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The Mulatto Advantage: the Biological Consequences Of Journal of Interdisciplinary History, xxxiii:1 (Summer, 2002), 21–46. Howard Bodenhorn The Mulatto Advantage: The Biological Consequences of Complexion in Rural Antebellum Virginia Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jinh/article-pdf/33/1/21/1695226/00221950260029002.pdf by guest on 25 September 2021 For, as the whites have their blond and brunette, so do the blacks have their chocolate, chocolate-to-the-bone, brown, low-brown, teas- ing-brown, yellow, high-yellow and so on. The difference on our side is so much more interesting. —Claude McKay, quoted in Joel Williamson, New People: Miscegenation and Mutattoes in the United States Langston Hughes, the most prominent writer of the Harlem Renaissance emphasized skin color throughout his ªction. At different times, he referred to African-Americans as brown, light- brown, golden, yellow, high-yellow, almost white, blond, three- quarters pink, high-toned, coffee with cream, and cafe-au-lait. In Hughes’ ªction, complexion was paramount because it created in- terpersonal tensions, reºecting larger social dynamics. African- American men in Hughes’ ªction expressed a preference for light- skinned women, and dark-skinned women resented both the men who acted on that preference and the women who beneªted from it.1 Historians of race are quickto note that these tensions were not just the stuff of ªction. They regularly played out in real- world race relations. Leaders in the late nineteenth and early Howard Bodenhorn is Associate Professor of Economics, Lafayette College, and Research Associate, nber. He is the author of A History of Banking in Antebellum America:Financial Mar - kets and Economic Development in an Era of Nation-Building (New York, 2000); “A Troublesome Caste: Height and Nutrition of Antebellum Virginia’s Rural Free Blacks,” Journal of Economic History, LIX (1999), 972–996. The author would like to thank Claudia Goldin, Whittington Johnson, John Komlos, Robert Margo, Michelle McLennan, Carolyn Moehling, Deborah Rosen, Joel Williamson, an anonymous referee, and the editor and seminar participants at Lafayette College for com- ments on earlier drafts. He is also grateful to the librarians at the Library of Virginia for assis- tance in locating materials and to Lafayette College and the Robert King Mellon Foundation for ªnancial support. © 2002 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the editors of The Journal of Interdisciplinary History. 1 Langston Hughes, Short Stories (New York, 1996). 22 | HOWARD BODENHORN twentieth century African-American community were more likely than the general population to be light-complected mulat- toes. Hughes was; W. E. B. Du Bois was; and so were Booker T. Washington, Eubie Blake, Paul Robeson, and Walter White. Wil- liamson argues that these men’s ascendency to leadership was not coincidental. They were the sons, grandsons, and great-grandsons of light-complected men who formed the African-American elite Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jinh/article-pdf/33/1/21/1695226/00221950260029002.pdf by guest on 25 September 2021 before them. A fair complexion conferred a decided advantage in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Recent discus- sions suggest that the mulatto advantage continues into the twenty-ªrst century. In some circles, mulatto has become chic.2 Whether a light complexion conferred similar advantages be- fore 1865 remains unresolved. Most historians of the African- American experience accept a long-standing characterization of two Souths: Upper and Lower. Lower South whites, especially urban sophisticates in Charleston, Savannah, Mobile, and New Orleans, drew ªne distinctions based on color. As in the West In- dies and South America, light-complected African-Americans were treated more generously than dark-complected peoples. Up- per South whites, on the other hand, are generally portrayed as es- chewing even the crudest color distinctions, seeing the world in blackand white. There was no middle ground in the Upper South. In their relations with the white community, Upper South mulattoes faced all the disadvantages of being blackand none of 3 the beneªts of a white heritage. THE MULATTO ADVANTAGE A close reading of the traditional interpretation of an Upper South–Lower South dichotomy reveals a fundamental contradic- tion. On one hand, historians argue that Upper South whites re- fused to recognize any color distinctions and pushed all African- Americans down into a mass of “blackness.” Yet, on the other hand, historians argue that complexion distinctions were vitally important within the African-American community itself. It 2 Joel Williamson, New People:Miscegenation and Mulattoes in the United States (New York, 1984), 145; Claudine Chiawei, Half and Half (New York, 1998). 3 Several historians have made or repeated the claim about light-complected African- Americans in the West Indies and South America. See, for example, Ira Berlin, Slaves without Masters (New York, 1974), 183–216; John G. Mencke, Mulattoes and Race Mixture:American Attitudes and Images, 1865–1918 (Ann Arbor, 1979), 10; Williamson, New People, xiv; Whitting- ton B. Johnson, Black Savannah, 1788–1864 (Fayetteville, 1996), 78; James Oliver Horton and Lois E. Horton, In Hope of Liberty:Culture, Community, and Protest among Northern Free Blacks, 1700–1860 (New York, 1997), 84–85. THE MULATTO ADVANTAGE | 23 seems unlikely that complexion-based preferences within the Af- rican-American community would have persisted without rein- forcement from the white community. If African-Americans esteemed “whiteness,” they are likely to have done so because lighter skin conferred some advantage in a white-dominated world. Indeed, complexion differences generated unmistakable socioeconomic differences in the antebellum Upper South. Mu- Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jinh/article-pdf/33/1/21/1695226/00221950260029002.pdf by guest on 25 September 2021 lattoes climbed the agricultural ladder more quickly and accumu- lated considerably more wealth than blacks in antebellum Maryland and Virginia.4 This article utilizes a unique data set ultimately to conªrm the hypothesis that complexion differences were as important a deter- minant of socioeconomic status in the rural Upper South as in the urban Lower South. Using information contained in the registers of more than 10,000 free African-Americans from twenty-three rural Virginia counties and drawing on recent advances in anthropometric history, this article shows that the advantages of complexion were undeniable. Light-skinned African-American children beneªted from nutritional advantages in adolescence that dark-skinned children did not realize. These advantages in adoles- cence translated into substantially taller light-skinned adults. Put simply, color mattered in the antebellum Upper South, too. His- torians may have failed to recognize this fact because a visible, outspoken mulatto elite failed to materialize in the rural Upper South. But the emergence of a mulatto elite and the primacy of color were not synonymous. blacks, whites, mulattoes, and virginia law and custom, 1620–1860 Africans ªrst arrived in the Virginia colony in 1619 or 1620 and almost immediately formed intimate relation- ships with whites. The ªrst reference to an African appeared in Virginia’s legislative record in 1630; it represented the opening salvo in a long battle against miscegenation. Virginia’s council or- 4 Tommy Bogger, Free Blacks in Norfolk, Virginia, 1790–1860:The Darker Side of Freedom (Charlottesville, 1997), 104; Mencke, Mulattoes and Race Mixture, 2; Leon F. Litwack, North of Slavery:The Negro in the Free States, 1790–1860 (Chicago, 1961), 182. Johnson, Black Savannah, 16–17, makes a forceful case for the importance of complexion in the Lower South and how it was reinforced by white attitudes. Bodenhorn, “The Complexion Gap: The Economic Consequences of Color among Free African Americans in the Rural Antebellum South,” Ad- vances in Agricultural Economic History, II (forthcoming 2002). 24 | HOWARD BODENHORN dered Hugh Davis soundly whipped for “lying with a Negro,” an act he was required to acknowledge publicly on the Sabbath. A decade later, Robert Sweet was forced to do penance in church for impregnating a blackwoman. The woman was whipped. 5 Concerns about miscegenation ultimately provoked a signiªcant colonial departure from English law. English tradition held that a child’s status followed the father’s. In miscegenation Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jinh/article-pdf/33/1/21/1695226/00221950260029002.pdf by guest on 25 September 2021 cases, identiªcation of the father was often problematic; it was simpler to inhere the mother’s status to the child. In 1662, Virginia law made the mulatto child of a slave woman a slave. Until 1691, the mulatto child of a white woman was free, but an act of that year imposed a penalty of ªve years’ forced servitude on the white mother of a mulatto child and thirty years of servitude on the child itself.6 Although they labeled it servitude, most colonials viewed the children’s punishment as slavery, if only for a term of years. Many masters, however, ignored the term limitation and kept their ser- vants in lifetime bondage. Others released them only when the courts forced them to do so. The case of Ann Redman may have been typical. Ann, a mulatto daughter of an English woman, was freed only after a court ordered her “freed from slavery and dis- charged from the service of Thomas Lloyd” of Richmond County, Virginia, in 1697. Courts were forced to intercede in such instances because masters often represented their mulatto term servants as slaves and sold them to unsuspecting buyers who held them past their thirty-ªrst birthday. The practice became so egregious that in 1765 the legislature levied substantial punish- ments for misrepresenting and selling term servants as slaves.7 Interracial affairs, once discovered, carried a stigma in the United States not seen in other slave societies. In the British West Indies, gender imbalances among whites led to widespread misce- genation. British planters in the West Indies were probably as squeamish about interracial mixing at ªrst as their North Ameri- can counterparts, but demographic forces overrode social mores.
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