Mixed-Race Couples in Early America
Excerpted from Forbidden Love by Gary B. Nash.
While most white Americans came to adopt the view that character and culture were literally carried in the genes and that the mixing of races led to polluted blood and impaired intellect, others refused to accept this racial ideology. Largely unnoticed by historians,
these people formed families, raised mixed-race children, and strove for a decent place in their communities. For the most part, these Americans issued no tracts, passed no laws, and preached no sermons. Yet they made their ideas, values, and racial openness plain in the way they conducted their lives.
One such couple were William G. Allen and Mary King. Having graduated from Oneida Institute in New York, clerked in a prestigious Boston law firm, and become the first African-American appointed to a professorship at an American college, Allen might have thought he had proven his worth. While teaching at New York Central College in 1851, he became romantically involved with a white minister's daughter, Mary King, who was studying at that interracial school. Allen, the son of a Welsh immigrant father who had married a free mulatto woman, was very light-skinned. Yet to local townspeople, black was black. They threatened to mob Allen and King when it became known that they intended to marry. Driven out of his college position and nearly murdered, Allen arranged to marry his fiancée in New York City.
In 1853, they went to England to escape white hostility and to pursue the abolitionist cause.
Even in the Deep South, some men and women challenged the color code. Nathan Sayre, a transplanted New Jerseyan who took up life in Sparta, Georgia, in the early 1830s, was such a person. Establishing himself as a lawyer and a shrewd real estate investor, he became a state's attorney, a member of the Georgia legislature, and a superior court judge. Though never marrying, he sired several children by one of his slave women and later took up life with Susan Hunt, who was herself a mixture of Cherokee, African, and white. For many years they lived together, raising three children in Pomegranate Hall, Sayre's stately mansion in Sparta. Among the volumes Sayre kept in his library was the book by an Englishman, Alexander Walker, titled
Intermarriage; or, The Mode in Which and the Causes Why, Beauty, Health, and Intellect, Result from Certain Unions, and Deformity, Disease, and Insanity, from Others.It was a rare book for this era, for it argued against the common belief that racial "amalgamation" would inevitably produce degenerate and physically inferior children.
The children of Nathan Sayre and Susan Hunt--dark-haired, dark-eyed, and light-skinned--soon provided evidence that they were anything but inferior. For example, their middle child, known as Cherokee Mariah Lilly, married a white man in about 1853, and her eight children and many grandchildren figured prominently in southern education and reform movements. Among them were Adella Hunt Logan, a graduate of Atlanta University and a leader of the black women's club movement; Henry A. Hunt, Jr., also trained at Atlanta University and later a member of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's "black cabinet''; and Tom Hunt, a graduate of Tuskegee Institute who moved west and served on the agriculture faculty at the University of California at Berkeley.
Other southern white men, including important political leaders, had few compunctions about establishing lasting relationships with black women. The southern social code required that these interracial liaisons, which amounted to parallel marriages, be conducted discreetly. Martin Van Buren's vice president, Richard Mentor Johnson, was a popular Kentucky politician whose devotion to Mary Chinn, his black mistress, and their two daughters caused him no particular difficulties in politics. Sam Houston's friend John Hemphill, who sat as the chief justice of the Texas Supreme Court from 1841 to 1858, lived with his slave Sabina for more than a decade and sent their two daughters to Wilberforce College, an abolitionist training ground in Ohio, for their education.
Giving comfort to those who resisted the growing doctrine of racial separation was a vision of America as a place where all peoples of whatever race would fuse together. In this minority view, such a fusion would not lead to "mongrelization" and degeneracy but would produce a more vigorous society. To be sure, even most abolitionist reformers were opposed to interracial mixing. Abhorring both slavery
and African-Americans, many wanted freed slaves removed to Canada, to a separate territory in the vast West, or, ideally, to Africa. However, others in the antislavery crusade, like T.T., whom we met at the beginning of this chapter, had no qualms about racial mixing and upheld the ideal of a biracial democracy. William Lloyd Garrison, the trumpet of abolitionism and racial equality, predicted in 1831 that "the time is assuredly hastening . . . when distinctions of color will be as little consulted as the height and bulk of the body, when colored men shallbe found in our legislative halls and stand on perfect equality with whites." Garrison commented to a friend that soon black skin would "no longer be simply endurable, but
popular."
In the early 1830s, "amalgamationists" attacked the law in Massachusetts that prohibited interracial marriage. Garrison argued that the 1786 law banning these mixed marriages was "an invasion of one of the inalienable rights of man, namely, 'the pursuit of happiness.'" To take away people's choice of marriage partner was "utterly absurd and preposterous," in his view. "Does a man derive or lose his right to choose his wife from his color?" he asked. "Why, then, let us have a law prohibiting tall people from marrying short ones.... Shall fat and lean persons be kept apart by penalties? Or shall we graduate love by feet and inches?" When antiamalgamationists charged that if Garrison and his like had their way, the country would be swept with black men seeking white wives, Garrison retorted that "the blacks are not so enamored of white skins, as some of our editors imagine. The courtship, the wooing, the embrace, and intermixture--in nine cases out of ten--will be proposed on the part of the whites, and not of the opposite color." David Ruggles, a fearless New York City black activist, agreed. He pointed out acidly that neither he nor "any colored man or woman of [his] acquaintance" was eagerly pursuing cross-race marriage. Expressing a much more modern notion that "black is beautiful," Ruggles maintained that "nothing is more disgusting than to see my race bleached to a pallid and sickly hue by the lust of those cruel and fastidious white men." He pleaded, "To attempt to obstruct the flow of the affections is ridiculous and cruel." Another reformer argued that "when a man and woman want to be married it is
their business, not mine nor anybody else's.... So far from denouncing the marriage of blacks and whites, I would he glad if the banns [announcements] of a hundred thousand such marriages could be published next Sunday."
Massachusetts legislators were unmoved by such published arguments. But by the late 1830s, an avalanche of petitions from whites living in small towns all over the state changed their minds. After viewing ninety-two petitions containing 8,700 signatures in 1843, a large majority of legislators voted to remove the anti-intermarriage law. Although legislators in other northern states would not follow Massachusetts's lead, this was an important blow struck in the name of a person's unqualified right to choose a marriage partner, regardless of popular opinion. . .
For white Protestants, who dominated politics, business, and cultural affairs in the mid-nineteenth century, America was a redeemer nation chosen by God to reform the entire world. This sense of mission was as old as the first Puritan settlers in New England, who saw their outpost of Christianity as a saving remnant of corrupted Protestantism and a beacon in the wilderness. Two centuries later, in the decades before the Civil War, Americans were still trying to perfect their society. This perfectionist thrust, however, took many forms. In an age of reform, some pursued a vision of a purely white America in which Indians would become extinct and from which Africans would be returned to their homelands, while new European immigrants--mostly English, Irish, and German--left behind their old ways and adapted to the white American republic. In this godly mission, there was no room for cultural or racial mixing with lesser stocks. Sanctioned by science and medicine, endorsed by powerful politicians, and fortified by popular culture, the hostility to racial intermingling had eclipsed the ideal of a mestizo America as the United States began to unravel over the issue of slavery.
For those who still clung to the ideal of a new mixed-race America, the message of the white purists was bone-chilling. Out of the spotlight and out of favor with the majority, they did their best to build pockets of mixed-race life and conduct themselves as honorably as their situations permitted. Sometimes this required leaving America altogether. In other cases it meant a lifetime of anguish and an uncertain future for their children....