND RACIAL IDIOM
24I
clearthat some Old World plants and animalshad alreadygone native. Indeed,
settlers noted that, in climates with year-roundpasture,American cattle were
larger than their English cousins. This discovery reassuredthe English that
they, like cows and wheat stalks,might flourishin the New World.27Some sufferingand adjustmentwere nonethelessnecessary,and diseaseplayedan important role. Any Americanclimate could alter the complexions of colonists, and
warm climates were especiallydreadedas sinks of fevers. CaptainJohn Smith
wrote of early settlement in Virginia that the colonists died from "the Indian
disease,we call the French Pox [syphilis],which at first being a strangeand an
unknownemaladaywas deadlyupon whomsoeverit lighted."28
By the I55os, adaptation to American air, sustenance, and diseases had
gained the evocativename of seasoning,a term originallyapplied to cut wood.
The choice of "seasoning"to describe a human adaptation made clear their
view of the process: settler bodies were like trees felled in the Old World,
shipped like so much lumber to America, then dried, hardened, and proved
durablein a new climate. A seasoned colonist was an alteredperson, one who
had enduredlocal hazardsin order to remain in the New World. The "change
of ayre [in the Chesapeake]does much alter the state of our bodies,"according
to John Hammond. Lawson later insisted that seasoning should take "its own
course."He meant that medical interventionwas hazardousif it did not allow
the constitution fully to adapt to a new climate, because the body would
remainweak. Not all physical adaptationwas insidious, although a high mortality ratewas associatedwith seasoningin southernand Caribbeancolonies.29
27 On animals see the instructions from Council of Newfoundland Company to John Guy,
May 26, i6io, in Quinn, ed., New American World, 4:140; "Statement by George Eveling
[i627]," in JoyceLorimer,ed., English and Irish Settlementon the Amazon, i550-i646 (London,
i989), 273; and Crosby, EcologicalImperialism,172-94. On transplantations between the Old
and New Worlds see John Josselyn, New-Englands Rarities Discovered (London, i675), and
Joseph Acosta, The Naturall and Morall Historie of the East and West Indies, trans. E[ward]
G[rimstone] (London, i604), 308 (quotation). The successful transplantation of specimens to
other climates gradually undermined astrological thought, especially the idea that plants were
associatedwith specific planets. See Josselyn, New-EnglandsRaritiesDiscovered,86, and Mather,
Angel of Bethesda,ed. Jones, 301. On how the introduction of Europeanplants and animals made
the New World an extension of the Old see Crosby, ColumbianExchange,64-121.
28 Smith, The GenerallHistorie of Virginia,New-England,and the SummerIsles...
(i624),
in Philip L. Barbour, ed., The CompleteWorksof CaptainJohn Smith (Y580-i63I), vOl. 2 (Chapel
Hill, i986), 299.
29 Hammond, Leah and Rachel, or, the Two Fruitfull Sisters Virginia, and Mary-Land
(London, i656), io; Lawson, New Voyageto Carolina,ed. Lefler, 92. See also William London to
"Mr. Evelyn," Dec. 28, i68o, Early Letters: L.5.114, Royal Society, and John Archdale, A New
Descriptionof That Fertile and PleasantProvinceof Carolina, (1707), in Alexander S. Salley, Jr.,
ed., Narrativesof Early Carolina,i650-i708 (New York, 1911), 290-91. On "seasoning"see Darrett
B. Rutman and Anita H. Rutman, "Of Agues and Fevers: Malaria in the Early Chesapeake,"
WMQ, 3d Ser., 33 (1976), 3i-60; Gerald L. Cates, "'The Seasoning': Disease and Death among
the First Colonists of Georgia,"GeorgiaHistoricalQuarterly,64 (ig80), 146-58; John Duffy, "The
Impact of Malariaon the South," in Todd L. Savitt and James Harvey Young, eds., Diseaseand
Distinctivenessin the AmericanSouth (Knoxville, i988), 1-21; H. Roy Merrens and George D.
Terry, "Dying in Paradise: Malaria, Mortality, and the Perceptual Environment in Colonial
South Carolina,"Journalof SouthernHistory,50 (i984), 533-50;Chaplin, AnxiousPursuit,93-1o8;
and "season,""seasoned,"OxfordEnglishDictionary,2d ed. (Oxford and New York, i989).
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242
WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY
Seasoned colonists and creoles gloried in their stout American bodies. At
the end of the seventeenth century, Nathaniel Bacon claimed that English
troops would be helpless before an array of Virginians because of "the
Country or clime not agreeing with their constitutions." Given that Bacon
was soon to die of dysentery, his confidence in his seasoning was somewhat
overstated. Perhaps more surprising, British military leaders echoed this
opinion as late as I766. In that year, John Bradstreetlamented to Chancellor
of the Exchequer Charles Townshend that the British saw "great loss of
Troops by sickness in Florida and West India Islands." Bradstreetwanted
permission to "Raise a Regiment of Foot in America" to guarantee a seasoned troop of up to one thousand creoles, including officers of "the Sons of
the best Families in the Several Provinces." Such a view was extreme and
infrequently stated, yet it also revealedhow the idea of a seasoned constitution remainedconnected to a British-Americanidentity.30
Well into the seventeenth century, English writing on America's nature
remained consistent with Hippocratic and Aristotelian beliefs that people
changed physically when they moved to another climate. Even so, settlers
were reluctant to accept that the New World's effects would be present from
birth. This was a first step in the modification of natural philosophy, which
had explained that fetuses and neonates could absorb local qualities. Early in
the history of colonization, some had speculated that American nativity
would produce radically different individuals-Indians, say, rather than
Europeans. One Paracelsiantext, reprinted in London in I590, argued that
the stars of a person's nativity could create propensity for syphilis, the disease most closely associated with America. More often, however, proximate
rather than astral causes were cited as reasons for creolization. Either way,
English migrants faced the possibility that, in America, they would become a
different people and would be parents of different people.31
Even in the late i6oos, however, settlers were reluctant to assume that
mere birth in America produced children different from Old World children
or even that acclimation of adults createdessentiallydifferent beings. William
Wood maintainedthat New Englanders'complexionwas unchangedfrom that
of their English forebears,and "asit is for the outwardcomplexion, so it is for
the inwardconstitution."Colonists did not want to believethat Americainhib30 Bacon, quoted in Stephen Saunders Webb, i676: The End of American Independence
(New York, i984), 8o; Bradstreetto [Townshend], Dec. 3, 1766, Buccleuch Muniments, bundle
296/5, GD.224, mfm RH 4/98, reel i, National Register of Archives, Edinburgh (this item corresponds to the Buccleuch collection in the Scottish Record Office; the original is in the
Clements Library,Ann Arbor, Michigan).
31 Philip Hermanus, comp., An excellentTreatiseteachinghowe to curethe French-Pockes
...
(London,1590), i, 6i. See also HenryOldenburgto RichardNorwood,Feb. io, i667/8, in A.
Rupert Hall and Marie Boas Hall, eds., The Correspondenceof Henry Oldenburg, vol. 4
(Madison, i967), i66-68. For views that climate affected humans even before birth see Siraisi,
Medievaland EarlyRenaissanceMedicine, iio-ii. Some of these extreme views of human adaptation remained. EdwardLong, in his HistoryofJamaica ([London], 1774), 2:262, stated that, just
as Englishmen who lived in China and Africa would eventually become Chinese or African, so
the settlers in Jamaicawere becoming permanentlyaltered.
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NATURAL PHILOSOPHY AND RACIAL IDIOM
243
ited reproductionamong the English. They insisted that Englishwomenconceived and gave birth easily in Americaand bore strong children.Thomas Ashe
said of Carolinathat "EnglishChildren there born, are commonly strong and
lusty." Lawson believed that Carolina was so fruitful it would make barren
Englishwomenfertile. Colonists also took pains to explain that their newborns
resembledEnglish infants, especiallythat they had pinkish skin. SamuelWilson
wrote that Carolina's creole children "have fresh Sanguine Complexions."
These statements stood in contrast to uncertaintyover whether Indians were
darkby nature,by exposureto sun, or by the applicationof pigments.32
It would have been a logical next step for colonists to speculate on the
mechanism that maintained continuity of English-ness. That they did not is
somewhat puzzling. It is possible that theories of generation simply required
too much technical expertise, referring, as they did, to a highly theoretical
literature as well as specialized knowledge of dissection and microscopy.
Most references to fetal development emphasized maternal character and
impressions. This was the case with the only early work on reproduction
meant to address American concerns, John Oliver's Presentfor Teeming
American Women(i694), which emphasized the piety and devotion to childbearingnecessaryfor Christian mothers. Accounts of monstrous births invariably mentioned maternal impressions, as was notorious with discussions of
miscarriagesand stillbirths among Antinomian women. Cotton Mather was
the first colonist who appeared (rather belatedly in the I720S) to have some
grasp of early modern debates over generation, yet his writings on this topic
appearedin his unpublishedAngel of Bethesdaand were incomplete and idiosyncratic,to say the least. He too relied on the doctrine of maternalcharacter
and impressions, and his ideas about the germs of matter that influenced
inheritance were intriguing but underdeveloped.33 Distinctions between
Indians and English that relied on generativeprocessesremainedin abeyance.
32 Wood, New England'sProspect,32; Ashe, Carolina (i682),
in Salley, ed., Narratives of
Early Carolina,I4I; Lawson, New Voyageto Carolina,ed. Lefler, 91, 92; Wilson, An Accountof the
Province of Carolina, in America (i682), in Salley, ed., Narratives of Early Carolina, i69.
Hammond emphasized the high birth rate, in Leah and Rachel, I7. Gabriel Thomas, An
Historical and GeographicalAccount of Pensilvania and of West-New-Jersey,in Myers, ed.,
Narratives of Early Pennsylvania, 332. See also John Canup, "Cotton Mather and 'Criolian
Degeneracy,"'EarlyAmericanLiterature,24 (i989), 20-34.
33 Oliver, [A Presentfor TeemingAmericanWomen](Boston, i694); James Kendall Hosmer,
ed., Winthrop's
Journal: "Historyof New England," i630-i649 (New York, 1953), 1:266-69 (on the
monstrous creature delivered by Antinomian Mary Dyer); Mather, Angel of Bethesda,ed. Jones,
31 (on the inheritance of original sin, based in the "Nishmath-Chajim" or middle quality
between soul and body), 44 (transmissionof microscopic "eggs"of disease from parent to child),
62, 203 (embryology);MargaretHumphreys Warner explains Mather's theory of a middle quality in "Vindicating the Minister's Medical Role: Cotton Mather's Concept of the NismathChajim and the Spiritualization of Medicine," Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied
Sciences,36 (i98i), 278-95. See also LaurelThatcher Ulrich, Good Wives:Imageand Realityin the
Lives of Womenin NorthernNew England, i650-i750 (New York, i982), 135-38, on folk understandings of maternal behavior and fetal development. On monstrous births see David D. Hall,
Worldsof Wonder,Days of Judgment:Popular ReligiousBelief in Early New England (New York,
i989), 72-74,
8i-85, ioo-oi. For a typological view of Puritans' criticisms of Indian bodiesparticularly females-see Ann Kibbey, The Interpretationof Material Shapes in Puritanism:A
StudyofRhetoric,Prejudice,and Violence(Cambridge,i986), 104-13.
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244
WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY
To distance themselves from the natives, the English explained that
America's effects on them were cultural rather than physical. Mather
deplored that the climate could "Indianize"the English by making them lazy
and disrespectfulof authority, though presumablynot dark of complexion or
otherwise changed in body. In I728, William Byrd II complained that
Virginia's backcountry"Lubbers"were sallow and diseased-all due to sloth,
a behavior
that made them resemble Indians. As Mather's and Byrd's distaste
over "Indianized" settlers re-emphasized, colonists explained permanent
adaptations as behavioral, not physical, similarities to Indians. To have
asserted a physical adaptation would have made them, paradoxically, not
proper inhabitants of America, but inferior ones.34
At this point, a second variation on received medical theory occurred:
Indian susceptibility to disease was described as an innate weakness, more
easily explained by internal factors that presented themselves externally as
symptoms of imbalance than by climate. English bodily superiority became
evidence for their superiority as natives of America. Colonists saw that the
Indians suffered from remarkable epidemics: as early as I554, the English
could read in Eden's translation of Peter Martyr'swritings that the Indians
were dying "of newe and straunge diseases."When English emigrants went
to America themselves, they witnessed still other epidemics.35
How did they explain the death and disease they witnessed in North
America? Scholars have pointed to English statements that the Indians'
afflictions were providential, supernaturalmandates against the natives and
in favor of the invaders. For instance, John Smith concluded that "God had
laid this Country open for us, and slaine the most part of the inhabitants by
civill warresand a mortall disease"that sparedthe settlers.36But medical theory offered nonprovidential explanations of mortality, including Galen's natural (intraconstitutional) and non-natural (environmental) causes of disease,
34 Kenneth Silverman, comp., SelectedLettersof CottonMather (Baton Rouge, I971), 398;
Byrd, Historiesof the Dividing Line between Virginiaand North Carolina,ed. William K. Boyd
(New York, i967), 46-57. The idea that settlers became Indians was possibly stronger among
Old World residents than among the colonists themselves. See Slotkin, Regenerationthrough
Violence,190-205,
and Jack P. Greene, The Intellectual Constructionof America:Exceptionalism
and Identityfrom i492 to i8oo (Chapel Hill, 1993), 66-67.
35 See McNeill, Plagues and Peoples, 199-234,
and Crosby, Columbian Exchange, 35-63.
Quotation from Martyr,Decadesof the Newe Worlde,trans. Eden, i99.
36 On the providential view of Indian attrition see Francis Jennings, The Invasion of
America:Indians,Colonialism,
and the Cantof Conquest(ChapelHill, 1975),
15-3i,
and Neal
Salisbury, Manitou and Providence: Indians, Europeans, and the Making of New England,
(New York, i982), ioi-o9. Smith, GenerallHistorieof Virginia,441. See also Bradford,
I500-I643
PlymouthPlantation, ed. Morison, 364-65. Hariot was probably first to speculate along these
lines, in New FoundLand of Virginia,F recto. BernardSheehan, in Savagismand Civility:Indians
andEnglishmen
in ColonialAmerica(Cambridge,
i980),
179-82,
hasarguedthatnativemortality
eventually brought feelings of guilt and the softening of opinions about Indians among
colonists. This may have been the case for the older colonies by the turn of the i8th century but
does not accuratelydescribe colonists' earlier sentiments on Indians and disease or the views of
settlers in newer colonies that had continued conflict with Indians. Colonists not only blamed
Indians for bringing on their own mortality but also blamed other whites for their own illnesses.
See Chaplin, "Climateand Southern Pessimism."
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245
and the English discussed epidemics as moral and material events.
Comparisons between Indian and European constitutions were equivocal at
first. In the sixteenth century, no European would have argued that the
Indians suffereddifferentlyfrom diseasesbecause they had fundamentallydifferent bodies. Bartolomede Las Casashad stated (first in I552, then in English
translation from I583 onward) that America's natives "are most delicate and
tender," an idea that had considerable impact on later colonial thinking
about Indians. But Las Casas had meant to compare all Indians (even commoners) to European aristocrats-as humans whose constitutions occurredat
the more refined end of the usual scale, not as different beings. Andre Thevet
wrote that, because Indians were composed of the same "foure elementes"as
Europeans, they were also subject to the same illnesses, those conveyed by
the air in a particularlocation or from "the maner of mens liuing." At first,
the English agreed with these assessments: Roger Williams concluded that
"Natureknowes no difference between Europeand Americansin blood, birth,
bodies, &c."37
Nor did the English think that the epidemics in which Indians died
resulted from European immigration: conceptualization of diseases as infectious entities was not the norm. Martyr's "new" diseases might simply have
been caused by changes within the existing qualities of a place. The English,
therefore, contrasted their seasoning with the natives' morbidity in a way
sharply at variance with modern understanding of epidemiology and eventually developed a racial construction of bodily difference. The English suspected that the Americas simply had shifting, hazardous, and fevered
climates; epidemics in colonial settlements and the continued necessity of
seasoning supported this assumption. Colonists saw epidemics as expected
features of American nature, not as recent alterations, and blamed the
Indians for their own mortality. This view was consistent with natural philosophy's place-specific theory of disease.
The extent to which the English maintained an environmental view of
have been both a denial of the
disease nevertheless seems-sometimes-to
demographic disaster taking place in the native populations and a strategic
avoidance of the hypothesis of infectious transmission. When Squanto, ally
of the Pilgrims at Plymouth, died from what seems to have been a European
malady, Bradford categorized it as "an Indian fever" in the same way Smith
assumed that the syphilis at Jamestown had to be an Indian disease and not
something the English had brought. Winthrop wrote in i647 of an "epidemical sickness" that ran through "Indians and English, French and Dutch," as
if the epidemic were a local pest that did not differentiate among the bodies
it found in New England. In the i670s, Daniel Gookin wrote that several
young Indian men who went to English schools had died of fever and consumption. Gookin admitted that some colonists "attributed it unto the great
37 [Las Casas], The Tearsof the Indians . . , trans. J. Phillips (London, i656), 2; Thevet,
TheNewfound worlde,orAntarctike. . , trans. Thomas Hacket (London, [I568]), 70 recto (manners), 71 verso (elements); Williams, A Key into the Languageof America (i643), ed. John J.
Teunissen and Evelyn J. Hinz (Detroit, 1973), 133.
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246
WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY
change upon their bodies, in respect of their diet, lodging, apparel, studies"-in other words, some settlers believed Indians were undergoing a kind
of seasoning to a Europeanized life. Gookin flatly denied such speculation:
"The truth is, this disease is frequent among the Indians; and sundry die of
it, that live not with the English."38
From the assumption that diseases in America were indigenous to
America, part of the New World atmosphere of contagion, the settlers concluded that Indian suffering resulted from some constitutional failingeither the inadequateseasoning to their native climate or a propensity within
their bodies. It took some time for the latter view to gain the upper handperhaps because climatic reasoning requiredless technical expertise to articulate. When colonists insisted that Indians had local remedies for many
diseases, they asserted their belief that such maladies had to be native to
America and that Indians could combat them if they wanted. This contention drew on the argument that each climate had complexes of natural
phenomena, such as diseases and plants, that were peculiar to it. If a region
had an herbal cure for a disease, the disease itself must be native.
Associations between guaiacum and syphilis, between cinchona and malaria,
convinced Europeansthat the New World was home to many a virulent malady as well as many an exotic cure.39
English observers tended, if anything, to praise Indian pharmacology.
Hariot believed that, because native Virginians used tobacco, they were "preserved in health, and know not many greevous diseases wherewithall wee in
England are oftentimes afflicted." In Thomas Ashe's judgment, Carolina
tribes had "exquisite Knowledge" of "Scorbutick, Venereal, and Malignant
Distempers"; the last two categories included syphilis and fevers, diseases
most likely to be associated with America and most likely to have a local
cure. Mather noted that "our Indians cure Consumptions with a MulleinTea," thereby attributing to them a remedy for the pleural and wasting maladies doubtless introduced by European settlement. Lawson concluded that
native medicines were efficacious, "God having furnish'd every country with
specifick Remedies for their peculiar Diseases."40
38 Bradford,PlymouthPlantation, ed. Morison, 114; Hosmer, ed., Winthrop's
Journal, 2:326;
Gookin, Historical Collections of the Indians in New England (i674), ed. Jeffrey H. Fiske
(Totowa, N. J., 1970), 53-54. Settlers were slow to realize that their proximity to Indian susceptible populations increased the likelihood that contagions such as smallpox would pass between
them; Duffy, Epidemicsin ColonialAmerica(Baton Rouge, 1953),69-70.
39 Crosby, ColumbianExchange,122-64; Grafton, New Worlds,Ancient Texts,159-94; Saul
Jarcho, Quinine'sPredecessor:
FrancescoTorti and the Early History of Cinchona(Baltimore and
London, 1993), esp. chap. 4 (interpretationof cinchona in England), 240-44 (on Sydenham'sview
of fevers as environmentallycaused). For a contemporaryexample see [Nicolas Monardes],Joyfull
Nevvesout of the newefounde worlde,trans. John Frampton (London, 1577), ii-i8. Cinchona was
also thought to be a true specific-a unique cure for a particulardisease, whereverand however
contracted-which was a contradictionof environmentalisttheoriesof pharmacology.
40 Duffy, "Medicine and Medical Practices among Aboriginal American Indians," in F.
Marti-Ibanez, ed., The History of American Medicine: A Symposium(New York, 1958), 15-23;
Shryock, Medicine and Society in America, 48; George E. Gifford, Jr., "Botanic Remedies in
in Cash, Christianson, and Estes, eds., Medicine in
Colonial Massachusetts, i620-i820,"
Colonial Massachusetts,263-88. Hariot, New Found Land of Virginia, C3r; Ashe, Carolina, i56;
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247
Only during the early I700s did colonists begin to admit that some diseases, such as smallpox,were foreign entities introducedto America.Winthrop
had reportedon a "greatmortality"among the smallpox-strickennativesaround
Boston in i633 and had specified that some were "curedby such means as they
had from us," though he did not conclude that the diseasewas also from the
English. In a later era, Lawson believed that the Indians died from smallpox
becauseit was foreign to America.One M7o0account specifiedthat the Iroquois
had no remedy againstsmallpoxbut used a local barkto cure malaria.Even in
this later time, however,the English comparednative and settlermortalityrates
as if both populationswere equally familiarwith all the recurringdiseasesand
displayed mere variation on a common theme of strugglewith America'sclimate. Josselynwrote that New England'scold northwestwind brought illness
that struck"the Inhabitantsboth Englishand Indian."Matherrevealinglywrote
in I716 that smallpox "hasusuallyproven a greatplague to us poor Americans,
and getting among our Indians hath swept awaywhole nations of them." Both
peopleswere plaguedby smallpox;only the latter,however,were swept away.41
Mather's distinction between Americans and Indians foreshadowedlater
assertions,such as Romans's, that Indians were not the only or the most distinctive Americans. Indeed, it seems that creoles were reluctant to call themselves "Indians"or even "natives"of America. Colonists like Mather and Byrd
used the first designationto describewhites' culturalratherthan physicaladaptations, and all settlers were remarkably chary of the second term. When
Josselyn assertedthat respiratorydisorderswere "maladiesthat the Natives are
often troubledwith," his next words specified that "Natives"meant "Indians,"
only. His earlierassessmentof the cold wind's effects on all New Englanders
likewise differentiatedamong the neutrally designated "inhabitants,"English
and Indian. The reluctanceto describesettlersas natives perhapswas owing to
the fact that the English word native originally meant a person born into
bondage, a legal meaning that persistedat least into the eighteenth centuryand
perhaps beyond. It is likely that, within Britain's imperial context, the word
native acquireda new and pejorativesense becauseit distinguishedconquerors
from the conquered.John Clayton was perturbedat the "grossmistakes"made
"fromthe want of making a distinction"between "the English or Whites born
[in Virginia] and so called Natives; and the Aborigines of the Country."
Clayton took care in his writings to note that "natives" meant "Indians."
Colonists' suspicions about the Americanclimate provided them with a reason
to postulate their superficial adaptation or seasoning rather than a genuine,
native affinity to a degeneratephysicalworld.42
Mather, Angel of Bethesda,ed. Jones, i83; Lawson, New Voyageto Carolina,ed. Leffler, 17-i8. See
also Bernard G. Hoffman, ed., "John Clayton's i687 Account of the Medical Practices of the
Virginia Indians," Ethnohistory,ii (i964), I-40; [George Wateson], The Cvresof the Diseased,in
remoteRegions.PreventingMortalitie incidentin ForraineAttempts,of the EnglishNation (London,
Accountof Pensilvania,323.
1598), C2v-C3r;and Thomas, Historicaland Geographical
41 Hosmer, ed., Winthrop's
Journal, i:iii; Lawson, New Voyageto Carolina,ed. Lefler, 232;
The Four Kings of Canada (London,1710), 25; Josselyn,New-EnglandsRarities Discovered,3;
Silverman,
comp.,Lettersof CottonMather,213-14.
42 "Native," QED, 2d ed.; Josselyn, New-EnglandsRaritiesDiscovered,46; Hoffman, ed.,
"JohnClayton's i687 Account," 3.
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248
WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY
Whites still continued to claim that the natives could master new diseases and medicines. A i69os account of New England stated that the settlers
had "learnedof the Indians" a remedy against colic (stomach pain) made of
beaver castoreumand rum. Such medical distinctions narrowed the possible
difference between Indians and English. Indians were familiar with some, if
not most, diseases that plagued Europeans, and they could strengthen their
own pharmacologywith European substances such as rum. Indians' greater
mortality was thus a sign, not of their cultural backwardness,but of their
physical weakness within a climate now common to both groups. Indeed,
English praise of native ingenuity in medicine also functioned as a backhanded notation of their bodily inferiority.43
This low opinion of native resistanceto disease also appearedin English
speculation about global migration of disease. Even when colonists and colonizers finally complicated the Hippocratic premise of place-specific disease
enough to conceive that contagious diseasesare entities that can change locations and appearamong unseasoned populations, they continued to think of
themselves as particularlyhardy human specimens. Again, the image was of a
sharedatmosphere of disease (global rather than local) in which the English
survived better than the Indians. Mather speculated that smallpox was for
Europeans a "New Distemper,"unknown to the ancients, which had "spread
overthe Face of the Earth"during the "SaracenConquests"of the earlyMiddle
Ages. Mather supposed that Europeanshad only recently become accustomed
to smallpox and stated the by then axiomatic notion that "Americafirst convey'd this Great Pox (syphilis) to Europe, in requital whereof, Europe has
transmittedthe Small Pox to America."The Saracengift was again exchanged
in a later conquest, in which the Europeans were the victors. Mather's
imagery dismissed any possibility that the assault of new diseases on the
Indians was unique-though their delicate nature might have been.44
The English were reaching two conclusions. First, the English body not
only did well in America but was not essentially changed by its seasoning.
Creoles retained the Old World stamp despite their birth in places like
Jamestown and Boston. Second, the contrast between English vigor and
native mortality revealed the physical inferiority of the latter in the place of
their nativity. This point did not itself prove racial inferiority. Indians may
have been suited to some hypothetical non-American climate. But the
English contended that Indians were ill adapted to any region. This subsequent argument relied in part on reports that Indians did not thrive in
Europe. It seemed to Europeans that New World specimens did less well in
the Old World as they moved up the Great Chain of Being. Plants were relatively successful, animals much less so, and humans even less.45 Spanish
43 Benjamin Bullivant to James Petiver, Jan. 13, i697/8, Early Letters, B.2.46, Royal
Society. See also Bradford,PlymouthPlantation, ed. Morison, 270. Syphilis most strongly challenged the complexionate view of illness; Siraisi, Medieval and Early RenaissanceMedicine, 129.
By the early I700s, germ theories were serious hypotheses (see note i8 above).
44 Mather,Angel of Bethesda,ed. Jones, 93, 117.
45 Acosta, Naturall Historie, trans. [Grimstone], 253-60; John Ray to "Dr. Robinson," ca.
i684, Letter Book (copy), io, Royal Society; Sarah P. Stetson, "The Traffic in Seeds and Plants
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NATURAL PHILOSOPHY AND RACIAL IDIOM
249
accounts of Indians' perishing once they crossed the Atlantic initiated suspicion about native resistance. Accounts of the brief lives of Indians who visited England (including Martin Frobisher's kidnapped Inuit and the
Christianized Pocahontas) seemed to conclude the matter. Morbid fascination with the Indian body in Europe continued into the eighteenth century.
When four Iroquois emissaries visited England in I7IO, the event was
remarkable,and when one of the four fell ill, the news made the Tatler.The
man recovered but died shortly after his return to America. Shakespeare's
comment that Londoners were quick to "lay out ten [doits] to see a dead
Indian" had coldly identified a lasting English fascination with Indian-ness
and morbidity.46
Nor was Europe the only non-American climate unsuited to Indians.
Speculation that Indians had originated outside America suggested that they
had earlier proved unfit in yet another region. The English believed that
Americahad been the scene of repeatedinvasions and that they were only the
most recentwave of colonists. The present natives belonged to an earliergroup
of arrivalsand had not originated in the Americas.The idea of a separatecreation of humanity-in which Indians would be native to the New World just
as Europeanswere native to the Old-was heretical and not widely discussed
until the Enlightenment eroded Christian orthodoxy. Instead, the first era of
European expansion saw a widening of the interpretationof monogeneticism
and post-Noachic settlement. Some commentators,following Acosta, posited
that Indians had come from Asia.47 Others hypothesized that Indians had
come from Europe, via the Israelitesexpelled from Jerusalem,or the scattered
Trojans, or from medieval migrationslike those led by the Celts Brendanand
Madoc. From these theories, the English tended to conclude that the denizens
of the New World were not true aboriginalsbut migrants.48
from England's Colonies in North America," AgriculturalHistory, 23 (1949), 45-56; Joseph
Kastner,A Speciesof Eternity(New York, 1978).
46 William Shakespeare, The Tempest(i6ii), 2.1, 31-32. On reports of Indian deaths in
Europe see "RobertDydley's recollections of Thornton's voyage, i647," in Lorimer,ed., English
and Irish Settlementon the Amazon, 147; On the Inuit see Pagden, EuropeanEncounterswith the
New World:From Renaissanceto Romanticism(New Haven and London, 1993), 31-33; Quinn,
ed., New American World, 4:217-8. On the Iroquois see Richmond P. Bond, Queen Anne's
AmericanKings (Oxford, 1952), 3, 80, 98 (on the case of illness); John G. Garratt, The Four
Indian Kings/Les Quatre Rois Indiens (Ottawa, i985); Daniel K. Richter, The Ordeal of the
Longhouse:The Peoplesof the IroquoisLeaguein the Era of EuropeanColonization(Chapel Hill,
227-29;
and Eric Hinderaker, "The 'Four Indian Kings' and the Imaginative
1992),
Construction of the First British Empire," WMQ,3d Ser., 53 (i996), 487-526.
47 See Don Cameron Allen, The Legendof Noah: RenaissanceRationalismin Art, Science,
and Letters(Urbana, Ill., i963), "13-37;Hodgen, EarlyAnthropology,207-53, 404-26; and Burke,
"Wild Man's Pedigree,"281-307.
48 On migration generally see Alfred A. Cave, "Canaanites in a Promised Land: The
American Indian and the ProvidentialTheory of Empire,"AmericanIndian Quarterly,12 (i988),
277-97; Slotkin, RegenerationthroughViolence,58-65; Peckham, True reporteof the late discoveries, 45;and Archdale, New Descriptionof That Fertileand PleasantProvince,308. On the Indians
as Israelites see A Letterfrom William Penn ... to the Committeeof the Free Societyof Traders
(i683), in Myers, ed., Narrativesof EarlyPennsylvania,236-37. On Brendansee Quinn, ed., New
American World, 1:55-62. On Madoc see Gwyn A. Williams, Madoc: The Making of a Myth
(Oxford, i987), chaps. 3, 4; David Armitage, "The New World in British Historical Thought:
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WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY
250
Reports that Native Americans were not only recently arrived but also
continually wandering supplied more evidence of their unsettled nature.
Settle's account of the second Frobishervoyage of I577 probably set the pattern for English literature on Indians when he reported that Inuit houses
"have no signe of footway, or any thing else troden, whiche is one of the
chiefest tokens of habitation." Lawson echoed the received opinion that
Indians were "a shifting, wandering People." He, like others, concluded that
the Indians were not the "Ancient Dwellers of the New-World, or Tract of
Land we call America." Indian ancestors had come from "some Eastern
Country,"and their progenywere too recentlyarrivedto be consideredpermanent, let alone aboriginal. Lawson also drew on biblical history (evidence of
the deluge in Carolina) and what he claimed were traces of ancient iron tools
in America to support a claim that the original and civilized residents of
Americamust have vanished.49These conjecturesimplied that Indian cultures
lacked the dignity of an ancient history and the right to be considered truly
indigenous. At their most cynical, the colonists could posit a long sequence of
invasions of America that awardedfinal and successfulsettlement to the most
recent arrivals-Europeans generallyand, in North America,the English.
The English used the hypothesis that the Indians' ancestors were
migrants to reinforce their suspicions of native corporeal inferiority. Indians
had moved at least once before coming to the New World, were still unable
to thrive in the Americas,yet did not thrivewhen transplantedto other places.
In contrast,most English bodies transplantedwell to America,and all that survived remainedtrue to type. These beliefs were not universal,nor did they fail
to elicit disagreement.Gookin's insistence that New England'sIndians died of
consumption even if they did not live with the settlers indicates that he was
refuting a contraryopinion. But a good measureof the persuasivenessof the
argumentfor English physical superioritywas the fact that it appearedeven in
the writings of colonists who were sympatheticto Indians and who otherwise
argued for native hardiness.Williams, who defended native rights against the
invadingEnglish, remarkedwith sympathythat Indians had a "terrible"fear of
"infectious disease," whereas his insistence that they could "perfectly and
speedily cure" syphilis and that they had their own words for "Pox" and
"plague"showed his assumption that Indian knowledge of these diseases had
precededEnglish arrival.Robert Beverleygave numerousfavorableassessments
of Virginian Indians-he proudly stated "I am an Indian"becauseof his plain
style of writing-but simply ignored the impact of disease on the natives. He
From Richard Hakluyt to William Robertson," in Kupperman, ed., America in European
Consciousness,
i493-i750,
(Chapel Hill, i995) 57-58; Humphrey Lhwyd, The historieof Cambria,
ed. David Powell (London, 1584), in Quinn, ed., New AmericanWorld,i:67-68; Peckham, True
reporte,E recto-verso;An Introductionto the Historyof the Kingdomand Statesof Asia, Africa and
America,BothAncientand Modern,Accordingto the Methodof SamuelPuffendorf(London, 1705),
and Archdale, New Descriptionof That Fertile and PleasantProvince,294. The fables of
5ii-i2;
Atlantis and Utopia also described migration from the antique world. See Sir Humphrey
Gilbert, cited in Quinn, ed., New American World,3:9, I1, II; Cave, "Canaanitesin a Promised
Land,"278-79; and Cave "ThomasMore and the New World,"Albion, 23 (199I), 220-27.
49 For Settle see Quinn, ed., New AmericanWorld,4:214. Lawson, New Voyageto Carolina,
ed. Lefler,172-73.
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NATURAL PHILOSOPHY AND RACIAL IDIOM
25I
stated that Indians were "not subject to many Diseases, and such as they
have, generally come from excessive heats, and sudden Colds," although he
later admitted that the "Indiansof Virginiaare almost wasted."50
These ill-matched statements reflect the complexity of English thinking
about differenthuman bodies in North America.Colonists had worked out an
idiom, not an ideology. The pervasivenessof comments on native attritionand the ease of their utterance-is quite remarkable.Each such phrase undermined any sense in which Indian bodies could be fixed to parts of the natural
landscape of interest to English-speaking migrants. And this unplanting of
native bodies was perhapsrelatedto the similarproject of uprooting and commodificationof Africanbodies-as if the people in these bodies, Americanand
African,had no real place to which they belonged. (Though this view was not
presentin English colonies like Ireland,where decline of the native population
did not occur.) The conclusion,well developedby the earlyeighteenthcentury,
was that creoles in the British mainland colonies were at least as natural to
Americaas the Indians. Indeed, white Americansseemed to believe themselves
more naturalthan the aborigines,as if Englishbodies (little changedin America)
had alwaysbeen meant to be planted in Virginia,or Plymouth, or Carolina.To
colonists, the fact that anotherpopulation had arrivedbefore them meant little
if people in the first grouphad bodies that nevertrulyacclimated.51
Although English speculation about disease defined a racial idiom within
the discourse of natural philosophy, it was not yet a fully developed form of
racism.When colonists defined a contrast between their own and Indian bodies, they begged the question of how such differences might be transmitted
generationally.They began to consider this question during the seventeenth
century (as their emphasis on the paleness of creole children revealed), even
though theoriesof generationdid not mesh with ideas of race until later, in the
eighteenth century.They were not interestedin such issues at the start of colonization, when they instead focused on how individualbodies might be altered
in new climates while retaining an older physical type. They seemed eager to
avoid any possibility that such alterationwould be passed on to their children,
perhapsbecausethey had a keen desire to see bodily change as reversible.
It is also possible that the English did not earlier comment on generational transmission of physical traits because of their unwillingness to face
the possibility of a mestizo population whose existence would have forced
them to discuss the inherited qualities of mixed-race people. After the celebration of the Pocahontas-John Rolfe marriage, commentary on-let alone
50 Williams, Key into the Languageof America, ed. Teunissen and Hinz, 243, 244, 245
(Indian physicians cheated their own people, who begged colonists for medicine and bandages);
Beverley,Historyand PresentState of Virginia,ed. Wright, 217, 232.
51 See JenniferMorgan, "'Some Could Suckle over Their Shoulder':Male Travelers,Female
Bodies, and the Gendering of Racial Ideology,"in this issue. On English imperialismthat linked
the fates of Ireland and America see K. R. Andrews, N. P. Canny, and P.E.H. Hair, eds., The
WestwardEnterprise:EnglishActivities in Ireland, the Atlantic, and America, r480-1650 (Detroit,
I979),
and Canny, Kingdomand Colony:Ireland in the Atlantic World,I56o-i8oo (Baltimore and
London, I988), 58 (growth of Irish population after I603), 67 (the demographiccontrast between
Irelandand America).
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WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY
encouragement of-intermarriage between Indians and English died off
until the early eighteenth century, when some, such as Beverley, recommended it in order to preserve both peoples in an amalgamation. English
belief in their physical superiority might help make sense of their earlier
reluctance to marry Indians. Conversely, as James Axtell has suggested,
Indians too may have thought the English had superior resistance to disease
and hence sought to capture and incorporate settlers in their tribes. For
whites, mestizos reached their peak acceptability in the era of the American
Revolution, when particular circumstances encouraged a positive view of
intermarriage:Enlightenment romanticization of savageryand the frontier,
colonists' desire to contrast their country and people to the Old World, and
a need to expand the number of supportersof the Revolution, which played
to mestizo populations willing to bear arms against the British. By the early
nineteenth century, prejudice against mestizos had re-emergedand was supported by modern theories of race and racial degeneration. Perhaps whites
had earlierlacked confidence in their ability to come up with seemingly scientific views of racial difference and mixture, which had impeded their willingness to discuss intermarriageand the generation of new, mestizo bodies.52
Even within the static, nongenerational terms of comparison that the
English laid out by the second decade of the eighteenth century, the colonial
propensity to move toward racial distinctions is striking. The desire to strip
Indian bodies of any natural affinity with Americawas especiallyforeboding:
they may have been natives, but they were unnaturalnatives. Observing that
Indians sufferedfrom disease and declined in numberswhile the English survived epidemics and grew in population, settlers congratulated themselves
becausethey seemed to have been the foreordainedinhabitantsof America.In
the mid-eighteenth century, when George Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon,
argued that America'snaturalproducts were stunted and degenerate,EnglishspeakingAmericansperhapsworried over their physical suitability to a world
that Europeansthought degenerate.53But settlershad alreadygained considerable psychologicaland corporatestrength from the belief that, at the deepest
physicallevel, they were the true and naturalresidentsof America-the powerful, racistfiction that remainsthe basisof North Americanidentity.
52 Axtell, "TheWhite Indiansof ColonialAmerica,"WMQ,3d Ser., 32 (i975), 55-88;Brewton
Berry, "America'sMestizos," in Noel P. Gist and Anthony Gary Dworkin, ed., The Blendingof
Races:Marginalityand Identityin WorldPerspective(New York, I972), esp. i94-97; Gary B. Nash,
"TheHidden History of MestizoAmerica,"JAH, 82 (I995), 94i-62. Berryand Nash portraymestizo
populationsas typicalof North America,though it is clear from their evidence that they only trace
groups that gained notice by the i8th century. For fear of miscegenationsee Jordan, Whiteover
Black,I36-78, i63, i65-66, 47I-75. Hulme, Colonial Encounters, I47-52, points out the exceptional
characterof the Rolfe-Pocahontasalliance,despite the prevalenceof marriageimageryin European
accounts of colonization. Compare David D. Smits, "'Abominable Mixture': Toward the
Repudiationof Anglo-Indian Intermarriagein Seventeenth-CenturyVirginia," VMHB, 95 (i987),
I57-92, and J. H. Elliott, Britain and Spain in America:Colonistsand Colonized(Reading, Eng.,
1994), 8-II. Both Smits and Elliott emphasizeculturaldifferencesas impedimentsto marriage.
53 White Americanswere also realizingthat they themselveshad difficulty with Old World
disease cultures; Duffy, Epidemicsin ColonialAmerica,iog. On American degeneracysee Gerbi,
TheDisputeof the New World:TheHistoryof a Polemic,r750-r900, trans.Moyle (Pittsburgh,I973),
chaps. I-5, and Marshalland Williams, Great Map ofMankind, 2i6-i8.
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