I was reading about Sally Hemings, Thomas Jefferson’s slave, mistress, and mother to his children (strong DNA evidence). However, I suprised about a few things. First was that she was Thomas Jefferson’s sister-lin-law. The second was that she was only 1/4 black. I had always heard of the “one drop rule” but never really thought it through. Sally and Thomas Jefferson’s children would therefore be only 1/8 black and still in slavery. Slavery is equally terrible no matter the race of the slaves but I found this really suprising.
Were there many completely “white looking” slaves around? Were there slaves with blonde hair and blue eyes? Did the one-drop rule really carry down into infinity or was there a limit?
I do recall hearing or reading somewhere that indentured servants–Europeans who sold themselves into a term of servitude to pay for their passage to America–somehow became commingled with the population of African slaves. Not so much by virtue of interbreeding, though that undoubtedly happened sometimes, but more in the sense of their different social and legal statuses merging into that of later antebellum slaves.
It was carried pretty far. Slavery law is not something that I’ve ever studied (it tends not to come up much these days for obvious reasons), but my understanding is that at least some slave states followed the one-drop rule.
Point of clarification: You do realize that free blacks existed in the South, right? You could be considered black, whether under the one-drop rule or otherwise, and not necessarily be a slave. But you and your descendants would remain slaves until and unless you were freed by the slaveowner. There wasn’t a percentage-white-ancestry cutoff that made a baby born to a slave mother free under any law I’ve ever read about. Even if you were freed, though, you’d still be under certain legal disbilities in most Southern states. In New Orleans, there were a whole set of classifications (socially if not legally) between people who were considered mulattoes, quadroons, octaroons, etc.
Oh, it carried down REAL far - 1/2 black=mulatto; 1/4 black=quadroon; 1/8 black=octoroon; 1/16 black=quintroon (or mustee) - I think at 1/32 black or 1/64 black, you could have yourself declared white. These designations were common in french and spanish held territories - in Louisiana especially and maybe Florida. “Mustees” were most definitely “white” slaves. sitemap for merrycoz.org is an interesting article and so is http://multiracial.com/content/view/460/27/
Just search “white slaves” and you should find a host of articles about it.
Mark Twain wrote a story “Puddenhead Wilson” about a 'mulatto" slave woman who was indistinguishable by appearence from whites. When she and her master’s wife had babies at about the same time, she switched them so that her son could grow up “white” while the true heir was raised as a slave. Fiction, but although Twain was no doubt making up an extreme case, it had to have been conceivable.
Oh yes, I know. I am from Louisiana where those things were perhaps the most complex of all like you say. There were plenty of free men of color in New Orleans and some were wealthy and slaveowners themselves. It is kind of easy to slip into the white/free black/slave mindest. I think it is interesting to explore the oddities of the situation because it sheds some light on the beliefs during a time that we won’t be able to fully comprehend.
The “one-drop rule” was used to determine color, not status as a slave. The law of slavery was generally that if you were born to a slave mother, you were a slave. You could of course be 100% African and still be free. The one-drop rule came into play more often after emancipation, when Jim Crow laws specified how “black” and “white” had to do various things–ride the bus, go to school, and so forth. In general, if you had any African blood at all, and the locals knew about it, you were considered “black”.
But even during slavery free blacks had nowhere near the rights of whites. And it should be noted that not all slaveowners were white either. Usually it was a free black who owned a relative, but couldn’t afford to pay the emacipation fees. But there were a handful of black plantation owners who cared more about more about profit than racial solidarity. Also Plessy (of Plessy vs Ferguson) was 1/8 black. He looked white. He was planted in a Whites’ Only car and the conductor was tipped off in advance. None of the other passengers suspected he was “black”.
There certainly were white indentured servants: link, link etc.
My understanding is that most came from Britain, Ireland and (at least in the case of Pennsylvania) what’s now Germany.
Interesting to note that although the contract (assuming non-convict) was 4-7 years, there was no guarantee that in the harsh conditions the servant would live that long and see freedom.
This legality is discussed in Tim Tyson’s book Blood Done Sign My Name. Unlike in Europe, in the Americas free vs. slave status was determined by the status of the mother. In Europe, it was by the status of the father. This meant that slave owners could have children by their female slaves and increase their assets by creating additional slaves. The concept of black men sleeping with white women was a threat to the structure of society, because it would result in mixed-race people who were legally free. Tyson’s opinion is that this is the origin of the rhetoric about the purity of white Southern womanhood as an excuse for racism.
I have a book I often read excerpts from to my students, Eyewitness to History. It has around a hundred or so first person accounts of historical events. One of them is told by a Quaker in the 1830s who goes to an estate sale only to find that the dead man’s slaves are being auctioned off. One of them was a boy who appeared, for all intents and purposes, to be white - pale skin, blue eyes, straight brown hair. The crowd jeered the boy, saying things like “a white nigger’s even more trouble than a black one.”
So yes, those we would consider white were often slaves.
After Reconstruction, of course, racial prejudice and segregation, especially in the South, increased to far worse levels than before the war. Very few people today appear white but identify as African American. Is this because those people generally married darker skinned African Americans, or did significant numbers manage to “pass” as white, which would mean a sizable number of self-identified whites having some AA ancestry. This situation is not at all unknown, but is there any information on how common it is? Or are there plenty of white appearing African Americans, but because of cultural conditioning, I don’t notice them, mentally lumping them with others as either “black” or “white” and therefore seeing them as that. (I’m pretty sure the last is not the case, but I’m well aware of how pernicious the “seeing what you expect” phenomenon is and that I am not immune.)
I’d imagine that they’d move to a place where no one knew. I have a young relative that’s been dealing with children at his school calling him a nigger. He’s very fair skinned with straight reddish blond hair and blue eyes. He lives in a small town though, so everyone knows the truth about his race. If he moves away when he grows up, he can get by with letting people assume he is what he appears to be.
