MISCEGENATION

Relative to the cultural phenomenon it names, the word "miscegenation" is a recent invention, dating only as far back as the U.S. Civil War. From the beginning of their colonial expansion into the Americas, Europeans expressed curiosity about sexual unions between men and women belonging to different racial categories (a point exhaustively demonstrated in 1997 by Werner Sollors in Neither Black Nor White Yet Both: Thematic Explorations of Interracial Literature). Even before a racial vocabulary had fully emerged, observers were commenting on sexual relations between Europeans and Native Americans or Africans living in America. The earliest additions to this racial vocabulary were primarily descriptors of the products of those sexual unions. While by the mid-sixteenth century "mongrel" could be used pejoratively, "mulatto" and "mestizo"—two terms borrowed from Spanish and Portuguese to describe the offspring of Europeans and either Africans or Native Americans—were often used merely to identify parentage. The emergence of increasingly refined categories, such as "quadroon" and "octoroon," indicates an obsessive interest in calculating the degree to which a person could be considered mixed. Other terms, such as "hybrid" and "half breed," focus on the fact of interracial union rather than on any specific genetic combination. The diversity of this racial discourse reflects how attitudes toward interracial unions could vary according to regional differences, changes over time, and the particular ways that a particular combination cut across race and class lines. In the United States it was not until the nineteenth century that words emerged to express—and often condemn—the desires driving these unions.

Nineteenth-century American literature reflects this complex linguistic and ideological heritage. While the word "miscegenation" was coined in the intense turmoil of Civil War fervor for the purpose of satirizing and condemning the sexual union of Euro-Americans and African Americans, the racist attitude that underlies it is the cumulative product of at least 250 years of talk about interracial sex in America. To understand "miscegenation" as both a cultural and literary phenomenon, it is first necessary to understand how racial thinking evolved over time and shaped nineteenth-century American attitudes toward sex, love, and marriage.

THE POCAHONTAS MYTH, CAPTIVITY NARRATIVES, AND FRONTIER ROMANCES

By 1820 stories of interracial sexual unions between Europeans and Native Americans had long titillated readers. One of the most durable of these stories was the legend of Pocahontas. In the popular melodrama The Indian Princess; or, La Belle Sauvage (1808), James Nelson Barker (1784–1858) depicted a mature and noble Pocahontas. Her dialogue with her English lover, Lieutenant Rolfe, articulates the Euro-American fantasy of Native American submission to, and even love for, a superior European culture that will rescue her from "the path of savage error" (p. 149). This romantic fantasy, however, is doubled in the play's comic plot, in which the clownish Robin overcomes his fears of native savagery to steal off into the woods with his "little dusky divinity," Nima (p. 148). Their banter knowingly winks at the sexual realities underlying the play's sanitized allegorical resolution of European and Native American cultural differences through the marriage of noble racial representatives. Throughout the nineteenth century, variations on this theme of interracial love in the woods were acted out on stages across the United States.

As the double plot of The Indian Princess indicates, Americans held a variety of attitudes toward sexual relationships between European men and Native American women. Although by the 1820s seven states prohibited marriage between Euro-Americans and Native Americans, the rhetoric of noble savagery typified by the Pocahontas myth, as well as the material realities of frontier life, led some Americans to tolerate and even encourage Indian-white marriages. Such relative tolerance must be understood, however, against the anxiety that surrounded sexual relationships between Euro-American women and Native American men. One of the primary sites for the expression of this fear was the Indian captivity narrative. These narratives, first popularized in the seventeenth century, were still widely read in the nineteenth, both in the form of eyewitness accounts and as stylized potboilers. Many of these narratives stressed the valiant resistance of white women against their Indian captors' savage lusts. Some, however, detailed the lives of captured girls and women who, having been adopted into Native American communities, married Indian men and raised mixed-race children. For example, the best-selling A Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Mary Jemison (1824) relates the story of a woman who had been taken captive at age fifteen and gradually adapted to living among Native Americans. Far from sensationalizing taboo sexual relations, Jemison's narrative factually recounts her two marriages to Native American men (the second lasting some fifty years) and justifies her decision to remain among her adopted culture by documenting an extensive family network that included eight children and dozens of descendants. Jemison's experience was not unique, but her telling of it was; far more of these accounts included stock elements that came to typify captivity narratives: sudden violent attacks, frail white women, lascivious savages, heroic and harrowing escapes. The threat of rape or forced marriage was a frequent motif, even if only to deny their occurrence.

The strenuousness with which these narratives reinforced racist attitudes betrays the desire of nineteenth-century Euro-Americans to deny the interracial mixing that, whether by force or by choice, was taking place in all corners of the United States and its territories. In addition to the coupling between Euro-American settlers and Native Americans on the western frontier, black slaves mixed (often by choice) with white indentured servants and (often by force) with white slave owners. In the Southeast, escaped black slaves joined and married into Native American communities. In addition, as the United States acquired territories previously held by France and Spain, it absorbed significant mixed-race populations.

Recognizing the tension between the democratic ideals of the United States and its racism, the novelists Lydia Maria Child (1802–1880), James Fenimore Cooper (1789–1851), and Catharine Maria Sedgwick (1789–1867) plotted historical romances featuring interracial unions. In Child's Hobomok, A Tale of Early Times (1824), Mary Conant, the daughter of New England Puritans, marries and bears the son of a Wampanoag Indian, Hobomok. Despite the daring depiction of marriage between a white woman and a Native American man, the novel essentially reinforces racist attitudes. When Child writes that Mary herself "knew that her own nation looked upon her as lost and degraded; and, what was far worse, her own heart echoed back the charge," she effectively endorses the social values of her time (p. 135). Two years later, Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans (1826) took an even more oblique approach toward interracial unions. At times the novel plays on Euro-Americans' worst fears of Indian savagery, as when the malevolent Magua threatens to take Cora Munro to "live in his wigwam forever" (p. 119). And yet it also traces the blossoming romance between Cora and the heroic Uncas, a romance cut short by their deaths but consummated symbolically through an Indian funeral chant that envisions their partnership in the afterworld. With respect to interracial union, however, even this happy prospect is undermined by the reader's awareness that, although she is praised by the Indians as having "blood purer and richer than the rest of her nation," she is in fact "descended . . . remotely" from African slaves (pp. 386, 180). The novel's ideology of racial purity is further affirmed by the chaste friendship of its protagonist, Hawkeye, and his stoic Native American sidekick, Chingachgook. The racial group to which Mohicans like Chingachgook belonged was the Lenni Lenape, which as Cooper explains in his preface to the first edition of the novel signifies "unmixed people" (p. 4). In contrast, Magua's guile is represented as characteristic of one who was born a Huron but who has learned to affiliate himself with other nations (i.e., the Mohawks and the French). The most frequent proponent of racial purity, however, is Hawkeye himself; he repeatedly makes assertions to the effect that he "has no cross in his blood, although he may have lived with the red skins long enough to be suspected!" (pp. 39, 42). Through Hawk-eye, Cooper displaces the Pocahontas myth by presenting a hero who embodies both European and Native American traits, but who simultaneously rejects the inter-racial logic upon which the earlier myth was predicated.

A year after the publication of Mohicans, Catharine Maria Sedgwick published her own story of interracial romance and marriage, Hope Leslie; or, Early Times in the Massachusetts (1827). Although Sedgwick allowed her characters to cross the racial dividing line to a greater extent than Cooper, the manner in which she constructed her multiple love plots undermines the appearance of supporting interracial unions. She fashioned the primary love plot out of elements from the Pocahontas story. The bold and passionate Indian maiden Magawisca protects her Euro-American lover from the wrath of her vengeful father. In the process of shielding him from execution, however, her arm is violently severed. As a consequence of Magawisca's disfigurement, the culturally mixed (but racially pure) Puritan girl Hope Leslie takes her place as primary love object. The novel's other interracial romance plot borrows from the captivity narrative tradition. Hope's younger sister, Faith, having been taken captive as a child, marries into the family of her captors. Although her decision to remain with her husband, even after she has been restored to her white family, appears to endorse the viability of interracial love, the childlike simplicity of her attachment and the absence of any offspring from the union suggest that such love is necessarily stunted and doomed. Ultimately the firmness with which the novel rejects such unions is expressed by Hope Leslie herself, who in response to the news of her sister's marriage exclaims, "God forbid! . . . My sister married to an Indian!" (p. 196).

In addition to the consciously literary efforts of Child, Cooper, and Sedgwick, publishers churned out fictionalized pulp versions of captivity narratives in an attempt to capitalize on their popularity. In the anonymously written Gertrude Morgan; or, Life and Adventures among the Indians of the Far West (1866), the eponymous heroine describes her encounter with one of the chiefs of the Pawnee who have taken her captive. Summoning her to his lodge, "The Yellow Face" warns, "Don't be afeard, Missus, I'ze not agwine to hurt you. Yah! Yah! I jes want you to come and be my wife; now won't you?" (p. 404). As his name and caricatured dialect indicate, this chief is not Native American but rather an escaped mulatto slave. That a fugitive slave would appear in such a narrative is not particularly remarkable; those who could not make it to the North could often find refuge by merging into Indian communities. However, "The Yellow Face's" motiveless sexual aggression, in contrast to Magua's vengefulness, exemplifies how representations of black-white sexual unions focused less on allegories of national unification than on the perceived dirty consequences of desires that many Americans believed were both unnatural and immoral.

THE MULATTO AS IDOL AND TARGET

As the persistence of the Pocahontas myth suggests, Americans could at least tolerate the idea of sexual relations between Euro-American men and Native American women. Part of this tolerant attitude stemmed from the belief (held by Thomas Jefferson and others) that the mixture of native and European peoples would result in a new people entitled to the emerging continental empire. Others viewed the inter-marriage of whites and Indians as a humane approach to civilizing and preserving a people that would otherwise be extinguished by westward expansion. The attitude toward sexual relations between whites and blacks, however, was decidedly less favorable. As early as the 1660s, as Winthrop Jordan has documented, Virginia and Maryland passed laws prohibiting sexual relations and marriages between whites and blacks (pp. 78–80). Such laws were instrumental in consolidating the status of Africans as inherently inferior and therefore permissible to enslave. They also codified a racial distinction between people of European and African descent that increasingly differentiated between indentured servitude and permanent slavery. Preserved and reinforced by slavery, such laws continued to exist into the nineteenth century (and in many locations, into the twentieth). By the 1820s, Elise Lemire notes, eighteen of the twenty-three states then in existence prohibited black-white marriages. In contrast, only seven states prohibited Indian-white marriages (p. 47).

Legal statutes, though important, reveal only one part of the complicated matrix of social and cultural attitudes toward interracial sexual relationships. Both abolitionists and defenders of slavery used interracial sex to promote their positions. Abolitionists decried the inherent injustice of laws prohibiting interracial marriage, noting that such laws violated Christian principles of brotherhood and equality. Lydia Maria Child, a follower of the antislavery advocate William Lloyd Garrison, argued in her Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans (1833) that the government was powerless to regulate affections and that "A man has at least as good a right to choose his wife, as he has to choose his religion" (p. 187). With the exception of a few radicals, however, few went so far as to promote intermarriage. Indeed, to make their arguments more palatable to moderate audiences, many abolitionists reinforced racist attitudes by arguing that slavery actually promoted racial mixing. Such arguments were intended to shock audiences by exposing a sexual degeneracy southerners wanted to hide; in the process, however, they also portrayed sexual relationships between blacks and whites as immoral and unnatural. For example, when Frederick Douglass (1818–1895) flatly states in his Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845) that "My father was a white man. . . . The opinion was also whispered that my master was my father," he reveals slavery's cruelty and hypocrisy (p. 48). The coy depiction of his master's attentions toward his Aunt Hester, culminating in Douglass's voyeuristic description of his aunt being stripped and whipped, further paints such relationships as immoral and perverse.

Defenders of slavery denied that such sexual abuses occurred. They did, however, use a similarly structured argument about the perversity and immorality of inter-racial sex to attack abolitionism. As Lemire has documented, in 1834 New York City was engulfed by widespread rioting following newspaper reports claiming that the abolitionists supported "amalgamation" between blacks and whites. By borrowing this term from metallurgy to describe genetic mixing, anti-abolitionists effectively encoded racial preference (and repulsion) as governed by the laws of nature. The year after the riots, Jerome B. Holgate anonymously published A Sojourn in the City of Amalgamation in the Year of Our Lord 19—by Oliver Bolokitten—Esq. (1835). In it, Holgate describes a northern city of the future in which whites and blacks have intermarried out of a sense of moral and political obligation contrary to their natural inclinations. The marriages themselves are universally loveless; the resulting offspring are ugly.

Depicted by defenders of slavery, mixed-race children were the misshapen fruit of unnatural and immoral unions. Some abolitionist writers inverted this portrait by making biracial characters into sympathetic models of virtue and righteous suffering. Despite their intentions, these portraits eventually consolidated into a stereotype that was as unrealistic in its idealism and sentimentality as the anti-abolitionists' caricatures were ridiculous: the tragic mulatto. Judith Berzon surveys the propagandistic utility of the tragic mulatto in antislavery novels. In their natural goodness, such characters belied racist stereotypes of African inferiority. Through their tribulations, biracial characters who looked white and acted with Christian virtue demonstrated the patent injustice of a system that enslaved individuals according to their parentage. White readers could also identify with them more closely than characters that were phenotypically and culturally black. In some texts, white-seeming characters unaware of their mixed racial heritage dramatically (and tragically) discovered the truth of their status, often too late to prevent falling into the clutches of an evil slave-holder—giving white readers a graphic illustration of the precariousness with which they held their place in the racial hierarchy (Berzon, pp. 54–58, 99–101). Ultimately the moral and logical appeal of tragic mulatto stories rested in their inherent endorsement of white supremacy. What makes the tragic mulatto's life so tragic is that he or she inevitably must be denied the benefits of whiteness that he or she clearly merits or to which he or she has become accustomed.

Novels featuring light-skinned mulattoes passing for white and circulating through white communities and white bedrooms held another appeal for readers, regardless of race or politics. With this conceit, such novels could purport to reveal the truth behind the whispered rumors and emphatic denials of the slave-holding South. In addition, the possibility that one could unwittingly break such a strong taboo titillated some and frightened others. In Richard Hildreth's (1807–1865) antislavery novel The Slave; or, Memoirs of Archy Moore (1836; republished in 1856 as Archy Moore, the White Slave; or, Memoirs of a Fugitive), Archy Moore, the son of a Virginia aristocrat and his female mulatto slave, becomes so disgusted with the indignity of being enslaved by his own father that he escapes to Britain where he passes for white. Unrecognized when he returns to the United States, Moore is free to gossip about the rumored interracial trysts of Jefferson and Martin Van Buren. While the novel plays on the thrilling power of hiding behind a secret identity, it also hints at its dangers by suggesting not only that offspring of unknown or unacknowledged parentage would inevitably result in incestuous pairings but also that the appeal of interracial sex existed at least partially in that very possibility.

The mulatto's firsthand experience of both the power of whiteness and the suffering of enslavement was figured by abolitionist writers at times as an unbearable internal conflict that must eventually lead to a tragic demise. In Child's short story "The Quadroons" (1842; revised 1846) for example, it is precisely the white-inflected beauty of the mulatto that makes her so attractive, and precisely the pride inherent in that whiteness that prevents her from accepting her white lover's inevitable rejection. Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811–1896) used similar plot elements in her two great abolitionist novels, Uncle Tom's Cabin; or, Life among the Lowly (published serially in 1851 and 1852) and Dred; or, A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp (1856). In Uncle Tom's Cabin the beautiful and proud Cassy becomes a helpless, isolated victim in a system of sexual exploitation, willing to murder her own mixed-race children rather than permit them to suffer enslavement. Cora Gordon faces an equally hopeless situation in Dred. Pampered because of her beauty, exploited because of her background, it is only through her intelligence and strong character—what her brother Harry describes as her "blood [coming] up"—that she nurses her lover/master out of illness and saves his plantation (p. 63). She is rewarded with emancipation and marriage but, in an echo of Hildreth's incest motif, upon his death becomes vulnerable to the legal and sexual predations of her white half-brother, Tom. If in these female characters biraciality is represented as a pair of isolating negations, such that one is neither white nor black, in Stowe's male characters, mixed racial identity manifests itself as a violent internal struggle of contending impulses. In Uncle Tom's Cabin the "high, indomitable spirit" that George Harris has inherited from his white father manifests itself as a bristling and bitter rebelliousness (p. 182). When in Dred Harry Gordon exclaims that he is "Colonel Gordon's oldest son"—just as white as, and a good deal wiser than, his half-brother, Tom—he sets in motion a chain of rebellious acts that unfold with prophetic inevitability (p. 386).

In the hands of well-meaning white abolitionists, the tragic mulatto figure functioned as a logical and emotional icon; white injustice and black suffering were embodied in a single tortured body and psyche. The popular theater seized on the melodramatic appeal of the tragic mulatto. Watching the 1852 stage version of Uncle Tom's Cabin by George L. Aiken (1830–1876), one of many based on Stowe's novel, audiences could see George and Eliza Harris's white skin and hear their crisp white diction. Audiences could similarly sympathize with the plight of Zoe, the mulatto heroine of Dion Boucicault's (1820–1890) The Octoroon (1859), which concludes with her drinking poison onstage rather than continuing to live as a slave. Nevertheless, these dramas and other popular amusements tended to skirt the political controversy and psychological complexity that mulatto characters could generate. In comparison, biracial authors imagined a greater range of motivations and reactions for their mixed-race characters, perhaps as a consequence of their own experiences as children of interracial unions. When William Wells Brown (c. 1814–1884), himself the child of mixed parentage, adapted Child's "The Quadroon" for use in Clotel; or, The President's Daughter: A Narrative of Slave Life in the United States (1853), he placed his vignettes of interracial union within a larger and richer network of social forces. As a result, the tragic consequences of these outcomes seem less predetermined by inherent conflicts within the characters than externally generated by economics and politics.

An even stronger example of this phenomenon is Harriet Jacobs's (1813–1897) Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861). Writing as "Linda Brent," Jacobs stresses that, although her power to control her own fate is limited by slavery and further compromised by her biraciality, she is not circumscribed by a stereotypically tragic script. Rather than suffer endlessly at the hands of her cruel master, Dr. Flint, she elects (though it is a choice made under duress) to attach herself to another (white) man, in part because their mixed-race children might enjoy greater protection than any born exclusively under her master's legal authority. By humbly repenting her sexuality and explaining it as a rational response to a sexually exploitative economy, she contradicts racist portrayals of black licentiousness. Through the conclusion of the narrative, in which Jacobs secures freedom and a safe home for herself and her family, she revises the propagandistic, melodramatic portrayals of Child and Stowe to show that a mulatta can overcome an oppressive system to find personal happiness.

THE INVENTION OF A PECULIAR AMERICANISM

While abolitionists deployed the tragic mulatto figure as a rhetorical weapon in the war of words preceding the Civil War, supporters of slavery continued to make racist appeals by claiming that the inevitable outcome of abolition would be racial amalgamation. In the process they made a lasting contribution to the American lexicon: "miscegenation." A brief overview of the word's origins forms a useful lesson in the difficulty of discussing interracial sexual relationships without resorting to an inherently racist vocabulary. Sidney Kaplan traces the origins of the word to the presidential election of 1864 and two enterprising newspaper reporters. In December 1863 David Goodman Croly (1829–1889) and George Wakeman (1841–1870), writers for the Democratic New York World, anonymously published a seventy-two page pamphlet titled Miscegenation: The Theory of the Blending of the Races, Applied to the American White Man and the Negro. In it, the authors explain that the word "miscegenation" is derived from the Latin miscere (to mix) and genus (race or kind). Adopting a tone of cool scientific detachment, the authors explain that the inevitable outcome of abolition and a second Lincoln presidency will be a miscegenated U.S. populace, a vision calculated to inflame political opposition. Croly and Wakeman sent copies of their pamphlet to leading abolitionists, several of whom replied with praise tempered by concern that the pamphlet's enthusiasm for such a controversial social policy would jeopardize the immediate aim of abolition. Meanwhile, the anti-Lincoln papers treated the authors' mishmash of pseudoscientific reasoning and provocative vision of a future United States in which "the most perfect and highest type of manhood will not be white or black, but brown" as an authentic statement of the abolitionist position. Opposition to miscegenation was so hostile and so popular that even most advocates of emancipating African Americans rejected the possibility of marrying one.

Although the Civil War emancipated African Americans from chattel slavery, the miscegenation controversy helped shape the widespread acceptance of racial segregation in the United States for the next hundred years. In American literature the theme of interracial sex, detached from debates about abolition, focused less on the tragic fates of mulatto characters exploited by a heartless legal system than on the personal choices individuals would make in a politically reconstructed, yet socially segregated, United States. Once again, Child's would be a leading voice. In A Romance of the Republic (1867), she traces a complicated web of inter-racial relationships beset by the kinds of tricks and tragedies characteristic of antebellum abolitionist fiction. However, it also presents biracial progeny as more than mere victims. The novel's profusion of racial pairings results in a large, happy, prosperous, multihued family. The conclusion, featuring a star-spangled pageant of patriotic songs and Negro spirituals, celebrates the Union's victory and optimistically portends Croly and Wakeman's facetiously conceived miscegenated American future. In a different manner, optimism also characterizes the resolution of "The Foster-Brothers" (1869), a short story written by President Lincoln's private secretary, John Hay (1838–1905). Hay permits the union of a southern white aristocrat and the white-looking daughter of his father's former slave, but only because her true racial identity is kept secret. In the story's cataclysmic conclusion, the two fathers kill each other, suggesting that the future of interracial love in the postbellum United States was necessarily predicated on the violent repression of the nation's racist past.

See also Abolitionist Writing; Blacks; Captivity Narratives; Hope Leslie; Indians; Leatherstocking Tales; Marriage; Slave Narratives; Uncle Tom's Cabin

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Works

Aiken, George L. Uncle Tom's Cabin; or, Life among the Lowly. 1852. In Early American Drama, edited by Jeffrey H. Richards. New York: Penguin Books, 1997.

Barker, James Nelson. The Indian Princess; or, La Belle Sauvage. 1808. In Early American Drama, edited by Jeffrey H. Richards. New York: Penguin, 1997.

Boucicault, Dion. The Octoroon; or, Life in Louisiana. 1859. In Early American Drama, edited by Jeffrey H. Richards. New York: Penguin, 1997.

Brown, William Wells. Clotel; or, The President's Daughter: A Narrative of Slave Life in the United States. 1853. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2000.

Child, Lydia Maria. An Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans. 1833. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996.

Child, Lydia Maria. Hobomok. 1824. In Hobomok and Other Writings on Indians. Edited by Carolyn L. Karcher. New Brunswick, N.J., and London: Rutgers University Press, 1986.

Child, Lydia Maria. "The Quadroons." 1842, 1846. In An Anthology of Interracial Literature: Black-White Contacts in the Old World and the New, edited by Werner Sollors. New York and London: New York University Press, 2004.

Child, Lydia Maria. A Romance of the Republic. 1867. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1997.

Cooper, James Fenimore. The Last of the Mohicans. 1826. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.

[Croly, David Goodman, and George Wakeman.] Miscegenation: The Theory of the Blending of the Races, Applied to the American White Man and the Negro. 1863–1864. Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Literature House, 1970.

Douglass, Frederick. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. 1845. New York: Penguin, 1986.

Gertrude Morgan; or, Life and Adventures among the Indians of the Far West. 1866. In American Captivity Narratives, edited by Gordon M. Sayre. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000.

Hay, John. "The Foster-Brothers." Harper's New Monthly Magazine 39 (1869): 535–544.

Hildreth, Richard. The Slave; or, Memoirs of Archy Moore. 1836. Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Gregg Press, 1968.

[Holgate, Jerome B.] A Sojourn in the City of Amalgamation in the Year of Our Lord 19—by Oliver Bolokitten—Esq. New York, 1835.

Jacobs, Harriet. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. 1861. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987.

Seaver, James E. A Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Mary Jemison. 1824. In Women's Indian Captivity Narratives, edited by Kathryn Zabelle Derounian-Stodola. New York: Penguin, 1998.

Sedgwick, Catharine Maria. Hope Leslie; or, Early Times in the Massachusetts. 1827. New York: Penguin, 1998.

Stowe, Harriet Beecher. Dred; A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp. 1856. New York: Penguin, 2000.

Stowe, Harriet Beecher. Uncle Tom's Cabin. 1851–1852. New York: Penguin, 1981.

Secondary Works

Berzon, Judith. Neither White Nor Black: The Mulatto Character in American Fiction. New York: New York University Press, 1978.

Jordan, Winthrop D. White over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro, 1550–1812. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968.

Kaplan, Sidney. "The Miscegenation Issue in the Election of 1864." Journal of Negro History 34 (1949): 274–343.

Kinney, James. Amalgamation!: Race, Sex, and Rhetoric in the Nineteenth-Century American Novel. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1985.

Lemire, Elise. "Miscegenation": Making Race in America. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002.

Sollors, Werner. Neither Black Nor White Yet Both: Thematic Explorations of Interracial Literature. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.

Sollors, Werner, ed. Interracialism: Black-White Intermarriage in American History, Literature, and Law. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.

Tilton, Robert S. Pocahontas: The Evolution of an American Narrative. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994.

Michael Householder