Abstract
American Christian ideas about (black) Africans as Hamitic were not recent inventions but had their origin in a long, complex tradition of Judaic, Christian, Islamic, and otherwise biblical thought. This history comprised descriptions of Ham as a great ancestor of early nations, as a moral failure who blighted a portion of humanity because of his sin against Noah, and as one to be distinguished genealogically and morally from the other posterity of Noah. As we shall see, he was regularly (though not exclusively) associated with the African nations of Ethiopia and Egypt. The various narrative productions of early Judaic, Christian, and Islamic traditions about Ham were critical ingredients in an eventual, consummate formula of religious and cultural antiblackness in American Christianity.1
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Notes
Among the best studies of ideas about Ham are Stephen Haynes, Noah’s Curse: The Biblical Justification of American Slavery (New York: Oxford, 2002)
and David Goldenberg, The Curse of Ham: Race and Slavery in EarlyJudaism, Christianity, and Islam (Princeton/Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2003). Despite his impressive efforts to avoid anachronisms and essentialism, Goldenberg relies upon the troubling concept of “black African.” He uses this, for example, in order to distinguish between Egyptians and Ethiopians (he does not consider Egyptians to be “black Africans”). This concept of the “black African” was developed by racist intellectuals of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in order to avoid attributing examples of cultural prowess or achievement to “blacks.” The concept is in every sense a product of white supremacist strategies to dehumanize Africans by inscribing them as having no history or culture. Unfortunately, Goldenberg is not alone in his use of the concept—most contemporary scholars have uncritically taken up its use. Haynes’ text also provides extensive treatment of American Christian ideas about Nimrod as a villainous ancestor of Negroes. See especially chapters 3 and 6 of Haynes’ study.
Ephraim Isaac, “Ham,” in The Anchor Bible Dictionary, ed. David Noel Freedman (New York: Doubleday, 1992), 3:31–3:32.
Audrey Smedley, Race in North America: Origins and Evolution of a Worldview (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1993).
Philip Schaff, Slavery and the Bible: A Tract for the Times (Chambersburg, PA: M. Kieffer and Co.’s Caloric Printing Press, 1861); located at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York City. The tract contains a preface of endorsement, dated March 1861, citing its popular reception and listing as signatories twenty-three people from the Mercersburg Seminary.
Samuel A. Cartwright, “Slavery in the Light of Ethnology,” in Cotton is King, and Other Pro-Slavery Arguments; Comprising the Writings of Hammond, Harper, Christy, Stringfellow, Hodge, Bledsoe, and Cartwright, on this Important Subject, ed. E. N. Elliot (Augusta, GA: Pritchard, GA: 1860), 693, 694.
Thornton Stringfellow, “The Bible Argument: Or, Slavery in the Light of Divine Revelation,” in Cotton is King, and Other Pro-Slavery Arguments; Comprising the Writings of Hammond, Harper, Christy, Stringfellow, Hodge, Bledsoe, and Cartwright, on this Important Subject, ed. E. N. Elliot (Augusta, GA: Pritchard, Abbot & Loomis, 1860).
Lewis S. Gordon, Existentia A fricana: Understanding Africana Existential Thought (New York: Routledge, 2000), 97.
Martin Marty, Righteous Empire: The Protestant Experience in America (New York: Dial Press, 1970).
Eddie S. Glaude, Exodus!: Religion, Race, and Nation in Early Nineteenth-Century Black America (Chicago/London: University of Chicago, 2000), 75.
Reginald Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism (Cambridge/London: Harvard University Press, 1981).
William Haller, Foxe’s Book of Martyrs and the Elect Nation (London: Jonathan Cape, 1963), 14–18.
Jonathan Edwards, History of the Work of Redemption in The Works of President Edwards (1817; reprint, New York: Burt Franklin, 1968), 5: 246.
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© 2004 Sylvester Johnson
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Johnson, S.A. (2004). Divine Identity and the Hamitic Idea in Historical Perspective. In: The Myth of Ham in Nineteenth-Century American Christianity. Black Religion / Womanist Thought / Social Justice. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4039-7869-1_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4039-7869-1_2
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