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Brooke Judie
Dr. Shorter-Bourhanou
PHIL 4315
5/1/17
Transgressing the Racial Binary: Miscegenation During the Colonial and Chattel Slavery Eras The goal of this paper is to explore the history of miscegenation in the United States beginning with the English settlement of the North American colonies and ending in the antebellum period. My research will focus on understanding the complex phenomenon of amalgamation during this time period. In order to contextualize why miscegenation was so significant during this portion of American history, it is first important to note that the English, by and large, historically perceived Africans as genetically inferior. Secondly, these perceptions had a profound impact not only on the relationships that the English settlers had with Africans in the colonies thereafter, but the way that society was eventually restructured in order to support chattel slavery. This new societal structure was especially important when considering the ways in which propertied English settlers attempted to socially categorize multiracial people after chattel slavery became institutionalized. What is clear is that miscegenation and the subsequent presence of mixed-race individuals in America transgressed the white population’s binary conceptions of race, especially after the institutionalization of chattel slavery. This transgression of societal structure caused the propertied white male hegemony of this time period to implement laws and practices over time that would secure their place at the pinnacle of American society.
What was the significance of miscegenation specifically between English settlers and Africans during the colonial era? In order to engage with this question, I will acknowledge some of the preliminary accounts of English explorers and their conceptions of Africans. This will give some context for some of the pre-conceived notions that English settlers had about black
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indentured servants during the colonial era. As a result of acknowledging the English ideological heritage pertaining to matters of race, especially in respect to Africans, it will become easier to understand why miscegenation was seen as a threat to racial purity in the North American colonies. As early as the late 1500s, English explorers began traveling to Africa to expand trade. It was not uncommon for explorers to transport small groups of Africans back to England and keep them there until they learned English. Upon becoming proficient in the English language, the Africans were transferred back to Africa to be translators for English explorers. Many of the explorers were struck by the disparity in appearance and culture between themselves and the Africans. One of the most notable of those differences was skin color. In 1578, voyager George Best wrote, “I myself have seen an Ethiopian as black as coal brought to England […] and the most probable cause to my judgement is, that this blackness proceeds of some natural infection of the first inhabitants of that Country, and so all of the whole progeny of them descended, are still polluted with the same blot of infectionâ€. Best believed that “blackness†was a genetic deformity unique to Africans. His belief was derived from his interpretation of the Old Testament story of the great flood. According to Best, it was apparent that Noah and his family were white and should have all had white children. However, Satan had caused one of Noah’s sons to disobey his father’s orders, therefore bringing about a blood curse which afflicted all of his progeny. Consequently, Ethiopians’ “blackness†was a result of this natural blood infection and was in no way a result of the climate of the land they were indigenous to. Although others may not have shared George Best’s theory of the origin of dark skin, he was not alone in his belief in the inherent inferiority of Africans. As stated by another English traveler, Thomas Herbert, the “Devil had infused prodigious idolatry into their hearts, enough to relish his pallet
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See George Best,
The English Literatures of America: 1500-1800. (New York, NY: Routledge, 1997), 55.
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and aggrandize their tortures, and to fry their souls as the raging sun had already scorched their coal-black carcassesâ€. Here is another English explorer validating his claims to the innate subordination of Africans to Europeans by invoking supernatural causes. Upon arriving in Africa, Herbert observed a people with an entirely different appearance, religion, and culture. His understanding of those differences were influenced by his belief in traditional Western Christian associations of white and black as equivalent to good and evil. This perspective led him to theorize that the Devil had chosen to afflict African people with “prodigious idolatryâ€. Herbert also asserted a negative connotation with dark skin by referring to it as “scorched†by the “raging†sun. In addition to this, he used the phrase “black carcasses†to refer the bodies of African people. This phrase is particularly degrading because it functions to deny the humanity of the African people by referring to their bodies as dead and lifeless. In using this language, Herbert appealed to the idea that Africans were evil, animalistic and uncivilized. English planters then carried these negative connotations of Africans over to the first North American colony of Virginia.
One of the first documented accounts of Africans arriving in the colonies came from John Wolfe in 1619. During this time, African and white indentured servants were considered to be of the same social class. Eventually, on plantations where there was a mixture of white and black servants, problems for their propertied white masters began to arise. There were interracial groups of slaves attempting to run away together so frequently that the Virginia legislature began to complain. In addition to this, white settlers and/or servants and black servants began having
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See Ronald Takaki,
A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America. (New York, NY: Back Bay Books, 2008), 50.
See Kim F. Hall,
Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995), 103.
Ronald Takaki,
A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America, 51.Judie 4
romantic relationships with one another. As a result of this, a series of case rulings and laws were passed to curtail amalgamation which was being practiced with increasing frequency. These rulings did not however, disperse equal punishment between black and white parties.
In 1640, there was a case in which a free white man, Robert Sweat, had impregnated a black female slave. Therefore, the Virginia court ordered that “the said negro woman be whipped at the whipping post and the said Sweat shall tomorrow in the forenoon do public penance for his offence at James city church in the time of divine serviceâ€. There is clear indication in this ruling that the black female slave whom Sweat had gotten pregnant received a more severe punishment while he was merely required to confess his “sin†in front of a church congregation.
In addition to legislature and case rulings that penalized intimate relationships involving interracial partners, colonial laws also attempted to provide clarification on how the status of biracial children was to be determined. In 1662, the Virginia legislature passed a law that punished intermarriage with blacks by banishing those who partook in the practice from the colony. This law did not necessarily make interracial marriage illegal, but did attempt to discourage “that abominable mixture†and subsequent “spurious issueâ€. Children born to married interracial couples were generally determined to be free or enslaved based on the status of their mother. In spite of this, there were some colonial slave masters who chose to exploit interracial marriage for economic gain. For example, some of the planters in the Maryland colony arranged marriages between white female servants and black male servants in order to produce more slaves. This practice was eventually penalized in the act of repeal of 1681 which not only fined the master and the person who joined the two individuals in marriage, but granted freedom to
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Ibid, 54.
See Carter G. Woodson, “The Beginnings of the Miscegenation of the Whites and Blacks,†The Journal of Negro History, Volume 3, Number 4 (October 1918): 342-343.
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any white woman coerced into such a marriage as well any children she had as a result of the marriage. This repeal however, did not prevent the same exploitation of black women’s reproductive capacities for the economic gain of their slave masters. Nor did it grant freedom to black male servants who were forced to marry white female servants. None of these laws or case rulings made miscegenation illegal, but instead functioned to assign heavier punishments to black servants who participated. Black women were especially marginalized by colonial legislature regarding miscegenation because there were no laws put in place to protect them from white men who desired to exploit them for their sexual and reproductive capacities.
Restructuring American Colonial Society As I stated earlier, white and black indentured servants occupied the same class. However, differences in punishments assigned to black and white servants eventually evolved into a complete societal division of the two groups. In this section, I will address how and why colonial society became restructured as a hierarchy not only based on class, but race. This will yield the result of being able to identify how the restructure of society and criminalization of miscegenation were utilized to maintain political and economic prosperity for the landowning class.
During the same time that miscegenation was increasing in the colonies, uprisings began taking place on plantations. These uprisings stemmed from the fact that many free white men and indentured servants were finding it progressively difficult to secure property of their own. Finally, in 1673, Nathaniel Bacon led the very rebellion which the propertied class had feared
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Ibid, 341.
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would take place. During the second half of Bacon’s rebellion, many black servants who were bound for life joined his army, recognizing that they had more to gain from the outcome of the rebellion than their white counterparts. Bacon’s rebellion caused white planters to realize that their designation as society’s elite would always be threatened as long as they continued to rely on white laborers. At this point, the planters had to reconsider the way in which society was organized. They understood that increasing economic and political opportunities for white laborers would eliminate their own economic and political edge. Therefore, they decided that restructuring society on the basis of class and race would serve best to preserve their political hegemony.
One of the first steps that the planters took to systematize this new societal structure was turning to slavery as their main system of labor and focusing on Africa as their main source of laborers. The next step was to pass laws that denied African slaves the freedoms of assembly and movement. One of the last and, for the purposes of this research paper, most important steps to systematizing the organization of society based on class and race was in implementation of the “one-drop ruleâ€. In 1691, new legislature was passed in Virginia which officially prohibited interracial marriage and procreation. This new law ordered that the white mother of a mixed-race child would be banished from the colony and the child would be enslaved. Not only that, but it no longer mattered whether the child was fathered or mothered by a white person. From that point forward mulattoes would automatically become slaves and would be implicitly classified as black. By adding a racial component to social classification, the planters had essentially created a third class – black slaves. Furthermore, legislature such as Virginia’s “one-drop rule†served to clear up ambiguity surrounding the status and identity of mixed-race individuals. Anti-
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Ibid.
Ibid, 61.
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miscegenation laws also provided a false sense of security around the idea of racial purity for elite English settlers by attempting to create clear racial markers to determine who was black and who was white. These steps that the landowning class took to establish this restructured society are significant because of the ways in which these measures aided them in not only maintaining their place in society, but preventing future uprisings from lower-class whites.
The Illusion of Racial Purity Following the reformation of American colonial society, many white Americans began promoting and subscribing to the idea that “Americanness†was synonymous with whiteness. In this section, I will discuss the increase in anti-miscegenation rhetoric in the era of chattel slavery and the public code of silence surrounding the rape of black female slaves. I will also discuss some of the ways in which people of African descent in antebellum New Orleans defined or negotiated their Creole identities against this backdrop of white supremacy. In examining the cultural dominance of the racial binary in the United States in conjunction with the presence of multi-racial people, it becomes clear that the Anglo-American theory of racial purity presented a paradox which was not consistent with reality.
Moving away from the American colonial era and into the era of chattel slavery, there was an increase in anti-miscegenation legislature and a general resentment among the white population against amalgamation. Anti-miscegenation laws were an attempt to keep each race separate and distinct, hence many white American scholars and politicians constructed theories of white racial superiority to support racial caste. One of the most notable of the American theoreticians on racial superiority was Thomas Jefferson. He stated that, “Their amalgamation with the other color produces a degradation to which no lover of his country, no lover of
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excellence in the human character can innocently consentâ€. According to Jefferson, blacks were inferior in intelligence and inherently licentious. He believed that these innate qualities of Black people threatened white racial purity in America. He believed that interracial sex and multi-racial offspring would fracture the boarders of caste and make the United States a nation of mulattoes. In 1802 however, James Callender wrote an article alleging that Jefferson not only had a sexual relationship with a female slave named Sally Hemings, but also had several children with her. Interestingly enough, propertied Virginians remained silent when confronted with Callender’s allegations against Jefferson. The apathy of the elite class was largely due to Callender’s infringement upon what Joshua D. Rothman refers to as “a cultural code of public silence†about masters having sex with slaves. One of the issues with the “code of public silence†is that it enabled the rape of female slaves. This is a critical component in this discussion of miscegenation because often times amalgamation, for female slaves, involved their white masters sexually assaulting them. Yet, elite whites in Virginia and throughout the United States maintained that they were morally superior to blacks.
Similar to their colonial predecessors, the white American elite in the antebellum era were, as historian Winthrop Jordan wrote, “the living image of primitive aggressions which they said was the Negro but was really their ownâ€. During both the colonial and chattel slavery eras, there was a pattern of the elite white class projecting onto blacks a fear of their own sexual desires. They proclaimed racial purity while intermingling, most times through sexual violence, with both free and enslaved blacks. Although this landowning class possessed the most cultural
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Ibid, 68.
See Elise Virginia Lemire,
“Miscegenationâ€: Making Race in America. (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 12.
Ibid.
Takaki,
A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America, 50.Judie 9
influence, their own actions contradicted their theory of the racial purity. The United States was a nation established by immigrants who virtually annihilated the land’s indigenous people and then for centuries had its main industries powered through an imported labor force (Africans). Considering this history, the idea of keeping races separate in America is quite benighted.
These ideas of racial superiority, purity, and identity all collided in New Orleans during the 1800s. The new state of Louisiana received an influx of refugees from places such as, the Haitian Republic, Cuba, and Mexico from 1809-1811. During the 19th century, New Orleans was a hotbed of ideological tensions as U.S. officials worked to enforce American culture, laws, and racial division while a diverse array of traditions from many different ethnicities flourished. As a result of this tension, there emerged a complex relationship between Americanization and Creole identity in 19th century New Orleans. The term “Creole†in this case, refers to the various intersecting identities, practices, and traditions that are formed from the mixture of different cultures, races, and ethnicities. At the same time, in antebellum New Orleans, as with the rest of the South, whiteness was an attribute that assured economic and political freedom. Hence, many Creoles of African descent sought to recreate themselves by passing as white. Straying away from the narrative of “the tragic mulattoâ€, passing as white provided those with the ability to do so an opportunity to evade laws meant to track and subjugate people of African descent. Many Creoles of color succeeded in achieving status as a white American and thrived in society. Of course, not all Creoles of color were successful at passing and one controversial example of this phenomenon was the 1858 Louisiana Supreme Court case, Desarzant v. LeBlanc. Anastasia Desarzant was a French-speaking free woman of African descent who was passing as white in New Orleans. Desarzant filed a suit in 1858 after two childhood acquaintances referred to her as
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a woman of color on several public occasions. For her, this lawsuit was a chance to solidify her reputation as a white woman, but for other Creoles of color in New Orleans this case represented the advantages as well as the dangers of passing as white. Especially after the court ended up ruling against Desarzant in order to “place the matter in its true lightâ€. The final judgement stated, “that the plaintiff’s real status is that of a person of color and that she has been endeavoring to usurp that of a white personâ€. The Louisiana Supreme Court’s ruling on this case represented yet another measure taken by the powerful white male hegemony to draw clear racial markers which would continue to secure their economic and political advantages.
Despite this ruling and others, including anti-miscegenation legislature that came before and after it, racial ambiguity never disappeared. It was just relegated to the shadows or dismissed by legislation that sought ways to categorized people using the Anglo-American racial binary. In spite of the proclamations of white racial superiority, miscegenation was widely practiced, especially by propertied white men who pledged their allegiance to protect white purity. The very existence of mixed-race individuals, regardless of whether or not they chose to pass as white, transgressed the societal structure that was created during the colonial era. As a result of this heritage, miscegenation and the mixture of cultures has and will continue to be an integral part of the history of the United States.
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Ibid, 8.
Ibid, 6.
