The popular

Abstract

In New York City in 1839, refi ned, alabaster women glided across crowded dance fl oors in the arms of apelike, jet-black men. Or soon would, according to artist Edward W. Clay ’s alarmist predictions about the end results of the growing abolitionist movement. Dancing was not the worst that Clay envisioned in the series of prints he entitled Practical Amalgamation ( Figure I.1 ). In the new society brought on by abolitionism, Clay warned, white women and black men would openly court, marry, and produce interracial children. The mixing of the races that resulted would inevitably lead to the end of white female purity and white male supremacy in the United States. Such was the future that Clay and others portended as they sought to discredit abolitionists, whose calls for immediate emancipation and racial equality were growing louder and more insistent by the late 1830s. In visual and written texts, antebellum artists and authors on all sides of the slavery issue, from abolitionists to proslavery advocates, regularly placed white women alongside enslaved men, occupying the same physical space. Yet unlike Clay’s prints, which unambiguously represented this proximity as romantic intimacy, most antebellum texts eschewed any overtly sexual element when they portrayed white girls and women in the company of African American men. The creators of these texts also eliminated the negative connotations that Clay had invoked in his engravings. Rather than depicting associations between black men and white women as taboo and scandalous, most antebellum authors portrayed them as nonthreatening, or even desirable. The frequency with which antebellum authors and artists juxtaposed dark-skinned males with lightskinned females, and the positive tone of these scenes, indicate a popular