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Freedom and Ballgowns: Elizabeth Keckley and The Work of Domesticity
- Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory
- University of Arizona
- Volume 57, Number 4, Winter 2001
- pp. 45-87
- 10.1353/arq.2001.0011
- Article
- Additional Information
KATHERINE ADAMS Freedom and Ballgowns: Elizabeth Keckley and The Work of Domesticity We were shown through the damp cold rooms into the drawing room. The nation's drawing room—where the mobocracy assemble by the light of beautiful chandeliers and circulating amidst rich furniture—great men and accomplished women fancy they live in a country of equality as well as liberty. Quety: do they ever feel their inequality more than on such occasions? Catharine Maria Sedgwick, describing a visit to the White House In march of 1866, President Andrew Johnson found occasion to remind Congress that both law and propriety stood against the intermarriage of blacks with whites. Drawing upon the late New York supreme court judge, James Kent, whose essays on constitutional law had become a ptimer in conservative legal thought, Johnson explained Kent says, speaking of the blacks, that "mafriages between them and the whites are forbidden in some of the States where slavery does not exist, and they ate prohibited in all the slave holding States; and when not absolutely contrary to law, they ate tevolting, and regarded as an offence against public decorum ." (CRV 75)' If the words were not Johnson's, the sentiments were, and had frequently been voiced before.2 In this instance, however, theit context was somewhat obscure. The speech concerned Johnson's veto of the Civil Rights bill, a piece of legislation engineered by the Radical Arizona Quarterly Volume 57, Number 4, Winter 2001 Copyright © 2001 by Arizona Board of Regents issN 0004- 16 10 46Katherine Adams Republicans to extend and protect the rights of newly emancipated blacks. Demonstrating his entrenched racism towatd blacks and conciliatory approach to Southetn states, the veto matked a turning point in the President's battles with Congress ovet the design of Reconstruction . Most specifically, it constituted a direct intervention into contempotary debates over how to define and distribute the condition of democtatic freedom in the postbellum era. Since emancipation, the Radical Republicans had argued that freedom had no meaning for anyone ifnot shared equally by all. As one Republican journalist put it, the failure to legislate equal civil rights would not only subvert the aim of emancipation, but tender "all the principles of democracy and freedom upon which our creed of Republicanism rests . . . false" (qtd. in Cox 48). The President, meanwhile, opposed any such move towatd racial equality. A fotmer slave-owner who believed blacks an inferior race, Johnson asked, "can it reasonably be supposed that they possess the requisite qualifications to entitle them to all the privileges and immunities of citizens of the United States?" (75). In vetoing this bill, he aimed specifically to ptevent the convergence of black and white freedoms and to formalize the differences between them.' What, however, might that aim have to do with racial intermarriage —an issue not mentioned in the Civil Rights bill? The answer concerns changes in racialist discourse that occutred as white supremacy accommodated itself to the new social, political, legal and economic contexts of Reconstruction. Racial mixing was a persisting theme and personal obsession with Johnson, but it was not his alone. Nor was he first to deploy it within an attempt to mediate access to political freedom . The term "miscegenation," coined just four years before Johnson's speech, had already gained currency in segregationist vocabularies. It had proved convenient for invoking not only the imagined integrity of racial identity and difference but also, crucially, the sanctified image of white domesticity. Johnson acknowledges that interracial marriage lies somewhat outside of his present concerns, but explains that he raises it as an instance of the State policy as to discrimination, and to inquire whether, if Congress can abrogate all State laws of discrimination between the two races in the matter of real estate, of suits, and of contracts genetally, Congress may not also te- Freedom and Ballgowns47 peal the State laws as to the conttact of marriage between the two races? Hitherto every subject embraced in the enumeration of rights contained in this bill has been considered as exclusively belonging to the States. They are matters which in each State concern the domestic condition of its people, varying in each according to its own peculiat circumstances and...