Quotes from Annette Gordon-Reed

Some have cited race and religion as the deciding factors, allowing men who jealously guarded their liberty to obliterate the liberty of others who were of a different color and different faiths.

Yet we would never expect law and even extreme social opprobrium to remove from a population jealousy, hatred, greed, sympathy, mirth, possessiveness—the entire palette of human emotions.

Even if Africans chose to adopt the mores of the English, they could never overcome the powerful view that the differences between the groups were elemental and largely insurmountable.

The Church of England shut down that avenue of emancipation when it confirmed that baptism of a slave into the Christian faith did not require the emancipation of that slave, an understanding that Virginia codified in law. Christians could

Inventing the rules of slavery, in 1662, Virginians decided to adopt the Roman rule partus sequitur ventrem, which says that you were what your mother was. 14

Even white males who owned no slaves could contribute to the problem by producing, with enslaved black women, children who would be born free, thus destroying a critical component of the master's property right: the ability to capture the value of the "increase" when female slaves gave birth.

Calling such people "mulattoes," from the Spanish word meaning "mule," insinuated that blacks and whites, though related, were close to being separate species, as a mule is the offspring of a horse and a donkey.

Being powerful and successful on earth through evildoing was not a true mark of superiority.

the past is never dead. It's not even past.

When a presumptively heterosexual man makes gratuitous transfers of money to a woman who is not his wife or daughter, it raises, fairly or not, questions about the man's motivations.

People dream, despite whatever supposed realities may be before them.

The pervasive doctrine of white supremacy supposedly inoculated whites against the will to interracial mixing, but that doctrine proved to be unreliable when matched against the force of human sexuality. People are prone to having sex, especially when they are in daily contact with potential objects of sexual attraction. That inclination has permeated every slave society, every frontier society, and every colonial society that has ever existed.

SEC. 6. All free white persons who shall emigrate to this republic, and who shall, after a residence of six months, make oath before some competent authority that he intends to reside permanently in the same, and shall swear to support this Constitution, and that he will bear true allegiance