Editor's Introduction

THIS YEAR'S VOLUME of the MHR is special in every sense of the word. Its terrain extends from the American colonial period to the era of the Civil War, and it offers compelling examples of historical scholarship. Most important, it focuses on race and slavery, subjects that are central to understanding American history. As W. E. B. Du Bois wrote in The Souls of Black Folks, one of the primary documents of American intellectual life, the history of "the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line,—the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea."1
Topical journal volumes such as this one do not, and should not, happen by chance. We have been planning volume four of the MHR for over two years. The resulting collaboration of authors and editors speaks directly to the mission of our enterprise as stated in the inaugural editorial statement four years ago. These exciting and well-crafted essays by expert scholars help recover "the legacy of the forgotten" and reflect the rich and inclusive concerns of today's historical profession. Equally important, they possess the analysis and innovation that scholars require and the good writing general readers deserve.
Americans have always expected—if not demanded—that historians explore issues related to the development of democracy. But the historical profession's interest in the subject of race (like its interest in gender) is of comparatively recent vintage, although race and gender issues are central to the democratic story. Prior to the 1960s, few whites cared to examine the meaning of race or the history of slavery, and certainly the overwhelming number of popular historians failed to incorporate the research of their African American brethren into their own work. Until recently, this was especially true of the avalanche of writing on the Civil War. Ironically, Southern white historians such as Ulrich B. Phillips, who wrote in the first half of the twentieth century, proved the most interested in research related to African American history. But Phillips and his colleagues who dominated slavery and Southern studies produced books that buttressed the social values and racial priorities of their region and era.2
The scholarship of these historians attracted wide attention and much professional respect, although its shortcomings are painfully evident today. Still, these researchers explored a field that interested few other whites.3 Before Phillips, the overwhelming number of white historians and intellectuals could not be bothered with African American subjects. They dismissed out of hand the very idea that Africans—and African Americans—possessed a history. In 1843, for instance, Amos G. Beman, a black minister and abolitionist leader from New Haven, Connecticut, sought advice from the famed creator of the first American dictionary, Noah Webster. Beman asked Webster what books he might recommend on the history of the African race. "In answer," Webster replied, "I would remark that of the wooly haired Africans, who constitute the principal part of the inhabitants of Africa, there is no history, & there can be none. That race has remained in barbarism from the first ages of the world; their country has never been explored very fully by civilized man." For the northern areas of the African continent, inhabited by nations "of a different origin," such as Egyptians, Webster advised Beman to consult any good encyclopedia.4
Webster's letter typified nineteenth-century "white" American opinion, keeping in mind, as one of our essays emphasizes, that "whiteness" and "race" are historical constructs, not immutable facts of nature.5 Nevertheless, Webster and his contemporaries assumed that vast, fixed, biological, and intellectual gulfs divided Europeans and Africans. The ignorance and arrogance manifested by these assumptions created countless rivers of sorrow that flowed directly into civil war and led to an additional century of grinding racial oppression. The articles that we are offering explore the historical background and contexts of the opinions expressed by "whites" like Webster. They also chart the long and deeply flawed transformation of white attitudes toward slavery from the late seventeenth century to the Civil War and the meaning of race and slavery to African Americans in the old Bay State. Collectively, these essays tell us much about the American historical experience that some still would prefer to ignore. Marvelous examples of the historian's craft, they ask the right questions, offer clear prose, and leave us with the desire to know more; this is historical scholarship at its best. We could not be more pleased to publish volume four of the MHR. Donald Yacovone, MHR Editor
NOTES 1. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches (1903; New York, 1961), 23. 2. See Phillips's American Negro Slavery (New York, 1918) and Life and Labor in the Old South (Boston, 1929). 3. One notable exception was Frederic Bancroft. See his Slave Trading in the Old South (Baltimore, 1931) and A Sketch of the Negro in Politics, Especially in South Carolina and Mississippi (New York, 1885). 4. Amos G. Beman to Noah Webster, Apr. 27, 1843, Beman papers, Beinecke Library, Yale University.The letter also appears in Black Abolitionist Papers, microfilm edition, 04:0563. 5. See also Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (New York, 1995); Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, Mass., 1998); and David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (London, 1991).

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