The population diversity of the United States of America, known as “the melting pot” of races and cultures, has been formed through ages of cultural struggle and polemics. Native inhabitants, immigrants, refugees, people brought to the country initially as slaves — all of them eventually tended to mix and form interracial relationships, which has been arising burning discussions and debate as to the ‘righteousness’ of the case. Depending on the time and morals, people stood a certain ground in relation to the interracial relations, and frequently the public opinion on the matter was far from favorable. At one time being lenient and tolerant towards those involved with representatives of a different race, at other times the public demonstrated a categorical disapproval and reprimand towards them, stigmatizing their choice and casting them out of the ‘moral’ society. The reasons for such changes and fluctuations may have varied from social to political and economic; and in her book White Women, Black Men: Illicit Sex in the Nineteenth-Century South Martha Hodes undertakes the task of discovering the trends of the time which determined the attitude towards interracial relationships between which women and black men and which brought about dramatic changes in the position of the society towards such relationships.
Despite the puritanic morals of America of the times discussed, it turns out that cross-cultural marriage between representatives of black and which races were not unusual already in the early nineteenth century. Stories of black and white people registering their relations — if not within the traditional church, then under the patronage of black ministers — fill the chronicles of the time. Not only early nineteenth century witnessed such occasions: much earlier, already in 1681 an official marital bond was established between a white female servant of Irish background and a black male slave. The remarkable thing about the wedding ceremony was that it possessed unequalled openness and transparency, being conducted by a Catholic clergyman and boasting several prosperous planters among the guests. In the century that followed, such situation would be quite unconceivable, as a sufficient rigidness of the boundaries between black slaves and white servants could be observed.
But although in the eighteenth century sexual relations between black men and white women in the South received much less publicity, they never ceased to exist. Conducting a scrupulous research of written evidence, studying volumes of legal testimony, personal diaries, and private correspondence, Hodes discovers that instances of divorces between white couples in which wives gave birth to a mulatto child were not singular. On the other hand, facts point to a considerable degree of allowance made to black slaves in cases of law suits due to economic reasons. Thus, for example, in a 1824 case set in Virginia, a seven-year long relationship of a much younger wife with a local slave caused an elderly man to appeal to court demanding a divorce. However, the court chose to reject his petition, as during the investigation a conclusion was reached that the requesting party was unable to handle the wife’s behavior in a due way. In the year that followed, another remarkable case was brought to existence: in North Carolina a white woman with low income brought an action against a black slave accusing him of committing sexual violence to her. It did not constitute any difficulty for the court to promptly prove the slave’s guilt in the case, but the consequent revelation that the woman had been impregnated even before the alleged assault caused the court to restart the case and relieve the defendant of all accusations. The case described clearly demonstrates that executing a slave in that situation would be too wasteful for economic reasons; therefore any pretext was used to leave him unpunished.
Thus is the historical background set for the events of the nineteenth century which witnessed a dramatic transition of the public opinion on interracial relationships: from a certain degree of toleration (unless the liaison was displayed too explicitly and led to pregnancy and childbirth) during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, to a violent outrage and prohibition emerging after the Civil War of 1861, as the southern white patriarchs began to fear the potential political and economic power of newly autonomous black men after the events of the war.
As soon as there was politics involved, white southern society refused to accept any allusions to consensual sex involving a white woman and a black man, and violent action was taken to prevent such relations in society. As Martha Hodes states, “Black men’s hopes for and insistence on equality brought public expressions of fear from white Southerners, and those fears included direct references to white women and sex” (23). Governed by a sense of fear and understanding the need for active social measures, white Southerners preferred to ingenuously associate the newly-born equality of the black part of the population with sexual infringements across the color border, and thus terrorism and lynching conducted by the white men enjoyed easy justification under the pretext that those were the inevitable protective measures for preserving the white womanhood intact — even despite the fact that less than thirty percent of all lynchings ever involved incriminations of sexual violation. After the Civil War, interracial sex was viewed as sinful and offensive to a degree which had never been achieved even in the periods of the most oppressive slavery. Thus the white women’s sexual purity was brought into the realm of politics and served a banner inspiring violent action against the black part of the population.
Analyzing the tendencies in the post-bellum American society, Hodes draws a noteworthy link between the attitudinal shifts and the evolution of the institution of slavery at the time. On the one hand, in the late seventeenth century the prosperity of chattel slavery brought to an end the preceding period of comparative variance in sexual relations, and drew racial boundaries which appeared to be much more distinct than even social class boundaries. On the other hand, the post-Civil War period brought about the new social chance in perception of interracial sex which grew more intolerant and violent. The social phenomenon that at first was considered a taboo but was evident in the society, became rejected, denied and persecuted by all means.
Moreover, the racist ideologies involved in the case also underwent a modification through the times. Already in the seventeenth century efforts were taken by certain specific groups, that shaped the definitions of and legal controls over ‘illicit’ sexuality, to stigmatize, criminalize, and punish miscegenation in American society. New ideologies were formulated, legislation was enacted and racist viewpoints were actively propagated by such groups, involving more and more members and followers of their viewpoint. Consequently, from the second half of the nineteenth century onward, lynching, disguised as protection for the inviolability of white womanhood, actually constituted attempts at quenching populism and interracial labor activities which were unprofitable and disadvantageous for the interests of certain groups.
Contributing greatly to the corpse of research on interracial relationships and miscegenation, Martha Hodes’ insightful and provocative study traces the multiple reasons underlying the attitudinal changes to the issue involved and evokes a number of problems concerning the right to personal happiness infringed throughout American history by manipulation of sexual issues with the view of obtaining certain political objectives of doubtful value to a healthy society.
Works Cited
Hodes, Martha. White Women, Black Men: Illicit Sex in the Nineteenth-Century South. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997.