The Fight for Interracial Marriage Rights in Antebellum Massachusetts 9780674286238

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The Fight for Interracial Marriage Rights in Antebellum Massachusetts

The Fight for Interracial Marriage Rights in Antebellum Massachusetts

Amber D. Moulton

Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England 2015

Copyright © 2015 Amber D. Moulton All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America First printing Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Moulton, Amber D., 1980– The fight for interracial marriage rights in Antebellum Massachusetts / Amber D. Moulton. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-674-96762-5 1. Interracial marriage—Massachusetts—History—18th century. 2. Interracial marriage—Massachusetts—History—19th century. 3. Interracial marriage—Law and legislation—Massachusetts—History—18th century. 4. Interracial marriage—Law and legislation—Massachusetts—History—19th century. 5. Massachusetts—Race relations— History—18th century. 6. Massachusetts—Race relations—History—19th century. 7. Massachusetts—History—1775–1865. I. Title. HQ1031.M68 2015 306.84'6—dc23 2014035855

For Hiroatsu Brent Sugimoto

Contents

Introduction

1

1. Amalgamation and the Massachusetts Ban on Interracial Marriage

10

2. Interracial Marriage as an Equal Rights Measure

49

3. Moral Reform and the Protection of Northern Motherhood 4. Anti-Southern Politics and Interracial Marriage Rights 5. Advancing Interracialism Epilogue Notes

177 187

Bibliography

243

Acknowledgments Index

269

267

146

86

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Introduction

O

n July 4, 1863, aged activist Wendell Phillips stood before a crowd in Framingham, Massachusetts and proclaimed, “This country has no value, except as the home of all races . . . Remember this, the youngest of you, that on the 4th day of July, 1863, you heard a man say, that in the light of all history, in virtue of every page he ever read, he was an amalgamationist to the utmost extent. [Applause]”1 Northern papers hurried to reprint and comment on Phillips’s speech. For example, a writer to the Harrisburg Patriot voiced the majority opinion when he excoriated the abolitionist and his “arrogant cabal” for advocating “the Devil’s own method of degenerating and destroying the white race.”2 The speech reached its widest circulation later that year, when David Croly and George Wakeman included it in the pamphlet Miscegenation: A Theory of the Blending of the Races Applied to the American White Man and Negro.3 Croly and Wakeman presented a thorough commendation of interracialism and a proposal that the Republican Party make advocacy of racial amalgamation, or “miscegenation,” a plank in its political platform. The pamphlet was a hoax. Croly and Wakeman were Democratic strategists hoping to discredit the Republicans by revealing some of the most liberal race science and social theory of the day; the authors created a backlash, rallying white supremacists to defend against the creation of a multiracial America. At the end of their meandering pamphlet, Croly and Wakeman provide an appendix of promiscegenation writings, ostensibly to illustrate the severity of the abolitionist threat. Wendell Phillips’s July 4 speech is the first appended document. Instead of the new millennium of interracial comity that Phillips envisioned, the Miscegenation pamphlet would provide new terminology to

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support over a century of antimiscegenation politics and social taboos against interracialism that stretch well beyond the Supreme Court’s ruling in Loving v. Virginia (1967), which declared laws against miscegenation unconstitutional. How did these competing factions, amalgamationists and antiamalgamationists, arrive at their respective battle lines in 1863? What were the social and political implications embedded in their advocacy, and what relationship did they have to racial equality? How did Phillips become so outspoken an advocate for racial integration, and how could his speech garner “Applause” on July 4 in Framingham and at the same time become a cornerstone in the national campaign against interracialism? This work answers these questions by tracing Phillips’s battle back to its origins in the 1830s, amidst the rise of organized political mobilization on behalf of antislavery and equal rights. During that period, reformers in Massachusetts initiated a movement to legalize interracial marriage. Until February 1843, when the state legislature repealed the statute that banned marriages between whites and “Negroes, Indians, or Mulattos,” interracial couples in Massachusetts found their unions declared null and void, their children were classed as “illegitimate,” and any official who solemnized an interracial union could be fined. African American reformers, radical, political, and evangelical abolitionists, and moral reformers carried out six years of protest and petitioning that resulted in repeal. It was one of the first, and the first successful, equal rights battles in the state since emancipation. This work brings to light interracial families long lost to history and reveals how activists united an unlikely cohort of African American men and women, abolitionists, moral reformers, and a tripartisan group of lawmakers to legalize interracial marriage. It was this battle that shaped Phillips’s conviction to be “an amalgamationist to the utmost extent” and gave him the language he would use to defend his position. Notably, the abolitionist newspaper the Liberator printed Phillips’s speech in its July 7 issue, with some important revisions “by the author.” Among his revisions, Phillips clarified his position on amalgamation by adding, “Not the amalgamation of licentiousness, law of Slavery—and the ruin of both races—but the pious and harmonizing union, in honorable marriage.”4 This sentence could have been lifted directly from debates surrounding Massachusetts’s interracial marriage ban two decades earlier. As this work will explain, Massachusetts legislators did not legalize interracial marriage because they valued interracial love or shared a commitment to equal rights. Indeed, few of them did. They legalized interracial marriage only after equal rights advocates like Phillips extended their appeal to moral reformers, who viewed legal marriage as an antidote to licentiousness, and proud Yankees

Introduction

3

seeking to distance themselves from collusion with the Southern Slave Power. When Phillips asserted that his version of amalgamation was “pious” and “honorable,” and directly opposed to interracialism in slavery (namely, the sexual exploitation of enslaved women by white men), he was attempting to recreate the alliance that had spelled victory in 1843. Phillips’s addendum highlights a conflict that lay at the heart of the movement for interracial marriage rights. These rights were, on the one hand, emblematic of the equal citizenship African Americans were owed in the free state of Massachusetts. On the other hand, however, interracial marriage signaled racial mixing, a threat to white supremacy, and the extreme of not only political but social equality across the color line. Massachusetts was a slaveholding British colony with an attendant slave code including the ban on interracial marriage, which dated from 1705, but by 1783, slavery had lost its constitutional footing. A series of freedom suits, most famously those of Quok Walker and Elizabeth Freeman, led to the tacit acknowledgment that the Massachusetts state constitutions did not permit enslavement.5 No concerted popular effort to repeal the ban materialized until 1837, but even in debates during the early 1840s, repeal advocates maintained the position that the law was an outdated relic or “vestige of the Slave code.”6 By identifying the law this way, activists hoped to quell fears that they intended a radical social upheaval. However, the suggestion that the marriage ban was a long-forgotten relic belied the law’s recent legislative history. Massachusetts legislators revived the law and altered its language in 1836. In the 1836 Revised Statutes they included explicit instructions that the biracial offspring of interracial couples should be classed as “illegitimate.” The inclusion of new language shows that on two occasions since the abolition of slavery in Massachusetts, once after statehood in 1786 and then again in 1836, state lawmakers reestablished their support for the ban as a measure directed not at slaves, but rather at free men and women of color. The perpetuation of Massachusetts’s interracial marriage ban after 1786 can be attributed to the same motivations as later miscegenation law, namely, the maintenance of white citizens’ racial cum social distinctiveness in a society where African American men at least theoretically joined the ranks of citizens permitted to vote or hold office.7 This case examines the unique transformation of a colonial marriage ban created within the slave codes, through the early nineteenth-century establishment of a Northern caste system, to its confrontation with popular social reform and a growing Northern disavowal of the “peculiar institution” as peculiarly Southern. It offers a glimpse of a society in transition, still debating race and its place in the scaffolding of full citizenship.

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Citizenship in antebellum America was not an unchanging category, nor can it be easily defined. The varied markers of citizenship—membership in the associations that were understood to make up the American polity, voting, jury service, or the militia—acknowledged “self-mastery,” manly honor, and judgment were rights and duties that were denied women and most African American men.8 The antebellum period saw state legislatures very intentionally limit or negate African American citizenship claims to construct a white and male body politic. They restricted African American men’s voting rights, limited militia service to white men, denied African Americans the right to sit on juries, and even excluded African American migrants from settling and becoming property holders. The Supreme Court’s proslavery decision in the 1857 Dred Scott case denied African Americans citizenship at the federal level. Even in Massachusetts, where African American men held voting rights by the 1830s, both the legal and social constructions of black citizenship were incomplete. Kunal Parker notes that in late eighteenth-century Massachusetts, officials went so far as to obscure the nativity of African American former slaves, claiming that black people were foreigners, not members of the community who were entitled to public support like poor relief.9 Those decisions had more than a psychological impact on Massachusetts residents’ understandings of who belonged, as enslaved people’s descendants (especially those of mixed racial descent) continued to struggle to establish residence, affirm their legitimacy, and attain entitlements. Perhaps most influentially for antebellum equal rights activists, the contradictions between the federal constitutional protections for slaveholders and any state constitutional protections for African Americans targeted as escaped slaves left black Americans without meaningful equality under the laws. Importantly, however, African Americans challenged restrictions on their meaningful citizenship, demanding equality. As Stephen Kantrowitz notes, antebellum African Americans used the word “citizen” in their rights appeals because its connotation of “equality, inclusion, and participation” gave their reform activities legitimacy.10 In this work, I use the term citizen in the unambiguous way antebellum African American activists for equal rights did, as a claim to due process and membership in the American body politic and in spite of the fact that white American society largely rejected their “colored citizenship.”11 By the Supreme Court’s decision in Loving v. Virginia, the relationship between laws banning interracial marriage or “miscegenation laws” and equal citizenship was quite clear. Chief Justice Earl Warren’s opinion leaned heavily on the Fourteenth Amendment to argue that denying individuals the right to marry based on their race was unconstitutional. But bringing

Introduction

5

this history back to antebellum America, to an era before the Fourteenth Amendment had been conceived, begs the question, what is the relationship between antebellum “amalgamation” and equal rights? Were antiamalgamation and antimiscegenation ideologies the same? Did the cultural taboo against interracialism grow and expand as the nation expanded and the American citizenry became increasingly diverse? Or did it peak and then decline so that steps like legalizing interracial marriage at the state or national level were judicious reflections of increasing racial liberality? The battle over interracial marriage in Massachusetts stands as a prehistory to later miscegenation laws and it illuminates their social and political significance, but it also shows how white supremacists laid the ideological and discursive groundwork for their reactionary politics through the Civil Rights Movement. At a fundamental level, anxiety, taboos, and laws against miscegenation replaced antiamalgamation sentiment after “miscegenation” was coined during the Civil War.12 Miscegenation laws after the constitutional abolition of slavery took on increased social significance as a means by which white lawmakers could maintain white supremacy outside of the slave system. Scholars of interracial sex in Southern states have argued that it was only after emancipation that miscegenation laws contributed to a segregated caste system and even that during slavery some interracial sexual relationships were “tolerated.”13 While the framework of a racialized slave system circumscribed the rights and opportunities of African Americans, interracial sex posed no real threat to white supremacy. It was only after the strictures of legal slavery were removed that whites marshaled antimiscegenation laws to counter the enfranchisement of African American men and maintain a caste system.14 Scholarship on the political uses of interracialism leaves no room for doubt that miscegenation was one of the most potent political tools in the white supremacist arsenal. Martha Hodes has argued that faced with the enfranchisement of black men, whites in the postwar South constructed a discourse of black male hypersexuality to check African Americans’ political power because it was only by shoring up both white male sexual supremacy and white racial distinctiveness that they could safeguard their political, social, and economic control.15 While challenges to citizenship and full political equality are one aspects of miscegenation law, they would be incomplete without antiamalgamation and antimiscegenation ideologies that undergirded them. Indeed, the real power of interracialism lies not in interracial marriages, per se, but in the much broader canvas of interracial socializing, friendship, dating, sex, and cooperation that is the hallmark of an equal society. Legal disabilities were not aloof from social practices, but in fact shaped American discourse and

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praxis, circumscribing what white Americans viewed as “natural” and “legitimate” sexual choices into the twentieth century.16 During the Jim Crow and Civil Rights eras, activists often distinguished between the sorts of political rights represented by equality under the law and “social equality,” which white supremacists threatened would lead to miscegenation. Elise Lemire charts the cultural history of interracialism in the antebellum North to assert that even without laws banning interracial marriage, antebellum Americans were socialized to view interracialism as abhorrent to the “faculty of taste.”17 Peggy Pascoe, while painstakingly disaggregating the politics of white supremacy from the vagaries of the social construction of race, has shown that the development and ubiquity of miscegenation laws in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries represents a concerted (and successful) campaign to mark interracialism as “unnatural.”18 Lemire goes so far as to argue that the rhetoric of taste in antebellum America would grow into a “nation-wide rhetoric for ensuring white supremacy without seeming racist.”19 What we have yet to explain, though, is why. Why did white supremacists find it necessary to denounce interracial marriage and social equality when political and economic equality were unpopular enough? The power of miscegenation discourse derives from the paired hope and fear of what I term “advancing interracialism,” which developed during debates over interracial marriage laws and equal rights in the antebellum North. The microhistory of the movement to legalize interracial marriage in Massachusetts reveals the component elements of this concept. In the first place, there was a visible minority, including interracial marriage rights activists like Wendell Phillips and Charles Lenox Remond, who earnestly advocated for full social equality and struggled to advance interracialism throughout their lifetimes. No matter how much more cautious advocates of antislavery or political equality disavowed them, white supremacists could point to these radicals as the spokespeople of social upheaval. The history of progressive race laws in states like Massachusetts convinced white supremacists that equal rights concessions led them down a slippery slope toward social equality, interracial marriage rights, and even a fully multiracial American future. Because they knew that granting rights across the race line did, must, and would, usher in interracialism, racial conservatives and reactionaries created over a century’s worth of shifting defenses against what they saw as an advancing interracial battle line. We have known of the existence of these white supremacists, but The Fight for Interracial Marriage Rights in Antebellum Massachusetts introduces us to some of the advocates who hoped, uncompromisingly, to advance interracialism and helps to explain just what the reactionaries were reacting against.

Introduction

7

Existing work on the interracial marriage movement in Massachusetts largely preceded the rise of scholarship on the social and cultural implications of interracialism over the last two decades. In sum, existing scholarship asserts that the 1843 repeal was the culmination of a twelve-year petitioning effort on the part of the state’s abolitionist organizations and the Liberty Party to expand African American citizenship.20 Louis Ruchames was first among historians to address the significance of the 1843 repeal and traces the prorepeal movement through the pages of Garrison’s Liberator. He presents the repeal legislation as a Garrisonian abolitionist victory. George Levesque and Sara Dubow devote most of their work on the marriage law’s repeal to antiamalgamation attacks on white women petitioners and attendant questions about antebellum women’s activism. They and Bruce Laurie also analyze statistics related to state elections and legislators’ party affiliations, and the rationales set forth in legislative debates. Levesque argues that Democrats favored repeal; Laurie and Dubow offer a more nuanced account of the rise of the abolitionist Liberty Party and negotiations Libertyites made with Democrats in 1842 that appear to have tipped the scale in favor of repeal in 1843.21 In a brief but sweeping analysis, Laurie suggests that three distinct ideologies contributed to the final vote: strong Yankee identity, libertarianism, and a belief that interracial marriage was so “repugnant” that a law against it was unnecessary.22 My review of activists’ and legislators’ rhetorical strategies, drawn from previously understudied petitions on the marriage ban, legislative committee reports, and manuscripts, reveals an even more complicated web of justifications for repealing the law, not least of which were its moral implications.23 This work moves beyond the questions that motivated earlier scholars to better explain how legislators justified repealing a law in the face of intense disapproval of amalgamation and to account for the persistence of interracial rights activism and opposition throughout the antebellum period. One could investigate the battle over interracial marriage in antebellum Massachusetts for a number of reasons. As earlier historians have shown, it can be viewed as a political history or a history of antislavery activism. Other scholars have used debates over interracial marriage to chart racist discourses and illustrate the depths of antiamalgamation and antimiscegenation feeling throughout U.S. history. It has been fruitful to explore interracial marriage as a lens into race laws and racial beliefs in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This work does some of each of these things, but is primarily concerned with the social and political significance of interracialism, not simply interracial marriage, in the long battle for racial equality in the United States. Ultimately, the chapters that follow detail the establishment, impact, growth, and denouement of the process that granted marriage

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rights to interracial couples and, at the same, time, bequeathed antiamalgamation ideology to later generations. Chapter 1 provides a history of interracialism in Massachusetts from the establishment of the interracial marriage ban in 1705 until its legalization in 1843. The chapter begins with an exposition of early American views of interracialism, particularly a swell in antiamalgamation (and antiabolition) hysteria in the early part of the nineteenth century that put interracial marriage rights advocates in danger of social ostracism and even bodily harm. It then examines sex, marriage, and family formation among interracial (and multiracial) families in antebellum Massachusetts. Using case studies of individual families who challenged legal and social proscriptions, I show how the marriage ban impacted interracial couples’ opportunities and how individuals in these relationships challenged and subverted the law, engaging in illicit interracial sex, cohabitating, attempting to form common law marriages, marrying out of state, marrying in the state in spite of the ban, and even petitioning on behalf of interracial marriage rights. Chapter 2 marks the beginning of a narrative history of mobilization against the marriage ban. It focuses on successive petitioning campaigns in which activists attempted to convince state legislators to repeal the ban on interracial marriage and examines the ways they honed their demands. Here, I challenge the contention that African Americans were silent observers in the interracial marriage debate, and show that they were vocal and integral participants in the repeal effort. This chapter reveals the means by which African American activists like Charles Lenox Remond championed the interracial marriage ban as an equal rights issue. By tracing the life histories of African American petitioners on interracial marriage rights, this chapter shows that amalgamation was not anathema for all abolitionists; it was, rather, one link in a chain of concurrent movements against slavery and for the rights of free Northerners and escaped slaves. Their early efforts catalyzed abolitionists’ petitioning drives while shaping the marriage question as a distinctly Northern call for free peoples’ rights. Chapter 3 documents how antiamalgamation attacks threatened to discredit the movement in 1839 and how activists subtly shifted the marriage rights campaign. I show how leading activists (Lydia Maria Child in particular) merged the appeals of the antislavery and burgeoning moral reform movements to champion interracial marriage as a moral issue: as a measure that could curb extramarital sex or “licentiousness” and strengthen the normative marriage institution. The moral reform appeal made interracial marriage rights a safe issue for middle-class reformers, who demanded that legislators protect the rights of free Northern mothers and children, and in so doing shore up the moral primacy of northern motherhood.

Introduction

9

Chapter 4 charts the repeal movement’s progress to the halls of the state legislature, where from 1839 to 1843, the legislative response to petitions in favor of interracial marriage shifted from patronizing misogyny to serious debate. Abolitionist legislators, like George Bradburn of Nantucket, merged discourses of rights and morality and built upon the foundation activists had laid to ensure that voters and legislators would view interracial marriage as a test of Northern culture and credibility. Even legislators, like Charles Francis Adams, who were ambivalent about equal rights issues, were persuaded to advocate for interracial marriage rights. And when Northern states’ independence was challenged by the imprisonment of fugitive slave George Latimer in November of 1842, massive public outcry and calls for a “personal liberty law” provided an anti-Southern push that would help finally to legalize interracial marriage. The 1843 legislation signaled progress in the fight against racial discrimination in Massachusetts, but its antiracist promise was limited by the crosscurrents of bourgeois moral reform and mercurial anti-Southern feeling that carried it to victory. Chapter 5 examines continued battles, from the protracted struggle to integrate Boston public schools and the debarment of African Americans from state militias, to persistent cultural taboos against interracial relationships. Earnest amalgamationists persisted in the fight, championing interracial love, cooperation, and full political and social equality. But they remained in the extreme minority despite the legal recognition of interracial marriages. While reformers succeeded in legalizing interracial marriage, they did not eradicate white Americans’ overwhelming aversion to interracialism. The Civil War precipitated a crisis point at the nexus of race and citizenship, and Croly and Wakeman and other antiamalgamationists capitalized on persistent taboos against racial equality, stoking the fires of legal opposition to advancing interracialism through Reconstruction and beyond.

chapter one

Amalgamation and the Massachusetts Ban on Interracial Marriage

T

he history of interracialism in Massachusetts begins with two competing phenomena. As the colonial and early republican eras progressed, Massachusetts banned interracial sex and marriage and engaged in fierce antiamalgamation discourse, bolstering racial slavery and later establishing a framework for full citizenship that could be reserved for whites. At the same time, interracial sex, and even marriage, persisted, and multiracial families populated the state. The laws that deemed their unions illicit and void could have dire consequences for interracial couples, and antiamalgamation ideologies threatened any attempts to create greater securities for those who socialized or collaborated, let alone created families, across racial lines. With the rise of organized antislavery, however, a small group of reformers began challenging the laws and taboos against interracialism. For the most radical among them, interracialism signaled the hope of full racial equality in the young nation. On December 5, 1705, the General Court of the Massachusetts Bay Colony passed an act “For the Better Preventing of a Spurious and Mixt Issue, &c.” As colonial Governor Dudley would later recall, the legislative body had been compelled to act after reports that “several Negroes had lain with white women.”1 Under the new law, the colony’s English and Scottish settlers, and indeed any white or “Christian” citizens, were forbidden from marrying a “negro or molatto,” and the clergyman who solemnized such a marriage could be fined fifty pounds. Should any subjects engage in illicit interracial sex, the weight of law would fall heaviest upon the man or woman of color who could be whipped, imprisoned, and then sold out of the colony. Massachusetts legislators thus took their stand against racial intermixture. However, the bill went further, revealing their larger design. The lawmakers

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decreed that any “negro or molatto” who struck a white person would be ordered whipped under the auspices of the colonial courts and established a strict tariff system for the importation of black people into the colony. In other words, Massachusetts legislators resolved that if people of African descent were to reside in the state at all, they would do so as an enslaved and subjugated people, marginalized from the rights of colonial Englishmen. Enacting the 1705 law, Massachusetts joined in the late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century trend of strengthening the legal foundation of English colonial slave societies and regulating populations along racial lines. Perhaps most infamously, Virginia’s legislature in 1669 passed an act “for the casual killing of slaves,” that Edmund Morgan and subsequent scholars identify as representative of a turning point in early Americans race law, where white lawmakers attempted to buy the race loyalty of working class whites by summarily subjugating people of African descent.2 Critical to the new racial paradigm was the regulation of interracial sex; each colonial legislature created prohibitions on sex and marriage to fit their interests. Virginia’s legislature acted first, declaring in 1662 that interracial “fornication” would garner double the fine normally meted out to those engaging in illicit sex. In 1664, Maryland lawmakers decreed that any free English woman who married a slave would be compelled to serve his master until her own death, and her biracial child would be enslaved as his or her father was. Virginia went further in 1691, declaring that any white person who married a “negro, mulatto, or Indian” would be banished from the colony.3 The ubiquity of laws regulating such relationships illustrates one thing quite clearly: interracial sex continued in spite of a progressive deterioration of the social status of African Americans. The shape of each colony’s interracial marriage legislation reveals its leaders’ racial vision. In Virginia’s early colonial slave society, banishing or selling men or women who engaged in interracial sex would have been disastrous economic policy. In 1700, enslaved people comprised 28 percent of Virginia’s labor force, providing the forced manpower necessary to fuel Britain’s tobacco trade and distribute wheat and other foodstuff to the more profitable West Indian sugar and coffee enterprises.4 Massachusetts would maintain a legal slave system until its constitutionality was challenged by freedom suits like Quock Walker’s in 1783 but it would not fashion itself as what Ira Berlin has termed a colonial “slave society.”5 Certainly the colony, its merchants, and its residents profited from slavery and the slave trade, but enslaved people comprised only approximately 1 percent of the population and were marginal to the business of production in Massachusetts. The act of 1705 illustrates the colony’s early attempt to define itself as a predominantly free laboring society, one in which independent white

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farmers, white merchants, white mechanics, and white artisans comprised its economic base. The act was one of a handful around the same time distinguishing the rights of biracial children born to at least one free parent from the rights of free people per se under existing law.6 With Massachusetts’s new law, because their parents’ marriages were deemed invalid, even free biracial children would be denied full rights of settlement and inheritance. As the act and Governor Dudley’s reflection suggests, large numbers of African Americans, especially men, on the same legal, social, and economic footing as whites were not part of Colonial Massachusetts lawmakers’ social prescription. The 1705 ban on marriages between whites and those defined as “negro or molatto,” remained a part of the laws of Massachusetts through early statehood. When in 1786 the Massachusetts state legislature considered the subject of an interracial marriage ban again, they renewed the prohibition, as a matter of fact expanding its scope and increasing its severity. The new law prohibited marriages between whites and “Negroes, Indians, or Mulattos,” and stated unequivocally that any such marriage would be considered immediately null and void. Under the colonial law, if civil officials discovered a solemnized interracial marriage, they were to follow established step to nullification. The new state law classed solemnized interracial unions as a legal impossibility.7 The British North American colonies and later early republican United States were a collection of societies in flux. The merchants, businessmen, and gentry who comprised colonial and state governments crafted laws that would define how race, class, and gender shaped American citizenship. However, laws worked hand in hand with the development of social proscriptions that, as Peggy Pascoe explains in her work on antimiscegenation laws since 1865, made interracial interaction and sex seem “unnatural.”8 Relying as it did on the science of racial classification that was in its infancy in the early eighteenth century, the question of “natural” sexual choices held virtually no salience for Massachusetts Bay legislators in 1705. In fact, the very habituality of sexual relations between whites, African Americans, and Native Americans of the same social and class status provided the impetus for the law.9 These early colonial laws were some of the first stones in the foundation of the long campaign to establish and maintain white supremacy in the United States and explain why, even after Massachusetts’s new state constitution declared that all men were born “free and equal,” both legal and de facto traditions continued to define free African American citizens as racially distinct from and inferior to whites. Free former slaves, for instance, struggled to collect public entitlements to which their white neighbors had access. In the late eighteenth century, state poor laws tightened,

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limiting the entitlements of legal settlement like poor relief to those whose parents or in-laws were part of a settled community. Despite nativity or claims to the towns where their former masters lived, officials classed former slaves as “foreigners,” leaving them in a precarious legal position outside the bounds of settled communities.10 As the antebellum era progressed, there was a growing arsenal of defenses for racial discrimination and slavery. They ranged from religious claims that God ordained that different types of men perform different roles in the world and that subservience was the “Negro’s” role to play, to cutting-edge science that used facial angles and fertility data to “prove” the biological distinctiveness of different races (and white supremacy among the nations of the earth). The most challenging arguments for those who advocated a free and equal multiracial citizenry were historical and scientific arguments in favor of racial difference and the supposed natural propensity of men to despise those who are different than them. The antebellum era saw a dramatic rise in the proliferation and popularity of natural science and its attendant theories of racial difference.11 In the late 1700s, scientists in Europe and America began to challenge the established, monogenist, history of humanity that traced men and women back to one common origin (Adam and Eve). Monogenists argued, citing biblical teachings, that any differences among humans could be explained by “degeneration” from the ideal (usually believed to be like whites) because of climate or other physical or social factors.12 Polygenists, the proponents of a new theory, argued that different climates and conditions could not account for the physiological differences between races. Polygenesis offered white supremacists a tempting new cache of weaponry to defend against claims for racial equality. These new race theorists cited studies that relied on anatomic measurements of European, Indian, African, and other human bodies, along with the growth of popular phrenology, to establish a theory that insisted that different racial groups originated from distinct ancestral stock and, furthermore, that they could be rated on the scala naturae as higher or lesser species. During the eighteenth century, Dutch scientist Petrus Camper presented “facial lines” measurements comparing the skulls of primates and people of African descent to suggest that Europeans were ideal and Africans closer to apes. Camper’s evidence was nothing short of racialist propaganda, but his findings circulated widely during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries after his dissertation was translated into English in 1794.13 In 1799, English polygenist Charles White cited anatomical measurements to place the “Negro” as the lowest human link in the “Great Chain of Being.”14 As early as 1830, Charles Caldwell cited biblical chronology to argue that different races must have

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been created separately and that whites were granted a “gift of nature,” intelligence, that other races did no possess.15 In his Crania Americana (1839) Samuel Morton argued that according to his calculations, Noah’s Ark dated to 4,179 years before his time and the Egyptian pyramids to only 1,000 years later. That 1,000 years would not have been nearly enough time for Africans to “degenerate” from the original type. Thus, he concluded, the races must have separate origins.16 When debates over interracial marriage came to Massachusetts, some defended the ban on marriage by citing new scientific “evidence” that claimed that biracial children, like the offspring of a horse and a donkey, were the product of mixed species and likely to be infertile.17 Josiah Nott popularized this theory in an article that he admitted he wrote to support antiabolitionism, “The Mulatto a Hybrid—probable extermination of the two races if the Whites and Blacks are allowed to intermarry.”18 A few years later, Morton reported that there was a high degree of infertility between certain racial groups (for instance “Caucasians” and “Australian aborigines”) and attributed it in part to “a disparity of primordial organization.”19 Still, he hedged his bets, suggesting that “hybridity” was possible even between different species, as with mules. In 1846, Morton jettisoned purely genetic arguments and cited James Cowles Prichard to argue that in any case, there was a naturally developed “repugnance between individuals of different kinds” that had been confused by domestication (of both mules and men).20 These race scientists’ findings were damning for antislavery and equal rights activists alike. If humans came from different origins, African Americans should not only accept distinct treatment under the law, but slaveholders could amass fodder for paternalist arguments that the “Negro” was made to serve whites and that the institution could “civilize” an otherwise savage race. The polygenists were not unchallenged. Monogenesis had a firm scientific grounding in the early nineteenth century thanks in large part to its conformity to biblical teachings. As late as 1837, equal rights activist and minister Hosea Easton, whose lineage was African, European, and Native American, stated confidently that, “One great truth is acknowledged by all Christendom, viz/—God hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth. . . . it is a settled point with the wisest of the age, that no constitutional difference exists in the children of men, which can be said to be established by hereditary laws.”21 As George Frederickson points out, famed naturalist Samuel Stanhope Smith and his monogenist thesis, first published in 1787 and then again in 1810, garnered deference even among many proponents of white supremacy in the early antebellum period. Smith, like other eighteenth-century monogenists, argued that man

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came from one origin and that differences could be explained by climate and the influences of “savagery” and “civilization.” Dark skin was a product of the sun; even whites got freckles in the sun; thus, dark complexions could “be justly considered as a universal freckle” that was compounded by a “redundancy of bile” produced by the body in hot humid climes.22 If only “civilized,” the “Negro” would evolve toward whiteness.23 Still, by the publication of the Miscegenation pamphlet in 1864, polygenesis and the popular conceptions of racial difference that accompanied it had been so well ensconced in common knowledge that monogenesis practically seemed like new science. Croly and Wakeman peppered their pamphlet with scientific arguments on the biological brotherhood of man, perhaps hoping that readers would reject the monogenetic science as antiquated or rally new race science to defend against monogenetic studies. In their opening chapter “Physiological Equality of the White and Colored Races,” the authors cite Dr. John William Draper of the University of the City of New York, Pieter Camper, and Prichard to argue that all races are derived from a common origin and that “mulattoes” undoubtedly can and do reproduce “rapidly.”24 Draper was an avid believer that environmental causes, not different origins, defined racial difference. In his Human Physiology (1856) he argued among other things that no race was in a state “of absolute equilibrium,” and that heat and social conditions could change the physiognomy of any existing group.25 While persistent interracial sex in early America offered ample evidence to prove American fertility, interracial marriages were uncommon enough in that they often garnered national attention. In December 1832, New England papers ran a brief article sharing that in Ohio, a black man sued a white woman for breach of marriage promise. Consensual interracial relationships were deemed so absurd that the paper needed only to report that the man demanded $8 in restitution to deliver readers the journalistic equivalent of a sideshow oddity on par with P. T. Barnum’s “Fejee Mermaid.”26 The New Hampshire Gazette picked up a story in 1834, reporting that “a missionary of the amalgamation society” tried to lodge with his family in Buffalo, New York, but was turned away when it was discovered that is wife and children were “colored.”27 Just a month later, papers throughout the country reported that whites rioted against African Americans in Columbia, Pennsylvania, because they had heard rumors that a black man had married a white woman (this despite the fact that such a marriage was legal in Pennsylvania).28 The Salem, Massachusetts, Gazette reported a case of such attempted amalgamation in their own town in 1835, after a black man and white woman applied to be married there. They were turned away and apparently stated their conviction that they “would be married if there was

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any such thing.”29 The story got out, and soon papers in adjoining states were reporting on the “attempted amalgamation at Salem,” salaciously elaborating that the bride emitted a foul odor.30 The New Bedford Mercury reported, via the US Gazette, that a “pretty white girl” had married a Negro in Philadelphia and been taunted by boys in the street.31 And when an Amherst College student reportedly left school and ran away with his African American lover, the story made the pages of the New Hampshire Post.32 The most notorious story of interracial family formation in the 1830s was that of Richard M. Johnson of Kentucky, member of the U.S. House of Representatives and by 1836 vice president under Martin Van Buren. Johnson, like many prominent white men and slaveholders, had a sexual relationship with an enslaved woman. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Johnson made no secret of his relationship with Julia Chinn; some sources go so far as to claim that they considered their bond a common law marriage.33 Johnson’s father owned Chinn when Johnson and she began their relationship, and he later inherited possession of her. Chinn was described as an “octoroon” (someone who is one-eighth African) and under Kentucky law barred from marrying a white man, even if they had wished to be married. Instead, Johnson and Chinn lived together, raised two daughters, and it was reported that when Johnson was away on military or political campaigns, Chinn took full control of household matters.34 Their relationship was common knowledge throughout the early decades of the nineteenth century, but interest peaked during political campaigns or major events, as when their daughter Adeline married Thomas W. Scott, a white man, and the couple inherited a sizable estate from then-Congressman Johnson. The Lexington Observer reported on this “Marriage Extraordinary,” bemoaning Scott’s degradation and demanding that Johnson’s kin be prosecuted; the story circulated in papers throughout the country.35 Despite being states and many hundreds of miles away, the Johnson daughters’ marriages were fodder for debates over amalgamation in Massachusetts. Abolitionists took the opportunity to weigh in, commending Johnson’s sons-in-law for entering into “virtuous marriage[s]” instead of taking the usual course of the “planters who do not scruple to prostitute their female slaves and beget as many bastards as possible.”36 A reader of the New Bedford Mercury asserted the righteousness of marriage and added, “all degradation that I can see, is his holding his wife’s brothers and sisters, and mother in slavery. Let him liberate them, and his name shall deserve a place in every colored man’s heart.”37 As the abolitionists and marriage reformers were quick to point out, this “tempest” rose out of the very fact that while interracial sex was ubiquitous, at least in slavery, interracial marriage was “extraordinary.”38 Yet, it was no less extraordinary that Mas-

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sachusetts would take up the interracial marriage question and ultimately legalized interracial marriage during a decade when amalgamation loomed large over all race questions. When Johnson ran for vice president on Van Buren’s ticket, his family arrangement again hit the spotlight. Harpers Weekly printed a satirical sketch commenting on the media firestorm surrounding his family life (see Figure 1.1). In the center of the print, Johnson sits with his head thrown back and hand over his face in apparent distress after reading how his family was excoriated in the New York Courier and Inquirer. He has dropped the paper to the floor and is being succored by the figures who surround him: a newspaper man; a black man apparently meant to represent the “black vote”; an abolitionist; a postmaster; a Democratic voter; and two young darkcomplexioned women, his daughters Adeline and Imogene. Johnson exclaims, “When I read the scurrilous attacks in the Newspapers on the Mother of my Children, pardon me, my friends if I give way to feelings!!! My dear Girls, bring me your Mother’s picture, that I may show it to my friends here.” Johnson’s “friends” then pledge their support, the postmaster vows: “Your Excellency, I am sure all of us Postmasters and deputies will stick to you; if you promise to keep us in office,” the black man assures him, “Colonel, I pledge you de honor of a Gentlemen dat all de Gentlemen of Colour will support you”; the white abolitionist asserts in Quaker prose, “be comforted Richard, all of us abolitionists will support thee”; and the voter in the background urges him on with the cry, “Pickle! Pop!! and Ginger!!! Can the slayer of Tecumseh be thus overcome like a summer cloud! fire and furies. oh!”39 His daughters, clad in voluminous gowns with large tear-drop earrings, their hair in curly buns atop their uncovered heads, carry him a large and elaborately framed portrait of a black woman wearing a turban and matching print dress, probably meant to suggest her African heritage. While hamhandedly failing to portray the complexity of biracial physiognomy, the artist codes interracial family formation as absurd, discrediting the constituencies he assumes Johnson’s interracial relationship represents.40 While attacks in the press could be damning, antiamalgamation rhetoric reached well beyond the printed page. In cities like Cincinnati and New York and rural towns throughout the country, antiabolitionists reacted to the threat of emancipation and racial equality with convoluted discourse and violent riots. They conflated any type of interracial cooperation with interracial sexuality and assaulted abolitionists and interracial couples they deemed a threat to the racial status quo.41 With the heightening of violent antiabolitionist protest, amalgamation took on increasingly more sophisticated rhetorical mobility and moved center stage as a major political issue.42

figure 1.1. An Affecting Scene in Kentucky, Courtesy of the Library of Congress

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News of the riots spread throughout the nation’s newspapers, drawing critique and proclamations from all sides. Editors called for law and order and expressed regret over the mob’s actions, but many nevertheless labeled the abolitionists “fanatics” who favored immediate emancipation of slaves and advocated amalgamation.43 Antiabolition cum antiamalgamation attacks were frequent, widespread, and increasingly anticipated by abolitionists as they toured and lectured. Still, three attacks loomed largest for Massachusetts reformers and shaped their views of amalgamation during the decade when the state’s interracial marriage ban entered the political spotlight.44 In each case, abolitionist women were targeted by white male mobs, and the mobbers’ aims were at least in part to destroy the spaces in which black and white people mingled for the furtherance of abolition and equal rights. Prudence Crandall and the black female students she taught in Canterbury, Connecticut, were the targets of the first of these affecting attacks. A Quaker, born and raised in the Canterbury vicinity, Crandall opened a school for girls in January 1832. At first, she catered to the families of wealthy local whites and enjoyed overwhelming support from her community. In the fall of 1832, however, Crandall admitted Sarah Harris, a twenty-year-old free woman of color, to her boarding school. White parents and patrons instantaneously protested, withdrawing both their children and their backing. With the support of free black New Englanders and abolitionists, Crandall reopened her school in 1833 as a school for girls of color. Further incensed by the prospect of a growing population of people of color in their midst, white Canterburians turned to state legislators. The legislature responded by declaring it illegal to bring black students from outside Connecticut to be educated at a school in the state. Although arrested and threatened with fines and violence, Crandall refused to close her school or deport her pupils. On September 9, 1833, white townspeople took matters into their own hands, attacking the school and threatening Crandall and her students. Convinced that her students’ lives might be in jeopardy, Crandall closed her school and later moved to Illinois. The attack on the boarding school at Canterbury was hardly an isolated incident. In Canaan, New Hampshire, in 1835, white townspeople protested the admission of black students by harnessing their horses to the school’s frame and dragging it into a swamp outside the town limits. The attack had been discussed, planned, and voted on via quintessential New England direct democracy: at the recent town meeting.45 Boston saw its own antiamalgamation riot in 1835, when a mob later described by the press as “gentlemen of property and standing” disrupted a meeting of the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society.46 Apparently riled by news that the group was composed of black and white women meeting

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together and that they would be addressed by the renowned British abolitionists George F. Thompson, who was hated widely for his immediate abolitionist sentiments, the mob descended on the BFASS meeting room in the evening of October 21, 1835. The mob called for Thompson, tore down and shattered the BFASS’s sign, and threatened the women with physical violence. In response, the women of the BFASS famously linked arms, black and white together, and forced their way through the crowd. William Lloyd Garrison was not so fortunate. Unable to seize Thompson, who had been warned away from the scene by threats of violence, the mob caught Garrison, bound him, and dragged him through the streets in preparation for the application of burning tar and feathers. He might have met this fate had not Mayor Theodore Lyman beseeched the mob to deliver Garrison into the hands of the police.47 With Garrison in a jail cell for the night, the mob’s ire dissipated and they dispersed. Abolitionists thereafter noted that Lyman neither read Garrison’s attackers the riot act nor instructed the police to detain any of the mob.48 Many of the activists who led the movement for antislavery and interracial marriage rights in their Massachusetts communities were deeply affected by a riotous attack upon the Anti-Slavery Convention of American Women in 1838. The group of black and white women and prominent male abolitionists who convened in Philadelphia for that convention had come to celebrate the completion of Pennsylvania Hall, a space dedicated to antislavery work. Some 3,000 abolitionists filled the hall on Wednesday May 16 to hear BFASS leader Maria Weston Chapman speak, when an angry crowd pressed toward the building, threw stones, broke windows, and attempted to force their way in. Afraid, but refusing to retreat, the women linked arms, attempted to protect the black women they feared were in particular danger, and left the hall en masse. The mobbers threw stones and eggs as they emerged. By Thursday, the mob had swelled. In a move that revealed where city leaders’ sympathies lay, the mayor asked the convention to exclude African American women. They refused, choosing to cancel the meeting rather than bow to antiamalgamation pressure. Once the women evacuated, the mayor locked the building and quietly slipped away. With a cheer, the rioters broke through the doors and windows and set Pennsylvania Hall aflame. No one called the fire brigade for hours, and when they finally arrived, the brigade attended to the protection of neighboring buildings while the hall dedicated to freedom burned to ashes. Sure to convey their distaste for the abolitionist minority, white Philadelphians failed to convict a single arsonist and the grand jury cited the abolitionists for inciting a riot by holding a meeting that promoted “race mixing.”49 As an increasingly vociferous antislavery movement swept over the Northeast, those with little to gain by abolishing slavery, providing equality to

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Northern African Americans, or alienating Southern planters found themselves odd but powerful antebellum bedfellows, originating an alliance that would contribute to the political power of amalgamation and then “miscegenation” into the twentieth century. Conservatives shaped amalgamation as a centerpiece in their campaign to secure the support of whites, from laborers to elite bankers and businessmen under the banners of white racial purity, power, and national union.50 Amalgamation carried highly charged sexual innuendo, suggesting that interracial work environments, schools, neighborhoods, and meeting halls would lead inevitably to interracial intercourse and a growing biracial (or multiracial) population. The formulation of interracialism as a social threat coupled with increasing popular anxiety over middle-class reformers’ willingness to breach presumed racial barriers made amalgamation a powerful weapon in the war for antebellum social and political reform. The constant tension that cast interracial marriage as an issue of, on the one hand, social abomination and, on the other, antislavery and equal rights, did not emerge fully formed in the political realm. It was fostered in antebellum Northerners’ parlors and reading rooms where they consumed tales of interracial contact. By the 1830s interracial intimacy had become rich soil for literary devices and moral allegories, and some authors were particularly heavy-handed in their treatments. In 1835, Jerome B. Holgate wrote and pseudonymously self-published A Sojourn in the City of Amalgamation in the Year of Our Lord 19—by Oliver Bolokitten—Esq. In what Holgate intended as a burlesque dystopian world heavily influenced by satirists like Jonathan Swift, American abolitionists insist that the only means of righting the race problem is through racial intermarriage. Residents of the “city of amalgamation” intermarry, not out of love but in spite of apparent biological and cultural aversions to interracial intimacy.51 Borrowing his premise from fabricated advertisements in New York papers during the 1835 antiamalgamation riots that depicted white men soliciting black wives in the name of American racial equality, Holgate constructed a future “New York” full of what he viewed as racial perversions. As the narrator, Bolokitten, tours the city in the hands of his local guide, he views a future in which the state is run by amalgamationists with the power to force interracial marriages on unwitting men and women. Upon meeting his first interracial couples, the narrator reflects that they must view him as a backward inhabitant of a land where “innovation and conglomeration have yet not dwelt.”52 In one case, a white man marries a black woman because “an amalgamationist wished it,” while in another a white woman’s “rigid amalgamationist” father forces her to marry a black man. None of these couples marry out of love, which is considered out of the question due to the supposedly natural aversion between the races.

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Notably, Holgate highlights those natural aversions by having Bolokitten’s guide reiterate the social and scientific ways these forcibly married couples suffer. A black wife hectors her white husband because she believes he secretly loves a white woman more than her. This interracial jealousy is seen as a “natural” reaction, and the man “ought to have borne with it, and lived a miserable life for the sake of philanthropy.”53 Holgate’s is a fantastical future world in which state control and scientific technology have united to subvert the will of God and “Poor nature— abused, caricatured nature!”54 He begins the parody with a heraldic quotation from Swift: “If the moderns mean by madness, only a disturbance or transposition of the brain, by force of certain vapours issuing up from the lower faculties; then has this madness been the parent of all those mighty revolutions that have happened in empire, philosophy, and in religion.” Amalgamationists have invented whirligigs that use “fans and little vials” to waft black odors away from whites and replace them with “delightsome perfume.”55 In the amalgamationist churches, preachers boil their parishioners and hopeful marriage partners in vats of chemical foam that allow enthusiasm to “fuddle or make drunk” the powers of judgment and reason in the brain that otherwise would keep white ladies and gentleman from desiring black spouses.56 Making casual reference to Kentucky Congressman Johnson, Bolokitten remarks that the “zoological boiler,” “reminded me of that said to have been moulded in Kentucky, and which was so large that the artisans at work upon it could not be heard from one side to the other.” In these vats, even animals are boiled to overcome their “prejudices” against other species.57 The same brew concocted to induce interracial couples to tolerate each other is so powerful an antidote to nature that “chairs, tables, and kettles were all frisking and capering.” A rat dances a horn-pipe and the narrator himself starts dancing as the din “metamorphosed into an Indian pow wow.”58 Enthusiasm, then, counters physics, biology, socialization, and civilization itself. Furthermore, should the partners be unwilling to submit to the boiling process, there are other methods, as when a Mr. and Mrs. Sternfast drug their white daughter and marry her, unconscious, to a black man despite her love for a white one.59 While questions of race, interracialism, and human nature shape The City of Amalgamation, Holgate likewise suggests that abolitionists ask too much, that equality in a multiracial society requires more sacrifice than a citizen should be made to bear. In the perfumery, for instance, black initiates are flogged until their skin is tender enough to receive injections of perfume that mask their “effluvia,” and whites have their nostrils stretched and pumped full of perfume before a bottle “resembling very much a cow’s tit” is attached to their nose hairs, providing them with an ever-ready supply

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of fragrance.60 The character of the amalgamator, Mr. Sternfast, is introduced as the uncompromising white abolitionist who, when contrasted with the pragmatic narrator, personifies the threat equal rights activists posed national comity and sanity. Sternfast argues that “We must torture self, in order that others may not be tortured” but admits that he was weak and married a white woman.61 When his daughter shows signs of attraction to a white man rather than the black man to whom she is promised, there are no limits to the suffering she should endure to compel her to make the “right” choice (including having her flogged, having her suitor “[knock] her down with a club, and [drag] her home by the hair of the head,” and drugging her with opium).62 In perhaps the most extreme example of institutionalized self-sacrifice, Sternfast, Wildfire, Bluebottle and others, “slumber with a platter of . . . excrement smoking before their noses, in order to their olfactory nerves not believing that manure is offensive [sic], which, according to these obstreperous wights’ creed, is a hell-bred prejudice, which no consideration whatever, not even that of a stomachal splitting and disgorging of vile and foul secretions should prevent from overcoming.”63 Stepping out of character to editorialize through Mr. Bolokitten, Holgate argues that one does not love another as oneself when it causes undue pain and that prejudicial feelings are natural and God-given.64 Thus both God and nature militate against modern notions of human equality. Holgate goes on to argue that the abolitionists’ unnatural, irrational, and uncompromising program will precipitate a race war. Running roughshod over even dubious early nineteenth-century race science, Holgate introduces the character Boge Bogun, a biracial man who has a black lower half and white upper half because of “the war which took place in his own body, between the different coloured particles of flesh.” As Bogun explains, “Commonly . . . an inexplicable chemical process goes forward in the mongrel body . . . producing what is technically and vulgarly termed the mulatto, but in my eccentrical body it was singularly different.”65 His memoir is a battle narrative between black and white, like the race war some antiabolitionists warned would result from ending slavery. Furthermore, even if race war should not come, and instead racial intermixture produce “the future American,” Holgate offers white supremacists a cautionary tale.66 After they leave the zoological boiler, Bolokitten’s guide tells him that the “zoological superintendent,” who looks like “a strapping tall negro,” had ancestors who were white. “His great, great, great grandfather, or somewhere thereabouts, whose name was S——, was a pure white man; but his progeny on the male side, all marrying a coal black negress, have at length entirely neutralized their white blood, rendering the family as you saw him, as black as a chimney back.”67 Not only did abolitionists threaten

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the purity of whiteness, they promised white extinction. Holgate’s vision of amalgamation was not one of black disappearing into white, but of white disappearing into black and the extinction of the “white race.”68 Holgate hoped to discredit political abolitionism, perpetuate beliefs about racial difference, and promote colonization, the forced removal of free African Americans to areas outside the United States, as a solution to the race problem.69 However, his writing actually reveals and bolsters important contemporary beliefs about marriage and the state that foreshadow the success of advocates for interracial marriage rights in Massachusetts. No one in the dystopian “city of amalgamation” marries for love. Holgate builds the perversity of this community around its failure to live up to the contention that marriage and family formation should follow directly from love between two individuals. In each example he gives, the insinuation is that happy marriages are built on love. Not only that, but if it were not for political amalgamationists’ power, residents of the city would, if they could, marry a partner of their choosing. The “natural” alternative to the perversions of the city of amalgamation, then, is a community in which individuals choose mates without unsolicited state interference. Writing as he was in the early years of the immediate abolitionist movement, Holgate might not have anticipated a legitimate role for abolitionism in politics. For him, it was ridiculous that abolitionists might control the city and shape marriage policy. As the creation of the Liberty Party and later the Free Soil Party would show, Americans did not relish a political role for abolitionists who failed to pepper their antislavery with nativism and white supremacy. Nevertheless, Holgate’s world suggested a sort of political legitimacy for abolitionists and interracial marriage rights advocates that would play out in Massachusetts and contribute to the interracial marriage ban’s repeal. A few years after Holgate’s work was published, lithographer Edward G. Clay created a widely circulated series of lithographs mocking abolitionists and the social upheaval they represented. His prints included An Amalgamation Waltz, in which African American men, drawn animalistically with protruding lips and teeth, dance, kiss, and cuddle with white women while white men look on from a far-away balcony and The Fruits of Amalgamation, depicting a black father propping his feet upon the lap of his white wife while she nurses their biracial baby. A white servant brings the family their tea. While all of Clay’s prints alluded to interracial sex, one addressed marriage directly (see Figure 1.2). In Practical Amalgamation (The Wedding), Clay presented the marriage ceremony of a white woman and African American man in an ornate drawing room filled with a racially mixed group of attendants. The African American groom and his groomsmen are depicted as hopeless social aspirants,

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figure 1.2. Practical Amalgamation (The Wedding), Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society

dressed absurdly in formal and military dress, complete with pantaloons and prim slippers. Their hair and facial features are accentuated and their expressions sketched to look ridiculous and even idiotic. William Lloyd Garrison stands to the right of the rotund and dark-complexioned officiant. He is arm in arm with a large and well-dressed African American woman whose back is turned to the observer. Garrison regards the wedding with a contented countenance but is one of the few people in the room who look comfortable or pleased. Most of the attendants, including the bride and groom, look miserable. The groom stares at the minister with a confused air while his bride-to-be grips his hand but turns her gaze downward. The bride’s face is partially hidden by a veil as she looks away, distraught or ashamed. An older white woman stands just behind the bride, possibly a mother, comforting her and whispering in her ear. Like Holgate’s depiction, Clay seems to imagine that interracial marriages occur only through compulsion, against the laws of nature, and at the expense of marital happiness. Holgate’s and Clay’s view did not go unchallenged. The rise of abolitionism in the United States in the 1820s and 1830s initiated a wave of antislavery novels and stories inspired by the exoticism and tragedy of interracial intimacy in racist societies. Readers also had access to popular

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European stories like “Inkle and Yarico,” refashioned in dozens of ways and different languages over the course of the eighteenth century, in literature and on the stage.70 Some of these, as in the original “Inkle and Yarico” written by Richard Steele in 1711, offered modest antislavery messages. For instance, slavery induces the morally bankrupt merchant Thomas Inkle to betray and sell his beloved, the indigenous (sometimes African) Yarico. Tales of interracial relations often were characterized by salacity or tragedy (or both), and imprinted conventional stereotypes like the tragic mulatto onto readers’ understandings of interracialism in slavery and freedom.71 Literary portrayals of biracial children could be more sympathetic, a trend that would be reflected in public debates over interracial marriage in the coming decades. A redeemed biracial child is the central figure in a popular morality tale, The Tawny Girl; or, The History of Margaret Russel, published in New York in 1823. The story follows a young mulatta, half “negro” and half Irish, who struggles to survive and rise above her social station. Printed by Samuel Wood & Sons in a series of juvenile books including titles such as History of Fidelity and Profession, Rational Dame, and Hieroglyphical Bible, the story features Margaret Russel, the daughter of an Irish mother and West Indian father, who through her parents’ tragic deaths becomes the quintessential recipient of Christian charity, confesses her youthful sins, and perishes with a cleansed soul, surrounded by white friends and teachers.72 Because he marries a white woman, Margaret’s father is dismissed from his position as a servant in an Irish household. Tragically, he dies and the “tawny girl” and her mother move to York, England, as “tramps” and match sellers. Despite the negative influences in her life, the author explains, Margaret attends school and earns good marks. Nevertheless, her mother also takes ill and dies, while Margaret nurses devotedly at her bedside. The Tawny Girl’s author does not hide her purpose. One edition of the book was subtitled “illustrating the benefits of education on the most degraded classes of society.” Education did not save Margaret Russel; rather, it taught her how to be suitably humble and thankful that her neighbors treated her charitably despite her poverty, biraciality, and distasteful origins. The introduction reminds young readers that they should be thankful not to be Margaret Russel and that they should be “encouraged . . . to rescue from depravity, ignorance and misery, those degraded fellow-creatures, whom Providence may cast in their way, and afford opportunities for wise and benevolent endeavors, to relieve and protect them!”73 Neither the author’s introduction nor the narrator provides commentary on interracial marriage itself, but the parents’ interracial marriage marks the family’s precipitous degradation. First, the narrator mentions without further comment,

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that Margaret’s father lost his job because he married a white woman. Later, the family takes initiative, moving to “try their fortunes in England” but for unexplained reasons cannot find footing. Perhaps it is her father’s illness, or his blackness, that dooms the family. Or perhaps it is Margaret’s parents’ ill-conceived match that makes “humble,” intelligent, Christian Margaret a “degraded fellow-creature” in search of solicitude. While her parents’ marriage is portrayed as degraded, or at least tragically ill conceived, Margaret’s own biraciality is not coded negatively. In addition to her role as the redemptive Christian protagonist, this is exemplified in a frontispiece depicting Margaret at her mother’s deathbed. In this visual introduction signed by Alexander Anderson, Margaret sits upon an upturned box, hunched with cold, reading attentively at her dying mother’s bedside. The pallid white figure of her mother is curled up in bed, covered in patched rags, casting her pleading eyes toward her daughter. Their room is bare, the walls unplastered. The Russels’ home is unfurnished except for a small rope bed, two boxes intended as seats, two empty baskets, and a peg on the wall that serves as a closet for a shawl, presumably the only other article of clothing Margaret owns. One six-paned window casts light onto the scene. Two of its panes are cracked and one is missing, a rag stuffed in its place to keep out the cold. Except for its obvious portrayal of poverty, Anderson’s scene lacks any of the hallmarks of negative racial stereotyping so popular in the antebellum period. Margaret poses as the loving child, assuaging her mother’s pain through her innocent strength and calm (see Figure 1.3). Prominent marriage rights advocate Lydia Maria Child built her literary career on antislavery and sentimental fiction, and offered relatively positive portrayals of both biracial children and interracial families through her work.74 Child (then Lydia Maria Francis) entered the fray when in 1824 she merged her fascination with early America and the historical romances of contemporaries like Sir Walter Scott to pen her first novel: Hobomok.75 Hobomok tells the tale of Mary Conant, a young Englishwoman who crosses the Atlantic to the colonial settlement of Salem, Massachusetts, where she first falls in love with evangelist Charles Brown who is forced into exile by the town’s Puritan fathers. Learning the following year that he has been lost at sea, Mary’s nonconformist romanticism leads her into the arms of Hobomok, a young Native American man who loves her. They elope, her father disinherits her, and eventually Mary and Hobomok have a son. But the interracial romance cannot last. Charles Brown, assumed to be dead, returns, and Hobomok relinquishes Mary to him, knowing that she has continued to yearn for him. The elder Hobomok goes off alone, the tragic Indian, and the couple’s child, also Hobomok, is raised as a white

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figure 1.3. From The Tawny Girl, Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society

boy, educated at Harvard and in England, and assimilates into English society. Only twenty-two years old, Lydia Maria Francis was well educated and intellectually curious, but she could not have guessed that Hobomok marked the beginning of a lifetime critiquing American race and republicanism. Unsurprisingly, one of her first reviewers blanched at the romance, calling it “not only unnatural, but revolting . . . to every feeling of delicacy.”76 Fran-

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cis’s work did not sell until she used a personal connection through her brother to ask Boston’s literary czar George Ticknor to make his favorable review public. Still, North American Review editor Jared Spark promoted Hobomok despite, not because of, the interracial romance. He suggested that while it might be indelicate, the romance was all too true to history and that “If our ancestors were more sternly virtuous, they were certainly without much of the delicacy and refinement of the present generation.”77 Francis here began a career in which the complicated relationships between patriarchy and white supremacy, feminism and abolitionism, and even metaphor and reality would play out in her oeuvre.78 While Conant’s attraction to Hobomok garnered a great deal of attention from Francis’s contemporaries, perhaps the most telling part of the story is its denouement, in which the Indian Hobomok disappears while his son, the biracial Hobomok, the metaphorical union of English and Native Americans, lives and prospers under white tutelage. Francis’s vision was not a multicultural utopia. Her failed interracial romance illustrated the incapacity of different races to live side by side as long as existing social customs reigned. However, young Hobomok offers hope that the fruit of interracial sex, the blending of races according to republican principles, if not social norms, might signal a heraldic American future. Child would go further to defend interracial romance in her later works. In 1834, she rewrote a tale from John Stedman’s Narrative of a Five Years Expedition against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam as “Joanna,” published in the antislavery journal Oasis.79 In “Joanna,” Captain Stedman travels to Surinam where he meets and ultimately marries a “mulatto” girl named Joanna. When he returns to Britain, he cannot afford to bring her or their son, Johnny, and while he is away, Joanna dies. Johnny, however, eventually travels to England and is educated at Devon, later to become a sailor and die at sea. Of the appropriateness of their marriage, Child writes, “His marriage was unquestionably a sincere tribute of respect to the delicacy and natural refinement of Joanna’s character,” but she adds sardonically, “Yet . . . he never calls her his wife.”80 He “was often made ill and wretched by the cruelties” of slavery, but “he conjured the English Abolitionists not to oppose the continuance of the Slave TRADE; lest Holland should make more money than England!”81 John Stedman in “Joanna,” already a significantly air-brushed version of the real Stedman, serves a critical purpose.82 Stedman and Joanna’s relationship tread the line between concubinage (which it probably actually was) and “honorable” marriage. Child simultaneously critiques the immorality of forced or coerced amalgamation in slavery while she illustrates the naturalness and appropriateness of interracial desire. She was fully aware that conventional norms and

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taboos cast interracialism as in bad taste; she mockingly assures her readers that “the Abolitionists have no wish to induce any one to marry a mulatto, even should their lives be saved by such a one ten times.” Still, Child’s purpose is clear: to assert the righteousness of interracial attraction and the honorability of consensual interracial marriages between those of equal character. This is the sentiment that would fuel both Child’s antislavery career and her leadership in the movement for interracial marriage rights in Massachusetts.83 By 1842 she penned perhaps her most influential work “The Quadroons,” which again borrowed from Stedman and ushered the character of the “tragic mulatta” into the sentimental literary tradition. In “The Quadroons,” Child exposes the evils of slavery through the characters Rosalie and her daughter Xarifa, light complexioned biracial characters caught between the worlds of white and black in slave society. Morally righteous, Rosalie insists that a minister sanctify her relationship with the white Edward, but when he eventually enters a legal marriage with a white woman, Rosalie is grief stricken and dies. Xarifa, their daughter, having grown up free and virtually passing for white, suddenly finds herself tangled in slavery’s web, claimed as a slave during the distribution of her grandfather’s estate and auctioned to an abusive master who kills her white lover. Child leaves little space for interpreting the buyer’s purpose. Standing at auction, Xarifa is offered as a sex slave: “There she stood, trembling, blushing, and weeping; compelled to listen to the grossest language, and shrinking from the rude hands that examined the graceful proportions of her beautiful frame.”84 Her new master pays $5,000 for her, and after a short period during which he tries to bribe her to perform sex acts, “He grew weary of her obstinacy, as he was pleased to term it; and threats took the place of persuasion.” Shortly thereafter, Xarifa follows her mother to the grave a “raving lunatic.”85 As she did in “Joanna,” Child distinguishes between the conventionality of racial taboos (and male profligacy) and the spiritual sanctity of marriage. Child describes Edward’s relationship with Rosalie as “a marriage sanctioned by heaven, though unrecognized on earth.”86 The Quadroons’ consensual relationships with white men are not abominable in Child’s eyes. Instead, it is the institution of slavery that tramples the sanctity of Christian marriage in the dust and renders these women’s lives unbearable. Interracial families in antebellum Massachusetts could find positive portrayals and advocates in people like Lydia Maria Child, but the ribald attacks on their relationships by people like E. G. Clay and Jerome B. Holgate and the physical dangers posed by antiamalgamationist mobs were constant reminders that the Massachusetts ban on interracial marriage was more than just legislation. It represented the views of a society hostile to

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them and their children, as individuals: a society that would use the press, laws, and maybe brickbats to maintain a status quo steeped in white supremacy. Historians struggle to quantify interracial intimacies in early America. Some have tried to count interracial marriages in colonial and state vital records.87 Others have catalogued the numbers of men and women prosecuted under antimiscegenation law, and the results of even this imperfect approach have been unsatisfying.88 Many others have avoided an attempt to quantify interracial marriage and instead favor an anecdotal approach, turning to the dossiers of court cases in which interracial couples were prosecuted for rich information about their lives and legal struggles.89 In antebellum Massachusetts, few families were prosecuted under the 1705 law “For the Better Preventing of a Spurious and Mixt Issue, &c” or its successors. This likely is due to the state’s small African American population: there simply were fewer African Americans to intermarry with whites, and the occasional interracial marriage did not pose a significant threat to white supremacy or established racial classifications (or the fictitious “racial purity”). A handful of interracial marriage cases that reached Massachusetts’s Supreme Judicial Court did address the interracial marriage law but only when the legitimacy of their marriages could determine other questions, like whether local overseers of the poor should provide them aid. I have taken this paucity of legal documentation as a challenge to view “interracial marriage” through a wider lens, recognizing the significance of the documentation that exists as well as the knowledge we can gain by studying the gaps.90 The interracial relationships discussed here have been revealed not through the act of marriage, per se, but through other records like those tied to family crises and poverty. In fairness to those who struggled with how to organize their own interracial relations without the right to marry, I have chosen to discuss both “marriages” and other types of interracial relationship, from apparently illicit interracial sexual encounters to lifelong cohabitation. This illustrates how the law affected families and society, and how individuals responded to and subverted legal strictures. Massachusetts’s ban on interracial marriage was clear-cut. In spirit, it forbade whites from forming families with African Americans or Native Americans. In practice, it barred interracial couples from recording their unions with state authorities. If they attempted to marry, their presiding minister could be fined and their marriage nullified. But what of “common law marriage,” the practice by which couples performed and garnered public affirmation of their unions without a formal sacrament?91 On the one hand, interracial couples could not claim the benefits of common law marriage because authorities could simply nullify their marriage when it was revealed.92

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However, if the couple never sought any support from state or local authorities, they could have practiced common law marriage. If they never asked the overseer of the poor for relief, never adjudicated a family matter in the courts, and carefully delineated inheritances to avoid the involvement of probate officers who could circumscribe biracial children through their (official) illegitimacy, Massachusetts residents theoretically could have avoided the ban. It is likely that many families practiced interracial common law (or more precisely “informal”) marriages in antebellum Massachusetts, quietly providing for themselves and avoiding the authorities (and detection in the historical record). People of different races certainly cohabitated in ways that suggest family formation, and evidence of their interracial households lies temptingly in census records. The vagaries of record collection frustrate research that attempts to use racial classifications, but it also can offer clues about families’ racial make-up and the ways local officials and neighbors attempted to identify race or ethnicity when it was not clear-cut. In Boston, for instance, census takers struggled to classify the members of the Elisha family whose race and class united to leave them on the margins of the city’s community and thus either too confusing or not prestigious enough for officials to classify consistently. In 1840, during the petitioning campaign to legalize interracial marriage in Massachusetts, James Elisha headed a household in which two other people lived: one white woman around his age and a young boy identified as “of color” like James.93 In 1850, the family was listed under the name “Elisher,” with a household comprised of James (fifty years old), Betsey (forty-four years old), J[ames] F. (seventeen years old), Joseph (seven), and baby Charlotte. Everyone in the household was listed as “mulatto” as were the other relations living in the same building: William and Harriet Elisher (perhaps husband and wife) and fifty-year-old Sarah Elisher who was listed as living alone.94 Then by 1860, the house was headed by twenty-six-year-old James (Jr.) along with a twenty-nineyear-old woman name Maria who was identified as a “mulatto” from New Brunswick, Canada, an eleven-year old-girl named Charlotte, twenty-oneyear-old Joseph, James (Sr.) now sixty-three years of age, a woman named Betsey listed as thirty-eight, James (3rd) who was two years old and fouryear-old Adelaide, likely James (Jr.’s) children, and then a sixty-four-year-old white woman named Sarah Coates. Could this be the same Sarah Coates who lived a few doors down and was listed as of color in the 1840 census or even the woman listed as Sarah Elisher in 1850? She certainly appears to have lived in the household with the family (not next door; the census takers were careful to delineate, for instance, that thirty-year-old William E. Elisha lived in a separate apartment in the same building).95 Even more

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confusing, by 1870, James (Jr.) is listed as living with a woman named Maria who this time is listed as white and only twenth-seven years of age.96 We do not have evidence of how the Elishas characterized their family, and it would be irresponsible to ascribe family formation and interracial sexuality to all such households, particularly considering that these individuals lived during a period when their communities likely did just that, demarcating and sexualizing all interracial interaction in ways that were undeniably destructive. In contrast, John and Ann Barber of Nantucket offer a clear example of a couple who performed marriage despite the formal illegality of their relationship. John Barber, a black man possibly from Pennsylvania, moved to Massachusetts and created a family with Irish-born Ann, bearing three biracial children, all born in Massachusetts, by the late 1830s. In the 1830 census, John Barber is listed as head of household, in an area inhabited almost exclusively by people of color, for a home with a woman listed as of color around his age and a young son. By 1840, whether because the census taker was nosier or because the Barbers were more inclined to make their status public, the Barber family is recorded as John, a man of color between thirty-six and fifty-five years of age, a white woman in her thirties, two boys, and two girls.97 In 1850, the Barber’s are finally recorded by name: fifty-two-year-old John and his forty-two-year-old wife Ann, their grown son John A. Barber who was employed as a Nantucket mason, and teenagers Ann and Philip.98 John lists himself as from Pennsylvania but might well have been an escaped slave trying to avoid detection. Ann hailed from Ireland and by 1850 is listed as illiterate. She was the only person in the family, and indeed one of the few people in her neighborhood, who could not read and write.99 By 1860, Ann was head of household at fifty-four years of age and lived with her son Philip, by then a twenty-threeyear-old mariner, a woman named Elizabeth who might have been his wife, and a five-year-old boy named Clarence, perhaps Philip’s son. Notably, with John and the other children gone, Ann moved to a more racially diverse part of town, surrounded by approximately equal numbers of people identified as white and as of color.100 Her son John, trained as a mason, traveled to California to make a life for himself. By 1870, he was working as a bricklayer in San Francisco and is listed as “mulatto” and head of a household including his wife Hannah and children John, James, and Ira.101 Many of the families whose interracial status can be identified in the historical record are memorialized there because their contemporaries deemed them deviant. Luckily, we have some evidence of interracial families like the Barbers whose status does not appear to have left them uniquely vulnerable or targeted by local authorities. Equal rights reformer Reverend Hosea Easton recalled that two of his uncles, men of mixed African and

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Native American heritage, had been married to white women.102 In the case of his uncle Caleb, Easton thought it notable that he had married not simply a middling white woman, but a daughter of one of the first families of North Bridgewater. Caleb Easton of Middleboro and Chloe Packard of North Bridgewater married February 2, 1818, when Caleb was twenty-seven years old. They cohabitated and identified themselves as a married couple both before and after interracial marriage was legalized in Massachusetts. During the Eastons’ lifetimes, only a handful of people with any African American ancestry resided in North Bridgewater. With a few exceptions, the citizens identified as “of color” were living as servants in white families’ homes or in the town Almshouse.103 While there appear to have been other multiracial households, the Eastons achieved a social status that warranted their inclusion in nineteenth-century local history texts, an “honor” not often bestowed on people of color. In his History of North Bridgewater, published in 1866, local historian Bradford Kingman included an entire genealogical listing for the Eastons, recording their marriage, the births of their seven children, and their subsequent marriages.104 No records exist to elucidate how either Caleb’s or Chloe’s parents viewed their relationship. However, it does not appear to have alienated either of them from their respective families. Caleb moved to North Bridgewater, and he and Chloe managed a farm adjacent to Packard properties, likely on land they bought or inherited from her family. They do not appear to have become rich or lived a lavish lifestyle, but they were financially stable and grew their wealth over time. In 1840, their farm consisted of seventy acres of land, thirty of them improved, worth approximately $1,000 (cash value). They owned a horse, three milking cows, a hog, and some other livestock for butchering. With the help of their children, they not only sustained themselves, but produced butter, corn, hay, and butchered meat for market.105 Ten years later, they had increased their landholding to 100 acres worth $3,000 and had begun selling orchard fruit, peas, beans, potatoes, and larger quantities of butter and meat. While their farm was by no means the largest in the area, it was above average.106 Like the Barbers, the legitimacy of the Eastons’ marriage was never challenged or voided by state of local officials. The Treadwells of New Bedford might have been so fortunate were it not for the local overseers of the poor. Caesar Treadwell and Deborah Bacon listed their marriage date as March 11, 1792. Treadwell was an African American who had come North out of slavery and settled in New Bedford, and Bacon was a white woman from Barnstable, Massachusetts. The couple lived at a house Treadwell owned near “the Cove,” an area of New Bedford near the orphan’s home.107 They

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had five children: Deborah who later married John Scofield, Jane, Martha who married William Franklin, William, and James who took to the sea.108 Jane did not marry and lived with her ailing parents until after their deaths. In 1848, alone, middle aged, and struggling to maintain the family’s small farming operation, she was forced to turn to the town for help. Between 1848 and 1850, Jane Treadwell asked the overseers of the poor for wood and coal to warm her home, and groceries to sustain herself. The overseers complied but conducted research on her background, legitimacy, and settlement. Jane was fortunate that her father owned their home. Based on her settlement in New Bedford through Caesar, and perhaps feeling generous or sympathetic, the overseers’ investigator allowed her claim. In the process, however, he did something no other official had. He inscribed the invalidity of Caesar and Deborah Treadwell’s marriage into the historical record: “father Casar [sic] Treadwell married a white woman of Barnstable— a void marriage.”109 The overseers enacted this sleight of hand again when in 1850, Jane’s sister Deborah asked for support. Living in close quarters with three other families and trying to support her young grandsons, Deborah asked for and received supplies of wood from the overseers twice during 1850.110 In her entry, the investigator goes even farther in negating the validity of her parents’ relationship: “she is daughter of Caesar Treadwell by Deborah Bacon of Barnstable.”111 There is no evidence to suggest that Caesar Treadwell and Deborah Bacon were anything other than married, except, of course, that their marriage was across the color line and thus technically “void.” They consecrated and recorded their marriage with the authorities.112 They cohabitated in New Bedford, in a home they owned, and raised five children, one of whom (Jane) apparently cared for them through their old age. Nevertheless, by 1850, at least according to the overseers, a lifetime together had been transformed, postmortem, into a series of illicit sexual encounters. If the overseers had deemed it worthwhile, Jane’s or Deborah’s case might have gone before the courts. Instead of challenging whether or not the 1843 repeal of the interracial marriage ban was retroactive, New Bedford’s overseers struck a “conciliatory” note, placing the women on the dole while quietly discounting their legitimacy. The Treadwells and others like them show that individuals identified as of different races lived as married couples in Massachusetts despite the ban. Some even married legally, turning to neighboring states to find ministers who would solemnize a legal interracial union. Ishmael Coffee, identified as “mulatto,” and Hannah Gay, white, comprised one such couple.113 In early 1768 Hannah Gay learned that she was pregnant. We do not know whether or not the pregnancy was planned. Perhaps a pregnancy was the

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only way to elicit her parents’ approval of a marriage to her lover Ishmael Coffee. Perhaps the pregnancy was entirely unintentional and all the more daunting for the legal and social stigma that accompanied interracial family formation in eighteenth-century Massachusetts. As the months passed and Hannah found her ability to hide her pregnancy from a judgmental community rapidly diminishing, she sought whatever means she could to salvage her future well-being. Ultimately, Ishmael and Hannah decided not only to cohabitate, but to seek out a legal marriage. They traveled to Rhode Island where on July 16, 1768, they were married.114 Their child, Roba or Rhoda was born October 17, 1768.115 Whatever the circumstance, Ishmael and Hannah enjoyed a long and exceptionally fruitful marriage. Hannah gave birth to seventeen children between 1768 and 1793, including two sets of twins, spacing the births approximately two years apart.116 Although not all of the Coffee children lived to adulthood, many did, and in times of economic distress Ishmael Coffee found himself compelled to seek town support in order to heat his home and clothe and feed his large brood. In the summer of 1789, their daughter Roba Coffee married Christopher Vickons, a man identified as white, in Natick, Massachusetts.117 Whether unaware that interracial marriage was illegal in Massachusetts or supposing that the prohibition did not pertain to them, Roba and Christopher did not bother to have their marriage solemnized outside of Massachusetts. In the early decades of the nineteenth century, the Coffee-Vickons family found themselves the subjects of judicial decisions pertaining to the meaning and interpretation of Massachusetts’s interracial marriage laws. The Vickonses did not move far from their families. They lived in Natick, and when Christopher died, Roba moved back to Medway. Moving closer to her aged parents and her siblings’ families offered Roba the possibility not only of emotional support but also a wide network of family members who might offer much-needed financial help. Ultimately, even this was not enough, and Roba was compelled to turn to the town of Medway for aid. Medway relieved Roba, but as was customary among overseers of the poor, sought compensation for their expenditures from Roba’s place of legal settlement. Reasoning that her late husband Christopher had legal settlement in Natick, Medway turned to Natick for their reimbursement. The overseers of the poor in Natick countered that Roba had no legal settlement, not because she had not lived there, but rather because her marriage to the white Christopher Vickons was illegal. Roba Vickons was a “mulatto,” they reasoned, and forbidden from marrying a white person under existing law. The case went before the Massachusetts Supreme Court in 1810 with two questions: first, was it constitutional for the state legislature to declare

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a marriage between a white person and a mulatto null and void, and second, was Roba Vickons a mulatto at all?118 Here was the court’s first chance to examine the constitutionality of the interracial marriage law. As it turns out, they sidestepped the question entirely by turning to the increasingly scientific study of racial classification to determine that, no, Roba Vickons was not a mulatto, but rather a “quadroon,” and yes, her marriage to Christopher Vickons had been legal. Natick would reimburse Medway for her support. The brief decision in Inhabitants of Medway v. Inhabitants of Natick reveals that the seated justices had no interest in entering the thorny fray of racial politics. They refrained from offering the slightest hint of their views on the interracial marriage ban’s constitutionality. However, the town of Medway would offer the Supreme Court another chance to weigh the question just a few years later. In its October 1819 session, Justice Isaac Parker offered a decision that laid bare the political nature of the ban on interracial marriage and even questioned its creators’ original intent.119 This time, Medway sought recompense for monies they had expended to support the now elderly paupers Ishmael and Hannah Coffee.120 Medway turned to Needham in this case, claiming that the couple had legal settlement there, and Needham countered, as had Natick, that they were not liable because the couples’ marriage was null and void under state law. Mr. Chickering, the lawyer for Needham, pointed out that no one was denying that Hannah and Ishmael Coffee were Massachusetts residents when they were married, or that they went to Rhode Island to solemnize a marriage that would have been illegal in their own state. They had knowingly evaded state law, he reasoned, and their marriage should be considered null and void as if they had attempted to marry at home. The sitting justice countered with a scathing indictment upon Chickering’s interpretation of the marriage ban, a reading that he saw as socially irresponsible and foolhardy. Parker turned to the question of whether a legal marriage solemnized in a foreign country or state should be considered legal in any other state and decided that “general convenience and security” were served by mutual recognition of all legal marriages. Pointing to English common law for a precedent, he found that an English court deemed it prudent to recognize Scottish marriages “to avoid the great inconvenience and cruelty of bastardizing the issue of such marriages.” In other words, marriages should be seen as a special form of contract because of their unique social significance. Parker pursued a similar line of reasoning in the 1818 case Wightman v. Coates, when he asserted a woman’s right to sue for breach of promise, not simply because engagement was a sort of contract, but because “loss sustained in other respects—the wounded spirit, the unmerited disgrace, and the probable solitude, which would be the consequences of

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desertion after a long courtship—were considered to be as legitimate claims for pecuniary compensation as the loss of reputation by slander, or the wounded pride in slight assaults and batteries.”121 As historian Michael Grossberg has pointed out, Parker’s interpretation of the crime as an issue of private emotions and family comity rather than simply as a breach of contract (or a “commercial” concern) was quite modern.122 Furthermore, Parker reasserted his faith in the relationship between stable family institutions and greater social well-being when he wrote that the sanctity of the marriage agreement was something upon which the “interest of all civilized countries so essentially depends.”123 Parker did not stop there. He proceeded by turning to the Massachusetts marriage ban itself and calling into question what social effect the provincial legislature actually intended when it penned the law. Again citing English legal history he suggested that in 1705 legislators might not have intended to nullify interracial marriages. They might have believed that they were simply forbidding such marriages and relegating surreptitiously contracted interracial marriages to illegality, like any number of other marriages undertaken without the formalities of law. Other illegally contracted marriages, he reasoned, were considered marriages nonetheless, and provincial legislators might not have fully grasped the inference of their law. Even if the provincial legislators had intended to nullify interracial marriages and illegitimate biracial children, he went on to argue, their intentions should be viewed as an act of “political expediency,” not social responsibility. In particular, Parker pointed to incestuous marriages as an exception to his general ruling on mutual recognition of foreign marriages and allowed that unions that “would tend to outrage the principles and feelings of all civilized nations” should not be tolerated. Interracial marriage, he stated unequivocally, was no such outrageous practice. Parker’s bold dismissal of the marriage ban as politically motivated would lay the groundwork for repeal activism twenty years later. In the context of its creation in 1705, the law was a critical stone in the foundation of a racial caste system. Racial slavery was instrumental to the labor and mercantile systems of colonial Massachusetts, where, as Ira Berlin has observed, Massachusetts was part of a “society with slaves,” in which slavery existed alongside a vibrant free labor culture.124 Interracial marriage bans worked as keystones in the early history of American race laws. They simultaneously helped to engender and grant legitimacy to popular perceived racial distinctions. Such laws combined with those denigrating the free status of biracial children to segregate society. In short, they were critical to the development throughout colonial North America of a free and largely white population that existed separate and apart from an enslaved population of

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African descent. Judge Parker realized that far from fading into irrelevance in the nineteenth century, after the judicial abolition of slavery in the state, the ban on interracial marriage had taken on a new political mantle as a test of African American full citizenship in a free society. Parker’s decisions reveal his keen interest not simply in equality before the law, but in attempting to provide equity for children, in spite of their parents’ choices or status.125 While Parker would not live to see the rise of radical abolitionism, he was a product of his age and its attendant changing views of children and family law. The vulnerability of children was of particular interest to post-Revolutionary American jurists, who struggled through the early decades of the nineteenth century in an attempt to square new liberal views of republican childhood with persistent concerns about the pathology of poverty and white supremacy. In contrast to British and colonial judicial practice that used the bastardization of illegitimate children as a punitive measure to curb subversive family formation, early Americans developed a distaste for punishing children for their parents’ misdeeds. However illogical it was on the surface, states had begun legitimating the children of parents whose marriages were considered void. Virginia began revising the English policy when its legislature passed a statute allowing for the legitimacy of children born of parents whose marriage was not legally permissible. In an 1804 decision in Stones v. Keeling, Virginia justice St. George Tucker reflected proudly that American law was “much more favourable to bastards, than the law of England.”126 Notably, though, the Virginia decision expressly forbade the legitimacy of biracial offspring. It legitimated the issue of “incest” and “fornication,” but did not speak to the legitimacy of “a class of persons clearly not within the idea of the legislature when contemplating the subjects of marriage and legitimacy.”127 Parker’s decision hints at a more liberal spirit in Massachusetts a decade later. Doubtless he would have labeled Tucker’s statement about interracial families as “political” as the 1705 law.128 States throughout the country rolled back laws of bastardy over the course of the early nineteenth century. A 1785 Virginia statute allowed children to be legitimated if they were born out of wedlock and their parents eventually married.129 In other states, fathers could simply claim their children in the presence of a witness to legitimate them.130 Massachusetts was not quick to adopt this new law, but the general loosening of restrictions on legitimacy makes continued provisions related to biracial children all the more striking. A child’s illegitimacy was not simply a matter of moral judgment in early republican Massachusetts; it could have dire economic consequences. When the question of legitimacy was paired with slave status, Native American guardianship, or biracialism, it reveals just how difficult it was for people

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of color to claim protection as members of civil society. A Supreme Judicial Court case from the winter of 1816 offers an example. In 1816, the town of Andover sued the town of Canton for $499.65 to support Lewis Elisha, his wife, and children.131 The case revolved around the question of Elisha’s legal settlement, and specifically whether or not he could claim legal settlement in Canton, where he had been born. Elisha was the son of Caesar Elisha, identified as black, and Abigail Moho, identified as a “mulatto,” as she was the child of a Punkapog father and white mother who the Punkapog state guardian reportedly considered part of the tribe. The court decided that he could not claim settlement in Canton based on his birth there because his father was enslaved when he was born. Caesar Elisha would have claimed settlement there because a slave’s settlement followed that of his master. Settlement, though, could not be transferred to the child. Could Lewis, then, claim settlement based on his mother? As it turns out, legal precedent presented an untenable position. No, as only illegitimate children could claim settlement based on their mother. Lewis Elisha was left outside the net of his own community because his parents had deigned to marry. Judge Parker went on to note that even if he had been able to claim settlement based on his mother, it would not have been settlement in the town of Canton because Abigail had been a Native American under the guardianship of the state and thus not legally a part of Canton’s community. Parker hinted that the legislature should create a fund for the maintenance of Native Americans who found themselves impoverished and indigent after having been guardians of the state.132 As the question before the court was simply Elisha’s settlement in Canton, the case rested there. Parker completely side-stepped the other glaring issue before him, namely, the legality of Elisha’s own marriage and its implications for racial classification and marriage law in Massachusetts. In 1803, Lewis Elisha married Hannah Richardson, a woman described as the daughter of “a mulatto father and white mother.”133 In Inhabitants of Medway v. Inhabitants of Natick in 1810, the court decided that, “A mulatto is a person begotten between a white and a black. The issue of such a person and a white is not a mulatto.”134 With less African American ancestry than a “mulatto,” was Hannah Richardson then white? Was this a marriage that was legal in Massachusetts? In Medway v. Natick, the person with mulatto and white parents, Roba Vickons, married a white man. In this case, the person with mulatto and white parents married a man whose mixed ancestry coded him as black. The court refused to take up the question, flailing before yet another illogical application of racial classification and leaving those who straddled racial lines particularly vulnerable. As Hendrik Hartog, Clare Lyons, Nancy Cott, and others have shown, early American marriage practices varied widely, from formal marriage with

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the publishing of banns to common law marriage, serial monogamy, and marriage with self-divorce.135 While historical (and contemporary) understandings of family formation generally suggest that marital relations are normal and extramarital sex is illicit and deviant, legal bans on marriage complicate that dichotomy. In Massachusetts from 1705 to 1843, the marriage or attempted marriage of a black and white person was in itself illegal. Even when other antebellum sexual taboos like premarital sex were tolerated in certain circumstances, extramarital sex across the color line could leave couples, or more explicitly, women, in a difficult position.136 One group whose sexual practices caught local officials’ attention was those who could not support their children. Unlike her counterparts who engaged in sex outside of marriage with a man of her own race, a woman in Massachusetts who was impregnated by a man of a different race could not seek a quick marriage, either to salvage her social respectability or avoid turning to the authorities for support. In Massachusetts, bearing an illegitimate child could have disastrous consequences. Beginning in 1759, Boston’s selectmen assumed authority over women who bore bastard children at the city’s expense and could bind them out to labor for five years to recoup the funds.137 The almshouse, rather than being a refuge, became a threat and last resort. Furthermore, as Clare Lyons reveals, even in Philadelphia, where interracial marriage was legal (however taboo), as the first decades of the nineteenth century progressed, “African-American women who came to the Guardians for assistance in securing child support from the white fathers now faced a hostile reception.” While in the 1790s some 5 percent of bastardy cases were cross-racial, by the 1820s only approximately 1.5 percent were.138 African American women who attempted to collect child support from the white fathers of their children met increasing hostility. By the early nineteenth century, single women also had gained the blessing and curse of custody of illegitimate children. In a shift from earlier precedent, Justices Samuel Sewell, Theodore Sedgwick, and Theophilus Parsons of the Massachusetts Supreme Court decided in Wright v. Wright (1806) that Charles Wright, who was born before his parents married, was to remain in the custody of his mother even after she and his biological father divorced and she remarried another man. The justices reasoned that while the couple was married, Charles’s father could claim custody, but after the divorce, the boy should go with his mother, his “natural guardian.”139 Judge Parker again took his stand for family stability in Newton v. Braintree (1817) when he stated that since current policy granted mothers custody of illegitimate children, “he is of course part of her family, wherever she may go” and that the child could claim legal settlement where his mother did, despite his illegitimacy. That is not to say, however, that it was easy for mothers, particularly poor mothers, to keep or support their children independently.

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Indeed, Grossberg’s review of early American family law reveals a persistent trend in bastardy law, namely, the “state’s vital interest in fixing paternity upon some man and thus obtaining child support.”140 When Hannah Stetson, a young white woman from Randolph, Massachusetts, went to the town’s overseers of the poor for relief and a place to stay to give birth to the child she was carrying, their first order of business was to identify a father and collect child support.141 Stetson had left home in Randolph to work as a domestic servant in Bridgewater and while there appears to have developed romantic and/or sexual relationships with two men of color, Henry Lee Carrier and Calvin Ashport.142 She became pregnant around March 1838, and by October of that year her situation was dire. Hannah had no family to turn to and even if she had wished to, marrying her child’s father was illegal. In need of aid and holding a legal settlement in Randolph, Hannah returned there to deliver the child in the almshouse. The overseers of the poor of Randolph immediately went to work recovering the money they spent caring for and boarding Hannah and the baby. In early October, Samuel Thayer and Ezekiel French, agents for the overseers, appeared at the home of Dr. George Hayward in Boston where Henry Carrier was working and engaged in a shake down. Without warrant or a legal complaint from Hannah stating that he was the suspected father, they demanded $150 and threatened to throw Carrier in jail if he failed to comply. In his sworn testimony, Carrier admitted that, far from home and friends, he feared imprisonment and agreed to pay.143 The existing receipts for his payment show how he scrambled to find the funds. He offered a promissory note for $63  in his own name, attested to by his current employer Hayward, and appears to have asked his former employer in Randolph, Martin Eddy, to loan him some of the funds.144 Eddy’s contribution suggests the immediate threat Carrier faced: on October 17, 1838, the treasurer of Randolph wrote out a receipt for “fifty seven dollars, also one watch valued at twenty five dollars” that Eddy offered the overseers on Carrier’s behalf.145 The hysteria that had surrounded interracial socializing over the past few years, raising mobs across the Northeast, offer ample clues as to why Carrier paid this money on demand. However, confident of his innocence, he did not leave the matter there. On Eddy’s legal advice, Carrier visited Hannah in Randolph’s almshouse and tried to convince (or compel) her to clear him of blame. This meeting appears to have worked. Whether legitimately convinced or strong armed, on October 20, Hannah filed a complaint against Calvin Ashport, another African American man in Bridgewater, stating that they had engaged in sex “on or about the fifteenth day of March last past in the barn of Edward Mitchell in said Bridgewater” and that the child she carried was the re-

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sult.146 Ashport appears to have acquiesced and paid the sum demanded of him, but the overseers refused to clear Carrier’s name or refund his money. In early April 1839, he filed a claim for his refund plus interest and damages in the court of Common Pleas in Plymouth County, initiating a case that would go to the state Supreme Court, involve dozens of witnesses, reach the Boston press, and drag on until 1842. In the end, Carrier won his case and was awarded $181.79 (the debt plus interest) and $232.84 to cover the cost of the suit.147 Where is Hannah Stetson in all of this? When Hannah’s supposed love affairs were exposed for all her neighbors to read in 1840, she was living in the poor house in Randolph nursing her child. In the midst of the trial, and when Hannah’s biracial son was six months old, probably to support the overseers in their case against Carrier, she made another complaint, claiming that “he did beget her with Child, in the Dwelling house of Morton Eddy Esq. in said Bridgewater . . . on or about the Fifteenth Day of March in the Year of our Lord One Thousand Eight Hundred and thirty eight.”148 While titillating, it seems implausible that she actually had both of these sexual experiences. Still, her situation highlights the vulnerability of single mothers in antebellum Massachusetts, particularly those for whom sex was socially taboo and marriage out of the question. In order to support the Stetsons, the town of Randolph expended $56.84 between April 1838 and 1839 and another $45.03 between 1839 and 1840.149 They remained in the poor house for at least part of the next year, during which the town only paid $15.19; Hannah must have found some employment. By 1842 she and her child were out of the poor house and collected only $6.77 from the town, perhaps to help pay for housing, firewood, clothing, or food. Furthermore, Hannah and another child, whose fate is unclear, are listed as collecting aid from the town from at least 1835 to 1838, when Hannah’s condition forced her into the almshouse with Carrier’s or Ashport’s child.150 Hannah Stetson’s status as a poor single mother left her vulnerable to public ridicule and the whims of local authorities. Just a county away, another woman battled singledom, racial discrimination, and the looming threat of slavery to raise her biracial daughters alone in a strange city. In 1834, Patrick Gibson, a white slave owner from Creighton Island off the coast of Georgia, arrived in New Bedford with an unusual cargo. He was accompanied by an African American woman and three children, all of whom he owned under Georgia law. The woman, Betsey, was known as Mrs. Gibson in New Bedford, although she was not, according to the laws of Massachusetts or Georgia, permitted to marry him. Two of the children were theirs, the third being her child with another partner, and the Gibsons brought them to New Bedford to get an education.151 Betsey Gibson must

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have exerted all of the leverage she had to remove her children to Massachusetts. She and Patrick arranged for their room and board with local African American abolitionist and businessman Nathan Johnson, who then became the conduit through which the Gibsons in New Bedford and those in Georgia communicated their complicated relations.152 Patrick Gibson died unexpectedly in March 1837. The letters and last will and testament he left reveal how enslavement perverted familial relations. Patrick had written paternalistically asking after the children’s health, sending bushels of peaches from their old Georgia home, and relaying love from grandparents, sisters, and aunts on the plantation. He also left “Slaves numbering 34 . . . Betsey and her two children, Helen and Jane, now in New Bedford, Massachusetts” to his friend Edmond Molyneaux, Jr., of Savannah in his will. At best, he trusted Molyneaux to continue guardianship of the Gibsons in New Bedford. At worst, he damned the woman and children to extradition and a life of servitude. Either way, his unwillingness legally to manumit them left Betsey, Helen, Jane, and the third child, Margaret, at Molyneaux’s mercy. The surviving Georgia Gibsons, revealing what appears to be a genuine familial concern for their illegitimate but no less real sister-in-law and nieces, urged them to continue their studies and suggested that they would receive remittances from their new master, Edmond Molyneaux very soon.153 Nathan Johnson, both trusting the Gibsons thanks to their three years of continued financial support and desperately in need of the remittances Patrick sent for board, clothing, and school costs, wrote W. Gibson a number of times between March and August 1837 asking for news. What a shock, then, when Edmond Molyneaux wrote with a small sum of money and the news that “I think it probable that Betsey and the children will return to Georgia this fall.”154 Then again, it might not have been a shock at all, at least not to Betsey who fought to remove her children and herself from their more vulnerable position in the South some years earlier. Either way, Betsey did not return to Georgia. Molyneaux, clearly frustrated but loathe to exert the time and energy necessary to bring the four forcibly back into slavery, acquiesced for a time. He continued to pay some of their expenses through the spring of 1839, when this unusual balance between freedom and slavery was again tested.155 Molyneaux was no stranger to Betsey Gibson, nor was he unfamiliar with New England. He conducted business out of Newport, Rhode Island, and in the summer of 1835, he had hired out Betsey’s sister Nan to act as a wet nurse for his new infant. After their child was born, the Molyneauxs left for their summer vacation in south Newport. Nan’s own child was never mentioned in the white men’s correspondence. At that time, Patrick wrote

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to Johnson with more paternalist instructions: “Betsey can go and see her sister Nan at South New Port, but don’t let any of the children go with her. When I come they may perhaps go then.”156 Betsey and Nan visited with each other twice, and Nan was away in the North serving the Molyneauxs through early November. Nan traveled North again in the spring of 1839, but this time it was on other business. Molyneaux permitted her to visit New Bedford with orders to accompany Betsey and the children as they traveled to Newport, Rhode Island, to board southward-bound ships. Molyneaux had written Nathan Johnson with orders to send the women and girls to Newport to sail to Jamaica (where they could settle as free people, since West Indian emancipation was achieved in 1834), but Johnson and other New Bedford abolitionsts doubted Molyneaux’s sincerity.157 They began reconnaissance to determine whether it would be safe to send the women off. For her part, Betsey seems to have been unwilling to go, at least at first. She refused to go when Molyneaux first sent for her in May, and from August through October of 1839, Nathan Johnson and Molyneaux carried out trite correspondence in which Molyneaux continued to press that the women be sent to Jamaica via a sloop through Savannah. Johnson discussed the plan with Betsey who, as one New Bedford African American activist David W. Ruggles later recalled, planned to “go and trust in God.” Although she could not be sure of Molyneaux’s intentions, she did know that her partner, Patrick, had discussed settling the family somewhere under the British government before his death, and she was willing to take the chance once Molyneaux reported that other members of the family would be settling in Jamaica in 1840.158 Acceding to her wishes, Nathan Johnson escorted them to Newport. Benjamin Rodman, a prominent local abolitionist who shared many of his neighbors’ fears that the Gibsons were in danger, followed close behind and tried to talk Johnson out of letting them embark. Eventually Johnson decided to ask the ship captain William Littlefield what he thought of the plan. Littlefield reported that free people could not be entered at the custom house in Savannah and commended Johnson on his close attention to the situation. Betsey and the children were in danger of reenslavement, and they did not get on the sloop.159 When the party returned, New Bedford was in an uproar. Rodman’s tale of successfully stopping Betsey and the girls’ departure turned into a rumor that Nathan Johnson had tried to kidnap the Gibsons and ship them back into slavery. The Young Men’s Anti-Slavery Society started an investigation into Johnson’s and Rodman’s actions. Pastor Henry Jackson of the William Street Baptist Church wrote to McIntosh County, Georgia, asking “Can persons, who have been slaves in Georgia, and brought to the north, returning, enjoy their freedom?” The clerks of the court wrote back very helpfully:

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no. And Benjamin Rodman wrote to Molyneaux himself, demanding that the slaveholder provide proof of his good intentions.160 When Molyneaux wrote back angrily that Rodman was ignorant of the facts except that the “slaves” had been sent north for their education, Rodman published his letter in the newspaper, confident that Molyneaux was not to be trusted. Ultimately, the hubbub dissipated, the Gibsons remained in New Bedford (later joined by some of their other kin), and both Johnson and Rodman were “acquitted” of any wrongdoing by the Young Men’s Anti-Slavery Society. Interestingly, however, the society also determined that Molyneaux had, in their opinion, acted in good faith, and actually had intended to send the family to freedom in Jamaica. They had two stated reasons for trusting Molyneaux: first, that some other members of the family later settled in Jamaica, and second, that they trusted Patrick Gibson to provide for his partner and children. Confident that he had brought Betsey, Helen, Jane, and Margaret to New Bedford to be “emancipated” and “enlightened,” they believed that he made “every arrangement that parental affection could dictate for the education of his offspring” and that his correspondence expressed the “tenderness, the affection, the solicitude manifested toward the absent family,” the “anxious father and friend manifesting himself in every page.”161 That the Young Men’s Anti-Slavery Society was willing to give Molyneaux the benefit of the doubt, however, did not mean that all New Bedford residents were so inclined. Many abolitionists, including the member of the prominent Weston family who then lived in New Bedford, Deborah, were critical of Johnson’s willingness to send the women south. Despite Betsey’s apparent willingness to go, many of her friends and associates in the African American community were furious at Johnson, and as Weston reported, refused to associate with him for a time. All of the waiters refused to serve under him, and they boycotted work until he was replaced by Tom Roberson, a local black caterer.162 The Gibson case offered New Bedford residents a close and personal look at the relationship between law and family. Patrick and Betsey Gibson’s relationship was real as much as it was legally impossible. They engaged in sex, produced children, and seem to have felt at least some mutual affection for one another. Nevertheless, at Creighton Island, Georgia, it would have been illegal for them to marry. Likewise, when they arrived in Massachusetts in 1835 it was illegal to marry. New Bedford residents were appalled that Gibson did not manumit Betsey and his children in his will, but that was also easier said than done. He would have had to obtain permission from the state legislature before the manumissions could be entered into record with the McIntosh County court.163 There are, of course, other things he might have done. He could have deleted Betsey, Helen, Jane, and

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Margaret from the will altogether, removing the temptation for Molyneaux to claim his “property.” He might have manumitted all of the enslaved people he held and helped them resettle elsewhere. Even at that, though, Betsey was uniquely vulnerable as a single black woman and mother, whether enslaved in the South or “emancipated” and “enlightened” in the North. This tangled web of slavery, paternalism, emotion and family was complicated further by intersections of race and gender that left Betsey economically vulnerable. However free she felt in New Bedford, she nevertheless relied on Patrick for her subsistence. In addition to niceties and reminders of home like peaches and hominy that he shipped north as gifts, he also sent steady remittances to Nathan Johnson for all of their expenses, including school costs, clothing, warm blankets for cold New England winters, doctors’ fees, medications, room, and board. While his neighbors were up in arms over Johnson’s willingness to cooperate with Molyneaux, finances must have influenced Betsey’s view of the situation. She well knew what an economic burden she was becoming to the well-meaning Northerner who had helped situate her in New Bedford. The five short months between Patrick’s death and Molyneaux’s next remittance left Johnson writing repeatedly, begging for word and money to support the Gibsons. Even after Molyneaux did agree to pay something for their support, he sent just $150 for the entire year of 1839, clearly unwilling to maintain the Gibsons’ settlement in New Bedford in the way Patrick had (at approximately $1,000 per year, paid quarterly). When Betsey first refused to sail south, it was money that Molyneaux used as leverage: “Betsey must now support herself by her own labour . . . My orders for Betsey’s going to Jamaica ought to have been obeyed and you should have turned her out of Doors.”164 Molyneaux seems to have resigned himself to leaving Betsey and the children in New Bedford, but Betsey must have been anxious to find some means of economic stability aside from remittances from Georgia. She was a woman left without a spouse’s support and certainly did not inherit Patrick’s estate. In spite of her extreme vulnerability, Betsey remained a free woman in the North. During the battle over the state’s interracial marriage law, her daughters and their spouses would advocate for interracial marriage rights along with hundreds of other New Bedford citizens of color. At least one of those neighbors shared the Gibsons’ personal investment in the law. Perry Young arrived in New Bedford, possibly as an escaped slave, sometime before 1839.165 He had had a wife and child in Baltimore whom he reported as dead by the 1850s, whether because they actually were, or because he chose to sever ties to his past and create a new family in freedom.166 By 1843, Perry had met and courted another woman, Sarah Belden, originally from Canada. It is unclear where the couple met, but by early 1843 they

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hoped to create a new family together. Massachusetts state law was the only thing standing in their way because Sarah was white and Perry was black.167 The restrictions and disabilities placed upon interracial families would shape activists’ demands as they mobilized to repeal the marriage ban between 1837 and 1843. Should the marriage choices of those in this early American republic be shaped by the “political” concerns of their forebears? Would Massachusetts continue to allow race to supersede character and republican family formation through its antiquated marriage law? Was the state perpetuating a system in which it was forced to maintain a population of illegitimate biracial children on the public dole? Would Massachusetts citizens stand aloof as thousands more Xarifas and Betsey Gibsons were exploited before their eyes? For Perry Young, the Gibsons and thousands of their African American neighbors suffering beneath Jim Crow’s yoke in the “free” North, the central question was clear: would Massachusetts continue to ape the slave South and perpetuate a legal caste system? And what of Perry and Sarah? Living in New Bedford, they had options. They might have found a sympathetic minister in Bristol County to marry them in defiance of the law; they might have traveled the few dozen miles to Rhode Island, married there, and then returned home; they might even have moved to Sarah’s hometown in Canada. Instead, Perry joined the movement to provide marriage rights to couples like theirs. Along with hundreds of his neighbors, he petitioned the legislature to legalize interracial marriage, and after the existing ban was repealed, he and Sarah traveled to Boston where African American minister Elder Beenan married them.168 Due to the fortunate timing of their romance and the advocacy of their community, the couple escaped the scrutiny earlier interracial couples faced. Their four children were classed as legitimate; they were able to buy land, work, and establish legal residency in their home in New Bedford.169 Perry supported his growing family as a gardener, sailor, laborer, and waiter for the abolitionist Samuel Rodman.170 Their eldest, Harriet, was born eleven months after their marriage, Elizabeth in 1846, David in 1847, Louisa who died a few days later in 1848, and Isabella in 1853.171 The benefits afforded the Youngs as a legally married couple became clear in 1859 as Perry became increasingly frail and could no longer work. On repeated occasions, they were compelled to ask the overseers of the poor for provisions to survive the cold Northern winters.172 Unlike the Treadwells, whose long life together was voided by a stroke of the overseer’s pen, Perry and Sarah’s relationship stood unchallenged. The overseers affirmed their union: “The law allowing White, Col[ore]d, to marry was passed in Winter of 1843. They were married in Aug[ust] that year, 1843. Settlement in N[ew] Bedford.”173

chapter two

Interracial Marriage as an Equal Rights Measure

I

n an antiracist manifesto published in 1837, just before his death, multiracial equal rights spokesman Hosea Easton laid bare the injustice inflicted upon people of color in the United States. “Were I capable of dipping my pen in the deepest dye of crime,” he wrote, “and of understanding the science of the bottomless pit, I should then fail in presenting to the intelligence of mortals on earth, the true nature of American deception. There can be no appeal made in the name of the laws of the country, of philanthropy, or humanity, or religion, that is capable of drawing forth any thing but the return,—you are a negro! . . . If there is a spark of honesty, patriotism, or religion, in the heart or the source from whence such refuting arguments emanate, the devil incarnate is the brightest seraph in paradise.”1 Massachusetts residents like Easton, no less than other Americans in the antebellum era, lived in a world where racial categories, racial stereotypes, and racial hierarchies were vital. Race shaped citizenship, state and federal law, the organization of labor, economic opportunities, residential patterns, and sex and family choices. While for the majority of white Americans amalgamation was disrespectable or threatening, most African American activists shaped the interracial marriage rights movement as a prerequisite for equality. As an example of the unjust influence of laws founded under a slaveholding system, the interracial marriage ban became an early target for antebellum abolitionists and prominent African American orators. Facing off against the rise of antiamalgamationist sentiment, they sparked a battle pitting, on the one side, white supremacists intent to maintain the privileges their whiteness promised them and, on the other, abolitionists, antiracists, and equal rights activists who viewed interracial interaction as a vital step toward dismantling racial

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oppression. For those on each side of the spectrum, interracial marriage became a flashpoint either to disparage as the extreme expression of that which they most feared or to embrace as the future solution to the race problem. When African Americans and other equal rights activists chose to advocate for interracial marriage rights, they were supporting something that not only challenged the well-established legal scaffolding of white supremacy, but the scientific, cultural, and historical claims upon which it was built. In Federalist Paper Number 2, John Jay outlined his support for one united federal government. For one thing, he argued, the geography of the United States lent itself to the intimate connection of the states. He went on to claim that the former colonists now deciding the question of unity or confederacy were culturally homogenous: “Providence has been pleased to give this one connected country to one united people—a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs, and who, by their joint counsels, arms, and efforts, fighting side by side throughout a long and bloody war, have nobly established general liberty and independence.”2 Jay was, of course, referring to those who not many years before had considered themselves Englishmen. Men and women of African and Native American descent, no matter their presence on the continent, were not part of the body politic Jay envisioned for this new nation. Jay was not alone. Thomas Jefferson took up the inevitable question of African Americans’ place in the new states in his Notes on the State of Virginia published in English for the first time in 1787. He explained a proposal put before Virginia’s legislature by which African American children would continue as slaves until an age of maturity, when black families would be exported from American soil to “such place as the circumstances of the time should render most proper, sending them out with arms, implements of household and of the handicraft arts, seeds, pairs of the useful domestic animals, &c. . . . and to send vessels at the same time to other parts of the world for an equal number of white inhabitants.”3 Benjamin Franklin, likewise, championed the all-white nation: “Why increase the Sons of Africa, by planting them in America, where we have so fair an opportunity, by excluding all blacks and tawneys, of increasing the lovely white and red?”4 These former Englishmen, these new Americans, had founded a white republic. If African Americans were to live there, they should do so only as an enslaved labor force, before being shipped to foreign lands. As African Americans claimed citizenship or fair treatment in the early United States, their protest strategies were shaped by the struggle to respond to popular racial ideologies. Their approaches to resistance spanned from

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demanding citizenship and revealing the hypocrisy of American “liberty” to embracing emigration and black nationalism, advocating armed resistance, and performing respectability as a means of illustrating readiness for the full rights and responsibilities of citizens.5 They faced stiff opposition in a nation dedicated to slavery and the scientific, religious, and cultural arguments necessary to sustain it. As Easton pointed out when he reflected on Independence Day in 1828, even those people of color who were technically free were systemically excluded from full citizenship. Even in nominally free Massachusetts, he noted, “Everything is withheld from us that is calculated to promote the aggrandizement and popularity of that part of the community who are said to be the descendants of Africa.”6 African Americans made up just over 1 percent of the total population of Massachusetts around 1840 and generally lived in concentrated communities in a few towns and cities, making up, for instance, 6 percent of Nantucket’s population, over 2,400 of Boston’s 85,000 residents, and over 750 of New Bedford’s 12,000.7 There were fewer than 10,000 African Americans living among the 770,000 total inhabitants of the state while citizens and legislators debated the interracial marriage question.8 Increasingly, archival research illustrates that Northern African Americans were at the forefront of well-known movements such as abolition, temperance, and moral reform.9 Still, existing scholarship suggests that African Americans participated only marginally in the debate over interracial marriage.10 As it turns out, African Americans had a significant impact in shaping and supporting the movement to legalize interracial marriage.11 In the first place, African Americans like the Eastons and Youngs bucked laws to enter into unsanctioned interracial unions. But beyond those in interracial couples, many African American activists embraced the right to interracial marriage as one of the rights black men and women were owed as equal citizens. African Americans intellectuals, like Hosea Easton and David Walker, advocated interracial marriage rights. African American abolitionists, like Charles Lenox Remond, promoted interracial marriage at abolitionist conventions, shaped the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society’s petitioning drives on the subject, and provided grassroots support for reform. That is not all. African Americans called for interracial marriage through petitions sponsored by local antislavery societies that included white and black members and petitions sent by communities of people of color in Boston, New Bedford, and Nantucket. These petitions act as signposts in a broader, largely African American campaign that moved beyond antislavery to tackle a myriad of other abuses heaped upon free black Northerners. The ways African Americans in the state advocated for interracial marriage illustrates not only that they were invested in the subject, but that

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interracial marriage rights were at the center of the equal rights movement. In New Bedford, local leaders met to support the antislavery society as they petitioned the state to protect the rights of black seamen in Southern port cities and demanded interracial marriage rights as a fulfillment of the state’s equal rights promises. A multigenerational and mixedgender cohort of reform leaders in Boston initiated community mobilization on antislavery, interracial marriage, integrated railroads, the protection of escaped slaves, and educational reform. Middle-class white abolitionists, like William Lloyd Garrison, frequently cited the marriage ban as the “last vestige of slavery” in the state’s legal code but for African American reformers, interracial marriage rights were just the beginning of a chain of rights and privileges they would demand through the antebellum period and beyond.

In his Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World, David Walker critiqued American interracial marriage bans on the grounds that they denied African American men full citizenship. While he famously wrote that he himself would not “give a pinch of snuff to be married to any white person” he had ever seen, he held up marriage bans as the quintessential example of the degradation of African American men under white American law. In an unconventional reading of the story of Joseph, son of Jacob, Walker argues that Pharaoh had not only granted Joseph, a man of color, reign over all the land of Egypt, but he “gave [Joseph] to wife Asenath the daughter of Potipherah priest of On.”12 Parochially a tale of the Israelite Joseph’s rise from slavery to rule over Pharaoh’s Egypt and Asenath’s conversion to Judaism, some have interpreted their marriage as one between two “nations,” sometimes seen as religious or cultural classifications and in some cases, as with Walker’s reading, as between two ethnic or racial groups. Asenath is Egyptian; it is not clear whether Walker reads Joseph as being “black” or as being analogous to black Americans because he had been enslaved under Pharaoh. That African American men were forbidden from marrying white women illustrated for Walker not simply a lack of social equality in American society. In interracial marriage bans Walker saw proof that white American men refused to share the status of “man” with African Americans. He did not initiate this line of reasoning; in a letter to the Public Advertiser in 1788, renowned author of a narrative of trans-Atlantic enslavement, Olaudah Equiano gave no quarter to slavery’s apologists when he drew attention to white planters’ sexual exploitation of enslaved women and argued for the virtuosity of intermarriage rights. He asked, “Why not establish intermarriages at home, and in our Colonies? And encourage open, free, and gen-

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erous love upon Nature’s own wide and extensive plan, subservient only to moral rectitude, without distinction of the colour of a skin?”13 While scholars traditionally read Walker very differently than Equiano and focus attention on the former’s seeming disdain for white women as an affirmation of race pride, his Appeal actually offers a much more nuanced perspective, one that celebrates the potential of marriage in the new republic. Do they not institute laws to prohibit us from marrying among the whites? . . . I do say it, that the black man, or man of colour, who will leave his own colour (provided he can get one, who is good for any thing) and marry a white woman, to be a double slave to her, just because she is white, ought to be treated by her as he surely will be, viz: as a NIGGER!!!! It is not, indeed, what I care about inter-marriages with the whites, which induced me to pass this subject in review; for the Lord knows, that there is a day coming when they will be glad enough to get into the company of the blacks, notwithstanding, we are, in this generation, leveled by them, almost on a level with the brute creation: and some of us they treat even worse than they do the brutes that perish.14

Walker does not, as many people assume, condemn those who might choose to marry white women. Instead, he does what a large number of marriage rights activists did throughout the antebellum period. He asserts an individual’s right to marry another of any color if the person is worthy, reputable, and of good character. More damning than his dismissal of white partners is Walker’s insulting insinuation that it might be difficult to find a woman of color “who is good for anything.”15 Given that such a suitor should choose a white partner and wish to marry her on her own merits and not “just because she is white,” Walker offers no chastisement. It is the individual (man’s) search for a worthy partner, not simply a sense of race pride, that animates Walker’s marriage argument. He anticipates that the issue will be moot in the near future and that whites will clamor for marriage partners of color not because of any inherent racial traits, but rather because African Americans will have raised themselves out of the social degradation to which whites had “leveled” them. In his second issue of the Liberator, Garrison used Walker’s reasoning to demand the repeal of the marriage ban, calling it “an invasion of one of the inalienable rights of every man . . . inconsistent with every principle of justice . . . and utterly absurd and preposterous.”16 In this first foray into finding a legislative solution to the interracial marriage debate, Garrisonians called for the law’s repeal on the grounds that it was “disgraceful,” on the one hand, and unconstitutional, on the other. They brazenly defended interracial marriage as “natural,” “liberal,” and “divine,” and considered it both “reasonable” and “self-evident” that the ban should be removed.17 Like Walker, Garrison attacked the marriage ban as an infringement on

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men’s rights to choose their marriage partners, calling the ban a “usurpation of rights,” particularly the universal right to “the pursuit of happiness.”18 His timing was fortuitous. In 1831, the House and Senate were reviewing the state’s statutes on marriage, discussing such issues as the interracial marriage ban, ministers’ lack of efficiency in reporting marriages, and whether children born out of wedlock should be considered legitimate if their parents later married.19 The debate attending this first concerted legislative reconsideration of the marriage ban thrust every conceivable question related to interracial marriage regulation into the realm of public discussion. The most prevalent issues occupying the minds of legislators in 1831 were social and legal: the vagaries of racial classification, the role of marriage as a social institution, and the rights of men in a republican society to build their families however they saw fit. On March 5, 1831, the state legislature took up a bill to reform the states’ marriage laws, and John Bigelow of Boston moved that the body strike article seven, the portion that provided fines for clergy who solemnized interracial marriages and made the unions themselves null and void.20 In the discussion that followed, legislators focused upon the effect the existing laws had on the “innocent,” in this case clergy members who could not be expected to know an individual’s racial admixture, the women who could be left dishonored after the voided marriage, and biracial children classed as illegitimate by the state. Much of the discussion focused not upon the issue of interracial marriage per se, but upon the problem of racial classification. Nathan Brooks of Concord recounted the story of a minister fined after marrying a white women and a “mulatto” man who appeared “white,” alluding to the absurdity of admixture laws. To this, John Paul Robinson of Lowell stated that he believed the original law characterized any person with “any less than half blood” to be white. He later proposed that under state law a person should be considered “white till they were proved to be black.”21 In one of his editorials in support of repeal, Garrison sarcastically demanded that opponents “define the boundary line! Let us known the exact shade and the particular curl of the hair which justly deprive a man of his right of choice!”22 Others pointed out that the law dated from Massachusetts’s early slave codes and was entirely at odds with the state’s 1780 constitution, which declared, “All men are born free and equal, and have certain natural, essential and unalienable rights; among which may be reckoned the right of enjoying and defending their lives and liberties; that of acquiring, possessing and protecting property; in fine, that of seeking and obtaining their safety and happiness.” Without offering any sort of comprehensive equal rights program, a majority of prorepeal legislators in 1831 asserted that the right

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to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness extended into the hearths and homes of all American men. Deeply resonant with Walker’s Appeal, this early legislative debate foregrounded a man’s prerogative to choose his own marriage partner.23 As an anonymous correspondent wrote in a letter to the Liberator, “The very first article of the Constitution of this State, paraphrasing a passage in the Declaration of Independence, declares, that ‘all men are born free and equal’ . . . Unless we say that Indians, negroes, and mulattoes, are not men, and therefore are not born free and equal, and have not the right of seeking and obtaining happiness, the law in question violates one of the fundamental principles of our Constitution. . . . Would not this law be pronounced unconstitutional by our courts, as infringing on the right of every individual to seek happiness?”24 Over the preceding decades, marriage had actually become more straightforward for intraracial couples; it was quicker and easier to gain a marriage license and find a minister qualified to solemnize their union.25 Why, levelheaded legislators asked, should the state continue to meddle in the marriage choices of interracial couples? As the discussion closed on March 5, the Senate voted to strike out article seven, a move that would have legalized interracial marriage in the state. Although the revised bill passed that day, it was rejected a week later after its final passage through the House of Representatives. Tellingly, press reportage on the legislative discussion made some hay over support for repeal but offered no insight whatsoever into the final decision. Reporters failed to editorialize enough to reveal a strident opinion in favor of or against the law. But this marked lack of attention suggests that the status quo was considered perfectly acceptable to newspaper editors and their reading public. The editor of the Boston Free Press revealed what he believed to be broad constituent sentiment when he argued that interracial marriage had a “general demoralizing tendency” and would bring “contention and misery . . . on the kindred of those so connected.”26 At the same time, a writer to the Boston Courier hinted at the larger regional significance of the question, suggesting that the state should let the interracial marriage issue drop because “the east will never recover its influence with other portions of the union until it ceases to press those irritating questions, where our interests and prejudices conflict with those of our southern brethren.”27 The 1831 House and Senate debates over the interracial marriage ban stand as a prehistory to the later battle that would begin with a modest petitioning drive in the late months of 1837 and extend to the ban’s repeal in March of 1843. When the issue reemerged as a topic of debate six years later, it would be inseparable in the public mind from the horror of amalgamation, and the fear among whites, from workers and wives, to merchants and politicians, that the mingling of the races posed a threat to their social

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and economic security. Widely publicized antiamalgamation violence and growing antiamalgamationist attitude that surrounded any talk of interracialism changed the course of debate on interracial marriage in Massachusetts. Legislators no longer had the luxury of viewing interracialism as simply an uncommon mode of family formation that elicited discussions on the merits of racial classification, companionate marriage, or rights for men. Even the direct condemnation of interracialism as “demoralizing” or socially damaging to family and kin gave way to more strident attacks on abolitionism and anxiety that interracial marriage laws were not an issue of choice, but rather heralded the precipitous deterioration of white American culture. Even so, there were some Americans who remained willing to advocate for the righteousness of a fully racially inclusive social and political community. Prominent African American activists and their radical abolitionist allies continued to shape reform discourse on interracial interaction. Hosea Easton was perhaps the most successful African American spokesman in the early antebellum period to articulate the philosophical basis of Northern racial prejudice and its ruinous impact on communities of color. Even before the movement for the marriage ban’s repeal reached its peak, he spoke and wrote of all people as “of one blood,” potentially drawing upon the example of his own mixed heritage to advocate for equality and integration in all aspects of life.28 In his 1837 “Treatise on the Intellectual Character, and Civil and Political Condition of the Colored People of the U[nited] States,” Easton described the American prejudice against color as the critical justifying influence that transformed the legal apparatus of slavery into a full-fledged caste system (although he did not use the term). United, slavery and its supporting actor prejudice created a “monster” through which “the withering influence of slavery is directed to the very vitals of the colored people . . . destroying the body—making one universal wreck of the best work of nature’s God.” This aberration of God’s egalitarian creation did not end in slavery. Easton went on to describe how the same racial prejudice that sustained slavery was deemed “expedient” in the North, giving it “as full toleration to exercise itself . . . as law at the south.”29 Thanks to the extraordinary profitability of slavery and its attendant commodities, white Americans could little afford to view black people as anything other than slaves and certainly not as white women’s marriage partners. “If he should chance to be found in any other sphere of action than that of a slave,” Easton argued, “he magnifies to a monster of wonderful dimensions, so large that they cannot be made to believe that he is a man and a brother.”30 While so many antiracist activists chose to claim equality based upon the professed equal opportunity outlined in the founding documents of the na-

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tion and respective states, Easton disregarded such appeals as the naïve claims of men and women not yet fully knowledgeable about the omnipresence of American racism.31 He did not deign to offer arguments for equality, taking the position that prejudice was a contemptible social construct with no justification other than white American avarice. Instead, Easton discredited the race science of polygenists, like Petrus Camper and Charles White, and positioned all people born on American soil as Americans in both nationality and “blood.” Instead of begging increased freedoms as a particular oppressed race, Easton writes, “The claims of the colored people set up . . . are the claims of an American,” no more and no less.32 Easton refused to beg for more rights; rather, he denounced white Americans for oppressing their biological and biblical brethren for profit and insisted that conventional racial classifications were nothing more than stones in the foundation of a slave nation. By the late 1830s, many prominent abolitionists and activists spoke and wrote on behalf of repealing the interracial marriage ban as a measure of constitutional rights and republican policy. Because antiamalgamation hysteria surrounded interracial interaction of any sort, drastically fewer openly advocated for interracial marriage as a measure of social equality or as valuable social policy in its own right. For a very small population, however, repealing the interracial marriage ban represented a victory for both antiracist political policy and social integration. And some were willing to be more direct than Easton was in their affirmation of interracial socializing as a measure of full citizenship. This most radical contingent was dominated by African American social reformers, particularly the well-developed communities in Boston and New Bedford, and prominent activists like Charles Lenox Remond. Remond was born in 1810 and grew up in Salem, Massachusetts, a town with a modest African American population, approximately 300 in 1840 out of a total of approximately 15,000 people.33 His father and mother, John Remond and Nancy Lenox Remond, ran successful catering and hairdressing businesses that set their family among the town’s African American elite. Remond entered adulthood just as William Lloyd Garrison began printing the Liberator, and he became an agent for the paper in 1832, the same year that African American women from Salem founded the Salem Female Anti-Slavery Society, the first women’s abolitionist society in the United States. He would be one of the founding members of the New England Anti-Slavery Society and the American Anti-Slavery Society, the leading, predominately white, radical abolitionist antislavery society in the country. Remond is usually remembered as the first prominent black antislavery orator in the United States, overshadowed almost immediately by

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Frederick Douglass who arrived in New England in the early 1840s. The reason for Remond’s diminishing renown is simple: Douglass had been enslaved and Remond was born free. The white abolitionists who organized antislavery lecture tours acknowledged Remond’s oratorical skills but preferred the dramatic effect Douglass could produce, melding brilliant elocution with visceral tales of separation from his mother, fighting for his manhood against the brutal Covey, and executing a daring escape. As prominent Boston abolitionist Anne Warren Weston once complained, Remond had “nothing to say, for his manner merely is good and gentlemanly.”34 State legislator George Bradburn, one of the primary proponents of interracial marriage, similarly disparaged Remond’s participation in antislavery lectures, suggesting that only Douglass had the authority to speak on the matter.35 Bradburn’s complaint reveals what rankled white abolitionists, that Remond did not wish to be simply an antislavery orator or an exemplary African American speaker to be paraded around the lecture circuit. Remond’s goals were antiracism and radical integration. Antislavery lectures provided him an international platform to push for emancipation, at least until Douglass’s ascension, but his real aim was to stamp out racial prejudice in all its forms. Whatever white abolitionists thought of Remond’s authority on slavery, he was uniquely qualified to speak on behalf of his very personal battle to expunge legal and social strictures that oppressed African Americans in New England. And that is precisely what he did while lecturing throughout the Northeast and in England and Ireland in the 1840s. Writing to Ellen Sands, a white friend and fellow abolitionist he spent time socializing with while on his lecture circuit in Maine, Remond, like Easton, linked slavery and racial discrimination, referring to his dual enemies: “His majesty Mr. Slavery and her majesty Mistress Prejudice.”36 Racial prejudice, perhaps even more than slavery, was the beast Remond sought to fell.37 Remond stands as a brilliant example of the uncompromising stance many African American reformers took in the face of racism and racially exclusive citizenship in the United States. Perhaps because of the relative ease of research in white abolitionist manuscripts, with the accompanying danger of reading race through their eyes, Remond has garnered scant attention. While he and Garrison shared many views and strategies, Remond actually stood out as one of the foremost and most vociferous advocates for moving the antislavery platform away from its focus on slavery alone to a larger view of the rights and privileges free people must demand.38 One of Remond’s hallmark rhetorical flourishes was pointing out in no uncertain (not to mention impolite) terms just how disappointed he was in the United States’ republican hypocrisy. In a characteristic correspondence with Rev-

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erend Charles Bennett Ray for publication in the Colored American in 1840, he wrote that he would advocate for women’s controversial leading role in abolitionism, and any other measure necessary, “until the bastard system is annihilated, and not a vestige remains to remind the future traveler, that such a system ever cursed our country, and made us a hissing and a byword in the mouth of every subject of every Monarch, King, Queen, Despot, Tyrant, Autocrat and Czar of the civilized and uncivilized world!”39 As one of the executives of the American Anti-Slavery Society, Remond was active in initiating the 1837 petitioning drive calling on states to repeal laws making distinctions of color, the catalyst for Massachusetts reformers’ movement for interracial marriage rights. During the late 1830s and early 1840s, he acted the part of itinerant lecturer, traveling through Maine, Massachusetts, New York, and Britain to speak on slavery, racism in the free states, Irish independence, and the plight of workers in Britain’s India colony, among other topics. Records of his speeches and letters reveal an abiding interest in social equality, particularly the rights or privileges of black and white people to engage in leisure activities like dining, carriage riding, and walking arm in arm without being molested by enraged ruffians. Lecturing throughout New England, Remond confronted overt racial discrimination everywhere he went. When he traveled, he was forced into the Jim Crow railcar and the top of the stagecoach. When he walked together with white friends in the streets, bystanders harassed them, and at least once, they made the regional newspaper. The case illustrates the complex intertwining of the platonic and sexual in antebellum conceptions of interracial interaction and how antiamalagamationists (and integrationists) mobilized them. The Commercial Gazette reported in February 1839 that the women who petitioned for the repeal of the marriage ban should be “hooted from good society” just like a certain young lady who was seen walking arm in arm with a black man in Maine. An anonymous writer to the Liberator countered that the unnamed couple were Hannah Dole and Remond, and that the latter was a man of better character than most of the white men of Hallowell, where they were caught socializing.40 Remond demanded respect from whites and was despised in return.41 Remond’s lectures and correspondence reveal more than a passing interest in pushing the bounds of interracial social interaction with white women. Both he and Garrison seem to have viewed the ability of black men and white women to sit, eat, and walk together publicly as a measure of true freedom, and both intended to test society’s egalitarianism through Remond’s own actions. His lecture tour of Britain provided him the opportunity to escape some of the most virulent targeted racism he was accustomed to and

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came to represent for him the ideal society against which New England and the United States as a whole should be measured. Planning for his trip to England, Remond wrote another of Maine’s white abolitionist women, Martha Usher, describing what England meant to him. His emotive writing provides a rare glimpse into the consuming experience of prejudice to which he and so many other free people of color were subjected.42 The soil, which the poor slave has but to touch and becomes free . . . the air which if the slave shall breath his shackles fall, the country where man is presumed to be free, until proved to be guilty . . . Where man is appreciated by his merits, where schools and colleges and academies, and seminaries are open to all with reference to castes, creed, color or clime, where iltreated [sic] women may seek shelter and protection . . . where the minds of the virtuous and intelligent have not been narrowed into American patriotism by the cruel enslavement of the sixth part of its population, where the whole people have not been Geo McDuffee and Martin Van Burenized into modern American Republican sons, where they dare receive at the court of Victoria the Haytien Ambassador without fear, and trembling, lest the people of the Old England should be inclined to imitate customs which have become notorious throughout the South and some sections of the Liberty loving country, where the people will not be frightened out their wits and run stark mad almost to know that Mr. Remond rode with Miss H. M. Dole walked with Mrs. Mason, or escorted Ms. Sands & sisters.43

Remond begins with the specter of slavery that, although never legal in his lifetime in Massachusetts, nevertheless tainted his own life. On American soil, he was haunted by the physical manifestations of slavery in chains and manacles and the denial of due process to African Americans claimed as fugitive slaves. Although he had never been enslaved, he mourned the wasted futures of enslaved youth, sacrificed like the children immolated in the bowels of Moloch. He dreamed of a place where he might have been able to pursue an academic or religious calling at college or seminary according to his abilities, not his race. He imagined a land where women, enslaved or free, would be free from sexual exploitation and humiliation. From Remond’s vantage point, the U.S. government was a slaveholders’ government, of, for, and by men like South Carolina Democrat George McDuffie, champion of antitariff and state nullification issues, who famously argued slaveholding apologia before the South Carolina legislature in 1835, stating, among other things, “the African Negro is destined by Providence to occupy this condition of servile dependence” and that “Amalgamation is abhorrent to every sentiment of nature.”44 Remond reflected on his own status as a black man in the company of white women, yearning for a land where his social engagements would not elicit fear and loathing from his neighbors.

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In July 1840, Remond embarked on his lecture tour in Britain, traveling first with Garrison and Nathaniel P. Rogers to the World Anti-Slavery Convention in London (where they ultimately declined taking their seats to protest the convention’s debarment of women voters). Throughout his trip, he reveled in denoting instances that illustrated disparities between his social freedom on American and English soils. The journey began with a voyage in which Remond was relegated to steerage rather than the cabin berth he had purchased or as Garrison put it, by being “in America, all the time he was on the water.”45 As he spoke throughout England and Scotland, he referred to this prejudice and lauded British abolitionists for their social liberality.46 Speaking at an antislavery meeting in Edinburgh, Garrison reported on the reversal of Remond’s fortunes, joking, “Look at him in conversation with that lady up in yonder gallery [Lady Byron]. . . . Will the New Yorkers who turned the abolitionists out of their boarding house into the streets last spring, because their colored friends sat at the same table with them, mob that woman? We all dined with her, at the table of a great lady there, with several other ladies, and when they went from thence to the meeting of the evening, Remond was invited to go in the carriage with them, and we had to follow after on foot. (Laughter and applause).”47 A critical look at the proceedings of these British meetings, however, illustrates how fraught they were with Britain’s own racial history (or more appropriately, its overwhelming whiteness). Much of the interracial kindness Remond seems to have been the recipient of was political theater as much if not more than it was genuine. During one meeting in Paisley, Scotland, Remond spoke and even broke into tears over the collegial treatment he had received in Britain, expressing how thankful he was to be among those who did not discriminate against him because of his color. In response, all of the members of the meeting resolved to file past and shake his hand on their way out of the meeting. This they did, “leaving his hand aching,” according to a reporter.48 This pageant of antiracism, Scottish men and women offering to touch a black man, many of them perhaps for the first time, was performed as much for the white audience’s benefit as it was for Remond. Like Garrison who described his first experience walking in the streets of Boston arm in arm with Frederick Douglass, or the members of the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society who befriended African American schoolmistress Susan Paul because they viewed her as the exceptional African American woman worthy of their respect, these Paisley residents could claim Remond as their virginal interaction with a person of color. In spite of his participation in this theater, a clear look at Remond’s words and advocacy illustrate a man pursuing a mission of equal rights. While in Britain, Remond strayed far from a strict antislavery script. He spoke at

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temperance meetings, antislavery meetings, and conferences on the cotton trade in British India. One of his great accomplishments was to collect and transmit the “Irish Address,” copies of a speech he delivered on the mutual questions of exploitation and disfranchisement of the Irish by the English and African Americans by white Americans. As freely as he praised Britain as a means of criticizing U.S. race relations, Remond compared British imperialism and its attendant exploitation with racism and the system of slavery in the United States. Along with the Irish address, he spoke at least once on slavery conditions among cotton growers and other Indian laborers in Britain’s East India colony.49 He also devoted a great deal of energy to countering the influence of Ralph Randolph Gurley of the American Colonization Society, who was prowling around Britain during the same period promoting African American expatriation. The question of colonization was of particular interest to him, being first and foremost a free man of color and precisely the class of person white colonizationists most hoped to deport. Remond’s protest against racial discrimination in the North and his yearning for social freedom translated directly into advocacy for the repeal of the interracial marriage ban in his home state. In May 1840, just a few months after the Massachusetts legislature again failed to pass the repeal measure, he proposed a resolution at the Bristol County Anti-Slavery Society meeting that the existing marriage law was “unchristian and unconstitutional, and ought to be immediately abolished.” It was adopted unanimously.50 Immediately after the state senate took up the interracial marriage repeal question in the winter of 1840, Remond described it as one of the “dictates of an unholy and contemptible prejudice which is searing our northern country with everlasting infamy,” and vowed that his work would continue until “every state like my own my native soil shall repent and put far from them this last remnant of Bad Education and forthwith write upon the forehead of the Hydra Prejudice ‘the mother of abominations, the liar, the coward, the waster of the poor, the tyrant of the tyrants is fallen is fallen.’ ”51 Unlike Hosea Easton, who by the late 1830s seemed resigned to critique, rather than change, views of interracialism in American society, Remond entertained persistent hope that abolitionists would both overthrow slavery and limit discrimination. He gathered optimism from the ways antislavery advocacy outstripped antiamalgamation attacks in Massachusetts in the early 1840s and was confident that the interracial marriage law would change public opinion on interracial interaction. Even “amalgamation,” he wrote “has become a right in the estimation of the wiseacres of 1835, 6, 7, 8 and 9, providing silence gives consent . . . Another feather is soon to be

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placed in the cap of my native State, (Massachusetts,) the first to strike for the freedom of the country. May she be the first to banish from her soil and associations the corroding fetters of prejudice.”52 By 1842, the state still had not repealed the marriage ban, but legislators debated the issue during the same sessions in which they addressed another equal rights issue: the integration of rail accommodations. On February 10, 1842, Remond became the first African American to speak before the state legislature. While it would take the legislature a decade to address the issue of racism on the rails adequately, Remond moved legislators with his tale of returning from Europe only to be relegated to a segregated car, where he and his white friends were insulted by the conductor.53 Near the end of his speech, he suddenly took up the marriage cause. Remond asked, “What if some few of the West or East India planters and merchants should visit our liberty-loving country, with their colored wives—how would [the superintendent of railroads] manage? Or if R[ichard] M. Johnson, the gentleman who has been elevated to the second office in the gift of the people, should be traveling from Boston to Salem, if he was prepared to separate him from his wife or daughters.”54 It is a testament to Remond’s fine elocution that, according to the house transcript, these references to interracialism garnered him bursts of applause and whispered sympathy, the only audience responses recorded throughout the entire speech.55 Remond’s dogged quest to reform Massachusetts race law continued later that year and reveals how his social criticism transformed into collective action. While on a lecture tour to protect the rights of fugitives from slavery, he again married his multiple reform initiatives, stopping in Boston long enough to sign a petition calling for the repeal of the interracial marriage ban. Here it is worth pausing to recall that earlier historians of the marriage law believed that African Americans largely were silent on the question because they hesitated to broach so indecorous a topic as amalgamation in a public forum. The petition Remond signed was headed by Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society president Francis Jackson and included the signatures of prominent white abolitionists, like Oliver Johnson and William F. Channing, as well as Boston’s leading African American reformers, including Remond’s father John and sister Sarah Parker Remond, young futureattorney Robert Morris, William H. Allen, William Cooper Nell, and future integrator of the Boston public schools Benjamin F. Robert.56 Notably, most of the African American leaders whose names appear on this petition also attended a large public meeting in support of legalizing interracial marriage in the Belknap Street Church in Boston on February 1, 1843.57 None of the white leaders on Jackson’s petition appear to have attended, or at least they did not sign the petition that their hundreds of

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African American friends did. By petitioning, not only ideological leaders like Remond and Easton, but rank and file African Americans in Boston and elsewhere in the state made their support for marriage reform known. The apparent racial segregation evident at the Boston meeting highlights a tradition of racial separateness in reform work that helps to explain why existing historiography has overlooked African American participation in interracial marriage reform. It underlines the importance of disaggregating African American reform mobilization that was independent of the betterpublicized white-led organizations. While Remond and Nell had access to elite whites’ reform mobilization, the masses of people who attended the Belknap Street Church meeting did not. Instead, they united to organize independent initiatives that unsurprisingly had the potential to diverge from white ones. African American voices in favor of repealing the interracial marriage ban are represented, either in all-black or racially mixed petitions coming from Ezra Johnson and forty-one other men of New Bedford in 1838, the women of the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society in 1839, the women of Lynn in 1839 and repeatedly thereafter, John Bailey and ninety-two other men of New Bedford in 1842, Julius Lyons and over 300 men and women from New Bedford in 1843, William Cooper Nell, John Hilton, Patrick Stewart and some 500 others in three separate petitions from Boston in 1843, and Nathaniel Borden and seventy-six others of Nantucket, as well as others who signed integrated petitions like Remond did in 1842. To be fair, there is a smattering of evidence suggesting, and one might justifiably assume, that not all African Americans in Massachusetts stood united in favor of repealing the marriage ban or publicly advocating on such a sensitive subject. In both 1838 and 1843, legislators reported receiving petitions from African Americans asking that the ban not be repealed. In February 1838, local papers reported that David Sherrod and other “colored people of Boston” petitioned the legislature asking that the law not be repealed because it was “calculated to annihilate their race, which they are anxious to preserve.”58 Garrison dismissed this petition as a farce, a suggestion that garners some traction from the fact that the petition is not extant, and reports in later years detailing the intense mirth legislators apparently drew from discussing interracial marriage on the floor of the legislature. In 1843, Representative Daniel Gibbens of Boston, who advocated for maintaining the ban, presented what he claimed to be a petition from Elsy Fisk and other women of color of Boston worrying that repealing the ban would leave black women “deserted by our natural protectors . . . Colored husbands will regret that they married before the change of the law, and will wish their wives out of the way.”59 Garrison and legislators

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who advocated for repeal dismissed this petition, too, as a hoax. The petition itself seems to support this suggestion at least inasmuch as the handwriting on the file notation is all the same, suggesting that the document did not actually arrive as others did at the office of a sympathetic legislator later to be filed by a clerk (or often more than one clerk). Many of the names are written in the same handwriting with no sign of individuals’ “marks.” Even if the women whose names are affixed to the petition could not write their own names, other petitions suggest that if they intended to affix their names to the petition, at least some might have written their mark.60 To dismiss these petitions entirely, however, might do a disservice to the history of antebellum African American political activity. The perspectives these petitions offer, diametrically opposed as they are, do fall upon the spectrum of antebellum African American social concerns. There is plenty of evidence that some members of the African American reform community did not support integrated political and social initiatives, whether antislavery societies, schools, churches, or business ventures. Indeed antebellum leaders, like John Russworm and Paul Cuffe, advocated emigration, if not exactly according to a belief in black nationalist brotherhood, certainly because of a wish to escape the oppression that accompanied living among whites. The petition from Elsy Fisk, too, could have voiced a legitimate concern on the part of working-class African American women who were well aware of an existing racial hierarchy in which the opportunity to marry white women presented African American men with a chance at social advancement that most black women could not grasp. Whether these petitions are legitimate or not, then, it is not at all unlikely that such concerns were voiced during private discussions of the marriage bill. The two small petitions African American men and women might have submitted in favor of maintaining the ban are dwarfed by petitions calling for repeal. African American reformers, most of whom had been or were descended from enslaved people with no marriage rights (and many of whom were of mixed racial parentage), had an existential interest in the interracial marriage campaign. Just like segregation and employment discrimination, the ban on interracial marriage had the potential to impact the entire African American community and implicitly affected each and every person of color, intended, as it was, to restrict their rights to form families with whites. Public calls for interracial marriage illustrate how, on some issues, African American reform discourses not only outstripped white reform initiatives, but rather fundamentally, deliberately, and publicly challenged the social theory and science of racial difference in antebellum America, from popular views of polygenesis and African American intellectual inferiority to a biological or God-given “disgust” for interracial interaction.61 Advocacy

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of interracial marriage was for its African American supporters, far more than for most of its white advocates, a means of demanding equal rights and social equality. The right to socialize and marry across racial lines implicitly acknowledged the commonality of all members of the human race and an individual’s claim to civil and natural rights.62 The interracial marriage question was not an aberration in an otherwise political and economic battle for citizenship and respect; it was a brick in the foundation of the Northern African American equal rights strategy. This cemented the link between interracialism and equal rights (or social equality and political equality) that would be politically volatile for a century. A review of petitions from Boston and New Bedford reveals that reformers there placed interracial marriage within the widespread battle against racial discrimination. Members of the state’s foremost African American communities united across political, religious, and ideological lines to support interracial marriage rights. When equal rights opponents began a public relations campaign claiming that African Americans opposed the interracial marriage measure, reformers in New Bedford and Boston came out en masse to, in their view, reassert and confirm their support for repeal and other legal encumbrances that discriminated against them because of their race. Elders who had battled colonization movements throughout the 1830s joined with a young crop of reformers who would go on to advocate for integration, school reform, emancipation, and abolition through the Civil War.

During the antebellum period, New Bedford, Massachusetts, was a world-renowned hub of whaling and maritime commerce, Atlantic travel, and free African American life in the United States. Its busy ports and sympathetic African American and abolitionist population made it a haven for African Americans escaping slavery and free black citizens seeking steady employment. The black population in New Bedford swelled during the 1830s, with official estimates of some 750 persons in a total population of over 12,000 and probably many more who went uncounted or visited New Bedford as transient seamen or fugitives from slavery.63 This sizeable black population, second only to Boston in Massachusetts, produced a small but successful African American working and business class and a vibrant social and activist community.64 New Bedford African American residents, perhaps even more than those in other areas of the state, had a unique perspective on the intertwining issues of free people’s rights, antislavery, and interracial marriage rights thanks to the relatively large African American population and its large numbers of ex-slaves and international travelers.65 New Bedford’s African American community grew and thrived during the antebellum era. While New Bedford was not strictly segregated, African

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American residents tended to cluster on Elm and Middle Streets, near the Waterfront, on South Water, First Street, and Second Street, and at what would later be called “Dog Corner” where Bedford, Wing, Sixth, and Allen Streets intersect, a pattern that is reflected in the order in which they signed petitions during the late 1830s and early 1840s.66 Its foremost families, the Cuffes, Howards, and Johnsons, prospered in maritime trades, purchased land and ships, ran businesses and rented real estate, and intermarried. Abolitionist and equal rights activist Ruth Cuffe Howard Johnson, the daughter of famed sea captain and businessman Paul Cuffe, wife of Alexander Howard, and later second wife of Richard Johnson, embodies their web of association. These community elites united with their neighbors to found the African Christian Society, the abolitionist Massachusetts General Colored Association, New Bedford Union Society, Wilberforce Debating Society, and Female Anti-Slavery Society. African American women held antislavery fairs and the politically minded “colored Abolitionists” were so well-organized that the New Bedford Mercury credited them with swaying local elections.67 By the late 1830s, African American activists were petitioning the state and federal legislatures on antislavery, the security of fugitive slaves, the rights of black seamen in southern ports, and interracial marriage. Richard Johnson was by the 1830s a respected businessman and property owner in New Bedford. His home, store, and the rooms he rented to laborers and seamen coming in and out of New Bedford acted as focal points of the community. During the late 1830s and early 1840s Johnson and his two sons, Richard C. and Ezra were deeply embroiled in wide-ranging equal rights activism and had developed useful affiliations with a network of black and white reformers throughout the North. He was a delegate to the third annual convention of free people of color in Philadelphia in 1833, knew Reverend Richard Allen and supported some of his activities among Philadelphia African Americans, and in 1833 acted as one of the founding members of the New Bedford Union Society, the city’s antislavery society and auxiliary to the African American national convention movement.68 For the Johnsons, as with Remond and other African American reformers, the impulse to enter the political fray derived from personal experience. Richard Johnson had, himself, been threatened with arrest when he entered Charleston Harbor as supercargo (officer in charge of commercial concerns) on a trading ship called the Rodman. “Negro seamen acts” in South Carolina, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and elsewhere allowed local officials in cities like Charleston to imprison free people while their ships were in slaveholding ports, ostensibly to keep them from communicating with enslaved people and negotiating escapes.69

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Johnson had been at sea in a variety of capacities “from cabin boy to captain,” but on this particular occasion in 1824 he was a joint capitalist of the Rodman’s voyage, along with white merchant Peleg Crowell.70 As prominent white abolitionist Samuel J. May recounted, the black cook and one black sailor were arrested and jailed along with Johnson, but the latter was able to engineer his own release because he was not a cook, sailor, or stevedore, the occupations considered “dangerous” under the act. Because Johnson was an officer, Charleston’s mayor ultimately deemed him less likely to inspire rebellion in South Carolina’s enslaved population because his lot in life so outstripped theirs. He was free to go.71 In 1826, he and Ruth Cuffe Howard entered into each of their second marriages together, and by the late 1830s they were aged, respected, and active members of the black activist community. Ruth advocated for the rights of fugitive slaves and embraced the right to petition on equal rights matters. Richard and his sons were active in abolitionist and equal rights circles and provided a steady bedrock to needy members of their communities. According to William Lloyd Garrison, Johnson had been a subscriber to the Liberator from its first issue, and by November 1831, he was one of two agents for the paper in the city. Ezra and Richard acted as agents for the Colored American and attended and reported on antislavery and colonization meetings and black conventions throughout the Northeast. In his will, Ezra continued the family’s philanthropic mission by leaving his home “for the aged colored widows resident in New Bedford.”72 Ironically rarely listed in the city documents as “colored,” Richard and Ezra drove community activism and uplift initiatives, from providing living space for African American boarders at the Water Street buildings to hosting New Bedford Union Society meetings in their homes and financing the voyages of the Rising States, a ship that sailed with an all-black crew.73 Ezra Johnson, like his father, embodied the struggle of skilled, enterprising African Americans in the antebellum North. Although reportedly a gifted engineer or “mechanic,” he was unable to make a suitable living at that trade and when he reached adulthood in the 1830s opened a dry goods business with his brother Richard on the property their family owned at 23 and 25 Water Street in New Bedford.74 New Bedford’s ties to the South touched not only sailors and their families, but former and fugitive slaves who found safe harbor in the city. The case of Betsey Gibson and her daughters offered New Bedford residents a poignant example of one family’s encounter with the consequences of interracialism in a nation half slave and half free. And after the very public investigation into Nathan Johnson’s treatment of the Gibsons, Betsey’s daughter Helen would carry her mother’s example with her as she came of age and joined the ranks of equal rights activists in her adopted hometown.

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In the early 1840s, Helen married one of Paul Cuffe’s grandsons, leading local race reformer Shadrach Howard. Howard was a few years older than Helen, and by 1841, he had bought land on Union Street and worked as a “victualer” selling food out of a market stall on Third Street.75 His father had died and the two eldest sons, Alexander and Shadrach, joined their mother and stepfather Richard Johnson (the elder) to support their younger siblings to adulthood. They drew on their parents’ estates, the largest among African Americans in New Bedford, as well as their own incomes derived from work as sailors, coopers, and dry goods merchants, carrying on the established Cuffe-Howard-Johnson family businesses.76 Like Charles Lenox Remond, Howard was active in the movement to integrate Massachusetts railcars, and in late January 1842, he carried out a protest on the New Bedford and Taunton line, sitting in the “long car,” the car reserved for white passengers, on his way from Boston to New Bedford for the Bristol County Anti-Slavery Society quarterly meeting. The racially mixed crowd of antislavery delegates had been relegated to the rear car, but Howard and his traveling companion, another man of color, sat in the white car. They were ordered out by the conductor, and sympathetic accounts of the case suggest that they actually did collect their things to retreat before the conductor and his henchmen attacked Howard, choking, kicking, and beating him back through the aisle and out onto the tracks. Bruised and bloodied, Howard refused to retreat, drew his pocketknife and attempted to reboard the train but was repulsed. To preserve segregation on his train, the conductor called for another rear car, and before the train embarked, Howard and a group of African American men boarded it. When they had progressed down the track from Taunton to New Bedford, the conductor entered the car, realized Howard was there and was not in possession of a ticket, refused to simply sell him a ticket, and instead, egged on by some of the white passengers, set about trying to eject him from the car. When Howard moved into the car filled with African American passengers and abolitionists, they sheltered him and would not allow the conductor to reach him. In response, the conductor stopped the train and ran it back to Taunton where Howard got off and attempted to find a police officer to take out a warrant on the conductor. He eventually had to give up the search and retreat to New Bedford when enraged whites from the train, some reportedly shouting “when will the niggers learn to know their places?” and “we’ll teach the nigger his place” raised a mob to track him down.77 Integrated railcars were not Howard’s only concern. Along with hundreds of their neighbors in New Bedford’s African American community, Shadrach, Helen, and Howard’s brothers and mother were all active in state and national equal rights initiatives including the movement to repeal the interracial marriage ban. In 1838, 113 men and 107 women, headed by Ezra

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R. Johnson and his stepmother Ruth Cuffe Johnson, petitioned the Massachusetts legislature to ensure the rights of free people of color, particularly seamen, when they arrived in ports in slaveholding states.78 The petitioners asked Massachusetts legislators to execute agreements with the governments of slaveholding states barring officers from imprisoning or attempting to enslave black sailors when they made landfall. The same year, Ezra Johnson and forty-one other men of color of New Bedford hand wrote a petition calling upon the state to “repeal all Laws in the State which make distinction among its inhabitants on account of color.”79 No other group of men or women from New Bedford petitioned the legislature on the marriage measure that year. While most of the other petitioners throughout the state used preprinted blank forms provided by the American Anti-Slavery Society and seem to have drummed up support through reform networks based in local churches, this petition was written and signed independently, perhaps during a meeting at Johnson’s own home. The “colored citizens of New Bedford” remained outside the fray of the state-level battle over interracial marriage until 1843, just before the large meeting of African Americans in the Belknap Street Church in Boston. When they again chose to address the problem, they collected some 330 signatures, over a third of the city’s total black population.80 The petition was signed by 339 men and women in approximately equal numbers, their signatures intermingled, not segregated by sex (see Figure 2.1). An analysis of the petition suggests that the signatures were collected in a variety of ways, some at meetings, where signers could add their names en masse, and others via a door-to-door campaign. For instance, one petition circulator seems to have visited Experience and Lydia Fairweather, Amey and Charles Simmons, George and Mary Ross, and others along Middle Street at or near the same time.81 Still, the first signers include some prominent activist members of the community: Julius Lyons, who was a leader in antislavery during this period; David W. Ruggles; Richard Johnson (the elder); other members of the Johnson family; and Shadrach Howard. These petitioners likely put pen to paper at a public meeting called to discuss desegregation initiatives; antislavery; or the case of George Latimer, a fugitive slave held in Boston. They likely met at Richard Johnson’s home during an impromptu community gathering or at the local antislavery society office. Helen Howard signed much further down on a separate sheet pasted in the middle of the ream, just before her sister-in-law Eliza Crouch, whom she might have been visiting when the petition fell into her hands. Who were these reformers, who linked the rights of free seamen, fugitive safety, integrated public transport, and interracial marriage rights? New Bedford’s African American activist community spanned the length and breadth

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figure 2.1. Petition of Julius Lyons, Courtesy of the Massachusetts Archives and the Center for American Political Studies at Harvard University

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of its social and economic classes, from Frelon (or Freeland) Modon and Harriet Cross, who on a number of occasions required the help of the overseers of the poor to Ezra and Richard Johnson, two of the town’s most prominent and wealthiest black citizens. Social and political activists who advocated for interracial marriage rights through the 1843 petition were fund-raisers for the Liberator, members of the New Bedford Female Union Society, delegates to national antislavery society conventions, supporters of Garrisonian abolitionism, critics of colonization, and protectors of fugitive slaves.82 The movement to legalize interracial marriage, as part of the larger equal rights struggle, may have offered New Bedford’s struggling black residents hope that rights activism could lead to improvements in African American men’s employment opportunities, lend a measure of stability to working families, and perhaps eventually increase women’s rights both within and without marriage. Over 10 percent of the petition signers worked in the sea trades, leaving their families for multiyear voyages, and most of the petitioners appear in the overseer of the poor’s records, needing financial aid at some point during their lives. The city’s sea trade provided African American men opportunities for work, adventure, and interaction with an international community; it also exposes the unique challenges facing African American families attempting to claim economic sustainability and civic freedom in the antebellum North. Cynthia and Marshall Potts, the eighteenth and forty-first signers to the petition, likely sought that elusive stability. They were well-respected members of the community; Cynthia acted as officer of the Female Union Society in the late 1830s, but in order to maintain their livelihoods, Marshall had to cobble together work at sea, selling newspapers, and tailoring. They missed tax payments and became the subject of local rumors surrounding their personal and financial circumstances.83 Joseph Durfee, the forty-third signer, faced even more dire chances. He could not find work and risked eviction from his basement room on High Street, pawned his clothing, and had to ask the overseers of the poor for help to survive.84 Even when men were employed or had spent their lives working, they and their families hung vulnerably to the bottom of the city’s social ladder. Deborah and John Ebrymore, who signed 194th and 212th, tried to support an adopted son while John suffered from rheumatism and struggled to raise money, leaving home to preach in the 1850s.85 Margaret Shepherd, the seventy-eighth signer, Sarah Clark (217th), Rosana Elliott (245th), Adelia Broacher (283rd), and others struggled yearly with their husbands’ long absences at sea.86 A reform movement linking equal rights and marriage rights appealed to the needs and desires of people throughout the African American com-

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munity. Many African Americans in New Bedford at this time were familiar with or actually in families that were comprised of ancestors of different races. The Gibsons and Howards were among other New Bedford residents whose own histories exposed the ruptures between legal proscription and lived reality. Helen Howard carried with her the example of her own parents’ troubled union. Shadrach was well aware that his grandfather, Paul Cuffe was an African American descendant of slaves and his grandmother Alice Pequit was Native American. He was listed as “mulatto” or a “Dartmouth Indian” in some records.87 Furthermore, Perry Young brought more than theoretical support for interracial marriage rights to his decision to sign the petition. He and Sarah Belden would marry months after the ban was repealed.88 Young’s right to marry was a distinct victory against race law, but the relationship between marriage rights and equal rights was neither simple nor straightforward. Especially for antebellum women, there was no direct correlation between the right to marry and “equal rights.” For the many women who signed this petition, approximately half of all petitioners in New Bedford, marriage reform that truly would have benefited them was too slow in coming. Helen Howard was one of these women. She and Shadrach had three children in New Bedford and shared a reform mission, but he was dedicated to seeking his fortune away from home. The historical record is replete with his adventures. In 1845, leaving Helen with threeyear-old Cordelia and one-year-old Ann, he sailed for Hawaii on a three-year voyage. Along with his brother Alexander and brother-in-law Philip Piper, he struck out to seek his fortune in California by 1856.89 Their families might have joined them, at least for a time, and Shadrach made quite a name for himself as a sailmaker (trained by James Forten of Philadelphia) and entrepreneur.90 It might be tempting to assume that Helen was content, thankful to be removed from slavery, supported by a relatively wealthy and respectable husband. One might even presume that her political work was an imitation of her husband’s. In fact, Helen proved to be a capable independent woman, and her relationship with Shadrach might not have been as amiable as it seems. By 1871, she went before the Bristol County Court of Probate stating that her husband Shadrach had lived “separate and apart” from her for the last seventeen years, that she owned a piece of property on William Street in New Bedford, and she wanted to sell it.91 She had already made out the deed to Edward Wing and they had agreed on a price of $3,500. Helen was moving on with her life. The court granted her permission, she sold that and another small portion of property in 1871, and moved to Bristol, Rhode Island, probably to live near her eldest daughter Cordelia who married Jezbez Holmes Hazard, a Bristol barber with Native

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American ancestry.92 Far from relying on Shadrach, Helen had been working as a schoolteacher to support herself in Fall River and likely continued that in Bristol. She outlived all but her youngest child and passed away in 1907.93 It would be fair to say that antebellum marriage laws never did much to benefit Helen Louise Gibson Howard. She took her maiden name from a master/father who settled her in a foreign city for an education and ostensibly to gain her freedom while he continued to live on a plantation where her loved ones were enslaved and failed to legally free her before his death. She spent much of her adult life estranged but still bound by the laws of coverture to a man who abandoned her for a new life in California, and she was forced to seek redress in the courts simply to sell her own property and facilitate her daughter’s marriage. When Helen Howard signed the petition calling for interracial marriage reform, was she affixing her name to a petition that, while bolstering African American equality in Massachusetts, effectively enhanced the citizenship claims, rights, and status of African American men like her husband Shadrach, while at the same time strengthening the patriarchial family model that left her struggling to raise a family on her own for seventeen years? It is not out of the question that she was. Historians of African American women and antebellum politics have identified patterns whereby African American women began to emerge onto the political stage in the early antebellum period by advocating womanly persuasion over men and accommodating black men’s politics in antislavery work.94 There is no question that Howard and other African American women signed their names to petitions that enhanced African American men’s claim to both full citizenship and access to white wives. They might have signed with trepidation, worrying that legal interracial marriage could further constrict the likelihood that they or their daughters would find a suitable marriage partner. But they did sign. And we must assume that their signing illustrates political action on the part of African American women in the North, struggling to find a free space despite quotidian racism and misogyny. On the other hand, we must also acknowledge that in spite of the possible dangers inherent in the bill, antebellum African American women, particularly the formerly enslaved, antislavery activists, and community organizers, had a vested interest in promoting marriage. While legal marriage was forbidden throughout much of the slave south, African American reformers viewed the right to marry, and the act of marriage, in the North as an integral part of the struggle for equal rights. In the North, an African American woman married to an African American man could not be denied the protections he or the marriage contract afforded. African American advice literature and narratives of slavery heralded marriage as one of

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the benchmarks of freedom.95 Furthermore, securing a legal marriage and performing the duties of husband and wife became an act of domestic activism for the African American middle class. Even the most elite African American women were compelled to work outside the home to support their families, but African American reformers subscribed to the tenets of middleclass white respectability that included the mandates of womanly domesticity and wifely submission, hoping that if African American families exhibited respectability in the domestic realm, they would be granted full equality in public and political matters.96 There is another important possibility and an outcome that repealing the interracial marriage law had, specifically for African American women. Legalizing interracial marriage effectively established the legal rights of African American women to have equal access to engage in sex with white men along with the legal protections (for their honor and their economic security) that many white women already enjoyed. Before interracial marriage was a legal possibility, black women had no way to compel white men to support them if they conceived a child through interracial sex. They could not sue for breach of promise and had no legal leverage outside basic paternity claims. Abolitionist Reverend Charles Torrey cited this very injustice as one of the most injurious effects of the marriage ban when he testified before a legislative committee in 1840. He pointed out that because breach of promise could not be filed by an African American person against a white, “the most effective legal protection of personal purity and individual happiness is taken away . . . as far as the colored female is concerned.”97 Torrey went on to argue that the law was inherently racially unequal because of the “comparative poverty and dependence of the colored race” that left African Americans, and black women in particular, vulnerable to abuse and abandonment.98 Helen Howard would know a husband’s abandonment later in her own life, but when she signed the petition in 1843, it was her mother’s vulnerability and abandonment by a white man that had shaped her youth. Especially for women who had escaped slavery or whose families had recently come from slavery, like Helen Howard, the interracial marriage rights movement offered an opportunity to take part in a shift in the legal framework that defined real freedom, freedom from the sexual vulnerability that slavery and historic slave codes had constructed to commodify them and their children. Helen Howard represents the multiple motivations of African American women petitioners: signing to support men’s and women’s full citizenship rights, signing in favor of their own marriage choices, and certainly signing to protect other children from the vulnerability she faced as a biracial child deemed illegitimate in nominally free America.

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The activist spirit that spurred so many women and men to petition was so intense during the winter of 1842–1843 that it garnered comment from a number of observers, from Deborah Weston to Frederick Douglass, who wrote an editorial for the Liberator from Lynn, Massachusetts, November 8, 1842, stating that “New-Bedford has never been so favorably aroused to her antislavery responsibility as at present.”99 With Douglass, Remond, and other activists engaged in an exhausting lecture tour, the spirit spread throughout the state and spurred mass petitioning on equal rights, including marriage rights. Inspired by New Bedford’s example, black Bostonians organized a massive petitioning drive in favor of repealing the marriage ban. A number of individual African Americans in Boston had signed petitions on the marriage issue throughout the movement, but, like in New Bedford, a large unified petition did not arrive until the 1842–1843 petitioning season. Like the petitions compiled in New Bedford, the document and the occasion at which it was raised reveal the myriad threads that made up the fabric of Boston’s black reform community and, more precisely, how African Americans with sometimes severely divergent views and circumstances united to support a discrete political cause. Reformers from throughout Boston’s black community met on February 1, 1843, to rally for interracial marriage reform. The resolutions passed during this meeting at the Beknap Street Church illustrate not only the organization of African American reform communities throughout the region, but also how these activists viewed their rights and citizenship in the Massachusetts body politic. Under the direction of Chairman Benjamin Weeden, with William Cooper Nell as secretary, the participants immediately began a discussion of the ongoing legislative battles. They expressed indignation over the attempt by “designing individuals” in the legislature and news media to suggest that African Americans were not in favor of repealing the ban on interracial marriage. They resolved that “disregarding the vulgar ribaldry which has been heaped upon the subject, we, as men and as citizens, denounce the law of this State, forbidding persons of different colors to intermarry, because it is wrong in itself—at variance with the Constitution of the State—a relic of the prejudice from which the slave system springs, and belonging rather to a slave code than to a free State; and as children of Massachusetts, we rejoice to believe that this stain will soon be wiped away.”100 In spite of their intention that this list of resolutions would be published in local papers, they did not disavow their advocacy of amalgamation. The men who led this meeting identified the marriage ban as a hallmark of Massachusetts’s continued failure to protect the rights of people of color. Its primary purpose, they argued, was to support “that prejudice from which the slave system springs,” namely, white su-

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premacy, and they hoped that altering the state’s laws would be one step in a larger process of ensuring liberty for free people. While white abolitionists often cited the marriage question as the “last vestige of slavery” on the statute books, these men did not see it as quite so revolutionary. Tellingly, they cheered the success of the “Great Latimer Petition,” marked by widespread meetings in which white citizens advocated a state personal liberty law that would protect them from federal constitutional requirements to aid Southern slave catchers. Knowing full well that the motivation behind much of the white support for the fugitive slave grew out of white citizens’ concern for their own independence and their relationship to the South, not support for antislavery, much less free people’s rights and privileges, the black Bostonians hinted that there yet was work to be done. They suggested optimistically that the Latimer affair was a “good omen . . . believing that our fellow-citizens will be as ready to do right by the oppressed freeman, as by the fugitive slave.”101 Before the meeting was out, participants filed through and affixed their names to a petition demanding the repeal of the marriage ban. The petition collectors used the long petition form distributed by the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, which enumerated two practical and six principled reasons for repeal. By the end of the evening, 351 people had signed (see Figure 2.2).102 The first signers were well-known leaders: John T. Hilton, a well-respected community activist who would lead other equal rights initiatives, including the move to integrate Boston’s public schools; his sister-in-law Eunice Davis, a founding member of the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society and by this time a single woman head of household caring for her teenaged son; and Robert and Clarissa Johnson, abolitionists, prominent members of the Twelfth Street Baptist Church, and parents to a large and growing family they hoped would reap the benefits of their fight for equal rights. Paul C. Howard of New Bedford also joined the Bostonians on this occasion. Howard had come to share word of his town’s recent reform work and in appreciation for his participation, the Bostonians resolved that they “feel truly encouraged in view of the exertions of our brethren in New-Bedford, and would recommend their example to be imitated in all other parts of the Union.”103 They further resolved that a copy of these resolutions be signed and sent to the state legislature to add Boston black citizens’ support to the growing pile of petitions calling for the repeal of the marriage ban, the integration of railcars, and the personal liberty law. While even the most public meetings during this period functioned according to a strict racial, gendered, and status hierarchy, the pattern of signatures collected in support of interracial marriage rights at this meeting

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figure 2.2. Petition of John C. Hilton, Courtesy of the Massachusetts Archives and the Center for American Political Studies at Harvard University

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illustrates something different: if not egalitarianism, at least a looser interpretation of this rule. Even when women met to discuss women’s issues in antebellum America, they were expected to defer to any man present to preside over the meeting.104 When members of the public attended meetings organized by the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, they often were not permitted to vote on resolutions, and petitions created during these meetings inevitably were headed by a dozen or more prominent male abolitionists (Wendell Phillips, William Ellery Channing, Henry Bowditch) before the “rank-and-file” were permitted to affix their names. When African Americans met, William Lloyd Garrison or Wendell Phillips often joined Hilton, William Cooper Nell, or Remond on the speaker’s platform. In this case, however, prominent white abolitionists were absent. This was a meeting of black citizens, organized by black citizens to discuss the future of African American freedom in the antebellum North, and it offers us a telling glimpse into the workings of this energetic black reform community that, while it cooperated with white liberal colleagues, was in no way directed by them. When Robert and Clarissa Johnson rose to sign the petition along with Martha Ames and George Amos they were followed by Francis Clary, who even in the 1880s when he was in his late sixties still worked to support himself and his family as a janitor in Boylston Hall at Harvard University, and John Eli, who has largely eluded the historical record.105 Some prominent leaders like Thomas P. Smith and Jonas Clark signed thereafter, but others appear much farther down on the list: Benjamin Weeden, active in Boston’s response to the Supreme Court’s ruling against the rights of escaped slaves in Prigg v. Pennsylvania and chairman of reform meetings in the early 1840s, was the 187th signer, and John T. Raymond, the pastor of the Belknap Street Church, signed after over 200 other already had. As with the New Bedford petition, a review of Boston petitioners’ lifelong reform careers illustrates the place of marriage in the larger reform movement. The Belknap Street Church petition includes the signatures of people who protected fugitive slaves, petitioned for the security and rights of black sailors in southern ports, called for the diplomatic recognition of Haiti, fought for integrated railroads, organized for and against integrated public schools in Boston, advocated for an African American militia, published fugitive slave narratives, attended African American conventions, raised funds for David Ruggles’ Mirror of Liberty, supported Garrison’s Liberator, challenged segregation at Harvard Medical School, and escaped slavery themselves.106 Interracial marriage rights was one antebellum reform cause among many to which Boston’s African American activists dedicated themselves.

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Benjamin F. Roberts, for instance, is best known as the man who brought suit against the Boston public schools on behalf of his daughter Sarah when she was denied access to the school closest to their home and ordered to  attend the segregated “colored school” on Beacon Hill.107 However, Roberts’s interest in racial equality and his ambivalence about existing racial classifications highlighted by legal strictures, like segregated schooling and the ban on interracial marriage, had much deeper roots. In a postwar reminiscence of his integration activism, Roberts would memorialize his grandfather, James Easton, who not only fought to claim racially inclusive citizenship during the American Revolutionary War, but continued his fight for inclusion for decades to come. Easton resisted his family’s relegation to the “Negro Pew” in at least six instances in a variety of churches and established a manual training school for African American youth who sought steady careers in skilled industries generally monopolized by whites. Hosea Easton, Roberts’s uncle, recounted that “By reason of the repeated surges of the tide of prejudice the establishment, like a ship in a boisterous hurricane at sea went beneath its waves, richly laden, well manned and well managed, and all sunk to rise no more.”108 Roberts’s parents, too, worked against the forces of segregation through vocal opposition to the American Colonization Society and membership in one of Boston’s only racially inclusive churches, the First Independent Baptist Church on Belknap Street, which was attended by African American Baptists as well as white abolitionists like Garrison. Furthermore, The Easton family, like the Cuffe family with whom they intermarried and created business alliances, included members whose family heritage defied simple classification. Benjamin Roberts’s aunts, uncles, cousins, and friends had united African, Native American, and European heritage. It is no surprise that he would eagerly advocate the repeal of a law that disavowed his very ancestry and delegitimated the marriage of his uncle Caleb and aunt Chloe who made a home with their seven children in North Bridgewater, Massachusetts, despite the state’s unwillingness to recognize the validity of their marriage. Ultimately, the Easton-Roberts families’ struggles were for full citizenship in a nation and state to which they rightfully laid claim. As integrationist as they were, however, Benjamin Roberts and his forebears refused to accept the established patronage relationship usually prescribed for aspiring black Northerners during this period, especially when their supposed white patrons failed to illustrate sufficient dedication to the causes they held most dear. After establishing a print shop in Boston in 1838, Benjamin Roberts printed the Anti-Slavery Herald, a journal dedicated to antislavery and equal rights advocacy. When it became clear that he intended to move beyond established antislavery discourse to editorialize on racial discrimination

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and the treatment of free African American men and women, many of his white patrons cut their ties. Amos Phelps, consequently a strong supporter of interracial marriage rights as a moral reform issue, wrote Roberts in the spring of 1838 to demand that Roberts return his letter of endorsement. Roberts’s anger practically seethed off the page of his response: I am for the improvement among this class [free African Americans] of people, both mental and physical. The arts and sciences have never been introduced to any extent among us—therefore they are of the utmost importance. If our anti-slavery men will not subscribe to the advancement of these principles, but rail out and protest against them, why, we will go to the heathen . . . It is of no use [to] say with the mouth we are friends of the slave and not try to encourage and assist the free colored people in raising themselves . . . Shall this be defeated? . . . I was not aware that so many hypocrites existed in the antislavery society. According to what I have seen of the conduct of some, a black man would be as unsafe in their hands as those of Southern slaveholders.109

Clearly disgusted by white supposed abolitionists’ racist potential, Roberts likely relished the opportunity to collaborate with leaders within the African American community to call for reform. He worked closely with William Cooper Nell, just such a reformer, on the marriage issue. In the early 1840s, Nell was beginning a career that would leave him perhaps the best-respected member of Boston’s antebellum black activist community. A decade later he would stand before his neighbors, honored as the champion for integrated schools. During the Civil War he was renowned for his advocacy of African American military service and the just treatment of black troops. And he would put pen to paper to record some of the first works of African American history: Colored Patriots of the American Revolution and Services of Colored Americans in the Wars of 1776 and 1812. Nell was brought up surrounded by activists. His father had been an associate of David Walker and in 1826 was a founding member of the early black antislavery society, the Massachusetts General Colored Association. But Nell had his own motivations. When he graduated from Boston’s segregated school in 1829, his performance should have earned him the citywide award for academic excellent, the Franklin medal. Instead, the school board determined that because he had attended the segregated “colored school,” Nell, along with two of his classmates who also would otherwise have qualified, would not receive the prize. Nell refused to fade quietly out of sight and instead spoke with a local caterer who allowed him to work as a waiter at the dinner where the white boys were to be honored with their medals. He later wrote that while he was serving, “Mr. Armstrong whispered to me, ‘you ought to be here with the other boys.’ Of course, the same idea had more than once been mine, but—his remarks, while witnessing

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the honors awarded to white scholars only augmented my sensitiveness all the more by the intuitive inquiry, which I eagerly desired to express—If you think so why have you not taken steps to bring it about?”110 Like so many others detailed here, that early experience of exclusion would shape Nell’s political activism. As in New Bedford, petitioners came from all walks of life. Taking time away from their toil, those who worked taking in washing and sewing, selling new and used clothing, waiting on wealthy whites, dressing hair, jobbing, and blacking boots attended this meeting and rose to affix their names to the petition alongside more well-known black Bostonians like Hilton, Peter M. Howard, and Mary A. Barbadoes, as if signaling to the world that despite their poverty and oppression, labor and caste did not circumscribe their lives.111 After all, many had challenged and would continue to challenge the status quo, escaping from slavery, aiding other fugitive slaves, and striving to end segregation through individual and communal activism. As members queued to sign the petition, they joined the line with family members, friends, and neighbors. Most of Boston’s black community lived in Boston’s fifth or sixth wards, but even in such a relatively small area, closer bonds formed. The Hilton-Ames family, united through John and Lavinia’s marriage, signed together, Rebecca and Mary Roberts signed just before their neighbors, Frances and Aaron Joseph, and prominent Baptist churchmen and neighbors, George Washington and James Scott signed the petition one behind the other.112 Perhaps they even walked to the meetinghouse together, discussing the church, their daughters, and the equal rights movement.113 Whether he discussed it or not, Scott’s attention was likely well attuned to popular attitudes toward escaped slaves in Boston, he being one himself.114 Shortly behind them came another man who must have reveled in the loving support of fellow abolitionists and equal rights activists while keeping his finger on the pulse of Northern attitudes toward free people of color. Lunsford Lane approached the petition and apparently without hesitation signed the names of all of his family members then in the Boston area: his wife Martha, mother Clarisa, daughters Elmira and Laura, and son Edward. That Lane attended this meeting and affixed his family’s names to this public, political document is nothing less than extraordinary. Lane escaped slavery and obtained freedom in New York in 1835, returning to Raleigh, North Carolina, to work toward purchasing the rest of his family’s freedom. In 1841, accused (rightly to be sure) of being an abolitionist, he was forced to flee, but returned undeterred in 1842. When he returned, he was attacked and tarred and feathered before friends helped him escape the rages of the mob and flee north with his family.115 Just months

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later, here he was in Boston, composed, surrounded by loved ones, and unyielding in his quest for justice. Ralph Rhoberts a laborer in his forties who would later list his birth location as Virginia, possibly a former slave, signed his own name but was followed by his wife and family who required help writing their names: Sarah, Susan, Irena, Margret, and Ralph Jr., indicated affirmation with their marks.116 A large portion of the signers were not literate and enlisted a friend’s help in transcribing their names while they affirmed them with “×” or “+,” their mark. Many of the signers undoubtedly had been enslaved and cherished this opportunity to engage in this political process as free people intent on affirming the rights they were owed in a free community. Some offered adopted names that reveal their likely fugitive status: John H. and Jane E. Garrison stand out as a man and woman who, like Harriet Tubman would a few years later, adopted the last name of the renowned antislavery advocate to highlight their own free identity. Further down the list, as the petition collectors added strips to their growing sheaf of names, more families signed on. Belknap Street Church pastor John Raymond, his wife Susan, and teenaged son William signed, as did supporter and boarder of escaped slaves, Henry Thacker and his large family. They were joined by those who have for the most part evaded the historical record: the Putmans, the Burrs, Jesse and Elizabeth Allen and their children, the Holmes, the Saunders family, and others. Couples rose to sign together: Henry and Mary Washington, Salmon and Nancy Alexander, Joseph and Mary Russell, Cato and Almira Foreman, Henry and Adeline Benjamin, Eliza and James Gardner, John and Eliza Springstine, and others, many of whom trusted others to sign their names while they affixed a mark. There was no shortage of single people who attended the meeting, alone or with friends and neighbors, and signed their names of their own accord. Robert Morris was one such man, then a single teenager working as a servant cum clerk for Edward G. Loring and not at all assured of his later trajectory to the practice of law and ascension as one of Boston’s foremost African American citizens. Likewise, there were men, like Thomas G. Williams, himself a young man in his early twenties, who might have chosen to attend the meeting with his neighbors the Allens. Nor are all of the signing women attached to men or parental guardians, whether they left them at home or lived alone and supported themselves. Mary Oswell, Ann LeFord, and Sarah Jackson queued together to sign their own names to repeal the marriage ban. Margaret Amory apparently attended the meeting without her husband Henry and signed the petition for herself and the young girl Cornelia Dalton who had accompanied her from New York to Boston in

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recent years.117 Mary A. Barbadoes signed, while the names of her parents, activists James and Mary Ann Barbadoes do not appear on the petition.118 Ann Hall signed amid a short list of her female friends and neighbors: Fanny Clark, Lucy Layton, Elisabeth Curtis, and Betsy Eli.119 Like Eunice Davis, some of these women lived alone or as heads of household (and thus have entered the historical record), including Elizabeth Fisher, a woman in her late twenties or early thirties, who lived alone in Boston’s sixth ward.120 What is perhaps most telling about the activists who attended this meeting and joined together to demand change from their state legislators is that they came from all sides of the reform spectrum. Those, such as Samuel Snowden, Thomas Cole, Robert Roberts, and Coffin Pitts, who were first and loudest to denounce the work of the American Colonization Society, met with those willing to consider emigration, at least as it was proposed by members of the African Colonization Society.121 Those who fought for integrated public schools, including Jonas Clark and John Hilton, signed right alongside those who, like Joseph Russell and Thomas P. Smith, advocated separate schools.122 Prominent members of integrated local antislavery societies were joined by those who would later agree with Smith when he promoted a return to African American–led antislavery work during the school integration debates.123 Outside this meeting, the community was divided on social, economic, and religious lines, lines that loomed large in the years prior to 1843. In 1840, Reverend George Black and some forty members of the Independent Church, the very church in which black Bostonians gathered on this day in February 1843, left and formed their own congregation to protest what they saw as religious and social conservatism in the church.124 Membership dropped under 100, and Boston’s black Baptists found themselves at a crossroads. Over the following years, while some activists still criticized the church and their neighbors for failing to address social ills, and particularly antislavery, head on, the Belknap Street Church and its congregants shifted.125 The meeting in that church’s sanctuary, uniting its presiding minister Raymond, critics like Nell, and many hundreds of black Bostonians from other congregations, must have been a particularly poignant moment for those who worked to reunite the Independent Church after its 1840 schism and for those who wished it would come down on the right side of antislavery and equal rights work. Still, the cohesiveness of the African American community on this issue begs the question, what did advocacy of interracial marriage mean for each of these activists? To be sure, interracial marriage meant different things to different people, from Perry Young and Sarah Belden, waiting to solemnize a legal marriage, to Charles Lenox Remond, who viewed it as the legal and

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symbolic encapsulation of a society in which he, as an African American man, would be treated with due respect. Surely there were those, like the small groups who might have petitioned the legislature against repeal, who opposed interracial marriage on practical or personal grounds. Nevertheless, that such a cross-section of Boston’s African American reformers stood together on this issue offers a caveat to scholars intent on pointing out the many ways African American communities fragmented over social and political concerns. Ultimately, it is clear that despite personal preferences, those who joined together to sign this petition viewed the right to marry someone irrespective of race not as a discrete privilege to be disaggregated from political equality, but as an equal rights measure just like desegregation and fugitive rights. For the activists who viewed the interracial marriage question as an issue of equal rights above all else—the rights of free people to engage fully and freely in Northern society—its repeal was not a singular event, but rather one step in a long effort to garner greater justice for themselves and their children. When the interracial marriage ban was repealed, Boston’s black leaders could breathe one brief sigh of relief before continuing with related initiatives like the battle over segregated rail accommodations and a move to improve education for African American students in Boston that had begun in earnest in 1840 when William Cooper Nell, John T. Hilton, and Henry Thacker began a campaign to demand integrated educational facilities for Boston schoolchildren.126 Advocacy for interracialism as an equal rights measure undermined racist ideologies, weakened white supremacy, and thus pushed beyond conventional calls for abolition or limited political rights. It destabilized the very concept of race. By showing their willingness to step out against foundational racial beliefs, these activists built an antiracist movement tradition that both undergirded the battle to legalize interracial marriage and outstripped the demands of many white activist allies whose caution or ambivalence would lead them away from the goal of interracialism.

chapter three

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I

n the fall of 1837, Daniel and Polly Chute, two white abolitionists, founding members of the Anti-Slavery Society of Reading, Massachusetts, joined other antislavery societies throughout the state when they organized a modest drive to affix their neighbors’ signatures to a petition calling upon the state legislature to repeal all state laws that made “distinctions on account of color.”1 In Massachusetts, the petitions targeted a federally mandated law barring African Americans from forming into armed militias and the portion of the state marriage statute that banned unions between whites and “Negroes, Indians, and Mulattos.” The petitioning drive coincided with a national movement calling upon members of the federal House and Senate to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia, halt the expansion of slavery into Western territories, and lift the “gag rule,” a new law the House passed in 1836 that required that antislavery petitions be tabled without consideration. Massachusetts was not the only state to see such efforts; similar forms circulated throughout the North. In Ohio, petitioners demanded that the right to trial by jury be guaranteed to African Americans and that all other racist laws be repealed.2 In New York, abolitionists had submitted a survey to candidates in state government races demanding, among other things, whether they would be willing to abolish all legal distinctions of color. They followed up their inquiries with petitions to the new legislative session calling for just such a measure.3 Philadelphians Charles A. Gardner, Frederick A. Hinton, and others petitioned the Pennsylvania Legislature for full citizenship rights for themselves and other African Americans upon hearing that the state legislature was considering a bill to restrict African American suffrage.4

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figure 3.1. Petition of Daniel Chute, Courtesy of the Massachusetts Archives and the Center for American Political Studies at Harvard University

The Chutes had been active in the abolitionist movement since the early 1830s, and they supported the call to eliminate racially discriminatory laws from the statute books. First pasting the American Anti-Slavery Society’s form to the top of eight inch by ten inch sheets of paper, then dividing the sheets into two columns to make room for the hundreds of signatures they were about to collect, they boldly signed their names (see Figures 3.1 and 3.2). Daniel acted as the head signer for the men of Reading, while Polly affixed her name to the top of the women’s petition. After their drive was complete, the Chute had collected nearly 500 signatures, a phenomenal success for Reading, a town with a population of just over 2,000 inhabitants.5 That success likely can be attributed to the Chutes’ high standing among their neighbors and fellow parishioners. Reading’s male and female reformers knew that their controversial petitioning efforts could create a backlash. The credibility of their organization rested on their ability to crown their petitions with the mantle of respectability.

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figure 3.2. Petition of Polly Chute, Courtesy of the Massachusetts Archives and the Center for American Political Studies at Harvard University

Along with the Chutes’ petition, calls to repeal Massachusetts’s race laws came from men and women across the state. The largest of them, with 200 or more signatures, came from the men and women of Reading with 275 and 201, respectively, 200 women of Upton, 208 women of Dorchester, and the women of Ashburnham with 256 signers.6 There were at least twentyfour separate petitions containing over 2,500 individual signatures, and almost all of the petitions came in pairs, one each from the male and female antislavery societies in their communities. The leaders of many of these petitioning efforts were prominent members of Congregationalist, Baptist, or Methodist religious organizations in their towns. Abel Duncan, who petitioned along with his wife Lucia and over 200 neighbors, was the pastor of the Central Meeting House in Hanover.7 Benjamin Wood (with his wife Betsey) ministered to Upton’s Congregationalists for fifty years and sent a total of 291 signatures.8 Samuel Crocker of Fitchburg was a deacon of the new Baptist church in his town and petitioned with seventy-four other Fitch-

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burg men.9 James Porter was a new pastor for the Methodist Episcopal Church in Worcester and sent a modest petition of twenty-four signers.10 In most of these areas, antislavery activism centered on reform families like the Chutes, with husband and wife pairs heading petitions and circulating them among their neighbors, the men attempting to convince male legal voters to sign while women called upon their female friends and neighbors to support the reform cause. In all but one case, more women than men in each locality signed the petitions, a testament to Northern women’s rapidly increasing position as the collective voice of antebellum social reform.11 When the thousands of signatures arrived at the General Court, they were forwarded to a special committee on the subject. The committee did not deliberate long before the young Whig senator assigned chairmanship of the committee, James C. Alvord, reported that it was “not expedient” to legislate on the question at that time.12 It was no surprise to reformers that the legislature did not leap to respond to their petitions. The subject of rights for free people of color entered the treacherous terrain of amalgamation, and as soon as tabloid journalists learned that white women had petitioned the legislature promoting the rights of people of color, and the right of interracial marriage no less, they set off a firestorm of antiamalgamationist harangues. Luckily for Polly Chute, her petition arrived a few days after that of Charlotte F. Thompson, the woman who would become an unfortunate target for those within and outside the state who wished to derail the repeal movement. In January 1838, Thompson and fifteen other women from Rehoboth, Massachusetts, submitted a petition to the legislature. Their petition appears to have differed from the others only in that it arrived first, and its arrival was published in the legislative columns of Massachusetts newspapers.13 In fact, it was one of the shorter petitions received in January 1838, suggesting that the repeal movement in Rehoboth was not as large or as well organized as those in the other early petitioning locales. The legislators, and those newspaper editors who reported on the petitions, were more inclined to mock them as ill-conceived and in bad taste than to consider their political implications. Without naming any individual petitioners, an editor for the Gloucester Telegraph noted that quite a few “ladies” had petitioned the legislature to repeal all state laws making distinctions of color, and after explaining that this was a call for legal interracial marriage, sniped, “the right of petition, sacred and invaluable as it is, may be degraded to purposes tending to weaken the respect in which it ought to be held, and Heaven forbid that the females of Massachusetts, virtuous, intelligent, and respected, should do anything to debase so priceless a privilege.”14 By casting the

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women’s political demands and abolitionist agenda as a promotion of interracial sex, opponents hoped to quash both. On Saturday January 27, 1838, a likely fabricated petition reportedly signed by people of color in Boston, in response to Charlotte F. Thompson’s petition, asked the legislature not to repeal the marriage law because it was a “salutary law calculated to preserve the purity of our RACE and to prevent the evils resulting from a mixed BREED.” While it is not implausible that some African Americans in Boston supported the marriage ban, there is no evidence to suggest that this particular petition actually originated from Boston’s black population. Senator George Bradburn of Nantucket and Deborah Weston suspected that one of the state legislators submitted it as a grand joke. Southern papers ran with this sensationalist story. The Intelligencer of Washington, DC, and the Easton, Maryland, Gazette praised the fictional black petitioners for showing “proper resentment” for Ms. Thompson and the other “white ladies” of Rehoboth.15 Further hilarity ensued when, on March 5, Representative Abraham Osborne of Edgartown read aloud a ribald petition from John P. Norton and twenty-six other men of that town praying that the legislature “enable Miss Charlotte F. Thompson and her associates to marry negroes.”16 Although the legislators were amused enough to pass the petition to the committee on the subject, they sobered as the day progressed and ultimately revoted that the petitioners be given leave to withdraw. As the story ran further and further afield from its relevance in the Massachusetts state legislature, no one paused to ask “who is Charlotte F. Thompson?” The only pertinent aspects of her profile seemed to be that she must be both white and single, and that she and her equally white and single female friends petitioned for the legalization of interracial marriage. As it turns out, Thompson was white but decidedly not single. Charlotte Fales Thompson was the second wife of the Reverend Otis Thompson, a former minister and long-time private school teacher in Rehoboth.17 The couple was married in Charlotte’s hometown of Bristol, Rhode Island, in the winter of 1828. Thompson pastored the Catholic Congregational Church and Society in Rehoboth’s second district until 1832, when he was pushed out of the active ministry after a series of scandals and personal squabbles. However, Thompson did remain a respected member of the community inasmuch as his neighbors trusted him in the capacity of master of the school he taught in his home for many years.18 The reverend’s transitional status in Rehoboth in the mid-1830s might help to explain the vast difference between petitions with only a handful of signers and the more weighty efforts by activists like the Chutes in Reading. No known petition on equal rights or the marriage ban was ever sent by a group of men in Rehoboth.

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If the other localities are any indication, Reverend Thompson might have headed such petitioning efforts had he shared his wife’s reform initiative and been an active minister in 1837. However, the citizens of Rehoboth no longer turned to Reverend Thompson on moral matters, which might also account for Charlotte’s inability to garner more than a dozen signatures herself.19 Polly Chute, it need hardly be stated, also failed to live up to antiamalgamationists’ sordid imaginations. The Chutes were not young zealots. They were steady Congregationalist reformers in their mid-seventies. Daniel Chute’s ancestors had arrived in Massachusetts from England around 1735 and had settled in Essex County. His wife Polly (Stimpson) drew him to Reading, and when Chute arrived in the last decade of the eighteenth century he lived in the Old South parsonage for ten years as he established himself in business and built a house on land adjoining the church. Over the course of his life, Chute espoused an abiding interest in both education and business, becoming one of Reading’s foremost and wealthiest citizens. The couple was tied to two of the most important emergent reform movements of the 1830s: abolitionism and moral reform. In 1809 he built a school and recruited as teachers Elizabeth and Susan Eaton, sisters of Rebecca Eaton the “editress” of New England’s premier moral reform journal the Friend of Virtue.20 Eager to take a leading role in the antislavery struggle, Polly was the first member to affix her name to the constitution of the Reading Female Anti-Slavery Society founded in 1833, declaring, “Whereas we believe that slavery is contrary to the precepts of Christianity, dangerous to the liberties of the country, and ought immediately to be abolished; and whereas we believe that the citizens of New England . . . are under the highest obligations to seek its removal by moral influence; and whereas we believe that the free people of color are unrighteous oppressed, and stand in need of our sympathy and benevolent co-operation; therefore . . . we agree to form ourselves into a society.” In addition to circulating the 1837 petition calling for a repeal of Massachusetts laws making distinctions of color, the female antislavery society donated money for schools for black children, including Prudence Crandall’s school in Connecticut, advocated on behalf of the Amistad captives, supported the New York vigilance committee for the protection of fugitive slaves, and took part in yearly antislavery petitioning drives.21 It is no accident that much of the popular advocacy for interracial marriage rights came in the form of organized petitioning. The interracial marriage debate rose to prominence in Massachusetts during a critical period of transition. The 1830s saw the popular rise of abolitionism, organized opposition to the expansion of slavery into new territories, a burgeoning

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women’s rights movement, and the politicization of antislavery with the rise of the Liberty Party. Political historians also point to this antebellum era as exemplary of the sort of popular politics (and sometimes mob action) that grew out of post-Revolutionary shifts in political and economic power, from elites and artisans to the expanding working class.22 While studies of New York often place the rising working class within a rubric of Democratic antiblack politics, the case is not so clear-cut in Massachusetts.23 Microstudies of industrial centers in the state, Lynn most notably, show that workingclass empowerment also fueled social reform mobilization. Working men and women (and teenagers) of Lynn joined antislavery societies, raised money, and signed petitions for the restriction of slavery and for the repeal of the interracial marriage ban in Massachusetts.24 Petitioning was the clearest manifestation of popular political engagement in antebellum America. By the early nineteenth century, Americans based their right to petition in the First Amendment to the Constitution, and the act of petitioning was a far more critical link between common constituents and political representatives than it is today.25 In antebellum America, petitioning was political action and a means of generating and displaying mass support for a cause. Through the petition, individuals, not just the enfranchised, could mount a mass protest against existing legislative policy. In fact, it was particularly after the rise of nearly universal white male suffrage in the early republic that nonelites, including white women and African Americans, found that that their petitioning efforts had a chance of garnering a hearing.26 By signing petitions, farmers, laborers, and factory girls could take part in the same political theater as the nation’s elites. By 1838, there was nothing surprising about the willingness of abolitionists in Reading, Dorchester, Boylston, or the other towns to petition the legislature on an antislavery matter. It was the large numbers of white women who chose to petition for interracial marriage rights that so shocked their critics. When one considers the extent to which amalgamation had been sexualized over the course of the decade and the heightened criticism women faced when they engaged in political activism, we cannot take for granted their willingness to enter the political fray on this issue. This is especially true because many Massachusetts abolitionists stepped away from strident equal rights demands during this period. Antiabolitionist violence reached its peak with the 1838 attack on the Anti-Slavery Convention of American Women, and the economic downturn of 1837 left would-be activists attending to their purses and bank accounts instead of their humanitarian pursuits. Furthermore, some women considered abandoning petitioning on controversial issues following the circulation of the “Pastoral Letter” in 1837, in which the Congregaltionist clergymen of the General Association of Mas-

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sachusetts asserted that “the appropriate duties and influence of women . . . are unobtrusive and private, but the sources of mighty power.”27 They insinuated that women’s character was in danger due to engagement in public or political matters and stated flatly that “we cannot . . . but regret the mistaken conduct of those who encourage females to bear an obtrusive and ostentatious part in measures of reform.” They urged their congregants to refocus their reform efforts inward and to attend to “the cultivation of private Christian character, and private efforts for the spiritual good of individuals.” Faced with criticism from the clergy and antiamalgamation attacks, women who advocated for controversial equal rights measures found themselves increasingly vulnerable. Only one of the reform communities that had sent a petition to repeal the marriage ban in 1838 did so again in 1839. Not all activists were willing to be silenced, however. Adopting the interracial marriage issue as a stage from which women could declare their right to engage in the politics of social reform, much as they had in response to the congressional gag rule, large numbers of women in Braintree, Dorchester, Lynn, and Plymouth began walking door to door asking their female neighbors to petition the legislature to repeal laws making distinctions of color.28 Reforming women’s motivation for petitioning grew from a variety of interrelated concerns. Women petitioned because despite conservative claims that political matters were outside their sphere, legislative decision making had profound impacts not only on women’s lives, but on their reform work. Abolitionist women were prominent supporters of the 1835–1836 postal campaign, in which the American Anti-Slavery Society printed newspapers, tracts, and even the children’s journal The Slave’s Friend, and sent them through the post to towns and cities in the South. They hoped to expand their reach and attract the attention of silent, but they hoped supportive, antislavery Southerners to their cause. Enraged white Southerners, terrified that an influx of antislavery literature would foment massive slave uprisings, mobbed post offices, burned Garrison in effigy, and demanded that the federal government stop the shipments. And they did, stepping far across the proverbial line that separated federal nonintervention with slavery in the states to active protection of slavery in interstate commerce. This was one of the events that convinced Southern congressman that abolitionist initiatives could undermine the security of the slave system, inspiring them to enact the gag rule.29 At the same time, female antislavery advocates planned a massive letter writing campaign aimed at slaveholding women, a group they liked to believe were secret abolitionists who, if given the chance, would rise in solidarity with women throughout the country to demand emancipation.30 Their hopes were dashed summarily, but these women were hamstrung by their

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limited political power and clung to the conviction that through “persuasion” they could sway slaveholders and slavery’s apologists to denounce the institution on moral grounds. Persistent petitioning became their most potent means of mass protest and evinced advocacy of abolition, women’s political rights, and what Northerners began to see as their Davidian battle against the Goliath “Slave Power.” As November faded into bitter cold December and 1838 was coming to a close, one of those reform women, Aroline A. Chase, found her life more hectic than ever. The usual schedule of teaching, caring for her father and their home on the hill on Broad Street, writing poetry, hearing lectures, and attending Friends fellowship and reform meetings, was strained by two mammoth undertakings: the year-end petitioning drive and the Lynn Female Anti-Slavery Society Fair. Each would be stunningly successful, thanks in great part to Chase’s dedication. She, Miriam Johnson, and a small handful of members had volunteered to circulate this year’s important petitions. After a few lukewarm attempts, the women had learned that if they intended to host a successful petitioning campaign, display meaningful devotion to the slave’s cause, and deliver verifiable petitions to the state and national congresses when their sessions opened in January, they must rely on those women who were most committed.31 Chase was quick to volunteer her services, filled with righteous indignation and renewed dedication to the interracial agenda of the abolitionist ever since she witnessed the despicable actions of the mob at Pennsylvania Hall the previous May. All, they claimed, because white and black women met together to try to alleviate the suffering of those in slavery. She began an intensive petitioning campaign to collect women’s signatures in favor of repealing the marriage ban and in the process bolster the political efficacy of Lynn women. Like the Chutes in Reading, Chase had substantial social credibility in Lynn, but her influence and network emanated from different religious and economic circumstances. Lynn had a large reform community that spanned gender, age, race, and class.32 As a Quaker, a schoolteacher, and the daughter of an independent shoemaker whose family had resided in Essex County for generations, Chase was able to appeal to a wide variety of women. This year, the national petitions called upon the U.S. Congress to end the gag rule, emancipate those held in bondage in the District of Columbia, and abolish the interstate slave trade.33 She was particularly pleased with the success the society had circulating the marriage petition. They were preparing to send Representative George Hood to the next legislative session with the signatures of 735 Lynn women demanding repeal.34 The women of the Female Anti-Slavery Society of Lynn were aware of criticism and the threat of attacks on women like Charlotte F. Thompson

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who dared stick out their pale necks to act independently on reform politics, but Chase and her cohort on the petitioning committee were determined to flout them. In fact, they had decided to carry out a petitioning drive despite a recent dip in the popularity of antislavery issues among the men of Lynn.35 They were practically belligerent in their demands, not prayers, for support and patronage of their Anti-Slavery Fair fund-raiser, posting an advertisement in the Liberator stating bluntly, “The women of Lynn feel that the abolitionists . . . throughout the State, need no further appeal to induce them to sustain this fair, both by purchase and donation.”36 The fair took place on the first and second days of the new year and raised an impressive $575 for the antislavery cause, more than even the Boston women could muster in this turbulent time.37 With holiday fellowship and the fair under way, Chase pasted together the many sheets of signatures she had collected. Before delivering them to Hood, who would present them before the state House of Representatives, however, these long strips of paper had to be made ready for the post. After rolling and folding, stuffing and compressing, she managed to contain the ream in a bursting envelope.38 When Brother Hood presented this petition on the House floor, it was sure to make an impression. The Lynn petition arrived contemporaneously with those from the women of Brookfield, Dorchester, and Plymouth, with a total signature count of over 1,300.39 The petition headed by Aroline Chase dwarfed the other petitions, and critics immediately attacked the “ladies from Lynn” as palpable threats to white men’s racial and political power. The Massachusetts women’s petition reached wide media circulation, and Edward G. Clay, New York based creator of the amalgamation prints series, immortalized them in his lithograph Johnny Q, Introducing the Haytien Ambassador to the Ladies of Lynn, Mass (see Figure 3.3). Clay presents what, in 1839, would have been viewed as a scandalous scene. It is a meeting of abolitionists where white women and black men stand close together, pressing forward to admire “Gen. Marmalade, the Ambassador from Hayti” while he exchanges formalities with one of the most liberal antislavery congressmen in Washington, Massachusetts’s own John Quincy Adams. The imagery and language not only mocks African Americans and abolitionists, but suggest that the “ladies of Lynn” sought a complete overthrow of the existing racial hierarchy and advocated interracial sexual activity. Clay dismisses the diplomatic legitimacy of the Haitian ambassadorship by presenting “General Marmalade” as a salacious predator who tells Adams that “de charming rose buds ob Lynn make vater in my mouse.” Likewise, the women’s political ambitious are dismissed as mere conduits for sexual desire. One gasps, “How I should like to kiss his balmy

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figure 3.3. Johnny Q, Introducing the Haytien Ambassador to the Ladies of Lynn, Mass., Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society

lips!” Like Sternfast in Jerome Holgate’s City of Amalgamation and the congregants in Clay’s “Practical Amalgamation,” the men and women welcoming the Haitian ambassador ignore societies’ racial and gendered conventions. At the left, a woman wearing a thick, dark stole that she clutches at her breast remarks on the “delightful perfume” the ambassador exudes. Well-dressed African American men throng the room, mingling freely with the white abolitionist women while two servants, a white man and woman, stand uncomfortably in the doorway waiting to serve refreshments. In recent works, Susan Zaeske and Elise Lemire most notably have drawn attention to Clay’s image to illustrate the media campaign critics waged against abolitionists’ calls for social integration and middle-class women’s forays into the public, political sphere.40 The petitions addressed fine points of Massachusetts state law and were signed exclusively by women, drawing attention to their insistence that women could act independently of men to call for social reform. In this case, though, Clay’s subjects were not simply abolitionists who held racially integrated meetings, called for American diplomatic recognition of the free black republic of Haiti, or critiqued the Southern slave system. The women from Lynn and their reform sisters en-

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gaged in politics to demand interracial marriage rights. They were, by all rights and purposes, amalgamationists. As their story circulated through national media, critics pounced, claiming that this was proof that abolitionists promoted amalgamation and that abolitionist women flaunted their cherished femininity when they entered the political stage to advocate for equal rights.41 The Morning Post wrote snidely, “Caroline [sic] Augusta Chase and 735 other ladies, in Lynn, have petitioned the Legislature for the privilege of marrying black husbands . . . perhaps some of these ladies despair of having a white offer, and so are willing to try de colored race.”42 The Hampshire Republican’s editor urged abolitionists to regain what credibility they could by denouncing “such revolting connexion.”43 Massachusetts men sent petitions to the legislature denouncing and mocking the women’s petitions. Caleb Hubbard and other men sent a petition asking the legislature to make interracial marriage legal in Lynn, so that the famed shoe manufacturing city would be “more celebrated than ever for the production of Soles and understanding.” As long as these women sought equality between the races, these men reasoned, they could host this “city of amalgamation” and spare the rest of the state. In a similar vein, 158 men from Lynn sent a “scurrilous petition,” praying that Aroline Chase and her fellow petitioners be granted exclusive rights to marry a “Negro, Indian, Hottentot, or any other being in human shape, at their will and pleasure.”44 How these women and other abolitionists responded to this criticism made Massachusetts’s ban on interracial marriage a litmus test for the interrelated subjects of women’s politics, slavery, and regional animosity that pitted racial equality against the comity of national union. The hand-written petition submitted by a group of antirepeal advocates in Sunderland reveals, in addition to an attempt to discredit politically active women, their deep anxiety that repeal could precipitate disunion and civil war and draw large numbers of emancipated free laborers from Southern fields to Northern factories. They wrote, The contest for the honour of an alliance with such heroic and pure minded women may involve the North and the South in civil war and bloodshed, and occasion the return of the days of Chivalry. The petition from the distinguished town of Lynn will have a wonderful effect upon the long agitated question of Slavery and shake the system to its centre. Swords will leap from their scabbards, in defense of those whom the illustrious Lynn ladies would fain take for better or worse. Delight will fill the shining faces and ebony hearts of their admirers, who their fetters being broken will yield only to Cupid’s silken chains and make the best of their way to Lynn as to the land of promise.45

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First, the petitioners mock modern young reform women’s presumption, casting them as faddish, irreverent, and foolish. Their “stately grandmothers in their primeval simplicity . . . (poor ignorant creatures)” would have shuddered at the thought of petitioning the legislature in such a way. In their fervor to avoid the pitfalls of the “primeval” women, the women from Lynn put their community and themselves in grave danger. Responses to the petitioners reveal more than disapproval over female petitioning. Critics betrayed annoyance and resentment over what they viewed as abolitionists’ self-righteous and in many ways selfish campaign.46 The Sunderland men’s flippancy at the prospect of Northern men taking up swords to free potential black suitors for the women does not hide their paranoia that abolition could roil the South. But perhaps most poignant for the working men (and women) of Massachusetts’s burgeoning industrial towns was the threat of free migrants of color coming North. While for most Massachusetts residents, slavery was a distasteful and unfortunate subject, a relic of a past that foreshadowed their modern free industrial present, free people of color still were not imagined as a constituent part of the Massachusetts body politic. Quite the contrary, ex-slaves were a threat to working-class whites’ social and economic security and were not welcome. In a state that maintained comparatively few checks against the sociopolitical clout of free African Americans, white workers content to maintain slavery could view segregated schools and railcars and bans on racial intermarriage as a last bastion for their tenuous working-class white supremacy. Instead of addressing the issue of interracial marriage or race law, members of the judiciary committee to whom the petitions were forwarded met the women’s petitions with derision and contempt. William Lincoln of Worcester submitted the committee’s “Report on Sundry Petitions Respecting Distinctions of Color” in February. Lincoln deftly dismissed the subject of the petitions by arguing, instead, that women’s petitioning, itself, was not “perfectly consistent with feminine delicacy.”47 Questioning both the right of women to petition on legal matters and the appropriateness of women’s addressing amalgamation, another member of the committee, Minott Thayer declared, “I have no respect for the women who sign [the petitions]. I BELIEVE THERE IS NOT A VIRTUOUS WOMAN AMONG THEM.”48 While Lincoln administered the committee that would dismiss the petitioners’ requests, peopled with men who refused to grant the women a fair and respectful hearing, Whig Representative George Bradburn of Nantucket advocated repeal on the House floor. Bradburn found the marriage issue thrust upon him when the women of Dorchester forwarded their petition to him.49 He had taken his place in the Massachusetts Legislature for the first time on January 2, 1839. Reflecting on his election as a Whig, he dis-

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avowed any party loyalty and dedicated himself instead to equal rights and antislavery measures that found no permanent home in either the Whig or Democrat platform.50 Bradburn was viewed as a thoroughgoing abolitionist, and immediately became the unabashed spokesman for all antislavery measures including the legalization of interracial marriage.51 Immediately upon presenting the petitions, he realized that the marriage ban would be a divisive issue and one on behalf of which most legislators refused to advocate. He claimed to be its sole advocate in 1839.52 Bradburn knew from the start that his opponents would gain the upper hand year after year by identifying a chink in repeal advocates armor: the social stigma attached to amalgamation. He introduced the marriage issue into his personal diary by writing, “The marriage law was among the most odious of the unpopular measures that enlisted my support in the House. The modification of it that was sought, the public would identify with amalgamation.”53 Garrison, Wendell Phillips, and other men who supported the call for repeal, defended the honor and virtuosity of the petitioning women on the grounds that their call for legal marriage was a call to curb licentious sexual activity and strengthen the marriage institution. In their disgust after Thayer and Lincoln’s treatment of the women, Garrison and Phillips rallied thousands at Marlboro Chapel to pass a series of resolutions (unanimously) including one that implicated all Massachusetts residents in the moral degradation the marriage ban precipitated. They declared that the ban, “is a bold, deliberate, and profligate abolition of the marriage institution, and tramples under foot the sacred injunction ‘What God hath joined together, let no man put asunder.’ . . . That whoever, with a clear comprehension of its design and tendency, is opposed to the immediate repeal of that unnatural law . . . is opposed to the inalienable rights of man, cannot be truly virtuous in heart, disregards the law of God, hates his fellow man without cause, and under favorable circumstances, would not hesitate to hold another in slavery.”54 Phillips positioned the women as feminine moralists, while the legislators, like committee chairman William Lincoln, were “only fit . . . representatives of scurrilous and licentious profligates.” Minott Thayer was so morally repugnant, he argued, that he could only respond “with fool born jest” when faced with the prayers of “such hearts as those of the women of Lynn.”55 Damning those who bowed to antiamalgamation pressures as slavery’s apologists, Phillips flatly denounced all members of the legislator, save George Bradburn, and implicitly chastised any abolitionist who refused to advocate on behalf of the marriage question. In keeping with his character, Bradburn rose and resorted to biting sarcasm, arguing that “Posterity may find some excuse, perhaps see some reason, for the conduct of our puritanical

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fathers, in breaking the necks of heretics, and putting men and women to death for ‘the sin of witchcraft,” but how legislators in 1839 justified upholding the ban on interracial marriage was, he argued, “impossible to comprehend.”56 He asserted that in fact posterity would remember the petitioning women as both champions of equal rights and virtuous moral reformers, while he insinuates that Thayer and Lincoln had “aided somewhat . . . in corrupting the ‘manners and morals of the age,’ as in perpetuating that corruption.” In its most innocuous interpretation, Bradburn charged the men with being rude and unrepublican; in its most scathing, he impugned them as possible seducers or adulterers who opposed the repeal because it would hamper their immoral schemes. Meanwhile, Minott Thayer had initiated an inquiry into the Dorchester petition. With the help of Reverend David Sanford, he hoped to discredit the interracial marriage rights movement by proving that Sarah Baker, the woman who had compiled the petition before sending it to the legislature, had forged the names of many prominent women of the town. By placing pressure upon the petitioning women, demanding that they publicly reaffirm their support for interracial marriage rights, he hoped to prove that a majority of the signing women were ignorant of their petition’s intended amalgamationist objective. It was Reverend Sanford who initiated the investigation. He and his wife Sarah had been active in other antislavery work, but when local newspapers reported that his wife supported interracial marriage rights, a claim that undoubtedly threatened the family’s reputation in their community, he wrote to the General Court asserting that Sarah did not sign the petition; her name was forged.57 Thayer and Sanford mined the petition for names, called men and women into the General Court to testify, and arrived uninvited at petitioners’ doors demanding that they reveal their thoughts on interracial marriage. Sanford struck such an imposing figure that Sarah Baker, the woman who would admit to having signed Sarah Sanford’s name on the petition, hid in her bedroom until he went away.58 In the end, Baker revealed that she had forged the names of Sarah Sanford and Laura Spaulding, members of the Dorchester Anti-Slavery Society whose names she assumed were missing simply because they had not had the chance to sign. Thayer took this forgery as evidence that women, in general, were unfit for politics. Baker approached her testimony before Thayer’s committee with understandable anxiety. She refused to go alone and instead brought a group of prominent abolitionists, including Wendell Phillips, Maria Weston Chapman, and John A. Collins, to support her.59 Maria Weston Chapman’s recollection of the committee proceedings suggests that that most of the members of the committee accepted that Baker

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had made an unfortunate but understandable mistake.60 Thayer, however, continued in his crusade to rid politics of women’s influence. He wrote, “No man would subscribe his own name to the most unimportant document of private concern without attentive perusal . . . [it is] inconsistent with the modestly of a virtuous woman to solicit the repeal of laws restraining the union of the white and black races in marriage.”61 Thayer capitalized on the controversial nature of the women’s petition to discredit all women’s political activity. Once Baker’s admission of those two forgeries was made known, it opened the floodgates for women who regretted having signed the petitions and hoped to disassociate themselves from the calumny that had been heaped upon them. While Baker and the other women who circulated the petitions testified that nearly every woman on the petition signed of her own volition, some forty women submitted letters claiming their signatures were forged.62 Doubtless, pressure or even threats from husbands and other family members might have influenced some of the women’s decisions to claim forgery. Spared the attention heaped on the Dorchester women, those in Lynn, Plymouth, and Braintree did not disavow their petitions in any public way. In fact, many felt vindicated in their efforts. As Lynn petitioner Mary E. Robbins wrote to fellow activist Abby Kelley, “I suppose you heard of our heretical petition. Many of its signers seem troubled by the ridicule consequent upon it.” She continued, “it strikes me, as a nail well hit, tho [sic] partly by accident. There is nothing like shocking people’s prejudices sometimes, it reveals their extent and power, and oftentimes works much good.”63 Anticipating an investigation like the one in Dorchester, the Lynn petitioners sent a representative to the legislature to affirm that their names were not forged and that they supported interracial marriage rights. Predictably, the committee maligned the women as lacking in virtue and urged them to withdraw. Instead, they bade their counsel defend their right to petition on the very grounds that they were women and, thanks to gendered reform conventions, particularly suited to petition on matters such as marriage. Playing upon gendered moralist concerns about men’s sexual freedom, their lawyer suggesting that some of the men who thronged the room had engaged in illicit sexual activity. He declared that “if every restraint were removed [the ladies] would refuse to form impure alliances or countenance licentious connexions” like those the legislators were protecting by supporting the interracial marriage ban.64 On the House floor, Bradburn, extended this gendered campaign. He suggested that Thayer’s attacks on the women emanated from his status as an old bachelor and that if he “had ever been so fortunate as to obtain a wife . . . or [if it was] possible for him to rise to the moral dignity of a just appreciated women’s character” he

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would have supported the petitions.65 Bradburn defended women’s petitioning on interracial marriage as both feminine and respectable activism. The Lynn women did not withdraw their petition and petitioned year after year until the marriage ban was repealed in 1843. Thayer held hearings in mid-March at which a series of Dorchester’s antislavery advocates testified. Called before a legislative committee that had already denounced their petitioning as unvirtuous, few of the women who had signed remained entirely steadfast in their decisions. While Sarah Baker, her sister, and a handful of other women denounced Minott Thayer as ungentlemanly, proclaimed their full understanding of the petition, and stood behind their actions, others denied that they knew that the petition calling upon the state to repeal laws making distinctions of color referred to interracialism.66 Not all of the petitioning women were able to muster even this courage. In a number of cases, the women called to testify before the committee remained home, either through their own embarrassment or because they were forced to retreat by their husbands, while men appeared in their stead. Indeed, Ann Warren Weston reported that had the women attended, they would be greeted like Sarah Baker was, with “a room filled with men” ready to interrogate them.67 Thayer questioned Baker “with great venom,” demanding that she admit that she did not realize the implications of her petition. Instead, she asserted the need for interracial marriage rights. Her counsel, Wendell Phillips, confirmed that Baker understood her actions and, furthermore, that the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society promoted the repeal measure. Unconvinced, Thayer drew his investigation to a close. Thayer published his report in April 1839. While the vast majority of women who petitioned on the interracial marriage ban had confirmed their support for the cause, he insisted that virtuous women would not knowingly advocate for interracial marriage rights. In spite of all the evidence, he could not conceive of a credible, suitably feminine petition from white women in favor of such rights. He affirmed the right of abolitionists to petition on antislavery but denied that the movement to repeal Massachusetts’s interracial marriage ban fit that criteria. One could easily categorize Thayer’s reaction to the petitions as a well-calculated antiabolitionist and misogynist defamation campaign. However, his report reveals a somewhat different possibility, namely, the genuine bewilderment of an old lawmaker scrambling to make sense of an expanding political and social milieu. Thayer was an aged fixture among Massachusetts Whigs when his position on the judiciary committee left him with the unwelcome task of considering a bundle of women’s petitions calling for the repeal of all state laws that made distinctions based on race. Thayer was not the best man for this job. At sixty-seven years of age, he was renowned as a notable old gen-

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tleman, not as a contemporary political innovator. Biographers would comment not on his legislative career, but on his amicable personal relationships with local and national notables like John Quincy Adams, and his sprawling house with a riverfront view in Braintree.68 Thayer took the opportunity afforded him by the petitioning campaign to remind the petitioners that they teetered dangerously on the precipice of disrespectability. Despite the by then common practice of antislavery women’s petitioning, the women were indisputably on controversial ground. Why had they insisted on petitioning without men’s oversight? After all, the hundreds of women who petitioned the previous year had done so side by side with men. And why on interracial marriage, rather than the more innocuous antislavery measures? Thayer asked as much in a letter he penned to Wendell Phillips, chastising Phillips for the disrespectful way he had excoriated Thayer during the meeting at Marlboro Chapel. Leaning heavily on his status as an elder, Thayer attempted to shame Phillips into an apology, going so far as to write, “the Ghost of your venerable and universally respected Father should rise from his sleeping ashes and point his finger of scorn to his degenerate and deluded son, and crush him to the dust, for thus abusing and vilifying an innocent friend of his, who never injured a hair of his head, or of any of his family.”69 By moving beyond the bounds of respectable bourgeois social thought, in this case from antislavery to advocacy of full equal rights and social equality, Phillips joined the petitioners and other race liberals on their stagecoach to infamy. Still, gender conventions that shaped Thayer’s condemnation of the female petitioners reveal something more than a social conservative’s distaste for equal rights activism. When Phillips wrote back maintaining that Thayer was wholly in the wrong for stating that the petitioning women lacked virtue, Thayer responded with a sincerity that must have made Phillips throw up his hands in resignation. He clarified that he had not said none of them had virtue, rather “that I believed that there were not ten virtuous ladies names on that petition that knew what they signed to.”70 Thayer, and most of the nation’s citizens in 1839, could not countenance respectable (white) ladies stepping out on their own, without male supervision, to advocate for something as raw as interracial marriage. The senator went on to praise Phillips’s antislavery work, even claiming that he was sympathetic to the cause. However, meddling with amalgamation and Northern equal rights issues was beyond the pale. Those, like Thayer, who opposed interracial intimacy, could point to the palpable threat of this proposed legislation. At the same time, those who championed antislavery and equal rights made abolitionists’ willingness to defend amalgamation a litmus test for reformist liberality. In one telling

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example, in March 1833, a colonizationist minister Dr. James Wood McLane from Harvard Andover Theological Seminary spoke on behalf of colonization at a public meeting in Reading. Evidently, his lecture was unconvincing because immediately after he spoke, those assembled voted to form the Reading Anti-Slavery Society. Taken aback, he lashed out by “alluding to the marriage question,” asking if these would-be abolitionists would be willing to marry black men and women. Reporting on the incident, William Lloyd Garrison judged his remarks “stale and disgusting,” but similar pointed attacks would greet abolitionists for decades to come.71 Daniel and Polly Chute and their 476 neighbors responded in 1838 with an affirmation of the right to interracial marriage. White abolitionists characteristically responded to charges of amalgamation by denying any interest in the practice. Some, however, were more outspoken, and women who petitioned their neighbors on the interracial marriage ban and other antislavery issues necessarily had to develop a rhetorical defense against the dismissive accusation that they were amalgamationists. Some adopted a doctrine of mutual respectability, stating that two people of equal character should be free to marry regardless of race. In her Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans Called Africans, Lydia Maria Child wrote of “two or three instances where women of the laboring class have been united to reputable, industrious colored men.” She argued that such matches were perfectly acceptable and that the husbands brought home wages and supported their families. Nevertheless, their children would be unable to claim an inheritance because the law “pronounces them illegitimate.”72 Reformers carried this argument forward throughout the movement for marriage rights, asserting the absurdity of a law that made distinctions based solely on race, not on character or standing. Garrison wrote bluntly, “there is nothing unnatural in the amalgamation of our species.” And the more conservative minister Amos Phelps, like Child, advocated marriages between equally refined and educated members of different races.73 As the debates over interracial marriage progressed, antiamalgamationists occasionally found that their attacks backfired when leveled at reformers devoted to these principles. Prudence Crandall, the school teacher defamed for attempting to open a school to educate black girls in Canterbury, Connecticut, reportedly responded to this question by noting that “Moses married a colored woman.”74 Gulielma Estes’s pastor confronted her about her casual comportment with black people and asked if she would marry a black man. She said yes, if his character were suitable, and was asked to leave the church.75 In a letter to Maria Weston, Frances Drake wrote that women around Worcester would not cooperate with her to raise money for the antislavery fair because she walked and rode with the black members of

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the Remond family when they visited from Salem. Her critics said they thought she could be an abolitionist and “not treat niggers so familiarly.” When they asked if she would marry a black man, she answered, “Yes—if he was just as worthy in every respect as a white man ought to be.” After reading her subscription to the Liberator for some time, Mary Manter wrote to Garrison that through reading his paper, she “lost entirely my prejudice against colour, and can feal just as well in the company of a coloured brother or sister as if their skin was the same colour as my own, and can sign a petition for the repeal of that part of the Law, that makes a distinction on account of colour, (heart and hand) wither it be to marry or ride together.”76 While each of these cases offers only theoretical approval of interracial sexuality, the mutual support offered by a growing network of like-minded men and women gave some abolitionists the confidence to place their names on the rolls advocating the legalization of interracial marriage. Still, many abolitionists could not escape the fear that their neighbors might judge them harshly for advocating interracial social interaction. The most prominent abolitionists consciously constructed an antislavery campaign that tacitly promoted social interaction between black and white men and women of the “right” character. However, many worked tirelessly to assure the ambivalent public that they did not actually advocate amalgamation. As the publishing committee of the American Anti-Slavery Society prepared the proceedings of the 1838 women’s convention for printing, they received urgent correspondence begging them to omit the resolution stating that it was a true white abolitionists’ duty to associate and work with African Americans. They even attempted to convince African American leaders to publish a disclaimer to the resolution. To the surprise of many white abolitionists accustomed to looking upon African American activists as dependants in the antislavery ranks, African American organizers refused, noting that the undertone of color prejudice evident in the request revealed the “timid” white abolitionists true stripes.77 After critics spread a rumor that his antislavery advocacy signaled his approval of “the Amalgamation of the White and Black people,” Reverend Henry G. Ludlow published a long disclaimer stating that he, in fact, preached against this “doctrine.”78 After violent riots in New York, the American Anti-Slavery Society posted public handbills disclaiming any intention to “promote or encourage intermarriages between white and colored citizens,” and an abolitionist coalition including Arthur and Lewis Tappan, John Rankin, and Samuel Cornish sent a letter to the mayor of New York denying that they promoted interracial marriage or adoption.79 Many abolitionists were sensitive to charges of amalgamation and shrank from their equal rights efforts when accused of promoting interracialism.

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George Bradburn, Thayer’s young opponent on the marriage issue, on the other hand, dedicated his career to providing a broader stage on which disfranchised and disaffected African Americans and white women could participate in the body politic. Lydia Maria Child was so impressed with Bradburn’s performance that she sent him a note of appreciation for his work as “the bold opposer of any limitation of rights by the gradation of color, and the true-hearted champion of women’s freedom.”80 However admirable, Bradburn’s sensationalist tactics could have had disastrous consequences. Mary Robbins of Lynn visited Ann Warren Weston on March 16 and reported that Boston was absolutely “convulsed with rage” after the rally in Marlboro Chapel and that “The Legislators are ready to Lynch Wendell.”81 In the face of continued and potentially violent opposition, activists for interracial marriage rights were faced with a quandary: how would they maintain the support of cautious abolitionists like Sarah Sanford, or recruit new women to the cause, when they knew that critics might easily deploy antiamalgamation attacks against them? Was the movement destined to dissolve because white women, the foot soldiers of social reform, were simply too vulnerable to antiamalamationists? To regain credibility and create new opportunities for activist recruitment, reformers had to make interracial marriage palatable to reform women. They would do this by melding equal rights and moral reform ideologies to shape a new appeal founded on Christianity, republicanism, and morality. Early petitioners for interracial marriage rights had established a pattern of defending women’s activism by affirming women’s gendered, moral obligation to perfect their society. Sarah Baker of Dorchester wrote, “ ‘What has woman to do with slavery?’ We are shamed and sorry to say—woman has much to do with slavery. Women are slave-holders. Women are apologists for slavery. Women are slaves. Women, too, are the greatest sufferers. . . . Let us then . . . come out against [slavery] and by our efforts, our prayers, hasten on the great work of emancipation.”82 Organizing in 1836, the women of the FASSL dismissed the suggestion that they should avoid antislavery because of its “political aspect,” and proclaimed “its highest and most distinctive aspect is a moral, and a benevolent one, and in this sphere it is not denied that woman may operate with propriety and efficiency. It is woman’s woes that call most loudly for our efforts to free them and their children from the most cruel oppression from degradation and outrage in every form.”83 By their annual meeting in 1837, the women of the FASSL prayed that their reform work would hasten the day when “it shall be practically acknowledged, that man and woman are both one in Christ.” Swelling with a faith that the antislavery societies now dotting the Northeast would hasten emancipation, these women believed they were doing God’s work

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in a sinful world. As Christians, they held the “weapons” of morality and feminine virtue that would fell their “carnal” enemies.84 When chastised for engaging in public, political debates over slavery and other issues, the women of the BFASS held fast to their duties as Christian women. This social restriction had “exerted a most baneful influence on her character and destiny and most wofuly [sic] delayed her advance of Christian duty.” Antislavery reform, they argued, was a woman’s basic Christian responsibility.85 Furthermore, they implicitly questioned the Christian ethos of their critics when they suggested that, surely, criticism of women’s reform was one of Satan’s means of promoting the sins of slavery. The gendered defense of women’s Christian activism had widespread implications throughout the realm of antebellum social reform and offered invaluable encouragement for women who faced constant criticism as they persisted in the work they deemed their duty. Historians have shown how the association of women’s benevolent work with feminine morality helped them avoid, to some extent, charges of impropriety as they pursued business and political ventures.86 Barbara Cutter has provided a term for this phenomenon, “redemptive womanhood,” and argues that with purity of motive and pious demeanor women of any class, race, or status might wield feminine virtuosity as a shield against her critics.87 But by the late 1830s, especially after the Pastoral Letter, women disagreed over which actions were virtuous, which political causes, if any, women had a Christian duty to address, and how much social criticism they should withstand.88 Activists’ struggle to define women’s place in the interracial marriage debate would reshape the movement and contribute to legislative victory by 1843. Activists in favor of the interracial marriage rights movement and women’s political petitioning hurried to voice their support for the women of Dorchester and Lynn. Some of these calls came in the form of petitions sent to the legislature, demanding the repeal of the marriage ban. Only two of those, one from Bradford and one from Lynn, were circulated by men. The rest were women’s petitions, including a defiant repetitioning effort from Phebe Cotton and the women of Plymouth. Others wrote to their local newspapers and attended public meetings defending the cause. One of Boston’s foremost antislavery leaders, Maria Weston Chapman penned a letter to the women of Massachusetts for publication in Garrison’s Liberator, challenging them to do “justice” to “their State and themselves,” by actively supporting equal rights and antislavery measures like marriage rights.89 Other well-known abolitionists like Henry C. Wright and John G. Whittier wrote to Garrison’s paper explaining that they supported the repeal measure because the marriage ban placed state law above the laws of God and represented “anti-Christian prejudice.”90 In Lynn, the Quaker editor of the Lynn

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Record attempted to shame the men who mocked the women’s petition by marshalling evidence that interracial marriage rights was a noble and legitimate political objective.91 Those who came forward to support the women did so by dismissing their neighbors’ understanding of femininity and replacing it with their own gendered defense of women’s moral activism. Although legislators, petitioners, and members of the public clearly understood calls for the repeal of laws making “distinctions on account of color” to mean repealing the marriage law, none of the prorepeal petitions up to this point had explicated it. That changed when a select cohort of prominent Boston women wrote to the legislature in support of the women from Lynn. The BFASS, like the American Anti-Slavery Society, had splintered in the years leading up to 1839 over how members chose to critique the institution of slavery in the United States. On the one hand, those dubbed “old organization” were comprised of elite Unitarian and Universalist white women and African American members of the society who remained, in short, committed to the reform means laid out by William Lloyd Garrison. They pushed for women’s inclusion as voting members of antislavery societies and insisted on criticizing members of the clergy who failed to uphold antislavery ideals and churches that maintained slaveholding members. With Garrison, they also championed the ideal of peaceful moral suasion as the best means of ending slavery and were particularly ambivalent about engaging in politics in support of federal government officials who were bound to uphold laws and a constitution that promoted and protected the institution of slavery. Those who the radical abolitionists called “new organization” tended to be middle class Congregationalist, Baptist and Methodist women who found deep meaning in their evangelical faith and were more divided on the proper place of women in public leadership positions. For many, moral suasion was not enough, and they supported men who used political action and political parties like the burgeoning Liberty Party to push for slavery’s abolition. New organization abolitionists viewed the Garrisonians’ insistence on bringing their “peculiar views” on religion and women’s rights into the “anti-slavery car” as a distraction that threatened to dilute the power of the antislavery message.92 It is likely that most women outside of Boston, by 1840, aligned themselves more with some portion of new organization principles than those of their less cautious counterparts.93 Taking the evangelical bloc, alone, Garrison’s heretical views threatened to alienate hundreds of thousands of Northern faithful who had shown dedication to the antislavery cause.94 While the new organization movement was not necessarily less committed to radical antislavery measures than the old organization, its members, es-

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pecially working- and middle-class white women, were economically and religiously vulnerable to social critique in ways that their elite sisters were not. Furthermore, some women who chose the new organization because they believed it would allow them to focus more closely on those duties proscribed for women had a tendency to abandon antislavery work for moral reform or less controversial benevolent causes by the middle of the 1840s.95 Importantly, those who were alienated from Garrison’s camp were not a homogenous group. Some insisted that political means were the best means of attacking slavery; others questioned whether women should take on leadership roles in antislavery organizations; and many felt chastened by criticism leveled at women who entered the political fray to demand equal rights for African Americans or themselves.96 Mary Parker had assumed majority control of the BFASS and according to the Weston sisters, she stonewalled old organization reformers Maria Weston Chapman and Thankful Southwick when they called for an emergency meeting after Thayer’s damning report went public. As Chapman described it, the “crisis” occasioned by the Lynn petition, ideological fracturing within the Massachusetts and American Anti-Slavery Societies, and other reform issues compelled her to request a special meeting. Parker flatly refused to call one and sidelined the minority old organization members, even stating that their intense criticism of religious institutions made her question whether they were “blessed to the cause.”97 Referring to the uproar that followed the Lynn women’s petition, Mary Robbins, the secretary of the FASSL hoped that “if the abolitionists will save themselves from internal divisions, none of these things will move or harm them.”98 If the abolitionists hoped to present a unified front on major antislavery issues and save themselves from irrelevance, they would have to identify and articulate the issues they shared. In the first months of 1839, competing members of the BFASS were not even meeting civilly on antislavery matters, and their antislavery initiatives were faltering.99 Nevertheless, the legislature received a sizable petition from the women who had comprised the BFASS before it crumbled into sectionalism. Mary Ann Johnson, Mary Parker, Maria Weston Chapman, Susan Paul, Henrietta Sargent, Lavinia F. Hilton, and a number of other prominent black and white reform women of Boston responded to the legislative committee’s attack by writing a brief and legalistic petition stating that the existing marriage ban was “unconstitutional, and a violation of the higher law which is above the enactments of all human codes.”100 In order quickly to compile one cohesive petition on the marriage issue, the Boston women had to unite under a banner distinct from their respective antislavery organizations. What brought them together was their dual

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loyalty to antislavery sentiment and moral reform. As Anne Boylan has shown, over 70 percent of the members of the Boston Female Moral Reform Society were also active abolitionists.101 The moral reform impulse, a type of radical social reform, to be sure, but not a racially radical one, fostered continued loyalty to the cause. This unity, outside the fracturing BFASS, helps to explain how, in February 1839, a group of women who claimed not to be speaking to one another all signed a petition in favor of repealing the marriage ban. By the late 1830s, middle-class women throughout the Northeastern United States, in urban and rural locales, were exposed to and engaged in a frenetic polyphony of reform and benevolent pursuits. The antislavery society and moral reform society coexisted with benevolent organizations like the Female Society for Missionary Purposes, Fragment Society, Penitent Female’s Refuge, Infant School Society, and many more.102 Women might attend lectures on Grahamite health reform and women’s anatomy, meet with the Society of Friends, and engage in benevolent work through local organizations and religious denominations. The complex web of antebellum reform shaped and defined the social bounds of the burgeoning American middle class.103 Women in Boston and throughout the Northeast embraced organizations as a means of identity formation, personal empowerment, and community engagement. These women’s organizations can be classified along a spectrum from benevolent to radical or, as Nancy Hewitt has characterized them, benevolent, perfectionist, and finally ultraist or radical.104 Abolitionists who advocated women’s public political leadership and equal rights in the North must be classified as radical reformers. The place of moral reform, however, is murkier and shifted through the late 1830s and early 1840s. Moral reform can be classified as ultraist because it demanded a reformulation of antebellum gender assumptions.105 However, evidence suggests that moral reform maintained more social credibility than radical abolitionism by the early 1840s. In particular, women like Martha Ball, who retreated from the radical, integrated BFASS, felt more comfortable dedicating themselves to moral reform, temperance, and benevolent causes.106 The wave of women’s organizing, in which many of the petitioners in the 1830s and 1840s developed their activist trajectories, was characterized by a desire to aid working women and their children, especially in industrial and urban centers.107 For some, this took the radical shape of advocating for enslaved women and their children as sisters in struggle, while many others focused on protecting working women’s virtue through moral reform, and others persisted in a benevolent crusade to provide housing, food, clothing, and education to the “deserving” poor.108 When critics used

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antiamalgamation attacks and pastoral critique to challenge the righteousness of women’s activism in the political realm, many felt the need to limit their advocacy to causes that could justifiably fall within the realm of women’s proscribed “duties” and “influence.”109 The 1839 backlash against women petitioners was, the abolitionists knew, too much for some reform women to bear. In the future, many would avoid interracial marriage rights, and all equal rights initiatives, so vulnerable were they to antiamalgamation attacks. Those who led the movement for marriage rights had a choice to make. They could continue to call for repeal as a part of the larger equal rights struggle, and watch their white reform colleagues retreat from the cause, or they could reshape the movement to regain public support. The historical record reveals that, in fact, reform petitioning on the interracial marriage law swelled in 1840. This was no coincidence. The increase in support for interracial marriage rights in 1840 was a direct result of movement leaders’ decision to reshape their arguments. To subvert antiamalgamation critiques, these activists would minimize their equal rights rhetoric and instead offer a series of regional, moral, historical, and gendered justifications for repealing the marriage ban. The splintering of the BFASS, along with its members’ continued advocacy for the repeal of the interracial marriage ban offers an early sign of how reform men and women would reshape the movement for marriage rights. Lydia Maria Child, abolitionist and author of An Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans Called Africans, in which she advocated for marriage rights, was the first to craft a more holistic appeal. While not completely abandoning the equal rights argument, she offered new defenses of marriage rights that linked them with Christianity and antebellum moral reform. A longtime resident of Boston, she might normally have signed the BFASS petition to repeal the marriage ban, but she and her husband David Lee Child had recently moved to Northampton, Massachusetts, where they were laboring to show the efficacy of beet sugar production (an alternative to slave-produced cane sugar). Instead of sending the brief, legalistic petition her Boston sisters had, Child hand wrote her own petition outlining the immorality, sinfulness, inequality, and illogic of the marriage ban.110 Lydia Maria Child’s petition outlined five primary reasons for repealing the marriage law. She first reiterated the language of the 1838 and 1839 petitions, stating that the marriage ban was an outgrowth of long-standing racial prejudice that stemmed from slavery. She went on to argue that this racism made a mockery of freedom in Massachusetts. The ban allowed the state to reach its long arm into people’s homes, into their personal affairs, to stop them from exercising the right to choose their own spouse. Her third point of criticism appealed directly to moral reformers: the ban on marriage

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had to be repealed, she argued, because it encouraged extramarital sex and left innocent children without parental support. To this, she added that the ban was superfluous, since there were so few interracial families in Massachusetts. And finally, she shamed legislators by likening their attacks upon the women petitioners to the infamous Salem witchcraft trials and assured antiamalgamationists that future historians would view them with unadulterated scorn. Reminding the legislators that she had more expertise than they, and that she wrote a defense of marriage rights into her 1833 Appeal, Child brazenly claimed the right, as a women, to engage in this public forum. Child was perhaps the most notable person publicly to approve of interracial marriage during this period. In her 1833 Appeal, she advocated the repeal of the interracial marriage ban despite “the gross ridicule to which I may subject myself by alluding” to the subject.111 She was, by all accounts, better informed on the subject than any of the legislators who deemed it imprudent or humorous. Loath to see her petition languish on a hostile legislator’s desk, she forwarded a copy to William Lloyd Garrison. He published it in its entirety, stating, “posterity will regard this act as the noblest of a life spent in doing good.”112 Child’s detailed letter to the legislature reveals the proliferation of moral reform language and ideology that not only helps to explain how many reformers viewed the marriage law, but why petitions for marriage rights surged in the four years following the uproar over the subject in 1839. When legislators arrived at session in January 1840, they were met with petitions from over ninety Massachusetts communities demanding that they repeal the marriage ban. The work Lydia Maria Child and other movement leaders did in the later months of 1839 helps to explain this apparent surge in support for marriage rights. Abolitionists and the petitioning committees who crafted their appeals for the 1840 session skillfully disentangled the equal rights argument that had been such easy fodder for antiamalgamationists from a moralist argument that cloaked interracial marriage activism in a mantle of Christianity and feminine duty. While the equal rights argument never completely faded from their demands, they foregrounded the moral implications of marriage rights to appeal to a broad community of middle class social reformers. Reshaping marriage rights as an issue of moral reform, activists would defend a woman’s right to participate in antislavery and equal rights politics, link interracial marriage rights with conservative sexual norms and morality, and finally succeed in defeating this remaining race law. When the movement reconstituted itself and its message in 1839, it expanding beyond antislavery and equal rights claims to argue that legalizing interracial marriage protected women’s virtue and provided economic support for mothers

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and children. In short, Lydia Maria Child and others used moral reform language and argumentation to make interracial marriage palatable to more cautious reform women. Moral reform and antislavery were by no means identical movements, but they did share constituents, and each borrowed from the other’s organizing techniques and ideologies. Despite the opposition politically minded women faced from conservative clergy, moral reform societies offered a potentially more socially acceptable avenue for political engagement and became a popular means for women to enter the world of reform.113 By the late 1830s, moral reform societies and their attendant concerns had proliferated throughout Massachusetts. A moral reform society existed in virtually every town and city from which advocates petitioned the legislature on the marriage law. In his study of rural moral reform women in New England, Daniel S. Wright noted a close association between moral reformers and abolitionists from the Congregationalist, New School Presbyterian, and to a lesser extent Baptist churches in the rural towns in Western Massachusetts, from which many petitions in favor of interracial marriage originated.114 In Boston, a preponderance of women in the BFMRS was Congregationalist, a group that felt increasingly alienated from the elite Unitarians and African American Baptist women of the BFASS after 1839.115 Furthermore, moral reform societies and antislavery societies shared leadership in many of the towns that petitioned for marriage rights. Martha Ball and Mary Ann Johnson of Boston were executive members of abolitionist organizations (the BFASS and then the Massachusetts Female Emancipation Society), petitioned for interracial marriage rights in 1839, and were active in regional moral reform activities.116 Nearly three-quarters of their sisters in the BFMRS engaged in antislavery work.117 Josiah Marshall and Eliza Pope of Dorchester and Almira B. Humphries of Millbury acted as leaders in the moral reform cause and led petitions to repeal the marriage ban.118 Lucy Dodge of Lynn was a delegate at the Anti-Slavery Society of American Women in Philadelphia a week after she attended the New York Moral Reform Society meeting in 1838. Many of these reformers felt compelled to embrace both of these movements, to condemn slavery, and at the same time to address the sexual dangers posed women in their own societies. Deciding how to balance these often competing causes was a challenge, and the ways New England women framed their relationship to enslaved people would transform the campaign for marriage rights. The moral reform movement erupted out of an evangelical impulse to perfect society, generally, and activists’ disaffection with existing, failing, efforts for the reform of urban prostitutes, specifically. The Magdalen Society and Asylum Society in cities like Liverpool, England, Boston, and New

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York had since the early nineteenth century committed prostitutes to an asylum system in an attempt to reform their immoral behavior and “rescue” their souls from damnation.119 Moral reformers in cities like New York and Boston extended their efforts as the 1830s progressed, conducting visits (or raids) to known brothels to proselytize to sex workers and their patrons.120 But it was not a desire to reform prostitutes that fueled the rapid growth of moral reform organizations in the Northeast. The real popularity of moral reform lay in its ability to give women a sense of power over the sexual transgressions that threatened their own communities and families.121 By the late 1830s, moral reform had begun to challenge temperance organizing among middle-class reform women, with loci around New York City and Boston. Moral reform societies spread like wildfire as men and women organized in local, often church-centered, groups, aligned themselves with a national or regional parent organization, and collected money to subscribe to the Advocate of Moral Reform and then later the Friend of Virtue. In churches, parlors, meetinghouses, and lecture halls, they met to discuss the dangers that men, temptation, and sexual naïveté posed to their young female friends and neighbors.122 Moral reformers sought to rid their communities of “licentiousness,” or immoral sexuality, and in keeping with the logic of moral reform, the ban on interracial marriage promoted licentiousness. Forbidden from contracting a legal, consecrated marriage, a woman in an interracial relationship was practically compelled to engage in licentious sex. Even if she conceived children, they were considered illegitimate, and her partner could abandon her with no consequence. As an unmarried mother, she faced social scrutiny and financial hardship. Because those who might have been her advocates viewed her as “dishonored” through extramarital sex, she was unlikely to find a way to extract financial support from the father of her children. As activists would argue beginning in 1839, the marriage ban rewarded lecherous men, tempting them to seduce women of a different race. Licentiousness was such a dire threat that it overshadowed even intemperance in many moralists’ eyes. In 1838 Boston’s moral reform journal, the Friend of Virtue, arguing that licentiousness was far more dangerous than liquor. Drinking small amounts of alcohol without ill effect was possible, but “to no extent, not even to the first or the least indulgence in lewdness can any person, male or female go, and not violate and derange the most sacred relations, duties and affections of life, and prostrate the noblest principles by which the heart of man is influenced.”123 As moral reform societies sprung up throughout the Northeast, their members vowed to remove any legal code or “law of society,” that “prevents matrimony [and thus] encourages licentiousness.”124 Moralists saw the roots of licentious-

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ness running deep to society’s core. In the Northern middle-class context, young men urged to amass wealth and business experience before marriage, reformers knew, sought sexual satisfaction outside the bounds of marriage, and endangered the virtuosity of their youthful potential future wives. Young independent women, whether by choice or coercion, might participate in sex outside of marriage with disastrous consequences. As Mary P. Ryan has argued, reformers did not need to live in a city with a strong traffic in sex workers or even witness a high level of sexual offenses to sense a need for moral reform. Increasingly, young people in antebellum America were engaging in extramarital sex without the traditional religious and social pressures that had previously ensured that, if the woman became pregnant, the illicit encounters would culminate in sanctioned marriage.125 Moral reform societies became a bastion for mothers intent on securing the chastity of their daughters and the sanctity of marriage in their communities. Subscribers to early issues of the Advocate of Moral Reform, the New York-based journal that circulated throughout the Northeast during the 1830s, met a relentless barrage of editorials outlining women’s supposed special obligation to moral reform activity. As young, “weak-minded, and inexperienced” women were seen as the primary victims of licentious men, it followed that older, wiser, and more experienced women should form the front lines of defense.126 And their reform was not construed as simply a private matter; it was political.127 Moral reformers offered dual gendered justifications for their petitioning and activism. First, they insisted that women must unite to counter the lascivious influences of immoral men.128 Second, they marshaled the power of womanly persuasion as justification for women’s very presence in the public sphere.129 In the first issue of Boston’s moral reform journal, the Friend of Virtue, Eliza Ann Vinal of Cambridge provided the minutes of a local annual meeting of moralists, at which Reverend I.  N. Sprague of New York spoke as an agent of the national organization on the topic of “Moral Influence.” Vinal and her female associates read his comments as assurance that they should use any means necessary to prevent moral degradation.130 Women had a responsibility, not just to preserve the morality of their homes, but also to use the power of petition to persuade legislators to enact benevolent and moral reform initiatives.131 One faithful reader of the Friend of Virtue went so far as to argue that without moralists’ attention to women’s “worth” as the righteous sex, “society will be deprived of morality and virtue.”132 As the tide of reform petitioning surged, moral reformers throughout the Northeast contemplated the merits of legislative action on issues of morality. In March 1837, readers of the Advocate, then the only moralist journal in circulation, were treated to a Ticonderoga, New York, resident’s proposal

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that moralists get up petitions to make adultery and seduction “a state prison offence.” He and a host of moral reformers reasoned that such social ills were at least as harmful as the capital offences burglary or grand larceny.133 Before the New York Moral Reform Society meeting in May 1838, Lucy N. Dodge of Salem proposed that “petitions be prepared and circulated . . . praying the legislatures of the several states to make the crimes of seduction and adultery offences punishable with imprisonment.”134 By the time Massachusetts residents carried out a concerted petitioning drive against seduction and adultery between 1844 and 1846, a number of other state legislatures had played host to such petitions. In Pennsylvania, a man had already been convicted and confined in the penitentiary for the crime of seduction.135 That Massachusetts moralists did not petition the state legislature on the particular question of seduction until 1844 must not be taken as evidence that the state’s moralists were uninterested in pursuing legislative means for preventing licentiousness in their communities. Without the security of legal marriage, women, be they black or white, in interracial relationships were liable to become the victims of both adulterous and seductive men. Despite the rising tide of antiamalgamation fervor during the 1830s, most Northeastern states no longer had laws banning interracial marriage. Thus, moral reform women in states like New York or Pennsylvania could turn their attention to creating positivist legislation to punish adulterers who stepped outside the bonds of marriage, or seducers who used marriage promises to lure women into complacent sex. Massachusetts was unique in that its interracial marriage ban still existed and had been bolstered by recent popular amalgamation anxiety, while the state saw an increasingly strong antislavery platform and outspoken female moral reform community. As Lucy Dodge and other influential Massachusetts delegates addressed regional concerns at the New York moral reform meeting, their neighbors at home circulated petitions to legalize interracial marriage and provide the women and children in such families both the right to choose their marriage partners and the protection of the marriage contract. In 1840, circulars sent to antislavery agents in Massachusetts contained three precisely worded petitions set side by side. On the left, sat a petition calling upon Congress to remove the standing gag rule against antislavery petitions. On the right, petitioners protested the annexation of Florida into the union as a slave state. Wedged between these two, sat the newest iteration of the petition calling for the legalization of interracial marriage on the grounds that it was inconsistent with the principles of “Christianity and republicanism.”136 Alluding to the immoral or “unchristian” influence of the ban as it promoted illicit sex, and its legal encumbrances upon the personal marriage choices

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of Massachusetts citizens, reformers echoed moral reform logic and Lydia Maria Child’s detailed petition in favor of repeal. Beginning in 1841, the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society petition forms went further in articulating the moral implications of interracial marriage, duplicated Lydia Maria Child’s logic in a long petition that outlined eight reasons the law should be repealed. Child, herself, was one of the members of the committee to develop and circulate petitions and is largely responsible for shaping the petitioners’ demands such that the moral implications of the marriage law appealed not only to abolitionists but a wide community of social reformers.137 To garner this broad support, they moved beyond pointing out the ways the marriage ban exemplified Northern licentiousness and equated interracial sex in the North with sexual exploitation in Southern slavery. When moral reformers turned their attention to slavery, they saw a society mired in licentiousness. Moral reform and much abolitionist literature highlighted the predatory sexuality of slaveholders in a society where law and social custom seemed to condone sexual assault as a tool of racism and slavery. Indeed, the women of the BFMRS issued resolutions at their 1838 annual meeting that they would dedicate their efforts and “pray without ceasing” for the end of slavery, so the “flood gate of impurity” that led to “unrestrained licentiousness” in the South would be permanently shut.138 The same year, the editor of the Advocate of Moral Reform celebrated emancipation in the West Indies but turned her attention to the generations of West Indian enslaved women who, she believed, must “call with trumpet-tongue on the God of purity and justice, for vengeance on those who have trampled them into the very dust of humiliation, and then used the abject condition of the poor victims of lust, as an argument to justify their own continued oppression.”139 The moralists’ attention to sexual exploitation and amalgamation in the South was also integral to the formation and early work of Massachusetts female antislavery societies. From their inception, many of the Massachusetts female antislavery societies that petitioned to legalize interracial marriage promoted the notion that by giving voice to oppressed women, they could undermine and ultimately destroy slavery. At first, Southern white slaveholding women were the lynchpin of this strategy, women they viewed as potential abolitionists whose voices were quashed by a powerful Southern paternalist hierarchy.140 Some of the earliest work of the female antislavery societies was devoted to reaching Southern women through a mass correspondence campaign. They aimed to “call upon the women of the South, to conjure them by every thing dear to them in their domestic relations, their patriotic emotion, or their religious hopes, to arise at once & annihilate

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slavery in their fair dominion.”141 Ultimately, these New England abolitionists believed that they could turn indifference to “enquiry” if not compassion by simply laying the abolitionists cause, truthfully, before Southern white women as they felt they had in recent years among their neighbors in Massachusetts. Critical to this scheme was an assumption on the part of these middle-class Northerners that white slaveholding wives felt threatened by their husbands’ interracial sexual relationships with enslaved women and that abolishing slavery would be the best, and perhaps only, means of restoring “every thing dear to them in their domestic relations,” a veiled reference to moralists’ belief that these women were surrounded and morally endangered by their fathers’, husbands’, and brothers’ illicit sexual relationships with enslaved women. The imagined link between abolitionist women and Southern slaveholding women quickly expanded into a popular reform ideology binding Northern white women and Southern enslaved women in a struggle against oppression and the exploitive power of men.142 Northern and Southern, white and presumably black, this professed sisterhood ran throughout women’s abolition work dating from the late 1830s. This “sisterhood” was a tenuous but ideologically powerful tool in the evangelical antislavery activist’s arsenal. In its basest and most exploitive form, as Karen Sánchez-Eppler has argued, the correlation allowed Northern feminists to use the bodies and sexual exploitation of the enslaved to further their own women’s rights struggle.143 This interpretation certainly holds true in cases where abolitionist women used antislavery discourse as a means of achieving white women’s independence, and it translated easily to the issue of Northern interracialism.144 Sánchez-Eppler’s assessment goes a long way toward explaining white women reformers’ tendency to analogize their oppression to that of enslaved people and, at the same time, to perpetuate Northern caste hierarchies. However, the biregional sisterhood abolitionists purported to feel had much less straightforward implications in the realm of interracial marriage law. Advocating Northern interracial marriage reform was not simply antislavery, it conjured a parallel issue, so called amalgamation in the South, which had become a central point of critique for abolitionists in their struggle for social credibility. Dating from the early 1830s, abolitionists worked to deflect antiamalgamation charges onto slaveholders, arguing the Southerners, not Northern equal rights activists, promoted sinful, exploitive racial amalgamation. Garrison expressed characteristic disgust when he noted that he and his reform colleagues faced constant criticism while the “vile prostitution” of enslaved women and a slave trade in “illegitimate” children “creates not a shudder.”145

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In contrast to the most radical assertion that women and men of equal character should be free to marry, many abolitionists simply countered that Southerners were the real amalgamationists. Reverend William Goodell, an antislavery spokesman from New York, offered a telling example of this rhetorical strategy in 1834 when he narrated an argument between an antiamalgamationist and an abolitionist. Goodell’s abolitionist argued that Northerners must support economic uplift strategies in African American communities, integrate their schools, abolish slavery, and extend Christian brotherly love to people of all races. The antiamalgamationist shot back, “What! Would you be willing your daughter should marry a negro! No. I’ll warrant you would not.”146 The characteristic abolitionist argument followed, with Goodell insisting that it was the South where “white and colored races are mingling together now, without marriage.” Abolitionists, he said, were trying to “break it up.” In response to Henry Clay’s claim that abolitionists were calling for racial intermixture, Gerrit Smith wrote snidely, “I do not know a white abolitionist, who is the reputed father of a colored child. At the south there are several hundred thousand persons, whose yellow skins testify, that the white man’s blood courses through their veins.” He went on to note that the “few abolitionists” in the South would have to be “prodigies of industry and prolificness” if they were the only sources of “amalgamation” there. Alvan Stewart, an abolitionist attorney, linked Southern amalgamation to Southern states’ disproportionate legislative representation. He dubbed the twenty-eight extra legislative seats the Three-Fifths Compromise afforded Southern states “a sort of body guard to lust, laziness . . . amalgamation, prostitution . . . yea, the right of vending unborn generations; yes, the exalted privilege, peculiar to the slaveholder; of selling his own children, his own brothers and sisters, cousins, nephews and nieces, into the most miserable slavery.”147 White abolitionist men were not raping women whom they owned, these men argued. But they certainly were not marrying across the color line. For most Northern whites, even avowed abolitionists, interracialism remained at best taboo and at worst an embodiment of the sins of slavery. Like the broader abolitionist defense against amalgamation, reform women’s claim of sisterhood with the women they saw as the victims of licentiousness had distinctive limits that would prove crucial to the interracial marriage debate. A visitor to the West Indies wrote Garrison’s Liberator on the state of formerly enslaved women there, declaring that, “The whole sex has been insulted, and degraded in their persons; and she who turns coldly away from their bitter cry, is a traitor to the holy cause of female honor and virtue.”148 Nevertheless, according to moralist ideology, the victims of licentiousness were mired in degradation. Northern reformers’ relationships

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with enslaved women remained fraught precisely because of their inability to erase a centuries-old double bind that classed the survivors of seduction, sexual abuse, or rape as depraved. Christian moral reform ideology categorized any participant in illicit sex, voluntary, compelled, or forced, as morally corrupted. Bourgeois reformers did not empathize with women they viewed as dishonored or prostituted. They analogized their relationship with enslaved women but then did not identify (personally or metaphorically) with the moral plight of women they persisted in seeing as prostituted and fallen from grace. This is a fundamental distinction and was not, for the reformers, contradictory or hypocritical. When eighty-nine women formed the Amesbury Mills Anti-Slavery Society in 1834, they engaged in a chain of correspondence with their sister society, the BFASS, drumming up mutual support and praying for the emancipation of those “whose bondage has hitherto deprived them, not only of liberty of person, but also of conscience.”149 Enslaved people’s plights were to be pitied, certainly, but these Northern reform women were in agreement about their Southern “sisters’ ” moral shortcomings. The secretary of the BFASS in 1836 professed her apparent sympathy for enslaved women when she wrote to the women of Pittsburgh’s antislavery society that, “We can take joyfully the spoiling of our goods when we remember that the slave mothers of the South can not call their children their own . . . more than a million of American women are placed beyond the protection of either law or public opinion.”150 In late 1838 the editors of the Advocate of Moral Reform took slavery apologist Chancellor Harper to task for claiming that white Southern men’s illicit intercourse with enslaved women was “less depraving in its effects” than illicit relations with white women because the former were “casual” and the men less likely to “receive any taint from her habits and manners.” She attacked Harper’s contention that white women in the South were morally superior to Northern women because they benefited from “the existence of an enslaved class of more relaxed morals”; in other words, that the stereotyped enslaved temptress relieved white men’s sexual lust, protecting white women from the perils of seduction. While the editor mourned the enslaved woman’s lot, a “living death without pity or remorse,” she nonetheless reinscribed the belief that enslaved women were of an inferior and tainted moral character and unwittingly supported Harper’s contention that enslaved women were naturally licentious.151 As middle-class white reformers pitied enslaved women and considered their salvation a matter of social concern, they nevertheless looked to white Southern women as their own moral counterparts. The moral reformer’s task was to prevent moral degradation in her community. With this paradigm as her guide, the Advocate’s editor reflected on

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the moral fate of the plantation mistress, suggesting that it mirrored Northern reformers, should they fail to rid their communities of licentiousness. Countering Harper’s contention that black women’s “natural” licentiousness made white Southern women purer than Northern women, she asserted that women surrounded by licentiousness to which they “must tacitly connive” would find their morals blunted. Quoting Alexander Pope’s Essay on Man, “seen too oft—we first endure, then pity, then embrace,” she suggested that the ultimate tragedy in Harper’s tale was the moral degradation to which plantation mistresses must succumb if they continued to be surrounded by the horrors of licentiousness. The Northern moralists reading the Advocate, could rest easily knowing that they were free from the web that ensnared their Southern counterparts, but the editor concluded with a thinly veiled threat to the complacent: “May the consciousness that we have done what we could, sustain us in [God’s judgment].”152 With illicit interracial sex in the Southern context forming the basis of what Northern abolitionists and moral reformers saw as the South’s invidious culture of licentiousness, they could not avoid the state-enforced illicit family formation among interracial couples within their own borders. From 1839 forward, activists for interracial marriage rights argued that amalgamation in slavery bled into amalgamation in freedom, wrapping Northerners in its sinful web. If plantation mistresses were in danger of succumbing to degradation, surely the women of Massachusetts, living in a society whose laws promoted licentious behavior, were no less vulnerable. The ban on interracial marriage, they argued, did not shield Northerners from immorality; it brought “moral degradation” to their doorsteps.153 Thousands of middleclass white reformers advocated for interracial marriage rights because they had been persuaded that the law was a vestige of slavery in their midst. Understanding this correlation reveals how moral arguments were so effective in gaining adherents to the movement for interracial marriage rights. Moral reformers embraced women’s right to petition on issues related to sexual morality and families. From the moment Lydia Maria Child highlighted the moral implications of the marriage ban in her widely circulated 1839 petition, she illustrated how moral reform could empower women to contribute their expertise in the political arena. Their participation was tolerated because of the particular reverence moral reformers had for the Northern marriage and family. Northern women, they argued, must not be the victims of licentious sex like their sisters in the South; the sexuality of women in freedom must be reserved for marriage; and women and their children must be afforded the protection of the marriage contract. Michael Pierson has shown that many of the early adherents to antislavery work joined the cause because they sought to protect what they viewed as an ideal,

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patriarchal family and to reform the “destructive family practices” found in slavery.154 That is, they sought to strengthen the normative, male-headed, Northern free family, not fundamentally change gender roles. Reform leaders made this explicit when they pointed out the ways the marriage ban denied women essential economic and moral protection that legal marriage could bring. Reverends Amos Phelps and Charles Torrey acted as spokesmen for this argument when they appeared before the legislative committee on the marriage law in 1840. Torrey, as Child had before him, claimed that the ban “nullifies the law of God” and “brands as fornicators persons of blameless life, because they are joined in the holiest of earthy ties, and separates them even without any legal process.”155 The law degraded the status of interracial families and allowed men to abandon women and children without consequence. He urged legislators to repeal the marriage ban and cleanse the Northern family of the sins of slavery. Phelps published Torrey’s testimony in the Massachusetts Abolitionist, the paper created after critics broke with Garrison and the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society and formed the Massachusetts Abolition Society. He, like many other antislavery activists, felt compelled to form a new society for a variety of interrelated reasons. He opposed Garrison’s anticlerical, arguably heretical, rhetoric, wished to limit voting and leadership positions in major antislavery organizations to men, and sought political (not simply persuasive) means of ending slavery.156 His paper reflected the views of his many abolitionist readers, those who dismissed Garrison as too radical or too apolitical to be effective. Phelps expressed unmitigated disgust for what he called the old organization’s “woman’s rights-non-government-anti-slavery society” and was clearly not an advocate for substantial political rights for women. Yet, he embraced the moral aspects of the interracial marriage movement, precisely because the marriage ban threatened the sanctity of the free Northern family.157 Mothers and children cast into disgrace through legal statute, women left with no legal recourse if their partners should abscond, and their children with no rights to inheritance, represented the specter of slavery on Massachusetts soil.158 While opponents might argue that the interracial union itself was distasteful, the family’s vulnerability was unjustifiable. In subsequent years, reformers and legislators would draw upon this formulation of interracial marriage as antislavery, promarriage, promother, and prochild to deflect public criticism and bring meaningful debate to the halls of the General Court. It is implausible that a campaign calling upon antebellum whites to sign their names in support of interracial marriage, alone, would have succeeded. Instead, like Judge Parker had in his decision in Inhabitants of Medway v. Inhabitants of Needham in 1819, reformers argued

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that legal proscriptions on marriage promoted the exploitation of women and the disinheritance of children who would require public support. They demanded that their neighbors decide whether they allied with slaveholders or chose to protect free Northern mothers and children. They used a gendered equal rights discourse and popular moral reform arguments to circumvent charges of amalgamation and call for the legalization of literal amalgamation. In so doing, they began a process of defining the parameters of wifehood and motherhood in free Northern society. The long rolls of reformers’ petitions calling for repeal were initial seeds of this redefinition, but they may never have blossomed as a gendered regional call to arms without a handful of key polarizing events in the early 1840s that challenged Massachusetts’s residents’ racial and regional sensibilities.

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mploying moral reform to combat the ban on interracial marriage produced dramatic results. In January 1840, over ninety petitions for repeal poured into the legislature, and George Bradburn was there to greet them. In spite of his constituents’ unease over his willingness to court infamy on behalf of interracial marriage, he was reelected in 1840 and appointed to the committee on the marriage issue.1 Bradburn remained optimistic that once buried under a sufficient heap of constitutional, practical, and moral reasoning, legislators would repeal the marriage ban.2 Known as a sarcastic loose cannon with a significant ambivalence about group affiliation, whether with religious institutions, abolition societies, or political parties, he was both the perfect candidate for leadership and an unfortunate choice for reformers.3 Bradburn was not mainstream. He was not soft spoken or polite. He was a social and religious radical with a fiery tongue and a flair for the dramatic. Once, after speaking on antislavery before a crowd in Maine, he wrote, “I had the satisfaction of addressing many thousands of Heathen. They were all, however, Christian Heathen; a circumstance, which, as you will naturally infer, renders the work of converting them one of great difficulty. Probably with all my efforts I converted but few.”4 He took a similarly abrasive tack in the legislature, terrorizing his opponents into silence or acquiescence. In spite of the controversy his causes engendered, Bradburn had achieved real success. In 1839, he employed stunning rhetorical skills to convince the full General Court and the governor to pass a resolution, “On the Deliverance of Citizens Liable to Be Sold as Slaves.” In this resolution, the government of Massachusetts protested against the laws of Southern states that restricted the freedom of movement of free black Northerners there and

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granted the governor of Massachusetts the power to appoint special agents to rescue those kidnapped or held against their will in the South.5 He had been appointed to a joint special committee to report on the subject and was disheartened when all the other members determined that providing protections for free people of color would roil antiabolitionist public sentiment. Undeterred, Bradburn compiled a detailed minority report that revealed Southern laws restricting the rights of free people and offered anecdotal evidence of Massachusetts citizens who had been kidnapped and carried off into slavery. When Thomas Kinnicutt of Worcester delivered the committee’s recommendation to table the measure, he politely asked Bradburn if he had anything to add. Bradburn stood up and delivered a scathing rebuttal before the 300-person joint session, defending the measure as an issue not of “technical abolition” but of the rights of Massachusetts citizens and belittling the committee majority as “truckling,” “quibbling,” and “heartless.” At one point in the midst of his diatribe, Martin Brimmer of Boston interrupted him to whisper in his ear that he was on the verge of losing everything thanks to his caustic tone.6 Despite his tone, or perhaps thankful for the spirited entertainment, the legislature ultimately overrode the majority report and passed the resolutions granting executive power for the retrieval of kidnapped free people. Bradburn was confident that he could similarly sway his colleagues on interracial marriage. He was fortunate in that the committee assembled to consider the interracial marriage law in 1840 was considerably more sympathetic than the 1839 committees had been. Whig chairman George T. Davis accepted the ninety-two petitions and signatures of nearly 9,000 Massachusetts men and women for marriage rights as evidence that the people of Massachusetts believed that the law promoted immoral behavior. His report recommended repeal, and he urged legislators to act. He wrote, “let not the father be excused from supporting his children on the plea that they are illegitimate. Let not the children be deprived of their inheritance because the law prohibits marriage and takes away the efficacy of the form if pronounced. Let not the parents of different races be at liberty to desert each other on every trifling disgust.” He went on to note that Massachusetts towns were compelled to provide support for women and children abandoned because of this law, support that husbands should have provided. Davis embraced reformers’ refashioning of interracial marriage rights as an economic and moral imperative.7 In 1840, in a sharp turn from the previous year, a bill to repeal the marriage law passed in the House for a third reading. When the measure was discussed on March 13, legislators friendly to the repeal measure turned out in force. Those who were ambivalent left the session early to avoid being

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embroiled in the debate and, more pointedly, being labeled either an amalgamator or a slavery supporter before their constituents. At least some of this zeal in the House seemed motivated by junior members’ anxiety that if they did not “vote right,” they would meet the wrath of George Bradburn. Caroline Weston joked about how he had “victimized Minott Thayer” and, after an afternoon debate on the marriage law, set one junior representative to begging “for God’s sake sir don’t say anything about me when you speak. I am friendly to all your measures—don’t mention me.”8 George T. Davis wrote the committee report that year, but he had fellow committeeman Bradburn read it before the assembly.9 Mirroring new petition language, Davis and Bradburn argued that the marriage ban was based on a premise of racial inequality and perpetuated prejudice, that it caused invidious harm to African Americans, and that it promoted licentiousness. Furthermore, it was unrepublican, as were all laws that made a distinction based on “blood,” and scripturally unsound in barring sanctified marriage simply because of popular “taste.”10 Robert Rantoul of Beverly took the moral appeal further, recounting the story of a man who challenged the inheritance of his brother’s biracial children to pocket their livelihoods. As Garrison reported in the Liberator, “The mother and the children were left penniless; and the law did what it could to keep them so, by pronouncing the latter bastards, and the former a concubine.”11 Bradburn, too, challenged the men of the General Court to uphold their responsibility to the women and children of Massachusetts. He offered anecdotal evidence to support his demands: “An individual in a neighboring town had connected himself with one of a different race. They had several children. But, taking advantage of this law, he abandoned both the mother and the children, leaving them to get bread as they might, though abundantly able himself to have provided, as before God he was bound to provide, for them all.”12 He wrote of a hypothetical situation produced by the ban, in which, “A man marries. Children are the result of the marriage. He becomes weary of the connexion, which was perhaps formed merely for the temporary gratification of his animal feelings . . . having then seduced and ruined one woman, and begotten and beggared a family of children, the miscreant may repeat his atrocities, till the number of his victims shall have equaled that of the inmates of a Turkish seraglio. And all this he may do, under the present law, with entire impunity.”13 His reasoning echoed that of earlier advocates like David Walker, Child, Phelps, and others, and would be mirrored in the petition forms the antislavery press printed for circulation later that year. Bradburn chose his language wisely. He likened these women’s position to those of the seraglio, or harem, to emphasize the ways their plight mirrored that of enslaved women. For Bradburn and the

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moralists he appealed to, the marriage ban implicated the state in prostitution and licentiousness. Bradburn himself chaired the committee in 1841 and wrote a thorough report recommending repeal. He argued that it was useless because people could travel to adjoining states to marry, that it “encourage[d] vicious connexions between the races,” unjustly punished women and children, was “unequal” or prejudiced against African Americans and thereby unconstitutional, that there was public outcry against it, and that it was a relic of slavery. In his report and on the floor of the legislature he referred to the marriage ban as the “legalized prostitution of the marriage covenant.”14 Nathan Appleton, who chaired the Senate committee on the marriage law was similarly sympathetic to the cause. His report delineated how men deserted women and children with impunity and suggested that they would continue to do so as long as the law remained in effect. He continued with the moralist claim, arguing that “a large number of the young and inexperienced are deprived of legal protection for their purity. The destroyer taking advantage of the prohibition of honorable marriage, works the ruin of his victim in perfect security.”15 Licentious men preyed on young women, casting them into dishonor, and did so with the state’s tacit approval. While early petitions simply alluded to the moral aspects of the marriage ban, by 1841, they incorporated direct moralist language. In February 1841, Reverends Torrey, Phelps, and others of the Massachusetts Abolition Society submitted a hand-written petition that argued that the marriage ban was “detrimental to the best interests of morality, and contrary to justice, and the peace of the State.”16 Furthermore, beginning in that year, the printed petitions sent from reformers throughout the state identified eight specific reasons for repealing the marriage ban, including that it promoted “illicit and immoral connexions.”17 Casting a wide net to appeal to all potential advocates, the petition committees iterated each of the major arguments reformers had made in favor of marriage rights. They argued that it was irrelevant, immoral, counter to God’s law, unconstitutional in a state declaring all men “free and equal,” a vestige of slavery, fodder for Southern critics of Northern antislavery, insulting to respectable citizens, and patently racist. Nevertheless, the recommendation for repeal did not garner enough support to sponsor a bill in 1840 or 1841. The equal rights appeal and gendered anxiety over amalgamation had stymied the repeal movement in 1839, but why did the moral reform argument not carry it to victory in 1840 or 1841? While the popular moral reform movement framed the issue as one of morality and antislavery, their opponents could also marshal questions of morality to their cause. Ultimately, the science of racial classification was

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what Minott Thayer cited to support his defense of the marriage ban. Arguing that the “science of physiology, and the experience of other lands” proved that interracial unions produced degraded offspring, Thayer turned the tables on reform advocates, claiming that by sanctioning interracial marriage, they would not be protecting morality and virtue, but rather removing an impediment to “alliances of misery” with disastrous consequences.18 This would become the most popular argument legislators used to support the ban and was repeated in the popular press, as when Nathan Hale of the Boston Daily Advertiser subverted moralist calls for repeal by asking, what could be “more immoral” than “the creation of a matrimonial union which inevitably entails upon its offspring, wretchedness and probably disease and shortness of life?”19 When the legislature failed to repeal the marriage ban again in 1841, Bradburn prophesied an easy win the following year thanks to the way he “stirred up” the legislature during the preceding session: “I scarce believe the next [House] will consent to a repetition of the torture for the sake of continuing the present disgraceful statute.”20 But he would not be reelected in late 1841. Bradburn’s importance as a devoted representative of equal rights and antislavery became plain when he wrote Francis Jackson a hurried letter listing the few other legislators who he had “faith” might pick up the torch he was now forced to lay down. Despite his three-year career as a Whig representative, he noted not a single member of that party that he held in confidence. At this early point, he also remained resistant to the inroads the third-party Libertyites had made into state politics, and avoided commenting on political abolitionists. The Democrat “Locos,” however, he viewed as potential successors on the marriage law.21 Bradburn’s apparent preference for Democrats prompts us to ask, how significant was “party” when it came to the interracial marriage question? Seemingly contradicting himself in later years, Bradburn would claim that much of the antirepeal agitation came from Democratic representatives who had “country” and working-class constituencies with uncommonly ardent racial prejudices. Whig Charles Francis Adams, who would succeed Bradburn as the spokesman for the marriage law in 1842, reiterated this claim. According to Bradburn, this distinction hinged on legislators and their constituents’ class status and their socioeconomic proximity to African Americans, the vast majority of whom can be characterized as poor or working class in antebellum Massachusetts. He reflected, “The elite of the Boston aristocracy were easier converted than ‘the hard-handed yeomanry’ of the country. A corporal fears familiarity with the rank and file. Napoleon had no such fears.”22 This familiarity was a double-edged sword in antebellum free Northern society, where a proliferating ideology of white supremacy

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united with working-class whites’ fear of economic competition with African Americans to form rampant popular antiamalgamation discourse. As Bradburn presented it, working-class whites’ anxiety rested largely on perception. Massachusetts had precious few laws that specifically proscribed the civil rights of free African Americans. The ban on interracial marriage was one of only two such state laws, and in addition to restricting marriage rights, it inscribed into law popular beliefs in racial difference that granted even poor whites social superiority over their African American neighbors. In political histories of the early American republic, the Democratic Party often has been identified as the organization that gave voice and clout to a cooperative that melded white supremacy and white workingclass economic and racial anxieties. In short, scholars have identified antebellum Democrats as the party of white supremacy. This conclusion seems apt when we note the Democratic Party’s ideology of white male egalitarianism (including the assimilation of Catholic Irishmen in urban centers) during a period marked by the mass disfranchisement of African American men in the Northern states, increased legal limits on enslaved and free black Southerners, and the dislocation of Native Americans from Eastern states.23 Furthermore, Northern enfranchised African Americans voted overwhelmingly Whig.24 In Massachusetts, however, there is virtually no evidence to suggest that Democrats could be blamed for the perpetuation of the marriage ban. When Whigs George Davis and George Bradburn chaired committees that recommended repeal in 1840 and 1841, they won enough votes in the House and Senate to be approved for further consideration. A draft bill passed the Senate with a vote of twenty-four to nine in 1842 but was defeated in the Senate by a vote of 136 to 140. One might even argue, as Sara Dubow and Bruce Laurie have, that one of the claims made in favor of repealing the marriage ban, namely, that it was inappropriate for government to meddle in the marriage choices of its citizens, appealed directly to Democrats, making them particularly susceptible to calls for repeal.25 However, experience warns against reading republican ideology through a lens of twenty-first-century racial liberalism, considering the extent to which white Americans of either party were uncannily capable of professing democratic principles while at the same time denying African Americans access to them.26 Equal rights appeals, small government appeals, republican appeals, and for that matter moralist appeals simply were not enough to draw either party together on the issue. Whether Whigs or Democrats controlled the General Court between 1839 and 1842, neither party united to legalize interracial marriage. Political historians have revealed three seemingly incompatible truths about the late 1830s in New England. First, the two major political parties,

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the Whigs and the Democrats, enjoyed more popular support and were more important for their constituents’ identities than any of their predecessors.27 Second, ambivalence about political parties, and even apolitical attitudes, abounded.28 Third, this was an era of transition in Massachusetts’s party politics.29 The transition was one from deferential political engagement to populist participation in local party politics, but it was also a period of transition within the parties themselves, as proud Northern legislators struggled to define themselves within the larger crucible of national political culture. Massachusetts’s political history is an enigma when laid beside national trends.30 Whigs controlled Massachusetts for all but a few years during the antebellum period, while Democrats with their Southern majority maintained a similarly tight grasp on the presidency and national legislature. The late 1830s and early 1840s, in fact, provided the few openings for Democratic power on Beacon Hill. They gained a foothold in 1839–1840 thanks to popular anger over the Whig-sponsored fifteen-gallon law, temperance legislation that forbade the sale of liquor in smaller than fifteen-gallon quantities, thus denying alcohol to all but those who could afford to drink in taverns or buy kegs for their own use. They then regained that foothold in 1842–1843 due in part to Governor Marcus Morton, an ideologically moderate Democrat who was avowedly anti-Southern but not stridently antislavery.31 He angered many Massachusetts abolitionists when he declined to sign a legislative resolve calling for the end of slavery in the District of Columbia in 1840. The Norfolk County Anti-Slavery Society claimed that Morton had proven himself an enemy of “genuine democracy and impartial freedom,” a charge that had virtually no impact on Morton’s popularity in the state at large.32 With Morton at the helm, Democrats in Massachusetts were able to avoid charges that they were props of the unpopular national party and thus gain equal footing with Massachusetts’s long-time dominant Whigs. During this critical period of transition, the burgeoning Liberty Party offered voters an independent Northern choice with substantial clout in state and local politics and in 1842 siphoned ten seats in the Massachusetts General Court from Whigs and Democrats. Many who hitherto had been Democrats defected to the Liberty Party because of the untenable pro-Southern policies of the national organization.33 Laurie has asserted that the legalization of interracial marriage owes much to the Liberty Party, particularly its ability to garner enough seats to split the Massachusetts House and Senate in 1843 and shape the year’s legislation. He surmises that the marriage law finally passed thanks to a back-room deal hashed out between Libertyites and Democrats prior to the 1843 session, a deal that granted Democrats the governorship (in Morton) and presumed control over the state legisla-

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ture (with the support of Liberty Party votes) in exchange for equal rights legislation.34 The Liberty Party platform in 1841 and 1842 appealed to voters not simply for its opposition to slavery and certainly not for its demands for abolition (it offered no abolitionist program), but rather for its willingness to champion Northern citizens’ rights and freedoms when they conflicted with slaveholders’ interests. When the Liberty Party had its first national convention in August 1843 and laid out its principles, noticeably absent were the religious and moral precepts that fueled the radical abolitionist movement. Libertyites struggled to distinguish themselves as a quintessentially Northern party while at the same time measuring their claims to appeal to a more moderate voter, one who wished to “disavow slavery” and avoid participating in the system in any direct way, but who was not concerned with immediate abolition or the dissolution of the Union. Cognizant of the free African American vote in the North (particularly significant in areas like Bristol County, Massachusetts), the party did nod to the issue of racial discrimination. For instance, at the national convention in Buffalo, Liberty men granted black delegates voting privileges and made “the restoration of equal rights” a plank of their platform. In spite of calls for moderation, anger over the South’s political power could not be suppressed, and the convention voted to accept a resolution stating that Liberty men should consider the fugitive slave law unconstitutional and not obey it, a move that alienated and angered members who worried this was too strident and inflammatory.35 In the 1842 fall election, this resistance to the fugitive slave law would be critical to shaping the Massachusetts legislature and contribute to the legalization of interracial marriage. With Bradburn voted out and resuming his responsibilities as a lecturer on the Northeastern antislavery circuit, 1842 saw a renewed call for equal rights measures at the legislative level. In addition to the marriage question, abolitionists petitioned for the end to Jim Crow cars on the railroad, and when Charles Lenox Remond testified before the legislature on the abuses he had suffered on the rails throughout Massachusetts, he became the first African American man ever to address that body. While Bradburn likely would have capitalized on Remond’s historic appearance, abolitionist reformers no longer had his legislative spokesmanship. Although (or perhaps because) he was not an avowed abolitionist and thus avoided the tinge of radicalism, the Whigs appointed Charles Francis Adams, son of John Quincy Adams, to the committee on slavery and equal rights matters. Adams was a weak ambassador. He sought to avoid antislavery questions because he fretted that when the abolitionists chose him, they really were offering a backhanded compliment, an attempt at “ruining [him] in Boston.”36

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Reflecting on the railroad matter the night after Remond’s remarks, Adams noted dryly that he was “disappointed at the general character of the argument and my mind was in greater doubt than ever.”37 Adams procrastinated in framing his statements on the railroad and marriage issues, and when what he called the “black question,” arose surprisingly on February 11, he was woefully unprepared to offer an assessment. He began the debate “rather briefly and not in a very satisfactory manner,” hoping that the question would pass to a vote without much difficulty. This lax attention can be attributed either to Adams’ ambivalence on the issues at hand or to his freshman status in the General Court, missteps George Bradburn certainly would not have made. “All of a sudden,” Adams recalled, “up rose J. C. Park and went into an elaborate harangue against the whole of this bill.”38 In classic Whig style, Adams viewed Park’s tirade as an attempt to attract the votes of backcountry Democratic legislators by playing upon their racial anxieties. When the railroad and marriage questions were discussed on the following days, Adams was appalled by open displays of racial prejudice from Park and other opponents. When it was his turn to speak again on February 15, the ambivalence that shrouded his earlier attempt seemed to have lifted. He argued each point in favor of repealing the marriage ban and thought his words had “a strong effect.” Like his predecessors over the past two years, he (re)asserted that the law was a vestige of the slave code, promoted immoral relationships, supported slavery and racism in the South, and was unconstitutional because Massachusetts recognized all men as equal before the law.39 The “yeas” would then carry the day to pass the repeal measure to a third reading.40 However, the next day, Hale of The Daily Advertiser published a column against repeal, just enough social disapproval, Adams judged, to ensure that it would be voted down in the next stage, “so hard is it in a community to do away with a deep rooted prejudice.”41 When his premonition was confirmed on March 1, he claimed to believe it of little consequence but revealed a poignant sense of failure, complaining that he had wasted the past two months and wished he could get out of politics altogether.42 Even with strong numbers and a series of coherent arguments against the marriage ban, the popular anxiety surrounding amalgamation and antislavery held repeal in check. Neither the railroad measure nor interracial marriage made any significant headway during the 1842 session. This would change dramatically by November and December of that year, when the commonwealth was thrust unceremoniously into a battle over the fate of fugitive slave George Latimer and the rights of Northern states and citizens in relation to slavery. The discourses of equal rights, moral reform, and a strong sense of anti-Southern Yankee sensibility united to affect Latim-

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er’s release, heralded a new personal liberty law, and finally repealed the interracial marriage ban. During the fall of 1842, Massachusetts, and the entire nation’s antislavery community, was rocked by the arrest and attempted return of George Latimer.43 In mid-October, twenty-one-year old Latimer and his wife Rebecca fled North from Norfolk, Virginia. They arrived in Boston with Latimer’s former owner, James B. Gray, close behind. When Gray arrived on October 18, he ordered a local jailer to arrest Latimer without legal process, claiming that in addition to being his slave, Latimer had broken into and stolen goods from his store before absconding. Accepting the promissory note of E. G. Austin, the local attorney Gray enlisted as his counsel, the jailer arrested Latimer and brought him to Leverett Street jail to await extradition to Virginia.44 Citing the March Supreme Court decision in Edward Prigg v. Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, the Supreme Judicial Court headed by Lemuel Shaw affirmed Gray’s right to claim Latimer under federal law. The court ordered that he be returned to jail while Gray applied to a federal tribunal for a certificate asserting his right to bring Latimer back to Virginia.45 The Prigg decision provided unmistakable precedent on behalf of Gray, as it overturned the kidnapping conviction of Edward Prigg, the slave catcher who entered Pennsylvania and kidnapped the former Maryland slave Margaret Morgan and her children without following the proper procedures for retrieving fugitive slaves under Pennsylvania’s 1826 personal liberty law.46 Upholding slaveholders’ right to property under federal law over state-mandated individual rights, Chief Justice Story declared Pennsylvania’s personal liberty law unconstitutional. The March decision virtually foreclosed any possibility of freeing Latimer through judicial channels. While Justice Story’s decision in Prigg upheld the legality of the fugitive slave clause of the Constitution and asserted that slaveholders had an unencumbered right to claim and retrieve people they claimed as slaves in any state or territory, it did leave open the legal possibility of restricting the obligations of state officials to cooperate to detain fugitive slaves.47 Thus, it was the collusion of state officials in arresting, arraigning, and holding Latimer on Gray’s behalf that activists cited in their public campaign for Latimer’s release. Latimer had a claim to freedom, not simply because he was on Massachusetts soil, but because he had been emancipated by his late mistresses’ will, which he claimed Gray had destroyed, and abolitionists sent up a hue and cry warning that all free men and women were in danger of being kidnapped back into slavery. There were some who wholeheartedly supported Latimer’s release as an issue of freedom and civil rights. Understanding the implications of Prigg,

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abolitionists sought to garner Latimer’s temporary release, perhaps in hopes of moving him to safety further North. At the same time, they began a public relations campaign calculated to compel Gray to emancipate Latimer himself. Boston’s African American vigilance committee applied, however unsuccessfully, for a writ of habeas corpus to affect Latimer’s freedom.48 A crowd of African American men and women who had been protecting Latimer attempted to rescue him after the hearing at the Supreme Judicial Court. The reporter for the court noticed a large crowd of African Americans gathering outside the courthouse, and at least thirteen people were arrested and later indicted in municipal court for “rioting” and assaulting an officer of the law. The sheriff even ordered his officers to make a show in support of nominal “law and order,” by arresting prominent white abolitionist Stephen S. Foster in front of hundreds of abolitionists as they met in support of Latimer at Marlboro Chapel.49 Charles Lenox Remond and Frederick Douglass carried out an exhausting speaking tour on behalf of Latimer and spoke before a large crowd of New Bedford’s African American citizens, who would subsequently petition the legislature for a personal liberty law and the legalization of interracial marriage. After the meeting, John Bailey and William Berry, two of the petitioners on the marriage law, were appointed to convey a copy of the meeting minutes and resolutions to Boston where another similar meeting on the dual equal rights issues took place in February of 1843.50 In the Liberator, Garrison denounced the editors of Christian news organs for not printing details of the Latimer case, and shined the light of reproach upon the Baptist Church establishment in particular for its failure to protect the rights of free people of color despite the many politically active African American faithful in their ranks. Equating Latimer’s plight with that of Christ in the hands of Pontius Pilate, and suggesting that Bostonians reread the tale of the Good Samaritan, he called into question the very foundation of their religious convictions. Frederick Douglass carried on a subtler rebuke of complacent religiosity, when he commended some New Bedford men for working to set up the lecture hall on the sabbath. He wrote, “Christianity prays for more of just such Sabbath-breakers as these, and may God grant by an overwhelming revival of antislavery truth, to convert and send forth more just such.”51 Others joined avowed abolitionists and African Americans in Boston, New Bedford, and elsewhere, who comprised vigilance committees for the protection of escaped slaves, to defend Massachusetts’s reputation as a haven for those fleeing bondage. Those who met on Latimer’s behalf in Dedham resolved to make the state “the uncompromising Protectress of all the oppressed who may flee to her for succor.”52 The slaveholder Gray had brought

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slavery to white reformers’ doorsteps and reminded them of the laws affecting people of color in their midst. Lynn residents assured the many “esteemed citizens” of their city, “assumed to be fugitives from the house of bondage” that “if any human hyena should dare to come among us to molest them, he will meet such a demonstration of public sentiment as will form a wall of adamant [sic] for their security.”53 In calling for laws shoring up the state’s power to remain free, and protect the freedom of its citizens, a large convention of reformers in Boston recalled Crispus Attucks’s as the first blood, the blood of a black man, spilled for the American Revolution. Memorializing Attucks, they called upon the state legislature to forbid any state entity to “proscribe, abuse, or assault colored citizens,” reasoning that “all her remonstrances with the South against slavery will have little claim, since precepts are comparatively useless without practice.”54 The louder abolitionists shouted on behalf of the freedom and security of free African Americans, the more they risked alienating members of the public who were either ambivalent or outright opposed to the advancing equal rights program. A meeting of abolitionists called in Faneuil Hall in late October 1842 revealed the thin line that separated mainstream Northern distaste for slavery and radical antislavery ideology. While Samuel Sewell, who was acting as Latimer’s attorney, spoke of the great danger the Prigg decision posed to free men of color, the crowd responded with polite applause and a few affirmations. The greatest applause, however, followed the interruption of someone from the audience shouting, “and white men too!” The meeting had attracted hundreds of citizens in addition to the usual avowed abolitionist legion and some were decidedly hostile. An exposition on the rights of free African Americans, which necessarily implicated Northern whites in their oppression, would not sit well with the crowd. Remond was an officer of the meeting, but when he stood to speak, he was drowned out by hissing and foot stomping. The same befell Frederick Douglass when he rose to deliver his remarks. Despite repeated attempts, they never could be heard. Wendell Phillips, enraged by the proceedings, worked the crowd into a fury when he abandoned any attempt at moderation and screamed, “I know I am addressing the white slaves of the North. (Hisses and shouts) Yes, you dare to hiss me, of course. But you dare not break the chain which binds you to the cart of slavery. (Uproar)”55 Abolitionists were on thin ice. Reformers appealed to whites outside the antislavery ranks by highlighting how Latimer’s plight could be any Massachusetts citizen’s plight. All the more so, they argued, because Latimer appeared to be white. Sewell began his speech before the crowd at Faneuil Hall by stating, “His color was the same as our own. He might have passed through this assembly, and been

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thought a white man.”56 Latimer was biracial and described variously as “bright yellow” or “white in color.”57 His status as a white slave necessarily conjured visions of his conception, which, for those familiar with reform discourse against Southern amalgamation, meant forced interracial sex between his mother and father. This fact was not lost on commentators who repeatedly pointed out that Latimer looked like a white person.58 In a dramatized account of a tête-à-tête between the slaveholder Gray and local abolitionist leaders, printed in the Emancipator, an anonymous “spectator” reported an exchange contrasting amalgamation at the North with amalgamation at the South: Citizen: Don’t you think he [Latimer] loves his wife? Gray: He love his wife? Niggers!—I did n’t come here to talk about that. Citizen: Latimer is part white, is he not? Gray: He’s touched with white—he’s a merlatter. Citizens: They are apt to get “touched” in that way at the South, are they not? Gray: They mix em here at the North. I see black and white walking together since I been here. Citizen: Yes; but at the South you seem to have the faculty of mixing black and white in one person. Gray: Well, I did n’t come here to talk about that.59

He might not have come to talk about that, but that was precisely what the citizens of Massachusetts wanted to talk about. “Spectator’s” descriptions of Latimer and Gray embody many residents’ regional sympathies and illuminate reformers’ discursive use of Southern amalgamation. Suggesting that the only prevalent interracialism in the North is public “walking together,” the writer dissipates critics’ fears that abolitionists are plotting a biracial citizenry by mocking Southern proclivities for “mixing black and white in one person.” Furthermore, he describes Latimer as practically white and loving toward his wife, while Gray is soulless, “cadaverous looking, with lantern jaws, black hair, dark complexion” and “a sort of hyena energy.”60 Although Latimer is the purported slave in this case, he is the one with whom free white Northern readers identify. He is a visibly white devoted husband while Gray is classed among unintelligent, lecherous slaveholders. In their calls for his release, abolitionists fostered this racial inversion, denying that Gray had any right to Latimer, a man, nay, a white man, who sought and seized his “inalienable right to freedom.”61 Latimer was a man whose rights they called upon the state of Massachusetts to respect. The question of interracial sex and marriage was never far from the Latimer case. Northern attitudes about amalgamation in the South, piqued by abolitionists, antiamalgamationists, and plantation romanticists, were

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critical to the popular antipathy to Gray and everything he represented. Abolitionists and moral reformers had set the stage for a reading of interracialism in slavery that foregrounded, if almost always circumvented, the sexual vulnerability of enslaved women to slaveholders like Gray. In their first issue of the Latimer Journal, the self-appointed Latimer Committee (young prominent white abolitionists Henry Ingersoll Bowditch, William F. Channing, and Frederick S. Cabot) published a cautionary tale titled “The White Slaves of the North,” in which they outlined how easy it would be for a white Southerner corrupted by “the demon of lust” to come North and kidnap a sex slave for his own pleasure. They described how he could set his sights on any socially alienated woman of color, swear she was his slave, imprison her, and proceed to collect “evidence” to support his claim. Meanwhile, he could leave the state at any time with his victim, and Massachusetts citizens were “powerless to rescue or avenge her till too late to reach the transgressor.”62 The terms the editors used here, “lust,” “avenge,” and “transgressor,” all point to the sexual assault readers were to assume this slaveholder would commit, thanks in part to Massachusetts’s lax personal liberty laws. Had Latimer’s been a more straightforward fugitive slave case without a claim to freedom, Gray might have succeeded in retrieving him without significant public outcry. If the raucous proceedings at Faneuil Hall did nothing else, they proved that there was no popular consensus in favor of Latimer’s freedom. During the first week of his imprisonment, attention to Latimer’s case was practically limited to the antislavery press and African American vigilance effort. However, when Latimer continued to maintain that he was a free man, and Gray stubbornly refused to free him even for the sum of $600 offered as compensation, public ambivalence blossomed into anxiety over Massachusetts residents’ own implication in the system of slavery or, as Phillips so indelicately termed it, their “chains.” The Boston Courier, otherwise relatively ambivalent to antislavery matters, reported that Gray not only had refused to emancipate Latimer, but had “declared that if Latimer will not passively return with him to Virginia, he SHALL BE KILLED BY INCHES.”63 Gray insulted Massachusetts residents’ nominally freedomloving sensibilities, a misstep that ultimately would leave him excoriated, ostracized, and retreating from Massachusetts without his human property.64 While Massachusetts residents at large cared little about Latimer himself, they exhibited overwhelming indignation at the thought that Gray could command Boston officials and the sheriff to participate in his slave hunt. The local lawyer who acted as Gray’s counsel felt so publicly censured that he published a lengthy rebuttal in the local newspapers, defending his reputation as a man who loathed slavery but believed that the sanctity of the

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Union demanded that Southern white men’s rights to property be respected.65 His call fell on many deaf ears. By November 17, Gray was so intimidated by public disapproval that he ultimately fled the city with only $400 in payment for Latimer. This settlement was reached outside of court, and the sheriff was compelled to demand Latimer’s release, accompanied by a strongly worded order that the jailer never again imprison someone purported to be a fugitive slave without a federal warrant to do so.66 Massachusetts residents’ anti-Southern feeling was spurred substantially by the circulation of Southern newspapers’ responses to the event. Virginia’s Norfolk Herald called Boston’s reformist community “infatuated madcaps” and claimed that the rights of Southern states had been “trampled in the dust.”67 The citizens of Norfolk met on November 30 to denounce Massachusetts and Latimer’s release, reporting the incident as the “Latimer War,” and accusing Northerners of “enticing” slaves away from the “service” of their masters.68 In response, reformers charged that Latimer’s imprisonment signaled Massachusetts’s vulnerability in a nation dedicated to the maintenance of the slave system. In a special issue dedicated to the Latimer affair in November 1842, the Emancipator declared, “Massachusetts is a slave” and the Latimer Journal rallied support by proclaiming, “Massachusetts is no place for slavish hearts.”69 As long as Judge Shaw, the Boston police force, and members of the bar were willing to deny Latimer his legal rights on the word of a single Virginia slaveholder, the editors reasoned, Massachusetts was a slave to the South. Even after Latimer’s release, reformers knew they had momentum for antislavery legislation during the upcoming term. On November 19, new and old organization abolitionists, and those who did not bother to distinguish between the two, met at Marlboro Chapel to celebrate Latimer’s release and plan their next steps. The Emancipator reported that some 300 members of antislavery societies in Lynn and Salem traveled to Boston for the occasion. Political and personal squabbles over how to interpret Latimer’s release, namely, whether to pause to celebrate it or to see it as a sober reminder of the dangers African Americans faced throughout the United States, did upset the meeting. Still, the assembly cooperated long enough to plan an extraordinary petitioning drive for a state personal liberty law. In a move that illustrates the strength of new organization and nonsectarian participants at the convention, they elected Bowditch, Channing, and Cabot, the Latimer Committee, to oversee the “Great Latimer Petition” which demanded that the legislature enact a personal liberty law to prevent state officials from being conscripted as slave catchers.70 Latimer was the symbol of this movement and signed his name atop the petition. However, the committee drummed up support for their petition not by championing

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the rights of fugitive slaves, but by calling whites to self-reflection. If they did nothing else, the Latimer Committee insisted, petitioners could “at least wipe off the immediate responsibility of this abomination and guilt.”71 The appeal worked. Moved by indignation, residents united to sign and deliver a colossal petition to the General Court in early 1843. Over 65,000 signers of the Great Latimer Petition, “earnestly desiring to free this commonwealth and themselves from all connection with domestic slavery and to secure the citizens of this state from the danger of enslavement,” prayed the legislature: 1. To forbid all persons holding office under any law of this state from in any way officially or under color of office, aiding or abetting the arrest or detention of any person claimed as a fugitive from slavery. 2. To forbid the use of our jails or public property of any description whatever within the Commonwealth, in the detention of any alleged fugitive from slavery. 3. To propose such amendments to the Constitution of the United States as shall forever separate the people of Massachusetts from all connection with slavery.72 Mass popular support for the Latimer campaign did not signal a turn to racially progressive politics or a call for abolition. Quite the contrary, it highlighted how discomfiting the realities of slavery could be when they emerged North of the Mason Dixon line to trouble the Northern conscience. Antebellum Massachusetts residents were engaged in a process of what Joanne Pope Melish has called “disowning slavery,” erasing from collective memory the fact that slavery ever existed on Massachusetts soil, and Latimer’s arrival threatened to bring the state’s participation in the slave system back into focus.73 William Channing began publishing the triweekly Latimer Journal and North Star not only to cover the events of the case, but to make war on “slavery here at the North,” warning “look out for your own liberties, men of Massachusetts!”74 In Sherburne, a group of citizens issued resolutions to defend free Northerners from the Southern “tyrannies.”75 Two thousand meeting in Salem petitioned the legislature to “guard the rights of Massachusetts against the aggressions of the slaveholders.”76 In Boston, Lynn, Plymouth, Newtown, and cities across the state, citizens met to fight back against the rising tide of slavery. They sought a return to normalcy, where slavery’s sins remained safely distant from their doorsteps.77 The overwhelming concern generated by Latimer’s arrest was not for escaped slaves; it was for Northern consciences. Nantucket residents expressed the mainstream view when they declared, “if the South wants Slavery, she shall have it to herself . . . we will have nothing to do with it . . . it shall be

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known that the heart of the entire North beats forth one strong simultaneous, ceaseless pulsation of Freedom.”78 Those who met in Lynn declared Gray’s actions as “AN ACT OF WAR,” while the Anti-Slavery Standard called upon Massachusetts’s Revolutionary War experience to proclaim, “Not for this was blood spilled at Lexington and Concord! Not for such result stood that firm barricade of free hearts on Bunker Hill!”79 Perhaps most telling, however, was the call for a Waltham meeting that promised residents that if they acted quickly on Latimer’s behalf, “before winter is past, Massachusetts will have . . . shaken the Slaves’ blood from her mane.”80 As thousands of citizens met in lyceums and city halls to denounce the encroachments of the Slave Power and affixed their names to the Latimer petition, reformers renewed the call to legalize interracial marriage. The Latimer case created a perfect storm in which equal rights advocates, moral reformers, and Yankees concerned with protecting their individual freedoms called for redress. African American citizens stepped forward by the hundreds to sign petitions from the people of color of Boston and New Bedford, Nantucket, and elsewhere.81 White reformers across the state signed new petitions for repeal of the marriage law and desegregation of railroad cars.82 While equal rights, antislavery, and moral reform rationales for repealing the interracial marriage ban never before had gained enough traction to succeed, the rise in anti-Southern fervor would help push it to victory. The election of 1842 heralded the first major success for Massachusetts’s Liberty Party, which made a strong showing for a third-party platform, winning enough votes to send ten senators and representatives to the state legislature. Liberty Party constituents stumped hard during the campaign season, and old organization abolitionists, particularly those faithful to a nonresistance strategy, agonized over how they should navigate the new political waters. Writing to her sister Deborah during October 1842, Anne Warren Weston complained that some of New Bedford’s abolitionists were attending Liberty Party lectures. While she judged this “wrong,” she assented that she thought it “difficult for them to do anything right” considering the circumstances.83 For many, the question of nonresistance in the face of Liberty Party mobilization held strong social significance as individuals chose whether to align with the mass of local abolitionists and vote the party line or risk alienation and even denunciation by their neighbors. J. S. Stafford of Cummington identified Francis Jackson as a sympathetic soul and wrote complaining that his neighbors all planned to vote and viewed him as a traitor and unpatriotic for his nonresistance stance. Worse, the local abolitionist minister denounced “Garrison and his mess.”84 But with or without Garrison’s old guard, Libertyites offered themselves as the Northern alter-

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native to the national parties and rode the wave of public indignation over the Latimer case to victory. With public sentiment calling for reform, the state legislature convened for its winter session on January 11, 1843. Petitions came flooding to the floor, and thus, the interracial marriage question and Massachusetts’s sovereignty against the Slave Power crested the state house steps together. It was not slavery itself that was under attack when the Latimer petition reached the legislature, but rather white Southerners’ ability to compel white Northerners to act on their behalf. Over the preceding decade, the interracial marriage ban had not resonated with most residents or legislators as addressing the question of Northern acquiescence to or collusion with Southern slaveholders. Quite the contrary, it popularly was viewed as an issue of equal rights, in many ways a distinctly Northern problem. In this way the repeal of the marriage ban was synonymous with integrated railcars or classrooms and presented a threat to white supremacy and the existing social hierarchy. When Latimer’s ordeal highlighted what Massachusetts residents saw as an attack on their free society, it created an opportunity into which repeal advocates thrust the marriage question. Without the work of moral reformers and abolitionists who spent years battling the marriage ban as an unjust, unrepublican, and immoral vestige of slavery, the Latimer affair might not have influenced the marriage rights movement in the least. But because of that work, by the time the legislature convened in January 1843, the personal liberty law and repeal of the marriage ban were wedded to the same cause. Success for the Whigs or Democrats during the 1843 session would hinge on their ability to persuade third-party voters to their side. Writing to his father, John Quincy Adams, Charles Francis Adams explained the imperative of treading with caution to garner Liberty Party votes while avoiding the possibility of alienating his own party. He wrote of his disapproval of the party in general but noted “they have got good principles . . . and I hope we may be able to take them from under them without putting ourselves in their hands.”85 The Democrats came out ahead in the 1842 election, and when Whigs met to discuss their strategy for the session beginning in January 1843, the meeting reflected their decreased numbers and, Adams recalled, the virtual absence of avowed antislavery men.86 For the moment, the Democrats and third-party Libertyites had wooed them from the Whig ranks. Arriving for his first day as a sophomore representative, Adams was surprised if not chagrined to be told in confidence that the abolitionists had decided to entrust him with the antislavery and equal rights matters yet again. While flattered that abolitionists chose him, Adams was anxious to

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maintain his independence and avoid being marked as an abolitionist himself. He mused with irony, “I will not consent to make myself their slave. Should they think it indispensable that I should take up with all their fancies I shall soon break out of the lines.”87 Petitions to repeal the marriage ban arrived first and passed to the committee for consideration on January 11. He presented a petition from Francis Jackson and sixty-nine men of Boston on the marriage ban, and the speaker immediately appointed him to a joint committee to consider the question. As during the previous year, Adams favored repealing the marriage ban and advocated for repeal during committee meetings in late January. Nevertheless, he remained wary of abolitionists. The Latimer Committee convened a private meeting to ask Adams to present the Great Latimer Petition to the House. He assented in their presence but in his diary reflected on his anxiety that if he attended the planned meeting at Faneuil Hall, where they would hand the petition to him, he would be required to speak publicly on behalf of the personal liberty law and thus be classed as an abolitionist.88 Adams revealed his fear that association with abolitionists would alienate him from his erstwhile friends and associates. He actually went so far as to write the Latimer Committee begging to be excused from making a speech on the matter. Ultimately, he did attend the Faneuil Hall meeting and accepted the petition for presentation to the House on February 1. Despite his extreme anxiety leading up to this event, carrying the voluminous petition to the State House had a profound effect on Adams’s confidence as a reform advocate. On the evening of February 1, he described presenting the petition as “perhaps the most memorable event of my life. I feel some degree of pride in the fact that I was selected for such a purpose. For in all the contests of the day, I would gladly continue to associate my name without any charge of demagogue practices with the real principles at the basis of Republican government.”89 The people had spoken, and Adams was moved wholeheartedly to advocate an “abolitionist” cause for the first time in his life. However much it might look like a conversion, Adams’s support for the personal liberty law illustrated instead a delicate balancing act in which the possible radicalism of abolition was offset by classic American individualism and Northern contempt for slaveholders’ growing national clout. In the months immediately after Latimer’s capture, Northern anger seethed toward Washington, where Unitarian minister Cyrus Peirce delivered the national version of the Latimer Petition, containing some 51,680 signatures, to John Quincy Adams. On February 22, Adams set the giant roll of papers on his desk and tried repeatedly and without success to present the

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petition for the record.90 Nearing the end of his active political career, Adams still battled year after year against the gag rule and held steadfastly to the belief that the federal government should not be extending slavery’s reach, but in his desire to go “off the stage,” he left more strictly abolitionist politics to those who would succeed him.91 Nevertheless, he consented to battle Southern disdain and introduced the reams of signatures as “the petition of George Latimer” and tens of thousands of Massachusetts residents against Northern citizens’ collusion with slavery. Peirce took great pleasure in recounting how Southern congressmen “stamp and swear and grate their teeth” and “really foam” upon realizing that Latimer, a fugitive slave himself, was the head signer.92 It was just this sort of regionalism—an unabashed display of Yankee bravado—that was able to overcome a decade of antiamalgamationist dissent to repeal Massachusetts’s interracial marriage law. On February 3, the House discussed the Latimer petition and the interracial marriage ban in tandem, the latter causing “amazing anxiety” with the opposition railing against amalgamation while some congressmen and clergymen in attendance joined Adams to call for repeal.93 This time, though, the marriage question was distinguished from other equal rights issues, most notably the bill to forbid railroad companies from segregating their facilities. As soon as the rail bill came up for discussion on February 6, it seemed doomed for failure. First, J. C. Park jumped up to oppose it in his usual style, as Adams described it, because he “seems to have a spice of hatred to all the abolition schemes.” Others followed, opposing the bill unless it was weakened to the point of being “ridiculous” by various amendments. The discussion very quickly acceded to an undercurrent of racism that compelled Adams to stand up and clarify that he opposed the bill not because he approved of racial discrimination, but because he claimed the legislature would overstep its bounds by regulating how railroad companies functioned.94 It was killed during its first day of discussion, with virtually no support despite the strong advocacy for both the personal liberty bill and the repeal of the marriage ban. On the other hand, while the Daily Advertiser came out in opposition to the marriage bill as usual, it did not have the stifling effect on the repeal measure that Adams attributed to it the previous year. The very day of the Advertiser editorial, in fact, the House voted to pass the bill to a third reading by a vote of 182 to 116, a larger majority than it had ever carried before.95 Legislators devoted three sessions to debating the marriage law before a final vote in February 1843. The opposition characteristically argued that African Americans did not favor repeal (a difficult contention, considering the hundreds of signatures the legislature had just received from African Americans who did support repeal), it threatened the purity of the races,

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was in “bad taste,” and promoted amalgamation. Legislators in favor of repeal called upon the language crafted through twelve years of petitioning and activism to argue that the ban was irrelevant thanks to the “natural repugnance of the races,” a vestige of slavery, unconstitutional, un-Christian, racist, and immoral.96 For the remainder of February, the House considered the two complementary issues and acted on the marriage law first, voting to repeal the ban on February 26, 1843. The dynamism sparked by the Great Latimer Petition added an increased and popular anti-Southern flavor to those reasons and won support for the repeal measure from nearly forty more representatives than it had in 1842.97 In his diary, Adams reflected, “I think it is the last remnant of slavery on our statute book. I am glad to have aided in removing it although nothing can be more disagreeable to me than the consideration of the subject which it involves.”98 Charles Francis Adams would not classify himself an “amalgamationist,” nor was he a strident activist for racial equality. His views on abolitionists’ petitions for integrated rail accommodations make this plain: he denied that the state had a right to compel private rail corporations to integrate their cars.99 As he came to understand the marriage issue, however, he viewed it as an outgrowth of slavery past and present, and part and parcel of the immoral Southern legal code that allowed slaveholders, like then infamous James B. Gray, to exploit enslaved women and carry on a trade in their own biracial offspring. Massachusetts legislators repealed the marriage ban in 1843, before addressing the issues of segregated schools or railroads, because doing so allowed them to tout their records as protectors of the state’s women and children, defending Massachusetts against the power of their Southern “tyrants.” The legislature sent the new bill to Governor Marcus Morton for his signature, and prominent abolitionists immediately claimed victory. “At last . . . human beings who love each other may be united together in ‘holy wedlock,’ even though the hue of their skin may not perfectly harmonize!,” Garrison wrote to Hannah and Richard Webb.100 Bradburn approved, writing simply, “People of Massachusetts, wishing to marry, are under no necessity of comparing complexions.”101 In a letter to Henry Wright of Darlington, England, two days later, Garrison again recounted the successful repeal campaign and boasted, “Thus has another tremendous blow been given to the monster prejudice.” Alas, he continued, “We have not been equally successful in regard to the rail-road question, and shall therefore ‘try again.’ ”102 While Garrison and Remond were some of the first and loudest to call for interracial marriage rights, the networks of activists with competing agendas who ultimately mobilized to repeal the interracial marriage ban were complex and tenuous.103 But far from detracting from the movement’s

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efficacy, its participants’ diversity was the key to their success. The fate of marriage rights rested on the decisions this diverse group made, and how they responded to structural and internal developments as the movement progressed.104 When calls for equal rights fell on deaf ears, reformers capitalized on the growing popularity of middle-class moral reform and reshaped the fight for marriage rights from 1839 forward as a moral issue. This reinterpretation gave the movement new life and carried it through 1842, when the arrest and incarceration of fugitive George Latimer brought the long arm of the slave South to Massachusetts’s doorsteps. Thousands of citizens, who shared no existential interest in interracial marriage, nevertheless interpreted the movement as a way to protest the national power of slaveholders and to create a sense of Northern identity. Interracial marriage reform succeeded in Massachusetts because for a brief time it represented the concerns not only of interracial couples or even African Americans demanding full citizenship, but Yankees defining their families and legal structures in opposition to the slaveholding South.

chapter five

Advancing Interracialism

I

n an 1857 speech laying the groundwork for the Lincoln-Douglas debates, Abraham Lincoln famously proposed colonization as the long-term solution not only to emancipation but the dreaded “indiscriminate amalgamation of the white and brown races” to which he believed there was a “natural disgust in the minds of nearly all white people.”1 The later president’s words offer more than a glimpse into the distasteful racial beliefs of one man; they reveal a cunning political sensibility. Free-soil politics was the somewhat more conventional outgrowth of the Liberty Party of the 1840s, embracing economic and political antislavery while avoiding the much less popular equal rights platform of the more radical abolitionists. Garrison famously called this position white-manism and, as in the 1842 election after George Latimer’s ordeal in Boston, it proved to be winning political strategy among Northerners. Goaded by Stephen Douglas’s claims that he and other Republicans were amalgamationists, Lincoln affirmed his opposition to interracialism, and furthermore, expressed frustration over the power of sexualized racial rhetoric when he continued exasperatedly, “I protest against that counterfeit logic which concludes that, because I do not want a black woman for a slave I must necessarily want her for a wife. I need not have her for either, I can just leave her alone.” At the dawn of civil war, as in the 1830s, the threat of amalgamation still loomed over any discussion of antislavery. What, then, had the seven-year struggle to legalize interracial marriage in Massachusetts wrought? Colonization rendered antislavery palatable— conceivable—for the whites whose support would carry Lincoln to victory in 1860. It was also precisely the strategy Harriet Beecher Stowe used to palliate the implications of her archetypal antislavery work. Twenty years

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after Massachusetts legalized interracial marriage, over a dozen states had done the opposite, banning it, and David Croly and George Wakeman coined the new term “miscegenation,” capitalizing on persistent taboos against interracial interaction to combat Lincoln’s reelection and the nascent civil rights promises of the Civil War era. Clearly, amalgamation was as taboo as ever. This could leave us with the supposition that the work of interracialism’s advocates was relegated to the dustbin of history. But what of those, both Lincoln’s and Stowe’s contemporaries, who refused to advocate colonization and instead demanded racial equality through their art and politics? What of those authors and activists like Lydia Maria Child who refused to perpetuate the canard that there was a “natural disgust” between races? By focusing only on the persistence of antiamalgamation feeling, we ignore an activist trajectory that included the movement for marriage rights and later brought desegregated railroad cars, integrated schools, and the revision of the Militia Act in 1862, which allowed African American men to enlist in the Union Army, not to mention a tradition of interracial literature that challenged Americans’ cultural convictions about race. In the twenty years following the repeal of the marriage ban in Massachusetts, equal rights activists made the marriage victory a stepping-stone to other rights battles, even as social taboos against interracialism continued unabated. The 1843 bill eked through the legislature thanks to a series of compromises built on its status as a measure of equal rights, moral reform, and anti-Southern race policy. Because marriage rights advocates were not able to succeed in reforming the marriage law on the merits of interracialism alone, it neither reflected nor substantively changed popular taboos against interracial socializing, romance, sex, or family formation. For moral reformminded evangelical women as for legislators responding to constituents clamoring for the personal liberty law, by 1843 the means of advocating interracial marriage rights may well have seemed more politically salient than the end of racial equality itself. While bans on interracial marriage reify and shape theories about race and support the concept of racial hierarchies and white supremacy, it is clear that repealing such laws does not necessarily mark a significant shift in antiamalgamation beliefs. The marriage reform movement in Massachusetts stands as a telling antebellum example of a phenomenon we tend to associate with the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: the achievement of political equality for African Americans, especially men, without firm protections for social equality across racial lines. The persistence of movements to achieve political equality without social equality can be attributed to a phenomenon I term “advancing interracialism.” The progressive and reactionary ways “advancing interracialism” was used developed during debates over interracial

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marriage laws and equal rights in the antebellum North. Its component parts are two sides of a coin. In the first place, there existed a visible minority, including interracial marriage rights activists like Wendell Phillips and Charles Lenox Remond, who earnestly advocated for full social equality and struggled to advance interracialism throughout their lifetimes. When they cheered the passage of the marriage rights law in 1843, they did so primarily because they saw it as a step toward a politically and socially integrated society. On the other side of the coin stood white supremacists and reactionaries. White supremacists could point to radical equal rights activists as the spokespeople of social upheaval. They reacted by classifying any equal rights concessions as a slippery slope toward social equality, interracial marriage, and even a fully multiracial American future. Because they knew that granting rights across the race line did, must, and would usher in interracialism, racial conservatives and reactionaries created over a century’s worth of shifting defenses against what they saw as an advancing interracial battle line. The movement for interracial marriage rights heightened the visibility and political traction of those who earnestly hoped to advance the cause of a multiracial citizenry. It also illustrated that many in the antislavery rank and file could not or would not advocate for interracialism as an end in itself. Scholars of amalgamation in particular have pointed out the myriad instances that abolitionists disavowed either the rights or privileges of interracialism.2 After New York’s amalgamation riots of 1835, abolitionists Arthur and Lewis Tappan, John Rankin, and Samuel Cornish publicly denounced amalgamation.3 John Quincy Adams viewed Desdemona’s desire for Othello as “a gross outrage upon the law of Nature” and insinuated that she was a harlot who “had her just deserts” “when Othello smothered her in bed.”4 White abolitionist women balked at interracial social intercourse; some arguably even exploited enslaved women’s plight for their own women’s rights agenda.5 Many abolitionists disavowed interracialism; some even considered themselves antislavery while clinging tooth and nail to white supremacy. They are disappointments to today’s progressive historians as they were disappointments to their vocal contemporaries and critics like Remond or Phillips. Progressive legislation like the repeal of the ban on interracial marriage was won by activists like Lydia Maria Child who possessed a keen eye for the broader landscape of public opinion. She knew that, whether kowtowing to public pressure or sincerely ambivalent about racial equality, the majority of her reform colleagues were moral reformers, they were antislavery, they were proud Northerners, but they were not necessarily in favor of social equality. While the antislavery movement fractured and became politicized in the 1840s and 1850s, there remained a small minority of the population who

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continued to advocate for measures that would not simply end slavery, but would advance racial equality. Those people did exist, and their writings and political activism positioned interracial love and marriage as one link in a chain leading to African Americans’ full civil and political rights. Their work would have profound implications for the future of American race and regionalism. The antebellum era witnessed a proliferation of interracial literature, some of it radical and celebratory of both African American freedom fighters and interracial romance. Interracial sex and its attendant horrors became a mainstay of sentimentalist fiction and the “tragic” mulatto or white slave a potent symbol of moralists’ critique of slavery.6 However, a handful of authors moved beyond the classic tale of the tragic mulatto or mulatta and the horrific sexual abuse of enslaved women to construct alternative narratives that challenged conventional views of interracial romance and even love. Perhaps unsurprisingly, some of the most influential authors of the interracial love story were abolitionist women who had been impacted by the debate over interracial marriage rights in Massachusetts. Lydia Maria Child, for instance, followed up her doomed romance in Hobomok and her tale of the tragic Xarifa with a loving, if unacknowledged, interracial romance in Romance of the Republic.7 Child’s involvement in shaping the debate around interracial marriage rights and the moral implications of marriage bans shines through in Romance. Interracial love proliferates in the tale, as mixed characters, all with ambiguous racial signifiers, dance back and forth across racial lines. Still, laws and customs that prohibit the legitimization of those interracial romances spell disaster.8 Two quadroon sisters, Flora and Rosa, are the love children of a white man and a “black” enslaved woman but are raised to believe they are white. Like other tragic mulattas, their lives are thrown into turmoil when their father dies and they are nearly sold into slavery. Instead, they are “saved” by Gerald (a white man) who proposes to marry Rosa. They establish the façade of marriage but the union is never legal and Gerald devolves into licentiousness, first propositioning Flora and then moving on to legally marry a white woman named Lily. Flora, now no more than a mistress, gives birth to a son and switches him with Gerald’s wife’s newborn. Signaling the vagaries of racial distinctions (if the parallel floral imagery is not enough), the boys live each other’s lives, and the “black” son is only revealed when Rosa must explain his past to prevent his incestuous marriage to his half-sister (Rosa’s daughter by a subsequent marriage). The “white” son is rescued from slavery, as Child would have all enslaved people rescued, and the “black” son goes on to die a martyr’s death in the Civil War. While peppered with tragic elements, Romance not only calls into question racial distinctions, but advocates for interracial

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marriage rights. As she had earlier, Child demands equal rights to marriage and affirms the plausibility of sexual attraction and love between those whom society deems racially distinct.9 Some of her contemporaries would go even further in affirming the rightness of interracial romance. Although Louisa May Alcott herself was too young to sign petitions in favor of repealing the interracial marriage law, her mother and many of the family’s social circle submitted a petition to the legislature in 1843. Josiah Bartlett and John Thoreau headed the petition with “Abba Alcott” signing ninth in the women’s column.10 Her friends and neighbors knew that despite Bronson Alcott’s occasional ambivalence on the subjects of slavery and equal rights, Abby could be counted on to advocate for both. Alcott’s abolitionist, feminist, and racial views were influenced by her own family as well as the reformers that surrounded her, including Margaret Fuller, Thoreau, Emerson, and visiting abolitionists like John Brown.11 In the 1850s and 1860s, she pushed her radical abolitionist and integrationist views through public disapproval to publish the interracial romances “M.L” and “The Brothers,” later titled “My Contraband,” as well as her abolitionist and slave rebellion stories: “Hospital Sketches,” “Colored Soldiers Letters,” and “An Hour.”12 Alcott opens “M.L.” by shattering the racial hierarchies her readers had come to expect in their fiction as in their lives. In poetic prose that mirrors the music her white protagonist Claudia is listening to, the author elevates the sound, and through it its source, the mysteriously dark piano player Paul Frere, to the “divine.” In comparison to Frere, the other listeners sink to the level of “frivolous women” and “pleasure-seeking men” whose soulless husks are transformed: “at its magic touch, the masks fell from many faces and a momentary softness made them fair, eye met eye with rare sincerity, false smiles faded, vapid conversation died abashed.”13 Frere and his music are like “a wizard’s wand,” “blissful,” “fiery and sweet,” “heroic.” He “had touched the chords of that diviner self whose aspirations are the flowers of life.”14 Even as Alcott subverts racial hierarchies, she reinscribes Frere with racialist exoticism. Before Claudia sets eyes on Paul, narrative descriptors signal his biracialism for the reader. He is “as proud as if the ‘blue blood’ of all the grandees of Spain flowed in his veins,” a “dark man with the melancholy eyes,” whose voice is like a “south winds full of an aroma fiery and sweet.”15 When Claudia sets eyes on Paul, the reader’s suspicions are piqued even further. He brings to mind a “tropical island,” and his physical characteristics give hints of the exotic; “black locks,” black brows, “pale bronze” unbearded countenance with a knowing, mature look suggesting that some trauma had “left a shade behind.” Unsuspecting, Claudia falls in love with Paul and he with her. Their partnership offers each of them new life, new hope, for a future that looked

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bleakly lonesome.16 But their bliss is shattered by Jessie Snowden, the “cat transformed into a woman,” who finds documentation of Paul’s enslavement that dropped out of a pile of papers he meant to burn and reveals that she knows his secret.17 Compelled to explain, although he has already placed an “invisible barrier” between them in anticipation of Claudia’s expected rejection, Paul describes his past as the beloved (but enslaved) son of a white father, his father’s death, his sale, and the horrors of slavery and attempted escapes. In the tragic mulatto tradition, Frere’s life is a struggle against “fate.”18 For the ten years after his escape, he buries his past and passes into whiteness. His pleasant childhood as his father’s acknowledged son and sister’s beloved brother was to be “crushed and broken” by the fate of his slave status once he is at the mercy of slaveholder Maurice Lecroix.”19 The reader expects Claudia, heartbroken though she may be, to denounce Paul and send him from her home forever. Instead, like the biblical Mary faced with Gabriel’s divine instruction, she rises above earthly concerns and takes “counsel in the silence of her heart.”20 She accepts him and acknowledges the heretofore surreptitious interracial romance, saying “Mine still, mine forever, Paul!”21 Alcott none too subtly places Claudia in the position her mother, her antebellum abolitionist female sisters, and she herself held in the battle over interracialism. If they were so dedicated to equal rights, would they, themselves, marry a black man? It is now up to Claudia to decide their collective fate. She judges his character worthy enough to outweigh his unfortunate birth, chooses the role of the protective white savior and martyr, and sacrifices her social circle to elevate the mulatto husband who is now in her protection. Paul’s “tears hot and heavy as a summer rain baptized the new born peace and words of broken gratitude sang its lullaby . . . Paul was the weaker now, and Claudia learned the greatness of past fear by the vehemence of present joy, as they stood together tasting the sweetness of a moment that enriched their lives.” This is no less than an emotional, even sensual, appeal to white female readers. If they took up the antislavery cause and promoted the Christian principle of man’s equality before God, the brotherhood of man signaled by Paul’s very name, they too might find a mysteriously biracial suitor to cradle in their righteous embrace while he weeps with vulnerable gratitude.22 Or, what is probably more to the point, they could live interracial arousal and self-righteous antiracism vicariously through Alcott’s tale.23 In 1858, popular novelist Mary Andrews Denison published a plantation romance that, while it conformed to many of the conventions of abolitionist sentimentalism, proffered perhaps the most radical claims for the merits (or even inevitability) of interracialism. Daughter of Thomas and Jerusha Robbins Andrews of Cambridge, Massachusetts, Mary Andrews married Charles Wheeler Denison, then a controversial minister and editor

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of the Emancipator antislavery newspaper, in 1846.24 Denison wrote prolifically, publishing over eighty novels in her lifetime, churning them out at a remarkable rate, sometimes more than two per year. While exceptional both for her sheer output and for her access to literary publishing circles through her marriage, she also personified the sort of middle-class white reformer who made repealing the interracial marriage ban feasible in 1843.25 Titled for the ancient African matriarch whose lifetime of suffering and knowledge of secrets forms the framework for a novel about sexual abuse, interracial love, and slavery’s ruinous impact on the family, Denison’s Old Hepsy is in many ways the quintessential antislavery novel.26 The drama centers on Washington Grange, a Maryland plantation, where Old Colonel Hollister’s relations, black and white, struggle with questions of race, sex, attraction, and the future of slavery. Through the character of Old Hepsy, Denison begins her attack on slavery’s destructive influence. Offered some of the money Master Kenneth lost gambling, Hepsy recalls the ways he decimated her own family, leaving her childless in her old age: “Didn’t he sell Sue to be white man’s mistress? . . . Oh, Mars’ Kenneth nebber strike he niggers, oh, no, no—but he put ’em whar they struck clar through the heart.”27 Immediately, the reader recognizes the tropes of the antislavery novel: the sadistic depravity of the slaveholder, the destruction of families for mere profit, and the sexual exploitation and abuse of enslaved women. Like Lydia Maria Child, George Bradburn, and others who drew moral reformers to the cause of interracial marriage rights with their harrowing depictions of illicit interracial sex in the context of slavery, Denison advocates antislavery through comparisons of the sexual fates of enslaved and free women and calls upon the vulnerable white slave to elicit sympathy among her largely white audience.28 It is on the nature of interracial sexual encounters in slavery that Denison diverts from other antislavery models. The requisite “white slave,” Lucina, is a central character in the drama, and she is a tragic mulatta in the vein of William Wells Brown’s Clotel or Lydia Maria Child’s Xarifa. What differs, however, are the circumstances of her conception. Lucina is the daughter of a young white mistress and an enslaved man of color (not an enslaved woman and a white master). That interracial love story, for so it is presented, foreshadows another in the next generation, between Lucina’s mother’s white daughter, Amy Kenneth, and Hollister (the white male slave).29 In Old Hepsy, Denison constructs a tangled web of interracial relationships, proof positive that whites (both men and women) desire sex with people of color. Interracialism still signals tragedy in Old Hepsy, but Denison is unique in that she distinguishes between interracial romance, which she portrays as both plausible and real, and illicit sex, whether interracial, exploitive, or incestuous.

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Two young white men, Harry Van Broek and Marshall Randolph provide Denison a platform for arguing her views on amalgamation. After Van Broek states unequivocally that Northern abolitionists neither condemn the U.S. Constitution nor seek the dissolution of the Union, he and Randolph turn to “amalgamation.” Randolph expresses the usual contempt, “They tell me you Northerners advocate [amalgamation]. That is revolting to me; I couldn’t do that, Mr. Van Broek.”30 Van Broek counters, “Which do you think carries the principle into practice most thoroughly, Mr. Randolph? . . . I’ve seen, in my short visit, not a few white faces in the slave quarters.” Randolph suggests that nonetheless there is a natural “repugnance” between the races, a contention that Van Broek refutes handily, pointing to the familiarity of slave and master. “If he comes up to you as a free man, you feel ‘repugnance’ then. This seems very strange to me, but only proves conclusively that it is not the color but the condition of the black.”31 If Denison’s story does nothing else, its web of interracial sexual relationships refutes the notion that interracialism is “unnatural” or even “distasteful.” As Hollister and Amy Kenneth perform their interracial lust, or love, the impossibility of which sparks a chain of madness and death, Denison repeats that it is the condition of the characters, not their races, that condemns them. She speaks through Hollister about the fate of his own lightcomplexioned mother: “Had she been a free white woman, with the control of her own body, this dreadful thing would never have happened.” Physiognomic whiteness alone was not enough; she “was a white woman!” but being also a slave, she was cast into madness by “the devilish passions of my cursed old master.”32 When Old Hepsy with “pretended scorn” chides Hollister for being attracted to Amy, he rejoins, “I’m her equal, any way . . . I’m a man; she’s a woman, neither nothing more nor less.”33 For her part, Amy struggles with her desire for Hollister. After she strikes him across the face with a riding crop, a cold adolescent reminder that she knows he loves her and that she at the same time owns him, she hopes that “he hates me now!” but then changes her mind. “No sooner had she spoken thus than came a secret hope that he would not . . . The face looked terribly grand in its wrath. The more she thought of it, the more its dark beauty impressed her.”34 Although she has always implicitly rejected him and continues to humiliate him for her own amusement, “perhaps unconsciously she wished he were free—her equal.”35 Even when he comes in through her window to profess his love, Amy does not refuse because of his race, alone. “To ask me to unite myself with such a fate! You, my father’s slave,” she screamed. “Do you think I would stoop to look at such as you?”36 Desperate to “meet somewhere as equals,” Hollister slips Amy a poisoned drink and then poisons himself. An interracial Romeo and Juliet, whose circumstances rendered their love impossible, “in madness and despair, slavery had sent these souls before their Maker!”37

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It is not until the concluding chapter that Denison reveals what the reader has already learned through Old Hepsy’s silences: the prehistory to this blighted romance. A generation ago, Amy’s mother (and Hollister’s halfsister) Miss Hollister (later Mrs. Kenneth) meets Fred Keene when he is sent to retrieve her from the train after her education in the North. They admire each other, recall childhood friendship, and “She also admired his finely formed figure, his handsome features, and intellectual face and mien, and in school-girl fashion, without reflecting upon the consequences that might result by her encouragement of look and word . . . fell in love with him, as the romantic phrase goes, and allowed herself to think too much of the elegant slave.” The characters repeatedly illustrate that any suggestion that there is a natural aversion between the races is absurd. Miss Hollister did not simply lust after, but she “fell in love with” Keene.38 Lucina, of course, was the result, the child Mrs. Kenneth could never recognize as long as slavery and white supremacy persisted. Like Lydia Maria Child’s much earlier work, Hobomok, Old Hepsy does not present the offspring of interracial sex as inherently degraded, although they may be degraded by their conditions and the society in which they live. Fred Keene and his daughter Lucina offer proof: while the mistress Mrs. Kenneth dies, Keene and Lucina escape North together and live out their lives as abolitionists in a free society. Lucina’s earlier suffering, along with the suffering of all the characters in Denison’s web, stems not from the interracial love affair, but from a web of exploitive and perverse interracialism begun by Mrs. Kenneth’s father Old Colonel Hollister. The master Hollister “kept a secret harem, and grew his enormous wealth by the sale of his own children for the most revolting purposes.” Old Hollister’s sins are the sins that attended slavery. Not only did he rape enslaved women and sell his own children, but slave society masked and multiplied his offenses. Unprosecuted (legally unacknowledged) rape begot familial betrayals, which begot incest and tragedy. It is the secretiveness—the unspeakableness—of these relationships that renders them cursed. Denison’s story is a defense of the “conditions debate” that went beyond political equality and citizenship to full social equality and interracial love.39 Simone Vauthier has argued that in Old Hepsy, Denison pushes toward a cultural understanding of the future American’s racial intermixture or “a whole spectrum of ‘color.’ ”40 For Denison, the spectrum of color was already begun in the South. Her approach to the antislavery novel moves beyond emancipation, sidesteps colonization, and instead insists that the dreaded amalgamation whites feared would result from racial equality was already an integral part of American society, past, present, and future. All that was necessary to progress toward a morally righteous multiracial

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America was emancipation and the attendant elevation of a degraded race to the same status and condition as whites. Of course, the movement for full political and social equality was not confined to the pages of radical fiction. Massachusetts’s African American reformers moved from their fight for interracial marriage rights and integrated railcars to advance interracialism in other venues. First, many of the same reformers who demanded interracial marriage rights, with the same conviction that Massachusetts must acknowledge the error of its race laws, moved on into an unflinching battle to improve their children’s educational opportunities by integrating Boston’s public schools.41 Some of the state’s school districts had been integrated historically, more for convenience than principle, but the quality of education for African American children was always suspect. In Boston, black residents first demanded a separate black school in 1787 because black children, although legally allowed to attend white schools, faced discrimination and abuse.42 Reports from New Bedford, likewise, cited instances in which African American students were forced to sit apart from white students within the classroom and received inferior instruction.43 As the early decades of the nineteenth century progressed, residents in towns with large enough black populations to have warranted Jim Crow schools demanded integration. The schools in New Bedford were integrated by the late 1830s and Salem closed its “colored” schools in 1843.44 Residents of Boston began petitioning the Boston School Committee to integrate the city’s public schools in 1840.45 The integration movement gained momentum in 1848 when Benjamin Roberts, activist printer and petitioner in favor of repealing the ban on interracial marriage, filed suit against the School Committee because it refused to allow his daughter, Sarah, to enroll in a white school closer to their home than the segregated Abiel Smith School. When he brought together antislavery lawyer and later radical Republican Senator Charles Sumner and young equal rights activist and lawyer Robert Morris as his legal team, Roberts reflected his demands for integration and implicitly discounted white supremacist ideas about African American intellectual deficiency.46 Robert Morris was only twenty-five and already a seasoned leader in Boston’s black activist ranks, a petitioner on interracial marriage rights when he was still in his teens, and the second licensed African American attorney in Massachusetts history. When the case went before the Massachusetts Supreme Court in 1849, Sumner delivered the argument in favor of Roberts.47 He argued that the state legislature was the wellspring of equal education in Massachusetts— that it “reared” the public school system—and that it should be the state’s responsibility to ensure equal integrated schooling to all children.48 While

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he might have limited his comments to equality before the law or proving the inferiority of the segregated black school, Sumner devoted a great deal of his argument to a defense of interracialism writ large. Like Easton and Remond before him, Sumner turned from antislavery to the question of racial discrimination and argued that racial distinctions violated the constitution of the free state. Unlike age or gender distinctions, Sumner argued, racial distinctions were “offensive” and indefensible.49 There were differences between black and white, he acknowledged, and the races might not integrate socially with much frequency: “The two may not readily intermingle, although we are told by Homer that Jupiter ‘did not disdain to grace / the feast of Ethiopia’s blameless race.’ ”50 However, social interaction was imperative for “human improvement.” Sumner wrote that it “remove[s] antipathies, promote[s] mutual adaptation and conciliation, and establish[es] relations of reciprocal regard.” Furthermore, this advancement was God’s will: “Who sets up barriers to these, thwarts the ways of Providence, crosses the tendencies of human nature, and directly interferes with the laws of God.”51 As they had in demanding the repeal of the ban on interracial marriage, Sumner, Morris, Roberts, and others argued that contrary to popular conventions, integration was God’s grand design and Americans’ responsibility. Far from avoiding the taboo subject, Sumner went so far as to reference the interracial marriage law as a precedent for the integration measure. Drawing from African American reformers’ equal rights claims, he noted that, upholding the doctrine of “equality of men before the law,” the Supreme Judicial Court had abolished slavery, and that the legislature had removed “the law interfering to prohibit marriages between blacks and whites.” Sumner even argued that “awakened public sentiment” had desegregated Massachusetts’s railroads. Like a disappointed patriarch, he complained, “caste prejudice has taken its last refuge in the schools.”52 Ultimately, Sumner and Morris leveled their criticism at the inherent inequality of racially segregated facilities. In an argument that would foreshadow the sociological work of Kenneth Clark that supported the plaintiffs in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka Kansas a century later, he argued that segregated schools could never be equal because by definition, they “branded a whole race with the stigma of inferiority and degradation, constituting them in to a caste.” Segregation from common schools was prejudice in itself, and Sumner denied the possibility that separate facilities could ever be equal. Still, integrated school activists faced a looming apathy on the part of their neighbors, who did not see white supremacy or racism as a particular stain on the moral character of their society. Like Minott Thayer when he chastised Wendell Phillips for his “fanatical” dedication to an amalgama-

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tionist program, Roberts’s opponents seemed perplexed by the reformer’s zealous insistence that racism was an evil worth expunging. The opposing counsel in the case, Peleg Chandler, thought radical white abolitionists were filled with false righteousness “born from the sophistry of fanaticism,” but could not help but admit that anyone who heard Sumner’s argument would be “irresistibly carried away by the soundness, the elevation and the journey of the course [he] point[ed] out.”53 If Judge Lemuel Shaw was so affected, he did not let on. The court ruled against Roberts and dismissed Sumner’s moralist and constitutional arguments. Judge Shaw patently refused to interpret the concept of “equality before the law” in the same sweeping way Sumner did. Like Holgate’s Oliver Bolokitten and the mass of white Americans who were accustomed to racial chauvinism and its benefits, Shaw believed that prejudice was perfectly natural. In his opinion, he wrote that, “this prejudice, if it exists, is not created by law, and probably can not be changed by law.”54 The facilities created for African American students were, in other words, equal enough for an inferior class of citizens. It would not be until 1855 that, after a mass petitioning drive on the part of African American Bostonians and other equal rights activists, the Massachusetts General Court would abolish segregated schooling and proclaim that extra segregated facilities could not be maintained in the state at the public expense. On a Monday a week before Christmas in 1855, William Cooper Nell attended a mass meeting that was in many ways similar to but in some important ways different from that one in 1843 where he and his neighbors had thrown their weight behind the effort to repeal the marriage ban. At the 1843 meeting, those assembled had honored white abolitionists Henry G. Chapman and William E. Channing and resolved “that we transmit to our children, and charge them to transmit to their children’s children, the cherished gratitude of our hearts towards these philanthropists, for labors of love in behalf of liberty, equal rights and humanity.” By 1855, the children paid tribute to Nell and all those who had worked to compel the legislative decision. This time, Nell was not rallying for support; he was being showered with communal gratitude for his leadership in the effort to open “the public schools of the city to children and youth within its limits, irrespective of complextional differences.”55 A half-dozen children, surely with faces glowing from recent scrubbing and wearing their Sunday best for the occasion, offered Nell floral bouquets. In return, the young organizer gave special honor to George Putnam and Jonas W. Clark for heading petitions in the late 1840s and to George F. Williams, who in May 1854 submitted a comprehensive report to the city government that ultimately would lead to the legislative decision in 1855.56 African American reformers in Nantucket and Salem, where they had

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already successfully integrated their schools, joined in petitioning the legislature and gathered the names of prominent white supporters. Nell’s description of the Salem petition is particularly illustrative of this process. He noted that Salem’s foremost African American women, Charles Lenox Remond’s wife Amy M. W. Cassey, Jane Clark Putnam, and Charlotte L. Forten who by that time boarded with the Remonds to attend Salem’s integrated schools, circulated the petition and collected “the name of Hon. Stephen C. Phillips with the leading clergymen and officials.” In cities and towns with large white abolitionist organizations, Nell noted, the “white anti-slavery friends” deserved equal praise. As during the interracial marriage rights movement, Lynn and Haverhill sent particularly large petitions, with over 300 names each. The reform community was beginning to show its maturity by 1855, as it grew in ranks, prestige, and influence. John T. Hilton, head signer for Boston’s 1843 marriage petition, maintained his paternal purview over the reform community and was joined by the younger leaders Jonas W. Clark, Robert Morris, and Nell, all of whom had been active on the interracial marriage question. However, many of those chosen as vice presidents and secretaries of the meeting were newer additions to the community like escaped slave Lewis Hayden and doctors John S. Rock and John V. DeGrasse. The former women’s guard including Eunice Davis had been replaced by an even further gender segregated “Committee of Arrangements” composed almost entirely of women (while men made up all of the vice presidential and secretarial positions). Like in 1843, though, the meeting drew supporters from across the community and those who came down on very different sides of the antislavery battleground. Nell praised antislavery advocates for meeting in civil “discussion,” and he noted that even some from outside the usual ranks had helped the cause of school rights. That said, he did not ignore those who had segmented the united front, petitioning and even engaging in violence against the integrated school movement. Referring to Thomas Paul Smith and others who fought against the integration measure, he spoke of being “betrayed by traitors with-in and beset by foes without.”57 He credited the mothers of the community for having the fortitude to “rally for a new attack upon the fortress of Colorphobia” and for being the ones who ensured, by their very presence on the first day of school, September 3, 1855, that the new law would be obeyed.58 Integrated schools were not the last measures of equity African American reformers in Massachusetts demanded of their government. In 1852, some of the state’s prominent leaders, including Morris and Remond, pushed the legislature for the right to form African American military units in the

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state.59 The ban on black militias dated from the Militia Act of 1792, when the members of the new nation’s second congress, reflecting on the “inconvenient” role African Americans played fighting for freedom in both the Continental and British armies, restricted militia participation to the white citizens of the new slaveholding nation. On March 3, 1853, lecturer and editor William J. Watkins and Robert Morris spoke before the Legislative Committee on the Militia, recounting the service African Americans offered the United States during the Revolution and War of 1812, and argued that the state should sponsor an African American militia.60 Morris began by asserting the constitutionality of the matter: first, Massachusetts law should not discriminate on the basis of race and second, African Americans were citizens (a contention under fire from the Supreme Court in the contemporaneous Dred Scott decision). Then, he moved to the policy implications of a black militia, arguing, for instance, that African Americans were eager to participate and thus would swell the commonwealth’s defensive force. The black force would complement other ethnic militias, like the Irish militia, and should be funded and raised by the state.61 Morris and Watkins represent two complementary approaches to political and ideological equal rights during the antebellum period. Morris maintained a firm but respectable campaign for rights on the grounds that African Americans were equal before the laws of the state while Watkins betrayed the seething anger that underlay the struggle, already decades old, to realize full equality.62 While Morris argued the constitutional merits of equal rights, Watkins stepped before the committee with a more strident moral message. There was one thing he refused to do, namely, beg legislators to acknowledge African American men’s fitness for military service or citizenship. He demanded it. Drawing on the already iconic antislavery martyr, Watkins accused the legislators of favoring black men who “like Uncle Tom, submit to your indignities with Christian meekness and becoming resignation.”63 The men’s demands shifted over the course of their movement, sometimes requesting full state support of a black militia, while at others simply praying that the designation “white” be removed from the Militia Act. Each request carried with it distinctive implications. Removing the stipulations that only white men serve in the militia suggested not only that black men could be armed, but that they might join integrated militias (in the same manner that students in many schools across the commonwealth attended public integrated schools). Even if state support for an independent African American militia might not have promoted an integrationist plan, it carried troubling implications for white supremacy, not the least of which was the vision of armies of African American men, perhaps even led by African American

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commanders, ready to march for freedom. In the years following Nat Turner’s rebellion in Virginia and hundreds of other slave insurrections in the United States, lawmakers would have had to be stubbornly deaf to slaveholders’ demands to consider such a proposition. When the legislature denied the request, Morris noted his particular disappointment considering information he and DeGrasse, had collected, which showed that there were state-funded black militias in Rhode Island and Ohio.64 Watkins refused to retreat quietly. In the tradition of men brought to the emotional brink by discrimination, like Remond writing to abolitionist friends in Maine or Benjamin Roberts’s message to Amos Phelps after the latter withdrew support for the Anti-Slavery Herald, Watkins wrote an impassioned letter to the editor of the Boston Herald expressing his disgust over what he saw as a “humbug—a legislative farce.” He contended that the committee never intended to grant the black militia a charter and had simply wasted his time. He continued, with reference to the petition of Jonas W. Clark and others on the militia issue, “Now I, as an individual, believe that no one has a right, morally speaking, to shoot his brother through the heart or blow out his brains; but if the Committee have the right, then [Jonas W. Clark and sixty-five others] have the right also. And if companies composed of foreigners can obtain charters, why, most assuredly, nativeborn American citizens ought to be able to obtain the same without any difficulty.”65 On the heels of their failure to erase “white” from the state’s militia law, William Cooper Nell issued his hallmark work against the ideological underpinnings of exclusively white American citizenship. In his pamphlet Colored Patriots of the American Revolution, Nell offered vignettes of the service of African American men in the nation’s founding conflict, first, to combat racial prejudice, and second, to demand the rights of citizens.66 In his preface, he alludes to this second purpose by noting that he was drawn to compile this work because “a combination of circumstances has veiled from the public eye a narration of those military services which are generally conceded as passports to the honorable and lasting notice of Americans.”67 Notably, the pamphlet contains much more than an account of African American soldiery during the Revolution. Nell traces the histories of those who participated in military action, then moves on to the great writings of Phillis Wheatley, and the legal challenges to slavery by Mum Bett and African American petitioners for freedom. In a section on the Massachusetts “Equal Rights Movement,” which Nell clearly sees as a direct antecedent to African Americans’ actions during the late colonial and early republican eras, he expends the majority of his pages describing the failed attempt to win a charter for the militia. He completes his analysis of this

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incident with a thorough commendation of the final petition entered by Nell, Jonas Clark, and others at the Massachusetts Constitutional Convention in February of 1853. The petitioners forthrightly define themselves not only as citizens of Massachusetts but as citizens of the United States, arguing that the Militia law was unconstitutional: It is true that, by the United States Constitution, Congress is empowered “to provide for organizing, arming and disciplining the militia”; it is also true, that Congress, in “organizing” the militia, has authorised none but “white” citizens to be enrolled therein; nevertheless, it is not less true, that the law of Congress, making this unnatural distinction, is, in this particular, unconstitutional, and therefore ought to exert no controlling force over the legislation of any of the States. To organize the militia of the country is one thing; to dishonor and outrage a portion of the citizens, on any ground, is a very different thing . . . to accomplish the latter, it has no power to legislate, and resort must be had . . . to usurpation and tyranny.

The petitioners concluded by demanding that the “colored citizens of Massachusetts . . . be enrolled in the national militia.”68 When they again were denied, and those assembled even voted to exclude the petition from the convention’s record, Nell commented wryly, “the petitioners, having been virtually excluded from the pale of American citizenship by that body, had a right at least to have their protest against such an exclusion placed on the records of the Convention.”69 The legislature remained unmoved, so African American men simply created their own militias, the Union Cadets in New Bedford in 1854 and the Massasoit Guard in Boston in 1855.70 What is perhaps most significant about African American men’s antebellum quests for militia involvement is the way they played on and across the line that separated federally sponsored military service (a performance of citizenship) and armed civil disobedience (from antebellum African Americans, viewed by whites as a threat of civil unrest).71 All of their public claims to militia service were based on their demands for full citizenship rights, but the willingness of some seventy men to organize an illegal (or at least unsanctioned) militia suggests that individual members’ motivations might have been a little more radical. John S. Rock, for one, once declared his support for “insurrections,” and Remond once proposed inciting a rebellion in South Carolina (as John Brown would try to a few years later at Harper’s Ferry), only to be outvoted by former slaves who assured the assembly that without substantial organization and support, enslaved people would simply be massacred if they attempted a massive uprising.72 Watkins, too, seemed less concerned about exhibiting respectability and more interested in denouncing the racist Militia Act and those who allowed it to remain on the books.

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In a letter to the Boston Evening Transcript, defending the Massasoit Guard against attacks on its legality, Morris spoke directly to the significance the militia had for the larger question of equal rights and citizenship. Reminding white citizens of their failure to realize the nation’s democratic principles, he paused to state that “this Company is not founded on caste; its ranks are open to all citizens of good moral character . . . we now desire to walk side by side with our white fellow-citizens, and in common with them enjoy those rights and blessings which have been handed down to us by our revolutionary sires.”73 They then wrote Governor Henry J. Gardiner asking for a loan of arms from the federally supplied armory. The governor did not jump to a decision; rather, he passed the request to Attorney General John H. Clifford of New Bedford, who concluded that under existing law, loaning arms to anyone other than “free, able-bodied, white male citizens” would be a breach of federal law.74 The governor followed the attorney general’s advisement but appears to have given the Guards’ request consideration. He even closed his letter to Morris by acknowledging the “bravery with which the colored citizens, side by side with their white brethren, poured out their blood” in the Revolution and intimated that it was the constraints of federal law, not his own convictions, that led him to deny their request. Federal law hamstrung Gardiner, and whether using it as a convenient excuse to deny the request or genuinely sympathetic to African American men’s struggle to wrest meaningful citizenship rights from the state, he appealed to popular anti-Southern (antifederal) opinion while avoiding an uncomfortable show of African American military force on Massachusetts soil. Morris vowed that the Guards would try to raise money to purchase their own arms.75 African American men would not be welcomed into Massachusetts state or national militias until the midst of the Civil War. In 1862, the Militia Law was revised to allow for the enlistment of African American men. That, of course, was the law whites at the 1853 Constitutional Convention had seen as an unbreachable barrier to chartering the black militia. Massachusetts Governor John Andrew actively pursued the formation of the Massachusetts Fifty-Fourth Volunteer Infantry Regiment, the first African American Union regiment to be raised in the North. Viewed by many whites as an experiment, testing whether African American men had the mettle to fight as American soldiers, the Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts came to exemplify African American valor and sacrifice during the war. While Massachusetts moved, ever so haltingly, closer to racial equality before the law, much of the rest of the country moved in the opposite direction, retrenching before the advancing interracial battle line that equal rights gains represented. States banned or discouraged African American

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immigration. They banned interracial marriage and instituted Jim Crow laws. In 1842, as equal rights activists saw victories at the state and local level in Massachusetts, white petitioners in Indiana called for the segregation of public schools. Their plea was referred to the legislative committee on education, which produced a report recommending segregation. Borrowing from popular racialist ideologies and fears of amalgamation, the committee argued that black students were intellectually inferior to whites and, rather incoherently, that their inclusion in the schools “would ultimately tend to bring about that feeling which favour their amalgamation with our people.” Wisconsin legislators went so far as to call for the full disfranchisement of African American men in hopes that political oppression would keep them from marrying “our sisters and daughters.”76 While apologist for white supremacy might argue that interracial antipathy was “natural,” lawmakers knew full well that white supremacy and white racial “purity” were social constructions and must rest on a solid foundation of socialization and law.77 Between the repeal of Massachusetts’s interracial marriage ban in 1843 and the midst of the Civil War, sixteen states created brand new bans on interracial marriage.78 Only a handful followed Massachusetts’s lead in removing interracial marriage restrictions. Iowa legalized interracial marriage in 1851, and in 1859 Kansas omitted a restriction the territorial legislature had established in 1855. Elsewhere, checks on interracialism became even more stringent. In many states, interracial marriages were deemed void, and couples could face fines or even jail time. In 1840, Indiana had instituted a particularly harsh law, banning marriages between whites and “Negroes, blacks, mulattoes, or anyone with one eighth Negro blood” and levied a fine of $10,000 and up to twenty years in prison for the couples, and up to a $10,000 fine for ministers. In 1842, they reduced the fine to $5,000 and up to ten years in prison, still an unusually steep penalty. No two states’ marriage laws were the same. Idaho and Nevada banned marriages between whites and “Chinese.” Some states still prohibited marriages between whites and Native Americans, although the regulations were often different than for marriages between whites and African Americans. For instance, in Washington after 1855, whites were forbidden from marrying anyone with one-quarter “Negro blood” but could marry someone with less than one-half “Indian.” What was perhaps most injurious to interracial couples, however, were the laws that not only banned marriage within the state, but refused to recognize marriages contracted elsewhere or outlawed interracial cohabitation. As we have seen, one thing that made Massachusetts’s interracial marriage law manageable for some interracial families was its precision. It did not invalidate marriages contracted in states

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where they were legal, and it did not provide for the identification and punishment of couples living as husband and wife without a marriage license. This was not so elsewhere in antebellum America. Kentucky instituted a particularly harsh law in 1852, revising the original Virginia statutes that had been in effect since statehood to levy up to a $5,000 fine and then a prison term if a couple continued to cohabit after being convicted of interracial marriage. Couples in Nevada faced separate punishments for marriage or cohabitation, with up to two years in prison for interracial marriage and up to $500 and/or six months in jail for “cohabitation in a state of fornication.” New Mexico banned marriage or cohabitation only between white women and “Negro or mulatto” men. Ohio deemed both marriage and “illicit carnal intercourse” between whites and “those with visible admixture of African blood” misdemeanors with a fine of $100 and up to three months jail time. Utah was unique in sidestepping the need for an interracial marriage ban by simply banning all sexual intercourse between whites and people of African descent, levying up to $1,000 and three years in prison for white offenders and the stipulation that convicted slaves would be surrendered to the ownership of the state.79 As the nation descended into sectional conflict and war, antiamalgamation feeling escalated beyond state borders to the plane of national debate. Democrats combated the Republican Party’s regional popularity by insisting that whatever Lincoln and his ilk intended with regard to slavery’s expansion, their policies threatened Northern whites and promoted amalgamation. Correlating Republicans with the interests of African Americans was neither innovative nor particularly inaccurate, but Democrats went much further, arguing that Republicans advocated amalgamation. In Indiana, white women went to the streets carrying signs that warned men to vote Democrat and “save us from nigger husbands.”80 Stephen Douglas attempted to tar Lincoln with an amalgamationist brush. Men in Democratic torchlight parades carried banners reading “No Emancipation,” “No Miscegenation,” “No Confiscation,” “No Subjugation.”81 And antiamalgamation rhetoric achieved new heights when it birthed an entirely new term: miscegenation, which encapsulated white fear of African American men’s social equality in the Civil War era. In January 1864, New York City’s papers began advertising Croly and Wakeman’s (anonymous) pamphlet titled Miscegenation: The Theory of the Blending of the Races, Applied to the American White Man and Negro. The publicity that surrounded the Miscegenation pamphlet over the next few months revealed the perpetual centrality of interracial anxiety at the core of America’s debate over race and citizenship. The pamphlet proposed “miscegenation” as a more precise and scientific term for “amalgamation” and

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argued, with self-conscious disregard for popular claims to the contrary, that there was a natural attraction between different races. Americans must become “a yellow-skinned, black-haired people,” and the Republicans should make racial intermixture a plank in their platform for the coming election.82 Croly and Wakeman hoped to capitalize on popular distaste for interracial intimacy to discredit the Republicans and swing the election away from the party of Lincoln, possibly garnering enough Democratic support to end the war and roll back the impact of immediate emancipation. Electoral politics alone, though, do not explain the significance of their piece. The pamphlet’s political clout came from white Americans’ anxiety that white supremacy, at least as it had been upheld since the nation’s founding, was in peril. By 1864, the Civil War had brought chaos to the country’s racial landscape. Fractured as it was, racial science (and Miscegenation) offered the theory of monogenesis, the common origin of all humans regardless of race.83 African Americans had risen up in large numbers fleeing enslavement for Union lines. Lincoln had issued the Emancipation Proclamation and the Union Army relied on some 200,000 African American soldiers and sailors in its military campaign. White supremacists watched African Americans edge (dangerously) close to the point at which granting them at least nominal citizenship status seemed inevitable. Croly and Wakeman seeded their audience’s paranoia by stating, matter-of-factly that “The Republican party to-day boldly demands that every black man in the land shall be free; that he shall stand side by side with the white soldier in the defense of liberty and law; that the plantations of the South shall be transferred to him from his rebel master; that by the Government and people his services shall be recognized; that he shall receive from the white North the right hand of fellowship as the reward of his loyalty.”84 Of course there was no such consensus. But who could deny that “melaleukation” was “universal, now, throughout the South?”85 What if, as the authors argued, “the irregular alliances of to-day, will become the recognized unions of to-morrow?”86 What did this mean for American racial stock? What if emancipation did provide a measure of legal, political, and sexual equality among races? What if emancipation really did foreshadow a multiracial America? “Miscegenation” was not simply a new term for amalgamation, it was a rallying cry for vigilant white supremacy as the country moved from Civil War to a new postslavery era. In a way most abolitionists themselves failed to, Croly and Wakeman carried the radical abolitionists’ equal rights plan to its logical conclusion. Stepping blithely over the taboo against promoting amalgamation, they acknowledged that equal rights must inevitably lead to increased social intercourse between races. They gave voice and a term, “miscegenation,” to what white

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supremacists saw as the threat of advancing interracialism. The German journalist Ottilie Assing, known as a close friend or lover of Frederick Douglass, was overjoyed and impressed by what she naively believed was the authors’ willingness to champion an important and unpopular cause. She rightly noted that “it was the very issue on which even declared abolitionists, who called for complete civil equality for the Negro, could not overcome their prejudice.”87 Croly and Wakeman’s chapter “The Future—No White, No Black” includes a surprisingly faithful exposition of the equal rights claims of the most radical abolitionists and African American reformers: “The negro is rooted on this continent; we cannot remove him; we must not hold him in bondage. The wisest course is to give him his rights, and let him alone.” They continue, “and by the certain influence of our institutions, he will become a component element of the American Man.”88 It is on the eighteenth page that the Miscegenation pamphlet goes off the rails; it is shocking that even a handful of equal rights activists took this at face value. Turning to the Civil War, the authors state, “It is idle to maintain that this present war is not a war for the negro.” They continue, suggestively, “It is a war for the negro . . . it is a war . . . of amalgamation.”89 The Civil War was not simply a war for freedom, but was a war for interracial sex. Taking a cue from Jerome Holgate, they maintain that the war should continue until “the great truth shall be declared in our public documents and announced in the messages of our Presidents, that it is desirable the white man should marry the black woman and the white woman the black man.”90 Furthermore, they write that the Confederacy is strong because of white Southerners’ long history of association with African Americans. Among many other assertions, they not only exonerate the white women of the South, but hold them up as a shining example of would-be interracial lovers, hobbled by society’s restrictive conventions. “The secret of the strange infatuation of the Southern woman with the hideous barbarism of slavery” was the supposed passion for amalgamation they tried unsuccessfully to mask. “She loves the black man, and the raiment she clothes herself with is to please him.”91 Then, after stating that abolitionists Wendell Phillips, Horace Greeley, and Theodore Tilton are naturally disposed to antislavery because of their light features, they write, “where nature has free course, men like those we have indicated, whether anti-slavery or proslavery, conservative or radical, democrat or republican, will marry and be given in marriage to the most perfect specimens of the colored race.”92 The authors ride roughshod over basic understandings of white supremacy, “giving” white men to black women in marriage.93 Criticism of the pamphlet ranged from sarcasm to disgust, but there is one thing missing: surprise. Particularly considering that the pamphlet was

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not written in earnest and was the most detailed and coherently articulated proposal for interracial cooperation in the history of American political culture, one would expect that its contentions might shock their contemporaries. Some actually advocated the doctrine, as when William Wells Brown responded that “the two races, blended in one, will make a more peaceful, hardy, powerful, and intellectual race than America has ever seen before.”94 Even those who disagreed seem to have seen the pamphleteers’ contentions as consistent with certain facets of abolitionism. The editor or Springfield, Massachusetts’s Weekly Republican provided a synopsis, unusually sparing in its criticism, including an assessment that it was true to radical abolitionist sentiment and that the future American should be “of a gingerbread hue.”95 In a sardonic critique titled “A Beautiful Doctrine,” a writer for the Cleveland Plain Dealer found the pamphlet plausible enough to warn that Republicans would be handily trounced if they actually advocated it.96 They even went so far as to attribute the pamphlet to various prominent abolitionists. The Daily Ohio Statesman quoted the pamphlet, but instead of citing the anonymous authors of Miscegenation, suggested that it came straight from the pen of renowned abolitionist minister Henry Ward Beecher.97 One abolitionist apparently was interchangeable with the next. Some abolitionists embraced the pamphlet. The New York Tribune praised the suggestions offered in Miscegenation, arguing that the future American should be formed by “subjecting merely material differences to the ameliorating influence of an honest and unlimited recognition of our common nature,” or, in other words, recognizing that condition, not race, produced social difference.98 African American activist and physician James McCune Smith took the pamphlet in stride (not to mention at face value) and suggested that instead of proposing miscegenation as a Republican issue, the authors reveal its bipartisan appeal. After all, he pointed out, “almost every slave state delegalized marriage between white and blacks,” but “we have some testimony that such marriages are bound to occur where such indecent laws are abolished.”99 But most antislavery activists responded to Croly and Wakeman’s hoax with caution, worrying that interracialism was still so socially unpopular that the authors should keep their pamphlet under wraps because it could “retard the preparatory work of justice and equality” that finally seemed within reach.100 The American Anti-Slavery Standard asserted that it was “in the highest degree improbable” that there was a God-given aversion to interracial attraction but flatly denounced the suggestion that white abolitionists preferred black partners.101 Advocacy for interracial marriage was common enough that it had earned a standard rebuttal, complete with antiabolitionist warnings and tongue-in-cheek

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reminders that this small minority stood outside the parameters of majoritarian “taste.”102 Over the decades between 1843 and the Civil War, those like William Wells Brown, Wendell Phillips, Frederick Douglass, and others who did not tiptoe around the fact that interracial rights (whether marriage, integrated conveyances, or integrated schools) undermined the logic of white supremacy, rose to national prominence. Their opponents were not blind to these implications. Antiabolitionists created and fomented a conservative antiamalgamation discourse because they ascertained the implications of antislavery that even many abolitionists failed to accept: full racial equality. When Croly and Wakeman released Miscegenation into the print stream in 1864, it hit a nerve not because it was unbelievable, but because it articulated and seemed to confirm what their conservative contemporaries had come to believe about African American equal rights activists and abolitionists. In what might have been a hint that the pamphlet was more critique than affirmation, the authors leveled a challenge at abolitionists: “Whereas, the result of the last Presidential election has given the colored race on this continent its freedom, the next Presidential election should secure to every black man and woman the rest of their social and political rights; that the progressive party must rise to the height of the great argument, and not flinch from the conclusions to which they are brought by their own principles.”103 We can almost hear the shocked gasps or exultant “ayes” that escaped readers when they encountered this passage. In the eyes of slavery’s apologists, the vocal minority of abolitionists who insisted on challenging racial discrimination and barriers to social equality left a stain on all checks to slavery’s power, reach, and expansion. Furthermore, they were a convenient foil. When African Americans and their allies advocated for integrated schools, desegregated rails, or suffrage, they confirmed white supremacists’ anxiety that the “conclusions to which they are brought by their own principles” were, in fact, interracialism, integration, or social equality. By mid-January, 1864, the pamphlet was being advertised in major metropolitan newspapers. Miscegenation proliferated so quickly that within months, the term entered the American lexicon as a new label for amalgamation. People would use the two interchangeably for years to come, but newspaper reporters seemed eager to test the new word. As early as February, some papers were using miscegenation alone, with no reference to the pamphlet and without any definition or explanation. The Springfield Weekly Republican titled a brief interracial tale “Chicama: A Story of Slavery and Miscegenation.”104 The Daily Age dubbed a front-page story “Miscegenation” and proceeded to report on African American soldiers in Detroit

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who, in addition to visiting a white prostitute, brawled with white soldiers and civilians.105 The National Daily Intelligencer, likewise, used the new term while reporting on legislators who worried that Republicans had already gone too far on racial equality.106 Soon, general references to equal rights or interracial sex or socializing gave way to precise references to interracial marriage, as when the New York Herald suggested that the abolitionist minister Stephen H. Tyng was being unreasonable when he complained that no white instrumentalists would play for a mixed marriage. The reporter wrote, “By and by, when the darkeys have proved that they are worthy to be called heroes and husbands, and come back to marry the sisters and daughters of the Union League Club, none of our bands will decline to play the ‘Wedding March’—if they are well paid for it.”107 But what would miscegenation mean? Betraying strong, if confused, convictions about the dissimilarity of racial groups, commentators on both sides of the issue weighed in. Abolitionist writer Theodore Tilton affirmed his support for much of what Miscegenation suggested and in an attempt to illustrate how common racial intermixture already was, he wrote, “The Negro of the South, growing paler with every generation, will at last completely hide his face under the snow.”108 Southern slaveholders largely responsible for this racial intermixture doubtless would have been surprised to learn that a prominent abolitionist credited them with ushering African Americans into whiteness. Or would Americans become darker? Would “mahogany-colored babies . . . become quite the fashion,” as derisively suggested by one antiabolitionist in the New York Mercury?109 The Knickerbocker Magazine cited the canard that biracial people could not reproduce to predict that miscegenation would lead to the “virtual extinction” of a Southern white “race.”110 Much of the debate surrounding miscegenation mirrored the one thirty years before over amalgamation. Interracial attraction was seen as distasteful. White abolitionist women and African Americans men and women bore the brunt of criticism over “bad taste,” as when Croly and Wakeman argued that opposites attract by pointing out “the large proportion of blondes” at abolition meetings. On the other side, those who supported the right to interracial marriage argued that it was a basic matter of equal rights under the law. As Horace Greeley’s Tribune argued, the Constitution “in its most liberal interpretation” sanctioned miscegenation.111 Also, as with Holgate’s Sojourn, anxiety surrounding miscegenation stemmed from a fear that American citizens would be forced, by the government itself or by a wave of public opinion, to intermarry. Croly and Wakeman hinted at this shift when they wrote, “let the friends of humanity, then, understand that it is not by forwarding religious and educational institutions alone that they can

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bring about the Millennium . . . grosser agencies . . . will prove more effectual in ushering in the millennial man and woman.”112 An editor for the Times wrote to poke fun at the Republican Union League by suggesting that it had employed a black minister to marry interracial couples and that “it is feared that in three months every white man who is not connected by marriage with a colored family will be ‘read out’ of the party.”113 The miscegenation controversy inspired a new crop of political cartoons that revised and updated the popular amalgamation prints of the 1830s. Even more explicitly than the lithographs that warned of a society turned topsy-turvy by interracial courting, dancing, and marriage, these miscegenation prints display interracial cuddling, kissing, and procreation. Like the amalgamation prints, the “joke” twists on the assumed repugnance of interracialism to signal African Americans’ “inappropriate” acquisition of social and political stature. In Bromley and Co.’s Political Caricature No. 2 Miscegenation: Or the Millennium of Abolitionism, biracial couples enjoy strolls through the park (see Figure 5.1). In these “Miscegenation times,” white men marry black wives, black men court white women, and whites act as servants to black families. Abraham Lincoln strolls alone, notably without his (white) wife, Mary Todd Lincoln, and bowing his head low greets an interracial couple, Charles Sumner walking hand in hand with his “dear friend,” an African American woman derisively named Miss Squash. Lincoln assures her that he “shall be proud to number among my intimate friends any member of the Squash family, especially the little Squashes.” Miss Squash, who is portrayed monstrously with a caricatured mammy stature, huge lips and protruding teeth, unattractive masculine facial features juxtaposed against her bourgeois dress, reveals that she used to work as a servant for Mrs. Lincoln but now “Don’t do nuffin but gallavant round wid de white gem’men!” She then laughs with a donkey’s “he-ah, he-ah, he-ah!,” as if to signal the popular belief that biracial children will, like mules, be unable to reproduce. The two interracial couples to the right cuddle and kiss, apparently beside themselves in the rush to marry. “Adolphus” holds abolitionist lecturer Anna Dickinson close, promising her that he will be in the front row at her lecture, while an unnamed black man clutches “Julia Anna [Beecher],” “so agitated” in anticipation of having “Brodder [Henry Ward] Beecher” marry them. Bromley & Co. suggest the couple married and had a biracial child, who features in Political Caricature No. 3: Abolition Catastrophe/or the November Smash Up, in which Beecher holds a dark-complexioned baby, surrounded by other Republican notables who have caused this political conflagration. In Political Caricature No. 4 The Miscegenation Ball, mixed couples cavort around the room, a couple on the far left sways through an intimate

figure 5.1. Miscegenation: Or the Millennium of Abolitionism, Courtesy of the Library of Congress

figure 5.2. The Miscegenation Ball, Courtesy of the Library of Congress

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waltz, those in the middle of the room polka, and pairs on the far right kick up their knees in a spirited gig. In contrast to Clay’s widely circulated Amalgamation Waltz (1839) and An Amalgamation Polka (1845), only black women join black and white men at the ball. Does the creator mean to say that interracial dancing has decimated the ranks of white women? Has amalgamation or “miscegenation” been so widespread that only darkcomplexioned women remain? The portrayals of black women in the scene move from the mundane, as with a light-complexioned woman with ambiguous features mid-frame to a large-lipped caricature at right and a buxom adult Topsy, hair flying stiffly from her head, dancing Juba in the foreground. The white men in the scene are almost universally foolish, whether because they are swooning in their lust for black partners; flailing their way through a dance; or, like a number of the men left of center, leering with devilish dark looks at apparently unsuspecting courtiers. To the far right, white men cuddle vulgarly with black women.114 The woman closest to the foreground perches on her suitor’s lap, one leg suggestively hidden, perhaps wrapped around his waist. To their right, the viewer spies an interracial couple in full embrace. The woman sits on the man’s lap with her back to the viewer, her legs wrapped fully around his waist, her skirt hiding and hinting at what might be going on between them (see Figure 5.2). Intended as a political statement as much as a social one, the series of images and the Miscegenation pamphlet called white men to self-reflection: will this be your future? Your son’s future? If you vote Republican, the creators suggested, the answer was yes. An article in the World emphasized this point a few months later when it ran the headline “Miscegenation/What the Republican Party Proposes to Do with the North after Emancipation/ READING FOR WHITE MEN/The Miscegenation Pamphlet Endorsed by Republican Papers and Politicians.”115 As if the scene’s spectacular nature were not obvious, the viewer notices the she is sharing this view with a group of white children who peer curiously through a space in the ceiling, gazing upon the “One Destiny” they can anticipate in this miscegenation era. Reception of the Miscegenation pamphlet and Bromley & Co.’s antimiscegenation series shows that by the middle of the Civil War, Americans (and voters particularly) were well acquainted with a political discourse of race that used the sexualization of interracialism to discredit African American citizenship claims. The images were understood to be denunciations of African American political equality, although their imagery was entirely social and sexual. The political backlash against advancing interracialism, complete with its new shibboleth, “miscegenation,” was unleashed. But the spirit of full equality never died. It marched through the decades like a thread linking David Walker to Lydia Maria Child to William Cooper

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Nell and on to Peter Van der Mede, Jack Johnson, and Mildred and Richard Loving. Throughout the antebellum and Jim Crow eras, amalgamationists were a small if visible minority, but their utopian vision would influence equal rights activists from generation to generation. In 1867, renowned lithographer J. L. (John Lawrence) Giles put graver to plate to produce a stunningly detailed idealization of the Reconstruction process, a last glorious vision of hope for interracialism (see Figure 5.3). Giles was an accomplished engraver who showed a particular interest in portraiture, architecture, and landscapes. During the war, he produced images of Civil War officers including Ambrose Powell Hill, Stonewall Jackson, and James Longstreet, along with an intimate portrait of President Lincoln and his family.116 Giles’s Reconstruction was commissioned and designed by Horatio Bateman about whom even less is known. Bateman’s national vision, however, is quite clear.117 A proud unionist and champion of universal political freedom, he followed his Reconstruction image with a “Who’s Who” of notable American patriots. His introductory historical sketch, tracing the founding of the United States through the war and Reconstruction, ends on this heraldic note: “Slavery having been abolished—the great obstacle to progress and cause of contention will have been removed, the prejudice of color and jealousy of sections will pass away, and the People of all parts of the country that have been divided on the question of Equality and Sovereignty will congratulate each other on the happy results of Reconstruction and become strongly United as One Country and One People in interest and feeling . . . exhibiting to the world the stability and tenacity of a Government whose ‘Sovereignty is the People.’ ”118 Bateman’s newly reunited United States is an equal rights advocate’s dream. The image centers around a colonnade captured midconstruction. Groups of men, black and white, work together to raise columns representing each state, to support a dome inscribed with the map of the newly reconstituted nation. Before securing the columns, the workers remove the economic and social foundation of the former Confederate states. Their old “Foundations of Slavery” represented by a kneeling supplicant male slave before a coiffed Southern belle, are replaced by new bases representing the “Justice, Liberty, and Education” that Bateman believed defined the Northern free states.119 Above the scene, the heads of prominent historical figures from Daniel Boone and John Brown to Daniel Webster and John C. Calhoun loom out of the heavens, signaling their approval through a pair of clasped hands. As Bateman explains, these “departed spirits of prominent men,” notably including slaveholders and infamous racists like Roger B. Taney, gaze “with satisfaction on Reconstruction.”120 They surround a figure of Christ meant to personify “Peace” topped by the inscription “Do unto others as you would

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figure 5.3. Reconstruction, Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society

have them do unto you” and are flanked by Justice and Liberty. To the far left, the rest of the globe looks on with approval. The most striking aspect of Giles’s lithograph, though, is its depiction of interracialism. This new America is entirely interracial; racial (and even gender) equality has won the day. Near the Freedmen’s Bureau, families reunite and build new lives for themselves. To the right of the central dome, black and white children play together, clasping hands, before an integrated schoolhouse. To the left, black and white men mill before voting booths that announce “Universal Suffrage.” A cloudy image, perhaps meant to suggest a vision of the future, shows women, too, lining up to vote. Black couples and white couples dressed in equal finery promenade and ride in carriages pulled by one white and one black horse. Racial equality extends throughout all the ages of men. From two caskets, likely meant to represent the Civil War dead, a black soul and a white soul ascend to heaven together. Centered at the bottom of the image, two babes lie in baskets, one black and one white, wrapped in swaddling clothes reminiscent of patriotic bunting. An eagle, one of several throughout the print, flies above them

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carrying a banner that reads, “All men are born free and equal.” These two infants, surrounding by the same smudging that surrounds the image of women’s suffrage, represent not only Bateman’s hope for Reconstruction, but his aspirations for the American future. Everyone in the image is content. Everyone in the image accepts and cheers this new government founded on the premise that they are “one country and one people” regardless of race or gender. Bateman and Giles’s engraving represents the zenith of interracial progressivism in the Civil War era. True believers like Bateman, Child, Denison, Douglass, Phillips, Remond, and Nell hoped that Reconstruction would usher in the full racial revolution represented in this image. If their optimism seems tragically naïve, it might say more about the limits of our own moral imaginations than the horizons that lay before them in the newly reconstructed United States.

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he Civil War era was a moment of questioning and transition for Americans, and opponents of the radical Republican plan were dedicated to ensuring that their “principles” would not lead to the “conclusion” of interracialism. They might have. On the heels of war, some interpreted the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution as outlawing antimiscegenation laws. For instance, in the case of Peter van der Mede (“white”) and Lucy Ann Bolen (“negro”), an Evansville, Indiana, judge initially ruled that the new federal legislation nullified the long-standing Indiana ban on interracial marriages. Because the new laws permitted African Americans to “make and enforce contracts” like the civil contract of marriage, a state could not bar them from marrying whites.1 But in a landmark decision that would shape miscegenation law for decades to come, his ruling was overturned by the state supreme court, which went to practically absurd lengths to uphold the sanctity of the state’s interracial marriage prohibition over federal law. Justice Samuel H. Buskirk argued first that the Civil Rights Act of 1866 was irrelevant to the case because, he claimed, it only gave rights to African Americans in the District of Columbia and states under federal jurisdiction during Reconstruction. He went on to argue that the Fourteenth Amendment, which secured citizenship and equal protection under the law for those born and naturalized in the United States, only granted citizenship to African Americans who had not already been citizens (slaves). Using this logic, Buskirk argued that the federal reforms were not applicable to race law in Indiana. Furthermore, he asserted that marriage was no ordinary contract (as had many before him, including Massachusetts Judge Parker who came to an entirely different conclusion about interracial marriage). As such, the court upheld the

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state’s right to regulate marriage as a “God-given, civilizing, and Christianizing institution” of “inestimable importance,” the responsibility of which could and should not be surrendered to the federal government.2 In other words, marriage was the last and most sacred bastion of white supremacy, and it had to be upheld at all costs. Opponents of racial equality, particularly unreconstructed white Southerners, raised interracialism not as an ideal, but as a threat. The Republicans, as Croly and Wakeman had written, brought emancipation and black suffrage, and might, if not checked, “secure to every black man and woman the rest of their social and political rights.”3 White supremacists believed they must resist, and resist they did. Forty-one states maintained laws banning interracial marriage at one point or another in U.S. history, and while laws in the colonies and early republic generally prohibited marriages between whites and African and Native Americans, late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century laws extended these bans to hyphenated Chinese, Japanese, Korean, “Mongolian,” “Malay,” and “Hindu” Americans.4 When the Supreme Court declared antimiscegenation laws unconstitutional in Loving v. Virginia (1967) and initiated the slow and laborious process by which they would be challenged and ultimately repealed, sixteen states still banned interracial marriage.5 And as with antebellum bans on marriage, these laws were more than just marriage laws. In the years between the Civil War and the twentiethcentury Civil Rights Movement, antimiscegenation laws were just one part of a larger defense against what came to be understood as social equality, social intercourse across the color line that went beyond the scope of conceivable rights that could be conferred by law or judicial opinion.6 Justice Henry Brown’s majority ruling in the Supreme Court’s 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson case explicitly drew a distinction between political and social equality. He wrote, “If the civil and political rights of both races be equal, one cannot be inferior to the other civilly or politically. If one race be inferior to the other socially, the Constitution of the United States cannot put them on the same plane.”7 During Jim Crow, reactionaries used the threat of social equality, particularly the extreme of miscegenation, to try to quash even basic political rights gains for African Americans. In an infamous instance in 1921, President Warren G. Harding expressed his approval of equal political rights for African American men and then stated in the same breath, “men of both races may well stand uncompromisingly against every suggestion of Social Equality . . . Racial amalgamation there cannot be.”8 Many African Americans in attendance applauded, whether because they were proponents of such a doctrine or had been inured by white allegations that any demand for social equality meant forced miscegenation. In his attack

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on Harding’s stance, W. E. B. Du Bois cut to the heart of white defenses against social equality, writing, “Let us henceforward frankly admit that which we hitherto have always known; that no system of social uplift which begins by denying the manhood of a man can end by giving him a free ballot, a real education and a just wage.”9 For Du Bois, as for Remond and his antebellum forebears, social equality was one step on the road to full equal rights. One could not be realized without the other. In Loving v. Virginia, the Supreme Court heard the case of Mildred and Richard Loving, a couple from Virginia who had been jailed for being interracially married and cohabitating in violation of the state’s Racial Integrity Act. The American Civil Liberties Union’s (ACLU) brief in the case made many of the same arguments activists had in favor of interracial marriage in antebellum Massachusetts. It highlighted the ill effects the law had on families and children: they would “not be able to inherit from one another; their children would be deemed illegitimate; they could lose Social Security benefits,” among others.10 It argued that miscegenation laws promoted licentiousness, or in the twentieth-century’s language, would “perpetuate and foster illicit exploitative sex relationships,” alluding to nonmarriage relationships between white men and black women that had been common and unprosecuted from slavery through Jim Crow.11 Other amicus briefs argued the case for interracial marriage rights on the basis of religious freedom, dismantled scientific racism, and appealed for colorblindness in the law.12 Ultimately, however, the ACLU’s lawyers made their case on the grounds of equal protection: since the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment, it was simply unconstitutional to deny someone the right to marry based on race. When the court decided Loving, the justices placed interracial marriage firmly in the realm of equal rights protected by the Constitution of the United States. Chief Justice Earl Warren, writing the majority opinion in the 7:1 ruling, stated that “Marriage is one of the ‘basic civil rights of man,’ fundamental to our very existence and survival,” and “restricting the freedom to marry solely because of racial classification violates the central meaning of the Equal Protection Clause” of the Fourteenth Amendment.13 The Loving decision was a clear statement about the unconstitutionality of race-based marriage laws, uniting the Fourteenth Amendment with an evolving American understanding of racism and racial classification. As with Massachusetts’s ban on interracial marriage 125 years earlier, however, changing the law did not necessarily correspond with a change in attitudes. In the months after the Loving decision, counties and cities continued to deny couples marriage licenses based on their apparent interracial status. In 1970, a Mississippi couple faced a court-ordered injunction brought on

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by a lobbying of a group of segregationists. During the same year, soldiers stationed in Alabama and Georgia were denied marriage licenses by local officials, and the federal government had to bring suit against the localities. Despite a decision from the highest court in the land, states refused to acknowledge the unconstitutionality of a law that barred interracial couples from marrying. In time, the states with remaining miscegenation laws repealed them, from Maryland’s repeal in 1967 and Virginia’s just after the Loving decision to the very tardy 1986 Delaware repeal.14 Perhaps most shocking, when, in 1999, South Carolinians called a referendum on a bill to repeal the outdated ban on marriages between a white and a “negro or mulatto,” that had graced the state constitution since 1895, some 40 percent of voters opposed the repeal, and over a dozen counties voted against it by majorities over 70 percent.15 Even with continued disapproval, public opinion and practice has shifted in favor of more interracial relationship and marriages. Census data from 2010 indicates that there are over 5.3 million interracial or “interethnic” marriages in the United States, constituting approximately 10 percent of marriages nationwide, up from 0.7 percent in the 1960s. These statistics mask dissimilarities among gender and racial categories. For instance, only 9 percent of whites enter interracial marriages, while 28 percent of Asians do. Only 9 percent of African American women marry interracially while 36 percent of Asian women do. The numbers vary by region, too, with the highest rates of interracial and interethnic marriages in the Western states; 22 percent of newlyweds in the West married “out” of their race in 2010, while only 11 percent in the Northeast and Midwest did.16 For cohabitating unmarried couples, nationwide, the numbers are even higher, with 18 percent of opposite-sex unmarried couples and 21 percent of same-sex unmarried couples in interracial or interethnic relationships.17 In our own time, bans on same-sex marriage offer a revealing parallel to laws against interracial marriage. These laws are by no means identical to miscegenation laws, nor do they all have the same intended impact that miscegenation laws did, namely, undergirding a racial caste system for generations of U.S. history. In fact, scholars of same-sex marriage law are engaged in a long-standing debate over the legitimacy of what they have come to call the “Loving analogy.”18 The analogy posits that the Loving decision’s declaration that marriage is “one of the basic civil rights of man” that cannot be denied based on race is applicable to marriages between those of the same sex. Some argue that the analogy simply does not apply because same-sex marriage, viewed by these dissenters as an entirely new way of understanding marriage, is not the same as removing a racial barrier to heterosexual marriage.19 Others have noted that the analogy is useful because

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it challenges us to consider the role of heterosexual marriage as normative in our society and possible correlations between its restrictiveness and the now widely rejected restrictions of miscegenation laws.20 In the face of this ambivalence, it is notable that arguments for same-sex marriage rights and legal decisions repealing bans on same-sex marriage have offered language and rationales that are strikingly similar to earlier arguments for interracial marriage rights. The 1996 Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) represented an attempt at the federal level to define marriage as an institution that can only exist between one man and one woman. Between 1998 and 2008, thirty-one states followed, passing laws that banned same-sex marriage, in most cases by altering their constitutions to define marriage as between a man and woman. But in recent years, other states have provided marriage rights to same-sex couples, federal rulings have challenged the constitutionality of bans on same-sex marriage, and as of the moment I write this, recent rulings appear to offer same-sex couples access to legal marriage in thirty-five states. The movement for same-sex marriage rights shares a great deal with the much earlier fight for interracial marriage rights in Massachusetts. In both cases, activists found success by highlighting not just equal rights arguments, but moral rhetoric about the importance of marriage, the protection of children, and the well-being of families. In the antebellum era and today, activists sometimes found themselves constrained by the language and strategies selected by movement leaders, leading to criticism and ambivalence. And activists in both cases built successful coalitions that contained disparate aims and objectives, different arguments, and contradicting commitments. The arguments for same-sex marriage today not only draw upon the precedent set by the more recent Loving decision but, in sometimes surprising ways, mirror those made by activists in favor of interracial marriage rights in the antebellum era. While the equal protection argument won the day in the Loving case, strict equal rights arguments in favor of legalizing samesex marriage have yet to result in a clear statement about the constitutionality of state laws banning same-sex marriage. In addition to the basic equal protection analogy to Loving, proponents of marriage rights have argued that legalizing same-sex marriage is a moral imperative, protects families and children, and affirms the sanctity and social significance of the marriage institution. Rulings in favor of same-sex marriage rights show that advocates, legislators, and judges often go beyond simple equal rights arguments to explain precisely how the denial of marriage rights and responsibilities to same-sex couples has a negative moral or social impact on families.21 When Massachusetts became the first state to sanction legal marriage

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for same-sex couples in Goodrich v. Department of Public Health (2003), the well-being of children and families weighed heavily in the majority opinion, as it had in the arguments over interracial marriage rights in the 1840s. While the state claimed that restricting same-sex marriage promoted “optimal” conditions for child rearing, which they claimed existed only in heterosexual two-parent households, chief justice Margaret Marshall argued the opposite. Marshall wrote that denying same-sex couples access to marriages prevented “children of same-sex couples from enjoying the immeasurable advantages that flow from the assurance of ‘a stable family structure in which children will be reared, educated, and socialized.’ ” Because same-sex couples were denied marital benefits, were required to go through complex second-parent adoption processes, and were excluded from guidelines for child support and custody in the event of divorce, the children of same-sex couples faced an undue burden because the state denied them equity. The justice concluded, “It cannot be rational under our laws, and indeed it is not permitted, to penalize children by depriving them of State benefits because the State disapproves of their parents’ sexual orientation.”22 Similarly, when the Supreme Court ruled section 3 of DOMA unconstitutional in Windsor v. United States (2013), the majority opinion stated that the law had sought to impose a disability on individuals in same-sex couples, in contradiction to the privileges they had been afforded by the state (New York’s) marriage laws.23 In particular, the justices argued that the well-being of children and families was at stake. Justice Anthony Kennedy stated that DOMA “humiliates tens of thousands of children now being raised by same-sex couples” by denying their families the dignity that heterosexual families are afforded.24 Furthermore, he noted that DOMA denied or reduced benefits that gay or lesbian survivors could claim after the loss of a spouse, benefits that were an “integral part of family security.” The example the justice offered went even further in arguing the importance of marriage for the economic support of children, citing the Social Security Survivor Benefit that is afforded a surviving partner who cares for the couple’s child.25 Like Lydia Maria Child, William Lloyd Garrison, and George Bradburn before them, Marshall and Kennedy noted that discriminatory laws governing marriage do not simply punish consenting adults in relationships sometimes deemed deviant in their time and place; they cast innocent children into dishonor and poverty. Those who advocate for same-sex marriage rights find themselves both empowered and constrained by the language of morality and metaphors of legal equality that they employ to win converts. Arguments that posit marriage rights as a moral imperative can be extremely powerful, especially because they stem from the central, honored, and embattled place that mar-

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riage holds at the heart of our society. The movement to provide marriage rights for same-sex couples, like moral reform arguments in favor of interracial marriage rights, is predicated on society’s high regard for marriage as an institution. Using this formulation, some activists foreground an argument that including gay men and lesbians in marriage will “assert the morality” of same-sex relationships.26 Former editor of the New Republic, Andrew Sullivan, argues for the importance of marriage equality to provide gay and lesbian children a vision of their future, “not in terms of sex, or sexual practices, or bars, or subterranean activity, but in terms of their future life stories, their potential loves, their eventual chance at some kind of constructive happiness.”27 Gay and lesbian marriages, then, may provide a potent means of breaking long-held stereotypes that limit not only the broader society’s inclusion of Lesbian/Gay/Bisexual/Transsexual/Queer (LGBTQ) cultures, but gay and lesbian youth’s very hopes and dreams. On the other hand, one can sense the frustration some feel with this moralist language in the concurring opinion Justice John Greaney offered in the Goodrich case. He concurred in the final decision but argued that the court ought simply to have ruled the state ban on same-sex marriages unconstitutional using more “traditional equal rights analysis,” not moralist arguments about marriage, children, and families. In short, because the Massachusetts state constitution states that “all men are born free and equal” and “equality under the law shall not be denied or abridged because of sex, race, color, creed or national origin,” he argued that it was patently unconstitutional to deny people the right to marry based on their sex.28 For Greaney, it was clear that a simple equal rights argument was sufficient; moral arguments were a distraction. Because judges have been hesitant to embrace the Loving analogy and apply constitutional equal protection to the rights of same-sex couples to marry in all states, no matter their gender or sexuality, courts have begun to dismantle same-sex marriage bans on more complex grounds. In Windsor, Justice Kennedy’s opinion stated that the federal government could not deny an individual what the state had granted: “a lawful status . . . reflect[ing] both the community’s considered perspective on the historical roots of the institution of marriage and its evolving understanding of the meaning of equality.” According to the judge, DOMA violated due process and equal protection afforded by the federal government because its avowed purpose is to “impose a disadvantage, a separate status, and so a stigma upon all who enter into same-sex marriages” that are lawful in their own states.29 This “second-class marriages” the law forced same-sex couples to inhabit did not, the justice argued, stand up to constitutional scrutiny under the Fifth Amendment right to due process or the Fourteenth Amendment right

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to equal protection.30 Subsequently, federal judges have reassessed state laws and deemed bans on same-sex marriage unconstitutional because, the ruling judges argued, they targeted gay men and lesbians for discrimination or failed to provide equal protection under the law. Still, the Supreme Court has not gone so far as to declare that state bans on same-sex marriage are unconstitutional. In Windsor, the court affirmed states’ right to create marriage laws, including laws that exclude same-sex couples from the right to marry. In other words, American lawmakers and much of the American public continue to disagree over whether denying one the right to marry based on sexuality (as opposed to race, in the Loving case) is a violation of one’s constitutional rights. One of the approaches to providing legal equality for same-sex couples without including gay men or lesbians in the institution of marriage, per se, has been to provide civil unions to same-sex couples, while denying them solemnized marriages. Vermont became the first state to provide this sort of legal equality to same-sex couples after Baker v. State of Vermont in 1999. In Baker, the Vermont Supreme Court demanded that the legislature provide legal rights to same-sex couples but did not require that they be granted marriages. Subsequently, other states have used the reasoning in Baker to restrict marriage rights while providing civil unions.31 The Windsor decision did not challenge these laws, but its implementation has. After Windsor, same-sex married couples in Massachusetts could access federal benefits that same-sex couples in a civil union could not. Furthermore, married heterosexual couples could access marriage benefits that couples in civil unions, even in the same state, could not. Because many of the federal benefits now afforded same-sex married couples are not granted to those in civil unions, states that allow same-sex couples to enter civil unions but ban same-sex marriage appear to have implemented separate and unequal systems. The movement for marriage rights has enjoyed a series of notable victories since Windsor, but it is important to note that there is no one, unified same-sex marriage movement. Disparate, sometimes contradicting, constituencies work in concert to affect change. And as with our antebellum activists, there is considerable mutual critique among LGBTQ activists, themselves. Most notably, feminist and queer critics feel that the focus on same-sex marriage as a means of achieving equality is too limiting. A more inclusive program would address broader issues of discrimination and equity for LGBTQ people (those who marry, and those who do not). These critics charge that same-sex marriage will simply elevate otherwise normative (middle-class, gender-conforming) gay and lesbian people in the eyes of the public while further stigmatizing poorer and single LGBTQ people.32 In other words, by focusing on same-sex marriage, and ushering LGBTQ people

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into this most quintessentially normal family structure, the movement is on a path to strengthen the institution of marriage and Americans’ investment in it, not fundamentally change American prejudices against LGBTQ cultures, offer queer or feminist critiques of marriage as an institution, or provide greater benefits for families headed by unmarried people.33 Others argue that the same-sex marriage movement makes gay men and lesbians assimilate to heteronormativity, the system that stigmatized them in the first place; Lisa Duggan dubs a new term, “homonormativity,” for the way she believes same-sex marriage will imprint social norms for gays and lesbians.34 Critics cite the same-sex marriage movement, itself, as evidence that the American public is perhaps less prepared to challenge negative views and practices that impact more marginalized LGBTQ people than it is to grant gay men and lesbians the rights and responsibilities associated with civil marriage. While the vast majority of advocates for greater equality for LGBTQ people support same-sex marriage rights as at least part of the larger struggle, those who criticize the focus on same-sex marriage worry that marriage and the accompanying normality that married same-sex couples might achieve simply does not do enough to create real equity for LGBTQ people in society.35 I am reminded of the African American activists who met in Boston’s Belknap Street Church in February of 1843. They cheered the momentum that would lead to interracial marriage rights but were unconvinced that their white neighbors were truly dedicated to changing the status quo that left them stigmatized and oppressed. They goaded Massachusetts whites, wondering if “our fellow-citizens will be as ready to do right by the oppressed freeman, as by the fugitive slave.”36 In antebellum Massachusetts, reformers secured interracial marriage in 1843 but did not affirm the rightness of interracialism, or social equality, across the color line. Critics of samesex marriage provide a similar, cautious, critical check for today’s marriage rights movement. The truth is that in the antebellum era, as today, activists could not predict the consequences of the change they hoped to create. Same-sex marriage, like interracial marriage, is part of a larger whole, and broad social equity may be much more difficult to achieve. But coalitions of disparate groups, those who foreground equal rights and the Loving analogy, those who wish to protect families and children, those who seek the normalizing influence of legal marriage, and even those who critique the movement, have collaborated to provide same-sex marriage to couples in over half of the United States. If we take the movement to legalize interracial marriage in Massachusetts as a guide, this diversity of constituencies and a broad set of arguments offers same-sex marriage advocates multiple avenues to victory.

Notes

Introduction 1. “Wendell Phillips on the Fourth,” New York Herald, July 7, 1863, 4. 2. “Wendell Phillips on the Fourth,” Harrisburg Patriot, July 16, 1863, 5. 3. David Goodman Croly and George Wakeman, Miscegenation: A Theory of the Blending of the Races Applied to the American White Man and Negro (New York: H. Dexter, Hamilton, 1864). 4. “Speech of Wendell Phillips, Esq. at Framingham, July 4, 1863,” Liberator, July 7, 1863, 110. 5. For a detailed analysis of the Jennison-Walker cases and Brom and Bett v. Ashley, which explains that while little contemporary evidence cites the Walker cases as precedent for emancipation in Massachusetts, the decision in Brom and Bett v. Ashley and circumstances surrounding freedom suits after Caldwell v. Jennison suggest that it was understood to outlaw slavery, see Arthur Zilversmit, “Quok Walker, Mumbet, and the Abolition of Slavery in Massachusetts,” William and Mary Quarterly 25, no. 4 (October 1968): 624. 6. For a concise statement, see petitions, House Unpassed Legislation, 1842 Docket 1153, Massachusetts Archives. 7. Free African American men were granted the rights to vote and hold office along with white men according to the Massachusetts state constitution. 1780 Massachusetts Constitution, “Declaration of Rights,” #9. 8. On the characteristics of antebellum citizens, see Nancy Isenberg, Sex and Citizenship in Antebellum America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), xii, xiv. On the long history of American women and the proscribed duties of citizenship, see Linda K. Kerber, No Constitutional Right to Be Ladies: Women and the Obligations of Citizenship (New York: Hill and Wang, 1998). 9. Kunal M. Parker, “Making Blacks Foreigners: The Legal Construction of Former Slaves in Post-Revolutionary Massachusetts,” Utah Law Review 75 (2001): 4. 10. Stephen Kantrowitz, More than Freedom: Fighting for Black Citizenship in a White Republic, 1829–1889 (New York: Penguin Press, 2012), 34.

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11. I use “membership” here following the framework William Novak establishes for changing views of citizenship in the antebellum age of association. See William J. Novak, “The Legal Transformation of Citizenship in Nineteenth-Century America,” in The Democratic Experiment: New Directions in American Political History, ed. Meg Jacobs et al. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), 105. 12. In her comprehensive history of the relationship between miscegenation law and white supremacy, Peggy Pascoe rightly identifies “miscegenation” as a replacement for “amalgamation,” “providing the rhetorical means of channeling the belief that interracial marriage was unnatural into the foundation of postCivil War white supremacy.” Peggy Pascoe, What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 1–2. Tavia Nyong’o provides a thoughtful précis of the etymological distinctiveness of amalgamation, as not simply a “scientific” or cultural term for interracial sex but as a more ancient one suggesting a “spiritual crucible for transforming America, body and soul, just as alchemists sought in gross matter the mirror of the soul’s transfiguration.” Tavia Nyong’o, Amalgamation Waltz: Race, Performance, and the Ruses of Memory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 74. And indeed his purpose is an important one: to reveal how the “spurious issue” suggested by amalgamation (nonnormative or as we might now say “queer” individuals) challenged and transformed the bounds that sought to govern them. However, I believe it is critical to recognize that as a measure of cultural literacy on the streets of antebellum American cities, particularly by the middle of the 1830s, “amalgamation” was a clear and powerful signifier of interracial sex. Further, it was a tool in the construction of racialized politics that is analogous to “miscegenation” from Reconstruction through the Jim Crow period. See Martha Hodes, “The Sexualization of Reconstruction Politics: White Women and Black Men in the South after the Civil War,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 3, no. 3 (January 1993): 402– 417. I reject, along with Nyong’o, the suggestion that “amalgamation” could be used now as a milder signifier for “miscegenation”; see Nyong’o, Amalgamation Waltz, 75, 192n21, where he refers to David Hollinger, “Amalgamation and Hypodescent: The Question of Ethnoracial Mixture in the History of the United States,” American Historical Review 108, no. 5 (2003): 1387. 13. A. Leon Higginbotham, Jr., and Barbara K. Kopytoff, “Racial Purity and Interracial Sex in the Law of Colonial and Antebellum Virginia,” in Interracialism: Black-White Intermarriage in American History, Literature, and Law, ed. Werner Sollors (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 82; Martha Hodes, White Women, Black Men: Illicit Sex in the Slave South (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997), 63. 14. Peter Wallenstein, Tell the Court I Love My Wife: Race, Marriage and Law—An American History (New York: Palgrave/Macmillan, 2002), 3, 8. 15. Hodes, “The Sexualization of Reconstruction Politics, 403. 16. Wallenstein, Tell the Court I Love My Wife, 8; Pascoe, What Comes Naturally. 17. Elise Virginia Lemire, “Miscegenation”: Making Race in America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 8.

Notes to Pages 6–11

189

18. Peggy Pascoe, “Miscegenation Law, Court Cases and Ideologies of Race in Twentieth-Century America,” Journal of American History 83, no. 1 (June 1996): 44–69; Pascoe, What Comes Naturally, 2. 19. Lemire, Miscegenation, 4. 20. Louis Ruchames, “Race, Marriage, and Abolition in Massachusetts,” Journal of Negro History 40, no. 3 (July 1955): 273; Bruce Laurie, Beyond Garrison: Anti-Slavery and Social Reform (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 112. 21. Laurie, Beyond Garrison, 111. This agreement promised Democratic support for a number of the Liberty Party’s civil rights measures in exchange for Democratic control of the Governorship and legislature. George A. Levesque, “Politicians in Petticoats”: Interracial Sex and Legislative Politics in Antebellum Massachusetts,” New England Journal of Black Studies No. 3 (1983): 40–59; Sara Dubow, “Not a Virtuous Woman Among Them: Political Culture, Antislavery Politics, and the Repeal of the Marriage Ban in Ante Bellum Massachusetts,” (seminar paper, University of Massachusetts Amherst, 1995). 22. Laurie, Beyond Garrison, 111–112. 23. By signaling the “moral” aspect of marriage rights advocates’ arguments, I mean specifically sexual and gender morality (as explained in Chapter 3), and particularly the claim that the interracial marriage ban promoted “licentiousness.” In his work on majoritarian politics, Kyle Volk accurately identified morality as an important factor in these debates but identifies “racial equality” as the moral value at issue. Racial equality is unquestionably central to this debate, but in order to disentangle the discrete lines of argument for and against the marriage ban, I have chosen to employ a more limited definition and one that I think contributed to marriage rights advocates’ 1843 victory. See Kyle Volk, “Majority Rule, Minority Rights: The Christian Sabbath, Liquor, Racial Amalgamation, and Democracy in Antebellum America” (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 2008), 241.

1. Amalgamation and the Massachusetts Ban on Interracial Marriage 1. Governor Dudley to the Lords of Trade, January 31, 1710, in “Province Laws 1705–1706,” The Acts and Resolves, Public and Private, of the Province of the Massachusetts Bay vol. 1 (Boston: Wright & Potter, 1869), 578–580. 2. Edmund Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York: W. W. Norton, 1975). 3. Notably, in the Slave Code of 1705, Virginia legislators removed the prohibition on white marriages to Native Americans, decriminalizing marriages like that between Pocahontas and John Rolfe. “An Act Concerning Servants and Slaves,” in William Waller Hening, Hening’s Statutes at Law, Being a Collection of all the Laws of Virginia from the First Session of the Legislature, in the Year 1619, reprint ed. (Charlottesville, VA: Jamestown Foundation, 1969), 3:453–454. For analysis, see A. Leon Higginbotham, Jr., and Barbara K. Kopytoff, “Racial Purity and Interracial Sex in the Law of Colonial and Antebellum

190

4.

5. 6.

7. 8. 9.

10. 11.

12.

Notes to Pages 11–13

Virginia,” in Interracialism: Black-White Intermarriage in American History, Literature, and Law, ed. Werner Sollors (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 106–108. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1970, 2 vols. (Washington, DC, 1975), 2:1168; Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America. (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1998) 369; Andrew Jackson O’Shaughnessy, An Empire Divided: The American Revolution and the British Caribbean (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000). Note that this classification is absolutely time sensitive; by the turn of the next century and the establishment of a highly profitable interstate slave trading system between the Upper South slaveholding states, such as Virginia, and the cotton-producing plantations of the Lower South and Southwest, exporting African Americans engaged in illicit sex might have been advantageous for Virginians. See for instance, Steven Deyle, Carry Me Back: The Domestic Slave Trade in American Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005); Adam Rothman, Slave Country: American Expansion and the Origins of the Deep South (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005). Berlin, Many Thousands Gone, 8. For a legal discussion of this act and subsequent amendments, see Appleton Howe’s Senate Committee Report, March 4, 1841, in House Unpassed Legislation, 1841, Docket 998, Massachusetts Archives. On the larger national significance of such laws, see Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York: Norton, 1975), 331; Higginbotham and Kopytoff, “Racial Purity and Interracial Sex in the Law of Colonial and Antebellum Virginia,” 107; Michael Grossberg, Governing the Hearth: Law and the Family in Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985), 127. Howe Report, House Unpassed Legislation, 1841 Docket 998, MA. No records exist for the 1786 session. Peggy Pasoe, What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 1. Kathleen M. Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996); John Wood Sweet, Bodies Politic: Negotiating Race in the American North, 1730–1830 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003); Clare A. Lyons, Sex among the Rabble: An Intimate History of Gender and Power in the Age of Revolution, Philadelphia, 1730–1830 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006). Kunal M. Parker, “Making Blacks Foreigners: The Legal Construction of Former Slaves in Post-Revolutionary Massachusetts,” Utah Law Review 75 (2001): 9. On the widespread appeal and popularity of natural science in the early antebellum period, see William Partin Smallwood and Mabel Sarah Coon Smallwood, Natural History and the American Mind (New York: Columbia University Press, 1941); Lynn Barber, The Heyday of Natural History: 1820–1870 (London: Jonathan Cape, 1980). Stephen J. Gould, “American Polygeny and Craniometry before Darwin: Blacks and Indians as Separate and Inferior Species,” in The “Racial” Economy of Sci-

Notes to Pages 13–15

13.

14.

15.

16.

17.

18.

19.

20.

21.

22.

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ence: Toward a Democratic Future, ed. Sandra G. Harding (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 90. Elise Lemire, “Miscegenation”: Making Race in America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 99–100; Petrus Camper, Über den natürlichen Unterschied der Gesichtszüge in Menschen (Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin— Preußischer Kulturbesitz, 1792) figures, cited in Lemire, Miscegenation, 101; Charles White, An Account of the Regular Gradation of Man (London: C. Dilly, 1799), 51. John P. Jackson and Nadine M. Weidman, Race, Racism and Science: Social Impact and Interaction (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2005), 39. Charles Caldewell, MD, Thoughts on the Original Unity of the Human Race (New York: E. Bliss, 1830); for discussion, see George M. Frederickson, The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817–1914, 2nd ed. (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), 73. Samuel Morton, Crania Americana, or, a Comparative View of the Skulls of Various Aboriginal Nations of North and South America (Philadelphia: John Pennington, 1839), 88; Gould, “American Polygeny and Craniometry,” 101. George A. Levesque, “ ‘Politicians in Petticoats’: Interracial Sex and Legislative Politics in Antebellum Massachusetts,” New England Journal of Black Studies No. 3 (1983): 50–51; New Hampshire Gazette, April 23, 1839; “Middlesex Senatorial Candidates,” Liberator, November 1, 1839; Boston Phoenix to Liberator regarding Bradburn’s call for repeal, February 7, 1840; “Senate,” Barre Gazette, March 19,1841; “Violation of the Intermarriage Law,” Barre Gazette, November 11, 1842; for the mulatto as “degraded,” see “Black and White Intermarriages,” Middletown Connecticut Constitution, February 22, 1843; “Encouragement to Amalgamationists,” Barre Gazette, June 9, 1843. J. C. Nott, “The Mulatto a Hybrid—Probable Extermination of the Two Races if the Whites and Blacks Are Allowed to Intermarry,” American Journal of Medical Sciences 6 (1843): 252–256; William Stanton, The Leopard’s Spots: Scientific Attitudes toward Race in America, 1815–59 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960), 77; Lemire, Miscegenation, 111. Samuel Morton, “On the Infrequency of Mixed Offspring between European and Australian Races,” Proceedings of the Academy of Natural Sciences Philadelphia 5 (1851): 173–175; Gould, “American Polygeny and Craniometry,” 101. James Cowles Prichard, Researches into the Physical History of Mankind (London: Arch, 1851, orig pub. 1813); Samuel George Morton, “Hybridity in Animals Considered in Reference to the Unity of the Human Species,” American Journal of Science 3 (1847): 39–50, 203–212. Hosea Easton, “A Treatise on the Intellectual Character, and Civil and Political Condition of the Colored People of the U. States; and the Prejudice Exercised Towards Them: With a Sermon on the Duty of the Church to Them,” in George Price and James Brewer Stewart, To Heal the Scourge of Prejudice: The Life and Writings of Hosea Easton (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999), 67. William Stanton, The Leopard’s Spots: Scientific Attitudes toward Race in American 1815–59 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960), 5.

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Notes to Pages 15–17

23. Samuel Stanhope Smith, An Essay on the Causes of the Variety of Complexion and Figure in the Human Species (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1965 [orig. pub. 1811]); Stanton, The Leopard’s Spots, 6; George M. Frederickson, The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817–1914, 2nd ed. (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), 72; Joanne Pope Melish, “The ‘Condition’ Debate and Racial Discourse in the Antebellum North,” Journal of the Early Republic (Winter, 1999): 651–672. 24. David G. Croly, and George Wakeman, Miscegenation; the Theory of the Blending of the Races, Applied to the American White Man and Negro (New York: H. Dexter, Hamilton, 1864), 3–6, 13. 25. John William Draper, Human Physiology, Statistical and Dynamical; or, the Conditions and Course of the Life of Man (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1856), 565, 568; Stanton, The Leopard’s Spots, 170. 26. “Amalgamation in Ohio,” reprinted in the Liberator, December 14, 1833. 27. [Buffalo Hotels], New Hampshire Gazette, September 9, 1834. 28. “Riot in Columbia, PA,” Liberator, October 11, 1834. 29. “A Failure,” Salem Gazette, July 31, 1835. 30. “Practical Amalgamation, Almost,” see the story printed in the Portland Eastern Argus, reprinted from the Commercial Gazette (Boston), August 1, 1835. 31. “Amalgamation,” New Bedford Mercury, April 29, 1836. 32. “A Whole Hog Abolitionist,” New Hampshire Post, July 18, 1836. 33. Leyland Winfield Meyer, The Life and Times of Colonel Richard M. Johnson of Kentucky (New York, Columbia University, 1932); David Mills, “The VicePresident and the Mulatto,” Huffington Post, April 26, 2007. 34. Portsmouth Journal, October 10, 1835. 35. “Marriage Extraordinary,” Lexington (Ky) Observer, reprinted in Liberator, December 8, 1832, 194. 36. From the Liberator commentary on “Marriage Extraordinary,” December 8, 1832, 194. 37. W. P. P. from New Bedford, “The Kentucky Marriage,” Liberator, December 22, 1832. 38. Garrison began his attack on the popular antiamalgamation sentiment circulating throughout the press by exclaiming “Here is a tempest, indeed!—Mr. Scott, like a virtuous and honorable man, chose to be legally united in wedlock with the object of his attachment, although her skin was somewhat darker than his own.” See “Marriage Extraordinary,” Liberator, December 8, 1832, 194. 39. Johnson was rumored to have slain Tecumseh. For instance, see Asahel Langworthy, A Biographical Sketch of Col. Richard M. Johnson of Kentucky (New York: Saxon and Miles, 1843), 26. 40. On Johnson’s relationships and his political careers, see Robert Bolt, “Vice President Richard M. Johnson of Kentucky: Hero of the Thames—Or the Great Amalgamator?” Register of the Kentucky Historical Society 75 (July 1977). 41. Lemire, Miscegenation; Leslie M. Harris, “From Abolitionist Amalgamators to ‘Rulers of the Five Points:’ The Discourses of Interracial Sex and Reform in Antebellum New York City,” in Sex, Love, Race: Crossing Boundaries in North

Notes to Pages 17–20

42.

43.

44.

45.

46.

47.

48.

49.

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American History, ed. Martha Hodes (New York: New York University Press, 1999). Large antiamalgamation riots occurred in New York; Philadelphia; Lancaster County, Pennsylvania; Hartford, Connecticut; and Utica, New York. George W. Price and James Brewer Stewart, To Heal the Scourge of Prejudice: The Life and Writings of Hosea Easton (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999), 21; Benjamin Quarles, Black Abolitionists (London: Oxford University Press, 1969), 38–40. David Grimsted estimates that in 1835 alone there were at least fifty racially motivated mobbings. See David Grimsted, American Mobbing: 1828–1861 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 4. “Abolition Riots,” Newport Mercury, July 12,1834; “New York Riots,” New Bedford Mercury, July 19, 1834; “New York Riots,” Farmer’s Gazette, July 19, 1834; “Reprinted from New England Galaxy,” Liberator, August 2, 1834. On mobbing in the 1830s, generally, see Carl E. Prince, “ ‘The Great Riot Year’: Jacksonian Democracy and Patterns of Violence in 1834,” Journal of the Early American Republic 1 (Spring 1985): 1–19; Leonard Richards, Gentlemen of Property and Standing; Anti-Abolition Mobs in Jacksonian America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970); Grimsted, American Mobbing: 1828–1861. Craig Steven Wilder, “ ‘N____ School’: The Plight of Noyes Academy in Canaan, New Hampshire,” New England Identities, Black New England Conference, 2006, Dartmouth, NH. J. M. W. Yerrinton, The Boston Mob of ‘Gentlemen of Property and Standing’: Proceedings of the Anti-Slavery Meeting Held in Stacy Hall, Boston, on the Twentieth Anniversary of the Mob of October 21, 1835 (Boston: R. F. Wallcut, 1855); William Lloyd Garrison, Helen Eliza Garrison: A Memorial (Cambridge, MA: Riverside Press, 1876); Vincent Y. Bowditch, Life and Correspondence of Henry Ingersoll Bowditch (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1902), 100; Jack Tager, Boston Riots: Three Centuries of Social Violence (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2001). In the decades following the Civil War, this was the incident most frequently described by reminiscent aging abolitionists indicating that they then felt vindicated for the social ostracism they had faced in the early years of radical abolitionist organizing. Also see Helen Garrison to Deborah Weston, October 31, 1835, folder 24, series III Correspondence, box 36, Garrison Family Papers, Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College, Northampton, MA. See, for example, Deborah Weston to Maria Weston, October 22, 1835, ms. A.9.2 vol. 7, no. 70, Weston Papers, Boston Public Library (BPL), Boston, MA; “Qui non vetat, cum debeat, et posit, Jubet.—Theodore Lyman, the Mayor of Boston, Co-Operating with a Mob,” Liberator, November 14, 1835; Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society, Right and Wrong in Boston, Report of the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society (Boston: self-published, 1836), 118; Henrietta Sargent to George Dixwell April 16, 1843, box 2, Wigglesworth Family Papers ms. N-114, Massachusetts Historical Society (MHS), Boston, MA. See, for instance, “The Wretched Snarl of Abolitionism,” from the Christian Advocate and Journal, reprinted in Liberator, July 11, 1835.

194

Notes to Pages 21–24

50. See David Roediger, Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (London: Verso, 1999); Alexander Saxton, Rise and Fall of the White Republic: Class Politics and Mass Culture in Nineteenth-Century America (London: Verso, 2003); James Brewer Stewart, “Modernizing ‘Difference’: The Political Meanings of Color in the Free States, 1776–1840,” Journal of the Early Republic 19, no. 4 Special Issue on Racial Consciousness and Nation-Building in the Early Republic (Winter 1999): 691–712; Joanne Pope Melish, “The ‘Condition’ Debate and Racial Discourse in the Antebellum North,” Journal of the Early Republic 19, no. 4 (Winter 1999): 651–672; Lemire, Miscegenation; Tavia Nyong’o, Amalgamation Waltz: Race, Performance, and the Ruses of Memory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), chap. 2. 51. On Holgate and Swift, see James Kinney, Amalgamation! Race, Sex, and Rhetoric in the Nineteenth-Century American Novel (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1985), 38; Lemire, Miscegenation, 163. 52. [Jerome B. Holgate], A Sojourn in the City of Amalgamation in the Year of Our Lord 1900—by Oliver Bolokitten—Esq. (New York: self-published 1835), 13. 53. Holgate, City of Amalgamation, 144. 54. Holgate, City of Amalgamation, 7. Holgate slips occasionally, as on 37 where he calls both segregation “an ordinance of providence” and amalgamation “this holy ordinance.” 55. Ibid., 17. 56. Ibid., 26. 57. For instance, “There was a cow always unruly whenever any one save Jack Hindpost came near her, of course shamefully prejudiced towards all men.” Ibid., 130. 58. Ibid., 28. In the city of amalgamation, the narrator also finds “an amalgamation of the horse and the cow.” Ibid., 46. 59. Ibid., 188. 60. Ibid., 41. The “proof” Wildfire offers that God intended the races to intermarry lies in men’s nose hairs “what do you suppose was God’s purpose in planting them there? Was it not for the very one to which they are now put? Can you give any other? There is no other.” Ibid., 42. 61. Ibid., 55. 62. Ibid., 180. 63. Ibid., 141–142. 64. Ibid., chap. 6. 65. Ibid., 74. 66. Charles W. Chesnutt, “The Future American,” Boston Evening Transcript, August 18, August 25, and September 1, 1900. 67. Holgate, City of Amalgamation, 132. 68. In contrast, African American activists David Ruggles, writing around the same time, described racial intermixture as the degradation of blackness: “To me nothing is more disgusting than to see my race bleached to a palid sickly hue by the lust of those cruel and fastidious white men whose prejudices are so strong that they can’t come in sight of a colored skin; ah no! his natural ‘prejudices’

Notes to Pages 24–26

69.

70. 71.

72.

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forbid it!” David Ruggles, The Extinguisher Extinguished or David M. Reese, M.D. “Used Up” (New York: self-published, 1834), 17. It is difficult to judge Holgate’s actual influence on antebellum politics, but his book does appear to have been distributed and probably read widely. On April 17, 1835, for instance, the Daily National Intelligencer advertised “New Books” including The City of Amalgamation being sold for 62½ cents by Franck Taylor, one of the most prominent booksellers in Washington, DC, and the favorite of then Congressman Millard Fillmore. By July, it was cataloged in Charles Cruickshank’s Georgetown Circulating and Reference Library on Bridge Street in Washington, DC. “New Books,” Daily National Intelligencer, April 17, 1835, 4. Catherine M. Parisian, The First White House Library: A History and Annotated Catalog (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010). When he was building the first White House library, Fillmore spent $280.06 buying books from Franck Taylor. Harvard’s copy of The City of Amalgamation is from the library of John Stuart Groves (bought in February 27, 1942 by the Greenough Fund). The American Antiquarian Society holds a copy bound by the publisher in its original black cloth, embossed with an ivy pattern, probably purchased by a book dealer sometime in the nineteenth century. “New Books,” Metropolitan, July 22, 1835, 4. See Werner Sollors, Neither Black Nor White Yet Both: Thematic Explorations in Interracial Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 193. As Sollors points out in Neither Black Nor White Yet Both, the shift in literary attention from “interracial (or mixed-status) founding couples to biracial descendants, from parents to their children, and from slavery to race” created the tragic mulatto stereotype. These early antebellum novels mark the beginning of an American literary tradition that would move well beyond slavery and antislavery to define and interrogate constructions of race. On the tragic mulatto, particularly in nineteenth-century American fiction, see Sterling A. Brown, “Negro Characters as Seen by White Authors,” Journal of Negro Education 2, no. 2 (April 1933): 179–203; Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, “Slavery, Race, and the Figure of the Tragic Mulatta, or, the Ghost of Southern History in the Writing of African-American Women,” Mississippi Quarterly 49, no. 4 (Fall 1996): 791– 818; Rainier Spencer, “Assessing Multiracial Identity Theory and Politics: The Challenge of Hypodescent,” Ethnicities 4, no. 3 (2004): 357–339; Sollors, Neither Black Nor White Yet Both, 222; Kathleen Pfeiffer, Race Passing and American Individualism (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2003); Eva Allegra, The “Tragic Mulatta” Revisited: Race and Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century Antislavery Fiction (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004); Cassandra Jackson, Barriers Between Us: Interracial Sex in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004), Teresa Zackodnik, The Mulatta and the Politics of Race (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2004); Karen Weierman, One Nation, One Blood: Interracial Marriage in American Fiction, Scandal, and Law, 1820–1870 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2005). See back cover, The Tawny Girl; or, The History of Margaret Russel (New York: Samuel Wood & Sons, 1823).

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Notes to Pages 26–31

73. Ibid., 6. 74. Sollors, Neither Black Nor White, 189, 480n4. 75. Deborah Pickman Clifford, Crusader for Freedom: A Life of Lydia Maria Child (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992), 39. 76. Review of Hobomok in the North American Review 19 (July 1824): 262. 77. “Recent American Novels, North American Review 21 (1825): 86–95; Clifford, Crusader for Freedom, 45. 78. Carolyn Karcher argues that while there is no evidence that Child intended Hobomok to be a critique of American racism, it offers “revolutionary insights into the connection between male dominance and white supremacy,” issues that would shape a lifetime of activism. Carolyn L. Karcher, The First Woman in the Republic: A Cultural Biography of Lydia Maria Child (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994), 22; Nathaniel Morton, New England’s Memorial: Or, a Brief Relation of the Most Memorable and Remarkable Passages of the Providence of God, Manifested to the Planters of New-England in America; With Special Reference to the First Colony Thereof, Called New-Plimouth . . . (Boston: John Usher, 1669). 79. Lydia Maria Child, “Joanna,” in The Oasis, ed. Lydia Maria Child (Boston: Benjamin C. Bacon, 1834), 65–105. 80. Ibid., 104. 81. Ibid., 105. 82. On the contrast between Stedmens, see Sollors, Neither Black Nor White, 201–203. 83. In 1833, she would take her first major editorial stand on the righteousness of interracial marriage when she wrote a treatise, An Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans in which she plead the case for legal interracial marriage, citing cases of white women and “reputable, industrious colored man” who had formed families but had been unable to wed in Massachusetts. Lydia Maria Child, Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans (Boston: Allen and Ticknor, 1833). 84. Lydia Maria Child, “The Quadroons,” in The Liberty Bell (Boston: Anti-Slavery Fair, 1842), 131. 85. Ibid., 141. 86. Ibid., 118. 87. See, for example, Kelly Alisa Ryan, “Regulating Passions: Sexual Behavior and Citizenship in Massachusetts, 1740–1820” (Ph.D. diss., University of Maryland, College Park, 2006), 366n9, documenting her attempt to find interracial marriages in colonial and early republican Massachusetts vital and church records. 88. Charles F. Robinson, II, Dangerous Liaisons: Sex and Love in the Segregated South (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2003), 67–68; Mary Frances Berry, “Judging Morality: Sexual Behavior and Legal Consequences in the Late Nineteenth-Century South,” Journal of American History 78 (December 1991): 839; for criticism, see Peggy Pascoe, What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 10.

Notes to Pages 31–33

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89. See, for excellent examples, Martha Hodes, White Women, Black Men: Illicit Sex in the Nineteenth-Century South (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997); Peter Wallenstein, Tell the Court I Love My Wife; Pascoe, What Comes Naturally; Peggy Pascoe, “Miscegenation Law, Court Cases, and Ideologies of ‘Race’ in Twentieth-Century America,” Journal of American History 83, no. 1 (1996): 44–69. 90. Massachusetts vital records do not contain substantial identifiable evidence of interracial marriages during the period such marriages were not legal. Even an attempted marriage generally was not recorded. This provides evidence of the marriage ban’s influence and the power of the state (and its clerks) to use the civil marriage contract to define race, legitimacy, and the bounds of the civil family. At the same time, it suggests the malleability of the race concept. If a betrothed could convince a clergyman or clerk not to record their race (thus demarcating whiteness) or “pass” for white, not only could she legally marry, but the interracial nature of her marriage would be lost to the historical record. 91. On the significance of public vows (and private choice) in marriage, see Nancy Cott, Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 1. On common law marriage, see Ariela R. Dubler, “Governing through Contract: Common Law Marriage in the Nineteenth Century,” Yale Law Journal 107 (1998): 1885–1920. 92. As Diana Williams notes in her study of interracial marriage in Louisiana, judges magnanimously recognized informal or “common law” marriages selectively, only for same-race couples, thus ensuring the continued legitimization of white families. States’ express prohibition of interracial marriage, sex, or cohabitation meant that African Americans, or those who wished to form interracial marriages, definitionally did not have the “capacity to contract” marriages. In practice, these prohibitions drastically limited proscribed groups’ (including slaves, in this case) access to “individual freedom in civil society.” See Diana Williams, “They Call It Marriage: The Interracial Louisiana Family and the Making of American Legitimacy” (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 2007), 109. 93. U.S. Census for Boston, Massachusetts—Ward 6, 1840. Two houses down is a household headed by “Sarah Cotes,” a woman listed as of color between twentyone and thirty-six years of age and a boy of color. 94. U.S. Census for Boston, Massachusetts—Ward 6, 1850. 95. U.S. Census for Boston, Massachusetts—Ward 6, 1860. William Elisha might be James Sr.’s nephew. The 1830 census lists two households headed by a James and a William Elisha in Malden, Massachusetts. A James Elisha who enlisted with the Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts United States Colored Troops in 1864 listed his place and date of birth as Malden, Massachusetts, in 1834. This might be James Jr. living in Boston later in the century. There are no later listings for Elishas in Malden by 1840. 96. U.S. Census for Boston, Massachusetts—Ward 6, 1870. 97. In an adjacent home, neighbor George Thomas also headed a biracial household where one white woman in her twenties lived with Thomas (of color and between thirty-five and fifty-five years of age), and two young men of color, fifteen to twenty-five years old.

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Notes to Pages 33–35

98. U.S. Census, 1850, Schedule I—Free Inhabitants in Nantucket, in the County of Nantucket, State of Massachusetts, 3832. 99. U.S. Census for Nantucket, Massachusetts, 1850. 100. U.S. Census for Nantucket, Massachusetts, 1860. 101. U.S. Census for San Francisco, California, 1870; Thomas Snow, listed as a white trader, also lived in the predominantly black section of Nantucket with a young woman named Lucretia Snow who was listed as “mulatto” and might have been his daughter, see 1850 U.S. Census for Nantucket, MA. 102. Price and Stewart, To Heal the Scourge of Prejudice, 40n1. 103. For instance, see U.S. Census for Bridgewater, Massachusetts, 1840. People identified as of color: a teenaged boy living with Asa Jones’s white family; one teenaged boy living with Caleb Badger’s white family; four people in the almshouse; Charlotte Wood, a black female head of household, a female roommate and a young girl; and the Freemans a middle aged man and woman of color; the Eastons; and another biracial family, the Talbots. 104. Bradford Kingman, History of North Bridgewater (Boston: self-published, 1866), 318, 497–498. Lydia married Sylvanus after he had come to live and work on the Easton farm. Eliza Ann married Samuel Gilmore of a large extended African American farming family in Raynham. See U.S. Census for Bridgewater, MA, 1850; U.S. Census for Raynham, MA, 1850. See adjacent households of Nancy Seabury, and Squire Gilmore. 105. U.S. Census for Bridgewater, MA, 1850, “Schedule of Agricultural Production.” 106. U.S. Census for Bridgewater, MA, 1860, “Schedule of Agricultural Production.” 107. Overseers of the Poor Index 1845–1852, Book of Denials October 22, 1858–January 4, 1882, 117, New Bedford Overseers of the Poor Records, New Bedford Free Public Library (NBFPL), New Bedford, MA; U.S. Census for New Bedford, MA, 1810. In 1830, Caesar is listed above fifty-five, Deborah in her sixties and as white, and they had Jane (twenty-four to thirty-six) and James or William (under twenty-four) living with them. By 1840, there are four people living in Caesar’s household. Jane, himself, and a woman who is listed as of color and over fifty-five. 108. Overseers of the Poor Index 1845–1852, Book of Denials October 22, 1858–January 4, 1882, 117, NBFPL; Henry H. Crapo, The New Bedford Directory (New Bedford, MA: J. C. Parmenter, 1838) (James Treadwell at sea). 109. Overseers of the Poor Index 1845–1852, Book of Denials October 22, 1858–January 4, 1882, 117, NBFPL. 110. U.S. Census for New Bedford, MA, 1850. Deborah is caring for John, Daniel, and Deborah Hall. 111. Overseers of the Poor Index 1845–1852, Book of Denials October 22, 1858–January 4, 1882, vol. 1, 61, NBFPL. 112. “Marriages,” Vital Records of New Bedford, Massachusetts to the Year 1850 (Boston: New England Historic Genealogical Society) lists Caesar Treadwell and Deborah Bacon as being married in New Bedford March 11, 1792. 113. See “Revolutionary War Soldier’s Legacy Pieced Together, Item by Item,” Boston Globe April 21, 2008. Ishmael Coffee’s father, Jupiter Coffee, was identified

Notes to Pages 36–40

114. 115. 116. 117. 118. 119.

120. 121. 122. 123. 124. 125.

126. 127. 128. 129.

130. 131. 132. 133. 134.

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in local histories of Needham, Massachusetts, as “notorious” and the husband of “an Indian and a citizen of our town.” It is not known whether this indicated two wives or partners, one identified as “Indian” and one white, or whether it is one woman. Descendants of Coffee maintain that Ishmael Coffee was of white, Native American, and African American heritage. “Marriages,” Vital Records of Medway, Massachusetts to the Year 1850 (Boston: New England Historic Genealogical Society, 1905), 172. “Births,” Vital Records of Medway, 41. Ibid. “Marriages,” Vital Records of Medway, 172; Inhabitants of Medway v. Inhabitants of Natick, Supreme Court of Massachusetts, 7 Mass. 88 (1810). See the court’s opinion, Inhabitants of Medway v. Inhabitants of Natick. Isaac Parker was the chief judge of the state Supreme Judicial Court from 1814 to his death in 1830. During his tenure, he heard a number of cases related to marriage. In addition to marshalling support for the social wisdom of legalizing interracial marriages and ensuring racial equality, Parker used the republican marriage model to interpret other cases of family law. On Parker more generally, see Lemuel Shaw, “A Sketch of the Life and Character of the Hon. Isaac Parker, Late Chief Justice of the Court,” Address before the Bar of Berkshire, September Term 1830, at Lenox, Massachusetts, printed in court reporter, 26 Mass. Appendix (1830). Inhabitants of Medway v. Inhabitants of Needham, Supreme Court of Massachusetts, Norfolk, 16 Mass. 157 (1819). Wightman v. Coates, 15 Mass. 1 (1818). Grossberg, Governing the Hearth, 36. Ibid. Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone, chap. 9. In his memorialization of Parker, Lemuel Shaw remarked on the jurist’s record both as an upholder of the established rule of law and an unapologetically principled judge, and said that Parker was known for “not unfrequently relying at last, and relying justly, upon the dictates of a mind, quick to discern, and anxious to allow, the claims of justice and natural equity.” Shaw, “A Sketch of the Life and Character of the Hon. Isaac Parker,” 577. Grossberg, Governing the Hearth, 203. Ibid. See Judgment, Medway v. Needham. Grossberg, Governing the Hearth, 205. William Griffith, Annual Survey of American Law (New York, 1822), vols. 2, 3, passim list other states with similar policies. Grossberg, Governing the Hearth, 207. Inhabitants of Andover v. Inhabitants of Canton, 13 Mass. 547 (November 1816). Ibid., 554. Ibid., 547. The Inhabitants of Medway v. the Inhabitants of Natick, 7 Mass. 88, Massachusetts Reports, 74.

200

Notes to Pages 41–43

135. Hendrik Hartog: Man and Wife in America: A History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000); Cott, Public Vows; Clare A. Lyons, Sex among the Rabble. 136. On sex practices in early America, see Laurel Thatcher Ulrich and Lois Stabler, “ ‘Girling of It’ in Eighteenth-Century New Hampshire,” in Families and Children, ed. Peter Benes, Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife: Annual Proceedings, 1985 (Boston: Boston University Press, 1987), 24–36; Daniel Scott Smith and Michael Hindus, “Premarital Pregnancy in America, 1640–1971: An Overview and Interpretation,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 4 (1975): 537–570; Nancy Cott, “Passionlessness: An Interpretation of Victorian Sexual Ideology, 1790–1850” Signs 4, no. 2 (1978) 219–236; John D’Emilio and Estelle B. Freedman, Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997); Richard Godbeer, Sexual Revolution in Early America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002; Lyons, Sex among the Rabble. 137. Lyons, Sex among the Rabble, 81. 138. Ibid., 377. 139. Wright v. Wright, 2 Mass. 109, 110 (1806); Grossberg, Governing the Hearth, 208. 140. Grossberg, Governing the Hearth, 215. 141. “Practical Amalgamation,” Boston Press and Post, May 26, 1840, 1. 142. See Henry Lee Carrier v. Samuel Thayer, 2nd et al., Supreme Judicial Court Plymouth County, May Term 1842, Judicial Archives held at MA. 143. “The Particulars of the Case,” Carrier v. Thayer. 144. Note torn into three pieces, dated October 13, 1838, in Carrier v. Thayer. 145. Abram Kidder to Morton Eddy, October 17, 1838 receipt, in Carrier v. Thayer. 146. “Complaint, Stetson vs. Ashport,” Carrier v. Thayer. 147. Decision, Carrier v. Thayer. 148. “Complaint, Hannah Stetson vs. Henry Lee Currier,” in Carrier v. Thayer. 149. For expenditures for Hannah Stetson, see “Expenditures of the Town of Randolph April 1, 1835 to April 1, 1836” through “Report of Town of Randolph April 1, 1841 to April 1, 1842,” bound and held in the Town Clerk’s Office, Randolph, MA. 150. In Randolph, as in other small towns, the town selectmen were also the overseers of the poor, and their records are found, if they exist, in selectmen’s meeting minutes. In more populous places like Boston or New Bedford, the overseers held their own department and record-keeping system. I have reviewed existing records of both the Boston and New Bedford overseers. During the early nineteenth century, there is some evidence of interracial sexual activity in the Boston overseers of the poor records. In 1817, for instance, sevenyear-old George Williams found himself alone in Boston’s almshouse without a mother, father, or anyone to support him. His mother Mary was herself the illegitimate child of an Indian woman Lisha from Canton, Massachusetts, and his father a man by the name of Lascar from outside the state. Mary died and the Boston overseers wrote to the town of Canton asking them to take young

Notes to Pages 43–46

151.

152.

153. 154. 155. 156. 157.

158. 159. 160.

161. 162.

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George away on the grounds that what flimsy settlement his mother might have claimed made that town at least partially responsible for him. While the vast majority of woman-child pairs in Boston’s almshouse shared racial classifications, there were exceptions. In 1816, for instance, Betsey Kennedy and her son William Kennedy resided in Room 30 of the almshouse. Betsey was white while William was recorded as a colored child. The letter to Canton is a slip of paper tucked into the “Monthly Memorandums to the Board of Overseers from January 3, 1816–April 6, 1825,” reel 1, Boston Overseer of the Poor Records, MHS. Also see George’s residency record at the almshouse: “Boys in the School,” reel 11, box 12, folder 3: List of inmates by room (1816), Boston Overseers of the Poor Records, MHS. George is listed as “discharged” without further explanation; reel 11, box 12, folder 3: List of inmates by room (1816), Overseers of the Poor Records, MHS. “Minutes of the New Bedford Anti-Slavery Society,” New Bedford Mercury June 23, 1834; extracts of letters recorded January 18, 1840 by Henry Jackson, pastor of the William Street Baptist Church, all in Gibson Papers, NBFPL. This is the same Nathan Johnson who housed Frederick Douglass when he came to New Bedford in 1838. On Johnson, see Kathryn Grover, The Fugitive’s Gibraltar: Escaping Slaves and Abolitionism in New Bedford, Massachusetts (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001), 135, 144–149, 172, 287. Details of the Gibson case can be found in local newspapers and in the correspondence and other files collected in the Gibson Papers at the NBFPL. Thanks to archivist Paul Cyr for drawing my attention to their relevance to the larger question of interracial marriage in the state. W. Gibson to Nathan Johnson, March 24, 1837, April 25, 1837, June 26, 1837, Gibson Papers, NBFPL. E Molineaux to Nathan Johnson, August 15, 1837, Gibson Papers, NBFPL. E. Molyneaux to Nathan Johnson, January 23, 1838, June 9, 1838, July 14, 1838, Gibson Papers, NBFPL. Patrick Gibson to Nathan Johnson, June 15, 1835, Gibson Papers, NBFPL. If Molyneaux had sent the former slaves to the West Indies, they should have been able to settle as free people, slavery having been abolished in the colonies in 1834. At issue was whether or not Molyneaux was in earnest or used the West Indian ruse to recapture the Gibsons in Georgia. Ruggles quoted in “Transcript of Investigation into the Case by the New Bedford Young Men’s Anti-Slavery Society,” Gibson Papers, NBFPL. “Important Investigation—the Innocent Defended,” Liberator, March  6, 1840, 37. Henry Jackson to Supreme Court of McIntosh County, December 5, 1839 and J. E. Townsend to Henry Jackson, January 4, 1840; J. Burdick to James B. Congdon, February 3, 1840; Benjamin Rodman to James B. Congdon, November 29, 1839, Gibson Papers, NBFPL. Transcript of investigation by the New Bedford Young Men’s Anti-Slavery Society, Gibson Papers, NBFPL. Deborah Weston to “Aunt Mary,” January 19, 1840, Weston Papers, BPL; Grover, Fugitive’s Gibraltar, 152.

202

Notes to Pages 46–50

163. J. E. Townsend to Henry Jackson, January 4, 1840; Transcript of investigation by Young Men’s Anti-Slavery Society, Gibson Papers, NBFPL. 164. E Molyneaux to Nathan Johnson, n.d. circa September 23, 1839, Gibson Papers, NBFPL. 165. Young listed his place of birth as variously Pennsylvania and Maryland, and there is no record of his living in New Bedford before he applied for a seamen’s protection certificate at the age of twenty-six. Seamen’s Protection Certificate for Perry Young, New Bedford Whaling Museum, courtesy of Kathryn Grover; U.S. Census for New Bedford, MA, 1850. 166. “Sarah Young,” New Bedford Overseer of the Poor Records, vol. 3, January 9, 1861, NBFPL. 167. “Marriages,” Vital Records of New Bedford, lists Perry Young of New Bedford and Sarah Belden of Lowell publishing their intention to marry on July 26, 1843; “Marriages,” Vital Records of Lowell, Massachusetts to the end of the Year 1849 (Salem, MA: Essex Institute, 1930) lists the intention as August 2, 1843. 168. “Sarah Young,” New Bedford Overseers of the Poor Records, vol. 3, January 9, 1861. 169. For property bought on Arnold Street, Emerson Street, and Elm Street, see “Perry Young” and “Sarah Young,” New Bedford Overseers of the Poor Records, vol. 2, January 17, 1869 and vol. 3, December 10, 1860. 170. He took out seamen’s protection papers, but I have not found evidence of his being away at sea. “Births,” Vital Records of New Bedford, for David H. Young lists Perry’s occupation as gardener in 1847; The New Bedford Directory 1841 (laborer), 1845 (waiter at Samuel Rodman’s), 1849 (laborer), 1856 (laborer); U.S. Census for New Bedford, MA, 1850 (illiterate laborer). 171. U.S. Census for New Bedford, MA, 1850. 172. “Sarah Young,” New Bedford Overseer of the Poor Records, vol. 2, January 17, 1859; vol. 3, December 10, 1860 and January 9, 1861, NBFPL. 173. “Perry Young,” New Bedford Overseers of the Poor Records, vol. 3, February 22, 1861.

2. Interracial Marriage as an Equal Rights Measure 1. Hosea Easton, “A Treatise on the Intellectual Character and Civil and Political Condition of the Colored People of the U. States,” in To Heal the Scourge of Prejudice: The Life and Writings of Hosea Easton, ed. George Price and James Brewer Stewart (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999), 97–98. 2. John Jay, “The Federalist No. 2: Concerning Dangers from Foreign Force and Influence,” Independent Journal, October 31, 1787. 3. Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, Query 14: Laws (New York: Penguin Books, 1999, orig. Eng. pub. 1787), 264. 4. Benjamin Franklin, Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind (1751) as cited in Stephen Jay Gould, “American Polygeny and Craniometry Before Darwin: Blacks and Indians as Separate, Inferior Species,” in The “Racial” Economy of Science: Toward a Democratic Future, ed. Sandra Harding (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 86–87.

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5. Happily, there is a large and growing historiography on African American Northerners and their identity politics from the revolutionary period to the Civil War. For examples, see, Frederick Cooper, “Elevating the Race: The Social Thought of Black Leaders, 1827–50,” American Quarterly 24, no. 5 (December 1972): 604–625; Ira Berlin, “The Revolution in Black Life,” in The American Revolution: Explorations in the History of American Radicalism, ed. Alfred F. Young (Dekalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1796): 349–382; Gary B. Nash, Forging Freedom: The Formation of Philadelphia’s Black Community 1720–1840 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988); Shane White, “It was a Proud Day”: African Americans, Festivals, and Parades in the North, 1741–1834.” Journal of American History 81, no. 1 (Jun.1994): 13–50; Julie Roy Jeffrey, The Great Silent Army of Abolitionism: Ordinary Women in the Antislavery Movement (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998); James O. Horton and Lois Horton, In Hope of Liberty: Culture, Community and Protest Among Northern Free Blacks, 1700–1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998); Joanne Pope Melish, “The ‘Condition’ Debate and Racial Discourse in the Antebellum North,” Journal of the Early Republic 19, no. 4, Special Issue on Racial Consciousness and Nation-Building in the Early Republic (1999): 651–672.; Patrick Rael, Black Identity and Black Protest in the Antebellum North (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002); Scott Hancock, “The Elusive Boundaries of Blackness: Identity Formation in Antebellum Boston,” Journal of Negro History 84, no. 2 (Spring 1999): 115– 129; John Sallient, Black Puritan, Black Republican: The Life and Thought of Lemuel Haynes, 1753–1833 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002); Leslie Harris, In the Shadow of Slavery: African Americans in New York City, 1626–1863 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003); Joanna Brooks, “The Early American Public Sphere and the Emergence of a Black Print Counterpublic,” William and Mary Quarterly 62, no. 1 (January 2005): 67–92; Christopher Leslie Brown, Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006); Beverly C. Tomek, Colonization and Its Discontents: Emancipation, Emigration and Antislavery in Antebellum Pennsylvania (New York: New York University Press, 2011), especially chaps. 5 and 7. 6. Hosea Easton, “An Address: Delivered before the Coloured Population, of Providence, Rhode Island, on Thanksgiving Day, Nov. 27, 1828,” in Price and Stewart, To Heal the Scourge of Prejudice, 54. 7. Jesse Chickering, Statistical View of the Population of Massachusetts, 1765– 1840 (Boston: Little and Brown, 1846); George W. Chase, Abstract of the Census of Massachusetts, 1860, from the Eights U.S. Census (Boston: Wright and Potter, 1863); Oliver Warner, Abstract of the Census of Massachusetts, 1865 (Boston: Wright and Potter, 1867); tables compiled in George A. Levesque, Black Boston: African American Life and Culture in Urban America, 1750–1860 (New York: Garland, 1994), I-10 through I-13. 8. See Christopher Malone, Between Freedom and Bondage: Race, Party, and Voting Rights in the Antebellum North (New York: Routledge, 2008), 155; Chickering, Statistical View of the Population of Massachusetts, 6.

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Notes to Page 51–51

9. Intensive archival research efforts, finding a resurgence in some notable recent works, reveal the depth and breadth of antebellum African American vigilance efforts, the black roots of radical abolitionism, and the similarities and real distinctions between middle-class white reform movements and the African American reform movements that often shared the same names (temperance, moral reform, antislavery, vigilance, etc.). Particularly influential for my work on the antebellum North have been Kathryn Grover, The Fugitive’s Gibraltar: Escaping Slaves and Abolitionism in New Bedford, Massachusetts (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001); Graham Russell Gao Hodges, David Ruggles: A Radical Black Abolitionist and the Underground Railroad in New York City (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010); John Wood Sweet, Bodies Politic: Negotiating Race in the American North, 1730–1830 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007); April Haynes, “Making ‘False Delicacy’ True: The Passions of Female Moral Reformers, 1935–1845,” Boston Seminar Series on the History of Women and Gender, Schlessinger Library, April 22, 2010, from “Riotous Flesh: Gender, Physiology, and the Solitary Vice, 1830– 1860” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Santa Barbara, 2009); White, “It was a Proud Day”; Rael, Black Identity and Black Protest in the Antebellum North; Manisha Sinha, “To ‘Cast Just Obliquy’ on Oppressors: Black Radicalism in the Age of Revolution,” William and Mary Quarterly 64, no. 1 (January 2007): 149–160. 10. Perhaps unsurprisingly, existing histories of the marriage law claim that African Americans were not active in the debate, a contention that was borrowed from Ruchames’ 1955 essay derived almost exclusively from reportage in the Liberator and has not satisfactorily been reexamined. Levesque echoes Gunnar Myrdal’s contention about twentieth-century “miscegenation” law in suggesting that African Americans were more active in opposing repeal: George A. Levesque, “ ‘Politicians in Petticoats’: Interracial Sex and Legislative Politics in Antebellum Massachusetts,” New England Journal of Black Studies No. 3 (1983): 54; Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (New York: Harper and Brothers Publishers, 1944), 57. Bruce Laurie writes, “The one group conspicuous for its absence in this drama was African Americans.” Bruce Laurie, Beyond Garrison: Antislavery and Social Reform (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 112. Randall Kennedy borrowed from these foundational works in Interracial Intimacies: Sex, Marriage, Identity, and Adoption (New York: Pantheon, 2003), 247, reiterating the assumption that African Americans preferred to avoid public debate on the issue. 11. It is understandable that scholars would assume that African Americans were silent on interracial marriage. Advocacy for so controversial an issue seems to contradict our understandings of one of the best-documented trends in racial politics in the antebellum North, namely, the politics of respectability. Defining the parameters of antebellum African Americans’ sociopolitical calls for equal citizenship, many, like Patrick Rael have found it useful to view the demands of antebellum racial activists through its lens. “Respectability,” defined as adherence to middle-class white norms of class, dress, sexuality, comportment, aesthetic, and arguably skin tone, absolutely played a role in the organization

Notes to Pages 52–53

12.

13.

14. 15.

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of African American communities throughout the antebellum North. Rael notes that a compulsion to conform led African American leaders in the antebellum North to promote temperance, denounce parades and Pinkster Day celebrations, and “co-create,” with white advocates, an uplift strategy predicated on the belief that through conformity to bourgeois norms African Americans could disprove prevailing beliefs about racial difference and demand full citizenship. One might assume that African American reformers implemented this cautious approach as they advocated for interracial marriage rights. After all, interracialism was stultifyingly taboo. James Horton was first to point out the importance of adherence to bourgeois “respectability” in antebellum African American gender relations. Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham further theorized the “politics of respectability” to explain the linkages and disjunctures between middle-class black Baptist church women and the poor working-class people they hoped to “lift” as they themselves “climbed” the American social ladder. As she explains, these women both attacked the “failure of America to live up to its liberal ideals of equality and justice” and demanded “respectability” from all black people as if “ ‘improper’ decorum could eradicate the pervasive racial barriers that surrounded black Americans.” James Oliver Horton, “Freedom’s Yoke: Gender Conventions among Antebellum Free Blacks,” Feminist Studies 12, no. 1 (Spring 1986): 71; Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church 1880–1920 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993). For more on respectability and claims to rights in the antebellum North, see Alfreda S. James, “Subversive Traditions: Free Women of Color in Abolition” (Ph.D. diss., State University of New York at Stony Brook, 2006); Germaine Etienne, “Excellence is the Highest Form of Resistance: African American Reformers in the Pre-Civil War North” (Ph.D. diss., University of Massachusetts, Amherst, 2004). David Walker, Walker’s Appeal in Four Articles; Together with a Preamble, to the Coloured Citizens of the World, but in Particular, and Very Expressly, to Those of the United States of America, 3rd ed. (Boston: D. Walker, 1830), 10. Tongue firmly in cheek, Equiano signed his letter “Your fervent Servant, Gustavus Vassa,” a name he describes as being forced upon him in slavery. See Gustavus Vassa, “To J. T. [James Tobin] Esq; Author of the BOOKS called CURSORY REMARKS & REJOINDER,” Public Advertiser, January 28, 1788, in Olaudah Equiano: The Interesting Narrative and Other Writings, ed. Vincent Carretta (New York: Penguin Books, 2003), 332; Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African. Written by Himself (London: self-published, 1789), 96. Walker, Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World, 10–11. It is worth noting that another reading of Walker would suggest that his criticism targets African American men who cannot prove themselves worthy of partnerships with respectable African American women (or as he writes, “women who are good for anything”). This reading seems slightly less likely to me, particularly considering his offhanded use of “good for anything” in relation to the women in question, not the men and his repeated direct address to the men in his audience throughout the appeal. See for instance, Walker, Appeal to the

206

16.

17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

24. 25.

26. 27. 28.

29.

Notes to Pages 53–56

Coloured Citizens of the World, 33: “Men of colour, who are also of sense, for you particularly is my APPEAL designed.” “Legislative,” Liberator, January 8, 1831. While, of course, Garrison was white and thus the Liberator generally is not seen as a black-led journal in the tradition of Russworm and Cornish’s Freedom’s Journal, evidence of those who worked for, subscribed to, and supported the Liberator in the 1830s and 1840s (particularly in the first years and when white abolitionists began splintering around 1838, demanding new papers like the American Anti-Slavery Standard and the Massachusetts Abolitionist, representing their particular constituencies) suggest that the paper largely was shaped by Massachusetts’s African American reformers and reflected many of the concerns of local reformers. “The Marriage Law,” Liberator, May 7, 1831; “Corinthian Editors,” Liberator April 2, 1831. “Legislative,” Liberator, January 8, 1831, 7; “Usurpation of Rights,” Liberator, January 22, 1831, 15. “Legislative,” Gloucester Telegraph, January 22, 1831, 3; “Legislative,” Salem Gazette, January 18, 1831, 2. “Marriage Bill,” Liberator, March 19, 1831. Ibid. “The Marriage Law,” Liberator, May 21, 1831. For some reformers, this extended to views of women’s choice, as well. While by no means a widely accepted approach, by the 1830s, the ideal of companionate marriage had taken root among reformers. See, for instance, Jan Lewis, The Pursuit of Happiness: Family and Values in Jefferson’s Virginia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); Chris Dixon, Perfecting the Family: Antislavery Marriages in Nineteenth-Century America (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1997), 20. “An Unjust Law,” Liberator, January 29, 1831. On post-Revolutionary trends toward new codifications of marriage laws, precisely what Massachusetts legislators were doing in the 1831 session, see Elizabeth Bowles Warbasse, The Changing Legal Rights of Married Women, 1800–1861 (New York: Garland, 1987), 63. “Mr. Bigelow’s Letter,” reprinted in “The Marriage Law,” Liberator, May 21, 1831. Hamilton to Boston Courier, reprinted in “The Marriage Bill,” Liberator, June 11, 1831. “Of One Blood” is a common allusion to Acts 17: “and [He] hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth, and hath determined the times before appointed, and the bounds of their habitation; that they should seek the Lord, if haply they might feel after him, and find him, though he be not far from every one of us.” Acts 17:26–27, King James Bible. Hosea Easton, A Treatise on the Intellectual Character, and Civil and Political Condition of the Colored People of the U. States; and the Prejudice Exercised Toward Them: With a Sermon on the Duty of the Church to Them (Boston: Isaac Knapp, 1837), in Price and Stewart, To Heal the Scourge of Prejudice, 104.

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30. Easton, “A Treatise,” 108. 31. On this strategy, see particularly Rael, Black Identity and Black Protest in the Antebellum North, 52. 32. Easton, “A Treatise,” 116. 33. Chickering, Statistical View, 45, 113. 34. Maria Weston Chapman to Deborah Weston, February 4, 1842, ms. A.9.2 v. 17 no. 32, Weston Papers, Boston Public Library (BPL), Boston, MA. She goes on to warn Deborah not to share these thoughts, as other attendants at the meeting were “highly delighted” by Remond’s speech. Her own sister Caroline apparently relished Remond’s talks a bit more, as when she raved to Deborah that he and Douglass had “used up” the “new organization” abolitionists by aligning it with the political abolitionists of the Liberty Party: Caroline Weston to Deborah Weston, November 5, 1842, ms. A.9.2.17, 104, Weston Papers, BPL. 35. He wrote bitterly that Douglass and Remond “speak as two having authority,” referring to the growing sense among white lecturers who had to compete with Douglass and Remond, that only one black man should carry the lecture circuit and that that man should have the scars of slavery upon him. George Bradburn to Maria Weston Chapman, September 6, 1843, ms. A.9.2.19.25, Weston Papers, BPL. In his personal journal, Bradburn offered a more thoughtful view, writing that while he thought Remond “too wordy” and not as tasteful as “the refugee . . . Douglass,” he reflected, “But as to his affectation, why I suppose it was difficult for a negro to bear himself like a white man without exposing himself to such a charge, even from abolitionists.” See George Bradburn, Ms Diary of George Bradburn, Anti-Slavery Lecture Tour, Begun March 14, 1842, November 8, 1842, 168, Newberry Library, Chicago, IL. 36. Charles Lenox Remond to Ellen Sands, April 20, 1840, mss. 271. Remond Family Papers. Charles Lenox Remond Letters, 1840–1860, Phillips Library. 37. For another interesting narrative including antebellum African American criticism of prejudice and discriminatory laws, see the biography of William Wells Brown: Josephine Brown, Biography of an American Bondman by his Daughter (Boston: Robert F. Wallcut, 1856). 38. This is not to take away from Remond’s clear dedication to Garrison and his belief that Garrison was a true advocate for freedom and the rights of black people in American society. He wrote inflammatorily to Francis Jackson August 5, 1840, that “Were [African Americans] true in their first love, and consistent with their first adopted principles, they would adhere to the old platform, though W. L. Garrison turned Infidel or Socialist.” See Remond to Jackson, “Letter from Charles L. Remond,” Liberator, October 9, 1840. 39. Charles Lenox Remond to Rev. C. B. Ray, June 30, 1840, “From the Colored America,” Liberator, October 16, 1840. Douglass later was known to make similar statements about the illiberality of American “democracy.” See, for instance, his commentary on Maddison Washington’s willingness to fight for the British during the American Revolution, calling his choice a voyage from “American republican slavery, to monarchical liberty.” Frederick Douglass, “American Prejudice against Color: An Address Delivered in Cork, Ireland, October 23, 1845,” Cork Examiner, October 27, 1845, in John Blassingame et al., eds., The Frederick

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40. 41.

42.

43. 44.

45. 46.

Notes to Pages 59–61

Douglass Papers: Series One—Speeches, Debates, and Interviews (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979), 1:59. “Equal Rights,” Liberator, February 8, 1839. Abolitionist Nathaniel P. Rogers wrote to their mutual friends the Doles to report, “Poor Remond! He feels fully tired with the colorphobia he has to contend with . . . His pretensions to humanity even, are treated by his neighbors with perfect contempt . . . They would [treat] him more loathingly than they could over the canine race, who should put on coat and hat and assume bipedal positions, walk in among them and under take to bow and scrape and shake hands and the like.” Nathaniel P. Rogers to Hannal Webb, September 3, 1842, ms. A.1.2 pt. 2 vol. 12, 83, Anti-Slavery Collection, BPL. Notably, Remond was never described as anything but entirely self-possessed when he spoke publicly. An editor for the Dublin Weekly Herald waxed positively romantic in describing the unusual burden American prejudice must have been for Remond, considering his “intellectual superiority. . . . His beautiful attitudes, elegant figure, flashing eye, vigorous language, and impassioned tones produced a thrilling effect,” Dublin Weekly Herald, October 2, 1840. In one of the most revealingly paternalist (maternalist?) comments she bequeathed the historical record, Lydia Maria Child wrote, upon hearing Remond for the first time, “He is the first colored person I have met, who seemed to be altogether such an one as I would have him. He carries ballast enough for his sails; and that is unusual”; see Child to Wendell Phillips, May 3, 1842, F: Lydia Maria Francis Child, 17 letters, 1842–1880 and n.d., folder 1 of 2, Wendell Phillips Papers, ms. Am. 1953, Houghton Library, Cambridge, MA. Comparing the actor Joseph Jenkins’s portrayal of Othello to Remond, William Wells Brown used the term “genteel” to describe him. William Wells Brown, The Black Man: His Antecedents, His Genius, His Achievements (New York: Thomas Hamilton, 1863), 261. Charles Lenox Remond to Martha H. Usher, April 29, 1840, Remond Family Papers, Phillips Library, Salem, MA. George McDuffie, “Governor’s Message,” before the South Carolina General Assembly, 1835. The message was carried widely throughout the country and in New England was seen as a pointed rebuttal of abolitionism and largely preposterous; some even assumed it was a burlesque. See, for instance, “Governor McDuffie of South Carolina,” Gloucester Democrat, December 8, 1835, 2; Salem Gazette, December 8, 1835, 1–2 (the editors call his message “turgid, pleonastic, and gasconading,” among other disparagements); “Gov. McDuffie,” Gloucester Telegraph, December 9, 1835 (disclaimed any hint of abolitionism but viewed McDuffie as both “unrepublican” and “unchristian”); “Uncle Bob and his Broken Leg,” Boston Courier, December 15, 1835, 2. “Arrival of William Lloyd Garrison and N. P. Rogers from England,” Liberator, August 28, 1840, 138. See, for instance, “Rechabite Festival” from Scottish Pilot, Liberator, September 18, 1840, 150, at which he said “though he was a freeman by law in the United States, he had never known what it was to be really free till within these few weeks he had set his foot on the shores of England; for then, for the first time,

Notes to Pages 61–65

47. 48. 49.

50. 51.

52. 53.

54. 55. 56.

57.

58. 59. 60.

209

he felt himself treated as a human being, and experienced no contumely or contempt for the blackness of his skin.” Also see “Speeches of O’Connell and Remond,” Liberator, July 31, 1839; “Miscellany. From the Dublin Weekly Herald Sketches of the Anti-Slavery Convention,” Liberator, October 2, 1840; “England American Slavery-Meeting at Darlington” Liberator, March 12, 1841; Remond to Thomas Cole, October 2, 1840, reprinted in the Liberator, October 23, 1840; see “Letters to Anti-Slavery Workers and Agencies,” Journal of Negro History 10, no. 3 (July 1925): 491. “Arrival of William Lloyd Garrison and N. P. Rogers from England,” Liberator, August 28, 1840, 138. “Miscellany. From the Dublin Weekly Herald Sketches of the Anti-Slavery Convention,” Liberator, October 2, 1840. “From the Scottish Pilot,” Liberator August 21, 1840; “Miscellany. From the Dublin Weekly Herald Sketches of the Anti-Slavery Convention,” Liberator, October 2, 1840. “Bristol County Anti-Slavery Society,” Liberator, May 15, 1840, 78. Charles Lenox Remond to Mrs. Ellen Sands, April 1, 1840, F: mss. 271, Remond Family Papers. Charles Lenox Remond Letters, Original Letter 1840– 1860, Phillips Library. Charles Lenox Remond to Mrs. Ellen Sands, April 1, 1840. “Testimony by Charles Lenox Remond delivered at the Massachusetts State House, Boston, Massachusetts, February 10, 1842, in C. Peter Ripley et al., eds, The Black Abolitionist Papers vol. III: The United States, 1830–1846 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985), 370–371. This is the same Richard M. Johson from Kentucky whose relationship with the enslaved woman Julia Chinn garnered national attention throughout the 1830s. Testimony of Charles Lenox Remond, Black Abolitionist Papers vol. III, 371–372. Petition of Francis Jackson and 68 others of Boston, 1843 Passed Legislation F: Acts of 1843, Chap.  5 Act Relating to Marriages between Individuals of Certain Races, MA. “Meeting of the Colored Citizens of Boston,” in William Cooper Nell: Nineteenth-Century African American Abolitionist, Historian, Integrationist. Selected Writings from 1832–1874, ed. Dorothy Porter Wesley and Constance Porter Uzelac (Baltimore: Black Classic Press, 2002), 57; “Resolution of Colored Citizens of Boston,” and Petition of John T. Hilton and  351 other Colored Citizens of Boston for Repeal of the Marriage Law and Others on Distinctions of Color, 1843 House Unpassed Legislation Docket #1286, MA. The Belknap Street Church is also known as the Independent Church and the African Meeting House in Boston. See “Proper Resentment,” Hampshire Gazette, February 7, 1838; “In the House of Representative,” Farmer’s Cabinet, February 16, 1838. See 1843 House Unpassed Legislation, Docket 1286, F: Petition of Women of Boston against Repeal, MA. A search of public records and amateur handwriting analysis does not provide sufficient evidence to determine whether or not these petitions are real or forged.

210

Notes to Pages 65–68

61. The latter is the subject of Elise Virginia Lemire, “Miscegenation”: Making Race in America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002). 62. On interracial marriage law and custom as it relates to equal rights, throughout U.S. history, see foundational studies: Peggy Pascoe, What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America (Oxford University Press, 2009); A. Leon Higginbotham, Jr., and Barbara K. Kopytoff, “Racial Purity and Interracial Sex in the Law of Colonial and Antebellum Virginia,” in Interracialism: Black-White Intermarriage in American History, Literature, and Law, ed. Werner Sollors (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 106–108; H Michael Grossberg, Governing the Hearth: Law and the Family in NineteenthCentury America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985), 126– 140; Nancy Cott, Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 163; Lemire, Miscegenation; Paul Goodman, Of One Blood: Abolitionism and the Origins of Racial Equality (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); Martha Hodes, White Women, Black Men: Illicit Sex in the Nineteenth-Century South (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997); Diana Irene Williams, ‘They Call it Marriage’: the Interracial Louisiana Family and the Making of American Legitimacy” (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 2007). 63. Chickering, Statistical View, 58, 119. 64. For the most comprehensive study of African American life in antebellum New Bedford, see Grover, Fugitive’s Gibraltar. 65. For details on population, origin, and slave status of antebellum New Bedford residents, see ibid., 52–66. 66. For a full analysis, see ibid., figs. 62, 63, 269–271. 67. Ibid., 118–119; Deborah Weston to Ann Weston, November 25, 1839, ms. A.9.2 vol. 12, no. 94, Weston Papers, BPL. 68. Grover, Fugitive’s Gibraltar, 122; Rosalind Cobb Wiggins, ed., Cuffe’s Logs and Letters: 1808–1817: A Black Quaker’s “Voice from within the Veil” (Washington, DC: Howard University Press, 1996), 277, 298n1; Minutes and Proceedings of the Third Annual Convention for the Improvement of the Free People of Colour in these United States, Held by Adjournments in the City of Philadelphia, from the 3d to the 13th of June Inclusive, 1833 (New York: Published by Order of the Convention, 1833). 69. South Carolina’s law was first enacted in 1822 after the Denmark Vesey attempted uprising. For additional information on the “negro seamen acts,” see Carol Wilson, Freedom at Risk: The Kidnapping of Free Blacks in America, 1780–1865 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1994), 58–63. 70. William Cooper Nell, Colored Patriots of the American Revolution with Sketches of Several Distinguished Colored Persons: To Which Is Added a Brief Survey of the Condition and Prospects of Colored Americans (Boston: Robert F. Wallcut, 1855), 90; Grover, Fugitive’s Gibraltar, 121. 71. Samuel J. May in “Rev. Mr. May’s Tour,” Liberator, May 2, 1835, 2:4–5. 72. Grover, Fugitive’s Gibraltar, 121; Mary T. Congdon to Deborah Weston, February 1840, Weston Papers, BPL; Will, June 8, 1861, Bristol County Probate Records.

Notes to Pages 68–72

211

73. For residents, see New Bedford City Directories and U.S. Census of New Bedford, MA, 1850; “For the Liberator,” Liberator, November 1, 1834; Martha S. Putney, Black Sailors: African-American Merchant Seamen and Whalemen Prior to the Civil War (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1987), 551; Grover, Fugitive’s Gibraltar, 139. While the Johnsons were well connected with both the white activist and commercial establishments, they nevertheless insisted on maintaining independent institutions like the Union Society, church, and mercantile business. This is unsurprising particularly during the late 1830s and early 1840s when white abolition societies were in their infancy, already splitting over “new” and “old organization” principles, and organizations like the Union Society and Boston’s General Colored Association had been established and functioning smoothly for years. To avoid the intersociety strife, African American women organized the New Bedford Female Union Society and in the summer of 1839 advertised their intentions to hold their own independent fair on New Year’s Day in 1840 to raise money for the Liberator and the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society. 74. New Bedford Directories, 1839, 1841, 1845. 75. New Bedford Directory, 1841; New Bedford Mercury August 13, 1841, 3 for specifications on his property. 76. New Bedford Directories 1838, 1839, 1841, 1845; Guardian Account vol. 133, 651, November 4, 1831 and vol. 82, 156, March 20, 1840, Bristol County Probate Records, Fall River, MA; F: Elijah and Paul C. Howard in Bristol County Probate Records, 1690–1881 (alphabetical) Howard, Elijah—Howland, Eliphal, microfilm F72, New England Historic Genealogical Society, Boston, MA; Kathryn Grover Database [Kathryn Grover, author of Fugitive’s Gibraltar, generously gave me access to her database of information on African Americans in New Bedford]. 77. For additional details and recreated dialogue from the incident, see “Riot on the New Bedford and Taunton Rail Road,” New Bedford Register, February 9, 1842. 78. Petitions of Ezra R. Johnson and Ruth C. Johnson, 1837 House Unpassed Legislation, Docket 249, MA. 79. Petition of Ezra R. Johnson, 1838 Senate Unpassed Legislation, Docket 10274, MA. 80. Petition of Julius Lyons, 1843 House Unpassed Legislation, Docket 1286, MA. 81. The Fairweather sisters and Simmonses lived next to each other. They were in their forties. Experience Fairweather was a widow by this time, and it is unclear how she and Lydia supported themselves. Charles Simmons is listed as a “laborer” in census records, but he had amassed about $1,000 in property by 1850. He hailed from the West Indies. Mary Ross and her son George lived just across Middle Street from the Simmonses. George took the opportunity to sign the marriage petition between sea voyages. In 1841, he was at sea with the Minerva. By 1845 he would be out again on the Huntress. 1841 and 1845 New Bedford Directories; U.S. Census for New Bedford, MA, 1850. 82. Known activists include John Adams, Hannah Briggs, Lloyd Brooks, John Butler, James Dyer, Reverend John Ebrymore or Elsimore, Mary Hoffman, Paul C.

212

83.

84.

85.

86.

87.

88.

89. 90.

91. 92. 93. 94.

95.

Notes to Pages 72–75

Howard, Shadrach Howard, Ezra R. Johnson, Richard C. Johnson, Anthony G. Jourdain, Julius Lyons, Solomon Peneton, Bela C. Perry, Edward Phelps, Cynthia Potts, David W. Ruggles, John W. Smith, Elizabeth Williamson, and Perry Young. Henry Howland Crapo, “Memorandum of Tax Delinquents of New Bedford,” 1838–1840; New Bedford City Directories, 1839 and 1845; U.S. Census for New Bedford, MA, 1850. He lived in three different rooms, on Elm, Kempton, and High, between 1839 and 1841. Crapo, “Memorandum of Tax Delinquents;” New Bedford Directory, 1841. Records for John Ebrymore, Overseers of the Poor Index 1845–1852. Book of Denials, October 22, 1858–January 4, 1882, 88, New Bedford Free Public Library (NBFPL), New Bedford, MA. New Bedford City Directories, 1839, 1841; U.S. Census for New Bedford, MA, 1850; Entry for Robert Elliot in Crapo, “Memorandum of Tax Delinquents;” Charles M. Broacher in New Bedford Directory, 1841, NBFPL. U.S. Census for New Bedford, MA, 1850; Grover Database; John Milton Earle, Report to the Governor and Council, Concerning the Indians of the Commonwealth, under the Act of April 6, 1859 (Boston: W. White, 1861). There are two different marriage records for Perry Young and Sarah Belden. Marriages in Vital Records of New Bedford, MA, int. July 26, 1843. Marriages in Vital Records of Lowell, MA list Sarah Belden of Lowell, and Perry Young of New Bedford, int. August 2, 1843. For their household in New Bedford, see 1850 U.S. Census for New Bedford, MA. Another possible interracial couple on the petition is Joseph and Caroline Cummings. Piper was Jane Gibson’s husband. “Shadrach Howard” in Grover Database; because of his grandmother’s Native American heritage, Howard and his family were included in John Milton Earle’s Report to the Governor and Council Concerning the Indians of the Commonwealth; Earle reported that the entire family was living in San Francisco in 1861, but other sources contradict this claim. It is not clear whether or not any of the Howard children accompanied Shadrach to California. Conveyances vol. 106, 421, Bristol County Clerk of Probate Record Books, Fall River, MA. “Cordelia Howard,” Grover Database. “Helen L. Howard,” Grover Database. Martha S. Jones, All Bound Up Together: The Woman Question in African American Public Culture, 1830–1900 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 28. Shirley Yee argues that to some extent advocated for black men’s citizenship before black women’s full equality. See Shirley Yee, Black Women Abolitionists: A Study in Activism, 1828–1960 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1992), 9. See Erica L. Ball, To Live an Antislavery Life: Personal Politics and the Antebellum Black Middle Class (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012), 82– 84, 88.

Notes to Pages 75–82

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96. Recently, Erica Armstrong Dunbar has revealed the ways advice literature and ideology was consumed and used by elite African American women, noting that North African American women’s friendship albums celebrated marriage, domesticity, and Victorian ideals of womanhood. See Erica Armstrong Dunbar, A Fragile Freedom: African American Women and Emancipation in the Antebellum City (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008), 131. On middleclass family formation more broadly, see Horton, “Freedom’s Yoke.” 97. On marriage law, seduction, and child support, see Grossberg, Governing the Hearth, 205–207. 98. “Substance of Rev. Charles T. Torrey’s Argument . . . on the . . . ‘Marriage’ and ‘Militia’ Laws of the Commonwealth.” Massachusetts Abolitionist, February 27, 1840. 99. “Frederick Douglass on Behalf of George Latimer” in Gregory P. Lampe, Frederick Douglass: Freedom’s Voice, 1818–1845 (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1998), app. B. 100. “Meeting of Colored Citizens of Boston,” Liberator, February 10, 1843. 101. Ibid. 102. See “Petition of John T. Hilton and 351 Other Colored Citizens of Boston for Repeal of the Marriage Law and Others on Distinctions of Color,” 1843 House Unpassed Legislation, Docket 1286, MA. 103. “Meeting of Colored Citizens of Boston,” Liberator, February 10, 1843. 104. Susan Zaeske, Signatures of Citizenship: Petitioning, Anti-Slavery, and Women’s Political Identity (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 76. 105. For Martha Ames, see 1840 U.S. Census for Boston—Ward 6; for Clary, see 1887 Cambridge Directory. 106. The known activist petitioners include John T. Hilton, Eunice R. Davis, Robert and Clarissa Johnson, Thomas P. Smith, Jonas W. Clark, John P. Coburn, Coffin and Mary Ann Pitts, James Scott, George Washington, Cyrus Foster, Lusford Lane, Robert Roberts, Peter M. Howard, Jr., Joseph Russell, Benjamin and Henry Weeden, J. B. Smith, Jane Putnam, the Raymond family, Henry Thacker, Samuel and Isaac Snowden, John Wright, Robert Morris, Thomas Cole, and Orecardo Minott. 107. For a comprehensive study, see Stephen Kendrick and Paul Kendrick, Sarah’s Long Walk: The Free Blacks of Boston and how their Struggle for Equality Changed America (Boston: Beacon Press, 2004). 108. He would attribute his father’s death to the heartbreak and strain associated with this failure. See George R. Price and James Brewer Stewart, “The Roberts Case, the Easton Family, & the Dynamics of the Abolitionist Movement in Massachusetts, 1776–1870,” Massachusetts Historical Review 4 (2002): 98–99; Hosea Easton, “A Treatise,” in Price and Stewart, To Heal the Scourge of Prejudice, 110. 109. Benjamin F. Roberts to Amos Phelps, June 19, 1838, ms. A.2.0499, Anti-Slavery Collections, BPL and in Ripley et al., Black Abolitionist Papers 3: 271. 110. William Cooper Nell for the Liberator, April 7, 1854.

214

Notes to Pages 82–85

111. Franklin A. Dorman, Twenty Families of Color in Massachusetts, 1742– 1998 (Boston: New England Historic Genealogical Society, 2010), 146– 147, 287. 112. On Hilton and the Josephs, see Dorman, Twenty Families of Color in Massachusetts, 193–195; for proximate addresses see U.S. Census for Boston, MA—Ward 6, 1840. 113. See James Oliver Horton and Lois E. Horton, Black Bostonians: Family Life and Community Struggle in the Antebellum North (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1999, orig. pub. 1979), 33, 42, 44, 101, 120; U.S. Census for Boston, MA—Ward 6, 1840. 114. Horton and Horton, Black Bostonians, 42. 115. Lunsford Lane, The Narrative of Lunsford Lane, Formerly of Raleigh, N.C. Embracing an Account of His Early Life, the Redemption by Purchase of Himself and Family from Slavery, and His Banishment from the Place of His Birth for the Crime of Wearing a Colored Skin (Boston: JG Torrey, 1842). 116. See U.S. Census for Boston—5th Ward, 1850; Dorman, Twenty Families of Color in Massachusetts, 33. 117. See U.S. Census for Cambridge, MA, 1850. 118. On Mary A. Barbadoes, see Dorman, Twenty Families of Color in Massachusetts, 287. 119. Betsy might be related to John Ely who in U.S. Census for Boston—Ward 6, 1840 is listed as near P. Hall and Bryant Clark. 120. “Eliza Fisher,” U.S. Census for Boston—Ward 6, 1840. 121. Horton and Horton, Black Bostonians, 90; on African American views of colonization, see Ousmane Kirumu Greene, “Against Wind and Tide: African Americans’ Response to the Colonization Movement and Emigration, 1770– 1865” (Ph.D. diss., University of Massachusetts, Amherst, 2007); Tomek, Colonization and Its Discontents, chaps. 5 and 7. 122. See Horton and Horton, Black Bostonians, 73. 123. See, for example, Henry Weeden, discussed in Dorman, Twenty Families of Color in Massachusetts, 459–461. 124. Levesque, Black Boston, 280. 125. In 1842 one activists group organized a “People’s Convention” to complain about clerical conservatives. They chose the AME Zion Church as a meeting place and condemned ministers for failing to show a “proper degree of zeal” for abolitionism. Levesque, Black Boston, 281; Nell, Colored Patriots of the American Revolution, 363; “The Methodist Church and Slavery,” Liberator, July 15, 1859, 112. 126. Donald M. Jacobs, “The Nineteenth-Century Struggle over Segregated Education in Boston Schools,” Journal of Negro Education 39, no. 1 (Winter 1970): 76–85; Horton and Horton, Black Bostonians, 73–76; “Resolution by a Meeting of Boston Blacks Convened at the First Independent Baptist Church, Boston, Massachusetts, June 18, 1844,” doc. 67, Ripley, Black Abolitionist Papers vol. III, 447; “The Smith School,” Liberator, June 28, 1844.

Notes to Pages 86–89

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3. Moral Reform and the Protection of Northern Motherhood 1. The petitions came in a variety of forms and contained slight variations in wording and spelling, but all contained this very general call for equality under the law. 2. “Ohio Legislature,” Ohio Statesman, December 25, 1838. 3. “The Abolition Question” from the New York Star, Ohio Statesman, November 20, 1838; “Legislature of New York,” Albany Evening Journal, January 5, 1838; “Legislature of New York in Senate,” New York Spectator, February 5, 1838. 4. “Memorial,” Philadelphia National Enquirer/Pennsylvania Freedmen, March 1, 1838, 97. 5. Jesse Chickering, A Statistical View of the Population of Massachusetts, from 1765–1840 (Boston: Little and Brown, 1846), 45. 6. 1838 Senate Unpassed Legislation, Docket 10274, MA. 7. John Stetson Barry, A Historical Sketch of the Town of Hanover, Mass. with Family Genealogies (Boston: Samuel G. Drake, 1853), 74. 8. Donald Blake Johnson, Upton’s Heritage: The History of a Massachusetts Town (Canaan, NH: Phoenix Pub., 1984), 93,143. 9. William A. Emerson, Fitchburg Massachusetts, Past and Present (Fitchburg, MA: Blanchard & Brown, 1887), 293. 10. Charles Nutt, History of Worcester and Its People (New York: Lewis Historical Publishing, 1919), 839. 11. The scholarship on antebellum women’s activism has grown vast. With special reference to Northern and New England reform politics, see Nancy F. Cott, Bonds of Womanhood: Women’s Sphere in New England, 1780–1835, 2nd ed. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997, orig pub. 1977); Mary P. Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County, New York, 1790– 1865 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981); Nancy Hewitt, Women’s Activism and Social Change Rochester, New York, 1822–1872 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,1984); Lori D. Ginzberg, Women and the Work of Benevolence: Morality, Politics, and Class in the Nineteenth-Century United States (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990); Dorothy Sterling, Ahead of Her Time: Abby Kelley and the Politics of Anti-Slavery (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991); essays in Jean Fagan and John C. Van Horne, The Abolitionist Sisterhood: Women’s Political Culture in Antebellum America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994); Carolyn J. Lawes, Women and Reform in a New England Community, 1815–1860 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1999); Julie Roy Jeffrey, The Great Silent Army of Abolitionism: Ordinary Women in the Anti-Slavery Movement (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998); Sandra Harbert Petrulionis, “ ‘Swelling That Great Tide of Humanity’: The Concord, Massachusetts, Female Anti-Slavery Society,” New England Quarterly 74, no. 3 (September 2001): 385–418; Jacquelin Bacon, The Humblest May Stand Forth: Rhetoric, Empowerment, and Abolition (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2002); Anne M. Boylan, The Origins of Women’s Activism: New York and Boston, 1797–1840 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002).

216

Notes to Pages 89–92

12. Report dated April 6, 1838, 1838 Senate Unpassed Legislation, Docket 10274, MA. 13. The petition itself is missing. It is not in the docket file on the subject for the winter 1838 session, suggesting that it either was lost or the women asked that it be withdrawn when they were excoriated in the press. By January 30, it had circulated long enough to inspire petitions in response. See “Legislative,” Salem Gazette, January 30, 1838, 2; “Legislative,” Gloucester Democrat, January 30, 1838, 2. 14. “The Right of Petition,” Gloucester Telegraph, February 14, 1838, 2. 15. “Showing Proper Resentment,” Daily National Intelligencer, February 9, 1838, and Easton Gazette, February 10, 1838. 16. “Legislature,” New Bedford Mercury, March 9, 1838. 17. Reverend George H. Tilton, A History of Rehoboth Massachusetts: Its History for 275 Years 1643–1918 (Boston, self-published, 1918), 178, 184. 18. Ibid., 179, 184. 19. Thompson would go on to a new active calling in Litchfield, New York, in 1840. Charlotte died in 1848. Ibid, 184. 20. See Vital Records of Reading, Massachusetts, to the Year 1850 (Boston: New England Historic Genealogical Society, 1912); Honorable Lilley Eaton, Genealogical History of the Town of Reading, Mass (Boston: Alfred Mudge & Sons, 1874), 545. 21. Eaton, Genealogical History of the Town of Reading, 514–517. 22. Ronald P. Formisano, “Deferential-Participant Politics: The Early Republic’s Political Culture, 1789–1840,” American Political Science Review 68 (June 1974): 473–487; Sean Wilentz, Chants Democratic: New York and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788–1850 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986); Alexander Saxton, The Rise and Fall of the White Republic (London: Verso, 2003), particularly chaps. 9 and 13; Seth Rockman, “Class and the History of Working People in the Early Republic,” Journal of the Early Republic 25, no. 4 (Winter 2005): 527–535. 23. For instance, see Saxton, The Rise and Fall of the White Republic, 153; David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (London: Verso, 1991), 141; Leslie M. Harris, In The Shadow of Slavery: African Americans in New York City, 1626–1823 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 271. For alternatives in Massachusetts, see Bruce Laurie, Beyond Garrison: Antislavery and Social Reform (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 2–25, in which he discusses a base for political abolitionism in industrial and craft centers like Lynn and Worcester focused around working people, not elites. 24. Paul G. Faler, Mechanics and Manufacturers in the Early Industrial Revolution, Lynn, Massachusetts, 1780–1860 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1981). 25. Richard P. Kollen, “The House Gag Rule Debate: The Wedge Dividing North and South,” OAH Magazine of History 12, no. 4 (Summer 1998): 55. 26. Susan Zaeske, Signatures of Citizenship: Petitioning, Antislavery, & Women’s Political Identity (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 21.

Notes to Pages 93–95

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27. General Association of Massachusetts, “Pastoral Letter,” in Ronald F. Reid, ed., American Rhetorical Discourse, 2nd ed. (Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland, 1995), 363–367. 28. Zaeske, Signatures of Citizenship, chaps. 5 and 7. 29. On the gag rule, and Southern congressional censure of antislavery petitions, see Bertram Wyatt-Brown, “The Abolitionists’ Postal Campaign of 1835,” Journal of Negro History 50 (October 1965): 227–238; Richard S. Newman, “Prelude to the Gag Rule: Southern Reaction to Antislavery Petitions in the Federal Congress,” Journal of the Early Republic 16, no. 4 (Winter 1996): 571– 599; Susan Wyly-Jones, “The 1835 Anti-Abolition Meetings in the South: A New Look at the Controversy over the Abolition Postal Campaign,” Civil War History 47, no. 4 (2001): 289–309; Daniel Wirls, “The Only Mode of Avoiding Everlasting Debate: The Overlooked Senate Gag Rule for Anti-Slavery Petitions,” Journal of the Early Republic 27, no. 1 (Spring 2007): 115–138. 30. For correspondence on this campaign, see Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society to New York Female Anti-Slavery Society, July 21, 1835 and BFASS to Putnam, Ohio Female Anti-Slavery Society, July 22, 1835, BFASS Letterbook, Massachusetts Historical Society (MHS), Boston, MA. 31. See Minutes, June 21, 1837, Lynn Female Anti-Slavery Society Record Book, Lynn Historical Society, Lynn, MA. 32. Edward Magdol, The Anti-Slavery Rank and File: A Social Profile of the Abolitionists’ Constituency (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1986), 37, 39. 33. For examples, see petitions in box HR 26A H1.1 to H1.2, 26th Congress, Record Group 233: Records of the House of Representatives, National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, DC. 34. On Chase in Lynn, see “The Abolitionist Movement: More of its Early History in Lynn—Some of the Early Advocates of a Then Unpopular Doctrine,” in D. F. Bennett, A Collection of Clippings on Various Subjects from Lynn, Mass. Newspapers, Widener Library, Harvard University; Records of the Female Anti-Slavery Society of Lynn, Lynn Historical Society; Dorothy Sterling, Ahead of Her Time: Abby Kelley and the Politics of Antislavery (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991), 29, 33; William Bassett to Abby Kelley November 12, 1838, box 1 folder 4, Abby Kelley Foster Papers, 1836–1891, American Antiquarian Society (AAS), Worcester, MA; M. E. Robbins to Abby Kelley, January 21, 1839, box 1 folder 5, Abby Kelley Foster Papers, AAS; Inventory and Appraisement of the Estate of Isaiah Chase, late of Lynn, May 14, 1849, vol. 155–158, 1848–1862, Probate Records of Essex Co., MA; Last Will and Testament of Aroline A. Chase, October 22, 1852, vol. 419–420, bks. 119–120, 1857–1860, Probate Records of Essex Co, MA, New England Historic Genealogical Society, Boston, MA. 35. William Bassett to Abby Kelley, November 12, 1838, box 1, folder 4 letters 1838, July–October, Abby Kelley Foster Papers, 1836–1891, AAS. This could be attributable to the financial crisis, the ideological split over clerical and Garrisonian abolitionists and/or a move on the part of Lynn’s antislavery activists to create a mixed men’s and women’s society, a move that was never realized. See June 4, 1838 Minutes, Records of the Anti-Slavery Society of Lynn and the Vicinity, Lynn Historical Society.

218

Notes to Pages 95–99

36. “Anti-Slavery Fair at Lynn,” Liberator, December 14, 1838. 37. “The Lynn Anti-Slavery Fair,” Liberator January 11, 1839. 38. “Petition of Aroline Augusta Chase and 785 women of Lynn,” 1839 House Unpassed Legislation, Docket 577, MA. 39. David H. Fowler, Northern Attitudes toward Interracial Marriage: Legislation and Public Opinion in the Middle Atlantic and the States of the Old Northwest, 1780–1930 (New York: Garland, 1987), 389. For previous work on the ban, and attention to the Lynn petition, see Louis Ruchames, “Race, Marriage, and Abolition in Massachusetts,” Journal of Negro History 40, no. 3 (July 1955): 250–273; George A. Levesque, “ ‘Politicians in Petticoats’: Interracial Sex and Legislative Politics in Antebellum Massachusetts,” New England Journal of Black Studies No. 3 (1983): 40–59; Sara Dubow, “Not a Virtuous Woman Among Them: Political Culture, Antislavery Politics, and the Repeal of the Marriage Ban in Ante Bellum Massachusetts,” (seminar paper, University of Massachusetts Amherst, 1995); Laurie, Beyond Garrison; 1839 House Unpassed Legislation, Docket 577, MA. 40. Zaeske, Signatures of Citizenship, 134; Elise Lemire, “Miscegenation”: Making Race in America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 62–63. 41. Committee on the Judiciary, “Report on Sundry Petitions Respecting Distinctions of Color,” Massachusetts General Court, House Document No. 28 (1839), Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA; Dubow, “Not a Virtuous Woman Among Them,” 10–16. 42. “Legislature,” Liberator, February 8, 1839. 43. “Legislature,” Liberator, February 8, 1839. 44. “Scurrilous Petition from Lynn,” from the Lynn Record, cited in Liberator, February 22, 1839. 45. Petition of Caleb Hubbard, 1839 House Unpassed Legislation, Docket 577, MA. 46. For an excellent illustration of this within one family, see letters on abolition happenings by devoted Garrisonian Henrietta Sargent written to her nephew, merchant and capitalist George Dixwell while he was in China. For instance, Henrietta Sargent to George B. Dixwell April 24, 1842 in which Sargent defends herself against her sister’s claim that she “writes abolition” to Dixwell inappropriately and the letter in F: 1842 November, where she complains that Dixwell’s mother (despite being related to Henry Ingersoll Bowditch and other reformers) is ignorant of the “fact” that the Latimer affair is the most revolutionary happening in the United States since the war of 1812. In Wigglesworth Papers, MHS. 47. “Report on Sundry Petitions Respecting Distinctions of Color,” Houghton Library, Harvard University. 48. “The Marriage Law,” Liberator, February 15, 1839. 49. Deborah Weston suspected that part of Minott Thayer’s zeal over the Dorchester petition came from his feeling personally slighted that Sarah Baker had sent the petition to freshman representative Bradburn rather than to Thayer himself. Deborah Weston to Ann Warren Weston, March 14–15, 1839, ms. A.9.2.11, 60, Weston Papers, Boston Public Library (BPL), Boston, MA. 50. Frances H. Bradburn, A Memorial of George Bradburn by His Wife (Boston: Cupples, Upham, 1883), 4.

Notes to Pages 99–102

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51. Bradburn, Memorial of George Bradburn, 20; Henry I. Bowditch to Mrs. Bradburn, August 22, 1880 and Lysander Spooner, “The Late George Bradburn” both in Memorial of George Bradburn, app. 52. Bradburn, Memorial of George Bradburn, 7. 53. Ibid., 6. 54. “Great Anti-Slavery Meeting in Marlboro Chapel,” Liberator, March  15, 1839, 43. 55. Ann Warren Weston to Deborah Weston, March 11–16, 1839, and Deborah Weston to Ann Warren Weston, March 14–15, 1839, Weston Papers, BPL. 56. George Bradburn, in Julius Rubens Ames and Benjamin Lundy. The Legion of Liberty!: And Force of Truth, Containing the Thoughts, Words, and Deeds of some Prominent Apostles, Champions and Martyrs (New York: Sold at the Office of the American Anti-Slavery Society, 1842), 127. 57. See “Report on the Petition of S. P. Sanford and Others, Concerning Distinctions of Color,” Massachusetts House Document Number 74 (Boston, 1839), app. 58. Ann Warren Weston to Deborah Weston, March 11–16, 1839, ms. A.9.2.11, 55, Weston Papers, BPL; Minott Thayer, in “Report on the Petition of S.  P. Sanford and Others, Concerning Distinctions of Color,” 19. 59. The leading reform women were aware that some petition signers did not conform to all the formal rules of petitioning etiquette and feared that legislators might draw attention away from their requests if they realized that the petitions included forgeries. At the end of the 1837 petitioning season, Abby Kelley wrote to Maria Weston Chapman, “O! Speed, Speed, the time when our great men shall have better employment” than to scrutinize every name on a women’s petition. Abby Kelley to Maria Weston Chapman, November 25, 1837, ms. A.9.2.9, 91, Weston Papers, BPL. 60. Ann Warren Weston to Deborah Weston, March 11–16, 1839, ms. A.9.2.11, 55; Deborah Weston to Ann Warren Weston, March 14–15, 1839, ms. A.9.2.11, 60, Weston Papers, BPL. 61. “Report on the Petition of S. P. Sanford and Others, Concerning Distinctions of Color,” 9, 12. 62. See Deborah Weston to Anne Warren Weston, March, 14–15, 1839, and Anne Warren Weston to Deborah Weston, March 11–16, 1843, ms. A.9.2.11, 55 and 66, Weston Papers, BPL. 63. M. E. Robbins to Abby Kelley, January 21, 1839, box 1 folder 5, Abby Kelley Foster Papers, AAS. 64. Massachusetts House of Representatives, Doc. 28, February 25, 1839, 7. 65. “Mass. Legislature,” Liberator, April 19, 1839, 62. 66. Thayer’s report admits that six of the women who did testify before his committee asserted that they knew what they had signed and reaffirmed their commitment to repealing the marriage ban. Report on the Petition of S. P. Sanford and Others Concerning Distinctions of Color, 9. Also see Sarah Baker to George Bradburn, March 1, 1839, printed as evidence before the committee on page 29. 67. Ann Warren Weston to Deborah Weston, March 11–16, 1839, ms. A.9.2.11, 55, Weston Papers, BPL.

220

Notes to Pages 103–107

68. Edmund Soper Hunt, Weymouth Ways and Weymouth People (privately printed, 1907), 67–68; Waldo Chamberlain Sprague, Genealogies of the Families Of Braintree, Norfolk, Mass., 1640–1850 (Boston: New England Historic Genealogical Society, 2001), 4912. He garnered some political attention during his early legislative career; in 1827 he was among a handful of men vying for the position of Treasurer of the Commonwealth and he stood out as a proponent of state-sponsored canal building projects. “To the Editor of the Newburyport Herald,” June 9, 1827, in Walter McIntosh Merrill and Louis Ruchames, eds., The Letters of William Lloyd Garrison: No Union With Slaveholders (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), 44; Pittsfield Sun, February 1, 1827 on Taunton River canal and July 17, 1827 on Boston Harbor canal. 69. Minott Thayer to Wendell Phillips, March 12, 1839, F: 1207 Minott Thayer 2 Letters 1839, Phillips Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University. 70. Minott Thayer to Wendell Phillips, March 18, 1839, F: 1207 Minott Thayer 2 Letters 1839, Phillips Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University. 71. “Colonization Logic,” Liberator, March 9, 1833. 72. Lydia Maria Child, An Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans (Boston: Allen & Ticknor, 1833), 196–197. 73. “Communicated—William Lloyd Garrison,” Rhode Island Republican, July 13, 1836. 74. “Miss Prudence Crandall,” New Hampshire Gazette, reprinted in the New Bedford Mercury, April 19, 1833. 75. Gulielma Estes to Friend Wright August 11, 1841, as quoted in Jeffrey, The Great Silent Army of Abolitionism, 152. 76. Jeffrey, The Great Silent Army of Abolitionism, 126. 77. James Mott to Anne Warren Weston, circa May 1843, ms. A.9.2.10, 29, Weston Papers, BPL. 78. H. G. Ludlow to the editors of the Journal of Commerce, July 25, 1834, in Connecticut Courant. 79. Leslie M. Harris, “From Abolitionist Amalgamators to ‘Rulers of the Five Points:’ The Discourses of Interracial Sex and Reform in Antebellum New York City,” in Martha Hodes, ed., Sex, Love, Race: Crossing Boundaries in North American History (New York: New York University Press, 1999), 191–212. 80. As quoted in Lysander Spooner, “The Late George Bradburn,” in Bradburn, Memorial of George Bradburn, 246. 81. Anne Warren Weston to Deborah Weston, March 11–16, 1839, ms. A.9.2.11, 55, Weston Papers, BPL. 82. Sarah Baker, “Dorchester, MA, Anti-Slavery Society,” The Legion of Liberty! And Force of Truth: Containing the Thoughts, Words, and Deeds, of Some Prominent Apostles, Champions and Martyrs (New York: American Anti-Slavery Society, 1843), 114. 83. Record Book, ms. O2: Records of the Female Anti-Slavery Society of Lynn, Lynn Historical Society (FASSL Record Book). 84. Annual Review, June 21, 1837, FASSL Record Book. 85. Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society to Portage Co Female Anti-Slavery Society, August 27, 1839, P-179 BFASS Letter Book, MHS.

Notes to Pages 107–109

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86. Ginzberg, Women and the Work of Benevolence; Bacon, The Humblest May Stand Forth, 114; Julie Roy Jeffrey, “Permeable Boundaries: Abolitionist Women and Separate Spheres,” Journal of the Early Republic 21, no. 1 (Spring 2001): 81. 87. Barbara Cutter, Domestic Devils, Battlefield Angels: The Radicalism of American Womanhood, 1830–1865 (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2003). 88. Boylan, The Origins of Women’s Activism, 215. 89. “A Call for Vigilance,” Liberator, March 15, 1839. 90. “Equal Laws—The Lynn Petition,” Liberator, February 22, 1839; “NonResistance,” Liberator, March 15, 1839. 91. Honorable Luther Bradish’s Letter to the Committee of the N.Y. State A.S. Society, broadside, Newberry Library, Chicago; “Scurrilous Petition from Lynn,” from the Lynn Record, cited in Liberator, February 22, 1839. 92. Quoted text was from Massachusetts Female Emancipation Society and Boston Female Moral Reform Society leader Martha Ball. Hansen, “The Boston Female Antislavery Society and the Limits of Gender Politics,” in Jean Fagin Yellin and John C. Van Horne, eds., The Abolitionist Sisterhood: Women’s Political Culture in Antebellum America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994), 60. For other examples, see, Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Lewis Tappan and the Evangelical War Against Slavery (Cleveland, OH: Press of Case Western Reserve University, 1969), 189–190; Laurie, Beyond Garrison, chap. 1; Julie Roy Jeffrey, “The Liberty Women of Boston: Evangelicalism and Antislavery Politics,” New England Quarterly 85, no. 1 (March 2012): 66. 93. Jeffrey, “The Liberty Women of Boston,” 50, 57. 94. Wyatt-Brown, Lewis Tappan and the Evangelical War against Slavery, 190, 200. 95. Ginzberg, Women and the Work of Benevolence, 88; Hansen, “The Boston Female Antislavery Society and the Limits of Gendered Politics,” 63; Boylan, The Origins of Women’s Activism, 47. 96. See Jeffrey, The Liberty Women of Boston, 46, 65–66, 76; Ginzberg, Women and the Work of Benevolence, 88. Julie Roy Jeffrey argues strongly that at least the members of Boston’s “new organization” Massachusetts Female Emancipation Society were not pawns of the Congregationist clerics and that they disagreed with Catherine Beecher’s declaration that women must limit political activity to maintain their place in a women’s proper sphere. They petitioned on antislavery and the personal liberty law in 1842, and insisted that women reformers must petition, even if their clergy suggested it was outside women’s duties. 97. Maria W. Chapman to Abby Kelley, March  14, 1839, Abby Kelley Foster Papers, AAS. 98. M. E. Robbins to Abby Kelley, April 23, 1839, Abby Kelley Foster Papers, AAS. 99. For the definitive account of this split, see Debra Gold Hansen, Strained Sisterhood: Gender and Class in the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1993). 100. “The Law of Caste,” Liberator, March 22, 1839; “Petition of MAW Johnson and 72 others, women of Boston for the repeal of the statute founded on color,” 1839 House Unpassed Legislation, Docket 577, MA.

222

Notes to Pages 110–113

101. Boylan, The Origins of Women’s Activism, 72. 102. For a full description of women’s organizations in Boston and their counterparts in New York, see Boylan, The Origins of Women’s Activism. 103. Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class; Hewitt, Women’s Activism and Social Change; on reform and the “middle class gospel,” see Steven Mintz, Moralists and Modernizers: America’s Pre-Civil War Reformers (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995). 104. Hewitt, Women’s Activism and Social Change, 40; In a broader study of antebellum social reform, Stephen Mintz characterizes the reform era as tripartite, containing “moral,” “humanitarian,” and “radical” reform movements. Mintz, Moralists and Modernizers, xiv. 105. Boylan, The Origins of Women’s Activism, 3. Carroll Smith-Rosenberg goes so far as to classify New York’s female moral reform as militant. See Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America (New York: A. A. Knopf, 1985), 110, 122. 106. Boylan, The Origin of Women’s Activism, 47, 215–216. 107. Ibid., 32. 108. On shifts in the focus of benevolent work in what Boylan calls the “third wave” of women’s organization, see ibid., 32, 33. 109. Ibid., 164. 110. “Petition of LM Child on Distinctions as to Color,” March 20, 1839, 1839 House Unpassed Legislation, Docket 577, MA. 111. Child, An Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans, 196– 197. Another literary example of this sort of union in New England can be seen in Harriet Wilson, Our Nig, or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black (New York: Penguin Books, 2005 [orig. pub. 1859]). 112. “Rare Example of Moral Courage,” Liberator, April 26, 1839, 67. 113. This is not to say that moral reform women escaped scrutiny. The Friend of Virtue and Advocate of Moral Reform literally are full of letters and editorials arguing over the morality, righteousness, and propriety of their endeavor. 114. Daniel S. Wright, “The First of Causes to our Sex”: The Female Moral Reform Movement in the Antebellum Northeast, 1834–1848 (New York: Routledge, 2006), 62, 102. 115. Boylan, The Origins of Women’s Activism, tbl. A.1. 116. They attended the New York Female Moral Reform Society Fourth Annual Meeting in May 1838, the equivalent of a national moral reform conference; Martha Ball also ran a home and employment service for young women in Boston and edited the Friend of Virtue. See Hansen, Strained Sisterhood, 108, 116; Frances E. Willard and Mary A. Livermore, eds., A Woman of the Century: Fourteen Hundred-Seventy Biographical Sketches Accompanied by Portraits of Leading American Women in all Walks of Life (Buffalo, NY: Charles Wells Moulton, 1893), 50; see petition in “The Law of Caste,” Liberator, March 22, 1839; “List of Petitions,” Liberator April 3, 1840, 54; “Fourth Annual Report of the NYFMRS,” Friend of Virtue 4.11, June 1, 1838. 117. Boylan, The Origins of Women’s Activism, 72.

Notes to Pages 113–116

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118. Tukker/Marshall Petition, 1840 House Unpassed Legislation,1840, Docket 800, MA; “New Agents,” Friend of Virtue 1.6, June 1838; Humphries Petition, Docket 1153 Intermarriage, 1842 Bills and Resolves Rejected, MA; “Third Quarterly Meeting of the New England Female Moral Reform Society, Worcester Methodist Meeting House, July 10, 1839,” Friend of Virtue 2.14, August 1, 1839, 219. 119. Larry Whiteaker, Seduction, Prostitution, and Moral Reform in New York, 1830–1860 (New York: Garland, 1997), 68. 120. Smith-Rosenberg, Disorderly Conduct, 113. 121. Ibid., 109, 122. 122. On temperance and middle-class gender ideology, see Scott C. Martin, Devil of the Domestic Sphere: Temperance, Gender, and Middle-Class Ideology, 1800–1860 (Dekalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2008); for an overview of moral reform work in the northeast, see Wright, The First of Causes to Our Sex. 123. “Licentiousness,” Friend of Virtue 1.8, August 1838. 124. “Causes of Vice,” Friend of Virtue 1.9, September 1838. 125. Mary P. Ryan, “The Power of Women’s Networks: A Case Study of Female Moral Reform in Antebellum America,” Feminist Studies 5, no. 1 (Spring 1979): 71–72. 126. See for example, “Third Quarterly Meeting, May 11, 1837,” Advocate of Moral Reform 3.11, June 1, 1837, 269; Caroline H. Daniels Letter, August 9, 1837, Advocate of Moral Reform 3.19, October 1, 1837; “Medicus Letter,” Advocate of Moral Reform 3.24, December 15, 1837, stating “Due respect for the character of her own sex, therefore, claims at the hand of woman an independent and decisive action upon this subject.” 127. Smith-Roseberg, Disorderly Conduct, 120. 128. Ibid., 117. 129. Ginzberg, Women and the Work of Benevolence, 76. 130. “Cambridge Annual Report,” Friend of Virtue 1.1, January 1838, 10. 131. Ginzberg, Women and the Work of Benevolence, 76. 132. Letter from U. H., Friend of Virtue 1.8, August 1838, 123. 133. Letter of O. Miner, January 8, 1837, Advocate of Moral Reform 3.3, February 1, 1837; see similarly “From the Journal of Commerce,” in Advocate of Moral Reform 4.12, June 15, 1838, 93, where the editor of the Advocate of Moral Reform recounted the tale of a woman who was sexually assaulted in 1838 and whose mother could only sue for the loss of her services occasioned by her subsequent illness. The editor hopes moral reformers will draw up petitions calling upon the state legislators to make “the crime of which we speak” a capital offense. 134. “New York Female Moral Reform Society,” Friend of Virtue 1.6, June 1838, 90. 135. Smith-Rosenberg, Disorderly Conduct, 120; Wright, The First of Causes to Our Sex, 156; “Report Relating to Seduction,” 1844 Docket 1401, House Unpassed Legislation, MA.

224

Notes to Pages 116–118

136. See Petition of Maria F. Rice of Northboro, 1841 House Unpassed Legislation, Docket 998, MA. 137. See the back of Petition of Miss. Abigail C. Coffin of Acton, Docket 1153 Intermarriage, 1842 Bills and Resolves Rejected, MA. 138. The meeting was held October 3, 1838. As reported in the Friend of Virtue 1.10, October 1838, 154. 139. “From the Advocate of Moral Reform ‘Emancipation in the West Indies,’ ” Liberator, May 3, 1838. 140. See for instance Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women of the South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988); Stephanie McCurry, Masters of Small Worlds: Yeoman Households, Gender Relations, and the Political Culture of the Antebellum South Carolina Low Country (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995). 141. BFASS to New York Female Anti-Slavery Society July 21, 1835, P-179 Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society Letter Book, MHS. 142. For the most complete assessment, see Jean Fagan Yellin, Women and Sisters: The Anti-Slavery Feminists in American Culture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992). 143. Karen Sánchez-Eppler, Touching Liberty: Abolition, Feminism, and the Politics of the Body (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). 144. In one telling example, Massachusetts abolitionist and interracial marriage advocate Abby Kelley took advantage of interracial abolitionist lectures to claim her self-styled “ultra” abolitionist identity. While an unmarried young white woman on the abolitionists speaking circuit, Abby Kelley was rumored to hint at her affection for Frederick Douglass to such an extent that her friend Abigail Mott thought it prudent to jot a quick note at the end of a longer letter warning, “Caution as you are traveling about with Fred Douglas [sic]. I advise you to be careful who hears your regrets that you are not a coloured woman.” That Douglass was married with two children seems to have been beside the point for both Kelley and Mott. By making a habit of flirting with Douglass on the speaker’s platform, Kelley seemingly disavowed the possibility of an interracial relationship with Douglass while simultaneously teasing her audiences with the notion of just such a match. Mott surely believed these remarks would enflame already prevalent antiamalgamationist feeling. The very performativity of Kelley’s suggestively sexual performance mirrors the process of “love and theft” Eric Lott has identified in white male blackface minstrelsy. Discounting the improbability that her desire was legitimate, this episode instead reveals Kelley’s commentary to be an exploitive and potentially dangerous attempt to enhance the thrill of a public interracial antislavery performance and to distinguish herself as an “ultra” and radical woman. See Abigail Mott to Abby Kelley, August 18, 1842, Abby Kelley Foster Papers, box 1 folder 12 Letters, 1842 August–December, AAS; Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994). 145. “Boston,” Liberator, May 21, 1831.

Notes to Pages 119–124

225

146. “Continuation of Mr. Goodell’s Address. False Accusations,” Easton Gazette, September 13, 1834. 147. Alvan Stewart, “The Slave Representation,” The Legion of Liberty, 133. 148. The writer notes, as a sign of progress for West Indian women, that marriages are overtaking concubinage. See “Emancipation in the West Indies,” Liberator May 3, 1838 (from Advocate of Moral Reform). 149. Amesbury Mills Anti-Slavery Society to BFASS, June 30, 1834, P-179 BFASS Letter Book, April 9, 1834–January 7, 1838, MHS. 150. BFASS to Pittsburgh Female Anti-Slavery Society, July 11, 1836, P-179 BFASS Letter Book, MHS. 151. “Extracts from a Work on Slavery, by Chancellor Harper, of South Carolina,” Advocate of Moral Reform 4.21, November 1, 1838, 164. 152. Ibid. 153. “The Quadroon,” from the Pennsylvania Freedman in Advocate of Moral Reform 4.19, October 1, 1838, 146. 154. Michael Pierson, Free Hearts, Free Homes, Gender and American Antislavery Politics (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 26. 155. Hearing Before the Legislative Committee,” Massachusetts Abolitionist, February 27, 1840. 156. On Phelps’s critique of women’s political activism and his role in advocating for the “new organization” Massachusetts Female Emancipation Society, along with the criticism he faced from women’s rights advocates, see Hansen, Strained Sisterhood, 129–130; Wyatt-Brown, Lewis Tappan and the Evangelical War against Slavery, 190; Sarah M. Grimke to Amos A. Phelps, August 3, 1837 in Larry Ceplair, ed., The Public Years of Sarah and Angelina Grimké (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), 274. 157. Amos Phelps to the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, April 30, 1839, ms. A.21.9, 83, Amos Phelps Papers, BPL. 158. As Alisse Portnoy has pointed out in her analysis of women’s opposition to Indian removal, the stated object of activists’ sympathies is a critical factor determining activist success. Portnoy argues that activist women’s racial perceptions of Native Americans and African Americans shaped the scope and accessibility of women’s activism against Indian removal (as a benevolent cause). Alisse Portnoy, Their Right to Speak: Women’s Activism in the Indian and Slave Debates (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005).

4. Anti-Southern Politics and Interracial Marriage Rights 1. Thayer was not reelected for the 1840 legislative session, nor would he ever again hold a political office. He had been caught in the crossfire of the political transition Ronald Formisano outlines in The Transformation of Political Culture, where traditional elite political exclusivity encountered citizens intent on furthering the republican project through mass popular participation in party politics and reform organizations, and was unable to make the transformation. See Norfolk Democrat, December 19, 1840, in which the editor

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2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

15. 16. 17. 18.

19. 20.

21.

22.

Notes to Pages 124–128

mourns Thayer’s loss and writes “The Whigs have shamefully neglected their great men, of late”; Ronald P. Formisano, The Transformation of Political Culture: Massachusetts Parties, 1790s–1840s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 23. George Bradburn to Henry W. Chapman, February 27, 1841, ms. A.9.2.15, 29, Weston Papers, Boston Public Library (BPL), Boston, MA. Regarding sarcasm and severity in speech, see William Lloyd Garrison to George W. Benson, January 28, 1842, ms. A.1.1.3, 82, Anti-Slavery Collection, BPL. George Bradburn to Hannah Webb, July 28, 1843, ms. A.1.2.12.2, 70, AntiSlavery Collection, BPL. Massachusetts House Doc. 38, Report on the Deliverance of Citizens Liable to Be Sold as Slaves (Boston: 1839). Extracts from Bradburn’s Diary, in Frances H. Bradburn, A Memorial of George Bradburn by His Wife (Boston: Cupples, Upham, 1883), 5. “List of Petitions,” Liberator, April 3, 1840, 54; Davis Report, 1840 House Unpassed Legislation, Docket 800, MA. Caroline Weston to Ann Warren Weston, March 14, 1840, ms. A.9.2.13, 39– 40, Weston Papers, BPL. Bradburn, Memorial of George Bradburn, 7. Draft Report “An Act Relating to the Marriages between Individuals of Certain Races,” 1840 Massachusetts House Unpassed Legislation, Docket 800, MA. “Reported for the Liberator,” Liberator, April 17, 1840. Ibid. Bradburn’s Report, 1841 House Unpassed Legislation, Docket 998 Intermarriage, MA. Ibid.; Massachusetts General Court House Document 7, January 19, 1841, copy of report collected with “Report on Sundry Petitions Respecting Distinctions of Color;” also see Chris Dixon, Perfecting the Family: Antislavery Marriages in Nineteenth-Century America, (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1997), 22, 38. Howe Report, filed with 1841 House Unpassed Legislation, Docket 998, MA. “Petition of Charles T. Torrey in relation to the free people of color,” 1841 House Unpassed Legislation, Docket 998 Intermarriage, MA. See petitions in 1842 House Unpassed Legislation, Bills and Resolves Rejected, Docket 1153, MA. Minott Thayer, in “Report on the Petition of S. P. Sanford and Others, Concerning Distinctions of Color,” Massachusetts House Document Number 74 (Boston, 1839), 10. Boston Daily Advertiser, February 6, 1843. Caroline Weston to Maria and Henry Chapman, February 12, 1841, ms. A.9.2.15, 24, Weston Papers, BPL; George Bradburn to Henry W. Chapman, February 27, 1841, ms. A.9.2.15, 29, Weston Papers, BPL. George Bradburn to Francis Jackson, December 15, 1841, ms. A.1.2.1, 133, ; George Bradburn, January 11, 1842, ms. A.1.2.12.2, 5, Massachusetts AntiSlavery Society Papers, BPL. Bradburn, Memorial of George Bradburn, 6.

Notes to Pages 129–130

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23. Alexander Saxton, The Rise and Fall of the White Republic: Class Politics and Mass Culture in Nineteenth-Century America (London: Verso, 1990), 153; David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (London: Verso Press, 1991), 141. Saxton goes on to iterate how ultimately Northern urban Democrats split with Southern slaveholders over the question of Western expansion, as Northern whites envisioned a frontier where they could be free to labor without the threat of black workers’ competition. In some cases, this contingent would transform into the Free Soil Party and later the Republican Party, which as Eric Foner has pointed out possessed both antislavery and intensely racist ideologies. See Saxton, The Rise and Fall of the White Republic, 154; Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War (New York: 1970), 261–300. 24. Daniel Walker Howe, The Political Culture of the American Whigs (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), 18. 25. Sara Dubow, “Not a Virtuous Woman Among Them: Political Culture, Antislavery Politics, and the Repeal of the Marriage Ban in Ante Bellum Massachusetts,” (seminar paper, University of Massachusetts Amherst, 1995), 34; Bruce Laurie, Beyond Garrison: Antislavery and Social Reform (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 111. 26. See particularly Pierre Van Den Berghe, Race and Racism: A Comparative Perspective (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1967); Kenneth P. Vickery, “ ‘Herrenvolk’ Democracy and Egalitarianism in South African and the U.S. South, Comparative Studies in Society and History 16.3 (June 1974): 309–328; George M. Frederickson, White Supremacy: A Comparative Study in American and South African History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981); Charles Mills, The Racial Contract (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999); Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness. 27. On the relationship between elite and popular party politics in Massachusetts, see Laurie, Beyond Garrison, 10; Ronald P. Formisano, The Transformation of Political Culture: Massachusetts Political Parties, 1790–1840s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983). 28. Glenn C. Altschuler and Stuart M. Blumin, “Limits of Political Engagement in Antebellum America: A New Look at the Golden Age of Participatory Democracy,” Journal of American History 84, no. 3 (December 1997): 855–885; Mark Voss-Hubbard, Beyond Party: Cultures of Antipartisanship in Northern Politics before the Civil War (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002). 29. Formisano, Transformation of Political Culture, 23. 30. See generally, Arthur B. Darling, Political Changes in Massachusetts, 1824–1848: A Study in Liberal Movements in Politics (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1926); Formisano, Transformation of Political Cultures; Dale Baum, The Civil War Party System: The Case of Massachusetts, 1848–1876 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984); Reinhard O. Johnson, “The Liberty Party in Massachusetts, 1840–1849: Antislavery Third Party Politics in the Bay State,” Civil War History 28, no. 3 (1982), in John R. McKivigan, ed., Abolitionism and American Politics and Government (New York: Garland., 1999), 120;

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31. 32. 33.

34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43.

44. 45. 46.

47. 48. 49.

50.

51. 52. 53.

Notes to Pages 130–135

Harlow W. Sheidley, Sectional Nationalism: Massachusetts Conservative Leaders and the Transformation of America, 1815–1836 (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1998). Formisano, Transformation of Political Culture, 275; Laurie, Beyond Garrison, 50. “Annual Meeting of the Norfolk County Anti-Slavery Society,” Liberator April 10, 1840. Laurie, Beyond Garrison, 10; According to Charles Francis Adams, Whigs did the same. Charles Francis Adams Diary (CFA Diary), January 2, 1843, Massachusetts Historical Society (MHS), Boston, MA. Laurie, Beyond Garrison, 111 fn. 100. Reinhard O. Johnson, Liberty Party: 1840–1848 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2009), 37–38. Charles Francis Adams to John Quincy Adams, March 4, 1842, Charles Francis Adams Letterbook, MHS. CFA Diary, February 10, 1842, MHS. CFA Diary, February 11, 1842, MHS. See petition language, 1842 House Unpassed Legislation, Docket 1153 Intermarriages, MA. CFA Diary, February 15, 1842, MHS. CFA Diary, February 16, 1842, MHS. CFA Diary, March 1, 1842, MHS. For a narrative history of the Latimer case, see Asa J. Davis, “The Two Autobiographical Fragments of George W. Latimer: A Preliminary Assessment,” Journal of Afro-American Historical and Genealogical Society 1 (Summer 1980): 3–18. For the order and promissory note, see “Read This Bostonians,” Liberator, November 3, 1842. “Thursday Evening October 20,” Daily Atlas, October 21, 1842; “The Latimer Case,” Daily Atlas, November 22, 1842. Paul J. Finkelman, “Story Telling on the Supreme Court: Prigg v Pennsylvania and Justice Joseph Story’s Judicial Nationalism,” Supreme Court Review (1994): 252. Prigg v. Pennsylvania, 41 U.S. 542 (1842). See Sewell’s speech in “The Case of George Latimer,” Emancipator and Free American November 17, 1842. “Municipal Court. Friday Nov 11, 1842,” Boston Courier, November 14, 1842; “Court Record,” Daily Atlas, November 18, 1842; “Grand Convention,” Emancipator and Free American, November 24, 1842. “Latimer Meeting at New Bedford,” Emancipator and Free American, November 17, 1842; Frederick Douglass to William Lloyd Garrison, Liberator, November 18, 1842. Douglass to William Lloyd Garrison, Liberator, November 18, 1842. “Jan 2nd Dedham Convention,” Salem Observer in Latimer Case Journal and Scrapbook, MHS. “Great Meeting at Lyceum Hall, Lynn,” Liberator, November 11, 1842.

Notes to Pages 135–138

229

54. “Latimer Convention,” Liberator, February 3, 1843, 18. On Attucks, Massachusetts’s Revolutionary heritage, interracial political mobilization, and movements like the “Latimer War,” see Stephen Kantrowitz, “A Place for ‘Colored Patriots’: Crispus Attucks Among the Abolitionists, 1842–1863,” Massachusetts Historical Review 11 (2009): 96–117. 55. “Grand Meeting for Human Rights in Faneuil Hall,” Emancipator and Free American, November 3, 1842, reprinted in the Boston Courier, November 7, 1842. 56. “The Case of George Latimer,” Emancipator, November 17, 1842. 57. See runaway ad in Norfolk Beacon, October 15, 1842; Latimer Journal and North Star 1.1, November 11, 1842. 58. “The Case of George Latimer,” Emancipator and Free American, November 3, 1842; “The Chivalrous James B. Gray,” Emancipator and Free American, November 17, 1842; “Re-Agitation of Abolition Riot,” Wisconsin Democrat, November 29, 1842, 3. 59. “The Chivalrous James B. Gray,” Emancipator and Free American, November 17, 1842. 60. Ibid. 61. “Great Meeting for Human Rights in Faneuil Hall,” Emancipator and Free American, November 3, 1842. 62. “The White Slaves of the North,” Latimer Journal and North Star 1.1, November 11, 1842. 63. “The Case of Latimer,” Boston Courier, November 7, 1842, 1; the white vigilance committee organized to work for Latimer’s release, including Willis Howe, William F. Channing, and John Ingersoll Bowditch published resolutions after the meeting at which they offered Gray the $600. They stated that he refused it out of spite and that “Justice and Humanity forbid that Latimer should be surrendered to a fate so terrible as that which appears to await him,” “Ward 12, City of Boston, Nov 12, 1842,” Boston Courier, November 17, 1842. 64. “Ward 12, City of Boston,” Boston Courier, November 17, 1842. The offer of $600 was made at a meeting hosted by Samuel Hill of Boston. Captain Willis Howes, A. J. Wright, Samuel Hill, and other vigilance committee insiders responded to Gray’s refusal by issuing a resolution “that Justice and Humanity forbid that Latimer should be surrendered to a fate so terrible as that which appears to await him; therefore, resolved that the citizens of every class are loudly called upon to sympathize with the said Latimer and to be forward in furnishing the means of procuring his best possible legal defense.” 65. See E. G. Austin’s appeal “To The Public” in “The Latimer Case,” Daily Atlas, November 22, 1842, 2. 66. “The Latimer Case,” Daily Atlas, November 22, 1842. 67. Norfolk Beacon, November 26 and 30, 1842, printed in Latimer Journal and North Star; see Latimer Case, Journal and Scrapbook, 1842–1844, MHS. 68. Norfolk Beacon, February 28, 1843; The Richmond Enquirer reported on calls in the Virginia Legislature to create new laws to assure the easy retrieval of fugitive slaves in the North; see Latimer Journal and North Star, January 3, 1843, Latimer Case, Journal of Scrapbook, 1842–1844, MHS; Norfolk later published

230

69.

70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77.

78. 79. 80. 81.

82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88.

Notes to Pages 138–142

the minutes of their citizens’ meeting including a report that hinted, not too subtly, that if Northerners hindered slave catchers, the South should consider dissolving the Union. See Proceedings of the Citizens of the Borough of Norfolk, on the Boston Outrage: in the Case of the Runaway Slave George Latimer (Norfolk: T. G. Broughton & Sons, 1843), 5. “Latimer Items,” Emancipator and Free American, November 17, 1842; also see “Slave-Catching City,” Liberator, November 18, 1842; “Grand Convention,” Latimer Journal and North Star, November 18, 1842. “Grand Convention,” Emancipator and Free American, November 24, 1842. “Petitions,” Latimer Journal and North Star 1.2, November 14, 1842. Latimer Journal and North Star, November 23, 1842; Latimer Case, Journal and Scrapbook, 1842–1844, MHS. Joanne Pope Melish, Disowning Slavery: Gradual Emancipation and Race in New England, 1780–1860 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998). “The Latimer Journal,” Emancipator and Free American, November 24, 1842, 118. “Let the Country Speak,” Emancipator and Free American, November 17, 1842, 115. “Latimer Meeting at Salem,” Emancipator and Free American, December 1, 1842, 123. “Grand Convention,” Emancipator and Free American, November 24, 1842; meetings took place in Hingham, Waltham, Abington, Dedham, Nantucket, Boston, Ipswich, Pepperell, and Northampton. Reports of meetings in Emancipator, November 17, 1842; Anti-Slavery Standard, November 17, 1842; others collected in Latimer Case, Journal and Scrapbook, 1842–1844, MHS. “Nantucket Meeting” n.d. Latimer Case, Journal and Scrapbook, MHS. “Honor to Brave Old Massachusetts,” Anti-Slavery Standard, November 17, 1842. Ibid. Petition of John T. Hilton and 351 other colored citizens of Boston for repeal of the marriage law and others on distinctions of color; Petition of P. Stewart and 67 colored citizens of Boston for repeal; Memorial of colored citizens of Boston convened in Belknap Street Vestry, February 1, 1843; Petition of Julius Lyons and 338 other colored citizens of New Bedford for repeal of marriage law all in F: Petitions, Boston, Repeal Marriage Law, 1843 House Unpassed Legislation, Docket 1286, MA. For extant petitions, see 1843 House Unpassed Legislation, Docket 1286, MA. Anne Warren Weston to Deborah Weston, October 22, 1842, ms. A.9.2.17, 99, Weston Papers BPL. JS Stafford to Francis Jackson, July 25, 1843, ms. A.9.2.19.2 Anti-Slavery Collection, BPL. Charles Francis Adams to John Quincy Adams, December 16, 1842, Reel 158 CFA Letterbook, MHS. CFA Diary, January 2, 1843, MHS. CFA Diary, January 11, 1843, MHS. CFA Diary, January 29–30, 1843, MHS.

Notes to Pages 142–145

231

89. CFA Diary, February 1, 1843, MHS. 90. Entry for February 22, 1843, Reel 46, John Quincy Adams Diary, MHS. 91. See entries for January 7 and March  9, 1840 and February 15, 1843, reels 45–46, John Quincy Adams Diary, MHS. 92. C. Peirce to Henry Ingersoll Bowditch, February 21, 1843 in Latimer Journal no. 2, Latimer Case, Journal and Scrapbook, MHS. 93. CFA Diary, February 3, 1843, MHS. It is not clear whether this anxiety was widespread or his own, although he does express extreme disappointment with his own exposition of the argument for repeal. 94. CFA Diary, January 20, 1843, MHS. 95. CFA Diary, February 4, 1843, MHS. 96. “Inter-Marriage Law,” Emancipator and Free American, February 9, 1843, 158. 97. Ruchames, “Race, Marriage and Abolition,” 270; Journal of the House of Representatives, Bill No. 13, 1843, MA; DuBow, “Not a Virtuous Woman,” apps. A & B. 98. Entry for February 26, 1843, CFA Diary, MHS. 99. Entry for January 20, 1843, CFA Diary, MHS. 100. William Lloyd Garrison to Hannah and Richard D. Webb, February 28, 1843, ms. A.1.1.3, 102, Anti-Slavery Collection, BPL. 101. Bradburn, Memorial of George Bradburn, 9. 102. William Lloyd Garrison to Henry Wright, March 1, 1843, ms. A.1.1.3, 103, Anti-Slavery Collection, BPL. Henry C. Wright was a foremost proponent of nonresistance social reform strategies, and was highly influential in Garrison’s own views on the politics of anti-slavery. 103. See Tzvetan Todorov, The Fragility of Goodness: Why Bulgaria’s Jews Survived the Holocaust, trans. Arthur Denner (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001). In his history of Nazi-era Bulgaria, Todorov establishes a theory of the “fragility of goodness” (a complement to Hannah Arendt’s “banality of evil”) to explain why Bulgarian Jews survived the Holocaust. Like granting marriage rights to interracial couples in antebellum Massachusetts, Bulgarian Jews’ survival was not a product of altruism. It was the product of a complex and tenuous web of conditions, the absence of any of which could have spelled disaster. 104. In the new introduction to his classic work Political Process and the Development of Black Insurgency, Doug McAdam revises the established model that hitherto explained the origins of social movements (“political opportunities,” “mobilizing structures,” “framing processes”) to include what he calls “Interpretive Process and the Collective Attribution of Opportunity/Threat.” In this new model, he asserts, “the ongoing interpretation of events by various collectivities shapes the likelihood of movement emergence, as it shapes all of social life.” The movement to legalize interracial marriage in Massachusetts is an excellent illustration of the ways such “various collectivities” shaped not only the movement’s emergence, but charted its course from year to year. See Doug McAdam, Political Process and the Development of Black Insurgency, 1930– 1970, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), xxi. Also see Derrick A. Bell, Jr., “Brown v. Board of Education and the Interest-Convergence

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Notes to Pages 146–150

Dilemma,” Harvard Law Review 93 (1980): 518–533, on “interest-convergence” and white support for civil rights measures in the United States.

5. Advancing Interracialism 1. Speech given at Springfield, Illinois, June 26, 1857; see Abraham Lincoln, Speeches and Writings, 1832–1858 (New York: Library of America, 1989), 397. 2. Tavia Nyong’o argues that it was abolitionist’s own refusals to embrace interracialism that made amalgamation “an act of ideological closure that opens out only onto the future of racially normative sexuality.” Tavia Nyong’o, Amalgamation Waltz: Race, Performance, and the Ruses of Memory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 101. 3. Leslie M. Harris, “From Abolitionist Amalgamators to ‘Rulers of the Five Points:’ The Discourses of Interracial Sex and Reform in Antebellum New York City,” in Martha Hodes, ed., Sex, Love, Race: Crossing Boundaries in North American History (New York: New York University Press, 1999), 198. 4. Tilden G. Edelstein, “Othello in America,” in Werner Sollors, ed., Interracialism: Black-White Intermarriage in American History, Literature, and Law (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 361. 5. For correspondence detailing early female antislavery societies’ hesitance to even permit black members, see William Lloyd Garrison to Boston Female AntiSlavery Society, April 9, 1834, and Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society to Garrison April 11, 1834, BFASS Letter Book, Massachusetts Historical Society (MHS), Boston, MA; Karen Sánchez-Eppler, Touching Liberty: Abolition, Feminism, and the Politics of the Body (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). 6. On criticism and the tragic mulatto stereotype, see Werner Sollors, Neither Black Nor White Yet Both: Thematic Explorations of Interracial Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 234. 7. Lydia Maria Child, A Romance of the Republic (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1867). 8. While Child is unusual for being a white author who so publically wrote and advocated on the subject of interracial marriage, interracialism was a constant theme in African American literature during the decades leading to the Civil War. Notable examples of authors who addressed the subject include William Wells Brown, Frank J. Webb, Harriet Wilson, and Harriet Jacobs. 9. Carolyn L. Karcher, The First Woman of the Republic: A Cultural Biography of Lydia Maria Child (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994), 512. Karcher asserts that her interracial fiction and particularly Romance reflects her conviction that interracialism was the only true answer to racial discrimination: “Through intermarriage, she imagined, race itself could be erased, and with it racial prejudice.” 10. Josiah Bartlett and 132 others petition for the Repeal of the Marriage Law, Passed Legislation, Acts of 1843, chap. 5. Act relating to marriages between individuals of certain races, MA. 11. In 1859, just a few years before Alcott published “M.L.,” Harriet Tubman was in Concord during the planning, funding, and subsequent mourning over John

Notes to Pages 150–152

12.

13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

24.

25.

233

Brown’s rebellion at Harpers Ferry. On the Alcotts, see Madeleine B. Sterns, Louisa May Alcott: A Biography (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1999); John Matteson, Eden’s Outcasts: The Story of Louisa May Alcott and Her Father (New York: W. W. Norton, 2008). On the Concord Circle, see Elise Lemire, Black Walden: Slavery and Its Aftermath in Concord, Massachusetts (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009); Sandra Harbert Petrulionis, “Swelling That Great Tide of Humanity’: The Concord, Massachusetts, Female Anti-Slavery Society,” New England Quarterly 74, no. 3 (September 2001): 385– 418; Sarah Elbert, Louisa May Alcott: On Race, Sex, and Slavery (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1997), xxi; Kate Larsen, “Harriet Tubman and the Underground Railroad,” Symposium: From New York to the Northampton Association: David Ruggles & the Underground Railroad in New England, April 2010, Florence, MA. What is perhaps most striking about Alcott’s insistence on writing stories that mainstream presses, like the Atlantic Monthly, refused to publish (she published most of these, instead, in the Commonwealth), is the common supposition that at least during the 1850s, Alcott’s writing was an act of economic as much as creative necessity. Elbert, Louisa May Alcott on Race, Sex, and Slavery, xi; “M.L.” was serialized in the Commonwealth 1, nos. 21, 22, 23, 24, 25 (January 24, 31, February 7, 14, 21, 1863). On the Atlantic Monthly, see Sarah Elbert, A Hunger for Home: Louisa May Alcott’s Place in American Culture (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1987). “M.L.” in Elbert, Louisa May Alcott: On Race, Sex, and Slavery, 3. Alcott, “M.L.,” 4. Ibid., 3–4. Ibid., 10. Ibid., 15. Ibid., 18. Ibid. Ibid., 21. Ibid., 22. Elbert, Louisa May Alcott on Race, Sex, and Slavery, xix. For a critical reading of ‘M.L” as a celebration of interracialism as a means of reforming whites’ racist views, see Elise Virginia Lemire, “Miscegenation”: Making Race in America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), chap. 5. John William Leonard and Albert Nelson Marquis, “Mary Andrews Denison,” in Who’s Who in America, John William Leonard and Albert Nelson Marquis (Chicago: A.N. Marquis, 1903), 383. Charles W. Denison actively advocated repeal of the interracial marriage ban and signed at least one petition on the subject. There is no evidence that then Mary A. Andrews ever did (notably, she was under age during the repeal movement). See Petition of William F. Channing (an interracial petition), Docket 998 Intermarriage, House Unpassed Legislation, MA; “Aged Novelist Has Birthday, Boston Morning Journal, June 1, 1910, 14; James Grant Wilson and John Fiske, eds. Appleton’s Cyclopaedia of American Biography (New York: D. Appleton, 1888).

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Notes to Pages 152–156

26. 27. 28. 29.

Mrs. C. W. Denison, Old Hepsy (New York: A. Burdick, 1858). Ibid., 56. Also see the deacon’s sale of Rosa from her husband Jim; ibid., 170. Here the web of family relations is complicated to say the least: Hollister is Lucina’s half-uncle and Amy her half-sister. Denison, Old Hepsy, 174. Ibid., 175. Ibid., 251. Ibid, 204. Ibid., 50. Ibid., 385. Ibid., 436. Ibid., 438. Ibid., 453. Joanne Pope Melish, “The ‘Condition’ Debate and Racial Discourse in the Antebellum North,” Journal of the Early Republic 19, no. 4, Special Issue on Racial Consciousness and Nation-Building in the Early Republic (1999): 651–672. Simone Vauthier, “Of African Queens and Afro-American Princes and Princesses: Miscegenation and Old Hepsy,” in Werner Sollors, ed., Interracialism: Black White Intermarriage in American History, Literature, and Law (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 349. See Charles Sumner, Argument of Charles Sumner, Esq., Against the Constitutionality of Separate Colored Schools, in the Case of Sarah C. Roberts vs. the City of Boston (Boston: B. F. Roberts, 1849); Charles Slack, in Triumph of Equal School Rights in Boston: Proceedings of the Presentation Meeting Held in Boston, December 17, 1855 . . . (Boston: R. F. Wallcut, 1856), 12. Stephen Kendrick and Paul Kendrick, Sarah’s Long Walk: The Free Blacks of Boston and how their Struggle for Equality Changed America (Boston: Beacon Press, 2004), 70. Kathryn Grover, The Fugitive’s Gibraltar: Escaping Slaves and Abolitionism in New Bedford, Massachusetts (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001), 181. Ibid., 180; “Address of the Mayor, upon the organization of the City Government” March 25, 1844” (Salem, 1844) in Salem City Documents, 1840–1858, Salem Public Library, Salem, MA. Nell reported that he joined officers of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, Garrison, Phillips, Francis Jackson, and Henry W. Williams, in a petition to the city of Boston in 1840. Triumph of Equal School Rights in Boston, 5. For a concise exposition of the many ways Charles Sumner’s radicalism and influence impacted antislavery, sectional strife, and Civil War, see David Herbert Donald’s biography, Charles Sumner and the Coming of the Civil War (New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1989). Sumner, Argument of Charles Sumner. Ibid., 12. Ibid., 23. Ibid., 20.

30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39.

40.

41.

42.

43.

44.

45.

46.

47. 48. 49. 50.

Notes to Pages 156–159

51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56.

57.

58. 59.

60.

61. 62.

235

Ibid., 20 Ibid., 25. Kendrick and Kendrick, Sarah’s Long Walk, 152. Shaws decision in Roberts v. City of Boston, 5 Mass. 198 (1854). Triumph of Equal School Rights in Boston, 20. There were two well-known men named George Putnam in Boston’s abolitionist circles, the minister of the first church of Roxbury, and white abolitionist and a prominent African American hairdresser and activist who lived and worked in Boston but moved his family to Salem to take advantage of desegregated schools there in 1845, while he continued his business in Boston. This reference is to the black Putnam, who was instrumental as a petitioner, boycott leader, and testifier before the school committee during Boston’s desegregation battle. See John Gorham Palfrey, Papers on the Slave Power: First Published in the “Boston Whig,” in July, August, and September, 1846 (Boston: Merrill Cobb, 1846), 15; Jessie Carney Smith, “Georgiana Frances Putnam,” in Notable Black American Women (Detroit: Gale Research, 1996), 533. There was an organized opposition to the integrated school play led by Thomas Paul Smith, cousin of the teacher at the segregated school. He and his cousin rallied support from others in the community who worried that white teachers, whether in segregated or integrated schools, would not provide African American children with a quality education. An integration meeting was even assaulted by a group of black school supporters in 1849. See Kendrick and Kendrick, Sarah’s Long Walk, 132, 121–124. Triumph of Equal School Rights in Boston, 8–9. Stephen Kantrowitz, More Than Freedom: Fighting for Black Citizenship in a White Republic, 1829–1889 (New York: Penguin Press, 2012), 199–204; Kellie Carter Jackson, “Force and Freedom: Black Abolitionists and the Politics of Violence, 1850–1861” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 2010), 123–124; Pauline Hopkins in the Colored American Magazine, September 1901; Benjamin Quarles, Black Abolitionists (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969); Remond obituaries in Boston Evening Transcript and Boston Daily Advertiser, December 13, 1882, and Boston Evening Journal December 13 and 15, 1882. Also see William C. Nell, “Matters and Things Pertaining to the Anti-Slavery Cause,” Liberator, March 11, 1853, 39, in which he links the battles for a “colored Military Company” and the fight for integrated schools. Watkins was born free in Baltimore and moved to Boston by 1849, after which he was active in both the antislavery speaking circuit and local vigilance and equal rights efforts. Unlike Garrison, he promoted political abolitionism, first through the Free Soil Party and later with the Republicans. He later dabbled in Haitian emigration and then became a lawyer in Boston in the 1860s. See C. Peter Ripley et al., eds., Black Abolitionist Papers vol. IV: The United States, 1847–1858 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 155n5. Robert Morris before the Committee on the Militia, March 3, 1853, in file 9: Massasoit Guard, Robert Morris Papers, Boston Athenaeum (BA), Boston, MA. On Morris’s concern for respectability, see Kantrowitz, More Than Freedom, 216.

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Notes to Pages 159–163

63. William J. Watkins, Our Rights as Men: An Address Delivered in Boston, Before the Legislative Committee on the Militia, February 24, 1853 (Boston: Benjamin F. Roberts, 1853), 10. 64. Robert Morris to George H. Devereaux, March 14, 1853 in file 9: Massasoit Guard, and file 10: DeGrasse, John V., Robert Morris Papers, BA. By 1859, there were militias in Massachusetts, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Rhode Island. Jackson, “Force and Freedom,” 124. 65. W. J. Watkins to Boston Herald, April 23, 1853, in Ripley et al., The Black Abolitionist Papers Vol IV153–54; also see the speech reprinted as “Equal Rights of Citizens,” Liberator, May 13, 1853, 76. 66. Nell had published a brief pamphlet version of his work, Services of Colored Americans in the Wars of 1776 and 1818, which Morris and others used as support for their claims to armed citizenship rights in the early 1850s. Kantrowitz, More Than Freedom, 200. 67. William Cooper Nell, Colored Patriots of the American Revolution, with Sketches of Several Distinguished Colored Persons: To Which Is Added a Brief Survey of the Conditions and Prospects of Colored Americans (Boston: Robert F. Wallcutt, 1855), 10. 68. Nell, Colored Patriots of the American Revolution, 109–110. Emphasis added. 69. Ibid., 111. Emphasis added. 70. Jackson, “Force and Freedom,” 123–124. 71. Nell, Colored Patriots of the American Revolution With Sketches of Several Distinguished Colored Persons, “The Equal Rights Movement” chapter; Quarles, Black Abolitionists, 229–230. On the formation of abolitionist militias as a marker of black and white masculinities, see Stephen Kantrowitz, “Fighting Like Men: Civil War Dilemmas of Abolitionist Manhood” in Catherine Clinton and Nina Silber, eds., Battle Scars: Gender and Sexuality in the American Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 19–40. 72. Ibid., 22. 73. “The Massasoit Guards,” Liberator (reprinted from Transcript), September 14, 1855. 74. Clifford to Gardiner, August 17, 1855, reprinted in Liberator, September 14, 1855. 75. If his words on an earlier occasion can be taken as representative, Watkins was probably less charitable to the governor than Morris. In a speech on West Indian Emancipation Day in New Bedford two years earlier, Watkins denounced Congress as a whole, including avowed allies like Charles Sumner, for their complicity in the perpetuation of the Militia Act, which he maintained was patently unconstitutional. See “Extracts from a Speech,” Liberator, August 19, 1853. 76. See Leon Litwack, North of Slavery: The Negro in the Free States, 1790–1860 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965), 77. 77. I follow Peggy Pascoe and many others in maintaining that “miscegenation law” is both influenced by and shapes cultural and social understandings of race. See Eva Saks, “Representing Miscegenation Law,” Raritan 8 (Fall 1988): 56– 60; Barbara J. Fields, “Slavery, Race, and Ideology in the United States of America,” New Left Review 181 (May–June 1990): 7; Peggy Pascoe, “Miscege-

Notes to Pages 163–166

78.

79. 80. 81. 82.

83.

84.

85. 86. 87.

88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93.

237

nation Law, Court Cases, and Ideologies of “Race” in Twentieth-Century America,” Journal of American History 83, no. 1 (1996): 47; Ian F. Haney-López, White by Law: The Legal Construction of Race (New York: New York University Press, 1996); Ronald Takaki, Iron Cages: Race and Culture in 19thcentury America, rev. ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 111. For details on these laws, see David Fowler, Northern Attitudes towards Interracial Marriage: Legislation and Public Opinion in the Middle Atlantic and the States of the Old Northwest, 1780–1930 (New York: Taylor and Francis, 1987), 339–439 listed by state. Ibid. Quoted in Jackson, “Force and Freedom,” 189. John B. McMaster, A History of the People of the United States During Lincoln’s Administration (New York: Appleton, 1927), 525. On the first page, the authors define the new term “miscegenation”: “From the Latin Miscere, to mix, and Genus, race, is used to denote the abstract idea of the mixture of two or more races.” See Miscegenation: The Theory of the Blending of the Races Applied to the American White Man and Negro (London: Trubner, 1864, reprinted from the New York edition). On the miscegenation pamphlets, see J. M. Bloch, Miscegenation, Melaleukation, and Mr. Lincoln’s Dog (New York: Shaum, 1958); Sydney Kaplan, “The Miscegenation Issue in the Election of 1864” in American Studies in Black and White: Selected Essays, 1949–1989, ed. Sidney Kaplan and Allan D. Austin (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1991). On battles over monogenesis and polygenism (and “subgenation”), and the popularity, by the 1860s, of the polygenesis school, see Lemire, Miscegenation, chaps. 2 and 4; John Van Evrie, Subgenation: The Theory of the Normal Relation of the Races; an Answer to “Miscegenation” (New York, 1864). David Goodman Croly and George Wakeman, Miscegenation: A Theory of the Blending of the Races Applied to the American White Man and Negro (New York: H. Dexter, Hamilton, 1864), 49. Ibid., 59. Ibid., 55. For Assing’s full assessment, see “Effects of War on Social Conditions and on Slavery,” in Radical Passion: Ottilie Assing’s Reports from America and Letters to Frederick Douglass, ed. Christopher Lohman (New York: P. Lang, 1999), 276–279. Croly and Wakeman, Miscegenation, 60. Ibid, 18. Ibid, 19. See Kaplan, “The Miscegenation Issue,” 51. Croly and Wakeman, Miscegenation, 28. Curiously, there seems to be chink in the argument, at least as far as its political satire stretches. The pamphlet is targeted at Northern voters and ostensibly those on the fence about their party loyalties. It takes particular pains to needle Irish Americans who competed with African Americans for jobs in urban centers like New York. See “Chapter IX: Present and Future Relations of the

238

94. 95. 96. 97. 98. 99. 100. 101. 102.

103. 104. 105. 106. 107. 108. 109. 110. 111. 112. 113. 114.

115. 116.

Notes to Pages 167–174

Irish and the Negro,” in Croly and Wakeman, Miscegenation, 29–32. One would expect that the authors, if they intended to maximize the anxiety of the Northern laboring Democratic base, would have advocated the migration of African Americans from the South to the North. Instead, they repeatedly argue that the lands of former slaveholders be given to ex-slaves: “as a matter of simple justice, the man whose toil has enriched the Southern plantations should own them” (ibid., 61). [No title], Wisconsin Daily Patriot, reprinted from Chicago Times, February 20, 1864, 2. “Miscegenation,” Springfield Weekly Republican, January 30, 1864. “A Beautiful Doctrine,” Cleveland Plain Dealer, February 5, 1864 “The Objects of the War as Avowed by Henry Ward Beecher,” September 1, 1864. “Facts and Fancies,” New York Tribune, January 21, 1864. Ibid., 56. Angelina Grimke, quoted in Kaplan, “The Miscegenation Issue,”56. Quoted in Kaplan, “The Miscegenation Issue,”58. On majoritarian politics and the question of amalgamation, see Kyle Volk, “Majority Rule, Minority Rights: The Christian Sabbath, Liquor, Racial Amalgamation, and Democracy in Antebellum America” (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 2008), chap. 5. Croly and Wakeman, Miscegenation, 65. See “Chicama: A Story of Slavery and Miscegenation,” Springfield Weekly Republican, February 6, 1864. “Miscegenation in Detroit,” Daily Age, March 4, 1864, 1. “Legislative,” Daily National Intelligencer, February 19, 1864, 2. Dr. Tyng on Foreign Fiddlers,” New York Herald, March 10, 1864, 4. Theodore Tilton, “The Union of Races,” Independent, February 25, 1864. “Miscegenation,” New York Sunday Mercury, January 17, 1864. “The Negro—His Nature and Destiny,” Knickerbocker Magazine, 63 (April 1864): 363–366, quoted in Bloch, Miscegenation, 22. “Miscegenation,” New York Tribune, March 16, 1864. Croly and Wakeman, Miscegenation, 34. “What Are We Coming to and When Shall We Reach It?” New York Times, March 26, 1864. An advertisement in the Day-Book observed that the Republican men were “on the sofas . . . squeezing and ogling thick-lipped Phillises.” Quoted in Kaplan, “Miscegenation Issue,” 317n59; Lemire, Miscegenation, 123. World, September 22, 1864. Harold Holzer and Gabor S. Boritt, The Confederate Image, Prints of the Lost Cause (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 129, 201; “President Lincoln and his Family Circle,” [n.d. circa 1862], Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division. He also seems to have specialized in black and white and colored images of buildings including churches, hospitals, and a circa 1875 drawing of the new New York Tribune building. The variety of subject taken up by Giles and his printing partner George E. Perine, from schoolchildren to military figures, pastoral scenes to religious themes and mythic ele-

239

Notes to Pages 174–180

117.

118. 119. 120.

gies, belies any attempt to place the firm’s political or ideological intent. Prints by Giles are preserved at many repositories, including the New York Public Library, American Antiquarian Society, and Library of Congress. Horatio Bateman, Explanation of Bateman’s National Picture of Reconstruction (New York: self-published, 1867). Harvard University’s copy of this pamphlet is inscribed “1868, Oct 1, Gift of Hon Chas. Sumner (H.C. [Harvard College], 1830).” Horatio Bateman, Biographies of Two Hundred and Fifty Distinguished National Men (New York: John L. Giles, 1871), xii. Bateman, Explanation of Bateman’s National Picture, 1. Ibid., 2, 8–9.

Epilogue 1. Peggy Pascoe, What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 47–48. 2. Ibid., 55–56. 3. David G. Croly, and George Wakeman, Miscegenation; the Theory of the Blending of the Races, Applied to the American White Man and Negro (New York: H. Dexter, Hamilton, 1864), 65. 4. Peggy Pascoe, “Miscegenation Law, Court Cases, and Ideologies of ‘Race’ in Twentieth-Century America,” Journal of American History 83, no. 1 (1996): 49. 5. On state-by-state challenges, see Pascoe, What Comes Naturally, 290. 6. On the legal distinction between political and social equality, see Andrew Koppelman, Antidiscrimination Law and Social Equality (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998). 7. Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896). 8. “The Negro’s Status Declared by the President,” Literary Digest, November 19, 1921, 1. 9. W. E. B. Du Bois, “President Harding and Social Equality,” Crisis, December 1921. 10. On the effects on family, see Pascoe, What Comes Naturally, 276. 11. Ibid., 277. 12. Ibid., 278. 13. Loving v. Virginia, 388 U.S. 1, 12 (1967); Pascoe, What Comes Naturally, 284. 14. Pascoe, What Comes Naturally, 290–291. 15. Ibid., 309. 16. Wendy Wang, “The Rise of Intermarriage: Rates, Characteristics Vary by Race and Gender,” Pew Research Social and Demographic Trends, February 16, 2012. http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2012/02/16/the-rise-of-intermarriage/ (accessed September 10, 2014). 17. Daphne Lofquist et  al., “Household and Families: 2010,” 2010 U.S. Census Brief (April 2012), 18. http://www.census.gov/prod/cen2010/briefs/c2010br-14 .pdf (accessed September 10, 2014). 18. James Trosino, “American Wedding: Same-Sex Marriage and the Miscegenation Analogy,” Boston University Law Review 73 (January 1993): 93–120. For a brief overview of these debates, see Greg Johnson, “We’ve Heard This Before:

240

19.

20.

21.

22. 23. 24. 25. 26.

27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32.

33.

Notes to Pages 180–185

The Legacy of Interracial Marriage Bans and the Implications for Today’s Marriage Equality Debates,” Vermont Law Review 34 (2009): 277–290. David Orgon Coolidge, “Playing the Loving Card: Same-Sex Marriage and the Politics of Analogy,” Brigham Young Journal of Public Law 12 (1998): 218–220; Monte Neil Stewart and William C. Duncan, “Marriage and the Betrayal of Perez and Loving,” Brigham Young University Law Review 555 (2005): 555–595. R. A. Lenhardt, “Beyond Analogy: Perez v. Sharp, Antimiscegenation Law, and the Fight for Same-Sex Marriage,” California Law Review 96, no. 4 (August 2008): 839–900; Julie Novkov, “The Miscegenation/Same-Sex Marriage Analogy: What Can We Learn from Legal History,” Law and Social Inquiry 33, no. 2 (Spring 2008): 345–386. On the injurious impacts of same-sex marriage bans, see Ellen D. B. Riggle and Sharon S. Rostosky, “The Consequences of Marriage Policy for Same-Sex Couples’ Well-Being,” in The Politics of Same-Sex Marriage, ed. Craig A. Rimmerman and Clyde Wilcox (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 65–84. Hillary Goodridge & others v. Department of Public Health, 44 Mass. 309, 335–336 (2003). Windsor v. United States, 570 U.S. 12, 19 (2013). Ibid., 22. Ibid., 25. On this debate, see Katrina Kimport, Queering Marriage: Challenging Family Formation in the United States (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2014), 9. Also see Jyl J. Josephson, “Citizenship, Same-Sex Marriage, and Feminist Critiques of Marriage,” Perspectives on Politics 3 (2005): 269–284; Aderson Bellegarde Francois, “As Iowa Goes, So Goes the Nation: Varnum v. Brien and Its Impact on Marriage Rights for Same-Sex Couples: Symposium Article: To Go into Battle with Space and Time: Emancipated Slave Marriages, Interracial Marriage, and Same-Sex Marriage,” Journal of Gender, Race & Justice 12 (Fall 2009): 105–151. Andrew Sullivan, Virtually Normal: An Argument about Homosexuality (New York: Vintage Books, 1996), 184. Goodridge v. Department of Public Health, 344–346. Ibid., 21. Ibid., 22, 25. Jason Pierceson, Same-Sex Marriage in the United States (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2013), 248. Mariana Valverde dubs this “the respectable same-sex couple,” who hides nonnormative sexual practices from the public and lives according to normative gender conventions. Mariana Valverde, “A New Entity in the History of Sexuality: The Respectable Same-Sex Couple,” Feminist Studies 32 (2006): 155–162. See Claudia Card, “Against Marriage and Motherhood,” Hypatia 11, no. 3 (Summer 1996): 1–23; Rosemary Auchmuty, “Same-Sex Marriage Revived: Feminist Critique and Legal Strategy, Feminism and Psychology 14, no. 1 (February 2004): 101–126; Ryan Conrad, ed., Against Equality: Queer Critiques of Gay Marriage (Lewiston, ME: Against Equality Press, 2010); Elizabeth Brake, Minimizing Marriage: Marriage, Morality and the Law (New York: Oxford Uni-

Notes to Page 185–185

241

versity Press, 2012); Nicola Barker, ed. Not the Marrying Kind: A Feminist Critique of Same Sex Marriage (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2013); Julie R. Enszer, “ ‘Whatever Happens, This Is’: Lesbians Engaging Marriage,” Women’s Studies Quarterly 41, no. 3/4 (Fall/Winter 2013): 210–224. 34. Lisa Duggan, The Twilight of Equality? Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and the Attack on Democracy (Boston: Beacon Press, 2003); Paula L. Ettelbrick, “Since When Is Marriage a Path to Liberation?” in Lesbian and Gay Marriage: Private Commitments, Public Ceremonies, ed. S. Sherman (Philadelphia: Temple University Press), 20–26; Mary Bernstein and Verta Taylor, The Marrying Kind: Debating Same-Sex Marriage within the Lesbian and Gay Movement (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013). 35. Kathleen E. Hull, Same-Sex Marriage: The Cultural Politics of Love and Law (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 98 and chap. 3. 36. “Meeting of Colored Citizens of Boston,” Liberator, June 3, 1842, 87.

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Acknowledgments

This project, like any good history, began as a mystery waiting to be solved. For pointing me to that mystery, I must thank Diana Williams. Many others have offered advice, perspective, research leads, and support throughout the process. Special thanks to Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham for always asking just the right questions, Werner Sollors for inspiration, encouragement, and some truly exceptional meals, Nancy Cott for feedback that is always spot-on, and Susan O’Donovan for sharing a constant curiosity and the love of the archives. Those who read versions of this work and provided feedback at conferences, especially Anne Boylan, Anne Brinton, Sarah Carter, David Greenspoon, Stephen Harper, April Haynes, Nancy Hewitt, Jessica Dainty Johns, Jamie Jones, Lotte Larsen, Elise Lemire, Hilary Moss, Liz Pryor, Rachel Remmel, Amy Richter, and Sue Zaeske, have offered invaluable insights that I hope are reflected in the pages that follow. An earlier version of my thinking in Chapter 3 can be found in an article entitled “Closing the ‘Floodgate of Impurity’: Moral Reform, Antislavery and Interracial Marriage in Antebellum Massachusetts” in the March 2012 issue of the Journal of the Civil War Era, and I am extremely thankful for the feedback and support I received while working on that piece. I am especially grateful for the close and thoughtful reading and excellent advice of my editor Andrew Kinney and the dedication of the Harvard University Press editorial staff and Deborah Grahame-Smith of Westchester Publishing Services for making this book a reality. This work would have been impossible without the help of the historians, librarians, and archivists at each of the repositories I visited. Special thanks to Paul Cyr at the New Bedford Free Public Library, New Bedford historian Carl Cruz, and Kathryn Grover, author of Fugitive’s Gibraltar, for going above and beyond to familiarize me with nineteenth-century New Bedford. The incredible work of Dan Carpenter and Nicole Topich on the Anti-Slavery and Anti-Segregation Petitions digitization project came a bit too late for my research (alas) but just in time for publication, and I am thankful for their willingness to share the fruits of that labor with me. I am also thankful to the various institutions that funded this time-consuming

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research: Harvard’s Graduate Student Council, the Center for American Political Studies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Charles Warren Center, Harvard’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, the New England Regional Fellowship Consortium, the Whiting Foundation, and the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater. Maintaining my sanity, focus, and general good humor throughout most of this process has been unusually easy thanks to my colleagues, friends, and family. For friendship, confidence, and nourishment of body and soul, thanks to Carla Martin, Trevor Bass, Meghan Healy, Seamus Clancy, Adam McGee, Grete Viddal, Ashley Farmer, Linda Chavers, Laura Murphy, Mia Bagneris, Cameron Leader-Picone, Peter Geller, Clinton Williams, Christina Knight, Chérie Rivers, Lisanne Norman, Teal Sallen, and Marc DiMarzio. I was fortunate to find the most collegial department imaginable at UW-Whitewater, and am thankful to Tony Gulig, Nikki Mandell, Jennifer Thibodeaux, Molly Patterson, James Levy, Mark Boulton, Emma Kuby, Rod Wilson, Adam Paddock, Mia Feng, and Libby Tronnes for making me welcome there. And last but not least, thanks to my family. The Tseng-Huang clan welcomed me into their family with open arms, for which I am extremely grateful. Cat, Joe and Isla Chiappa; Erin, Jason, and Tucker Robinson; Casey Moulton and Roy Rose; Moie, Stephen, and Sully LaRock; and my parents Mary Dainty Moulton and Dean Moulton are my dearest friends and daily inspirations. My deepest gratitude goes to Brent Sugimoto who has offered unfailing encouragement and love as I worked to draw this project to a close. I look forward to the many mysteries we will solve together as our journey continues.

Index

Abiel Smith School, 155 abolitionists. See antislavery Adams, Charles Francis, 9, 128, 131–132, 141–144 Adams, John Quincy, 95, 103, 131, 141–142, 148 adultery, 116 advancing interracialism, 6, 9, 147–148, 162, 166, 173 Advocate of Moral Reform, 114–115, 117, 120–121 African American reformers: and equal rights, 85, 156, 166, 76; gender among, 74–75, 158; independent of whites, 52, 63–65, 81, 85; and interracial marriage rights, 52, 65, 74, 76; and militias, 158–163; more radical than whites, 65, 81, 105; on multiple reform causes, 63, 155; personal motivations, 67; petitioning, 63–65, 69–74, 77–79, 82–84; and respectability, 75; and school integration, 157; uncompromising on racism, 58; unity among, 85 African American women: as activists, 20, 57, 67, 74, 158; against interracial marriage rights, 64–65; in interracial marriages, 180; as licentious, 119–121; in literature, 149, 152–154; marriage rights and, 75, 126, 144; and paternity claims, 41, 75; petitioning, 73–75, 158; in print culture, 25, 170–173; protection in marriage, 47, 72–73; in slavery, 16, 43–45, 52, 117–18, 120–121, 152–154;

West Indian, 117; and white women, 20, 94, 110, 118, 126, 144, 148. See also amalgamation; black women and white men African Christian Society, 67 African Colonization Society, 84 Alabama, 67, 74, 180 Alcott, Abigail, 150 Alcott, Bronson, 150 Alcott, Louisa May, 150–152 Alexander, Nancy, 83 Alexander, Salmon, 83 Allen, Elizabeth, 83 Allen, Jesse, 83 Allen, Richard, 67 Allen, William H., 63 almshouse, 34, 41–43. See also overseers of the poor Alvord, James C., 89 amalgamation, 1–2; abolitionists defending, 19, 97, 104–105; abolitionists disavow, 148; Civil War and, 166; forced, 21–24, 29–30, 136, 169–170; Harding on, 178; interracial marriage as, 15–16, 62–63, 95–97, 99; Lincoln on, 146; in literature, 21–24, 153; political, 17, 21; in print culture, 24–25, 95–96; and Republicans, 146, 164; and school integration, 163; in slavery, 3, 117–119, 121, 136–137, 143–144, 153–154; and white women petitioners, 92, 95–96, 98–99. See also interracialism; miscegenation amalgamationists, 1–2, 9, 21–22

270 Amalgamation Polka, 173 Amalgamation Waltz, 24, 173 American Anti-Slavery Society, 57, 59, 70, 87, 93, 105, 108 American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), 179 American Civil War, 66, 81, 146, 149, 162, 164–166, 173–175 American Colonization Society, 62, 80, 84 American Revolutionary War, 80–81, 135, 159–160, 162 Ames, Martha, 79 Amesbury Mills Anti-Slavery Society, 120 Amory, Margaret, 83 Amos, George, 79 Anderson, Alexander, 27 Andrew, John A., 162 antiabolitionist attacks. See mobs; riots antiamalgamation: and abolitionists, 97, 104–105; abolitionists’ defenses against, 62, 99–100, 104–105, 112, 118–119; ideology, 8, 57, 147, 164; and Miscegenation, 164, 168; in press, 17–18, 89–90; and white women’s politics, 7, 89–90, 93, 96–97, 106, 111. See also amalgamation; mobs; riots antislavery: and colonization, 146; dissent within, 108–109, 122; and enslaved women, 117–118; and equal rights, 51–52, 59, 61–62, 67–68, 70, 77, 81, 146, 156; family ideal, 121–122; and interracialism, 104–105, 119, 146, 148; and interracial marriage, 21, 100; lecture tours, 57–58, 61, 124; literature, 25–26, 27, 29–30, 152–154; and Miscegenation, 166–168; and moral reform, 110, 112–113, 116; and personal liberty law, 133–135, 137–138; petitioning, 51, 76, 86–88, 91–92, 126–127; politics, 98–99, 128, 131–131, 141; and race science, 14; and railroad integration, 69; sexualization of, 146; and slaveholding women, 94; and white supremacy, 24; women petitioners, 92, 94–97, 102–103; as women’s responsibility, 106–107. See also African American reformers; Garrisonians; Liberty Party; petitioning campaigns Anti-Slavery Convention of American Women (1838), 20, 92. See also Pennsylvania Hall antislavery fairs, 67, 94–95, 104 Anti-Slavery Herald, 80–81, 160

Index antislavery societies, 10, 51, 57, 92, 138; female, 106, 117; and interracial marriage rights, 86, 88; and moral reform, 113; separate African American, 65, 84; and women’s leadership, 108 anti-Southernism, 130, 132, 138, 140, 143–144, 147, 162 Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans Called Africans, 104, 111–112 Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World, 52–53, 55 Appleton, Nathan, 127 Ashport, Calvin, 42–43 A Sojourn in the City of Amalgamation in the Year of our Lord 19—by Oliver Bolokitten—Esq., 21–24, 96 Assing, Ottilie, 166 Attucks, Crispus, 135 Bailey, John, 64, 134 Baker, Sarah, 100–102, 106 Baker v. State of Vermont, 184 Ball, Martha, 110, 113 Baptist Church, 45, 77, 80, 82, 84, 88, 113, 134 Barbadoes, Mary A., 82, 84 Barber, Ann, 33–34 Barber, John, 33–34 bastardy, 37, 39, 41–42, 126 Batemen, Horatio, 174–176 Beecher, Henry Ward, 167, 170 Beecher, Julia Anna, 170 Belknap Street Church, 63–64, 70, 79–80, 83–84, 185 benevolence, 106–107, 109–110, 115 Benjamin, Adeline, 83 Benjamin, Henry, 83 Berlin, Ira, 11, 38 Berry, William, 134 Bigelow, John, 54 biracial children, 33–36, 41, 43–44, 48; abandonment of, 122, 126–127, 135; economic support for, 48, 112–114, 125, 126, 179; illegitimacy of, 12, 32, 38, 48, 54, 104, 114, 122, 179; and inheritance, 126; as innocent, 54; in law, 12, 38; in literature, 26–27; in slavery, 118 -119; as sterile, 14, 179 black men and white women, 34–37, 41–43, 48, 56 black women and white men, 44–47, 75, 166, 177, 179 Bolen, Lucy Ann, 117

Index Boone, Daniel, 174 Borden, Nathaniel, 64 Boston Daily Advertiser, 128, 132, 143 Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society, 19–20, 61, 64, 107–111, 113, 120 Boston Female Moral Reform Society, 110, 113, 117 Boston School Committee, 115 Bowditch, Henry, 79, 137–138 Boylan, Anne, 110 Bradburn, George: on Democrats, 128–129; for interracial marriage, 100, 126–127; and interracial marriage petitions, 90, 98–99, 101–102, 124; on kidnapping of free people of color, 124–125; on Remond, 58; on repeal of marriage ban, 144; on women’s rights, 101–102, 106 breach of promise, 15, 37, 75 Brimmer, Martin, 125 Bristol County Anti-Slavery Society, 62, 69 Britain, 11, 29, 38, 58–62 Broacher, Adelia, 72 Brooks, Nathan, 54 Brown, John, 150, 161, 174 Brown, William Wells, 152, 167–168 Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka Kansas, 156 Buskirk, Samuel H., 177 Byron, Lady, 61 Caldwell, Charles, 13–14 Calhoun, John C., 174 California, 33, 73–74 Camper, Petrus, 13, 57 Canaan, New Hampshire, 15–16, 19 Canada, 32, 47–48 Carrier, Henry Lee, 42–43 Cassey, Amy M. W., 158 caste, 3, 48, 56, 60, 82, 118, 156, 162, 180. See also Jim Crow Era; prejudice Chandler, Peleg, 157 Channing, William F., 63, 137–139 Chapman, Maria Weston, 20, 100, 107, 109 Chase, Aroline A., 94–95, 97 Child, David Lee, 111 Child, Lydia Maria, on Bradburn, 106; interracial marriage petition, 111–113, 117, 121; and interracial marriage rights, 8, 29–30, 104, 148; literary works, 27–30, 149–150, 154 children, enslaved, 12, 43–44, 50, 110, 118–120, 126–127, 154 children, illegitimate, 54, 139–141

271 children, of same-sex couples, 181–183, 185 Chinese, 163 Chinn, Julia, 16–18 Chute, Daniel, 86–87, 91, 104 Chute, Polly, 86–89, 91, 104 citizenship: of African Americans, 3–4, 7, 50–51, 74–76, 80, 86, 165, 173; and Fourteenth Amendment, 177; and interracial marriage, 39, 52, 66; and interracial socializing, 57; and militias, 159, 161–162; and whiteness, 10, 50, 160–161, 164 Civil Rights Act (1866), 177 Civil Rights Movement, 5, 178 civil union, 184 Clark, Fanny, 84 Clark, Jonas W., 79, 84, 157–158, 160–161 Clark, Kenneth, 156 Clark, Sarah, 72 Clary, Francis, 79 Clay, Edward G., 24–25, 95–96, 173 Clay, Henry, 119 clergy, 54, 92–93, 108, 113, 143, 158. See also ministers; reverends Clifford, John H., 162 Clotel, 152 Coffee, Ishmael, 35–37 cohabitation, 8, 31–32, 34–35, 163–164, 179–180 Cole, Thomas, 84 Collins, John A., 100 colonization, 24, 62, 66, 68, 72, 80, 84, 104, 146 Colored Patriots of the American Revolution and Services of Colored Americans in the Wars of 1776 and 1812, 160–161 common-law marriage. See marriage concubinage, 29, 126. See also licentiousness; prostitution condition debate, 153–154, 167 Confederacy, 50, 166 Congregationalist Church, 88, 90–92, 108, 113 Connecticut, 19, 91, 104 Cornish, Samuel, 105, 148 Cott, Nancy, 40 Cotton, Phebe, 107 coverture, 74 Crandall, Prudence, 19, 91, 104 Crania Americana, 14 Crocker, Samuel, 88 Croly, David, 1, 9, 15, 147, 164–169, 178 Cross, Harriet, 72

272 Cross, Modon, 72 Crouch, Eliza, 70 Crowell, Peleg, 68 Cuffe, Paul, 65, 67, 69, 73 Curtis, Elisabeth, 84 Cutter, Barbara, 107 Dalton, Cornelia, 83 Davis, Eunice, 77, 84, 158 Davis, George T., 125–126, 129 Declaration of Independence, 55 Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), 181 DeGrasse, John V., 158, 160 Delaware, 180 Democratic Party, 1, 17, 92, 128–130, 132, 164–165 Denison, Charles Wheeler, 151 Denison, Mary Andrews, 151–154 desertion, 38, 64, 124–127. See also seduction Dickinson, Anna, 170 District of Columbia, 86, 94, 130, 177 divorce, 41–42, 182 Dodge, Lucy N., 113, 116 Dole, Hannah, 59–60 Douglas, Stephen, 146, 164 Douglass, Frederick, 58, 61, 76, 134, 176 Draper, John William, 15 Dred Scott Decision, 4, 159 Du Bois, W. E. B., 179 Dubow, Sara, 7, 129 Dudley, Governor Thomas, 10, 12 Duggan, Lisa, 185 Duncan, Abel, 88 Durfee, Joseph, 72 Easton, Caleb, 34 Easton, Chloe Packard, 34, 80 Easton, Hosea, 14, 33, 49, 51, 56–57, 80 Easton, James, 80 Ebrymore, Deborah, 72 Ebrymore, John, 72 Eddy, Martin, 42 Edward Prigg v. Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, 79, 133, 135 Egypt, 14, 52 Eli, Betsy, 84 Eli, John, 79 Elisha, James, 32, 197 Elliot, Rosana, 72 Emancipation, West Indian, 45, 117, 119 Emancipation Proclamation, 165 emigration, 51, 65, 84

Index enslaved people, 16–18, 44–47, 50, 124, 161, 164, 177; in colonial America, 11; communication with free people of color, 67; descendents of, 4, 65, 73; free people viewed as, 56; in literature, 26, 29–30, 149–154; marriage of, 74; in Massachusetts, 4, 11, 138; and white women reformers, 113, 118; women, 47, 106, 120 equality under law, 4, 6, 169, 183. See also citizenship; equal rights; political equality equal protection, 177, 179, 181, 183–184 equal rights: activists, 2, 19, 33, 61, 77, 99–100, 128, 174–175; and antislavery, 103, 105, 107, 141; and citizenship, 4; families of, 67–68, 80–83; on interracial love, 150–154; interracial marriage as, 6, 21, 49–52, 66, 76, 85, 140–143, 179; and Liberty Party, 131; in Massachusetts, 54, 148, 160–162; and the “Negro Pew,” 80; and Miscegenation, 165–166; and race science, 14; and railroad integration, 63, 69; and respectability, 159; and same-sex marriage, 181, 183, 185; and school integration, 155–157; unpopularity of, 2, 23, 92–93 103, 131–135, 148; and white supremacy, 49–50, and women, 73–74, 97, 109–112. Equiano, Olaudah, 52–53 escaped slaves. See former slaves extramarital sex. See illicit sex; licentiousness Fairweather, Experience, 70 Fairweather, Lydia, 70 Faneuil Hall, 135, 137, 142 Federalist Paper Number 2, 50 Female Anti-Slavery Society of Lynn, 94, 106, 109 fifteen-gallon law, 130 Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts Infantry Regiment, 162 Fisher, Elizabeth, 84 Fisk, Elsy, 64, 65 Florida, 116 Foreman, Almira, 83 Foreman, Cato, 83 former slaves, 33, 46–47; among African American reformers, 65, 74, 82–83, 158, 161; kidnapping of, 125, 133; in Massachusetts, 4, 12–13; women, 74–75, 119 Forten, Charlotte L., 158

Index Forten, James, 73 Foster, Stephen S., 134 Fourteenth Amendment, 4, 5, 177, 179, 183 Franklin, Benjamin, 50 Frederickson, George, 14 Freedmen’s Bureau, 175 freedom suits, 3, 11 freed people. See former slaves Freeman, Elizabeth, 3 free soil, 24, 146 French, Ezekiel, 42 Friend of Virtue, 91, 114, 115 fugitive slave law, 131, 133 fugitive slaves, 9, 66, 70, 83, 137; and personal liberty law, 77, 132–135, 138–139, 143; protection for, 52, 60, 63, 67–68, 70, 72, 79, 82, 91, 185. See also Edward Prigg v. Commonwealth of Pennsylvania; Latimer, George; personal liberty law gag rule, 86, 93, 94, 116, 143 Gardiner, Henry J., 162 Gardner, Charles A., 86 Gardner, Eliza, 83 Gardner, James, 83 Garrison, Jane E., 83 Garrison, John H., 83 Garrison, William Lloyd: and Belknap Street Church, 80; and Boston mob, 20; burned in effigy, 93; as heretical, 108–109; and interracial marriage rights, 7, 52–54, 64, 99, 104, 118, 126, 144; and Latimer, 134; and Phelps, 122; in print culture, 25; and Remond, 57–59, 61; supported by African Americans, 68, 72; and Walker, 53–54; and white-manism, 146; at World Anti-Slavery Convention (1840), 61 Garrisonians, 7, 72, 93–94, 105, 108, 140. See also Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society; moral suasion; non-resistance Gay, Hannah, 35 gender, 94, 180; and African American reform, 52, 75, 77, 158; and antislavery, 121–122; and citizenship, 12; and moral reform, 110–111, 115; and race, 47, 96, 156, 175–176; and sexuality, 101, 183–184; and white women reformers, 101, 103, 106–108, 115, 127. See also African American reformers; African American women; manhood rights; middle-class reform women

273 General Association of Massachusetts, 217 Georgia, 43–47, 67, 180 Gibbens, Daniel, 64 Gibson, Betsey, 43–48, 68 Gibson, Patrick, 43–48, 201, 202 Giles, John Lawrence, 174 Goodrich v. Department of Public Health, 182–183 Gray, James B., 133–134, 136, 138, 140, 144 Greaney, John, 183 Great Britain. See Britain Great Chain of Being, 13 Great Latimer Petition, 77, 138, 139, 142, 144. See also Latimer Petition Greeley, Horace, 166, 169 Grossberg, Michael, 38, 42 Gurley, Ralph Randolph, 62 Hale, Nathan, 128, 132 Hall, Ann, 84 Harding, Warren G., 178 Harris, Sarah, 19 Hartog, Hendrik, 40 Harvard Andover Theological Seminary, 104 Hayward, George, 42 Hazard, Jezbez Holmes, 73 heteronormativity, 185 Hewitt, Nancy, 110 Hill, Ambrose Powell, 174 Hilton, John, 64, 77–78, 82, 84–85, 158 Hilton, Lavinia, 82 Hindu, 178 Hinton, Frederick A., 86 Hobomok, 27–29, 149, 154 Hodes, Martha, 5 Holgate, Jerome B., 21–25, 30, 96, 157, 166, 169 homonormativity, 185 homosexuality. See LGBTQ; same-sex marriage Hood, George, 94, 95 Howard, Alexander, 67 Howard, Ann, 73 Howard, Cordelia, 73 Howard, Helen Louise Gibson, 44, 46, 68–70, 73–75 Howard, Paul C., 77 Howard, Peter M., 82 Howard, Shadrach, 69–70, 73–74 Hubbard, Caleb, 97

274 Humphries, Almira B., 113 husbands. See manhood rights illegitimacy. See biracial children; children, illegitimate; interracial marriage bans illicit sex, 41, 164; in colonial America, 10–11; in Massachusetts, 8, 31, 35; and morality, 101, 115–121, 127, 152, 179. See also licentiousness Illinois, 19 immigrants, European, 160 incest, 38–39, 152 Independent Baptist Church, 63, 79, 80, 84, 185. See also Belknap Street Church India, 59, 62–63 Indiana, 163–164, 177 “Indians,” 2, 11–13, 22, 27, 55, 62, 73, 86, 97, 163. See also Native American industrial centers, 92, 97–98, 110 Inhabitants of Medway v. Inhabitants of Natick, 37, 40, 122 inheritance, 32, 104, 112, 122–126 Inkle and Yarico, 26 intemperance. See temperance interracial couples, 16–17, 63, 163–164, 170, 179–180; in literature, 21–22, 26–27, 149, 151; in Massachusetts, 2–3, 31–32, 33–37, 42–44, 47–48, 104, 121, 126; in print culture, 17–18, 170–173 interracialism: and abolitionists, 118–119, 148; and American future, 166–167, 174–176; as anti-racist theater, 61; in “bad taste,” 6, 30, 144, 170; and “degraded offspring,” 128; and equal rights, 66, 85, 135, 155–156, 185; and extinction of whites, 169; forced, 169–170, 178; as God’s design, 156, 167; and Lincoln, 146; in literature, 151–154; in Massachusetts, 10, 63, 68, 102, 118, 136; as natural, 153, 163, 166; as political, 7, 21, 170, 173; in print culture, 95–96, 170, 173–174; and regional conflict, 55; sexualized, 17, 170, 173; in slavery, 3, 136–137, 152–154; social rather than sexual, 5–6, 31, 59, 95–96; and sterility, 170; as taboo, 2, 5, 10, 64, 119, 147, 179–180; turning African Americans white, 169; undermining white supremacy, 56, 168, 178; as unnatural, 6, 22, 28. See also amalgamation; interracial couples; interracial sex; miscegenation interracial love, 27, 30, 53–54, 144, 149–154, 166

Index interracial marriage bans: as absurd, 54, 104; African Americans in favor of, 90, 143; and anti-Southernism, 140–142, 144; and Democrats, 129, 132; harming children, 112, 122, 179; harming women, 75, 122; and illegitimacy of children, 3, 125, 179; as immoral, 99, 122, 126–127, 132, 179; and inheritance, 47, 179; and legal settlement, 35–37, 48; and manhood rights, 52–54; as moral, 128; as political, 37–38; promoting licentiousness, 112, 114, 117, 121, 126–127; prostituting women, 126; protecting white supremacy, 77, 178; and race science, 128; as racist, 104, 126, 126–127; repealed, 180; and Social Security benefits, 179; as superfluous, 112, 127; supporting slavery, 127, 132; as threat to northern morality, 121–122; as unChristian, 62, 107, 116, 126–127; as unconstitutional, 62, 109, 127, 132; as unrepublican, 54, 107, 116, 126; as vestige of slave code, 49, 52, 122, 127, 132; voiding marriages, 2, 12, 37, 163. See also listings for individual colonies/states; interracialism; marriage; Massachusetts marriage law interracial marriage laws. See listings for individual colonies/states interracial sex: and African American women, 75; and the Civil War, 166; in colonial America, 10–11, 15; in literature, 29, 149, 152–154; in Massachusetts, 8, 10, 31, 33, 105; in print culture, 24, 95–96; in slavery, 5, 16, 117–118, 121, 136, 152–154; and white supremacy, 5 Irish, 26, 33, 129, 159 Irish Address, 62 Irish independence, 59, 62 Jackson, Francis, 63, 128, 140, 142 Jackson, Henry, 45 Jackson, Sarah, 83 Jackson, Stonewall, 174 Jamaica, 45–47 Japanese, 178 Jay, John, 50 Jefferson, Thomas, 50 Jim Crow Era, 6, 174, 178–179 Johnny Q, Introducing the Haytien Ambassador to the Ladies of Lynn, Mass, 95–96 Johnson, Adeline, 16–18 Johnson, Clarissa, 77, 79

Index Johnson, Ezra, 64, 67–70, 72 Johnson, Imogene, 16–18 Johnson, Jack, 174 Johnson, Mary Ann, 104, 113 Johnson, Miriam, 94 Johnson, Nathan, 44–47, 68 Johnson, Oliver, 63 Johnson, Richard, 67–72 Johnson, Richard C., 67 Johnson, Richard M., 16–18, 22, 63 Johnson, Robert, 77, 79 Johnson, Ruth Cuffe Howard, 67–68, 70 Joseph, Aaron, 82 Joseph, Frances, 82 judges: on family law, 39–41; in fugitive slave cases, 133, 138; on interracial marriage, 4, 37–39, 177, 179; on race, 37, 178; and same-sex marriage, 182–184; on school integration, 157 Kansas, 156, 163 Kantrowitz, Stephen, 4 Kelley, Abby, 101 Kennedy, Anthony, 182–183 Kentucky, 16–17, 164 kidnapping, 45, 124–125, 133, 137 Kinnicutt, Thomas, 125 Korean, 178 Lane, Clarisa, 82 Lane, Edward, 82 Lane, Elmira, 82 Lane, Laura, 82 Lane, Lunsford, 82–83 Lane, Martha, 82 Latimer, George, 132–138, 143; as white, 135–136 Latimer, Rebecca, 133 Latimer Committee, 137–139, 142 Latimer Journal and North Star, 137–139 Latimer Law, 138–140, 146. See also personal liberty law Latimer Petition, Great, 138–138, 140, 142–143; and interracial marriage petitions, 141, 143–144, 146 Laurie, Bruce, 7, 129–130 Law On the Deliverance of Citizens Liable to Be Sold as Slaves, 124 Layton, Lucy, 84 LeFord, Ann, 83 Lemire, Elise, 6, 96

275 Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transexual, Queer (LGBTQ), 183–185 Levesque, George, 7 Liberator, 7, 57, 68, 72, 79, 105 libertarianism, 7 Liberty Party, 7, 24, 92, 108, 128, 130–131, 140–141, 146 licentiousness, 8, 114, 149; and intemperance, 114; and moral reform, 114–116, 121; in slavery, 2, 117, 120–121; state-sponsored, 127; and women’s degradation, 119–120, 127. See also concubinage; illicit sex; interracialism; interracial marriage bans; prostitution Lincoln, Abraham, 144, 146, 164–165, 170, 174 Lincoln, William, 98, 99 Lincoln-Douglas debates, 144 Littlefield, William, 45 Loco-Focos, 128. See also Democratic Party Longstreet, James, 174 Loring, Edward G., 83 Loving, Mildred, 174, 179 Loving, Richard, 174, 179 Loving analogy, 180–181, 183, 185 Loving v. Virginia, 2, 4, 178–181, 183–185 Ludlow, Henry G., 105 Lyman, Theodore, 10 Lynn, Mass., 76, 113; and interracial marriage rights, 93–99, 101–102, 107–109; and Latimer, 135, 139–140; and school integration, 158 Lynn Female Anti-Slavery Society Fair, 94 Lyons, Clare, 40, 41 Lyons, Julius, 64, 70 Maine, 58–60, 124, 160 Malay, 178 manhood rights, 51–55, 58, 136, 179. See also citizenship marriage, 39–40; and children, 39; as civil contract, 177; common law, 16, 31–32; gender inequality in, 73–74; incestuous, 38; for love, 24; and manhood rights, 52–55, 84–85; regulation by states, 177–178; slaves denied, 65, 72–73, 75, 119; and women’s protection, 74–75, 101, 112–113, 115–116, 121–123, 127 marriage choice, 24, 54–55, 111, 129 marriage contract, 37–38, 74, 114, 116, 121, 127, 163, 177–178 marriage institution, 37–39, 127, 116, 177–178, 183

276 marriage law: 54, 73–74, 179. See also interracial marriage bans; Massachusetts marriage law; same-sex marriage marriage license, 55, 164, 179–180 Marshall, Josiah, 113 Marshall, Margaret, 182 Maryland, 90, 133, 152, 180 Massachusetts Abolitionist, 122 Massachusetts Abolition Society, 122, 127 Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, 51, 63, 77, 79, 102, 108, 117, 122 Massachusetts Female Emancipation Society, 113, 117 Massachusetts General Colored Association, 81 Massachusetts General Court, 10, 89, 100, 122, 124, 126, 129–130, 132, 139, 157. Massachusetts House of Representatives, 55, 95 Massachusetts marriage law, 3, 7, 10–12, 31, 38, 41, 54, 62, 86, 99, 108, 144. See also interracial marriage bans Massachusetts Senate, 54, 55, 62, 86, 127, 128, 130 Massasoit Guard, 161 May, Samuel J., 68 McDuffie, George, 60 McLane, James Wood, 104 Melish, Joanne Pope, 139 Methodist Church, 88–89, 108 middle-class reform women, 89, 98, 106–107, 110–111, 113–115, 118–120. See also antislavery; benevolence; moral reform; temperance Militia Law, 147, 159, 160–162 militias, 4, 9, 79, 86, 159–162 ministers, 54, 90–91, 104, 140–141, 167, 169; African American, 13, 25, 48, 84, 170; and interracial marriage ban, 30–31, 35–48, 54–55, 163. See also clergy; reverends miscegenation, 147, 168–169; and amalgamation, 5, 168–169; in print culture, 170–173; attack on Republicans, 164, 167, 170, 173; and white supremacy, 5–6, 165, 169 Miscegenation: A Theory of the Blending of the Races Applied to the American White Man and Negro, 1, 15, 164–169, 173 miscegenation law, 2–4, 12, 177–181. See also interracial marriage bans Miscegenation: Or the Millennium of Abolitionism, 170–171

Index Mississippi, 67, 179 Mitchell, Edward, 42 mobs, 19–20, 30, 69, 82, 92–94. See also antiamalgamation; riots Modon, Frelon, 72 Moho, Abigail, 40 Molyneaux, Edmond, 44–47 Mongolian, 178 monogenesis, 13–15, 165 moral reform, 113–114; linked to antislavery, 110, 113, 116; and interracial marriage rights, 111–113, 116–117, 124; as radical, 110; empowering women, 113–114, 121; as women’s obligation, 115; and women in public sphere, 115 moral reform societies, 110, 113–114 moral suasion, 94, 140. See also Garrisonians; non-resistance Morgan, Edmund, 11 Morgan, Margaret, 133 Morris, Robert, 63, 83, 155, 156, 158–160, 162 Morton, Marcus, 130, 144 Morton, Samuel, 14 Mum Bett, 160 Native American: heritage, 14, 34, 50, 73, 80; and interracial marriage, 12, 31, 163; in literature, 27–29; legal settlement, 39–40 Negro Pew, 80 Negro Seamen Acts, 66–67, 70, 79 Nell, William Cooper: on interracial marriage rights, 63–64, 76, 79, 81; on militias, 160–161; on school integration, 85, 157–158 Nevada, 163, 164 New Bedford Female Anti-Slavery Society, 67 New Bedford Union Society, 72 New England Anti-Slavery Society, 57 New Mexico, 164 Newton v. Braintree, 41 New York, 82, 83, 86, 92, 105, 114, 148, 182 New York Moral Reform Society, 113, 116 non-resistance, 140. See also Garrisonians; moral suasion Norfolk County Anti-Slavery Society, 130 Northern regional identity. See anti-Southernism Norton, John P., 90

277

Index Notes on the State of Virginia, 50 Nott, Josiah, 14 Ohio, 15, 86, 160, 164 Old Hepsy, 152–154 Osborne, Abraham, 90 Oswell, Mary, 83 overseers of the poor, 31, 34–36, 42–43, 48, 72 Park, J. C., 132, 143 Parker, Isaac, 37–41, 122, 177 Parker, Kunal, 4 Parker, Mary, 109 Parsons, Theophilus, 41 Pascoe, Peggy, 6, 12 Pastoral Letter, 92–93, 107, 111 paternalism, 80–81 paternity claims, 41–42, 75 Peirce, Cyrus, 142–143 Pennsylvania Hall, 20, 94. See also World Anti-Slavery Convention Pequit, Alice, 73 personal liberty law, 77, 133–134, 137–139, 141–142, 147. See also Latimer Law petitioning campaigns: for abolition in Washington, D.C. 86, 94; by African Americans, 51, 64, 67, 70, 86, 134, 155, 157–158, 160–161; for African American suffrage, 86; and First Amendment Rights, 91; against gag rule, 86, 94; against inter-state slave trade, 94; against laws making “distinctions of color,” 59, 70, 86, 88–89; for militias, 160–161; and moral reform, 115–116; against Negro Seamen’s Acts, 67, 70, 86; and nonvoters, 91–92; for personal liberty law, 77, 134, 138–139, 141–143; for railroad integration, 131; for school integration, 155, 157–158; for school segregation, 163; and slavery in western territories, 86; for trial by jury, 86; by women claiming political rights, 93, 107–108 petitions against interracial marriage rights, 64–65, 90, 97–98 petitions for interracial marriage rights, 124–125, 140–142; from African Americans, 7, 48, 51–52, 63–64, 66, 70–73, 77–79, 82–84, 86, 134; from African American women, 74–75; from Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society, 108–111; as feminine, 101; and morality, 101, 111–112, 117, 127; from religious

leaders, 88; and respectability, 90; as unfeminine, 59, 89, 93, 95–98, 100–103; from white women, 7, 88–89, 91, 94–95, 101, 107–108, 150 Phelps, Amos, 81, 104, 122, 127, 160 Philips, Stephen C., 158 Phillips, Wendell, 1–3, 6, 99–100, 102–103, 135, 166 Pierson, Michael, 121 Piper, Philip, 73 Pitts, Coffin, 84 Plessy v. Ferguson, 178 political equality: and interracialism, 6, 147, 165, 173; and social equality, 3, 66, 165, 173, 178, 179. See also citizenship; equality under law; equal rights politics of respectability, 63, 75, 159, 161 polygenesis, 13–15, 65 Pope, Eliza, 113 Porter, James, 89 postal campaign (1835), 93 Potts, Cynthia, 72 Potts, Marshall, 72 Practical Amalgamation, 24–25, 96 prejudice, 23, 51, 80, 107, 132, 160, 174; and African American activists, 56–58, 60–63; and Democrats, 128; interracial marriage ban as, 76, 111, 126, 144; as natural, 22–23, 157; and school integration, 156–157; and slavery, 56, 58, 60, 76; among white abolitionists, 105, 166 Prichard, James Cowles, 14–15 prostitution, 16, 113–114, 118–120, 126–127, 169. See also concubinage; licentiousness public assistance. See overseers of the poor public schools, 9, 63, 77, 79–80, 84, 155, 157, 163 Putnam, George, 157–158 Putnam, Jane Clark, 158 The Quadroons, 30, 37, 149 Quakers. See Society of Friends race, defined, 6, 16, 32–33, 36–37, 40, 57, 163 race law. See citizenship; interracial marriage bans; Massachusetts marriage law; militias; Negro Seamen Acts; prejudice; railroad integration; school integration races, as “of one blood,” 14

278 race science, 1, 13–15, 23, 57 race war, 23 racial equality, 21, 80, 97, 144, 149, 168–169, 175–178. See also citizenship; equality under law; political equality; social equality Racial Integrity Act (Virginia), 179 racial purity, 21, 24, 31, 90, 143, 163 racial uplift, 68, 119, 179 railroad integration, 52, 63, 69, 77, 79, 85, 131–132, 140, 143–144, 156 Randolph, Marshall, 153 Rankin, John, 105, 148 Rantoul, Robert, 126 Rape, 120, 154. See also concubinage; licentiousness; seduction; slavery Ray, Charles Bennett, 59 Raymond, John T., 79, 83, 84 Raymond, Susan, 83 Raymond, William, 83 Reading Anti-Slavery Society, 104 Reading Female Anti-Slavery Society, 91 Reconstruction, 9, 174–177 redemptive womanhood, 107 Remond, Charles Lenox, 57, 76, 161; and Douglass, 58, 76, 134; on interracial marriage rights, 59, 62–63, 84; on Latimer affair, 134–135; on militias, 158; on racial prejudice, 58–60, 62–63, 131–132; on slavery, 60; socializing with whites, 59–61, 104–105 Remond, John, 57 Remond, Nancy, 57 Remond, Sarah Parker, 63 republicanism: hypocrisy of, 51, 58, 60, 162; of interracial marriage law, 48, 54, 57, 106, 116, 126, 129, 141 Republican Party, 146, 155, 164–165, 167, 169–170, 173, 177–178 reverends, 33, 67, 75, 84, 90–91, 100, 105, 115, 119, 122, 127 Rhoberts, Irena, 83 Rhoberts, Margret, 83 Rhoberts, Ralph, 83 Rhoberts, Ralph Jr., 83 Rhoberts, Sarah, 83 Rhoberts, Susan, 83 Rhode Island, 36, 37, 44, 45, 73, 160 Richardson, Hannah, 40 riots, 17, 19, 21, 105, 148. See also antiamalgamation; mobs Rising States (ship), 68 Robbins, Mary E., 101, 106, 109

Index Roberson, Tom, 46 Roberts, Benjamin F., 80–82, 155–157, 160 Roberts, Mary, 82 Roberts, Ralph, 83 Roberts, Rebecca, 82 Roberts, Robert, 84 Robinson, John Paul, 54 Rock, John S., 158, 161 Rodman (ship), 67, 68 Rodman, Benjamin, 45–46 Rodman, Samuel, 48 Rogers, Nathaniel P., 61 Romance of the Republic, 149 Ross, George, 70 Ross, Mary, 70 Ruchames, Louis, 7 Ruggles, David, 79 Ruggles, David W., 45, 70 Russell, Joseph, 83 Russell, Mary, 83 Russworm, John, 65 Ryan, Mary P., 115 Salem Female Anti-Slavery Society, 57 Salem Witchcraft Trials, 100, 112 same-sex marriage, 181–185 Sanchez-Eppler, Karen, 118 Sands, Ellen, 58, 60 Sanford, David, 100 Sanford, Sarah, 100, 106 Scala naturae, 13 school integration, 19, 60, 80, 155–158, 175; African Americans against, 84, 158; and social equality, 119, 156, 163, 168 school segregation, 81, 156, 163 scientific racism. See race science Scotland, 37, 61 Scott, James, 82 Scott, Thomas W., 16 Scott, Walter Sir., 27 Sedgwick, Theodore, 41 seduction, 100, 114, 116, 120, 126 settlement, 12–13, 35–37, 40–42, 48 Sewell, Samuel, 41, 135 Shaw, Lemuel, 133, 138, 157 Shepherd, Margaret, 72 Sherrod, David, 64 Simmons, Amey, 70 Simmons, Charles, 70 slave narrative, 52, 74–75, 79 Slave Power, 94, 140, 141 slavery: and British imperialism, 62; defending, 4, 13, 93, 108; destroying

279

Index families, 122, 152–154; disowning, 131, 139; interracialism in, 3, 16, 119, 121, 137; and interracial marriage ban, 75, 77, 111, 121–122, 127, 132, 141, 144; and kidnapping, 133; and licentiousness, 99, 117, 120; in Massachusetts, 3, 11–12, 38; and prejudice, 56, 58, 60; and regional conflict, 97, 119, 135, 137, 139–141, 174; sexual exploitation in, 29–30, 106, 117, 120, 137, 144, 149, 152–154, 179; women and, 26, 29, 75, 94, 106–107, 117–118 slaves. See enslaved people; slavery slave society, 11, 30, 154 Smith, Gerrit, 119 Smith, James McCune, 167 Smith, Samuel Stanhope, 14 Smith, Thomas Paul, 79, 84, 158 Snowden, Samuel, 84 social equality, 59, 148, 154–155, 164, 168; and interracial marriage, 3, 57, 66, 103; and political equality, 6, 66, 147–148, 178–179 Social Security, 182 Society of Friends, 19, 94, 107, 110 South Carolina, 67–68 Spark, Jared, 29 Spaulding, Laura, 100 Springstine, Eliza, 83 Springstine, John, 83 Stafford, J. S., 140 Stedman, John, 29–30 Steele, Richard, 26 Stetson, Hannah, 42–43 Stewart, Alvan, 119 Stewart, Patrick, 64 Stones v. Keeling, 39 Story, Chief Justice Joseph, 133 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 146, 147 suffrage, 4, 86, 92, 168, 175, 178 Sullivan, Andrew, 183 Sumner, Charles, 155–157, 170 Swift, Jonathan, 21–22 Taney, Roger B., 174 Tappan, Lewis, 105, 148 The Tawny Girl, 26–28 temperance, 51, 62, 110, 114, 130, 152 Thacker, Henry, 83 Thayer, Minott, 98–102, 106, 109, 126, 128, 156 Thayer, Samuel, 42 Thompson, Charlotte F., 89–90, 94

Thompson, George F., 20, 91 Thompson, Otis, 90 Ticknor, George, 29 Tilton, Theodore, 166, 169 Topsy, 173 Torrey, Charles, 75, 122, 127 tragic mulatta/o, 26, 30, 149, 151–152 Treadwell, Caesar, 34–35, 48 Treadwell, Deborah Bacon, 34–35, 48 Treatise on the Intellectual Character, and Civil and Political Condition of the Colored People of the United States, 56 Tubman, Harriet, 83 Tucker, St. George, 39 Turner, Nat, 160 Tyng, Stephen H., 169 Union Army, 147, 165 Union Cadets, 161 Union League Club, 169, 170 Unitarian Church, 108, 113, 142 United States House of Representatives, 16, 95 United States Senate, 54, 55, 62, 86, 127, 129, 130 United States Supreme Court, 133, 159, 178, 179, 182, 184 Usher, Martha, 60 Utah, 164 van Buren, Martin, 16–17, 60 van der Mede, Peter, 174–175, 177 Vauthier, Simone, 154 Vickons, Roba, 36, 37, 40 Vinal, Eliza Ann, 115 Virginia, 11, 39, 50, 83, 133, 137, 138, 160, 164, 180 voting rights. See suffrage Wakeman, George, 1, 9, 15, 147, 164, 165–169, 178 Walker, David, 51–53, 55, 81, 126, 173 Walker, Quok, 3, 11 Warren, Chief Justice Earl, 4, 179 Washington, 163 Washington, George, 82 Washington, Henry, 83 Washington, Mary, 83 Watkins, William J., 159–161 Webb, Hannah, 144 Webb, Richard, 144 Webster, Daniel, 174 Weeden, Benjamin, 76, 79

280 West Indies, 11, 26, 45, 117, 119 Weston, Anne Warren, 58, 102, 106, 140 Weston, Caroline, 126 Weston, Deborah, 46, 76, 90, 140 Wheatley, Phillis, 160 Whig Party, 98, 99, 102, 128–132, 141 White, Charles, 13, 57 White men and black women, 44–47, 75, 166, 177, 179 White women and black men, 34–37, 41–43, 48, 56 Whittier, John G., 107 Wightman v. Coates, 37–38 Wilberforce Debating Society, 67 Williams, George F., 157 Williams, Thomas G., 83 William Street Baptist Church, 45

Index Windsor v. United States, 182–184 Wood, Benjamin, 88 working-class, 65, 98, 109, 128, 129 World Anti-Slavery Convention, 61 Wright, Charles, 41 Wright, Daniel S., 113 Wright, Henry, 144 Wright, Henry C., 107 Wright v. Wright, 41 Yankee identity. See anti-Southernism Young, Perry, 48, 73, 84 Young, Sarah Belden, 47–48, 51, 73, 84 Young Men’s Anti-Slavery Society (New Bedford), 45–46 Zaeske, Susan, 96