“White Ownership” — Discovering Personal Whiteness in America
Chapter Three of A Family History of Whiteness: American Roots of Racial Injustice
If you are one of the millions of Americans who has filled in a family tree you will be familiar with the problem genealogists call a “brick wall,” those exasperating dead ends where the document trail dries up and the link to previous generations is broken.
In the early days of investigating my own ancestry, I hit a lot of brick walls. With persistence and a little luck, I broke through many of them. As a result, I was able to extend some lines of my American ancestry across four centuries and more than a dozen generations.
However, there is one type of ancestry brick wall I never expected to be able to reach, much less breach — the brick wall separating me from ancestors who lived in a time before being a White person had any real meaning. For most of my life, I assumed the starting point of Whiteness in my ancestry had to be buried so deeply in European antiquity it could never be brought into the light. But I was wrong. White people are a product of modern history.
More than a century ago, W. E. B. Du Bois pioneered the study of what he called “personal whiteness.” Building on the foundation laid down by Du Bois, scholars have traced the invention of Whiteness to England’s American colonies in the latter half of the seventeenth century.[i]
In the earliest phases of the European colonization of America, Whiteness was a relatively unimportant description of appearance and little more. My earliest American ancestors were not White people — not in any way that was significant to them. During the first half of the seventeenth century, my settler colonial ancestors in the British American Colonies, New Netherlands, and New Sweden would have identified themselves by country of origin or by a particular social station or trade. Collectively, in the broadest sense, they identified as “Christians.” The significance of “white” as a collective identity came later.[ii]
When my American ancestors first began to feel a need to call attention to their identity as White people, they did so in the context of (and to clarify) their relationship to the African peoples they enslaved and the Indigenous Americans they traded with, fought, displaced, and also enslaved.
Unlike language, or religion, or class, or political allegiance, or even culture, Whiteness created a line between categories of people that could not easily be crossed. It was an attribute that could not be changed like clothing or reformed like religious beliefs. Whiteness served a purpose similar to the fences my British and European settler colonial ancestors built to mark property lines on the land, it created a physical and visible divide, a boundary between people who could be owners of property and people who could be owned as property.[iii]
W. E. B. Du Bois understood the seminal importance of ownership as an early attribute of Whiteness:
I do not laugh. I am quite straight-faced as I ask soberly: “But what on earth is whiteness that one should so desire it?” Then always, somehow, some way, silently but clearly I am given to understand that whiteness is the ownership of the earth, forever and ever, Amen![iv]
The desire to reinforce claims to ownership of land (and people) was one of the main reason my ancestors in the English colonies of North American decided to mark themselves off in law and society as White people.[v] As they began to see their own “white” bodies as fundamentally different than the bodies of “savage” Indigenous Americans and the “black” bodies of enslaved Africans, my early American ancestors could begin to imagine Whiteness as embodying a superior breed of people. It was the beginning of race-based hierarchy in America.
The first members of the Stites family in America, my ninth great-grandfather, Henry, and his son, my eighth great-grandfather, Richard, arrived in the Massachusetts Bay Colony sometime around 1647 or 1648. Their lives in America straddled the time before Whiteness became significant and after. Being a White person was never really important for Henry. He died in the 1650s, too early to benefit much from Whiteness. But for Richard, who lived until about 1701, identifying as a White person in America — and even more, as a free, White male — made it possible to achieve a level of prosperity and life success he never could have achieved in England.
Henry and Richard left England for America together as adults and on their own without any other family. They came from South Yorkshire, from a place called Woodseats, a hamlet in the forest later gobbled up by the city of Sheffield.[vi] In the early 1600s, Sheffield was still a small town, but its production of blades and cutlery was second only to London. Metalwork requires a lot of fuel. Henry, with help from his son, Richard, supplied fuel needed to fire the Sheffield blast furnaces. They were charcoal makers.
Skill in “the mystery of coaling” — the art of turning timber into charcoal — was what brought Henry and Richard to America. As the midpoint of the seventeenth century approached, population growth and industrialization had created a crisis of deforestation in England. But New England, at the time, was thick with trees. Sometime around 1647, Henry and Richard must have signed a contract (an indenture) that put them in debt to the Hammersmith Iron Works for the cost of their sea voyage to Massachusetts and obliged them to work for the company for three or more years.
Starting in 1648, Henry and Richard begin to make regular appearances in the records of the Essex County Court at Salem, the same court that hosted the infamous witch trials some fifty years later. When Henry and Richard appear in court records, it is always bad news. A “Hendry Stiche” appears in the Essex County Court Records in March 1648 when he is “presented for breaking the head of Rich. Bayly.” “Rich. Stiche” was called as a witness in the case. Richard first appears in the court records in February 1648 when he is fined for swearing. Later in 1648, both Henry and Richard are fined for swearing on the Sabbath.
In February 1650, Henry was admonished for not attending church more than “once or twice in a year.” In June of 1650 there is a record of Joseph Armitage, an agent of the iron works, suing Richard for a debt owed. That is the last we hear of Richard in the Salem court records, but in January 1651, Armitage enters another suit charging Henry with “breach of bond in that Richard Stich did not appear in court.” It’s a reasonable guess that, by the end of 1650, Richard had run away to escape his debt.
After Richard ran away, Henry continued to work as a charcoal maker for the iron works at least through the end of 1653. The court records for the January 1654 bankruptcy hearings for the iron works note that “old Stich, the collier, three months in 1653 boarded at the Scotchmen’s house on the Company’s provisions.” Those Scots were soldiers captured by the English in the Battle of Dunbar in 1650. They were prisoners of war sold into forced labor in the New World. The did the hard work for Henry by felling and cutting trees and it seems Henry got along with them just fine — he was never charged with breaking a Scot’s head.[vii]
Judging from the court records, it appears Henry did not gain much in wealth or status during his time in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. At the end of his life, living at least part of the time in a company house with his Scottish co-workers and still earning a meager living by burning timber to make charcoal, Henry remained near the bottom of the social hierarchy in New England.[viii]
Richard, unlike his father, lived long enough to realize the benefits of becoming a White person. To do so, he had to do something very American — move and reinvent himself. Richard fled Massachusetts and the reach of the Salem Court to make a new life for himself on Dutch-controlled Long Island.
In 1646, a group of fifty men (some English and some Dutch) had signed a patent with the Dutch West India Company to create a new settlement on the Long Island prairie about twenty miles east of Manhattan. These fifty men became the first “proprietors” (property owners) of a new settlement they called Hempstead. The terms of their deal with the Dutch required Hempstead to grow to one hundred tax-paying landowners within ten years.
Richard arrived in Hempstead in about 1651. At the time, he was “in service” to John Seaman, a wealthy landowner from the New Haven Colony who had purchased more than 12,000 acres of land near Hempstead. Richard was not bound to Seaman by an indenture and soon found other work, first as a hired hand on the farm of the widow, Mrs. Washbourne, and later as a cowherd tending the town herd during the summer months. Richard also made money by burning timber in the forest and selling charcoal.
From the mid-1650s to the 1690s, Richard’s name shows up frequently in the town records of Hempstead. In those records, Richard’s last name has a variety of spellings: Stich, Stiche, Stiches, Stitt, Stittes, and sometimes, Stites, the spelling that would eventually stick. The oldest surviving document bearing the name “Richard Stites” is a 1656 letter to Peter Stuyvesant, the Director-General of New Netherlands in New Amsterdam.
The text of the letter Richard put his mark on, along with thirty-seven other men of Hempstead, was a refusal to pay the “tenths,” a ten percent levy on profits from the land due to be paid to the Dutch West India Company ten years after the signing of the 1646 land patent. The fact that his name appears on the letter is evidence that, by 1656, Richard had become a property owner, a free man and “proprietor” of Hempstead.
Apparently, Richard had been given land so that Hempstead could meet the Dutch West India Company’s demand for the settlement to double the number of taxpaying landowners within ten years of its founding. Richard owned just a small parcel to start, but over time, he acquired several hundred acres of meadow, cropland, and forest.
Richard was able to transform himself from “serving man” to “proprietor” because he was the right kind of person — English and male and not bound by an indenture — in the right place at the right time. It was that simple.
World events also contributed to Richard’s transformation. The first large shipment of enslaved Africans to New Netherlands was in about 1655, just after Portugal took back control of Brazil from the Dutch and the Dutch West India Company needed a new market for its trade in enslaved Africans. After 1655, many Africans began to arrive in Hempstead where they replaced labor by indentured English and Dutch. By the time the first census of Hempstead was taken in 1698, enslaved people comprised roughly an eighth of the Hempstead population.
The 1698 census of Hempstead is a rare and remarkable document. It begins with the following introductory preface:
A List of all ye Inhabitans of hempsted, old and young fremen and servants, blacke and white tacken by strict Inquary, yt ye names of all ye Inhabitants old and young, white and blacke tacken by order of ye Justises of ye Peece, and to ys being true List by strict Inquiry we have given it under oure hands agust ye 31–1698
By 1698, as the census makes clear, the population of Hempstead was understood to be made up of people who were either old or young, either free or servants, and either “blacke” or “white.” The census record begins with a listing of the names of about six hundred “white” people of Hempstead in family groupings. My eight-times great grandparents, Richard and Mary Stites are on the list along with four of their children, including my seven-times great grandfather, William Stites.
The last page of the census is a list of “slaves” in four columns. The first three columns include first names of 104 “blacke” enslaved people. The fourth column on the far right of the page under the sub-heading — “A liste of ye Indians” — has nine listings, four of them couples — for example, “Posagalo and squa” — three single listings and two illegible.
The 1698 census does not reveal how many of the White families of Hempstead owned “blacke slaves” — the term seems to encompass both enslaved Africans and enslaved Indigenous people. But the labor of enslaved people created wealth for all the White proprietors of Hempstead. The combination of slave-powered production of goods and rapidly expanding markets for cattle (beef and dairy) and horses in nearby New England, from Massachusetts to New Jersey, were the primary engines of wealth production for my ancestors in Hempstead in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.
Owning sufficient forest lands, pasturage, and croplands, and the added boost provide by the labor of enslaved peoples made it possible for my Stites ancestors on Long Island to prosper. Becoming “White people” on Long Island helped put Richard Stites and his many descendants on a stable path to security and prosperity that would continue, without interruption, with the usual ups and downs, for the next four centuries.
NOTES
[i] William Edgar Burghardt Du Bois published “The Souls of White Folk,” in 1920. In the essay, he wrote: “The discovery of personal whiteness among the world’s people is a very modern thing — a nineteenth and twentieth century matter, indeed.” Nell Irvin Painter provides a thorough account of antecedents of modern Whiteness in European antiquity and history leading up to the emergence of Whiteness as an “official” category of people in late seventeenth-century America in her book, The History of White People (New York: W.W. Norton, 2010). Theodore W. Allen, in his two-volume The Invention of the White Race (New York: Verso, 1994–1997), documents the prior history of European class and religious conflict which laid the foundation for the invention of Whiteness in America, giving special attention, as have others, to the impact of Bacon’s Rebellion (1676–1677) on the creation of distinction between White people and others in legal codes in England’s American colonies. David R. Roediger’s work also focuses on the intersection of class and race in the emergence and development of Whiteness, work he summarizes in How Race Survived U.S. History: From Settlement and Slavery to the Eclipse of Post-Racialism (New York: Verso, 2008).
[ii] My earliest American ancestors were not yet “white” and they were also not immigrants. They were settlers and colonizers or, in some cases, indentured workers or serving people. Like most White Americans, I grew up believing in the myth of America as “a nation of immigrants.” Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz does a great job deconstructing this myth in her book, Not a Nation of Immigrants: Settler Colonialism, White Supremacy, and a History of Erasure and Exclusion (Boston: Beacon Press, 2021).
[iii] Michael Omi and Howard Winant discuss the process of “racialization” (the social and historical formation of racial identities) in Racial Formation in the United States (New York: Routledge, 3rd edition, 2014, pages 109–112) and define race as “…a concept that signifies and symbolizes social conflicts and interests by referring to different types of human bodies.”
[iv] The quoted passage is from page 228 of the 2018 reprint of writings by Du Bois entitled The Souls of Black Folk with “The Talented Tenth” and “The Souls of White Folk” (New York: Penguin Books, 2018).
[v] Historians trace the origins of the invention of “official” (i.e., legal) Whiteness to slave codes enacted in Virginia and Maryland in the 1660s to 1680s and see Bacon’s Rebellion in 1670s Virginia as an important catalyst for legal codification of White status. I believe official Whiteness came just a bit later for my British and European settler colonial ancestors living in what is now New York and parts of New England. Jacqueline Battalora, in her book, Birth of a White Nation: The Invention of White People and its Relevance Today (Houston: Strategic Book Publishing and Rights Company, 2013. p. 2) dates the first appearance of the label “white” in law to 1681. See, also the books by Painter (The History of White People) and Allen (The Invention of the White Race) cited above.
[vi] There is a Woodseats Parish Record of a christening on January 19, 1625 for “Ricardus, filius, Henrici Stichs” (Richard, son of Henry Stichs, or Sticks, the handwriting of the original record is hard to read). Personal communication from Simon Parker-Galbreath. See https://simonpg.com/d312.htm#P1100
[vii] See Janet Regan and Curtis White, “Hammersmith Through Historical Texts,” Chapter 2 in Saugus Iron Works: The Roland W. Robbins Excavations, 1948–1953, Edited by William A. Griswold and Donald W. Linebaugh. Accessed online on September 27, 2023 at https://www.nps.gov/sair/learn/historyculture/upload/03Chapter2-508x.pdf
[viii] In 1652, English colonial authorities in Massachusetts decreed that “all Scotsmen, Negers [Negroes], and Indians…servant to the English, from age sixteen to sixty” could join the colonial militia, giving all of the listed peoples a more or less equivalent legal status. See Records of the Governor and Company of Massachusetts Bay, Nathaniel B. Shurtleff, ed. (Boston: William White, 1854), Vol. III, 1644–1657, 267–268. Cited in “Slavery and law in 17th Century Massachusetts,” National Park Service article, online at https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/slavery-and-law-in-early-ma.htm.
