Illicit Love: Interracial Sex and Marriage in the United States and Australia
616
Illicit Love: Interracial Sex and Marriage in the United States and Australia
616eBook
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Overview
Illicit Love is a history of love, sex, and marriage between Indigenous peoples and settler citizens at the heart of two settler colonial nations, the United States and Australia. Award-winning historian Ann McGrath illuminates interracial relationships from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century through stories of romance, courtship, and marriage between Indigenous peoples and colonizers in times of nation formation.
The romantic relationships of well-known and ordinary interracial couples provide the backdrop against which McGrath discloses the “marital middle ground” that emerged as a primary threat to European colonial and racial supremacy in the Atlantic and Pacific Worlds from the Age of Revolution to the Progressive Era. These relationships include the controversial courtship between white, Connecticut-born Harriett Gold and southern Cherokee Elias Boudinot; the Australian missionary Ernest Gribble and his efforts to socially segregate the settler and aboriginal population, only to be overcome by his romantic impulses for an aboriginal woman, Jeannie; the irony of Cherokee leader John Ross’s marriage to a white woman, Mary Brian Stapler, despite his opposition to interracial marriages in the Cherokee Nation; and the efforts among ordinary people in the imperial borderlands of both the United States and Australia to circumvent laws barring interracial love, sex, and marriage.
Illicit Love reveals how marriage itself was used by disparate parties for both empowerment and disempowerment and came to embody the contradictions of imperialism. A tour de force of settler colonial history, McGrath’s study demonstrates vividly how interracial relationships between Indigenous and colonizing peoples were more frequent and threatening to nation-states in the Atlantic and Pacific worlds than historians have previously acknowledged.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780803285415 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Nebraska |
| Publication date: | 12/01/2015 |
| Series: | Borderlands and Transcultural Studies |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 616 |
| File size: | 16 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
Ann McGrath is a professor of history and the director of the Australian Centre for Indigenous History at Australian National University. She is the author and editor of numerous books, including How to Write History That People Want to Read; Writing Histories: Imagination and Narration; and Contested Ground: A History of Australian Aborigines under the British Crown. McGrath won the 2016 John Douglas Kerr Medal of Distinction from the Royal Historical Society of Queensland for research and writing Australian history.
Read an Excerpt
Illicit Love
Interracial Sex and Marriage in the United States and Australia
By Ann McGrath
UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS
Copyright © 2015 Board of Regents of the University of NebraskaAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8032-8541-5
CHAPTER 1
Harriett Gold and Elias Boudinot
Against History?
The Marital Frontier
Burnings Enough
It is June 1825 and we are in Cornwall, Connecticut. Led by her older brother Stephen, Harriett Gold's childhood friends are stacking wood to make a funeral pyre. Harriett and Stephen had been close. They had enjoyed singing, walking, and riding together. After Harriett disclosed her romantic interest in Elias Boudinot, a young Cherokee man who had studied in their village, Stephen turned on her. The proposed marriage tipped the whole orderly town upside down. Testing the boundaries of frontier, of social inclusion, and of colonizer virtue, the prospect of this marriage fractured this not-so-new New England.
Generations of white New Englanders had enjoyed a relative sense of settled security, bearing babies who would create ongoing dynasties. A nativist sense of belonging was starting to displace any thoughts of the prior residency of the Indigenous peoples. Occupying a new nation demanded fresh visions of the past. In the early republic, these events suggest how far New Englanders would go to draw lines between the Indigenous past and their imagined national futures.
The main protagonist in this story is the nineteen-year-old Harriett, who usually lived in the Gold family home. She is hiding in the house of a family friend. Looking out the window toward Cornwall's attractive village green, she writes that she witnessed a "full prospect of the solemn transactions in our valley." Although Elias's letters are not reaching her, she finds out from someone else that he is seriously ill. He is back home in New Echota, capital of the Cherokee Nation, near Calhoun, Georgia. Recently, Elias had received a letter containing an ink drawing of a gallows. He was warned off ever returning to New England, let alone to Cornwall. Although he had lived there for four years, his old friends are now preparing to burn an image of Elias too.
The house in which Harriett is writing overlooks the village green, but she is too frightened to go out. In a letter tempered with deep emotion, she speaks of herself in the third person. She had lived in Cornwall all her life. Music and voice meant a lot to her. Harriett loved singing; she enjoyed the harmonies of the church choir. Sunday hymns gave her an exhilarating communion with her peers and a way of communicating with God. However, Harriett was no longer permitted to join her choir group. Indeed, the last time she attended, the choirgirls had worn black crepe around their arms — bands normally used to mourn the dead. In Harriett's words, "the publick," "good people and bad" are against her. Not all, she reassures herself — although her few allies are afraid to offer open support. As she writes this letter, she musters a sense of moral rectitude, stating that she can hardly describe "the scenes we have witnessed the week past. Yes, in this Christian land. The members of the Mission School many of them said it was more than they ever knew among the heathen."
Harriett smells the fresh smoke. She looks down on her fine writing paper and breathes in the aroma of the moist black ink. She hears a chorus of youthful squeals, jeering, and rude shouting. As she writes, the metallic vibrations of the church bell fill the town, continuing to toll and echo.
Accused of "wrecking God's work," Harriett stands strong: "I have seen the time when I could close my eyes upon every earthly object and look up to God as my only supporter, my only hope — when I could say with emotion I never felt before, to my heavenly Father, 'other refuge have I none, so I helpless hang on thee.'" Perhaps she quietly sings the words, for they came from a hymn.
Resonating through the fields and sky, the tolling of the town bell, she explains is "speaking the departure of a soul." This sound marked Christian time, day after day. Recently, it rang for her older sister. Disease had struck Cornwall badly that past year, killing children and young women.
Cornwall's Cherokee and Mohegan residents had different signals to denote death, such as the appearance of a particular bird or animal acting in an unusual way. As she thought deeply about matters of the spirit, Harriett, too, may have wondered about signs. Was the bell's voice to counter the pure silence of the departing one? Or had this ritual peal become the sound of a departing Cornwall soul? It was her death they were marking.
Now, in burning Harriett's effigy, the Cornwall residents were providing a preview of hell. The bonfire on the town common had been prepared alongside the mission schoolhouse — the same building that Harriett, as a young child, had witnessed being officially opened. Now, around it, she reported, her old school friends danced "wildly," angrily, riotously.
Church missionary agents had assessed the local youth as "sober and promising" and well educated, for their family libraries bulged with religious tracts. Harriett recognized the wild dancers as "our respectable young people, Ladies and Gentlemen." Harriett's writings echo her detachment from their revelry, which lasted from early evening until after 10:00 p.m. "The flames were huge" and the smoke ascended to the heavens — so she told her sister Flora and brother-in-law Hermann. Harriett's older brother Stephen brought and lit a barrel of tar.
Harriett knew the exact reasons behind the spectacle. She provides details from firsthand observations. Specially constructed and carefully painted "corpses," as she put it, were to be ritually burned. One, she penned, was "a woman, an instigator of Indian marriages," and the other "an Indian"; the third was "a beautiful young woman." "Woman" applied to an Anglo-American female, and she knew the most beautiful painted effigy was meant to be herself. Her beloved fiancé, Elias, was rendered as a comical antique, the generic "Indian."
This public rite resembled the peasant Carnival of the Old World and perhaps recalled the Salem witch trials and New England's earlier practices of lynching unruly women. Meant to punish, to ostracize, to symbolize and threaten violence, it was shocking to see Cornwall's usually temperate males going into a frenzy. Harriett wrote, "My heart truly sung [sic] with anguish at the dreadful scene." She knew it was too dangerous to step outdoors.
Earlier that month, in June 1825, leading Congregational Church elders had posted the marriage banns — notices of the intent of Harriett Gold and Elias Boudinot to marry — on the church door. The banns were accompanied by a proclamation condemning the secret engagement. This was signed by the agents of the board of the Foreign Mission School — highly influential church men who were close friends of Harriett's parents. This sheet of paper incited the local community into uproar.
From 1817, the Cornwall congregation had accepted the unusual evangelical mission of educating Indigenous people from other countries in their own town. The Foreign Mission School was designed to redeem "heathens" from the "darkness and corruptions and miseries of paganism to be sent back to their respective nations with the blessings of civilized and christianized society." Perhaps the mission's success might justify colonization and dispossession as part of God's plan. Opukaha'ia, or Oobookiah as it was spelled by the missionaries, was a stranded Sandwich Islander or Hawaiian who shared with divinity scholar Timothy Dwight his desire to gain an education like the young white men at Yale. Opukaha'ia inspired Dwight to action, and he became the first Cornwall student, with other displaced Pacific Islanders soon joining him.
Cornwall's Foreign Mission School was one of the earliest local ventures of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, an interdenominational organization established by Congregationalist clergy and laymen in 1810. Notable names associated with its establishment included Reverends Samuel Worcester and Timothy Dwight, a Federalist who promoted the new historical narrative of Plymouth and the Old Colony as "the cradle of New England." Their missions carved the globe into historical timelines: peoples of "ancient civilizations" and "Islamic faith"; Native Americans came under the mantle of "peoples of primitive cultures."
Another founding figure was the Calvinist preacher Lyman Beecher, a modernizer who played a key role in adapting the Congregational Church to fit republican ideals. Beecher hoped to extend both the church's and the republic's ambit beyond the nation. The Congregational Church's effort to spread American religion and culture to "dark" lands hinged upon assumptions about race and gender in which true "womanhood" was conceived of as white. Although Beecher advocated women's rights, he believed that a missionary woman should serve only while under the authority of a white husband.
Calvinists like Beecher believed that God was sovereign and that humanity's natural inclinations were essentially depraved. Despite their understanding that a person's future was predestined, they sought direct guidance from God about correct choices. The recent flowerings of nativist Euro-American evangelicalisms merged with narratives of their ancestral Puritan past, especially with earlier revivalist traditions of the Connecticut Valley.
Cornwall's Foreign Mission School delivered an exotic immigration directly into the Congregationalist heartland. Without entering the privations and dangers of foreign travel, the small Cornwall community could reach out to distant strangers from beyond its boundaries. In an approved context, Harriett and other Cornwall youth could share their educational and advancement opportunities with people from a wider world.
The Anglo-American citizens of Cornwall seemed happy to be educators of "primitive" peoples from the Pacific. For they were confident regarding their moral and cultural superiority — in social progress, religion, and the written arts. Although the instigators did not have American "heathens" in mind, when Cherokee and Choctaw converts sought higher education, it was difficult to refuse. Besides, they were, in another sense, foreign nationals.
Seeking the skills and social empowerment to fight the battles ahead, the agendas of the all-male students diverged from those of their teachers. One Cherokee student, John Ridge, had already courted and married the young Sarah Northrup in 1824. The community uproar spread to Hartford and the influential newspapers. Boudinot's wealthy cousin John was the son of the Cherokee planter and slaveholder known as The Ridge — from the Blue Ridge Mountains. John and Elias were fellow scholars and friends. When Sarah Northrup first announced her intention to marry an Indian, churchgoers threatened to lynch her fiancé. Vitriolic newspaper editors ridiculed the backers of the Foreign Mission School. In January 1824 Isaiah Bunce, the editor of the popular Litchfield-based American Eagle, declared that intermarriage was "a new kind of missionary machinery" (emphasis in original). This marriage story was well covered in other papers too, including the Niles Weekly Register and the Eastern Argus. Bunce felt vindicated, for from the outset, he had opposed the establishment of the Foreign Mission School, predicting that bringing "barbarians" onto "their doorsteps" would be detrimental to "civilization." Senior church figures were mortified by the marriage, which seemed contrary to fundamental assumptions about New World progress. They declared it would never happen again.
The aftershocks of Sarah and John's engagement curbed open friendships or exchanges between the students and the town's young women. Any hints of friendships between town and "foreign" youth were viewed suspiciously. However, there was no curfew, and the pupils at the Foreign Mission School were still invited to visit the houses of Cornwall residents. Elias had enjoyed invitations and meals at the Gold family home.
Courageously, Harriett had decided to write a letter to her brother Stephen declaring the news of her impending marriage. We have access to many of Harriett's letters, but not this one. After he read it, Stephen bellowed, "Harriett! Harriett! Harriett!" and would not stop. Gold relatives locked him inside their house. A few days later, we witness him whipping up wildfire among Cornwall's youth.
Family Drama
When Harriett told her parents that Boudinot had asked for her hand in marriage, they were extremely upset. Her mother, Eleanor Gold, was highly respected. Her father, Col. Benjamin Gold, was a decorated military man and a church deacon. He owned farmland in Cornwall. He was one of several church leaders to assure the public that another wedding like that of John Ridge and Sarah Northrup would never take place in their town. Her parents refused permission for Harriett to marry and wrote to Boudinot expressing their opposition.
A few weeks afterward, in the cold of winter, Harriett fell mortally ill. Benjamin Gold's views changed. He decided that church and community opposition to his daughter's marriage was "pride and prejudice" and was "against Indians": "the least that can be said and done against Christian connections of any colour I believe to be best." The parents did not believe that marriages between Indian men and white women were "sinful," but at the same time, they explained that they did not wish to part with their "beloved daughter." This greater distance would be "like breaking their heartstrings — and they brought up every argument ... to dissuade her and prevent the connection."
Although Benjamin and Eleanor Gold had firmly opposed the marriage, their view changed. Believing in omens, they saw their daughter's illness as a sign that they were standing in God's way. They feared they would "be found fighting against God." Still grieving over the death of their nineteen-year-old daughter, Benjamin and Eleanor could not bear the thought of losing another daughter, their youngest. So they wrote a second letter, informing Boudinot of their consent — or at least that Harriett was "free to do as she pleased." Harriett recovered. Boudinot received the second letter first.
Meanwhile, one of the church leaders lobbied Harriett's brother-in-law, Reverend Hermann Vaill of East Haddam, to intercede. A former assistant teacher at the school, Hermann was in a position to influence her. And, as good clerical postings were competitive, he was eager to ingratiate himself. The Foreign Mission School and its board were desperate to maintain public credibility.
Beginning a tirade of emotional blackmail, Hermann Vaill wrote to Harriett. Boudinot, he explained, had been taught the wrong lessons at the Foreign Mission School: "To prove himself thus grateful to his friends and faithful to Christ, it is not necessary that he should marry a white woman." He warned Boudinot against being "one of those who return to their former sins" instead urging him to become one "useful to his Nation" and "grateful" to "christian benefactors."
He blamed Harriett for bringing "dishonour" on the Savior, describing her as "the one female enemy who shall quench the Light which the Mission School may yet shed upon the heathen world." He asked her to look back and remember when, as a young girl, she witnessed the school's opening day and heard the poignant redemption narrative of Opukaha'ia, since deceased. Labeling Harriett's actions as religious arson, he warned that the flames will spread: "thou and thy father's house shall be destroyed" (emphasis in original). Must Harriett "put forth your hand and pluck [Christ's] Banners down"? He even called her Judas and suggested hellfire. Nothing was off limits; he accused her of causing Christ to shed tears of blood.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Illicit Love by Ann McGrath. Copyright © 2015 Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Contents
List of Illustrations,Preface: Flowers for the Bride,
Acknowledgments,
Introduction: A Perfect Marriage?,
Part 1. Secrets of New Nations,
1. Harriett Gold and Elias Boudinot: Against History?,
2. Ernest Gribble and Jeannie,
Part 2. Marriage and Modernity among the Cherokees,
3. Socrates, Cherokee Sovereignty, and the Regulation of White Men,
4. John Ross and Mary Bryan Stapler,
Part 3. Queensland's Marital Middle Ground,
5. Husbands under Surveillance,
6. Consent and Aboriginal Wives,
Part 4. Embodying New Worlds,
7. Polygamy's New Worlds,
8. Entwined Sovereignties and the Great Unwedding,
Epilogue: Transnational Families,
Notes,
Bibliography,
Index,