Dallas Suttles
to a white woman in 1871. Heiskell argued that the Fourteenth Amendment applied equally to whites and blacks. White men could not marry black women; therefore, black men could not marry white women. “Really, [miscegenation laws] were intended to repress the white race, and not the negro,” Heiskell charged.56 This sentiment, that miscegenation laws were repressing the rights of white men, was a recurring theme in cases where white men had taken non-white wives. In inheritance cases, as Historian Mary Frances Berry’s research indicates, southern supreme courts validated twenty out of twenty-seven marriages between white men and their black wives.57 Peggy Pascoe’s research contrasts this data with the fact that no marriages between black men and white women were upheld.58 Lawyers were using the fourteenth amendment to protect the inheritance and property rights of white men, while they simultaneously used state laws to prosecute black men. The system built off miscegenation law would restore a similar situation to what existed under slavery. Seduction laws, which made it a crime to fornicate with an unmarried woman under a false pretense of commitment, allowed white men legal access to black women. Charges of seduction between whites could immediately be rectified by marriage. For interracial incidents marriage was impossible and, therefore, so was seduction. This allowed white men to seduce, cohabitate, and even rape black women with near impunity. As Mary Francis Berry noted, black women who sought recourse faced charges of miscegenation. Furthermore, the sexual exploitation that black women had endured during slavery was now the proof of their inherent licentiousness. Black men who faced such charges from a white woman could lose their lives.59 Miscegenation laws effectively disempowered women and codified into law racial categories as absolutes, strengthening and entrenching white patriarchy. However, as to their ostensible purpose, these laws were ineffective. Interracial marriages, whether legally recognized or not, persisted. Ironically, the social conditions imposed by white patriarchal rule actually encouraged such unions. First, the indigent people throughout the nineteenth century were predominantly women. In America’s patriarchal society, a woman cast out without a male supporter likely faced a life of wage slavery or prostitution.60 The economic incentive for women to marry was all- encompassing. One example of this practicality is found in New York City during the 1850s. Irish women, outnumbering the Irish men in the city by a wide margin, began marrying Chinese businessmen in numbers that elevated this coupling into a stereotype. Harper’s Weekly addressed the issue in 1857, depicting a Chinese cigar vendor and his Irish wife.61 One New York reporter berated one such woman, who defended her Chinese husband as “whiter” than the white men in her neighborhood.62 The association
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