2.1. Sympathy and Diversity

The social equality ostensibly enjoyed by American whites did not make questions of institutional design irrelevant for democracy's sustainability. At a theoretical level, however, socially equal intercourse, and the sympathy this was supposed to engender, helped mitigate the problem of factionalism, which Montesquieu had famously argued made republican government unsustainable within complex societies. While this had been controverted by Hume, as well as Publius, Montesquieu's warning continued to be influential well into the nineteenth century.Footnote ⁶¹ Building on themes developed by Scottish philosophers, in the early nineteenth century a diverse range of writers argued that wherever social intercourse on equal terms was impeded—by distance,Footnote ⁶² language,Footnote ⁶³ laws establishing “odious distinctions” or favoring one religion over another,Footnote ⁶⁴ because of strongly felt group prejudices, or, with an increasing frequency as biblical and biological notions of race gained adherents, because of “providential” or “natural” racial distinctions—then there was no assurance that sympathy would act as a solvent of divergent opinions.Footnote ⁶⁵ “I know,” commented one U.S. Senator, “what was once considered as a problem is now regarded as settled—that extent of territory is no serious obstacle to a free and representative Government; but, sir, whether your territory be great or small, it is indispensable to the maintenance of a representative Government that its population should be homogeneous people.”Footnote ⁶⁶

Across the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, writers and political actors regularly expressed the belief that “two distinct races of people” who did not have social intercourse as equals would not sympathize with each other.Footnote ⁶⁷ “A continuance of distinctions in language, among people who are mingled in the same country and live under the same government, is by no means to be wished,” insisted an author in The Eclectic Review. “They interrupt that freedom and familiarity of intercourse…, [and] serve to perpetuate the feelings of reciprocal fear and enmity.”Footnote ⁶⁸ “Unity in fundamental opinions constitutes the spiritual essence, the very life and soul of nationality,” argued one member of Congress, while “difference in race inevitably develops a corresponding difference in primary belief … [and] must tend naturally to social and political anarchy, inasmuch as it leads to fundamental antagonisms in opinion, feeling, and habit.”Footnote ⁶⁹ Willbur Fisk “challenged any to show how there could be political equality or even harmony where there was not domestic equality. Domestic relations were the foundation of all others—here in the domestic circle the elements combine and amalgamate, and from these elementary bonds the different parts of society become consolidated.”Footnote ⁷⁰ “The true foundation,” argued others, “of all our political, religious, and moral privileges, lies in the fostering of domestic associations. The basis of these is laid even in the nursery.”Footnote ⁷¹

Social diversity did not necessarily lead to violent social conflict, but without free and equal intercourse, the probability increased that public opinion would be polarized, a danger in any state that rested on popular consent and direction. This would be compounded by the likelihood that political conflict would be organized on the basis of intracommunal sympathies and intercommunal antagonisms. And if interactions were not on equal terms but were regulated by oppressive legislation, then the favored class would look on the lower ranks with scorn and be looked on in turn with resentment. Factional conflict would draw strength from the sympathy members within each group held for each other, and from the antipathies that unequal laws and social exclusion would inevitably nurse between them. Politics would be organized around what today we might call distinct identities, with elections amplifying animosity between them and making violent conflagrations more likely.

For this reason, Simón Bolívar warned the Second Congress of Venezuela that “the diversity of racial origin will require an infinitely firm hand and great tactfulness in order to manage this heterogeneous society, whose complicated mechanism is easily damaged, separated, and disintegrated by the slightest controversy.”Footnote ⁷² Alexander de Humboldt argued that “the mixture of races of which the interests are diametrically opposed” had in Spanish America been “an inexhaustible source of hatred and disunion.”Footnote ⁷³ A writer in the Edinburgh Review expanded on this analysis to argue that “the dangers of discord and division, arising from the mixed population,” would only be intensified under republican governments.Footnote ⁷⁴ William Robertson blamed Spanish-imposed civic distinctions, which had produced an implacable “antipathy between the two races.”Footnote ⁷⁵

Throughout the early part of the nineteenth century, writers argued that such heterogeneity produced convulsions, especially in republics. “The presence of different tribes in the same country,” wrote Grimké, “and yet separated from each other by unequal privileges, and consequently by dissimilar habits, has been the most fruitful source of internal dissensions and civil disturbances.”Footnote ⁷⁶ The Abbé Raynal noted that civic inequalities “cherish perpetual hatred and everlasting division, between people who inhabit the same region, and live under the same laws.”Footnote ⁷⁷ “Two distinct classes of men,” argued one Massachusetts writer, “could not live upon terms of equality in the same country and under the same government” without “mutual hostility of the two races” and ultimately a “war of extermination.”Footnote ⁷⁸ It was the “common rule” of politics, that “when races meet, they struggle for the mastery,” and that under a representative government they would each try to win power for their own advantage.Footnote ⁷⁹ The result would be the organization of politics along communal lines and its degeneration into chaos and violence. It was an “utter impossibility” to harmonize peoples of different origins and habits “under a representative Government,” argued one member of Congress, citing recent strife in Canada: The result was that whenever elections were held the people were “arrayed on the side of their respective races, and their dissensions, instead of being diminished by lapse of time, were only increased” until the “interposition of the Crown became necessary.”Footnote ⁸⁰

While pitched in general terms, in the American context this argument was most prominently deployed in opposition to abolitionism or in support of depriving political rights from free persons of color. The supposed danger of enfranchising free black Americans, it was repeatedly claimed, was that electoral contests would become racial ones.Footnote ⁸¹ So long as freed slaves could remember their treatment, their participation in “the privileges of citizens, political and social” could only lead to conflict and race war.Footnote ⁸² Emancipation “without political rights,” argued John L. Carey, “would be no blessing,” while “with political rights it would be ruinous to ourselves.”Footnote ⁸³ It would lead to electoral strife, to racial domination in government, and ultimately to extermination: “shall not we too kill,” asked John Randolph, “shall we not react the scenes which were acted in Guatemala and elsewhere, except, I hope, with far different success.”Footnote ⁸⁴

These arguments were neither uniquely American nor were they used only to justify the oppression of black Americans. As we shall see in Section 3.1, however, in the United States they gained traction among the orators and writers of the American Colonization Society, which provided an institutional network through which these arguments could be refined and disseminated. In addition, American debates over abolitionism and slavery in the 1830s radically revised American understandings of race, republicanism, and diversity, overthrowing an elite discourse of racial “paternalism” and installing a more popular and vitriolic language of mass egalitarianism premised on racial hierarchy, metastasizing emerging notions of biological essentialism into a form of “racial modernity.”Footnote ⁸⁵ Indeed, the increased prevalence of biological and ethnological arguments about race in American political discourse is more readily interpretable when we recognize that the function of such arguments was to render “race” as a distinctive type of difference that ostensibly could not be diffused through amalgamation.Footnote ⁸⁶ Organized opposition to black Americans’ rights and continued presence in the United States provided a vehicle through which biblical and biological accounts of racial difference and hierarchy could be disseminated, casting “racial” distinctions as especially impermeable and thus especially likely to result in persistent conflict.

But while debates over slavery and emancipation were important occasions for its exposition, similar tropes had also been invoked in opposition to liberal naturalization laws;Footnote ⁸⁷ in recurring debates over the British penal laws against Catholics;Footnote ⁸⁸ in discussions about establishing a representative government in Trinidad;Footnote ⁸⁹ in inquiries into the East India Company;Footnote ⁹⁰ and in interpreting the various conflicts of the transatlantic world in Haiti,Footnote ⁹¹ Canada,Footnote ⁹² France,Footnote ⁹³ and the Yucatán. In his report on the disturbances in Canada—what would become the definitive liberal statement on colonial policy—Lord Durham insisted that conflicts in heterogeneous societies, even those “which appear to have another origin, are but forms of this constant and all-pervading quarrel,” framing a local conflagration as but an instance of a more general phenomenon.Footnote ⁹⁴ His traveling companion, Charles Buller, agreed, later endorsing proposals to strip the West Indies colonies of their representative assemblies on the same grounds. “No man is more inclined than I am,” he claimed, “to adopt the will of the majority as the only safe rule of Government.” But the oppressions visited on the former slaves would be remembered, while the former masters—like the settlers in Ireland—had shown a determination to maintain their privileges. The result was to expose “society to the worst passions that can actuate men.” “Establish representative Government as extensively and as fully as you can; but establish it in homogeneous societies, and in circumstances which will give it some chance of fair play.” Prime Minister John Russell would later remark, that “in those [European] States which are composed of people of different races and nationalities” representative institutions did not provide a popular bulwark against despotic government but gave “greater scope to those popular feelings of jealousy, and perhaps of dislike which prevail among those races,” arraying “national parties against each other” and encouraging dissension and oppression.Footnote ⁹⁵

The opinions of European and Latin American political thinkers were shaped by their engagement with American discourse, just as Americans learned from transatlantic texts and events.Footnote ⁹⁶ Whether the belief that plural societies posed a problem for representative governments had a longer lineage,Footnote ⁹⁷ or whether it emerged gradually as political actors interpreted the events of the era, it was increasingly being claimed as “an axiom in politics” that “where there are two races in the same land, which, for any reason whatever, cannot amalgamate by intermarriage, they can only exist in peace in the relations of master and slave, or the oppressors and the oppressed.”Footnote ⁹⁸ The Yucatán “caste war” was another link in a long chain of evidence, one that connected Ireland, Canada, the United States, Colombia, and, above all, Haiti into a metropolitan narrative about the difficulties of reconciling diversity, equality, and republican government.

2.2. The Problem for State-Builders

The emphasis given by orators and writers to factors that impeded intercourse and sympathy subtly inscribed the supposed problem on to the physical presence of whichever group was deemed to be “heterogeneous.”Footnote ⁹⁹ This framing was often coupled with an explicit listing of the supposed solutions, each of which was premised upon the elimination or neutralization of diversity: (1) foregoing representative government; (2) expulsion; (3) extermination; (4) the subordination of one or more classes, whether through enslavement or the deprivation of political and civil rights; and (5) amalgamation.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Additional commitments might further curtail these options. Extermination was often decried as barbarous, although it remained a viable option and could even be decided policy. The erection of status hierarchies was not inherently objectionable, but these had to entail a deprivation of political rights—and thus a substantial limit on democracy—as well as restrictions on civil rights. Enslavement was not an entirely appropriate suggestion for English colonial officials after the 1830s (nor did expulsion make sense for a government concerned with maintaining sugar productionFootnote ¹⁰¹), just as abandoning representative government was not proposed in the United States. This last, however, was pursued by different English ministries for their colonies: Trinidad and the Cape Colony were denied representative assemblies on the grounds that self-government could not be safely extended under conditions of racial diversity, while Jamaica would lose its assembly after the Morant Bay Rebellion in 1865.Footnote ¹⁰² “Representative government,” wrote the London Review on that occasion, “is out of place in an island where two bitterly hostile races contend for mastery: it can only end in the supremacy of one, and in the subjection of the other.”Footnote ¹⁰³

The set of alternatives varied, but over and over we find the same basic offering. “The law of races,” argued one speaker, “renders the existence of two peoples … in the same land, on a footing of social equality, impossible. Amalgamation, extirpation, or emigration, would seem to be the only alternatives.”Footnote ¹⁰⁴ The necessary consequences of diversity were “first: The conquered people are reduced to slavery; or, secondly: They are removed from the country by extirpation or expulsion,” or “union [is] brought about by amalgamation … intermarriages [being] a necessary condition of a harmonious blending.”Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Two races could “never thoroughly amalgamate until they ceased to be distinguished by their physical peculiarities,” and until this had occurred, they “would never rest until one had obtained the ascendancy over the other, or driven them away, or exterminated them.”Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Lewis Cass noted that the question before “our forefathers” was “shall we put [the Indians] in reservations; shall we incorporate them; or shall they be driven before the great advancing tide of civilization?” The first two options had failed, and so the indigenous “can die; they know how to die.”Footnote ¹⁰⁷ The British Empire had “only three alternatives,” wrote Herman Merivale, a key liberal theorist of colonialism: “the extermination of native races,” their expulsion into reservations, or “their amalgamation with the colonists.”Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Even the ancient Egyptians had supposedly had “but one of four plans to adopt” vis-à-vis the Hebrews: “either to expel the Hebrews, or to amalgamate them with the Egyptians, or to see the Egyptians inferior to the Hebrews, or to enslave, if possible, the Hebrews.”Footnote ¹⁰⁹

These claims were made in very different contexts, about groups defined along lines of nationality, race, religion, and class; they were comparative as well as historical claims and were invoked to explain repeated conflicts throughout the transatlantic, perhaps most influentially with respect to Haiti. But they were also being invoked as evidence to strengthen particular arguments and projects that had their own political and material motivations. What is striking, however, is the commonality of the alternatives and the underlying logic that tied them together. Where sympathy was impeded by inequalities or by persistent distinctions between groups or by proscriptive laws, representative government could only exist if the heterogeneity was eliminated, whether peacefully and gradually or not.

These were rhetorical tropes, which came up most often in broad-ranging public debates over colonialism, abolition, immigration, or economic inequality, or in sweeping histories of empire and state-formation. But they also arose in concrete political fights over narrower policy questions, such as the civil and political rights that should be accorded to different groups; or how to arrange colonial government; or how intercourse along the frontiers of empire should be regulated. While the claims rested on a theory of human sentiment and the consequent requisites for democracy, their rhetorical value lay in the ability to jump from these foundations to sensational predictions of race war and to policy prescriptions of removal, subjugation, or colonial tutelage. Writers could move from the facts of a particular conflict to a claim that this was simply a case of a general phenomenon with a set of well-defined alternatives. As one author wrote about conflict between black Haitians and the country's gens de coleur, “the first feature that strikes us, is the difference, the next the rivalry of races. Without seeking farther; this is the fertile source of dissension and misery.”Footnote ¹¹⁰ This author proceeded to argue that extermination or amalgamation were the only possible alternatives “in a country where any of the principles of republicanism were recognized in theory.” In this way, the theory offered a way to interpret past or concurring events or to envision the long-term implications of policy as the unfolding of an underlying logic: So long as conflicts could be interpreted in terms of this theory, their specific features could be ignored, divergent facts disregarded, and bold pronouncements about inevitabilities and defined alternatives given the presumptive benefit of comparative authority.

Each of the options inherently implicated state policy. The state-building implications were perhaps clearest when it came to denying representation, exterminating, subjugating, or expelling populations, tasks that generally required a substantial coercive and infrastructural apparatus. The implications of amalgamation, making one community out of many by intermingling and mixed procreation, were subtler. While amalgamation was expected to be the natural result of human intimacies, it nonetheless required action on the part of state-builders: to slow, if necessary, the process of expansion or immigration or to deny representative institutions until sufficient time had passed to efface the pride and prejudice that impeded intercourse, and to arrange governing institutions so as to ensure that the tender affections and attractions that should develop naturally were not impeded by artificial impediments.Footnote ¹¹¹

When nineteenth-century writers surveyed the historical record, they instead found institutions to have been drawn up by the stronger community in order to preserve their own interests, to exclude the weaker from any access to privileges and rights, and to remind the latter that their appropriate station was underfoot. As Frederick Grimké warned, “it is in the power of governments … to create artificial races among their own population.”Footnote ¹¹² This was repeatedly emphasized by liberals as justifying their own vision of social and political development. The result of illiberal laws could be seen in Hungary, one example of many where the “dominant races” had ensured their supremacy: “in their ordinary employments and in military service, in the civil, political, and religious institutions of the country, the dividing line between them and the ‘subject nations’ is very broadly marked. This distinction, so universal and conspicuous, having been acknowledged and uncontested for centuries, has prevented any amalgamation of the different races with each other.”Footnote ¹¹³ English observers of Spanish America noted that the “casts” there were “not more distinguished from one another by differences of physical constitution and appearance, than alienated by sentiments of mutual prejudice and aversion,” which they blamed on Madrid's policy of “preserv[ing], rather than … extinguish[ing] these differences,” part of its goal to divide and conquer the subject populations.Footnote ¹¹⁴

The same failure of amalgamation, with the same underlying cause of proscriptive legislation, was frequently invoked to explain the persistent unrest in Ireland. The “odious distinctions” demanded by the English settlers imposed a civic hierarchy that extended throughout Irish society. They “establish[ed] two descriptions of your people: the one trusted, and therefore protected; the other whom your laws stigmatise with disaffection, and whom their fellow-subjects are therefore taught to regard with jealousy.”Footnote ¹¹⁵ By raising settlers to a favored status, the laws encouraged them to adopt an attitude of “lofty superiority” and an expectation of an “unlimited submission.”Footnote ¹¹⁶ This was the “very worst of tyrannies that can exist,” argued Thomas Macaulay, “the tyranny of race over race.” He went so far as to declare that the settlers should have completed their schemes to exterminate the native Irish, as this would have been more “humane in reality” than being “doomed to be what the Helots were in Sparta, what the Greeks were under the Ottoman, what the blacks now are at New York.”Footnote ¹¹⁷

Macaulay and other Whigs were insistent that amalgamation of the races in Ireland had been possible and desirable.Footnote ¹¹⁸ The amalgamation of the Normans and the Anglo-Saxons, romanticized by Walter Scott, was commonly claimed as having established the necessary conditions for representative institutions and free government in England. “Celt and Saxon—Dane and Norman—all have been fused down and melted together, to form the great and united English people. A similar amalgamation, we might have hoped, would have taken place in Ireland.” The fault lay explicitly with the English, whose policy had been to establish artificial privileges and prerogatives that settler jealousy and chauvinism had insisted on maintaining well after they served any original purpose of encouraging settlement. “The diabolical policy on which England has always acted towards Ireland has been to prevent an amalgamation of races—to keep up a race, on which the people of another race might practise all the arts and mysteries of oppression.”Footnote ¹¹⁹

By ending these distinctions, and releasing the “Protestant from the deplorable power of tyrannising over his Catholic fellow subject,” the “prejudices” of both would be removed.Footnote ¹²⁰ “Every passion of the human heart is a material for the mould of the legislator as for the observation of the philosopher,” declared one Irish legislator in favor of allowing intermarriages between Catholics and Protestants.

The common feature of aristocracy, however, whether of wealth, skin, or religion, was its contempt and hatred of the equality that would be suggested by intermarriages.Footnote ¹²² For this reason, a legally privileged class could never be expected to remove these distinctions on their own, making democracy potentially incompatible with the removal of illiberal proscriptions.

Mathew Carey, the influential American polemicist who had fled Ireland for his defense of Catholic rights, placed considerable stress on the lost opportunity of amalgamation. “In most cases of conquered nations,” he wrote in 1819, “the subjugated people … generally become amalgamated with their conquerors.”

That Carey was a consistent defender of similar proscriptions against free persons of color in the United States was evidence of his antipathy toward black Americans, but a perfect consistency in his political thought: Carey advocated expelling black Americans through colonization, resting this on the same grounds that he championed amalgamation in Ireland.Footnote ¹²⁴

3.1. The Impassable Barrier of Prejudice

American state-builders had long recognized the advantages of racial intermixing for the purpose of securing territory and establishing secure and stable political systems. In the colonial era, William Byrd “commended what he called the ‘modern policy’ of intermarriage employed in French Canada and Louisiana by which alliances rather than warfare were effected.” John Lawson suggested that “ordinary people, and those of a similar rank” be given financial incentives to take Indian women for wives, while Edmond Atkin proposed that English officers in Appalachia should be rotated out of the region quickly unless they took indigenous wives, “by which means our interest among the Indians will be strengthened.”Footnote ¹³¹ Having observed sexual intimacy between white men and indigenous women across the frontier, Lawson, Byrd and others desired it back east, in order to better amalgamate the nations in a way compatible with settler colonial state-building projects.

This willingness to consider amalgamation in order to facilitate settler expansion continued into the early republican era. In response to ongoing conflict on the frontier, Patrick Henry in 1784 championed and nearly won passage of a law in Virginia offering 10-pound bounties for “white-Indian marriages,” with a 5-pound bonus for each child as well as tax relief and free education for each male child.Footnote ¹³² During the first term of his presidency, Thomas Jefferson expressed his hope that “our settlements and theirs meet and blend together, to intermix, and become one people.” He was also clear about the state and economic interests at stake: “while [the indigenous nations] are learning to do better on less land, our increasing numbers will be calling for more land.” Amalgamation would be part of a larger process aimed at “familiariz[ing] them to the idea that it is for their interest to cede lands at times to the US.”Footnote ¹³³ Jedidiah Morse believed that “while Indians remain in their present state, the minds of civilized people must revolt at the idea of intermarrying with them,” but maintained that “by educating female children … the principal obstacles to intermarriage with them would be removed.”Footnote ¹³⁴ Secretary of War William H. Crawford went furthest by drafting a policy report that would see “intermarriages between [the indigenous nations] and the whites, be encouraged by the government.”Footnote ¹³⁵

As with Jefferson, amalgamation for Crawford and Morse was seen not as an alternative to territorial expansion but as facilitating the acquisition of land and its settlement by loyal citizens, with loyalty closely associated with whiteness. The goal was territorial expansion, which as Frymer has demonstrated was designed to advance through concentrated white settlement.Footnote ¹³⁶ Insofar as amalgamation could play a role, it was in facilitating this process. As Nicholas Guyatt notes, the vision of American Indian policy that “animated presidential policy until the Monroe administration” involved a reinforcing process of encouraging Indians to engage in agriculture, freeing up land that could then be transferred to whites, eventually allowing intermingled communities and “intermarriage of the established Indian residents and the new white arrivals.”Footnote ¹³⁷ Even James Barbour's plan of Indian removal was predicated on amalgamation, which would be encouraged among the Indians removed beyond the Mississippi but also for those that remained among the whites: “a peaceful but sure remedy, which may be safely left to time alone to produce.”Footnote ¹³⁸

Intermarriage with the indigenous nations had always been viewed with some ambivalence in colonial and republican America. The “Pocahontas myth”—the repeated claim by Virginia's enslaving aristocracy that they were descendants of Pocahontas, who had willingly “turned her back on her people and her title”—served as an important marker of elite status but also, for some, a “foregone golden opportunity for a mixing of the two races into a single ‘American’ people.”Footnote ¹³⁹ But Pocahontas's marriage to John Rolfe was safely in the past, and ongoing intermixing was generally treated with hostility among settled European populations.

Amalgamation, however, could also be raised as a possible accompaniment to the emancipation of enslaved African Americans. In 1789, future U.S. Attorney General William Pinkney explicitly defended incorporating newly freed slaves into the white community through intermarriage.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ Theologian Jonathan Edwards in 1791 pointed to “ancient and modern events” to prove that the “natural and necessary course of events” was that slaveholders would be either exterminated, “driven out,” or “reduced to the same level and … be mingled with [the former slaves] into one common mass.” Slaveholders “will be necessitated by Providence to make in one way or another compensation to the Negroes for the injury which they have done them. In the first case, by taking them into affinity with themselves, giving them their own sons and daughters in marriage…. In the other case, by leaving to them all their real estates.” Edwards held that amalgamation should follow abolition in northern states, something that he regretted but believed necessary.Footnote ¹⁴¹ Kentucky minister David Rice in 1792 argued similarly, acknowledging that emancipation would result in amalgamation but insisting that while he and his generation might find this offensive, it was only because of “our prejudices of education,” which would themselves change as intermarriage became more common.Footnote ¹⁴²

William Short, the American ambassador and member of the French Société des Amis des Noirs, wrote his mentor Jefferson about the prospect of devising policy to “remove the aversion (wch. it is so natural shd. Exist … with those who have been [bore & bred] among blacks all of them in the state of degradation inseparable from the most mitigated degree of slavery) to the mixture of the two colors.” He considered the options: “keeping 700,000 people & their descendants in perpetual slavery,” or “having that number of free people living in the same country & separated from the rest of the community by a marked & impassable line,” or “the expopulation of the U.S. of so great a number of their inhabitants.” The first was contrary to republicanism, the second sure to produce strife, and the third an extreme solution. Short hoped that over time the black skin of the Africans would turn white, but even if not, he wondered whether this would be such a bad thing. “I don't know if you ever saw, a Mrs. Randolph afterwards Mrs. Tucker,—There is no country that might not be content to have its women like her.”Footnote ¹⁴³

Jefferson had in a sense already given his reply in his Notes on the State of Virginia, where he argued that mutual prejudices and a supposedly natural repulsion between whites and blacks would prevent their amalgamation—prejudices rooted in their historical statuses as oppressor and oppressed and repulsion that resulted from a distinction of race. Echoing arguments made by Raynal and others, Jefferson insisted that the enslaved would want vengeance for their treatment, and that the whites, educated in prejudice, would never forego their claim to a higher status.Footnote ¹⁴⁴ As a result, freedom would “divide us into parties, and produce convulsions, which will probably never end but in the extermination of the one or the other race.”Footnote ¹⁴⁵ This, along with his extremely influential elaboration on human difference, combined to pose an impassable barrier to amalgamation—a remarkable claim given his own relations but one he would maintain to the end of his life.Footnote ¹⁴⁶

Samuel Stanhope Smith shared Jefferson's belief that the two races could not live together in peace so long as white prejudices prevented social equality. While Jefferson endorsed “expatriation” or “diffusion”—organizing America's expansion to spread the black population over a large territory (i.e., open new states for slavery)—Smith proposed an alternative state-backed solution: to create a colony of freed persons in the West where racial amalgamation would be financially subsidized by the government. “To obliterate those wide distinctions which are now created by diversity of complexion, and which might be improved by prejudice, or intrigue, to nourish sentiments of mutual hostility, every white man who should marry a black woman, and every white woman who should marry a black man, and reside within the territory, might be entitled to a double portion of land.”Footnote ¹⁴⁷ This creative use of land policy to socially engineer the demographic character of the society would be replicated with successive land acts and homestead bills; but these were effectively limited to whites, so that the new territories might be made racially homogeneous.Footnote ¹⁴⁸ The influential republican Joel Barlow—who had become a member of the Société des Amis des Noirs in Paris—also seems to have believed that the state could play a role in encouraging amalgamation, having “propos[ed] to encourage mixt marriages by premiums offered for that purpose” as a means of facilitating abolition.Footnote ¹⁴⁹ Another member of the Société, the Kentuckian Gilbert Imlay, conceded that it would “require a length of time to generalize marriages between the whites and blacks,” but argued that there “would always be some whites who would marry blacks for property,” just as many French colonists to Saint Domingue and Sénégal married into the ranks of the free people of color in order to acquire property and commercial connections.Footnote ¹⁵⁰ But he also had “no doubt, when prejudices are worn away, [that] they would unite from more tender and delicate sentiments.”Footnote ¹⁵¹ As late as the Missouri Crisis, some Americans would suggest that “blending colors” through state-engineered amalgamation was the only way by which “the dreadful shock of contest be avoided.” “Antipathies about looks are surmountable; but hatred to oppression can never be eradicated.”Footnote ¹⁵²

Amalgamation between whites and indigenous persons occurred regularly along the frontier and would often be pointed to by some as a basis for opposing expulsion or in favor of political rights. The Cherokee, for example, were defended by their supporters as “hav[ing] more nearly realized the theory of Benjamin Franklin and William H. Crawford, of an amalgamation with the whites, than any other portion of the aboriginal stock.” Those who were demanding their lands, such as Georgia Governor Troup, in turn made the rejection of amalgamation a central point in their argument, often pointing to the Seminole as a group that had amalgamated with African Americans and constituted a community hostile to both settlers and slavery.Footnote ¹⁵³ Amalgamation was a practical reality among traders in the “middle ground” and was a possible biopolitical tactic for state-builders in Washington and along its agential networks; it had much less support among the settlers upon which the state-building project ultimately rested, who were unwilling to accept the continued presence of large indigenous communities. Crawford's proposal was met with an uproar in frontier settlements, who appealed to both anti-Indian and anti-black racism: If amalgamation might be an effective means for dispelling hostilities between white settlers and the indigenous nations, then it could also facilitate the abolition of slavery.Footnote ¹⁵⁴ The controversy hurt Crawford's prospects in the 1824 presidential election, the same year a congressional bill to reward intermarriages of whites and indigenous Americans died in committee and the Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions repudiated its earlier encouragement of intermarriages.Footnote ¹⁵⁵

Amalgamation between blacks and whites was viewed with even more hostility, and while it did occur, it had fewer defenders and American policymakers never seriously considered encouraging it. Brissot de Warville, the founder of the Société, described some of the interracial couples he found as he traveled along the frontier in the Ohio Valley, but noted that were these couples to marry, the North “would revolt.”Footnote ¹⁵⁶ More common than consensual relations was sexual exploitation.Footnote ¹⁵⁷ Sexual intimacy across the color line was generally prohibited by social sanction, while rape might be in the pecuniary interest of the slaveholder, a deliberate strategy to reinforce patriarchal authority, secure reproducible property in slaves, and, by prohibiting autonomous and consensual intimacies, foreclose the possibility of alliances between whites or Native Americans with persons of African descent.Footnote ¹⁵⁸

White racism was the primary reason for this prohibition, but it also grew out of the deepening investments in human bondage and the resulting security imperatives for slaveholding communities and the American state. The example of Haiti was frequently pointed to by American slaveholders as illustrating the dangers of a mixed-race population, as well as the extension of political rights to “heterogeneous” groups. Children of interracial sex would be mixed-race and comparatively more likely to be born free or manumitted.Footnote ¹⁵⁹ A long-standing refrain of slaveholder discourse, however, held that “free men of colour have a very ill effect upon slaves.”Footnote ¹⁶⁰ The problem was twofold. Their existence supposedly undermined the association between color and slavery, for “if the blacks see all of their color slaves, it will seem to them a disposition of Providence, and they will be content. But if they see others like themselves free, and enjoying rights, they are deprived of, they will repine.” More worrying was that free people of color might travel in relative freedom, allowing them to “organize insurrection.”Footnote ¹⁶¹

The danger posed by free persons of color in America's slave societies would be compounded if they were allowed civil and political equality. In that case, it was regularly claimed that they would enter into a struggle with whites for supremacy. It was a false “philanthropy,” argued John Nicholson, to recognize political rights for free persons of color: “the French Revolution has taught us a lesson on this subject, which ought never to be forgotten—the history of the island of St. Domingo,” where supposedly the grant of political equality for free blacks had divided the free population of the island into competing parties organized on the basis of race, divisions that ultimately emboldened the slaves to rebel.Footnote ¹⁶² This ostensible danger was invoked to justify the eradication of free people of color, whether through colonization, the succession of laws in slaveholding states expelling free blacks, or by prohibitions on interracial marriage.

But the threat that politics would be organized along lines of race, with cross-racial sympathies impeded by memory and prejudice, stood as an imposing barrier to abolition as well. As John Taylor wrote, “the history of parties in its utmost malignancy is but a feint mirror for reflecting the consequences of a white and a black party. If badges and names have been able to madden men in all ages, up to robbery and murder in their most atrocious forms, no doubt can exist of the consequences of placing two nations of distinct colours and features on the same theatre, to contend, not about signs and sounds, but for wealth and power.”

Robert Walsh warned that already Anglo-Americans had “felt the inconvenience of naturalized Europeans exercising those privileges in distinct bodies, collected and animated by national feeling; the risk of the African race voting and legislating with the esprit de corps, is too serious to be incurred.” While he was pleased that so far, to his knowledge, free persons of color were “not ambitious of civil rights,” he quoted southern authorities that “to prevent the generation of such an ambition, appears necessary; for if it should ever rear its head, its partizans, as well as its opponents, will be enlisted by nature herself, and always ranged against each other.”Footnote ¹⁶⁴ William Drayton asked whether political equality could be denied post-abolition: “If so, they would, in the exultation and boastfulness of newly acquired importance, demand it. Pleased with a pretext for collision, they would at once fall upon the whites, and wrest, or attempt to wrest, the political power of the Southern states from their hands … [leading to] a war of extermination.” And if political rights were conceded, the result would be the same, only preceded by the more circuitous route of party warfare, organized along lines of race and competing over economic redistribution but “without kindred connections, without social or sexual intercourse,” to mitigate the polarization of sentiment or interests.Footnote ¹⁶⁵ As long as white prejudice impeded the equal “interchange of sentiments,” whites would have “no common interest with, no bond of union” with free blacks, who would in turn forge new and dangerous solidarities with slaves, foreign powers, or with “adventurous men.” Instead of a blending of sentiments into a subtly shaded public opinion, black Americans would be a group perpetually set apart, with ideas and aspirations in conflict with the social commitments and economic priorities of the white portion of the electorate.Footnote ¹⁶⁶

In such a context, the only alternative would be expulsion or amalgamation through civil, political, and social equality. “You must,” argued Joseph Konigmacher, “if you recognize them as citizens, place them on an equality with all other citizens, in social as well as political relations.” To enfranchise free blacks without establishing social equality “would be to bring an irritated and bitter enemy into the body politic, who could never be reconciled by a vote [for the ballot] for the insult to his feelings and pride, in his exclusion from your society.”Footnote ¹⁶⁷ Any extension of social equality, however, would require integration of schools and other social institutions and the diversion of economic opportunities to persons of color. The cultivation of tender affections through social intercourse, as well as the pursuit of economic connections with newly wealthy black Americans, both raised the prospect of interracial marriages.Footnote ¹⁶⁸ It was for this reason that “political equality necessarily brings about social equality; social equality produces amalgamation.”Footnote ¹⁶⁹ “With equal political rights,” declared W. F. Bullock, “the barrier to social equality is at once removed, and practical amalgamation is the consequence.”Footnote ¹⁷⁰ Over the course of the antebellum era, these rationales were supplemented, but never wholly displaced, by a biological claim that amalgamation would degenerate white Americans’ physical and intellectual capacities.

These themes would become central to the discourse of the American Colonization Society (ACS), which beginning in the second decade of the nineteenth century appealed to white racism by raising the specter of amalgamation while justifying removal by on the grounds that a natural antipathy prevented its occurrence. The ACS is perhaps especially difficult to slot into an egalitarian or anti-egalitarian coalition as suggested by a “racial political orders” framework. It was organized in 1816 by students of Stanhope Smith inspired by his plan for abolishing slavery. But in place of Smith's state-supported amalgamation, the ACS insisted that the only solution to the problem of diversity was a permanent separation of the races. Framing removal as an alternative to enslavement, amalgamation, or perpetual conflict, the ACS drew on existing currents of political thought in order to give intellectual heft to their state-building project, which envisioned the states, federal government, and private capital coordinating around a program of removal.Footnote ¹⁷¹ In doing so, they influentially disseminated the terms of the theory sketched above while drawing from this their own conclusion that the only alternative to continued enslavement was colonization, with the free people of color to be removed first.Footnote ¹⁷²

Henry Clay, a major sponsor of the ACS, argued that domestic tranquility required that the country be “render[ed] one homogeneous people.” Is “our posterity,” he asked, “doomed to endure forever, not only all the ills flowing from the state of Slavery, but all which arise from incongruous elements of population, separated from each other by invincible prejudices, and by natural causes? Whatever may be the character of the remedy proposed, we may confidently pronounce it inadequate, unless it provides efficaciously for the total and absolute separation, by an extensive space of water or of land.” If a racial war was to be “avoided, separation of amalgamation is the only peaceful alternative” to continued enslavement.Footnote ¹⁷³ Adopting the ACS's premise that amalgamation was “improbable,” James Fenimore Cooper concluded that if emancipation were not paired with colonization, then “two races will exist in the same region, whose feelings will be embittered by inextinguishable hatred, and who carry on their faces, the respective stamps of their factions. The struggle that will follow, will necessarily be a war of extermination.”Footnote ¹⁷⁴ “We should have nothing but the perpetual turmoil,” warned one politician, “which always existed when there were two races in the same country, antagonist to each other. One or the other must govern, and the struggle for superiority had kept all countries, where two such races existed, in constant turmoil and revolution.”Footnote ¹⁷⁵ Edmund Bellinger insisted that “all history shows that the same country cannot contain free races of men too distinct and different to amalgamate.” The inevitable “contest” between the races would end “in the extermination of one, or the other, or both!… Such would be the result—the inevitable result of the alternative to exportation.”Footnote ¹⁷⁶ “Will they harmonize and love each other,” asked Joseph Underwood, “Why, sir, during this very session of Congress, the Indians of Yucatan have been committing horrible butcheries of the white inhabitants, and in Hayti the negroes have been murdering the mulattoes. Trace these wars to their source, and we find no other cause for them as potent as the difference of color.”Footnote ¹⁷⁷

The ACS and opponents of abolitionism could claim not only the authority of comparative and historical analyses but also that of science, as an increasingly systematized body of ethnology and race science insisted not only on the inferiority of persons of African descent but cast them as a race so distinct that amalgamation was physically impossible, with the descendants of interracial reproduction supposedly becoming sterile by the third generation.Footnote ¹⁷⁸ Framed in this way, the problem was intractable: Unless there was amalgamation, for which social equality was a precondition and which perhaps not even time could ensure, then there could be no sympathy, resulting in persistent conflict, the expropriation of property, and the destruction of free institutions. “If there is a total defect of sympathy,” wrote Grimké, “arising from causes which it is impossible to remove, all efforts to melt them into one people must fail.” The “statesman” must then square up to the “two alternatives [that] seem to present themselves: to transport the African race bodily to some other country, or to retain them in their present condition.”Footnote ¹⁷⁹

In a widely republished speech, John H. B. Latrobe claimed as the ACS's greatest success the change they had wrought in American public opinion. “How stands colonization now,” he asked. At the founding of the ACS,

Throughout its long career, the ACS would attract political actors inspired by both an opposition to slavery and hostility toward black Americans. But through their lectures and magazines, the ACS helped disseminate an emerging discourse of racial essentialism that rested in part upon a supposed incapacity to perpetuate the lineage of mixed-race persons or in some ostensible degeneration in their physiological character.Footnote ¹⁸¹ Its signal contribution to American political thought was, on the basis of these and other spurious premises, to amplify the claim that amalgamation was impossible, and to elaborate from this a solution to their self-posed question: “What is to be the result?” Whatever antislavery pretensions the organization might have had, the slogan “Can't Amalgamate” would be among the most effective arguments deployed against abolition or equal rights for decades.

3.2. Imperial Amalgamation

The representative institutions of the United States made its governing elites responsive to, and indeed drawn from, important enfranchised classes whose prerogatives rested on a codified civic hierarchy. From the early republic into the antebellum era, from Jefferson's and Stanhope Smith's ruminations to the active propaganda of the ACS, any suggested support for cross-group intimacy between either persons of color or indigenous communities with whites was heatedly opposed by those whose status and material well-being rested on the land and/or labor of those beneath them in this hierarchy. Cross-group reproduction, as opposed to intimacy and familiar ties, might be acceptable or even desirable, but only if did not undermine this racial ordering.

By contrast, for theorists of empire, colonial officers, and the imperial founders of new states, amalgamation could appear as a promising avenue for reordering society, especially when it could be envisioned as a responsibility to be undertaken by others outside their own social class. Bolívar urged the abolition of racial distinctions and at times suggested a principled commitment to racial equality, even as he expressed his contempt for pardocracia (rule by the persons of color). More consistent was his belief that racial heterogeneity produced intense factionalism and “race wars,” informing his firm conviction “that America can only be ruled by an able despotism” and his repeated calls for amalgamation.Footnote ¹⁸² During the French Revolution a subset of writers regularly endorsed amalgamation in outlining their vision of a more enlightened colonialism. Grégoire saw amalgamation as a source of moral and physiological regeneration; abolition and the extension of equal citizenship to freed persons of color, he argued, would be successful only if accompanied by interracial marriages.Footnote ¹⁸³ Grégoire, Condorcet, and others associated with the Société des Amis des Noirs repeatedly argued that “emancipation [was] only the first step. Once slavery had ended, they looked to miscegenation to efface the physical differences between blacks and whites,” a position that scandalized whites in the slaveholding colonies.Footnote ¹⁸⁴

Even after the revolutionary period there were persistent voices in French discourse in support of amalgamation. Alexis de Tocqueville perhaps best revealed the extent to which individual views could be contingent upon how they were situated relative to different state-building projects. While in the United States, Tocqueville had been exposed to arguments that there was an impassable barrier to social equality with persons of color; and that the consequences of this confronted white Americans with the choice of continuing slavery, pursuing separation through expulsion, colonization, abandonment of the South by the whites, or a war of extermination. His own elaboration of these claims in his “Three Races” chapter, foreshadowing insights of critical race theorists,Footnote ¹⁸⁵ was an influential distillation and endorsement of this argument. Tocqueville claimed that abolition in American would have to surmount “three prejudices much more elusive and more tenacious than slavery: the prejudice of the master, the prejudice of race, and finally the prejudice of the white.” These posed a more daunting obstacle to social equality than that faced by European countries that had abolished aristocracy, as whites’ investment in an aristocracy of skin meant that they would never engage with black Americans in equal social intercourse. Once placed on a footing of civil and political equality, the remaining social inequality—denial of social intercourse, but also whites’ possession of land and capital—would appear to black Americans as a galling injustice. This was the argument of Jefferson, infused with a theory of human sentiment resembling that of Adam Smith, and Tocqueville drew from it the same sweeping consequences others had: slavery, extermination, or a separation that was unlikely to come about peacefully were “the only accounting that might ever be possible between the two races.”Footnote ¹⁸⁶

But as a minister in France, Tocqueville outlined a project for abolition that rested precisely on what he had foreclosed in the United States, a vision of the future in which blacks and whites would become “confondus,” “assimilié,” “amalgamé.” When called upon to explain the contradiction, Tocqueville noted that he had always allowed the possibility of amalgamation but simply denied that it could occur under democratic institutions. “If a man happens to stand outside of the prejudices of religion, of country, of race, and this man is king, he can work surprising revolutions in society,” he had written in Democracy in America. “A despot coming to join the Americans and their former slaves under the same yoke would perhaps succeed in mixing them together.” This is what he proposed for the French colonies. For amalgamation to proceed, the colonies were to be denied representative institutions and the power of the state would be shored up: “It is precisely because I thought that then, and still think it today, that I believe that the necessary prelude to any kind of emancipation is to first place the state in a superior and dominant position,” which would allow it to exercise a tutelary role and “force the two refractory elements [planters and ex-slaves] to combine themselves in some way in order to form one and the same people.”Footnote ¹⁸⁷ His early writings on Algeria likewise insisted that “a new society [should be] formed from an amalgamation of [settlers and natives], including both residential mixing and eventually intermarriage.”Footnote ¹⁸⁸

Whatever plans the revolutionary-era Amis des Noirs may have had for regulating colonial societies was foreclosed by their loss of influence and the reimposition of slavery under Napoleon. Decades later, Tocqueville's plans of amalgamation were never given anything more than cursory detail. Still, French colonial policy under Louis-Napoleon would center on a discourse of “la fusion des races,” with the governor-general of Algeria proclaiming that “the great preoccupation of the government [of the colony] must be to realize the fusion of the peoples of diverse origins and races that inhabit this country. This work begins in childhood, it's in the communal schools where it must be accomplished.”Footnote ¹⁸⁹

A similar interest in amalgamation as a tool of statecraft developed in the reform-era UK, which had long wrestled with how to respond to the cohabitation of its officers with native women.Footnote ¹⁹⁰ By the 1830s the abstract idea of “racial amalgamation”—so long as it occurred in a “respectable” form that did not threaten imperial control—gained proponents across the English political spectrum, including “not only Whigs and ‘philosophical radicals,’ but Chartists as well as Tory vicars.”Footnote ¹⁹¹ The belief that a project of imperial colonialism could benefit from the encouragement of amalgamation was most closely associated with Benthamite “Radicals,” who conceived of it “not [as] that eventual and distant process … [but] an immediate and an individual process” that could be achieved by a careful attention to arranging colonial life to maximize cross-racial social intercourse.Footnote ¹⁹² Amalgamation, in their plans, would begin with the removal of artificial distinctions, the encouragement of social intercourse among persons of similar standing, and culminate in the formation of unions that would see a male British settler take a native or woman of color for his bride. “Racial amalgamation,” for the vision of imperial liberalism that gained ascendancy after the 1832 Reform Act, “was a specific incarnation in a concatenation of analogous political and discursive projects, ranging through much of the Empire and Britain … perhaps even a modular solution” to the political problem of racial diversity and dispossession.Footnote ¹⁹³

Perhaps the most urgent political problem to which the idea of amalgamation was offered as a solution was the question of how peace and imperial authority could be sustained in the West Indies and other slavery-based colonies if a general abolition were enacted. As the English abolitionist movement gained steam in the 1820s, “liberals” associated with both the Whig and Tory Parties began to consider how society in these territories might need to be reordered so as to ensure peace, a limited form of representative institutions, and economic production. At the top of their agenda was the need to abolish civil and political legal distinctions between whites and free persons of color, which they saw as a necessary prelude and accompaniment to abolition. Before emancipation, antislavery activists demanded that discriminatory laws be abolished immediately in order to dispel prejudices of color. “By removing all political distinctions among the free class,” wrote John Jeremie in 1828, “they will mix and marry together. Nature will right herself.” If freedom came before amalgamation had begun, however, the distinction between black and white would result in “antipathies and jealousies.”Footnote ¹⁹⁴ In Parliament, liberal members regularly argued that it had been the racial discriminations in civil and political rights that had prevented “the due amalgamation of the European and African races,” claiming that these constituted the “only reason” for European prejudice in social relations,Footnote ¹⁹⁵ while the colonial office demanded that the legislatures of the West Indies show a willingness to respect the civil rights of free persons of color. Even Tories promised to support policies that aimed to “amalgamate two distinct and separate races.” Robert Peel argued that “the distinction of colour” posed a greater difficulty than liberals would admit, but even he maintained that the “amalgamation between the slave and the free population … all must admit to be desirable.”Footnote ¹⁹⁶

After emancipation, discriminatory laws and social practices would be denounced as impeding the amalgamation that would need to take place to secure the well-being of the colony. Lionel Smith, governor of Barbados, regularly fought planters over ensuring the removal of political discriminations while insisting on social intercourse between similarly situated persons of different races in official functions.Footnote ¹⁹⁷ Stipendiary magistrates—an office charged in post-emancipation with protecting the freed persons, but who, through social intercourse, often sympathized with the former owners—were instructed to report on the degree to which prejudice of color was diminishing in their districts.Footnote ¹⁹⁸

Racial amalgamation was seen as not only essential for the success of abolition but also capable of rendering colonialism humane. Liberals maintained that the racial distinctions imposed by settlers and the colonial state had prevented “the amalgamation of the native population with the English settlers.”Footnote ¹⁹⁹ Such claims were especially common in discourse about New Zealand. As The Economist noted, the whole sweep of empire had been “but one history of the extermination of native races in order to make room for strangers.” The promise of New Zealand was that the Maori were seen as an “advanced” race “whose character, intellect, and pursuits, render [amalgamation] a comparatively easy work.” A presumed compatibility in social and sexual relations in turn raised “the hope that we would in the future possess at least one colony to which we could point with the proud satisfaction of having made it a portion of the British dominions, to the mutual benefit of this country and that of the aborigines.”Footnote ²⁰⁰ Of the many organized colonization societies proposing a settlement program in New Zealand, every one of them placed an active policy of encouraging racial amalgamation at the core of their proposal.Footnote ²⁰¹

In the 1840s, it was often official policy to arrange colonial institutions—including the sale of land, the prohibition of legal distinctions, the establishment of schools, the provision for mixed hospitals, and the recognition of marriages—in order to ensure “the ultimate amalgamation of the two races.”Footnote ²⁰² Landholding patterns in Canada, New Zealand, and the Cape Colony, for example, were to be arranged so as to place “the land for the natives among the whites, so that, if there was any possibility of amalgamating them, to do it.”Footnote ²⁰³ Integrated schools were seen as especially important crucibles where distinctions of race, origin, or former status could be eradicated and tender affections fostered.Footnote ²⁰⁴

Imperial state-builders in London regularly expressed concern over policies that might impede social intercourse, and parliamentary inquirers pushed their agents for information.Footnote ²⁰⁵

While metropolitan policymakers could be supportive of amalgamation, it was always in the service of imperial interests.Footnote ²⁰⁷ When Earl Grey proposed a representative assembly for New Zealand, for example, he limited voting rights to those able to read English, ensuring that the colony's institutions would be responsive to a class of white settlers in which the ministry's reposed its confidence. The Aborigines’ Protection Society, the governor, and many MPs rejected the scheme as an impediment to amalgamation.Footnote ²⁰⁸ “If ever there was a plan cunningly devised,” argued the Earl of Lincoln, “to produce not friendship but hostility—not to promote but to prevent the amalgamation of the native population with the English settlers—it was this…. If ever there was a plan to postpone indefinitely the amalgamation of the two races—a plan most successfully to separate them—it was this.”Footnote ²⁰⁹

Insofar as it held the attention of state-builders, amalgamation was—like subjugation, expulsion, or extermination, each of which were pursued by the British in some places at some times—a means to a given end, providing a liberal veneer for imperialism. But its value to state-builders was real, even if instrumental; recognizing this, colonial elite often defended their appeals for representative institutions by claiming to have made progress toward the achievement of equal social intercourse. John Montagu, the government secretary for the Cape Colony, acknowledged that while “this distinction [of color] has ceased to be the badge of civil disabilities and moral wrongs, yet … it still forms a bar to social intercourse and intimate relations.” But he put considerable stress on his claim that near perfect equality in political matters had been achieved and insisted that with a new constitution this would be furthered, and that “the prejudices, feelings, and habits thought to result from diversity of race and origin, are daily passing away.”Footnote ²¹⁰ Colonists knew what the ministries wanted to hear, and insistent claims that illiberal privileges in law and exclusiveness in social intercourse had been eradicated, that racial animosity was declining, and that amalgamation was soon to begin in earnest became a mainstay of ministerial correspondence with colonial elites from the 1840s to the 1860s.

The interest of successive English ministries in fostering amalgamation did not reorder colonial society in a more racially egalitarian direction, and colonial correspondence claiming otherwise was little more than a Potemkin facade. Not only was the eradication of legal distinctions always conditional upon furthering the long-term interests of the imperial state, but the settler populations, former slaveholders, new immigrants, and the natives and freed people themselves all had their own priorities and proclivities.Footnote ²¹¹ In fact, settlers and the former owners of enslaved persons were persistently seeking ways to disfranchise the indigenous or freed populations, searching for qualifications that while “carefully worded to counter Colonial Office concerns about discriminating on the basis of race … simply coded race in other ways.”Footnote ²¹² The realization of their own particular goals, after all, were much more directly premised on the maintenance of social and economic hierarchies. Accordingly, many of the efforts to encourage amalgamation were derailed in their local implementation. After the Indian Mutiny and other colonial conflagrations, there was a definitive reorientation of colonial policy away from even the limited fostering of social intercourse that had occurred.Footnote ²¹³

4.1. The Specter of Amalgamation in America

The frequently repeated claim in the United States that abolitionists were promoting amalgamation has generally been treated as an illogical leap, an effective slander that tapped into the “long-standing white repugnance to intermarriage,” but lacking any foundation in fact.Footnote ²¹⁶ It was certainly well-calculated to provoke a hostile response. But its rhetorical force rested on how abolitionists’ stated goals were interpreted in light of the patterns of discourse recovered above and by their close association with the English antislavery movement.

The American movement was regularly denounced for supposedly sharing in the belief of English “ultras” that “the best plan is to put black and white men and black and white ladies upon an equal footing in the intercourse of social feelings.”Footnote ²¹⁷ One person regularly identified as an “ultra” was Frances Wright, the Scottish-born reformer who argued that emancipation must progress “through the feelings; and through that medium, be finally complete and entire, involving at once political equality and the amalgamation of the races.” By educating children together in her Nashoba Community, sympathies would be established and distinctions erased, “to leave the affections of future generations to the dictates of free choice.Footnote ²¹⁸ British abolitionists were seen as equally supportive of amalgamation. A debate in Glasgow between Robert Breckinridge and George Thompson (whose tour of America sparked several riots over accusations that he was a British agent encouraging disunion and interracial sex) saw the latter defend amalgamation, even as he repeatedly insisted that abolitionists had no interest in promoting it. He asked whether there was “any law in America forbidding ministers to celebrate marriages between Japthethite [white] American Christians and Jewesses (by birth, even if Christians by faith) and Jews, (even if Christian) to marry Japthethite, American females? If there be not; then, why may Shem and Japheth intermarry, but Ham [persons of African descent] with ne[i]ther?” And he turned to history to show that amalgamation was an effective means of resolving the supposed difficulty of heterogeneity.Footnote ²¹⁹

Another English author attacked the claim of an impassable barrier between the races, “an assertion contradicted by a thousand facts.” This supposed “antipathy, of which we are as sick of hearing as the Americans [are] of abolition,” was in his eyes the sublimation of an “irresistible inclination.”

British abolitionist George Smith blamed the ACS in particular for “nurturing the unhallowed prejudices which fearfully alienate the affections of the white population from their sable brethren,”Footnote ²²¹ while Charles Stuart concluded that those who would “keep the family of man asunder” were opposing God's will.Footnote ²²² In many ways, however, these abolitionists were operating within a conceptual framework they shared with the ACS, one that predicated the operation of democracy on either an amalgamation of diversity or its elimination through removal.

British observers on American slavery regularly expressed their hopes that social equality would be extended and amalgamation proceed. After a discussion on the beauty of multiracial women, Isaac Candler considered the two reasons given to him by Americans for not admitting free blacks to equal rights: The first was that they would never amalgamate, and thus “the attempt to bring about equality must be inimical to the peace and harmony of society,” while the second was “directly the reverse, namely, that the establishment of equality must inevitably effect a complete amalgamation of the two races, and thus deteriorate the species.” He thought the argument about deterioration to be nonsense, and hoped that “at no very distant day, marriages of one with the other will frequently take place,” pointing to the Goths and Romans, Saxons and Normans: “the sooner the union takes place the better, for a caste in society is a dangerous evil…. When a general insurrection of the slaves occurs, a massacre of the whites must be expected, if they should then be what they are now, determined to prevent marriages by all possible means.”Footnote ²²³

The accusation that abolitionists were encouraging amalgamation rested also on the practices and positions of the radical antislavery movement in America, which advocated opposition to racial distinctions in law and the eradication of the prejudice which they sustained. As long as prejudice remained in the hearts of white Americans, they argued, then social intercourse as equals could not occur.Footnote ²²⁴ In 1832, William Lloyd Garrison and Lydia Maria Child launched a campaign to repeal the Massachusetts statute forbidding interracial marriage, “one of the links of that chain which binds millions of our race in servitude.” Garrison argued that “if [intermarriage] is the necessary consequence of restoring that which does not belong to us, and doing justly to our fellow creatures, we cannot help it. One thing is pretty certain—there will be no compulsion; and if two persons love each other enough to be united in wedlock, it is none of my business, and I presume they would tell you it is none of yours. We have nothing to say, pro or con, on the subject of intermarriage, because it does not concern us.”Footnote ²²⁵ In addition to pushing back on widespread notions of black inferiority, abolitionists in their meetings and public forums often performed for a broader public the possibility of social equality, with “black men and women [speaking] as political equals with white men and women.”Footnote ²²⁶ The Liberator even outlined an imagined future in which “blacks and whites were mingling with perfect ease in social intercourse,” where a young African American woman was the center of attraction for a biracial crowd, where some black Americans had married into “respectable white families,” and where, as a result, they were “completely united into one people, and there is as little separate interests and feelings … as between tall and short, or dark eyes and blue, or between men and women.”Footnote ²²⁷

Practices such as this provided a germ from which elaborately exaggerated anti-abolitionist fantasies were concocted. Edward W. Clay's “amalgamation waltzes” presented black and white abolitionists dancing, singing, and otherwise fraternizing and socializing on equal terms—with mixed-race children the ultimate result—while Jerome Holgate's extraordinarily racist A Sojourn in the City of Amalgamation painted a future in which sexual amalgamation was in fashion. Antislavery events in which women were prominent speakers or organizers were framed in newspapers and popular imagery as brothels encouraging sexual amalgamation, the implied sexual equality almost as transgressive as the suggestion of racial equality. Incidents in which blacks and whites shared cabins or coaches were treated as scandalous: Clarissa Lawrence, an African American delegate to the Anti-Slavery Convention of American Women, was attacked for sharing a return packet cabin with a white companion. When the Rev. William R. Weeks of Newark introduced a black man into his pulpit, he was said to have caught the “amalgamation infection,” and his church was destroyed. The reception of black abolitionists in England was reported with special vitriol, the extension of social equality in these settings another expression of malice toward the United States. The repeated printing of images or text depicting social equality and the sexual union of white and black Americans was intended to “disgust and titillate a white male public” and to associate “abolition with Europhilic decadence and the subversion of the American republican experiment.”Footnote ²²⁸ The rhetorical value of “amalgamation” was that it threatened the psychological and civic investments of white men in racial and gender hierarchy.Footnote ²²⁹

Nicholas Trist, the U.S. consul to Havana, explained to English commissioners investigating the slave trade (in which he was illicitly participating) the underlying logic that connected civil and political rights with social equality. In monarchical societies, he argued, diversity posed less of problem than in it did in democracies, as they were marked by the “distinction of ranks; where the gradation, beginning with a king, might end with a black; and the latter be habituated to regard the white man of the rank just above him with the same deference that the latter would give him the example of, by showing it to the ranks to which he was subordinate.”

But democratic states relied on sympathy formed in equal social intercourse. An American “could not fail to see” that in a democracy without subordinate ranks the “certain and instant consequence [of abolition] would be, aspirations on the part of the black to a social equality,” which if denied would “prove a source of heart-burning and hatred, altogether inextinguishable.” It was for this reason that “popular instinct” had substituted “Amalgamationist” for “Abolitionist,” as the proper designation of the man who would venture upon abolition without “deportation.”

The logical implication of equal rights, insisted Trist and other defenders of slavery, was amalgamation: “what is to qualify them to vote, save that social equality with them which involves all the horrors of amalgamation … [to] marry and intermarry with them, and establish between us and them the close and tender relations which bind society together?” It was also the logical implication of preaching against “prejudice, which after all is the only barrier between the races.”Footnote ²³¹ So long as the antislavery movement opposed prejudice and petitioned for the abolition of legal distinctions, it could be inferred that they supported amalgamation “as neither improper nor inexpedient, when voluntarily exercised.”Footnote ²³² “Everything looks to this. The extensive sympathy felt and expressed for the black over the white by the abolition leaders; the revolting prominence given to blacks in all public assemblages; the efforts to set the blacks at the South free, even at the risk of the massacre of the whites, all directly advocated—can have but one social aspect, and must terminate in the hideous doctrine of amalgamation.”Footnote ²³³

For the most part, the abolitionist movement deflected and disclaimed, a reflection of continuing prejudices within the movement but also a strategic response to the intensity of white racism. Angelina E. Grimké, who was especially attuned to questions of social intimacy and gender and racial inequality among white abolitionists, explained in an abolitionist letter to southern women that the North was not pro-slavery, but rather “most dreadfully afraid of Amalgamation.”Footnote ²³⁴ Evidence of white hostility to interracial intercourse of intimacy was everywhere. Supporters of a proposed college for free blacks learned that patrons were threatening to scuttle the institution because of rumors that it would encourage amalgamation. Prudence Crandall's efforts to integrate her boarding school for young women were denounced for the same reason, as was New York Central College for allowing blacks and whites to attend.Footnote ²³⁵ American newspapers were quick to report on blacks and whites mingling in public, and “amalgamation riots” occurred throughout the 1830s.Footnote ²³⁶

Black abolitionists had long contradicted this charge,Footnote ²³⁷ treating with contempt the suggestion that they had any desire for white women and arguing instead that amalgamation was the product of slavery.Footnote ²³⁸ When European abolitionists endorsed amalgamation, the promise was that conflict would be reduced by absorbing one people into another. Most black American writers rejected this choice, whether in the form of Martin Delany's critique of those white abolitionists who “have for years been erroneously urging us to lose our identity as a distinct race”Footnote ²³⁹ or the Colored American’s opposition to any intermarriages that would separate the wealthy and most educated persons of color from their community.Footnote ²⁴⁰ Instead, they emphasized that there was no desire among black Americans for amalgamation, and so it would decline under freedom once black women had rights. Recognizing that the prohibition on legally sanctioned interracial unions was intended to stigmatize persons of color, however, they also insisted that that there was nothing problematic about consensual unions between free men and women of any race.

David Ruggles denied the likelihood of amalgamation under freedom and insisted that there was no natural impediment to it, only the artificial distinctions erected by prejudice. “I do not wish it, nor does any colored man or woman of my acquaintance, nor can instances be adduced where a desire was manifested by any colored person, but I deny that ‘intermarriages’ between the ‘whites and blacks are unnatural.’” He and others drew a distinction between intermarriage, which would occur only after prejudices had abated, and social and political equality, which could be accorded immediately and whose extension would reduce prejudices by changing the education received by whites. “If prejudice is invincible,” a point he refused to concede, then “amalgamation can never take place.” And if it were not, then its occurrence under freedom would be the product of consensual union rather than of rape.Footnote ²⁴¹

Many white abolitionists echoed these themes, especially those on the more radical end of the antislavery movement. Sarah Moore Grimké famously helped disseminate the point made by black writers that amalgamation was daily occurring through sexual violence in the South, encouraged by laws that gave enslaved women no protection; this became a regular trope of white abolitionist writing.Footnote ²⁴² William E. Channing's Slavery addressed “the most common objection [against emancipation], that a mixture of the two races will be the result.” “Can this objection be urged in good faith? Can this mixture on go on faster or more criminally than at the present moment? Can the slaveholder use the word ‘Amalgamation’ without a blush?”Footnote ²⁴³ Garrison argued similarly. While “abolitionists do not desire to conceal” that the increased wealth and social standing of free persons of color would “probably lead to friendly and agreeable intercourse between them and the whites, and by consequence some intermarriages,” these would be less frequent than the rapes that occurred daily in the South: “so long as there is prejudice against intermarriages, that prejudice will protect itself…. And when prejudice grows weak and perishes, if it ever should do so, then where will be the evil?” He instead suggested that the real fear expressed in howls against “amalgamation” was that “of having a degraded caste removed from that perpetual subjection to the brutality of low and lascivious whites.”Footnote ²⁴⁴ Gerrit Smith conceded that equality would result in a “multiplication of instances of matrimonial union between the two races,” but stressed that this would be a “lawful and sinless union,” and besides, it would only be an offense to “our taste;—for we must bear in mind that, offensive as the intermixture of different races may be to us, the country or age, which practices it, has no sympathy whatever with our feeling on this point.”Footnote ²⁴⁵

By placing the emphasis on white prejudice, with intermarriages likely to occur only if such prejudices abated, these abolitionists left themselves open to the charge that even if they were not actively encouraging it they were certainly not opposed to it in principle. While Drayton was “unwilling to press [the] charge” that abolitionists favored “sexual amalgamation,” he claimed that their support for social equality and opposition to prejudice necessarily implied otherwise: “it is well known, that the social habits of many encourage the most intimate, equal, and familiar intercourse between the two colours of different sexes. It is well known, that matrimonial connexions of the unnatural character referred to, have not been discouraged; and that, though the abolitionists have been frequently and forcibly charged with the design of encouraging such connexions, their denials have been but late, faint, and partial. From all these facts it is difficult to escape the belief that the abolitionists, if not decidedly and actively favourable to amalgamation, are by no means opposed to it.”Footnote ²⁴⁶

Many white abolitionists took great pains to prove otherwise. William Jay claimed it was “one of the designs falsely imputed” to the movement, and “in vain have they again and again denied any such design.”Footnote ²⁴⁷ “In all my intercourse with my friends,” wrote one abolitionist to The Spy, “I have never heard, either in public or in private, one word expressed in favor of encouraging intermarriages between the white and colored races…. It is seldom introduced among us; and then only to complain of the injustice of attributing to us views, which we never held, but have always disavowed.”Footnote ²⁴⁸ After a riot in New York in 1834, the Anti-Slavery Society of New York felt compelled to issue a “Disclaimer” denying any intention to “promote or encourage intermarriages between white and colored persons.”Footnote ²⁴⁹ This disclaimer seems to have disgusted foreign observers such as Edward Abdy and Gustave de Beaumont, whose own contribution to the antislavery genre—a novel detailing a romance between a white man and a young girl of one-eighth African heritage, where the options of amalgamation, extermination, or expulsion were made manifest in the different fates of the book's characters—cut against American abolitionists’ tactical objectives and was largely ignored by them.Footnote ²⁵⁰ The riots led many white abolitionists to place even greater stress on their opposition to intermarriages or intimacy across the color line, an effort to recast the movement as sober and respectable by more directly accommodating the racism of white society and that was particularly pronounced among “the more conservative arm of the abolitionist movement, the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society.”Footnote ²⁵¹ “Their feelings and views, on this point, were originally expressed with more frankness,” noted Drayton. “But the indignation with which the plan was received by the public, has induced them to defer its public avowal and advocacy.”Footnote ²⁵²

In strenuously denying that they encouraged amalgamation, white abolitionists found themselves accused—often with good reason—of legitimizing prejudice. James Mitchell of the ACS, for example, highlighted William Jay's rejection of amalgamation and declared “here is the prejudice well stated and well defended by a champion of the abolition cause.”Footnote ²⁵³ In opposing amalgamation, wrote another colonizationist to the Virginia Legislature, abolitionists “plainly show that their sympathies are factitious and unnatural.”Footnote ²⁵⁴

But abolitionists also did not have a compelling response to the claim that racial diversity would result in the destruction of free government or in racial war. If “sexual amalgamation” was recognized by all thinking persons “as the only means of attaining complete social equality … the only means, under heaven, by which the races can be ‘mingled, like kindred drops, in one,’” and the “sole recourse, in case of emancipation, by which the colliding races can be harmonized, their prejudices removed, and the divided and conflicting population welded into one mass,” then it was also “the only plan by which the vagaries of the abolitionists can, by the most remote possibility, by realized.”Footnote ²⁵⁵ When James Birney denied that emancipation implied social equality or amalgamation—although leaving open the possibility that it would occur “in many generations to come”—he was immediately left to answer why the slaves would not “turn around and cut our throats.” His response was that slaveholders should have little to fear if they had treated the enslaved as well as they claimed.Footnote ²⁵⁶ This was hardly a compelling argument in a society where John Brown Russwurm could taunt slave owners with the question, “what mean those pistols under [your] pillow, and that loaded rifle over it?”Footnote ²⁵⁷

4.2. Divorcing Social and Political Equality

The problem abolitionists confronted was at once political and theoretical: So long as they could not convincingly deny that the tendency of equal rights would be amalgamation, they were exposed to the intense racism of white America. However, they could not convincingly deny amalgamation without affirming prejudice or renouncing social equality, which would leave them without an answer to the supposed problem of diversity.Footnote ²⁵⁸

The response of a growing number was to reconceptualize the meaning of social equality and its relation to democratic government. Intimations of this had long been evident. In a widely cited passage, William Jay had suggested that social equality, rather than being a prerequisite for the development of sympathy and for sustaining democratic institutions, was merely a matter of individual taste.

The scope of social equality, in this formulation, was restricted to the most intimate settings, where it could be refused at will without consequence for the political order. With the sphere of social equality restricted, the abolitionist mission of eradicating prejudice could in turn be confined to areas that more directly impinged on the livelihood of persons of color or their ability to engage in the limited form of political participation of expressing a preference at the polls. And in a rhetorical move that would be repeated for decades, Jay justified the exclusion from social intercourse by reference to inequalities among whites.

“How absurd is the distinction,” wrote John Carey in response, “between political equality and social equality, granting the one and withholding the other! What is the end of political power except to secure social advantages? The first use of political predominance, will it not be to establish predominance in every thing?” He carefully explained that the question of social equality would not be important if it excluded only a small number of persons; moreover, the problem had nothing to do with individual tastes, but with the lack of sympathy between broad social classes. If social inequality and intercourse were successfully denied, as he believed white Americans would insist upon, then the result would be to bring into the body politic a large and embittered class, “bound by no sympathy, but rather disposed … to look with hatred and jealousy upon those who had once held them in bondage.” Europe served as his example of what would follow: an impoverished class denied social equality bound together “by some sympathetic bond,” would be “inflamed with bitter animosity against [those] … whom they stigmatize as aristocrats, monopolists, the oppressive class…. Will these men, not admitted to social equality, but possessed of full political privileges, remain quiet and peaceable? Will they submit to that social superiority and rest contended with their political rights?”Footnote ²⁶⁰

But explicit denials of the relevance of social equality became increasingly common as the antislavery movement expanded. This diffusion across a widening set of antislavery writers and politicians can be read as a “critical ideational development,” a “politically orchestrated enduring shift in how policy issues are predominantly conceived that advantages one political coalition over another.”Footnote ²⁶¹ Cassius M. Clay declared that “he did not stand there to plead amalgamation, or for entire social equality.” While Garrison and Smith had followed black writers and orators in arguing that social equality should be extended but that amalgamation would only proceed, if at all, once prejudices had abated, Clay was arguing that social equality itself, reduced in scope, should not be extended. “Here was an important distinction which he begged his audience to note—that between equality of social condition and equality of political rights. Suppose he were to meet in the street a live Yankee, a sucker from Indiana, a corn-cracker from Kentucky, or even a poor miserable drunken vagabond. He might not prefer such men for associates, but … would he deprive them of all political rights?”Footnote ²⁶² “Marriage and social intercourse,” wrote Charles Olcott, “are not matters of natural right, but exist in contract and agreement merely…. In European societies it is as disgraceful for the higher ranks to associate openly and publicly with the lower, as it is in this country, for the white people to associate thus with negroes. The civil and religious equality of mankind, does not include their social equality.”Footnote ²⁶³ A Free-Soiler supportive of equal political rights insisted that he was opposed to social equality: “the assumption … that we must admit into the bosom of our families, and consent to unite with our children in the most sacred ties, all those to whom we extend the right of suffrage. I take this to be a great mistake.…[Are there] not many ignorant and vicious white men to whom he willingly extends the right of suffrage, that he would not receive as inmates of his family, and to whom he would not give his daughter in marriage? We all know, sir, that there are many, very many, of this class.”Footnote ²⁶⁴ A growing number of abolitionists and their political allies were insisting that social equality bore no relation to political or civil rights, often pointing to the growing inequalities among whites for evidence.Footnote ²⁶⁵

That there were “many, very many,” whites who should not be extended social equality was likewise an emerging theme in American discourse after the 1830s. As one writer complained, “the fellow who blacked your boots in the morning, or groomed your horse, or it may be served you at table, sets up to be your equal in the Drawing Room, or at the Theater, even when the odor of being fresh from the kitchen or stable is upon him, and perhaps he is inclined to fisticuff you into a recognition of his social equality. Sometimes the chap who drove your carriage a few years ago gets rich by a lucky speculation and then marries your daughter.”Footnote ²⁶⁶ Suggesting that abolitionists desired social equality with black Americans was the same as inferring that one was willing “that his daughter or sister shall marry an ignorant, illiterate fellow, or that he would invite to his parlor and table his hostler and boot-black.”Footnote ²⁶⁷ Horace Greeley insisted that “there is no such thing as ‘social equality’ on earth, and never can be while some are good, others bad; some intelligent, others ignorant; some coarse and repulsive, others refined and agreeable…. Social relations are entirely matters of choice.”Footnote ²⁶⁸ Some conservatives rejected even the possibility of social equality among whites, arguing that different abilities created distinct classes between which “there is no natural sympathy.”Footnote ²⁶⁹ The supposed inevitability of social inequalities could also be mobilized in support of abolition. As one southern supporter of limited emancipation argued, “though [African Americans’] political equality might be admitted, the prejudice of color would deny them social equality; [and] a class would arise not yet well established in our slave States, a class of free laborers exercising handicraft occupations, and willing to accept the position of hired servants.”Footnote ²⁷⁰ Increasing inequality among whites provided a rhetorical justification for preserving it between whites and blacks, while raising the prospect that black Americans could be safely retained post-abolition in the role of a subordinate but free working class.

This subtle separation of social and political equality preceded the Civil War, and indeed there had always been some writers who suggested that the two were not essentially linked. But as events during the war tended toward emancipation, the question of what would be the status of free persons of color gained a new urgency.Footnote ²⁷¹ As more Republicans began embracing civil and political rights for freedmen, the distinction against social equality became more pressing. Some—such as Robert Dale Owen, who had once supported colonization because he believed social equality was not going to be forthcoming—now maintained that equal intercourse could occur and sympathy develop without amalgamation, and argued that Republicans must encourage this through reorganized social and political institutions.Footnote ²⁷² A critical number, however, simply insisted that social equality was neither desirous nor necessary. C. C. Andrews argued that “as for social equality with the blacks, none but a simpleton would apprehend that giving them the suffrage will produce it. It is a matter which will regulate itself aside from political matters. Social affairs never have and probably never will be much affected or regulated by politics.”Footnote ²⁷³ Charles Sumner, defending a civil rights bill that would prohibit any state-established body from discriminating on the basis of race, insisted that “there is no question of society here. The Senator may choose his associates as he pleases. They may be white or black, or between the two. That is simply a social question, and nobody would interfere with it…. How often shall I say that this [bill] is no question of taste,—it is no question of society.” The bill, he said, only removed the odious distinctions that denied the possibility of such a society.Footnote ²⁷⁴ This would be too much for those of his colleagues who denounced the Civil Rights Act and were relieved when it was overturned by the Supreme Court.

These shifts had not gone unnoticed. Both before and after the war, white antislavery politicians and activists were being called to task by black abolitionists for betraying the fight against prejudice. When Sumner spoke out against the social elevation of persons of color, for example, Frederick Douglass wrote to correct him: “I may be a little sensitive on the subject of our social position. I think I am become more so of late, because I have detected, in some of my old comrades, something like a falling away from their first love, touching the recognition of the entire manhood and social equality of the colored people.”Footnote ²⁷⁵ Many black American writers had taken a tactical stance against the claim that ineradicable prejudices would perpetually maintain a separation of the races. As Alvin Tillery has extensively shown, before the war most African American newspaper writers had opposed the arguments of writers such as Tocqueville who insisted that social equality would be impossible.Footnote ²⁷⁶ The Colored American, for example, was adamant that “civil and political rights, equally distributed, brings men thus enjoying them, at least in the exercise of those rights, upon a social equality, together in social life. Thus bringing them into this social equality, tends to destroy caste, unite them together, and elevate them in all the other duties and relations in life.”Footnote ²⁷⁷ For these writers, social equality could not be neatly separated from civil or political rights, even if it did not on its own tend toward an immediate amalgamation.Footnote ²⁷⁸ “Vote for no man for civil office, who makes your complexion a bar to political, ecclesiastic or social equality,” Douglass urged the National Negro Convention. “Better die than insult yourself and insult our social equality.”Footnote ²⁷⁹

While insisting on social equality, and denying any interest in amalgamation, African American abolitionists could also adopt the framing of social equality as a matter for individual tastes limited to those of the same economic circumstances. Douglass emphasized that by social equality he did not mean “that every colored man, without regard to his character or attainments, shall be recognized as socially equal to white people who are in these respects superior to him.” William W. Brown concurred: “Every man must make equality for himself. No society, no government, can make this equality,” and abolitionists had “never demanded that you shall take the colored man, any more than that you shall take the uncultivated and uncouth white man, and place him in a certain position in society.”Footnote ²⁸⁰

A deliberate ambiguity was being introduced, or at least exploited, in the meaning of the term “social equality.” It was being confined to matters of individual choice in their associations, rather than the relations and rights of hospitality that members of broad social classes were entitled to and expected to accord to each other. W. E. B. Du Bois would remark on this ambiguity decades later, writing that the real meaning of “social equality” was “the right of a human being to accept companionship with his fellow on terms of equal and reciprocal courtesy…. It has not been denied by any civilized man since the French Revolution. It is the foundation of democracy.” But “another narrow, stilted and unreal meaning” had grown up in America, that social equality is the “right to demand private social companionship” with any particular person, up to and including marriage. When black Americans were asked, “Do you want Social Equality?,” they could emphatically say “no.” “But,” he continued, “when the Negro said No, he knew that he was not answering the question the white man intended to ask and the white man knew that the Negro knew this, and that he himself had purposely asked a question of double and irreconcilable meaning.” Acceptance of this ambiguity, in his account, had been a tactical decision, necessary given the force of white supremacy but one that allowed whites to pretend that some classes of black Americans might agree with the claim that no person of color “shall be permitted to associate with his fellow men on terms of equality.”Footnote ²⁸¹ As Du Bois would argue on that occasion, not insisting upon the foundational importance of “social equality” to democracy validated in practical political rhetoric the theoretical argument that it could be separated from civil and political equality.

As he intimated, the consequences of this conceptual separation would be important in shaping the terms by which the American state was reconstructed after the Civil War. Both the ACS as well as English abolitionists and ministries had organized their respective state-building projects around well-recognized solutions to the problem of diversity and representative government, supporting colonization, amalgamation, or the denial of representative assemblies. So long as social equality and sympathy had been seen as necessary for democracy, American abolitionists had been pressured to articulate an alternative state-building project, one that would remove illiberal distinctions and reorganize institutions to facilitate social intercourse on equal terms, not solely as an end in itself but as a means of fostering sympathy and securing the reality of freedom. Radicals such as Sumner and Thaddeus Stevens, even as they disclaimed social equality in public or privately urged Republicans not to press the matter, continued to support such a reconstruction. And as Pamela Brandwein has demonstrated, many Republicans who denounced social equality nonetheless also opposed the imposition of legal distinctions that would establish a “caste.”Footnote ²⁸² Even this conceptual differentiation, however, between the erection of a caste and the denial of social equality, rested on a firmer demarcation of civil and political life from society than had been evident in earlier antebellum discourse. Transatlantic discourse in the first half of the nineteenth century had treated social equality, the free recognition of a citizen as a social equal with the right to access all the benefits and privileges of “society,” as the very essence of equality and foundation of democracy; the concept was being increasingly relegated to a nonpolitical realm.

Faced with the constraint of white racism, Republican politicians and writers were redefining what democracy required for a social foundation, placing less emphasis on sympathy and social solidarity than on education and elite brokerage. “We think it quite possible,” wrote one, “for two races differing as widely as these races do to live peacefully and prosper under the same government.” Democracy itself was a novelty that once seemed “as wildly impossible as many now consider the peaceable existence of whites and blacks side by side under the same Government.” Amalgamation, they promised, would not happen; nor would social equality. Instead, the races would live alongside each other but separate, with “custom and prejudice” limiting their intercourse. “The general problem of democratic government,” they concluded, “depends for its solution on education, religion, and humanity,” that is, on the enlightenment of individuals rather than a sympathy that permeated an integrated and equal society.Footnote ²⁸³