New from Harvard University Press:
The Fight for Interracial Marriage Rights in Antebellum Massachusetts (April 2015), by
Amber D. Moulton (Researcher, Unitarian Universalist Service Committee). A description from the Press:
Well known as an abolitionist
stronghold before the Civil War, Massachusetts had taken steps to
eliminate slavery as early as the 1780s. Nevertheless, a powerful racial
caste system still held sway, reinforced by a law prohibiting
“amalgamation”—marriage between whites and blacks.
The Fight for Interracial Marriage Rights in Antebellum Massachusetts
chronicles a grassroots movement to overturn the state’s ban on
interracial unions. Assembling information from court and church
records, family histories, and popular literature,
Amber D. Moulton
recreates an unlikely collaboration of reformers who sought to rectify
what, in the eyes of the state’s antislavery constituency, appeared to
be an indefensible injustice.
Initially, activists argued that the ban provided a legal foundation
for white supremacy in Massachusetts. But laws that enforced racial
hierarchy remained popular even in Northern states, and the movement
gained little traction. To attract broader support, the reformers
recalibrated their arguments along moral lines, insisting that the
prohibition on interracial unions weakened the basis of all marriage, by
encouraging promiscuity, prostitution, and illegitimacy. Through trial
and error, reform leaders shaped an appeal that ultimately drew in
Garrisonian abolitionists, equal rights activists, antislavery
evangelicals, moral reformers, and Yankee legislators, all working to
legalize interracial marriage.
This pre–Civil War effort to overturn Massachusetts’
antimiscegenation law was not a political aberration but a crucial
chapter in the deep history of the African American struggle for equal
rights, on a continuum with the civil rights movement over a century
later.
A few blurbs:
“An outstanding piece of history. Moulton
is the first to provide a thorough examination of the shifting
arguments for and against the repeal of laws prohibiting interracial
marriage. She offers a nuanced and convincing explanation for why the
forces of repeal were able to overturn the ban without diminishing white
resistance to marriage across the color line. Her book is an insightful
exploration of the evolving political, social, and moral thinking of
whites and blacks struggling to comprehend the complex meaning of black
freedom in the North.”—Joanne Pope Melish
“Amber Moulton’s finely-grained
history of the nation’s first sustained fight for marriage rights
chronicles the petitioning campaign that culminated in the repeal of
Massachusetts’ interracial marriage ban in 1843. As advocates for
equality struggled to make the case that marriage is a civil right on
which all other social and political rights are dependent, those
invested in preserving the North’s racial caste system waged a pitched
political battle in newspapers, political cartoons, and the streets,
warning that ‘amalgamation’ would lead to licentiousness and the end of
social stability. Both sides had a role in shaping the debate about
marriage and civil rights that continues to this day, making The Fight for Interracial Marriage Rights in Antebellum Massachusetts important reading for historians and activists alike.”—Elise Lemire
More information is available
here.
