The Color Factor: The Economics of African-American Well-Being in the Nineteenth-Century South by Howard Bodenhorn (review)

Historians have long wondered whether Americans of African descent who were considered to be of mixed race were better off than those classified as being black. In this brilliant, nuanced, and comprehensive book, economic historian Howard Bodenhorn shows conclusively that free mixed-race individuals ("mulattoes") in the late antebellum South were, indeed, more prosperous than black people. Examining a wide range of not only statistical data but also qualitative information, Bodenhorn clearly establishes that the nineteenth-century "one drop rule" was often broken at a time when slavery provided the chief racial dividing line.

Slaves of mixed race, Bodenhorn argues, were more likely to bring freedom suits because they were more likely to win them and because they were, on average, more skilled than darker slaves, so they had more to gain, economically, from freedom. In literature, the "tragic mulatta" was a recognized, racially intermediate figure. In what passed as "race science" in the nineteenth century, the brains of those of mixed black and white ancestry were said to be larger than those of darker persons.

Throughout, Bodenhorn takes an economic approach and rigorously examines data. Rather than accepting "postmodern" views of the casual sexual exploitation of slave women, for example, he emphasizes the costs to masters of alienating slave communities and the labor lost because of pregnancy and child rearing. Data on slave prices for mixed-race and black women and girls of different ages in New Orleans is consistent with his theorizing. If white men had been seeking light-skinned slaves for sexual purposes, then the ratio of prices of light-skinned to black women of ages fifteen to forty would have been higher than those of younger or older women. But in fact, the ratios were higher for women and girls outside the age range of likely sexual partners.

Slaves were more likely to run away if they had better chances of escaping and, because of skills such as literacy or the ability to fit into the largely light-skinned free black community, of remaining uncaught. Running away was chancy. Only about 1 percent of slaves did so each year in the late antebellum period, compared with 1 to 2 percent who achieved manumission, often by buying their freedom or being bought by relatives. Applying modern theory on marriage markets, Bodenhorn shows that light-skinned men and women, as theory predicts, were extremely likely to pair off with others of similar skin tone.

Light-skinned free people were also strongly differentiated from their darker brothers in the antebellum South. In a striking finding, Bodenhorn demonstrates that in ten southern cities in 1860, the gap in occupational status between black and mixed-race men was comparable to that between all African American men and all white men, or between native-born white people and white immigrants. Mixed-race men in agriculture were more likely than black men to own their own farms and less likely to be farm laborers. In cities, mixed-race men were more likely to own real estate, and such property was of higher value than that owned by black men. Mixed-race literacy and school enrollment rates exceeded those of the black community. Extremely detailed data from county clerks in Virginia and Maryland reveals that people of mixed race were significantly taller than black individuals, and economists and physiologists have long recognized that height is a good proxy for net nutrition.

This important book deepens and complicates the history of race relations and should remind historians of how useful the application of social scientific methods to historical issues can be.