|
Reserve Text: from F. James Davis, Who is Black? (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991). Chapter 3 HOW did it happen that some of the slaves on the plantations of the founding fathers appeared to be white? Was it the universal practice during slavery to define the lightest mulattoes as black? A look at miscegenation and the rules for determining who is black in the various periods and geographic areas of slavery in the United States, and during the Reconstruction era after emancipation will help answer those questions. The one-drop rule appeared early and eventually became the dominant rule, but for a long time it had a vigorous competitor, a rule that defined mulattoes not as blacks but as a racially mixed group between blacks and whites. Attention must be given to the different patterns of white control and the associated beliefs, to the different circumstances of miscegenation, to the issues surrounding mulattoes and the status of freedpersons, and to the shift in the sense of identity held by mulattoes. The one-drop rule did not become uniformly accepted until during the 1920s (see Chapter 4), but |
|
[32] before that there
had been more than two and a half centuries of miscegenation, most occurring
during slavery. In this chapter
and the next, I rely on Joel Williamson's New People (1980),
especially his lengthy first chapter, more than any other single source,
but detailed citations of this excellent work are avoided. Those who
read Williamson's book will note that, although he stresses the nation's
public definition of black, he prefers a different definition for his
analysis. He limits his own use of the term "black" to unmixed
African blacks; he defines "mulattoes" in the usual way, as
persons with any mixture of black and white ancestry; and he uses the
term "Negro" to mean any group that includes both blacks and
mulattoes. While there is some logic in limiting the term "black"
to unmixed African blacks, it is not defined that way now by the American
public or by legislators and judges. The terms Negro, mulatto, colored,
black, and African American have all come to mean persons with any African
black ancestry, no matter how little, and "black" has been
the usual term since the early 1970s (see Chapter 1). Our public usage
of "black;" and the one used in the present book, reflects
the one-drop rule. The terms black, African American, Negro, and colored
all include both unmixed African blacks and "mulattoes." Racially
mixed blacks are designated "mulattoes" in this book, regardless
of the degree of white-black mixture, and blacks who are not racially
mixed are called African blacks or unmixed blacks. Williamson emphasizes that the one-drop rule is unique to the United States, and also that it is paradoxical to have millions of people whose origins are more European than African defined by the general public, by law, and by themselves as black. The paradox is especially striking with regard to racially mixed people who appear white. He suggests that racial mixing in other societies has usually produced a third group loosely allied with the dominant race and asks why this pattern was broken in the United States (Williamson, 1980:2). Actually there are at least five other distinct patterns (see Chapter 5). However, Williamson has posed and provided convincing answers to the key questions: Why indeed have racially mixed persons of all shades in the United States been lumped with unmixed blacks into a single category called Negro-and later black or African American-and why have mulattoes in general come to accept and insist on that identity? From the beginning,
the one-drop rule for mulattoes seemed natural to the elites of the
upper South, since the whites involved in the racial mixing were an
underclass of indentured servants. However, the English rule had been
that a child had the class status of its father, so for half a century
or so the social position of the mulattoes was uncertain. Then, in 1662,
the colony of Virginia passed its first laws to discourage miscegenation,
proclaiming that any sexual intercourse between a white and a black
was twice as evil as fornication between two whites. Mulattoes born
to slave mothers were relegated to slave status. Until 1681 the mixed
child of a white woman was free, but thereafter the mother had to pay
a fine of five years of servitude, and the child was sold as an indentured
servant until the age of thirty. The white parent, male or female, was
to be banished from the colony within three months of the mixed child's
birth. In 1705 the penalty for the white parent was changed to six months
in jail. The mulatto children already existing in Virginia before these
punitive statutes were passed remained a problem, and the status of
their descendants was uncertain for two centuries. Although there
were legal uncertainties, by the early eighteenth cen- tury the one-drop
rule had become the social definition of who is black in the upper South.
After 1691, legal steps were taken to make manumission (the freeing
of a slave) more difficult in Virginia. Included was the requirement
that freed slaves had to leave the colony so that they would not become
a public burden when they became too old or too ill to work. Maryland,
Pennsylvania, and other colonies from New Hampshire to the Carolinas
followed Virginia's lead during the first quarter of the eighteenth
century, passing anti-miscegenation laws and otherwise limiting the
rights of mulattoes. Apparently, the primary motive for adopting these
laws was to prevent sexual liaisons and marriages between white indentured
women and black male slaves, yet both white and black women continued
to be involved in miscegenation. By the 1750s the legal status of mulattoes
in the Chesapeake area was still uncertain, although the whites clearly
thought of them as Negroes. During the era of the American Revolution
the amount of manumission increased considerably in the area, enlarging
and darkening the free mulatto population, which in turn resulted in
renewed determination on the part of whites to maintain a firm color
line. In 1785 Virginia
drew a genetic line, legally defining a Negro as a person with a black
parent or grandparent, a definition generally adopted at that time in
the upper South (Berlin, 1975:49,97-99). This allowed mulattoes to be
legally white if their black ancestry was any amount less than one-fourth,
such as three-sixteenths or seven thirty-seconds-but those fractions
were much too liberal in the eyes of most whites. Being legally white
conferred certain privileges, such as freedom from whipping by the police
for petty offenses. Intolerance for these lighter mulattoes, who were
legally white but socially black, became very strong. The pressure grew
to make the legal definition correspond to what had become the customary
social definition of a Negro as a person with any degree of black ancestry,
and the legislatures and courts began to move in that direction. SOUTH CAROLINA
AND LOUISIANA: A DIFFERENT RULE Rapid importation
of slaves continued in South Carolina until, by 1708, blacks outnumbered
whites. Sexual contacts between whites and slaves were tolerated until
the number of white women in the colony increased significantly. Then,
in 1717, punishments were adopted for both white males and females involved
in interracial pregnancies. Unprecedented, controversial restrictions
of mulattoes followed. Free Negroes lost the right to vote in 1721,
and in 1740 newly manumitted Negroes had to leave the colony. But the
restrictions generally were not severe, and free mulattoes received
fairly good treatment until the 1850s. It was then that interracial
marriage was first seriously questioned in South Carolina, and the state's
first anti-miscegenation statute was passed in 1865. Not even the failed
insurrection plot of 1822, led by freedman tJeriffiark Vesey, turned
the whites against their traditional allies, the free mulattoes. In
fact, a state legislative commission investigated the plot and pointed
out the advantages of having a mulatto group as a buffer between whites
and unmixed blacks. South Carolina's refusal to apply a one-drop rule to the free mulattoes, at least until the 1850s, became explicit in the courts. In the case ofa mulatto with an invisible but known one-sixteenth black ancestry, a Judge Harper declared the person to be white on the basis that acceptance by whites is more relevant than the proportions of white and black "blood." As late as 1835 the same judge made a similar ruling in the case of a person who apparently had some visible negroid traits, rejecting the criterion of racial visibility and embracing the test of reputation and acceptance in the white community. He commented that a [36] The status of mulattoes in lower Louisiana evolved from the French Catholic culture, at first by way of Santo Domingo and later by way of Haiti after the mulatto revolutionaries there ejected the French in the 1790s. Some of the free mulattoes rose to elite status in the Louisiana sugar economy, and then with cotton. Some, such as the Metoyer family, became wealthy, cultivated the arts of education, bought freedom from slavery for their own relatives, and themselves owned slaves. The mulatto elites avoided identification and marriage with both blacks and whites, following the Haitian pattern, carefully arranging marriages with other mulattoes. The southern Louisiana mulattoes in general developed and preserved the status of an in-between third group that was neither black nor white, thus avoiding the imposition of the one-drop rule until the 1850s. The Louisiana Civil Code of 1808 prohibited "free people of color" from marrying even blacks, in addition to whites, which was official recognition of a three-layered system of racial classification rather than a black-white dichotomy (Dominguez, 1986:23-26). The Creoles of
Louisiana, American-born whites of French or Spanish origin, employed
terms of reference for different degrees of racial mixture. The term
"Creole" itself came to be used by freedpersons to refer to
free mulattoes with some French or Spanish ancestry-thus, "Creoles
of Color" or "Black Creoles." The meaning of the Creole
identity varied and became a point of contention, especially in the
mid-nineteenth century, when the tripartite scheme of racial classification
came under intense pressure to change to a twofold scheme (Dominguez,
1986:12-16, 32, 94-151). Mulatto, meaning hybrid, comes from Spanish.
A person who was seven-eighths African black was called a "mango"
or a "sacatra." Someone three-quarters African was a "sambo"
or a "griffe." "Quadroon" and "octoroon"
became widely used for one-fourth and one-eighth African. The term "mustee,"
derived from the Spanish word mestizo (mixed European and Indian ancestry),
meant an octoroon, often one who was part Indian, but in some places
this term seemed to mean any mixture of black and Indian. A person one-sixteenth
African was called a "meamelouc," and someone who was one
sixty-fourth black a "sang-mele." The French Creoles had still
other terms, and the Spanish had a total of sixty four. In view of the
broad spectrum of ancestral fractions, such terms were usually just
approximations. Keeping mulatto
concubines became a luxury of many white men in Southern cities during
slavery, and nowhere was this more institutionalized than in Charleston
and New Orleans. It also became frequent among wealthy men in Virginia,
whose mulatto mistresses usually remained slaves. Sally Hemings, alleged
mistress of Thomas Jefferson, was not freed until two years after his
death (McHenry, 1980:35-38; Williamson, 1980:44-48). Jefferson's descendants
and some of his biographers have insisted that the father of Sally Hemings's
mixed children was one of Jefferson's nephews (Editors of Newsweek Books,
1974:336). Prospective concubines as well as prostitutes were sold as
"fancy girls" in the internal slave markets, and New Orleans
and Frankfort, Kentucky, became the largest markets for pretty quadroons
and octoroons (Bennett, 1962:256). The respectable New Orleans plaçage
system featured elaborate "quadroon balls" for meeting and
courting prospective free mulatto mistresses and for meeting the parents
and discussing details of agreements for housing and child care. Some
arrangements lasted only months or a few years, while others became
permanent. In New Orleans, as in Charleston, both mulatto servants and concubines were brought in from the plantations, and lighter and lighter mulattoes appeared in each successive generation. As in South Carolina, the free mulattoes enjoyed more privileges than unmixed blacks, but fewer than those enjoyed by whites. Homer Plessy and Mrs. Susie Phipps, plaintiffs in two widely publicized lawsuits (see Chapter 1), were both descendants of some of these "free people of color." There was consider able passing as white, and, although legally forbidden in Louisiana, some intermarriage (Blassingame, 1973:17-21). Most interracial sexual contacts were between white men and nonwhite women, but some involved white women. Miscegenation was both widespread and tolerated, as lower Louisiana accepted the in-between status of mulattoes and rejected the one-drop rule. Ownership of the
female slave on the plantations generally came to include owning her
sex life. Large numbers of white boys were socialized to associate physical
and emotional pleasure with the black women who nursed and raised them,
and then to deny any deep feelings for them (Blassingame, 1972:81-89).
From other white males they learned to see black girls and women as
legitimate objects of sexual desire. Rapes occurred, and many slave
women were forced to submit regularly to white males or suffer harsh
consequences. Frederick Douglass recounted the vicious beatings of his
aunt by their slavemaster, who was probably also Douglass's father.
His aunt paid a heavy price for rejecting her owner's sexual advances
and remaining true to the slave man she loved (Martin, 1984:3-4).
concubinage, and
sometimes love. In rare instances, where free Negroes were concerned,
there was even marriage (Bennett, 1962:243-68). Yet there is little
doubt that at the height of the plantation era much of the miscegenation
was marked by exploitation of slave females by white males. Generally,
in spite of the physical intimacy, white dominance was maintained by
the master-slave etiquette. Sexual contacts between white women and
black men were not tolerated, because a mixed child in a white household
violated and threatened the whole slave system. A mixed child in the
slave quarters was not only no threat to.the system but also a valuable
economic asset, another slave. The vast majority
of mulatto slaves on the plantations must have been permitted to find
mates among other mulattoes or among unmixed Africans. Thus, large numbers
of white genes were diffused into the slave population, and the percentage
of unmixed blacks declined. Social distinctions, based on whether one
was a house servant or a field hand and on the amount of "white
blood," developed among the slaves, particularly if the whites
concerned were aristocrats. A family prominent today in black society
in Washington, D.C., traces its lineage back to George Washington through
one of his mistresses. After being freed from slavery, the social status
of a mulatto also depended on the length of time he or she had been
free (Ottley, 1943:168). The "genteel tradition" among mulattoes began in the "big house" on the plantation. The slave servants learned white manners, habits, beliefs, and the master's English rather than the pidgin dialect of the field hands. Sons of house servants often were apprenticed to skilled artisans and in rare instances were then freed or allowed to purchase their freedom. House servants and skilled artisans attended the white church but sat in a segregated section, while field slaves attended their own churches and developed the black spiritual tradition (Frazier, 1957). When house servants and craftsmen were freed, whether before or after the Civil War, they transplanted the genteel tradition to the cities, where they joined the mulatto elites, perpetuating plantation-white ways and the value of lightness as marks of high status in the Negro community. Blue-vein societies, and other organizations that excluded all but the very light mulattoes who could meet certain physical standards of lightness, became crucial in keeping the gates to upper-class status in the urban Negro communities. Black male preference for light-colored mulatto women who met caucasian standards of beauty continued long after the end of slavery, although serious questioning of this priority began in the 1850. [40] The 1850 census
showed mulattoes to be 11.2 percent of the population classed as Negro.
This was based on visibility only, and thus was a gross undercount of
all Negroes with some white ancestry. Two-thirds of the mulattoes counted
were in the upper South, and more than half of them were free. Of the
smaller number of mulattoes counted in the lower South, including the
Black Belt, less than one-tenth were free. Georgia's mulattoes were
mostly slaves, as were most of those west and northwest of there, except
for lower Louisiana. The majority of the mulattoes in both New Orleans
and Charleston were free in 1850-exceptions to the general mold in the
lower South. The pattern in the newest slave states of Missouri, Kentucky,
and Tennessee was like that in the Black Belt: nine tenths of those
counted as mulattoes were slaves. In this sense, white men were increasingly
enslaving their own children and grand-children. Frederick Douglass
expressed his confused feelings about having a white father "who
would enslave his own blood" (Martin, 1984:3-4). By mid-century,
then, the proportion of mulattoes in slavery was both very high and
rising in areas and states settled after 1720, while farther north,
in the area where mulattoes were more numerous, the majority were free.
The 1860 census showed that this trend toward the "whitening"
of slavery continued during the 1850s, owing to the low rate of manumission
of mulattoes, and more to mulatto-unmixed black and mulatto-mulatto
unions than to unions involving whites. During the 1850s the South came under heavy pressure to defend its [41] institutions against
criticism from the North and from other countries. This included answering
questions about the apparent inconsistencies of the slave system,
such as the enslavement of the predominantly white persons, the double
standard of sexual morality in miscegenation, institutionalized concubinage,
and the differences in the status of mulattoes in different areas of
the South. Fear that slavery might be prohibited also promoted fear
of slave revolts and of free blacks. Tolerance of special treatment
for mulattoes on the plantation declined, and further legal restrictions
on manumission were imposed. Serious strains appeared in the alliance
between mulattoes and whites in Charleston and lower Louisiana, and
the status of mulattoes began to decline in free Negro communities as
well. Thus the exceptions to the one-drop rule, particularly the buffer
status of the mulatto elites in some situations and areas, began to
be eroded by the forces leading up to the War Between the States. Southern white
hostility toward free mulattoes grew after 1850. In Virginia the discrepancy
between the social and legal definitions of "black" erupted
into bitter controversy, and the law that anyone less than one-fourth
African was entitled to be white came under attack. A Charlottesville
editor argued that endless mixture with whites cannot make a white person
out of a Negro, thus lending his support to the one-drop rule (Berlin,
1975:365-66). Fear of insurrection and of the abolition of slavery turned
whites against mulattoes even in South Carolina and Louisiana. There,
as elsewhere in the South, vigilante groups were formed to watch free
Negro communities and to punish whites who continued sexual liaisons
with mulatto mistresses. This encouraged some Southern white women to
speak out against mulatto concubinage. There was agitation to have only
two classes of people rather than three and to expel nonproperty-holding
mulattoes from South Carolina, Louisiana, and other states. The freeing
of mulatto slaves became increasingly unpopular and legally restricted.
In the 1860s the vigilante activity spawned the Ku Klux Klan. Support for the
rule that mulattoes were not blacks but an in-between group rapidly
diminished during the 1850s, even in the Charleston and New Orleans
areas. The Louisiana "Creoles of Color" began their long struggle
to retain the advantages of an in-between status that was neither black
nor white (Dominguez, 1986:134-41). Public opinion became more and more
polarized, and all persons had to be classed as either white or black.
The one-drop rule received more solid support than ever throughout the
South, for the simple reason that it helped defend slavery. Public As whites in the
lower South guardedly rejected the lighter mulattoes whom they had previously
half-accepted, the latter sought alliances where they could find them.
Despite the traditional distrust of mulatto elites in the free Negro
communities, all Negroes began to be more allied in pursuit of their
common causes. In this realignment of race relations, whites gained
the one-drop rule but lost their alliance with the free mulattoes and
the advantages of having a buffer group between themselves and unmixed
blacks. This realignment started a basic shift in mulattoes' sense of
identity, especially lighter mulattoes, who began to see themselves
as Negroes rather than as a marginal group of "almost whites."
This shift in self-identity was accelerated early in the Civil War,
and dramatically so in Louisiana. In 1861 mulattoes formed a Negro regiment
to defend Louisiana but were disarmed by white officers and became alienated
from the white South. In 1862 the same regiment defected and joined
the Northern army. Receiving much bad treatment from whites in the Northern
forces, this regiment and other mulattoes came more and more to trust
blacks rather than any whites, North or South. |
|
[43] come enemies. The
racist ideas that were spread included many about mulattoes, who were
lumped more and more decisively with blacks in general. Whites and all
Negroes were now competitors for jobs, land, and political power. Job
competition with mulattoes was especially feared because of their experience
in the skilled crafts. These postwar developments
hastened the alliance between mulattoes and unmixed blacks that had
begun in the 1850s. Mulatto elite leaders began to speak for Negroes
as a whole and to lead the development of new American black institutions
and a black culture. The lower South, especially South Carolina, Florida,
and Louisiana, had the highest percentage of black legislators and other
public officials during the Reconstruction period, and most of them
were mulattoes. Many mulattoes migrated from the North and upper South
to the lower South to help in the reconstruction as teachers, relief
administrators, or missionaries. Southern whites widely feared that
the newly freed black males would take advantage of the postwar shortage
of white males and that miscegenation involving white women would be
rampant. By 1867 this idea became an obsession with the Ku Klux Klan.
Some whites advanced the view that they had lost the war because God
was punishing them for miscegenation. Black Republican political participation,
at the polls and in the legislatures, led temporarily to abolishing
the South's statutes against racial intermarriage, the so-called anti-miscegenation
laws-for example, Mississippi and Louisiana dropped their laws in 1870,
South Carolina in 1872 (after having such a law for only seven years),
and Arkansas in 1874. It was claimed at this time that every county
in South Carolina had up to three or four mixed marriages involving
white women, but the rate was always quite low. Edward B. Reuter and others have concJuded that sexual contacts between whites and blacks after the war, but contrary evidence and reasoning are more persuasive. In fact, sexual contacts not only seem to have decreased considerably during the war and its aftermath, but also probably reached a low point during Reconstruction. While some Southern white women did take black lovers, and a very few married them, these instances stand out as exceptions. The race groups became more segregated as the slave plantations were replaced by small farms, so that daily contacts between whites and blacks were less frequent. There was less opportunity and also less inclination for interracial sexual contacts (Williamson, 1980:88-91). All this took place in the context of vast devastation, social upheaval, resentment against the North, and economic dis- tress, as Southern
whites strove to replace slavery with a new system of cheap labor. The economic development
programs of the Reconstruction, including efforts to get blacks and
landless whites settled on land of their own, largely failed. Rebuilding
the South required a large amount of unskilled labor but also a great
deal of construction work involving expertise. It was generally the
mulatto slaves who were skilled in carpentry, masonry, cabinetmaking,
painting, and maintenance of buildings and machinery, and mulatto slave
women had been the dressmakers, gardeners, food preservers, and skilled
cooks, as well as nursemaids and house servants. New industrial job
opportunities began to emerge, and white Southern workers feared the
competition of former slaves in industry as well as in the skilled crafts.
Slaves had also been prohibited from learning to read, and there was
fear that blacks would become literate and take over clerical jobs in
business and government. Most whites in the South wanted blacks to be
restricted to field work and other manual labor. Eight Southern
states adopted Black Codes, designed primarily to prohibit blacks from
holding a large number of certain skilled and industrial jobs and to
provide special penalties for black debtors and vagrants. These codes
were quickly declared unconstitutional by the U. S. Supreme Court, and
Congress responded by passing the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments
to the Constitution. The Fourteenth Amendment, ratified in 1868, provided
that all citizens were entitled to equal protection and due process
of law. The Fifteenth Amendment, ratified in 1870, ensured equal voting
rights for all citizens regardless of "race, color, or previous
condition of servitude"--all citizens except women, that is, since
the attempt to add the word "sex" to the amendment failed. The clear aim of
the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments was to ensure that
the freed slaves had equal rights under the law. In 1867 Congress passed
the Reconstruction Acts, providing for the temporary military rule of
the South, which continued until 1875. During the Reconstruction years,
many blacks served in state legislatures in the South, and twenty served
in the U. S. Congress. It is little wonder that, during these strained
years when Southern whites and blacks were competitors and enemies,
white sexual contacts with blacks apparently were at a minimum. Although blacks
could no longer be owned as property objects, the demand was great for
their hard physical labor at low cost, and the vast majority of them
became tenant farmers under sharecropping agree- ments with white
owners. The black women and girls helped in the fields, and the women
were also in demand for household skills at low pay. Black children
received little schooling in their separate and unequal schools, so
that good field hands would not be "spoiled." The white landowners
and new industrialists opposed white labor demands for segregation laws
during the Reconstruction era, favoring instead paternalistic goodwill
toward the blacks. In return, the white owners expected the sharecroppers,
who had been used to slave quarters, to be content with inferior housing
and public facilities (Woodward, 1957). Only toward the end of the nineteenth
century did the white Southern elites join the white working class in
urging legislators to enact state and local segregation laws, and then
the tide was overpowering (Wilson, 1976:440-46). Despite growing
anti-mulatto sentiment among whites during the Reconstruction, antebellum
attitudes and practices did not die all at once, especially in the lower
South. Although the general disposition was clearly to move away from
miscegenation and to embrace the one-drop rule, there was also much
sentiment in favor of dealing equitably with the results of the previous
practices. In New Orleans, for example, the census of 1880 showed 205
mixed marriages (which had been legalized by the Reconstruction government),
29 of which involved white women. Of the 205 whites involved in these
marriages, 107 were foreign-born. All the couples tended to be older
people. Thus, many of these marriages were antebellum, and many of the
whites had been new in the community. Well after the Reconstruction in South Carolina, as late as 1895, there was political conflict between proponents of an unqualified one-drop rule and those who favored exceptions for descendants of antebellum mulattoes. In the state constitutional convention of 1895 it was proposed that the state again outlaw interracial marriages, and a legislative committee attempted to define a Negro, suggesting at first that anyone with oneeighth or more black ancestry was a Negro. Some legislators objected to this, proposing instead the one-drop rule, to which a George Tillman took strong exception. Tillman maintained that a one-drop rule would prevent marriage among many white families in South Carolina, since so many of them had black ancestry. He argued further that these families had produced men who had served creditably in the Confederate army and that it would be unjust and disgraceful to discredit them by declaring all their descendants to be black. This reasoning carried the day, and a Negro was defined as a person with one-eighth African black ancestry. Judge Harpers old reasoning about white conduct and acceptance thus [46] prevailed one more
time over a strict one-drop rule. This result was reached only a year
before the separate-but-equal precedent case of Plessy v. Ferguson in
Louisiana, in which the U.S. Supreme Court declared Plessy (who had
one-eighth African ancestry) to be black and embraced the one-drop rule
(see Chapter 1). An interesting
part of the above debate involved a mulatto congressman named Robert
Smalls, who put forth a proposal that whites who cohabited with Negroes
be barred from public office and that their children be given property
rights and the privilege of bearing the name of their father. Although
Smalls's proposal was defeated, this open reminder of concubinage and
other miscegenation in antebellum days caused much embarrassment and
delay. This bold conduct by a mulatto in the South Carolina legislature
came at a time when hostility toward miscegenation and mulattoes was
reaching a peak and when segregation laws were being passed to keep
the races apart, to get blacks out of politics, and in general to get
the blacks all back in "their place." This Restoration effort
will be looked at further in Chapter 4. THE STATUS OF
FREE MULATTOES, NORTH AND SOUTH [47] The status of freed
blacks in the North before the Civil War was little better than in the
South, and in some respects worse. The 1857 Supreme Court decision in
the Dred Scott case denied citizenship to blacks and said that escaped
slaves could be pursued into free states, arrested, and returned to
slavery. Free blacks in general were then suspected of being escapees
and were often asked to show the certificate of freedom. Typically in
the North, blacks had been barred from hotels, theaters, and other places
of entertainment and from skilled crafts and professional schools. They
had been segregated on trains and in churches, limited to menial jobs,
and taxed but not allowed to vote, serve on a jury, be a witness, or
serve in the peacetime military forces (Reuter, 1970:110-12). Two Northern states
had prohibited intermarriage, one had prevented blacks from owning real
estate or signing contracts, and five had not allowed blacks to testify
in court (Litwach, 1961). Job competition produced tensions, and blacks
were subjected to white race riots in several Northern cities in the
1820s, 1830s, and 1840s. Freedpersons in the North were generally poor,
and their legal status was uncertain, varied, and changing. Thus, well
before 1865, the entire nation had many precedents for systematic discrimination
against "free" blacks, and the onedrop rule was in widespread
use in the North and most of the South. THE EMERGENCE
AND SPREAD OF THE ONE DROP RULE In this chapter we followed the process of black-white miscegenation in the United States after its beginnings in Africa and Europe through over two centuries of varied experience with slavery and through the Reconstruction era. In each place and period, miscegenation has been related to the pattern of white domination and the associated beliefs, and to the ways of defining who is black. To underline the emergence of the one-drop rule, let us review the main themes. The first large-scale blackwhite mixing in the United States took place in the Chesapeake area between white indentured servants and both slave blacks and free blacks. Most of the whites involved were from the underclass, and the mixed [48] children were generally
treated as blacks, although in Virginia many were legally white by virtue
of the (then) one-fourth rule. Miscegenation in the lower South was
on a small scale during the early colonial period and generally involved
illicit unions between white males and black females, either slave or
free. At this time, especially in the Charleston and New Orleans areas,
mulattoes had an uncertain, in-between status, in contrast to that of
unmixed blacks. Southern Louisiana and South Carolina became major exceptions
to the one-drop rule, as miscegenation came to be accepted and free
mulattoes developed an alliance with whites. Later, during the height
of the plantation era, sexual contacts between whites and blacks were
frequent and typically involved white male exploitation of black females,
often under threats of violence or other punishment. Sometimes the contacts
involved adventure, love, prostitution, or concubinage, and often they
were initiated by the slave girls or slave women to gain special favors
for themselves or their mixed children. Preferential treatment
in the "big house" initiated the "genteel tradition,"
which was transferred by the limited amount of manumission to the free
Negro communities. In general, the master-slave etiquette made it possible
for white males to have interracial sexual contacts but to remain in
total control of the slaves. Intimacy between white women and black
men was not tolerated, because a mixed child in a white family threatened
the slave system, but another mulatto in the slave quarters was an economic
asset, not a threat. The temptation
to think of miscegenation only in terms of intermarriage must be avoided,
since most black-white sexual contacts in the United States have not
had the benefit of legal sanction, either during slavery or since. One
must also avoid the temptation to think of miscegenation as involving
only white-nonwhite sexual contacts. Long before slavery ended, miscegenation
had been occurring in mulatto-African black and mulatto-mulatto unions,
and often American Indian ancestry was involved as well. Genes from
white and black populations were mixed in these matings, since mulattoes
transmit white genes as well as black, and this is so whether one individual
is mainly African black and the other mainly white, or the two have
more nearly equal ratios. Thus, by the end of slavery, the visible traits
of the population defined by the one-drop rule as American blacks showed
a very wide and continuous variation from unmixed black to white. In
fact, as early as the time of the American Revolution there were plantation
slaves who appeared to be [49] completely white,
as many of the founding fathers enslaved their own mixed children and
grandchildren. Although strong
forces motivated Black Belt plantation whites to define a racially mixed
child as a black slave, many white owners and other white kin of the
mixed child were inclined to grant special treatment when they could
do so with impunity. The chief competition to the one drop rule remained
in the Charleston and New Orleans areas. At the height of the plantation
era, most of the mulattoes remained slaves, mixing with the African
blacks and thus "whitening" the slave population. In the 1850s
the strong fears of abolition and slave insurrections resulted in growing
hostility toward miscegenation, mulattoes, concubinage, passing, manumission,
and of the implicit rule granting free mulattoes a special, in-between
status in the lower South. The discrepancy between the social and legal
definitions of black in Virginia became a bitter public issue. Thus
the South came together in strong Support of the one-drop rule in order
to defend slavery, although some issues and exceptions to the rule continued
for decades. The growing rejection
by whites of the tie with mulattoes produced a shift in the sense of
identity of free mulattoes, who began to seek alliances with Negroes
in general. The Civil War greatly accelerated the alienation of mulattoes
from whites and caused Southern whites to see all Negroes as enemies.
During the Reconstruction, after the war ended in 1865, mulattoes emerged
as leaders of blacks in the South, and especially as teachers, relief
administrators, missionaries, and legislators. Thus mulattoes, having
no real choice, were themselves increasingly accepting the one-drop
rule. Black-white sexual
contacts apparently declined after 1850, reaching a low point during
the Reconstruction years, despite the temporary aboli tion of the anti-miscegenation
laws. Opportunities for intimate contact were reduced when the slave
plantations were replaced by the paternalistic sharecropping system,
and both white and black inclination for close contacts had declined.
Despite the shortage of white males, only a few white women took black
lovers or husbands, but that was enough to fan the fear that racial
mixing involving white females would run rampant. Poor white males,
who feared black competition in skilled trades and in industry, joined
the Ku Klux Klan and other vigilante groups to protect "white womanhood."
Some intimate contacts between white males and black females continued,
but in the midst of all the chaos and change there was far more mulatto-mulatto
and mulatto-unmixed black miscege- |
|
Works Cited: Adams, Romanzo.
1969. "The Unorthodox Race Doctrine of Hawaii." In Melvin
Tumin, ed., Comparative Perspectives on Race Relations, pp. 81-90.
Boston: Little, Brown & Co. [190] Berlin, Ira. 1975.
Slaves Without Masters: The Free Negro in the Antebellum South.
New York: Pantheon Books. Daniels, Doug.
1981. "The White Race Is Shrinking: Perceptions of Race in Canada,"
Ethnic and Racial Studies 4 (July), 353-56. [191]
|
|
[192] Henriques, Fernando.
1975. Children of Conflict: A Study of Interracial Sex and Marriage.
New York: E. P. Dutton. [193] Lincoln, C. Eric.
1961. The Black Muslims in America. Boston: Beacon Press. Litwach,
Leon F. 1961. North of Slavery. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. [194] logical View."
In Richard H. Osborne, ed., The Biological and Social Meaning of
Race, pp. 87-124. San Francisco: W. H. Freeman & Co. [195] Stoddard, Theodore Lothrop. 1920. The Rising Tide of Color. New York: Scribner. Stonequist, Everett
V. 1937. The Marginal Man. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. Toomer, Jean. Cane.
1923. New York: Boni and Liveright. -.1976. "Class
Conflict and Jim Crow Segregation in the Postbellum South." Pacific
Sociological Review 19 (October), 431-46. |
|
|