Marriage Makes a Man
the children of white slaveholders and black women were “unblushingly reared for the market.” Furthermore, she insinuated that if the children were girls, they would be sexually exploited.12 As historian Edward Baptist has documented, slave traders bought and sold light-skinned slave girls, called “fancy maids,” as sexual commodities.13 Mary Chestnut, a confederate aristocrat, compared every plantation to a harem where the wealthy wives of planters rationalized away the mulatto children that resembled their own.14 The 1850 U.S. census was the first to make a distinctive category for mulattoes, the contemporary term for the offspring of white and black parents.15 Among free blacks, 159,095 registered as mulattoes in the United States. How many biracial slaves remained uncounted in the South is difficult to judge. By the 1850s, accounts of runaway slaves, indistinguishable from whites, had become common.16 The notion of the white slave was contrary to every racial justification used to support slavery. The pamphlet Miscegenation: the Theory of the Blending of the Races Applied to the American White Man and Negro appeared in 1864, only a month before Harpers Weekly addressed the issue of white slaves in the South.17 Ironically, the pamphlet’s intention was to paint abolitionists as supporters of amalgamation. William Lloyd Garrison had previously attacked this notion in 1831 when he wrote that it was actually slavery that promoted amalgamation.18 Under antebellum miscegenation laws, an inherent bias manifested; interracial couples could not legally wed. Thus, States that charged a couple with miscegenation had to prove that cohabitation and fornication was taking place between the accused.19 For white women and black men establishing cohabitation was a simple matter. With cohabitation proven, fornication followed post hoc. Conversely, establishing cohabitation between white men and black women often proved irrelevant as black women commonly lived as domestic servants in the households of white men. Thus, miscegenation laws had little effect on white males in the South. Another component of maintaining white male privilege can be found in the marriage laws of the antebellum South that subjugated and emasculated black men. The masculinity bestowed by marriage is perhaps most apparent in the denial of slave marriages. The role a husband fulfilled within marriage was inseparable from the tenets of white manhood. Accordingly, if slave marriages were valid, black men could establish their own independence by fulfilling their role in matrimony as head of household. Of course, this would undermine the hierarchy of the plantation system and the property rights of slaveholders. It would also contradict white justifications for slavery, namely that black men were not capable of independence. While slave marriages were illegal, enslaved blacks still married one
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