Whiteness

Whiteness and Masculinity: 1619–1840

During the seventeenth century, as white indentured servants and African slaves coexisted in colonial America, and as colonial societies were still in a state of social flux, definitions of masculinity were not explicitly tied to whiteness. During the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, however, the decline of indentured servitude and the racialization of unfree labor were accompanied by an increasingly close link between freedom and manhood on the one hand and whiteness on the other.

By the 1780s commentators consciously tied manhood to whiteness. The independent producer and property owner celebrated by J. Hector St. John Crèvecoeur in his Letters From An American Farmer (1782) was both male and white. When Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1776 that all men are created equal, he was referring to white men. In Notes on the State of Virginia (1784), Jefferson declared nonwhites unfit for republican citizenship and participation in a form of government based on political equality. The U.S. Constitution, written in 1787, enacted the notion of the ideal citizen as a white male subject who is protected in his right to acquire property—including the right to own blacks as slaves. The Naturalization Act of 1790 limited the privilege of naturalization, and therefore the rights of political manhood, to those who were white.

Political change further reinforced the ideological link between whiteness and male citizenship and showed that white masculinity, despite its exclusionary functions, had powerful assimilative consequences along class lines. By 1820 all the U.S. states had adopted universal white-male suffrage. States such as Connecticut (1818) and New York (1821), for example, further limited the rights of free blacks as they expanded the rights of free white men. Connecticut excluded blacks from suffrage, and New York imposed property qualifications and prohibitive residence requirements on black [Page 492]suffrage. In effectively making class insignificant as a determinant of who counted as a citizen, universal white-male suffrage—and the concept of democratic manhood it generated—magnified the importance of, and the association between, whiteness and masculinity.

Competition in the capitalist marketplace—from which women and nonwhite men were largely excluded—served as another arena for affirming the identification of manliness with whiteness. Among middle-class Americans, the market revolution generated a model of masculinity that emphasized breadwinning, economic advancement, and domesticity, and which was closely associated with whiteness. White middle-class men generally denied that women and nonwhites possessed the “masculine” characteristics—rationality, industry, sobriety, and thrift—necessary for success in the emerging market economy. But because free rivalry among men in the marketplace meant that some would gain while others would lose, the market revolution set in motion processes of social differentiation and class formation that assigned some white men positions of masculine, entrepreneurial power over other white men in the workplace. Working-class men complained that they were being reduced to the status of “wage slaves,” a choice of words that implied that their whiteness entitled them to the economic independence they deemed necessary to full manhood.

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