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Full resolution (TIFF) - On this page / på denna sida - II. Race - 5. Race and Ancestry - 5. Ante-Bellum Miscegenation
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126 An American Dilemma
exploitation of Negro women was one of the most effective means of con-
solidating public opinion against slavery In the puritan North. Thus
Southern writers of the period avoided mentioning the point, especially
as it involved white men of the master class and their female slaves. What
the present writer has been able to read in historical sources and, in addi-
tion, to learn from the rumors in the South leads him to believe that Wirth
gives a balanced statement on the ^‘amount of miscegenation during the
period of slavery” when he says:
The contemporary observers, on the whole, tend to leave an impression that no
likely looking Negro, or more especially mulatto, girl was apt to be left unmolested
by the white males; that very few of the young white men grew up “virtuously,^’
and that their loss of virtue was scarcely to be attributed to cohabitation with white
women. While such impressionistic statements lead to the inference that interracial
sexual relations were normal experiences for at least the white men of well-to-do
families, they reveal nothing concerning the proportion of Negro women and, of
lesser importance, of Negro men, who entered into interracial unions. It is quite
conceivable that the very great emphasis on the sexual activities of the white male has
tended to obscure the extent to which large numbers of Negro women may have
been free from any sexual experiences with men of the white race.®^
It should not be assumed that interracial sex relations were a pattern only
of the Southern rural plantations. There is general agreement, among the
authors who have studied the question of interracial sexual relations of this
period, that such relations—measured in proportion to Negro women
involved—^were even more frequent in the Southern cities and In the North.
The Negro population in these urban communities contained a larger pro-
portion of mulattoes, partly as a result of race mixture there and partly
because slaveholding fathers of mulatto children sometimes freed their
offspring and moved them to the cities or to the free territory in the North.
The North contained more light-colored Negroes also because there were
many states without laws prohibiting intermarriage. Mulatto women have
always been preferred to full-blooded Negroes as sex mates. A large pro-
portion of city Negroes were freej in the North all Negroes were free.
City life—^both in the South and in the North—was more anonymous, even
for the slaves. In cities a larger proportion of Negroes were engaged in
household work. They were fewer and were more scattered through the
white population. All these factors tended to make interracial sex relations
relatively more numerous in the Southern and Northern cities than in the
Southern rural areas. The only factor, apparently, working in the opposite
direction—to decrease sex contacts between the races in the North—^was the
North^s lack of interest in breeding mulattoes for the slave market. These
interracial sex relations in the North and in Southern cities had only a
minor influence on the genetic composition of the total Negro population.
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