The Fight for Interracial Marriage Rights in Antebellum Massachusetts by Amber D. Moulton

Author:Amber D. Moulton [Moulton, Amber D.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, United States, State & Local, New England (CT; MA; ME; NH; RI; VT), 19th Century, Social Science, Discrimination, Political Science, History & Theory, Law, Legal History
ISBN: 9780674286252
Google: q56JBwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Published: 2015-04-06T22:27:50+00:00

CHAPTER FIVE

Advancing Interracialism

IN 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 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.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.