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Full resolution (TIFF) - On this page / på denna sida - II. Race - 5. Race and Ancestry - 4. Early Miscegenation - 5. Ante-Bellum Miscegenation
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Chapter 5. Race and Ancestry 125
to promote interracial sex relations.^® It seems from the historical records
that the two dependent groups—Negro and white servants—^were often
bound together by considerable sympathy during most of the seventeenth
century j
the extreme contempt and hatred between Negroes and poor
whites which has prevailed into the present time seems, in any case, to
be a later development.^^
Sexual relations occurred under these conditions rather freely and
a half-breed stock appeared early. Some of those early relations involved,
as the sporadic historical sources reveal, white women; some of the rela-
tions in both directions had the character of legal marriage. But from
the beginning the much larger portion of the intermixture occurred between
white men and Negro women and most of it was extra-marital. When a
mulatto generation came into existence, it served as a new stimulus to
relations between the Negro and white groups, as mulatto women were
preferred to pure-blooded Negroes as sexual objects. Even if in these early
relations it seems that most of the time the white male partner belonged to
the lower classes, the higher classes, who owned and could dispose of their
slave women, already had given a share to the paternity of the growing
Negro population of America.
Parallel to the stratification of the lower slave status for Negroes, the
various states started to pass laws against intermarriage and other types of
interracial sex relations.^’’ It is apparent from a casual inspection of these
laws that they were largely guided by the property holders^ interest in keep-
ing parents and offspring in slavery.® Their chief effect upon interracial sex
relations was probably to drive them even more toward the illicit type.
It probably did not diminish their actual occurrence to any appreciable
degree, since there was practically no attempt to enforce the law prohibit-
ing interracial intercourse outside of marriage.
5. Ante-Bellum Miscegenation
As the slavery and plantation system became more firmly established in
the early eighteenth century, a second stage was reached in Negro-white
sex relations. White servitude was already on the decline while the num-
ber of Negro slaves was increasing. Some authors hold the opinion that,
as a result, miscegenation decreased considerably, but their arguments are
not convincing.®®
A final answer to this question will probably never be reached, the less
so as the matter of interracial sex relations had become an important issue
between the white Southerners and the Northern Abolitionists in the
decades preceding the Civil War. The accusation that there was sexual
* Before these laws were passed, there was some question as to whether the oifsprinp- of
a free person and a slave was free or not. There was also some question as to the legal
status of both parents in such a case.
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