Marriage Extraordinary: Interracial Marriage and the Politics of Family in Antebellum Massachusetts

"Marriage Extraordinary" examines the history of interracial marriage and family formation in Massachusetts prior to 1843, when the state legislature repealed a law that had deemed such marriages illegal. Working with a wide array of archival sources, I bring to light interracial families long lost to history and reveal how activists united an unlikely cohort of African American men and women, abolitionists, moral reformers, and a tripartisan group of lawmakers to legalize interracial marriage.;The dissertation contributes to existing scholarship on interracial marriage and "miscegenation law" by Martha Hodes, Peggy Pascoe, and others, providing case studies of interracial families to show how they suffered under, challenged, and subverted the marriage ban. It places the battle over interracial marriage squarely in the history of African American grassroots political struggles, illustrating how African Americans and their allies navigated the treacherous terrain of sexual politics to make interracial marriage rights one of the first equal rights battles in the state since emancipation. It weaves work on abolition, moral reform, and antebellum women's reform mobilization by Mary P. Ryan, Steven Mintz and many others with fresh analysis that reveals how thousands of middle class women and men merged anti-slavery, moral reform, and anti-southern ideologies to repeal the marriage ban. While acknowledging the victory activists achieved when the state legalized interracial marriage, I track discourses surrounding interracialism through the Civil War and argue that the compromises and conditions necessary to make "practical amalgamation" politically palatable ultimately muted its effectiveness as a precedent for later equal rights struggles. Finally, I use the micro-history of the movement to legalize interracial marriage in Massachusetts to reveal the component elements of a phenomenon and ideology I term "advancing interracialism," which gave miscegenation its political power from the antebellum era well into the middle of the twentieth century.