trast, they kept the Africans under tight control and put them to work. In
effect, they treated the Africans as a species of farm animal.
Treating enslaved people as animals has a long history. The ancient
Assyrians spoke of slavery as eli erbi ritti pasalu,“walking on all fours,”
that is, behaving like a domesticated animal. Most primitive and ancient
peoples referred to themselves as “ThePeople.” That is the meaning of
many of what we think of as American Indian tribal names: Lenni Lenape
(Delawares), Ongwe Honwe (Iroquois), Illinois, Navaho or Nemene
(Apache). In Africa, there are the Nuer or Dinka and scores more. A
stranger was not of the people,not one of us; by definition, he was not a fel-
low human being. The word “slave” in all Indo-European languages is
derived from the concept “captive alien”; that was also the meaning of luin
Tang Chinese. Terms for aliens in many languages are derived from or
formed on analogies to wild beasts: the Aryan invaders of India called the
Dravidian aboriginals dasa,which means something like “beasts of the for-
est”; the Bushmen of the Kalahari called aliens “animals without hooves.”
Like animals, aliens could not speak (our) language: they were to the
Greeks,barbaros;to the Arabs,barbarri;to the Sanskrit-speaking Aryans,
me-luh-ha.To look or smell different was, in itself, a justification for being
regarded as not human. The wall friezes of the Assyrians and Egyptians
minutely detail the outlandish dress, unfamiliar facial features, and bizarre
hairstyles of foreigners who were destined for slavery.
An echo of this attitude can be heard in Thomas Jefferson’s strictures
on the “very strong and disagreeable odour” of Negroes who are, in sexual
preference, close to apes; and in George Washington’s description of the
hair of his black manservant as “wool.” Terms applied to blacks and their
treatment always carry at least a hint that the white thinks of the black as a
nonhuman animal. An American court made this explicit, ruling that the
word “person” did not apply to a slave. Black people’s color, their facial
features, their hair, and even—as Jefferson remarked—their smell set them
aside. The accuracy, morality, and legality of these attitudes were unques-
tioned in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and were rarely chal-
lenged in the eighteenth century.
Later, pseudoscientific explanations were offered. Dr. Samuel W.
Cartwright of Louisiana claimed that surface attributes—color, hair, and
164 THE BIRTH OF AMERICA