Blurring the Lines of Race and Freedom: Mulattoes in English Colonial North America and the Early United States Republic
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Blurring the Lines of Race and Freedom: Mulattoes in English Colonial North America and the Early United States Republic by Aaron B. Wilkinson A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in History in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Waldo E. Martin, Jr. Professor David A. Hollinger Professor Michael Omi Spring 2013 Blurring the Lines of Race and Freedom: Mulattoes in English Colonial North America and the Early United States Republic Copyright © 2013 by Aaron B. Wilkinson Abstract Blurring the Lines of Race and Freedom: Mulattoes in English Colonial North America and the Early United States Republic by Aaron B. Wilkinson Doctor of Philosophy in History University of California, Berkeley Professor Waldo E. Martin, Jr., Chair This project investigates people of mixed African, European, and sometimes Native American ancestry, commonly referred to as mulattoes, in English colonial North America and the early United States republic. This research deconstructs nascent African American stratification by examining various types of privilege that allowed people of mixed heritage to experience upward social mobility, with a special focus on access to freedom from slavery and servitude in the colonies and states of the southeast Atlantic Coast. Additionally, this work provides a framework for understanding U.S. mixed-race ideologies by following the trajectory of how people of mixed descent and their families viewed themselves and how they were perceived by the broader societies in which they lived. This study contributes to historiographical and contemporary discussions associated with mixed-heritage peoples, ideas of racial mixture, “whiteness,” and African American identity. 1 To Millie C. Edwards i Table of Contents Introduction iii Chapter 1 Seventeenth-Century Hypodescent Law in the Colonial Chesapeake Bay 1 Chapter 2 Mulattoes in the Eighteenth-Century English Colonies of North America 27 Chapter 3 Multigenerational Indentures: Mulatto Families in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake 54 Chapter 4 Mulattoes in the Revolutionary Era 82 Chapter 5 The Erosion of Mulatto Privilege in the Early National Period 108 Chapter 6 The Legislative End of Mulatto Privilege 139 Conclusion 169 ii Introduction Since its earliest days, the United States has had a racial system largely based on the “black-white” binary. Though various groups, such as Native Americans, Latinos, Asians, and others have long complicated the binary over the years, the idea of monoracial categories has dominated racial thinking throughout United States history. However, an increasing number of people in the twenty-first century United States are recognizing their mixed ethnoracial heritage and are choosing to personally identify themselves as having multiple ethnoracial ancestries.1 Some have tied this trend to a “multiracial baby boom” that resulted from an increase in so- called interracial marriages in the decades that followed the height of the Civil Rights Movements in the 1960s.2 In 1967, the Supreme Court decision in Loving v. Virginia struck down all state anti-miscegenation laws, or legislation that prohibited interracial marriage. In the following decades, mixed-heritage families flourished and their children have grown up in communities that are largely accepting of racial integration. Arguably, this lack of outwardly restrictive legislation coupled with more tolerant views of racial integration have allowed children of mixed heritage to become more comfortable identifying with more than one racial category. In the twenty-first century United States, it has largely become socially acceptable to identify oneself as mixed. Many multiethnic families welcomed the 2000 U.S. Federal Census, which allowed parents to “mark one or more” racial box for their children and presented everyone with the option to identity with multiple ancestries for the first time in United States history. Several years later, many of these families joined millions of others who championed the 2008 election of Barack Obama, the first U.S. President of African descent, born of a Kenyan father and European American mother. While growing up, Obama was haunted by fears of racial belonging due to his mixed ancestry. In Dreams From My Father, Obama recounts the feeling that he “didn’t belong somehow” and “would forever remain an outsider, with the rest of the world, black and white, always standing in judgment.” Similar to other people of mixed ethnoracial ancestry, he too struggled with racially tinged questions: “Who was I?” and “Where did I belong?”3 The young Obama emerged from his crisis of identity as an African American, and his personal journey later became the subject of national debate during his election, inauguration, and tenure as the 44th President of the United States. Many asked if Barack Obama should be considered the first African American or the first multiracial president of the United States?4 For African Americans, mixture with other ethnoracial groups has always been a complex issue. Their history in the United States and preceding English colonies evokes a past marked by various systems of racial oppression, first with slavery, then with Jim Crow segregation (both de jure and de facto), and today under the expanding penal system. During the height of Jim Crow in the twentieth century, people of African descent in the United States were labeled under the monoracial category of “black” according to the one-drop rule: whereby a person presumed to have descended from at least one traceable African ancestor is considered to 1 Ethnoracial is used throughout as a term that recognizes how both ethnicity and race have been used to categorize descent- based groups through historically constructed processes. 2 Kimberly McClain DaCosta, Making Multiracials: State, Family, and Market in the Redrawing of the Color Line (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), 7, 21. 3 Barack Obama, Dreams From My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (New York: Crown Publishers, 1995), 111, 115, 138. 4 See Andrew J. Jolivette, ed., Obama and the Biracail Factor: The Battle for a New American Majority (Bristol; Chicago: Policy Press, 2012). iii be fully “black,” “colored,” or “Negro,” despite having various degrees of non-African ancestry. For more than a century, the one-drop rule has defined membership within the African American community. More recent debates surrounding the “multiracial baby boom,” Obama’s racial identity, and the “check one or more” 2000 and 2010 censuses have been especially relevant for African Americans, as these issues bring into question the persistence of the one-drop rule. Prior to the 2000 census, leaders in the African American community wanted to ensure that the “check one or more” option would accurately count all those of African descent, thus guaranteeing the correct monitoring and protection of civil rights and federal entitlements. These concerns were real, not only for African Americans, but for other communities of color as well. Giving individuals the option to choose more than one racial category on the U.S. Federal Census could threaten groups of color in terms of personal identity, community involvement, and political power.5 Scholarly explorations of mixed identity have likewise proliferated, and at times provoke controversy. Within African Diaspora Studies, some have characterized “mixed race studies” as an attempt to dissolve African American identity by allowing “mixedness” to favor “whiteness.” For example, people of mixed African and European lineage may choose to distance themselves from negative associations with “blackness” by championing a mixed-heritage identity afforded them by their European ancestry. Others fear that romanticizing mixture as a solution to present- day race problems in the United States feeds into a color-blind approach to multiculturalism, which ignores institutional racism and supports “white supremacist” ideologies. Surely, these concerns are warranted, which is why we need careful, substantive, and more critical “mixed- race studies.”6 With the increase of people recognizing their blended ancestry in the twenty-first century has come a boom of lay and professional writing that explores mixed ethnoracial identity. Even though scholarship in the area of “mixed-race studies” has likewise surged in recent years, most research on racial mixture and people of multiethnic heritage has a contemporary focus and largely addresses the past two or three decades.7 This research project starts at the beginning of U.S. history in order to uncover the foundations of how people thought about racial mixture and people of mixed ancestry in the first English colonies and early U.S. republic. I use historical methodologies consisting of expansive archival collection, reading, and interpretation of seventeenth through nineteenth century primary source materials. I also employ sociological analysis of these sources to reveal the earliest perceptions of mixed-heritage peoples and explain how these beliefs affected the lives of those of mixed ancestry. Regarding the “mark one or more” U.S. Federal Census of 2000, Kenneth Prewitt, then head director of the U.S. Census Bureau, remarked that the “Census 2000 will go down in history as the event that began to redefine race in American society.”8 Prewitt was correct in that the new census format implicitly raised a critique of monoracial categories and has changed the way