2. MISCEGENATION
Marital or sexual relations between two people from
different racial groups
From the Latin miscere (to mix) and genus
(race, stock, species)
First coined in 1864
Response to the 1864 presidential election
Prior to this, interracial marital or sexual
liaisons were referred to as “amalgamation”
3. MISCEGENATION
Pamphlet in which term first
appeared
“Celebrated” possible effects of a
Republican president
Widespread acceptance of
interracial romantic/sexual
liaisons
Too good to be true?
YES Pamphlet was a HOAX
put on by two Democrats to
DISCREDIT Republicans
Hoaxes.org
4. MISCEGENATION IN OHIO
Anti-miscegenation laws in US Since 17th century
Typically associated with slave states
Existed in North as well
OHIO PASSED AN ANTI-MISCEGENATION LAW IN 1861
Anti-miscegenation
laws repealed:
1887 or before
1948-1967
1967 as a result of
Loving v. Virginia
Never had anti-
miscegenation law
Nativeheritageproject.com
5. NARROWING MY
RESEARCH
TOO BROAD:
Interracial
Relationships
TOO NARROW:
Personal aspects of
interracial
relationships in
Ohio
JUST RIGHT:
Flare-ups of anti-
miscegenation
attitudes in Ohio
RESULTING RESEARCH
QUESTIONS
When did clusters of public discourse
against miscegenation occur in Ohio?
Why did they occur at these times?
What rhetoric did Ohioans use to justify
their attitudes?
6. ARGUMENT AND
OUTLINE
Anti-miscegenation
attitudes in Ohio
spiked during
periods that saw
massive threats to
the notion of white,
male supremacy.
Just prior to the
Civil War
Reconstruction/
The 1880s
Civil War/
Emancipation
7. MAJOR SECONDARY
SOURCE
Northern Attitudes Towards
Interracial Relationships by
David Fowler
Argues that anti-
miscegenation legislation in
the Old Northwest came out
of white efforts to maintain a
system of racialized caste
Only source
focusing on
miscegenation
in Ohio
Helps audience
understand how
Ohio’s anti-
miscegenation law
fit into a larger
regional context
Outlines and
analyzes legislative
debate surrounding
Ohio’s anti-
miscegenation law
8. PRIMARY SOURCES
Primarily based on newspaper articles
Accounts of activities in Ohio Senate and House
of Representatives
Reports of interracial relationships
Other kinds of sources
Pamphlet that coined the term “miscegenation”
Publications on 19th Century ethnology
9. FINDINGS SO FAR
There is no clear “good guy-bad guy” relationship in this
story
Not all Northerners were abolitionists
Most Northerners were just as racist as Southerners
Only methods differed most of the time
White Ohioans more concerned with relationships between
white women and black men than white men and black
women
Socioeconomic class played a major role in determining
how the community reacted to a white woman involved with
a black man
10. FINDINGS SO FAR
In each of the periods I am looking
at, Ohioans used at least one of
three major rhetorical strategies to
justify their attitudes.
Just prior to the
Civil War
Partisan Politics
Civil War/
Emancipation
Nature
Reconstruction/
The 1880s
Paternalism
Each of these forms of rhetoric coincided with major trends in national events and
politics
11. FUTURE FINDINGS
■ I hope to learn:
– If/how white Ohioans dealt with interracial
relationships extra-legally
– How white Ohioans reacted to interracial
relationships between white men and black
women
– How black Ohioans reacted to anti-
miscegenation law
To begin, I just want to take a minute or two to discuss a term that you’re going to hear a lot during this presentation, but that might not be familiar to all of us. The term “miscegenation”….
Like I said before, the term “miscegenation” was coined in response to the 1864 presidential election. It first appeared in a pamphlet entitled “Miscegenation: The Theory of the Blending of the Races.” This pamphlet appeared to celebrate the fact that a Republican president (Lincoln) would mean a widespread acceptance of interracial romantic and sexual liaisons.
Now that you have a little bit of background information on the topic I chose for my IS, you might be wondering how I arrived at such a narrow topic. This topic and I have been together since Junior IS. When I went in, I knew for sure that I wanted to study interracial relationships during the 19th century, but I wasn’t sure which aspects I wanted to cover. After some thinking and consultation with Dr. Holt, I found that I was interested in personal accounts of interracial relationships between white women and black men in Ohio during the 19th century. I chose Ohio because, in some preliminary research, I found that this state actually banned interracial marital and sexual relationships at one point. Having heard Ohio touted as a “Promised Land” for blacks in the 19th Century my entire life, this fact fascinated me. In addition, I was interested in really getting to know the Ohioans involved in interracial relationships at this time. However, I just could not find the primary sources I needed to develop a historical thesis. What I DID find was an intriguing pattern of periods in which Ohioans wrote extensively about their attitudes against the concept of “miscegenation.”
I used the pattern that I found to develop the following argument:
The periodization that I will be using to configure my paper will include three distinct chunks of time:
Partisan Politics Knowing their constituencies’ anxieties about the implications of an integrated Ohio, white Republicans and Democrats used accusations of supporting the notion of racial mixture via sex as a method for discrediting each other. This reflected what was going on nationally in terms of the mounting tensions between the political parties as the possibility of a Civil War loomed nearer and nearer.
Nature During the Civil War period, white Ohioans tended to argue that interracial relationships were “unnatural.” They supported this claim either with the notion that “God never intended the races to mix” or with pseudoscientific suppositions about the “weakness” of mixed-race people. This period coincided with a peak in the fields of “racial science” and “ethnology.” White researchers all over the world were publishing works on the supposed hierarchy of mankind. In these works, white men always made the top of the list and black men almost always could be found at the bottom. More importantly, these authors argued that any mixture of these strata would have disastrous consequences such as offspring too mentally and physically weak to survive unassisted in society. These attitudes filtered down into the lay community.
Paternalism Later on in the 19th Century, white Ohioans tended to back up their prejudices about interracial couples with the notion that such relationships were harming white women and degrading their femininity. The authors of the newspaper articles I’ve looked at usually implied that white women had little to no agency in choosing to be with a black man by infantilizing white women in comparison to black men. In addition, those authors tend to place more value and emphasis on the femininity and virtue of white women from wealthy families. The heavy involvement of women in the anti-miscegenation arguments of this period make sense. During this period, black men were, at least theoretically, being written into the law as equal to white men. White men openly feared that being endowed with such rights would encourage black men to pursue white women. In addition, many women were becoming more and more involved in society and politics by participating in the Temperance movement. Both cases posed threats to white, male domination in Ohio and the US.
