Marriage, Mixed

By: Jane Dailey

Source:

 Encyclopedia of African American History, 1619-1895: From the Colonial Period to the Age of Frederick Douglass

Marriage, Mixed

Marriage is regulated in the United States by state, not federal, law. Between the 1660s and the 1960s forty-one colonies or states passed laws regulating interracial marriage and sex. People of African descent were uniformly targeted by such laws, which also often prohibited whites from marrying Native Americans and those whose ancestors came from the Indian subcontinent, Asia, or the South Pacific.

The history of slavery, emancipation, and the black freedom struggle cannot be understood without reference to interracial sex and marriage. Racially restrictive marriage laws—termed antimiscegenation laws after the Civil War—were an important milestone in the creation of racial slavery in antebellum America because they limited the possibility of color confusion in a system increasingly predicated on physiognomy. After emancipation, arguments about mixed marriage and interracial sex played a central—if not the central—role in the white supremacist construction of a system of racial classification and oppression. The sexual behavior of Americans—both legal and extralegal—had enormous repercussions for the nation's emerging social, economic, and political systems.

Colonial Chesapeake

In early America freeborn English men and women were permitted to marry Africans and the indigenous people Europeans called Indians. There were, in fact, advantages to such alliances in the earliest days of the New World colonies. Marriage across ethnic, language, and religious barriers has often served to cement social and political alliances and smooth the way for empire; the 1614 marriage of the English tobacco farmer John Rolphe to the Algonquian Indian princess Pocahontas brought peace to the infant colony of Virginia, founded in 1607.

Throughout the colonial period most people of African descent lived in the Chesapeake Bay colonies of Maryland and Virginia. Until the middle of the seventeenth century little legal distinction was made between slaves brought from Africa and white servants in the mixed labor force of the Chesapeake region, and the boundary between slavery and freedom was permeable. Small communities of free blacks appeared on the Atlantic coast. Some of these free people of color became slaveholders themselves—a fact that, among others, undermined the emerging logic of racial slavery. Some of these free men of color asserted their equality with other free men in another way: by marrying white women. At least one man from every leading free black family on the eastern shore in Virginia married a white woman. Many of their light-skinned descendants passed into white society; others joined Native American tribes and groups of European American settlers to create biracial and triracial communities.

Slaves and servants as well participated in interracial intimacy, often on equal terms with their partners. More mixed-race children were born to black slaves and white servants than to the black slaves of white planters. Between one-quarter and one-third of illegitimate children born to white women had fathers of African descent. In 1690 Ann Butler, a white woman in Somerset County, Maryland, gave birth to a child described in court documents as “a Molotta Bastard Child.” Bastardy was a crime in colonial America, as in early-modern Europe, offending both the morals and the purses of the ruling classes. Local communities had to provide for the illegitimate offspring of their members—which cost money. Often one town sued another over who was responsible for providing for said offspring.

Mixed-race illegitimate children, especially when borne by free white women, were even more offensive because they complicated the slaveholding elite's ongoing efforts to solder status to race. When interrogated, Butler named Emanuel, a slave belonging to William Coulbourne, as her baby's father. Ordered by the court to testify at the next judicial session against Emanuel, Butler was also sentenced to thirty-five lashes at the public whipping post. Then, at the next session of the court, the justices sentenced Emanuel to thirty-nine lashes and added that “Butler [was] to stand by his side” during the whipping. One might assume that the audience to such a spectacle condemned both Ann and Emanuel—as, indeed, Somerset County's ruling class intended. On the other hand, they might just as well have read the scene as one of star-crossed lovers standing in stoic solidarity in defiance of the law.

Ann Butler's official crimes were adultery and bastardy, but colonial assemblies also discouraged interracial marriage. In 1664 the Assembly of Maryland declared that free women who married slaves would take on the status of their husbands and become enslaved themselves. In an important departure from the common-law rule of patrimony, children would inherit the status of their mothers. When Nell Butler, the white servant girl of the third Lord Baltimore, decided to marry the black slave Charles in 1681, her lord tried to dissuade her by reminding her that the marriage would make slaves of her and all her descendants. Butler insisted that she would rather marry Charles than Lord Baltimore himself (and would rather sleep with Charles, too—apparently she had a basis for comparison). Baltimore relented, and the marriage was performed by a local Catholic priest. The marriage of Butler and Charles would have been prohibited one hundred, even two hundred, years later but was possible in the colonial Chesapeake, as lines of color and caste ran parallel but were not yet tied together.

This unsegregated world ended shortly after the marriage of Butler and Charles. By the late seventeenth century the marriage of whites with those designated by law as nonwhite was prohibited in Virginia and Maryland, where most Africans and their descendants lived. Concurrently, further restrictions were placed on slaves, who were no longer free to carouse with white servants. In this context blackness and whiteness took on new meaning, as slavery became more firmly associated with racial identity: blacks were slaves, whites were free.

So what became of Butler's descendants, one might wonder? In terms of law Butler was almost certainly enslaved after her marriage to Charles. An inventory of her master's saleable goods taken at his death in 1709 includes “1 old Irish woman”—Butler was commonly referred to as “Irish Nell.” By the Revolutionary era, however, the buying and selling of human beings had become color coded. The members of the General Court of the Western Shore who heard the freedom petition of Butler's great-granddaughter in 1787 most likely could not quite imagine that an Irish woman could be a legitimate slave; Butler's great-granddaughter was freed.

Revolutionary Era and Early Republic

Statistics regarding interracial sex and marriage are scarce; most mixed-race families lived outside the law—even in the North, where interracial marriage was forbidden through the mid-nineteenth century in Massachusetts, Maine, and Rhode Island. The best indicator of the prevalence of interracial sex, if not marriage, was the introduction of the new racial category of “mulatto” into the U.S. Census in 1850. That year officials concluded that 11 percent of the nation's African Americans were of mixed race (apparently all whites were pure). Although white men crossed the racial boundary in search of sex more often than did white women, even women's interracial sexual liaisons went uncensored far more often than might have been expected. A study of antebellum Alabama revealed eighty-three long-term interracial relationships, of which approximately half involved white women and free black men. No community action was taken against any of these unions.

Although outside the law and against the social grain, free white women's interracial love affairs may generally be considered (without evidence to the contrary) to have been consensual. Such was not the case for slave women, who often found themselves entangled in coercive sexual relationships with white men. Widely noted at the time, the sexual relationships of white men with female slaves undermined primary relationships on both sides and truly made slavery a “family affair.” A number of influential post-Emancipation African American leaders, including Frederick Douglass and Francis and Archibald Grimké, called their master “father.” Some slave-owning fathers (such as the Grimkés') recognized and provided for their offspring; more often they sold their children at the behest of their white wives, who were offended by the physical evidence of their husbands' sexual infidelities.

Despite the disapprobation of both the law and white society, in places interracial relationships flourished. Port cities on the Gulf of Mexico were particularly noted for their toleration of both licit and illicit interracial liaisons. There, according to one outraged clergyman, men of high standing lived “almost publicly with colored concubines” and “did not even ‘blush’” when they brought their mixed-race children to be enrolled in the parochial registries. Of course, these comments referred to New Orleans, where the director of the Capuchins' plantation “kept a mixed-race housekeeper whose children called him ‘papa.’”

The willingness of white men in the lower Mississippi Valley to recognize their mixed-race children and their relationships with the black women who bore them evolved by the end of the eighteenth century into an institution just short of marriage, termed plaçage. Recognized by all save the church and the state—significant omissions, to be sure—plaçage relationships assured free black women a lifetime commitment and often secured for them prominent positions in local society.

As the nature of the plaçage system would suggest, interracial affection and commitment were capable of crossing great chasms in power and status. Ralph Quarles, a Revolutionary War hero and Virginia planter of some means, fathered four children by Lucy Langston, a slave Quarles acquired as payment for a debt. Quarles emancipated and provided for all five enslaved members of his family. Buried side by side in 1836, neither Ralph nor Lucy lived to see their youngest son, John Mercer Langston, elected to Congress in 1888 as Virginia's first African American member of the House of Representatives.

The most famous interracial liaison short of marriage before the Civil War was the decades-long intimate relationship between Thomas Jefferson, the principal author of the Declaration of Independence and third president of the United States, and his slave Sally Hemings. Thanks to the long-term relationship between Jefferson's father-in-law, John Wayles, and his slave Elizabeth Hemings, Sally Hemings was the half-sister of Jefferson's wife, Martha Wayles Skelton Jefferson, who died some years before her husband's alliance with Sally began. The thirty-eight-year relationship between Jefferson and Hemings lasted longer than most single-race marriages in the early Republic. During this period Sally Hemings bore either six or seven children (the number is contested), four of whom lived to adulthood. Two of these children, Beverly and Harriet, ran away from Monticello and married into white families. Jefferson freed the remaining two, Madison and Eston, through his will when he died in 1826. Sally Hemings herself was freed shortly after Jefferson's death, following him to the grave in 1835. Though they were slaves like their mother, the Hemings children never doubted their racial identity: both Madison and Eston were white according to Virginia law, and both were counted accordingly in the 1830 federal census.

The relatively fluid society of colonial labor and legal status—in which Africans could cross the line between free and unfree, marry European women, and see their children blend into the free world of whites—devolved by the early nineteenth century into a society in which the lines between freedom and lack of freedom and between white and black were drawn much more boldly. Although the worlds of law and society never matched entirely—as the lives of the Hemings children attest—legal proscriptions on interracial marriage and sex limited the possibilities for the sort of cross-race alliances struck up in the colonial era and contributed to the increasingly rigid racial slave regime of the antebellum South.

The Antebellum Era

The inability of American slaves to marry legally was one of the clearest signs that they were neither free nor equal to others. Whereas indentured servants and others at various points on the servile spectrum could marry and establish families, slaves could not legally marry other slaves—a fact that enabled masters and mistresses to sexually exploit slaves and break up their relationships and families. Antimiscegenation laws, which prohibited whites from marrying free nonwhites, translated what was a marker of slavery into one of race. Indeed, the articulation of such laws in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was an important milestone in the creation of racial slavery in America and the broader system of white supremacy.

The fact that interracial marriage was prohibited in most of the nation before the Civil War does not mean that white and black Americans did not have sex with each other. Although white men crossed the racial boundary in search of sex more often than white women did, even women's interracial sexual liaisons went uncensored far more than might be expected. Sex between black men and white women seems to have been tolerated unless and until such unions produced mixed-race children—a fact that suggests that white Americans were as concerned with the orderly transmission of property along race lines as with supposed issues of racial purity. Dorothea Bourne, for example, could probably have continued a long-standing adulterous affair with a neighbor's slave had she not given birth to his child. The arrival of a suspiciously dark baby cast Dorothea's much older husband, Lewis, in the public role of cuckold; he filed for divorce in 1824.

Dorothea Bourne's principal crime was adultery, not miscegenation. Neither her own nor her lover Edward's racial identity was at issue. But the cases of those prosecuted under antimiscegenation statutes did often turn on racial identity, because the court could rule that a marriage was miscegenous only when the racial identities of the couple could be legally established. That is, miscegenation as transgression depended on the legal establishment of clear boundaries to transgress; yet, miscegenation as historical fact undercut those very boundaries. Because miscegenation threatened to undermine any system of clear-cut racial classification, it became a problem for the southern social and labor systems, which depended on stable categories of whiteness and blackness.

To counter this problem, antebellum state legislatures wrote a series of laws that defined whiteness for the purpose of marriage. This was always done in the negative, meaning that various degrees of blackness were defined, and people's marital possibilities were outlined accordingly. Depending on the state and the decade, people who were more than half black, one-fourth black, one-eighth black, one-sixteenth black, or even one-thirty-second black could not marry anyone defined by law as white; when a law prohibiting marriage with “persons who are part African” was proposed in Wisconsin in 1859, one wit asked, “What part?”

Antimiscegenation laws notwithstanding, marriages did occur across the color line in the Slave South. In 1805 Robert Wright, the mulatto son of a wealthy Virginia landowner and a black slave mother, inherited his father's estate. A year after inheriting the property, Wright married a white woman, although the marriage was not recorded legally; the Wrights managed to live openly as husband and wife without irritating their white neighbors. Wright's life began to unravel, however, when his wife left him for another man—a white man. When Wright petitioned the Virginia legislature for a divorce so that he could marry another white woman, the House of Delegates refused, declaring that although “Robert Wright could be married to a white woman in his community, he could not be married to her in law.” This decision cost Wright more than the wife of his choice. Having lived effectively as a white man for years, Wright was racially redefined in the public records and demoted on the county tax rolls from “White” to “Mulatto.” When he defied social convention by living openly with the woman the legislature had denied him the right to marry, Wright's neighbors condemned his “adultery” and ostracized him. Wright died humiliated at the age of thirty-eight, just two years after the commonwealth of Virginia and his neighbors stripped him of the prerogatives of whiteness.

Politics of Miscegenation in Civil War America

Miscegenation was a powerful political issue irrespective of the actual number of individuals who crossed racial boundaries in love and sex. Proslavery agitators constantly accused abolitionists of desiring interracial liaisons. By the 1830s newspapers commonly carried lithographed prints of interracial abolitionist couples kissing and marrying. Leading abolitionists such as Lewis and Arthur Tappan were rumored to favor interracial sex and to want their children to marry blacks. Such accounts fanned the flames of mob violence; on Independence Day in 1834 a mob attacked an integrated meeting of the American Anti-Slavery Society in New York City. The eleven days of rioting that followed was the greatest violence seen in New York until the 1863 Draft Riot.

Charges that abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison favored the amalgamation of the races gained currency from Garrison's own pronouncements about freedom of marriage. The existence of an antimiscegenation law in his own state of Massachusetts, Garrison declared, made “the wearing of a black skin a punishable offense” and “violated one of the principles of our Constitution … the right of every individual to seek happiness.” But those whose antislavery convictions were less pronounced also found themselves accused of favoring sexual liaisons across the color line. The debates between the two Illinois senatorial candidates in 1858, as recorded by Harold Holzer in The Lincoln-Douglas Debates, are a case in point. Accused by the Democrat Stephen A. Douglas of favoring repeal of the state's antimiscegenation laws, the Republican Abraham Lincoln—who was then against the spread of slavery but not committed to its abolition—replied, “I am not going to enter at large upon this subject, [but] I have never had the least apprehension that I or my friends would marry negroes if there was no law to keep them from it.” Lincoln affirmed that he gave “the most solemn pledge that I will to the very last stand by the law in this State that forbids the marriage of white folks with negroes.” When Douglas continued to press the issue, in the sixth debate Lincoln reaffirmed his opposition to intermarriage as well as other forms of social equality: “I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters of the free negroes, or jurors, or qualifying them to hold office or having them to marry with white people.”

All these rights—with the notable exception of freedom of marriage—would later be included in the Fourteenth Amendment (1868), which was designed to protect freedpeople's basic rights to life, liberty, and property from potentially unfriendly southern state governments. Before the Civil War, however, the symbolic power of the hierarchy implicit in antimiscegenation laws remained politically useful for those dedicated to saving slavery, as well as for those unwilling to challenge it head-on. To support his argument in the Dred Scott decision (1857) that even free blacks had no rights under the U.S. Constitution, Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger B. Taney turned to antimiscegenation laws passed by Maryland and Massachusetts during the Revolutionary era; such laws demonstrated that the founding fathers “looked upon [blacks] as so far below them in the scale of created beings, that intermarriages between white persons and negroes or mulattoes were regarded as unnatural and immoral, and punished as crimes.” Further, the official decision stated that “no distinction in this respect was made between the free negro or mulatto and the slave, but this stigma, of the deepest degradation, was fixed upon the whole race.”

Politics of Intermarriage after Emancipation

From the Constitution to the first congressional debates over the Reconstruction amendments, opponents of African American equality linked sexual and political rights, arguing that the state could not deny a citizen-voter the wife of his choice and that giving black men the vote would inevitably lead to interracial marriage. As one southerner depicted the situation,

"Do away with the social and political distinctions now existing, and you immediately turn all the blacks and mulattoes into citizens, co-governors, and acquaintances: and acquaintances … are the raw material from which are manufactured friends, husbands, and wives. The man whom you associate with is next invited to your house, and the man whom you invited to your house is the possible husband of your daughter, whether he be black or white."

(Moran, p. 79) Champions of black equality vehemently denied this scenario and insisted that clear lines could be drawn between political and what became known as “social” rights. “It is fright that makes you mistake a ballot for a billet-doux,” the Republican William “Pig Iron” Kelley teased the Democrats in 1868. “It cannot be possible that any man of common sense can bring himself to believe that marriages between any persons, much less between white and colored people, will take place because a colored man is allowed to drop a little bit of paper into a box.”

But that was exactly what many white people believed; thus, while protecting black men's rights to vote and hold office, Republicans refused to extend the Fourteenth Amendment's prohibition of discrimination based on “race, color, or previous condition of servitude” to the question of marriage. There would be no federal declaration with regard to interracial marriage; the issue would instead continue to be regulated by the states. The consequences of this decision were enormous. From limits on freedom of marriage and sex were derived limits on other forms of social contact; public schools, hospitals, trains, streetcars, restaurants, theaters, and even cemeteries were segregated through the extension and application of this sexual logic. Southerners called the statutes of segregation Jim Crow laws; these laws influenced race relations in other regions in America as well, particularly the West.

Case of Frederick Douglass

Born a slave on Maryland's Eastern Shore in 1818, Frederick Douglass escaped the fate seemingly dealt him and became instead the most important African American thinker and leader of the nineteenth century. A renowned author, orator, and editor, Douglass was a tireless advocate of the rights of his people for three-quarters of a century. Of mixed parentage himself—his father was a white man—on 24 January 1884 the then-widowed Douglass married his copyist, Helen Pitts, a white woman. The marriage was performed in the parsonage of the Fifteenth Street Presbyterian Church in Washington, D.C., by the Reverend Francis James Grimké. Himself the son of a slave mother, Nancy Weston, and her aristocratic South Carolina master, Grimké was the nephew of the renowned abolitionist sisters Angelina Grimké and Sarah Grimké. Francis Grimké's performance of the ceremony, William S. McFeely writes, “was an assertion not only of the sacred blessedness of this interracial marriage, soon the nation's most famous, but of its secular correctness as well.”

The marriage was not without its controversy. Douglass's children with his first wife, Anna Murray, were unhappy to see their mother replaced by a white woman. This feeling of betrayal toward the race was shared on a national level by many African Americans. “Fred Douglass has married a red-head white girl,” wrote one black newspaper correspondent. “Goodbye, black blood in that family. We have no further use for him. His picture hangs in our parlor, we will hang it in the stables.”

Confident in his belief that marriage was a personal right, Douglass was unprepared for the criticism evoked by his choice of bride. “My first wife, you see, was the color of my mother; and my second wife the color of my father,” he once explained tongue in cheek. “I wanted to be perfectly fair to both races.” He was somewhat cheered by the good-natured ribbing of his old abolitionist comrade Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who wrote that she had heard “much criticism on your condescension in marrying a white woman. After all the terrible battles and political upheavals we have had in expurgating our constitutions of that odious adjective ‘white’ it is really remarkable,” she teased, “that you of all men should have stooped to do it honor.” Congratulating the new couple, Stanton agreed with Douglass “that in some things individual tastes,” and not state law or public opinion, should rule. By late summer 1884 the stir had largely abated, and Douglass was able to report to his old friend Amy Post “that Helen and I are making life go very happily and that neither of us has yet repented of our marriage.”

Frederick and Helen Douglass married in the District of Columbia, which was for a century the southernmost outpost of free marital choice in nineteenth-century America. In the coming years, white supremacists in Congress would repeatedly try to prohibit such marriages in the district, without success. In the meantime, as the nineteenth century wore to a close and America acquired what the historian John Hope Franklin termed “America's Negro Empire” through the Spanish-American War, racially restrictive marriage laws spread to the western states. Despite Emancipation and Reconstruction, American citizens of whatever complexion remained unable to marry freely.

See also American Anti-Slavery Society; Antislavery Movement; Black Family; Civil War; Constitution, U.S.; Discrimination; Douglas, Stephen A.; Douglass, Anna Murray; Douglass, Frederick; Dred Scott Case; Fourteenth Amendment; Garrison, William Lloyd; Gender; Grimké, Angelina; Grimké, Sarah; Hemings, Sally; Identity; Inheritance and Slave Status; Jefferson, Thomas, on African Americans and Slavery; Jim Crow Car Laws; Laws and Legislation; Lincoln, Abraham; Lynching and Mob Violence; Mulattoes; Native Americans and African Americans; Post, Amy and Isaac; Race, Theories of; Racism; Reconstruction; Segregation; Sexuality; Skin Color; Slavery and the U.S. Constitution; Stanton, Elizabeth Cady; Supreme Court; Taney, Roger B.; Tappan, Lewis; and Washington, D.C.

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