Mixed Race Studies

The Slave South

The racial character of American slavery and the commitment to white supremacy fostered a widespread antipathy toward race mixture in southern society.  Whites feared that sexual relations between blacks and whites, if not controlled, could undermine the institution of slavery and the racial order.  Children of mixed European and African ancestry, in particular, blurred the sharply demarcated boundaries between the races essential to slavery in the South.

The restrictive policy toward intermixture that emerged before the Civil War, however, was not all-encompassing.  Miscegenation laws sought not so much to eliminate interracial sexual contacts as to channel them.  Those in power employed these laws, as well as laws against fornication and adultery, mainly to keep white women and black men apart.  The legal process exhibited a degree of toleration for white males who had sexual relations with black females, as long as the liaison was kept casual and discreet.  This sort of illicit intercourse—between men of the higher-status racial group and women of the lower—reinforced rather than challenged the existing system of group stratification in the South…

…Maryland’s miscegenation law, in short, was directed primarily at white women, black men and, their mulatto offspring.  Recognizing that only the reproduction of “pure white” children of white women could maintain the fiction of a biracial society, the legal system was particularly determined to keep white women from interracial sexual unions.  This preoccupation, combined with the custom of lumping mulattoes and blacks into the same category, provides a crucial insight into the social and legal construction of reproduction.  Under the social rules that operated in the South, a white woman could give birth to a black child—thus the need for strict legal regulation of her sexual behavior.  But under the same rules, a black woman could not give birth to a white child.  Such a construction of reproduction clearly served the interest of white men in the South, allowing them to roam sexually among women of any color without threatening the color line.

A similar thrust characterized miscegenation legislation in Virginia.  The colony’s assembly decided in 1662 that interracial fornication demanded special penalties; the fine it imposed for this crime was twice that stipulated for illicit intercourse between persons of the same race.  Legislators moved at the same time to clarify the status of mulatto offspring of interracial unions.  Declaring that the child of a black woman by a white man would be “bound or free only according to the condition of the mother,” the assembly broke with English common law, which stated that the status of a child followed that of the father.  Virginia lawmakers thus ensured that the transgressions of white men would lead to an increase in the population of the slave labor force, providing a powerful economic incentive to engage in interracial sex even as criminal sanctions were imposed for such behavior.  To say the least, this new legislation delivered a mixed message to white males…

…The fact that mulatto children derived their status from their mother also helps explain why southern lawmakers struggled to prevent sexual relations between white women and black men.  Although mulatto children of black female slaves were subject to enslavement, mulatto offspring of white females could no be placed in slavery.  The free mulattoes threatened the racial caste system ideologically, if not practically, because their presence could lead to the blurring of the distinction between slave and black, on the one hand, and free and white on the other…

Bardaglio, Peter. “‘Shamefull Matches’ Regulation of Interracial Sex and Marriage in the South before 1900”, In Sex, Love, Race: Crossing Boundaries in North American History, edited by Martha Hodes, 113, 115-116.  New York, New York: New York University Press, 1999.