Mixed Race Studies

Color Differentiation in the American Systems of Slavery

The Journal of Interdisciplinary History
Volume 3, Number 3 (Winter, 1973)
pages 509-541

Donald L. Horowitz, James B. Duke Professor of Law and Political Science
Duke University

In the comparative study of race relations, the evolution of group identity constitutes a central process. Although group boundaries tend to be taken as given, they are more fluid than is often supposed. The criteria of membership may change, and the inclusiveness of the groups may expand or contract accordingly.

The forces promoting the redefinition of ethnic group boundaries are only imperfectly understood. This applies particularly to the emergence of new groups. While the study of assimilation lias received much attention, the study of differentiation has not. Ethnic contact and the progeny it produces, for example, provide opportunities for the creation of new ethnic categories. But the opportunities arc not always taken. In some cases, distinctive “mixed-blood” groups emerge; in others, the offspring are incorporated in one or another of the original groups.

Examples of this process of group differentiation may be found in the history of slavery in the Western Hemisphere. Some slave systems differentiated “mulattoes” from Africans and bestowed varying degrees of separate status; others suppressed such possible distinctions. Everywhere rules were formulated to define the boundaries of the respective groups, to specify the criteria of identification, to categorize marginal cases, and to permit individual exceptions to the rules of group membership…

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Power, Perception, and Interracial Sex: Former Slaves Recall a Multiracial South

The Journal of Southern History
Volume 71, Number 3 (August, 2005)
pages 559-588

Fay A. Yarbrough, Associate Professor of History
University of Oklahoma

My father’s name wuz Robert Stewart. He wuz a white man. My mother wuz named Ann. She wuz part Indian. Her father wuz a Choctaw Indian and her mother a black woman—a slave.” This is how Charley Stewart, a former slave, described his lineage. Stewart was not alone in claiming parents and grandparents of mixed racial heritage; there are many references to mixed-race ancestry in the interviews of ex-slaves collected by the Works Progress Administration (WPA) in the 1930s. The interviews also contain candid observations about interracial unions in general and about how people of African descent understood relationships that crossed social. legal, and racial boundaries. The former slaves described various combinations of racial unions and their ramifications for the participants, families, fellow slaves, and offspring. This article will consider the words of ex-slaves, using the WPA collection and a selection of biographies and autobiographies of slaves, and will re-create descriptions of and attitudes toward interracial sex during the nineteenth century. These accounts…

Intimacy and Inequality: Manumission and Miscegenation in Nineteenth-Century Bahia (1830-1888)

University of Nottingham
April 2010
428 pages

Jane-Marie Collins

Thesis submitted to the University of Nottingham for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, Hispanic and Latin American Studies

This thesis proposes a new paradigm for understanding the historical roots of the myth of racial democracy in Brazil. In order to better comprehend the co-existence of race discrimination and racial democracy in Brazil it is argued that the myth itself needs to be subjected to an analysis which foregrounds the historically unequal relations of both race and gender. This study demonstrates how the enigma that is Brazilian race relations is the result of two major oversights in the scholarly work to date. First, the lack of critical attention to the historical processes and practices which gave rise to the so-called unique version of race relations in Brazil: manumission and miscegenation. Second, the sidelining of the role of gender and sex, as well as the specific and central place of black women’s labour, in theoretical formulations about Brazilian race relations.

The overarching intellectual aim of this thesis is to invert the way notions of familiarity and intimacy have been represented in the history of miscegenation and manumission in Brazilian slave society. The role of intimacy in the social history of race relations is instead shown to be firmly located within a hierarchy of race and gender inequalities predicated on the inferiority of blacks and women. In turn, this thesis explores how these race and gender inequalities intersected to inform and shape enslaved women’s versions of resistance and visions of freedom. In doing so this study unpicks some of the notions of advantage and privilege traditionally associated with women in general and light skin colour in particular in the processes of manumission and miscegenation; notions that are foundational to the myth of racial democracy.

Through an examination and analysis of primary sources pertaining to the lives of enslaved and freedwomen and their descendants in nineteenth-century Bahia, this study brings together different areas of their lived experiences of enslavement, manumission, miscegenation and freedom as these women came into contact with the authorities at pivotal moments in their lives. Collectively, these sources and the analysis thereof expose the limitations of advantage or privilege that have been associated with being female, parda or mulatta in the historiography of Brazilian slave society in general and the literature on manumission in particular. By foregrounding and highlighting the ways in which overlapping inequalities of race, gender and status determined experiences of enslavement and expectations of freedom during slavery, this study produces a new approach to interpreting race and gender history in Brazil, and a more comprehensive understanding of Brazilian slave labour relations.

CONTENTS

• Acknowledgements
• Glossary
• Section One: Introduction
  • Part 1: Introduction and overview
  • Part 2: ntimacy and Inequality: inverting the paradigm of racial democracy
• Section Two: Becoming Freed
  • 2.1 Introduction
  • 2.2 Manumission in comparative perspective
  • 2.3 Manumission in Africa
  • 2.4 Manumission in the Americas
  • 2.5 Manumission in Brazil
  • 2.6 Manumission, a gendered perspective: assessing advantage
  • 2.7 Childhood manumissions, Salvador 1830-1871
  • 2.8. Disputing and defending freed status
  • 2.9 Conclusion
• Section Three: Work, Wealth and Mobility
  • Part 1: The Demographics of Slavery in nineteenth-century Brazil
    • 3.1 Introduction
    • 3.2 The slave trades: trans-Atlantic and domestic
    • 3.3 Brazilian slave societies: provincial profiles
    • 3.4 Conclusion
    • 3.5 Occupational hierarchies, race and gender
    • 3.6 Conclusion
  • Part 2: Manumission and Mobility
    • 3.7 Introduction
    • 3.8 Manumission and creolisation
    • 3.9 Manumission and mobility
    • 3.10 Lourença on liberty
    • 3.11 Markets, labour and love
    • 3.12 Africanas and brasileiras, libertas and livres
    • 3.13 Motherhood and marriage
    • 3.14 Material wealth
    • 3.15 Markets and mobility
    • 3.16. Lourença’s last words
    • 3.17 Conclusion
• Section Four: The Enslaved Family: Unity, Stability and Viability
  • 4.1 Introduction
  • 4.2 The historiography of the Brazilian slave family: an overview
  • 4.3 Slave family 1: African/urban
  • 4.4 Slave family 2: mixed race/mixed status
  • 4.5 Slave family 3: married/rural
  • 4.6 Slave family 4: slave/free marriage
  • 4.7. Conclusion
• Section Five: Resistance
  • 5.1. Introduction
  • Part 1: Flight
    • 5.2 Paradigms
    • 5.3 Male flight
    • 5.4 Female flight: single women
    • 5.5 Female flight, family and protection
    • 5.6 Conclusion
  • Part 2: Murder
    • 5.7 Introduction
    • 5.8 Case studies
    • 5.9 Analysis
    • 5.10 Conclusion
  • Part 3: Infanticide
    • 5.11 Introduction
    • 5.12 Infanticide and slave resistance
    • 5.13 Infanticide and Illegitimacy: a question of honour?
    • 5.14 Conclusion
• Section Six: Conclusion
• Appendix
• Sources and Bibliography

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People of Color in Lousiana: Part I

The Journal of Negro History
Volume 1, Noumber 4 (October, 1916)
pages 361-376

Alice Dunbar-Nelson (1875-1935)

PEOPLE OF COLOR IN LOUISIANA

PART I

The title of a possible discussion of the Negro in Louisiana presents difficulties, for there is no such word as Negro permissible in speaking of this State. The history of the State is filled with attempts to define, sometimes at the point of the sword, oftenest in civil or criminal courts, the meaning of the word Negro. By common consent, it came to mean in Louisiana, prior to 1865, slave, and after the war, those whose complexions were noticeably dark. As Grace King so delightfully puts it, “The pure-blooded African was never called colored, but always Negro.” The gens de couleur, colored people, were always a class apart, separated from and superior to the Negroes, ennobled were it only by one drop of white blood in their veins. The caste seems to have existed from the first introduction of slaves. To the whites, all Africans who were not of pure blood were gens de couleur. Among themselves, however, there were jealous and fiercely-guarded distinctions: “griffes, briques, mulattoes, quadroons, octoroons, each term meaning one degree’s further transfiguration toward the Caucasian standard of physical perfection.”

Negro slavery in Louisiana seems to have been early influenced by the policy of the Spanish colonies. De las Casas, an apostle to the Indians, exclaimed against the slavery of the Indians and finding his efforts of no avail proposed to Charles V in 1517 the slavery of the Africans as a substitute.  The Spaniards refused at first to import slaves from Africa, but later agreed to the proposition and employed other nations to traffic in them. Louisiana learned from the Spanish colonies her lessons of this traffic, took over certain parts of the slave regulations and imported bondmen from the Spanish West Indies. Others brought thither were Congo, Banbara, Yaloff, and Mandingo slaves.

People of color were introduced into Louisiana early in the eighteenth century. In 1708, according to the historian, Gayarré, the little colony of Louisiana, at the point on the Gulf of Mexico now known as Biloxi, in the present State of Mississippi, had been in existence nine years. In 1708, the population of the colony did not exceed 279 persons. The land about this region is particularly sterile, and the colonists were little disposed to undertake the laborious task of tilling the soil. Indian slavery was attempted but found unprofitable and exceedingly precarious. So Bienville, lacking the sympathy of De las Casas for the Indians, wrote his government to obtain the authorization of exchanging Negroes for Indians with the French West Indian islands. “We shall give,” he said, “three Indians for two Negroes. The Indians, when in the islands, will not be able to run away, the country being unknown to them, and the Negroes will not dare to become fugitives in Louisiana, because the Indians would kill them.”…

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Between Black and White: Attitudes Toward Southern Mulattoes, 1830-1861

The Journal of Southern History
Volume 45, Number 2 (May, 1979)
pages 185-200

Robert Brent Toplin, Professor of History
University of North Carolina, Wilmington

The documents of slavery—laws, narratives speeches, and political tracts—contain abundant references to “Negroes” and “mulattoes.” By the standards of antebellum America, the distinction was not accidental or minor. Contemporary attitudes about the difference between Negro and mulatto related to fundamental racial ideas. For many years Americans from both the North and South openly expressed a marked bias favoring the mulatto over the Negro. The variations in white attitudes toward mulattoes in the antebellum period need closer investigation than they have received, especially in connection with conflicting opinions about miscegenation, sexual oppression, and racial identification. In many respects disputes about the mulatto’s position in southern society related to fundamental points in the debates about slavery and abolition.

Historians of slavery recognize that antebellum Americans often showed special interest in mulattoes, but their estimates of the extent and importance of this interest vary greatly. In a careful study of white attitudes from 1550 to 1812 Winthrop D. Jordan…

Boucicault’s misdirections: Race, transatlantic theatre and social position in The Octoroon

Atlantic Studies
Volume 6, Number 1 (April 2009)
pages 81-95
DOI: 10.1080/14788810802696287

Sarah Meer, Lecturer of English
Univeristy of Cambridge

This article challenges a number of myths the Irish-American melodramatist Dion Boucicault himself created about his play The Octoroon. Boucicault claimed that London theatre audiences were dissatisfied with the ending, in which the heroine commits suicide, because they had become unsympathetic to American slaves. He rewrote the play for these audiences, and the two versions of The Octoroon have subsequently been used to suggest differences of attitude between New York and London, a shift in British racial politics in the early 1860s, and an antislavery position in Boucicault himself. This article questions all of these interpretations using contemporary reviews, Boucicault’s advertisements and self-promoting articles, and much hitherto undiscussed material: a Boucicault letter, his evidence to a Parliamentary Select Committee, and the source of Boucicault’s play, Mayne Reid’s novel The Quadroon. Boucicault was a showman and self-promoter, and his assertions ignored the political uproar the play had caused in New York, and deliberately misinterpreted his audiences in London. The article demonstrates that British audiences were in many cases more sympathetic to American slaves than Boucicault himself, that they objected to the play on aesthetic rather than political grounds, and that Boucicault changed the ending for commercial reasons. It also reveals what the rewriting controversy has obscured: Boucicault’s close attention in the play to the subtleties of the plantation social hierarchy. His concern with social differences and distinctions ties The Octoroon more closely to his Irish plays than has been recognized and illuminates contradictory impulses in The Octoroon, which also help to explain the two endings. While the ‘tragic ending’ reinforces the racial determinism that many critics have observed in the play, the scenes where an outside observer fails to comprehend the racial and social hierarchy on the plantation reinforce an alternative vision that helps justify the ‘happy ending’ versions. Both Boucicault and his play were more interestingly equivocal than the Octoroon myths have allowed.

Dion Boucicault’s 1859 play The Octoroon has figured frequently in recent analyses of representations of race, slavery and the transatlantic in the nineteenth century. Joseph Roach’s influential study of what he called the ‘‘circum-Atlantic’’ made The Octoroon a touchstone of its argument about theatrical and ritual performance in ‘‘the circulation of cultures, material and symbolic’’, around and across the Atlantic. Jennifer DeVere Brody also drew on the play in her study of the ‘‘mulatta’’ in nineteenth-century British/Black Atlantic culture, and Werner Sollors identifies in it many of the central characteristics he discusses in his study of “interracial” literature. Daphne Brooks examines it as a transatlantic ‘‘spectacle of race.’’ The play’s attraction for critics interested in cultural contact, hybridity and creolisation is obvious. As Roach remarks, it was written ‘‘after a brief period of residence in New Orleans by an Anglo-Irishman of French ancestry’’ (183). It is also concerned with the socially impossible position of the daughter of a planter and a slave, a woman deemed to have seven-eighths white ancestry, and one-eighth black…

…This article examines Boucicault’s 1866 testimony to a Parliamentary Select Committee, an 1855 letter indicating his views on slavery, and New York and London reviews, advertisements and play scripts. Together they reveal a number of contradictions in the impression Boucicault created of the Octoroon incident, as does Boucicault’s source for the play, Mayne Reid’s 1856 novel The Quadroon. The significant changes Boucicault made in adapting the novel provide a fascinating index to Boucicault’s attitudes on race, interracial marriage and the nature of plantation society in the Southern United States. Boucicault’s focus is very different from Reid’s. His original play seems to insist on the unbridgeability of racial divisions, whereas Reid’s characters overcome them. Nevertheless, I shall suggest that Boucicault incorporates into The Octoroon the dramatic interest in social distinctions and hierarchies which is evident in his other plays, including the ‘‘Irish dramas,’’ The Colleen Bawn and The Shaughraun. This is particularly evident in the dynamics of Boucicault’s dialogue. Many readings of The Octoroon concentrate on single speeches and pay relatively little attention to dramatic interaction, but as I shall show, it is in the interplay between characters that Boucicault displays a dramatic sensitivity to social relationships and institutions. The play’s exploration of the social implications of the ‘‘Octoroon’s’’ mixed heritage balances its sensationalist racial essentialism, and this may help to explain the complicated and contradictory ways in which contemporaries interpreted its stance on slavery…

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The Octoroon and English Opinions of Slavery

American Quarterly
Volume 8, Number 2 (Summer, 1956)
pages 166-170

Nils Erik Enkvist
Akademi Abo, Finland

After his great successes, and notably that of Colleen Bawn, Dion Boucicault became something of a leading figure among English-speaking playwrights, while the critics as well as the public eagerly watched his prolific pen. In the summer of 1861, everyone in London knew he was about to produce his topical play about slavery, which had been so favorably received in the United States. This was indeed a subject well cut out for his cosmopolitan powers; when, after considerable delay, The Octoroon was finally presented at the Adelphi Theatre on Monday, November 18th, 1861, it came as a shock both to the playwright and to the critics that the fifth act was hailed by the audience with many rude noises. The reasons for this were debated at some length in the London papers; they provide a significant insight into Anglo-American relations at that time.

As readers of Professor Quinn’s Representative American Plays will recall, the story of The Octoroon was based upon the fact that a white man could not marry the one-eighth-Negro slave girl he loved. In the original fifth act Zoe had poisoned herself to preserve her maiden purity from the ruffianly overseer who had bought her. It was Zoe’s suicide that finally roused the tempers of the English audience. Possibly they felt cheated, having read in their playbills how Southerners sometimes escaped the predicament of the present hero and heroine by cutting their veins and mixing their blood, which, technically, sufficed to make a colored person of a white man. This hoary stock device was not used, and the tragic impact of the octoroon…

Wealthy free women of color in Charleston, South Carolina during slavery

University of Massachusetts, Amherst
2007
271 pages
Publication Number: AAT 3275800
ISBN: 9780549175599

Rita Reynolds, Assistant Professor of History
Wagner College, Staten Island, New York

This dissertation focuses on the lives and experiences of a small group of affluent free mulatto women in antebellum Charleston, South Carolina. Unlike their enslaved sisters we know very little about their community and the place they occupied in it. To comprehend the everyday world wealthy free women of color inhabited I begin by examining the origins of the wealthy free colored community in Charleston. I then investigate individual case studies of five wealthy free mulatto and black women and how their varying choices, made under differing degrees of societal duress, molded and formed their lives. Biographical sketches of Rachel and Martha Inglis, Nancy Randall, Hagar Richardson and Margaret Bettingall consider the different options each woman experienced under the same social, economic and racial framework. All five women (whose stories are told here for the first time) dealt with enslavement from either a personal perspective as slaves themselves, or as a recent memory in recalling a mother or grandmother’s bondage. Their stories relate how the lives of wealthy free women of color were paradoxical and how they often dealt with triumph and tragedy in the same instance.

Like the majority of wealthy southern white women who spent a portion of their time as sophisticated urbanites, wealthy free women of color also set out to participate as free people in a slave society. To fully share in the economic and social benefits of society these women made deliberate efforts to improve their station through education, religious participation, social institutions and caste and racial identification with their wealthy white neighbors. However, the oppressive nature of Southern slave society greatly thwarted their best efforts. As a result, free blacks basic rights were fundamentally denied. This examination of five wealthy free women of color will analyze the manner in which social, community and family relationships influenced the world these women occupied. Racial and class status were also defining creeds for free wealthy women of color. By probing into the importance of race and class affiliations in the free mulatto community a clearer portrait of racial hierarchy among the wealthy emerges.

Neither Black Nor White: Slavery and Race Relations in Brazil and the United States

University of Wisconsin Press
July 1986
328 pages
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-299-10914-1

Carl N. Degler (1921-2015), Margaret Byrne Professor of American History Emeritus
Stanford University

Carl Degler’s 1971 Pulitzer-Prize-winning study of comparative slavery in Brazil and the United States is reissued in the Wisconsin paperback edition, making it accessible for all students of American and Latin American history and sociology.

Until Degler’s groundbreaking work, scholars were puzzled by the differing courses of slavery and race relations in the two countries. Brazil never developed a system of rigid segregation, such as appeared in the United States, and blacks in Brazil were able to gain economically and retain far more of their African culture. Rejecting the theory of Gilberto Freyre and Frank Tannenbaum that Brazilian slavery was more humane, Degler instead points to a combination of demographic, economic, and cultural factors as the real reason for the differences.

Table of Contents

• Preface
• I. The Challenge of the Contrast
  • Contrast in History
  • Contrast in Cultural Response
  • Contrast Acknowledged
  • An Explanation Advanced
• II. Slavery Compared
  • Who Protects the Slave’s Humanity?
  • Manumission: How Easy, How Common?
  • Rebellions and Runaways
  • The International Slave Trade As Cause
  • Slave Rearing As Consequence
  • A Harsher Slavery
  • To Arm a Black Slave
  • Who Identifies with Negroes?
  • The Hidden Difference
• III. The Outer Burdens of Color
  • The Geography of Color Prejudice
  • Who Is a Negro?
  • Permutations of Prejudice
  • Measures of Discrimination
• IV. The Inner Burdens of Color
  • Negroes Alone Feel the the Weight
  • Eventually the Veil Falls
  • The Flight from Blackness
  • The Black Mother on Two Continents
  • Black Panthers Not Allowed
  • Sex, but Not Marriage
  • “A Negro with a White Soul”
  • The Heart of the Matter
• V. The Roots of Difference
  • Consciousness of Color
  • The Historical Dimension
  • The Mulatto Is the Key
  • The Beginnings of the Mulatto Escape Hatch
  • White Wife Against White Man
  • A Path Not Taken
  • Cultural and Social Values Make a Differance
  • Democracy’s Contribution
  • The Differences As National Ideologies
• VI. A Contrast in the Future?
  • The Gap Narrows
  • Negroes See a New Contrast
  • A Brazilian Dilemma
  • Always That
  • Indelible Color
• Index

Black Mexico: Race and Society from Colonial to Modern Times

University of New Mexico Press
2009
296 pages
6 x 9 in, 21 halftones, 4 maps
paperback ISBN: 978-0-8263-4701-5

Edited by:

Ben Vinson III, Professor of history and Director of the Center for Africana Studies
Johns Hopkins University

Matthew Restall, Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of History and Director of Latin American Studies
Pennsylvania State University

The essays in this collection build upon a series of conversations and papers that resulted from “New Directions in North American Scholarship on Afro-Mexico,” a symposium conducted at Pennsylvania State University in 2004. The issues addressed include contested historiography, social and economic contributions of Afro-Mexicans, social construction of race and ethnic identity, forms of agency and resistance, and contemporary inquiry into ethnographic work on Afro-Mexican communities. Comprised of a core set of chapters that examine the colonial period and a shorter epilogue addressing the modern era, this volume allows the reader to explore ideas of racial representation from the sixteenth century into the twenty-first.

Contributors:

Joan Bristol, George Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia
Patrick Carroll, Texas A & M University, Corpus Christi
Andrew B. Fisher, Carleton College, Northfield, Minnesota
Nicole von Germeten, Oregon State University, Corvallis
Laura A. Lewis, James Madison University, Harrisonburg, Virginia
Jean-Philibert Mobwa Mobwa N’djoli, Congolese native living in Mexico City
Frank “Trey” Proctor III, Denison University, Granville, Ohio
Alva Moore Stevenson, University of California, Los Angeles
Bobby Vaughn, Notre Dame de Namur University, Belmont, California