[Apologies for a VERY long post!]

On Feb 28, 2007, at 1:23 PM, Tom Magnuson wrote:
> I suspect that the taboo against miscegenation which seems to have 
> grown
> stronger after the end of slavery, when one could no longer, legally, 
> simply
> 'go through the cabins'  is as often as not, applied to our view of a
> history that was a good deal more tolerant than are we.
>

A good deal of work has been done on this subject as regards white men 
and black women, particularly during the slavery era, as you probably 
know, and so I won't attempt to summarize an enormously complex 
subject.  (If anyone wants to plunge in, I'd suggest starting with 
Joshua Rothman's fine recent work, Notorious in the Neighborhood, and 
also Joel Williamson's elegant outline, New People, though it was 
published about 25 years ago.) .

What's in many ways more surprising is the relative tolerance for 
relationships between white women and black men during slavery--a 
tolerance that disappeared  in the Reconstruction and Jim Crow periods, 
when as we all know in the Deep South (and somewhat less virulently in 
Virginia) a black man so much as looking "the wrong way" at a white 
woman could be an excuse for lynching.

The pioneering work on this topic is Martha Hodes, White Women, Black 
Men: Illicit Sex in the Nineteenth-Century South.   I'm appending the 
H-SHEAR review of Hodes's work below, because it sheds light on some of 
the questions that have come up on this thread.

Best wishes--

--Jurretta


 From http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.cgi?path=31255907259096:
Martha Hodes. White Women, Black Men: Illicit Sex in the 
Nineteenth-Century South. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997. xii + 
338 pp. Bibliographical references and index. $30.00 (cloth), ISBN 
978-0-300-06970-9.
Reviewed by: Steven Mintz , University of Houston.
Published by: H-SHEAR (September, 1998)
The Last Taboo

In 1800, a minister of the Gloria Dei Church in Philadelphia refused to 
marry an interracial couple. "A negro came with a white woman," he 
wrote. "I referred him to the negro minister, not willing to have blame 
from public opinion, having never yet joined black and white. 
Nevertheless these frequent mixtures will soon force matrimonial 
sanction."[1] What should we make of this comment, which suggests that 
marriages across the color line were not unimaginable during the early 
nineteenth century, despite virulent racial prejudice and legal 
prohibitions?

It is hard to believe that it was only a generation ago that the 
Supreme Court invalidated state laws prohibiting racial intermarriage. 
At the time the Court issued its 1967 Loving v. Virginia decision, 16 
states barred marriages across racial classification (altogether, 41 
states, at some point, enacted anti- miscegenation laws).[2] Legal 
change, however, has not unleashed dramatic tranformations in marital 
patterns. The 1990 census showed 1.1 million non-Hispanic black-white 
couples, up from not quite one million in 1980 and 321,000 in 1970.[3] 
In many cases, these interracial unions are second marriages and do not 
produce children, and many interracial marriages involve African or 
Afro-Caribbean partners, not native-born black Americans.

In a provocative, deeply-researched study which won the Allan Nevins 
Prize, Martha Hodes tackles one of the most explosive and potentially 
sensationalistic subjects a historian can address: interracial sex 
between southern black men and white women. Drawing on a remarkable 
range of legal testimony, personal diaries, and private correspondence, 
she persuasively argues that the late nineteenth century witnessed an 
abrupt shift in the South's treatment of such relationships. While 
antebellum white southern society did not condone such liaisons, it did 
exhibit a limited degree of toleration--a toleration that vanished 
following the Civil War, as southern white men saw their monopoly of 
political power challenged and the cotton economy collapse.

Although concentrating on the nineteenth century, Hodes wisely begins 
her book earlier in time by describing the marriage in 1681 between an 
Irish servant named Eleanor Butler and a black slave named Charles. 
This ceremony--presided over by a Catholic priest and attended by a 
number of prominent planters--was conducted with an openness 
unimaginable in the eighteenth century, when the lines between white 
servants and black slaves had hardened.

The marriage between Irish Nell and Charles was not a wholly isolated 
event. Kathleen Mary Brown, J. Douglas Deal, Philip J. Schwarz, and 
Lorena S. Walsh have demonstrated that the "taboo" against interracial 
sex was not nearly as universal in early America as scholars like 
Winthrop Jordan assumed.[4] On seventeenth-century Virginia's Eastern 
Shore, two marriages took place between free black men and free white 
women in the 1650s and three more in the 1660s. In addition, one slave 
married a white women, and at least half a dozen slaves fathered 
mulatto children by white maidservants during the 1680s and 1690s. 
Walsh concludes that unions of black men and white servant women were 
usually consensual, unlike many of the women's relationships with white 
men. She notes, for example, that only a handful of white women 
presented in court for bearing illegitimate children accused black 
fathers of rape and that a number accepted their punishment and resumed 
relationships with a black mate.[5]

After 1700, sexual relations between southern black men and white women 
occurred less frequently or at least much less publicly. Nevertheless, 
such liaisons continued to exist. In a remarkable job of detective 
work, Hodes mines bastardy and divorce cases for information about 
interracial sex--and finds a surprising number (including four divorces 
in Virginia and two in North Carolina granted to white husbands whose 
wives bore mulatto children). In one 1824 case in Virginia, an elderly 
man named Lewis Bourne unsuccessfully sued for divorce claiming that 
his much younger wife was involved in a seven-year relationship with a 
local slave. The court apparently concluded that Bourne had failed to 
adequately control his wife's behavior and denied his petition. The 
next year, a poor North Carolina white woman named Polly Lane accused a 
slave named Jim of rape. Although Jim was quickly found guilty of the 
charge, the discovery that Polly was pregnant prior to the alleged rape 
led the court to reopen the case and ultimately acquit Jim. A slave was 
simply too valuable a capital asset to execute under such 
circumstances.

After the Civil War, Hodes argues, consensual sex between a black man 
and a white woman became unimaginable in the white southern mind. White 
Southerners conflated black male autonomy with sexual transgressions 
across the color line and justified terrorism and lynching on the 
grounds that they were necessary to protect the purity of white 
womanhood--even though less than a third of all lynchings even involved 
accusations of sexual assault. Interracial sex became transgressive in 
a way it had never been under slavery.

Hodes's overarching argument is that sexual liaisons between white 
women and black men were not always met with violent outrage in the 
South. Before the Civil War, southern law could tolerate a liaison 
between a white woman and a black man. Indeed, communities showed 
little concern about such liaisons until they resulted in pregnancy and 
childbirth. Only when southern white patriarchs began to fear the 
potential political and economic power of newly autonomous black men 
after the Civil War did the issue of white women's sexual purity enter 
the realm of politics. Only then did violent intolerance replace an 
uneasy toleration.

This is a fascinating argument, but it is not the only interpretation 
that can be drawn from the evidence. Hodes tends to link attitudinal 
shifts to the evolution of the institution of slavery. It is the 
solidification of chattel slavery in the late seventeenth-century that 
ends an earlier period of relative flexibility in sexual relations, by 
making racial lines more salient than class lines. Later, it is the 
collapse of slavery that creates a newfound urgency in the taboo of sex 
between black men and white women and brings about a shift from uneasy 
white toleration toward increasingly violent intolerance.

An alternate interpretation might make two points: that ideologies of 
racism have changed in dramatic ways over time, and, that specific 
groups have shaped the definitions of and legal controls over "illicit" 
sexuality. Since the seventeenth century, efforts to stigmatize, 
criminalize, and punish miscegenation have reflected the interests of 
specific groups of people, who formulated new ideologies, enacted 
legislation, and actively propagated their racist viewpoints. As J. 
Douglas Deal has convincingly argued, while blacks in the early 
seventeenth century were treated differently from whites from the very 
beginning, racial prejudice did not evolve into a coherent ideology of 
racism until later. Early anti-miscegenation statutes--like the 1664 
Maryland law enslaving the children of English women who "intermarry 
with Negro Slaves"--reflected the attitudes of the most politically 
active segment of the planter elite--attitudes which were only 
gradually absorbed by many other whites.[6] Similarly, in the late 
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, lynching, supposedly to 
protect the purity of white womanhood, was in fact inextricably tied to 
efforts to suppress populism and interracial labor activities. From the 
anti-abolitionist mobs of the 1830s that raised the specter of racial 
amalgamation to the Northern Democrats who coined the term 
"miscegenation" and accused Republicans of favoring racial 
intermarriage to the post-World War I nativists who enacted the 
anti-miscegenation statutes that the Supreme Court overturned in 1967, 
miscegenation was a highly emotional subject that could be exploited 
and manipulated for a variety of social and political objectives.

For all its breadth, White Women, Black Men does not claim to cover all 
aspects of the topic of miscegenation. For one thing, Hodes explicitly 
omits Louisiana and South Carolina on the grounds that these states 
recognized an intermediate class between blacks and whites. In 
addition, Hodes primarily--though not exclusively--examines interracial 
sexual liaisons that made their way into courts. Additional studies 
need to be conducted on people of mixed racial ancestry.[7]

Even though the United States is a society with rigidly delineated 
racial categories, in practice racial boundaries tend to be blurrier 
than these categories presume. A number of recent works underscore this 
point. In their recent study of free black communities in the North, 
James Oliver Horton and Lois E. Horton uncover a working-class culture 
in which interracial fraternizing, drinking, and sexual relations were 
not uncommon. In a recent dissertation on nineteenth-century southern 
miscegenation laws, Charles Robinson III found that appeals courts 
frequently overturned miscegenation convictions after concluding that 
it was impossible to classify the defendants' race with precision. He 
also shows that interracial liaisons might last for years before 
entering the legal system and that most court cases were precipitated 
by property and inheritance disputes. Neil Foley shows how Mexican 
Americans in Texas attempted to emphasize their "whiteness" in order to 
advance their economic and political interests. While not minimizing 
the "negrophobia" that accompanied nineteenth-century democratization, 
these studies do suggest that while Americans are color blind in the 
sense that they see the world solely in black and white, racial 
identities have often been more complicated than this dual system of 
categorization suggests.[8]

Today, the moral issue raised by the Supreme Court's 1967 Loving 
decision has returned to the nation's political agenda. If marriage is, 
as the court declared, the single most important expression of a 
person's right to pursue happiness, should there be any restrictions on 
who consenting adults can marry? While Hodes's powerful and moving book 
does not directly address this issue, it does underscore the ways that 
throughout American history certain groups have manipulated sexual 
phobias in order to obtain broader political objectives.

Notes:

[1]. Quoted in Stephanie Grauman Wolf, As Various as Their People: The 
Everyday Lives of Eighteenth-Century Americans (New York: 
HarperCollins, 1993), 266.

[2]. Hodes, 231, n. 1. On the genesis of the term "miscegenation," 
which replaced the older term "amalgamation," see Hodes 264, n. 49; 
George M. Fredrickson, Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on 
Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817-1914 (New York: Harper & 
Row), 171-74; James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War 
Era (New York: Oxford, 1988), 789-91, David R. Roediger, Wages of 
Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (London: 
Verso, 1991), 155-56.

Among the works that examine interracial sex in nineteenth-century 
America are David Henry Fowler, Northern Attitudes Toward Racial 
Intermarriage: Legislation and Public Opinion in the Middle Atlantic 
States of the Old Northwest, 1780-1830 (New York: Garland, 1987); James 
Hugo Johnston, Race Relations in Virginia and Miscegenation in the 
South, 1776-1860 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1970); 
Charles F. Robinson, II, The Antimiscegenation Conversation: Love's 
Legislated Limits (1868-1967) (Ph.D. dissertation, University of 
Houston, 1998); Byron Curti Martyn, Racism in the United States: A 
History of Anti-Miscegenation Legislation and Litigation (Ph.D. 
dissertation, University of Southern California, 1979); Joel 
Williamson, New People: Miscegenation and Mulattoes in the United 
States (New York: Free Press, 1980).

On the treatment of miscegenation in literature see, James Kinney, 
Amalgamation!: Race, Sex, and Rhetoric in the Nineteenth-Century 
American Novel (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1985); Debra J. 
Rosenthal, Imagining Miscegenation: The Anxiety of Race in Ten North 
and South American Novels (Ph.D. dissertation, Princeton University, 
1995); Werner Sollors, Neither Black Nor White Yet Both: Thematic 
Explorations of Interracial Literature (New York: Oxford, 1997).

[3]. Wall Street Journal, May 9, 1991, B1. According to the 1990 
census, only 0.01 percent of white married men and 0.03 percent of 
white married women have married non-Hispanic blacks.

[4]. Kathleen Mary Brown, Gender and the Genesis of a Race and Class 
System in Virginia, 1630-1750 (Ph.D. diss., Univ. of Wisconsin-Madison, 
1990); J. Douglas Deal, Race and Class in Colonial Virginia: Indians, 
Englishmen, and Africans on the Eastern Shore During the Seventeenth 
Century (New York: Garland, 1993), 180; Philip J. Schwarz, Twice 
Condemned: Slaves and the Criminal Laws of Virginia, 1705-1865 (Baton 
Rouge: LSU, 1988); Lorena Seebach Walsh, From Calabar to Carter's 
Grove: The History of a Virginia Slave Community (Charlottesville: 
University Press of Virginia, 1997), 36.

[5]. Deal, Race and Class in Colonial Virginia, 180; Walsh, From 
Calabar to Carter's Grove, 36.

[6]. Deal, Race and Class in Colonial Virginia, 180, 181, 188; 200, n. 
99.

[7]. F. James Davis, Who is Black? One Nation's Definition (University 
Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991); Virginia R. 
Dominguez, White By Definition: Social Classification in Creole 
Louisiana (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers, 1986); Gary B. Mills, The 
Forgotten People: Cane River's Creoles of Color (Baton Rouge: Louisiana 
State University Press, 1977).

[8]. Neil Foley, White Scourge: Mexicans, Blacks and Poor Whites in 
Texas Cotton Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); 
James Oliver Horton and Lois E. Horton, In Hope of Liberty: Culture, 
Community, and Protest Among Northern Free Blacks, 1700-1860 (New York: 
Oxford, 1997); Robinson, Antimiscegenation Conversation.

Library of Congress Call Number: HQ1075.5.U6H63 1997

To subscribe, change options, or unsubscribe, please see the instructions
at http://listlva.lib.va.us/archives/va-hist.html