Between the Revolution and the Civil War, descriptions and pictorial representations of whites coupling with blacks proliferated in the North. Novelists, short-story writers, poets, journalists, and political cartoonists, among others, devoted a vast amount of energy to depicting blacks and whites dancing, flirting, kissing, and marrying one another. Invariably, the blacks are portrayed as ugly, animal-like, and foul-smelling. This makes them easily distinguishable from the whites, who are usually portrayed as physically attractive. In most cases, the whites portrayed coupling inter-racially are abolitionists. In all cases, the depictions appear when and where the question of black political rights was debated...

On a tour of North and South Carolina in 1773, Bostonian Josiah Quincy, Jr., took note of what he perceived to be the prevailing attitudes there about interracial sex. He recorded his findings in his private journal:

The enjoyment of a negro or mulatto woman is spoken of as quite a common thing: no reluctance, delicacy or shame is made about the matter. It is far from being uncommon to see a gentleman at dinner, and his reputed offspring a slave to the master of the table. . . . The fathers neither of them blushed or seem[ed] disconcerted. They...

In The Last of the Mohicans (1826), a historical novel about the New York frontier during the French and Indian War and the most popular novel of the 1820s, James Fenimore Cooper has the main protagonist refer repeatedly to race in terms of blood and fractions of blood.¹ Hawk-eye states that he is “the whole blood of the whites” and, on another occasion, that he is “a man of white blood.” On still another occasion, he claims to be “a white man who has no taint of Indian blood.”² Hawk-eye uses the rhetoric of blood in these statements to make...

A double-sided painting from New England circa 1825 provides, on one side, a portrait of a well-dressed man in a bust-length form and, on the flip side, two very provocative vignettes entitled Virginian Luxuries. One vignette depicts the same man posed to strike with a long stick the bared back of man much more dark skinned than himself and the other depicts him kissing a woman also darker than himself (Figures 2 and 3).¹ The frame molding on the flip side of the portrait lacks the hardware typical of the backside of a painting, indicating it was meant to look...

Philadelphia was the site of another one of the largest anti-abolitionist riots. In May 1838, a mob burned to the ground the abolitionists’ newly built Pennsylvania Hall for Free Discussion, attempted to burn the Friends Shelter for Colored Orphans, and attacked a black church. The hall was built earlier that year by a joint stock company formed by the abolitionists when they had trouble hiring halls for their meetings. In addition to providing rooms for various “benevolent or moral societies” to meet, the hall was intended to serve as a headquarters for publishing abolitionist newspapers and tracts.¹ In spring 1838,...

In the years leading up to and during the Civil War, there were radical abolitionists who continued to champion the right to inter-racial marriage. Most prominent were the anti-slavery women of Massachusetts, who between 1838 and 1843 petitioned their state legislature to overturn the law banning interracial marriage as part of their effort to “obtain for . . . [blacks] equal civil and political rights and privileges with the whites.”¹ They and their supporters stated publicly and persistently that marriage should be strictly a matter of personal preference.² A few radical abolitionists also argued not only that inter-marriage should be...

A look at recent discussions about race and sex in everything from the popular press to science articles and historical scholarship reveals that many Americans still believe there is a special category of sex that is “inter-racial.” We imagine that race is produced through sexual reproduction such that sex across imagined race lines must have its own term, must be marked as outside not only the social but the biological norm. In short, we hold on to biology when faced with the issue of race and sex even in the face of our many claims that race is purely a...