American Indian Culture and Research Journal

Indian-white biological amalgamation, whether in or out of wedlock, is a subject well calculated to evoke spirited conceptions and feelings; certainly, it impinges upon the research of those who would probe more deeply into the labyrinth of Indian-white interaction in late nineteenth-century America. The tapestry of post-Civil War America is woven with many-hued Indian and white attitudes toward race-mixing. To unravel, illuminate, and interpret the complex and often antithetical views of authoritative white commentators on this issue is the purpose of this essay. The Anglo-American commentators whose attitudes will be surveyed include natural and social scientists, novelists, army officers, Christian reformers, Protestant missionaries, Indian Service personnel, historians, imperialists, and immigration restrictionists, among others. Of course, their personal fears, hatreds, prejudices, jealousies, aspirations, imaginations, sympathies, and emotions shape their views. Moreover, their attitudes represent a complex interaction among the prevailing ideas about race, gender, and class, a topic of considerable current scholarly interest. Because Indian-white race-mixing often has been associated with the more inflammatory Black-white variety, it is useful to begin with a glimpse of representative antebellum attitudes toward the latter as they impinge upon the former. Several abolitionists were prominent among those Americans who marshalled arguments in defense of Indian-white as well as Black-white intermarriage. Lydia Maria Child‘s Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans Called Africans (1833) sought to abrogate a Massachusetts law prohibiting marriage between persons of different colors and maintained that Native Americans were no less capable of cultural advancement than Euro-Americans. Child’s An Appeal for the Indians (1868) cited Sir William Johnson’s cohabitation with the Mohawk woman, Molly Brant, along with less well known but “by no means rare” Indian-white sexual unions, to prove “as plainly as the complexions of mulattoes and quadroons, that the ‘antipathy of races’ is not a natural antipathy.”