Miscegenation

Miscegenation is a term that was invented in the mid-19th century to describe interracial sexual relations or marriage, usually between a black person and a white person. The practice first became a social and political issue in the early 17th century, two centuries before the CiviL War, when Maryland and Virginia passed laws banning marriages between white people and people of other races. Many other states followed suit, although miscegenation laws were not always enforced.

Generally, those who opposed miscegenation, or race mixing, were most concerned with relations between white women and black men. In part, this was because a person’s legal status derived from his or her mother. Thus, the child of a white woman and an enslaved African-American man was born free. Such children, free citizens despite having African blood, were perceived as a threat to the strict racial order of society. Children of enslaved African-American women and white men, on the other hand, were born slaves and thus posed no threat. Another reason that sexual contact between white men and black women was more tolerable was that it was much more common. Many of the men who owned slaves felt that it was perfectly acceptable for them to use slave women as concubines, even though it was almost invariably against the woman’s will.

Prior to the 1860s, the term used to describe interracial relationships was amalgamation. The term miscegenation did not come into use until the election of 1864. David Croly and George Wakeman of the New York World, a Democratic newspaper, published a hoax pamphlet designed to convince people that Republicans favored interracial marriage. Their goal was to play on American fears that the Republicans were planning to overturn the racial status quo in the country. The ploy largely didn’t work, although the fact that Croly and Wakeman thought it would is indicative of the state of race relations in mid19th-century America.

After the war miscegenation became largely a Southern issue. In the 1870s most of the states in the North and West with remaining miscegenation laws repealed them, while most Southern states passed new laws with increasingly harsh penalties for interracial marriage. Republicans in Congress objected, and the laws were temporarily repealed before being put back on the books once Reconstruction was over. These laws were upheld in a series of Supreme Court decisions in the 1880s, notably Pace v. Alabama (1883). Meanwhile, many Southerners dispensed with such legal niceties and simply hanged black men who were accused of sexual relations with a white woman. While the hangings eventually ceased, the attitudes behind them lasted well into the 20th century. When the Supreme Court reversed itself and declared miscegenation laws unconstitutional in Loving v. Alabama (1967), 16 Southern states still had such statutes on the books.

Further reading: David Henry Fowler, Northern Attitudes towards Interracial Marriage: Legislation and Public Opinion in the Middle Atlantic States of the Old Northwest, 1780-1930 (New York: Garland, 1987); Martha Hodes, White Women, Black Men: Illicit Sex in the Nineteenth-Century South (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1997); Joel Williamson, New People: Miscegenation and Mulattoes in the United States (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1980).

—Christopher Bates