From Native Savages to Savage Slaves

Introduction

Relative to the cultural phenomenon it names, the word "miscegenation" is a recent invention, dating only as far back as the U.S. Civil War. From the beginning of their colonial expansion into the Americas, Europeans expressed curiosity about sexual unions between men and women belonging to different racial categories (a point exhaustively demonstrated in 1997 by Werner Sollors in Neither Black Nor White Yet Both: Thematic Explorations of Interracial Literature). Even before a racial vocabulary had fully emerged, observers were commenting on sexual relations between Europeans and Native Americans or Africans living in America. The earliest additions to this racial vocabulary were primarily descriptors of the products of those sexual unions. While by the mid-sixteenth century "mongrel" could be used pejoratively, "mulatto" and "mestizo"—two terms borrowed from Spanish and Portuguese to describe the offspring of Europeans and either Africans or Native Americans—were often used merely to identify parentage. The emergence of increasingly refined categories, such as "quadroon" and "octoroon," indicates an obsessive interest in calculating the degree to which a person could be considered mixed. Other terms, such as "hybrid" and "half breed," focus on the fact of interracial union rather than on any specific genetic combination. The diversity of this racial discourse reflects how attitudes toward interracial unions could vary according to regional differences, changes over time, and the particular ways that a particular combination cut across race and class lines. In the United States it was not until the nineteenth century that words emerged to express—and often condemn—the desires driving these unions.

The Mulatto As Idol And Target

As the persistence of the Pocahontas myth suggests, Americans could at least tolerate the idea of sexual relations between Euro-American men and Native American women. Part of this tolerant attitude stemmed from the belief (held by Thomas Jefferson and others) that the mixture of native and European peoples would result in a new people entitled to the emerging continental empire. Others viewed the inter-marriage of whites and Indians as a humane approach to civilizing and preserving a people that would otherwise be extinguished by westward expansion. The attitude toward sexual relations between whites and blacks, however, was decidedly less favorable. As early as the 1660s, as Winthrop Jordan has documented, Virginia and Maryland passed laws prohibiting sexual relations and marriages between whites and blacks (pp. 78-80). Such laws were instrumental in consolidating the status of Africans as inherently inferior and therefore permissible to enslave. They also codified a racial distinction between people of European and African descent that increasingly differentiated between indentured servitude and permanent slavery. Preserved and reinforced by slavery, such laws continued to exist into the nineteenth century (and in many locations, into the twentieth). By the 1820s, Elise Lemire notes, eighteen of the twenty-three states then in existence prohibited black-white marriages. In contrast, only seven states prohibited Indian-white marriages (p. 47).

Legal statutes, though important, reveal only one part of the complicated matrix of social and cultural attitudes toward interracial sexual relationships. Both abolitionists and defenders ...