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24 Legal Stud. F. 133 (2000)
For the Better Government of Servants and Slaves: The Law of Slavery and Miscegenation

handle is hein.journals/lstf24 and id is 141 raw text is: FOR THE BETTER GOVERNMENT OF SERVANTS AND SLAVES: THE LAW OF SLAVERY AND MISCEGENATION KAREN WOODS WEIERMAN* William G. Allen, in The American Prejudice against Color (1853), explains that he writes to serve the Anti-slavery Cause, even though he has never been a slave and his experience of prejudice has been in the North. Allen presents the story of his controversial interracial marriage as an attack on American Caste and skin-deep Democracy and he makes clear the connection between the taboo against intermar- riage (even after the slaves were freed in the North) and Southern bondage.' In this Essay I explore the historical basis of Allen's claims. Using Virginia and Massachusetts as regional models, I argue that the development of slavery and the development of miscegenation law were concurrent and closely intertwined. Tracing the process of gradual emancipation in the North after the Revolutionary War and emancipa- tion in the South after the Civil War, I then posit that the particular historical conditions of slavery and emancipation (especially gradual emancipation in the North) transformed the concept of race and perpetuated the taboo against interracial marriage well past the demise of slavery.2 I. VIRGINIA: FROM JAMESTOWN TO THE LOVING DECISION As A. Leon Higginbotham, Jr. and Barbara K. Kopytoff contend, There is probably no better place than Virginia to examine the origins of the American doctrine of racial purity and the related prohibitions on interracial sex and interracial marriage. Colonial Virginia was the 'mother' of American slavery and one of the first colonies to formulate a legal definition of race and to enact prohibitions against interracial * Writing Center Coordinator, Wentworth Institute of Technology; Lecturer in English, Boston College. 1 William G. Allen, THE AMERICAN PREJUDICE AGAINST COLOR: AN AUTHENTIC NARRATIVE, SHOWING How EASILY THE NATION GOT INTO AN UPROAR 1-2 (London: W. and F. G. Cash, 1853). 2 See Joanne Pope Melish, DISOWNING SLAvERY: GRADUAL EMANCIPATION AND RACE IN NEW ENGLAND, 1780-1860 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998).

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