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Karen: Hello ladies and gentlemen. Karen Sharpe here, with Professor Randolph
Hemmings. This is part three of a four-part series on
the origins of the U.S. color line. Professor Hemmings: Thank you, Karen.
This is session C7C, After The Invention of The Color Line.
To recap: the United States is unique in preserving a genetic enclave of mostly African ancestry.
The enclave results from an intermarriage barrier imposed in 1691, which is still in
place due to social pressure. Today we discuss the period when the U.S.
horror of Euro-Afro intermarriage spread throughout the colonies.
For three generations Chesapeake colonists had intermarried freely.
Then, in 1691, Virginia made the Holy Sacrament of Matrimony a crime if celebrated between
an African and a European. The bizarre legislation struck like a thunderclap.
Dozens of interracial families (including the descendants of Anthony Johnson) fled from
Virginia to Maryland. Such innovative legislation had never happened
before in world history. It would never happen independently again.
But it happened this once and once was enough. The following year Maryland also outlawed
intermarriage, virtually copying the 1691 Virginia law.
Dozens of interracial families, among them those who had fled from Virginia, now fled
from Maryland to Pennsylvania. Four years later, in 1696, Virginia's rulers
made their anti-intermarriage law harsher. Apparently, the colonists were not taking
the law seriously enough. The 1696 change added the offending minister
as complicit in the crime of intermarriage. After this change, interracial married couples
would be banished, as before, but now the minister who married them would be fined 10,000
pounds of tobacco. Since this was far beyond the reach of even
some landed gentry, it meant the minister's defrocking.
The new law explicitly ordered ministers to preach against intermarriage.
Those who refused to comply were also defrocked and replaced.
How the landed gentry acquired the church authority to appoint and fire priests and
bishops is explained elsewhere. Over the next few decades, penalties became
increasingly cruel. According to one historian, a horror of intermarriage
was planted in the minds of the colonists: "by the creation of a total system of domination
that penetrated every corner of Colonial life and made use of every Colonial institution.
Nothing was left to chance. The assemblies, the courts, the churches,
and the press were thrown into the breach. A massive propaganda campaign confused and
demoralized the public, and private vigilante groups supplemented the official campaign
of hate and terror." No endogamous barrier is perfect however,
and America's new color line leaked. Despite the threat of law, the preaching of
religious leaders, and the pressure of social peers, people of mixed heritage continued
to be born. Conventional wisdom holds that such mixing
was the result of European male slaveowners raping or at least economically coercing female
slaves. In fact, although colonial interracial mating
was somewhat asymmetrical, it was not all that one-sided.
Many Americans today (White as well as Black) carry mitochondrial DNA of matrilineal European
descent and Y chromosomes of patrilineal African ancestry.
Nevertheless, whether the continued production of biracial children was the result of African
males joining with European females or vice-versa, colonists of every intermediate gradation
continued to be born during the eighteenth century.
Multiracial colonists had no legal existence then, just as multiracial Americans have no
legal existence today. Mixed-ancestry individuals, then as now, had
to be legislated out of existence. And so, for the first time, Americans faced
a problem that remains unsolved and plagues the nation to this day: how to decide to which
side of the color line to assign someone? In 1705, Virginia passed history's first law
defining who was considered a member of the Black endogamous group.
The law used a one-eighth blood-fraction rule; you were on the Black side of the color line
if you had one or more African great-grandparents. In addition, the fine for ministers performing
interracial marriages was increased farther beyond reach.
This law was the first instance in history of legalized hypodescent.
After the turn of the 18th century, punishment of intermarriage became ever harsher.
In 1705, Massachusetts outlawed interracial marriage.
In 1715, Maryland and Virginia condemned women who married across the color line to seven
years of bondage, and their mixed children to thirty-one years of bondage.
Other British colonies followed: North Carolina outlawed interracial marriage in 1715.
Delaware outlawed interracial marriage in 1721.
Pennsylvania outlawed interracial marriage in 1725.
Dozens of interracial families, among them those who had fled from Maryland, now fled
from Pennsylvania to New York, apparently seeding the maroon community knows as the
Jackson Whites. Fear/hatred of intermarriage spread throughout
British North America until, by 1776, 12 of the 13 colonies that declared their independence
legally enforced endogamous color lines. Oddly, the idea of a forcibly endogamous color
line did not jump the Atlantic to Europe. The New World was all the rage in Europe during
the 18th century,. Women's fashions aped the feathers and fringes
of Native American dress. Tobacco became the most lucrative crop ever
known, as smoking swept the Old World. New foods like tomatoes, potatoes, corn, lima
beans, were served in the best homes in Europe. The old languages absorbed new words like
hurricane and tomahawk. Previously unknown creatures, like opossums,
raccoons, and turkeys filled the zoos. Shakespeare's plays abound with references
to the mysterious and fascinating New World. Novels and stage musicals were set in the
exotic "Indies." And yet, Europeans never seemed to grasp the
colonial notion that Afro-European intermarriage was to be prevented.
Consider Queen Charlotte. England's highest social level welcomed Afro-European
intermarriage as late as 1761. King George III's wife of more than 50 years
was Charlotte Sophia of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, whom he wed in that year.
According to PBS Frontline historian Mario Valdes y Cocom, she was openly biracial, a
dark noblewoman descended from Margarita de Castro y Sousa, of the Afro-European branch
of the Portuguese Royal House. Her biracial features are clear in contemporary
portraits, the most famous being the one by Sir Allan Ramsay.
Two centuries later, according to Valdes y Cocom, during Queen Elizabeth II's coronation,
the Royal Household referred to the present queen's African bloodline (through Charlotte)
in a paper it published defending her as head of the Commonwealth.
The point, of course, is not whether Queen Charlotte actually had recent African ancestry.
As explained in other sessions, millions of people unknowingly do.
The point is that such a possibility was once welcomed and not seen as disgraceful.
Similarly, Dido Lindsey was a family member in the household of William Murray, first
Earl of Mansfield and Speaker of the House of Lords.
She was the biracial daughter of Mansfield's nephew, Rear Admiral Sir John Lindsey, and
an African-born woman that the naval officer met in Cuba.
Dido appears in several contemporary paintings, the most famous being one by Zoffany, the
court painter to the royal family, for whom Queen Charlotte sat on a number of occasions.
Incidentally, Lord Mansfield was the man who ended slavery in England when, as Chief Justice
of the King's Supreme Court in 1773, he ruled it unconstitutional.
He ruled that: "the air of England is too pure for a slave
to breathe, and so everyone who breathes it becomes free. Everyone who comes to this island
is entitled to the protection of English law, whatever oppression he may have suffered and
whatever may be the colour of his skin." Thenceforth, any slave would become free the
instant he or she set foot on English soil. Lord Mansfield's words are still memorized
by British schoolchildren today. William Cowper (1731-1800) made a poem out
of this ruling: "Slaves cannot breathe in England; if their
lungs / Receive our air, that moment, they are free! / They touch our country and their
shackles fall. In the coming centuries the idea of "racial"
African inferiority spread among Enlightenment thinkers.
We can trace its spread during these years. Hobbes (1650, 1651) never used the word "race"
in the modern sense. To Locke (1690), our species has different
"stocks" of equal merit. The first scholarly work identifying Africans
as somehow unworthy is the first volume of Natural History by George Louis Leclerc de
Buffon (1749). Immanuel Kant (1775) solidified what became
the nineteenth century concept of "degenerate" sub-human Africans.
Finally, Blumenbach (1791) was the first European to speak of different "races" in the modern
sense. By the way, he invented the term later used
to denote white folks, based on the most beautiful skull in his collection, one from the Caucasus
mountains. But none of these later events relate to the
social enforcement of a compulsorily endogamous color line. That particular innovation was
unique to British North America three centuries ago, and remains so to this day.
And with that, I conclude today's presentation. Thank you for listening.
Karen: Thank you, professor Hemmings. I have one comment and one question.
Professor Hemmings: Fire away. Karen: My comment is this.
I am surprised at your saying that the U.S. intermarriage barrier was a deliberate policy
imposed by colonial rulers. My experience is that people, especially minorities,
naturally associate with their own kind. Catholics tend to marry Catholics, Turkish
immigrants tend to marry other Turkish immigrants, and so forth.
Professor Hemmings: Yes and no. The endogamy of assimilating minorities is
well studied. Minority out-marriage runs from 15 to 45 percent.
At the low end, for example, are Chinese-Americans. At the high end are Japanese-Americans or
Afro-British. Minorities that out-marry at even higher rates,
like German-Americans or Irish-Americans, are hard to measure because the very definition
of "minority" or even of "ethnicity" breaks down once a group is fully assimilated by
marriage. But African-American out-marriage is one-tenth
of those numbers. Such a low out-marriage rate resembles only
that of a few religious cults. It can result only from deliberate and harshly
imposed social policy in the past. These sessions explore the origin of that
policy in colonial America. What was your question?
Karen: You said that, by the American Revolution, 12 of the 13 rebelling colonies had outlawed
intermarriage. Which colony was the exception?
Professor Hemmings: South Carolina. Incidentally, that fact was once challenged
by a historian of South Carolina. She said that colonial South Carolina had
many laws against interracial sex. I explained that during and after the Reformation,
every Protestant land had laws against illicit sex.
Fornication (unmarried sex) and adultery (extramarital sex) were outlawed virtually everywhere, and
interracial sex was often villified as somehow worse.
But we are not talking here about laws against fornication and adultery.
We are talking about a society, who took Christianity very seriously, making the Holy Sacrament
of Matrimony a crime. South Carolina never made such a law, at least
not until the Jim Crow era of state-sponsored terrorism.
Karen: Interesting. I want to ask why on earth colonial rulers
felt it necessary to make marriage a crime, but I am sure you will answer that next time.
Professor Hemmings: I shall. Kern: Well, that is our time for today ladies
and gentlemen. This is Karen Sharpe
Professor Hemmings: And Randolph Hemmings Karen: Signing off until next time.