I’ve been revising an article this week, and I needed to revisit an old and familiar source: James Thome and Horace Kimball, Emancipation in the West Indies (1838). The text praised the favorable results of emancipation in Antigua, Barbados, and Jamaica, critiqued the apprenticeship system and gradual emancipation, and it became a popular resource for abolitionists making the case for immediate emancipation in the United States.
I was interested to see how Thome (the primary author – Kimball died not long after the two returned to the United States) wrote about “amalgamation” and interracial marriage amid West Indian emancipation since this was a touchy subject even among the most radical white abolitionists. I did a keyword search on Google Books’ version of the text to see where “amalgamation” appeared, and among the few pages were several from the index.
I found that the book’s index had an entry for “Amalgamation,” as well as:
Promiscuous seating in church, 21 (See “Amalgamation” etc.)
Intermixture, 76, 79, 287 (See “Amalgamation.”)
The pages corresponding to the index entry for “Amalgamation” turned out to be passages related to interracial social scenes, not interracial marriage. Thome and Kimball described how white families sat next to colored and black families in church; as well as recounting how they had dined alongside white, black, and colored ministers and their wives. While the book does contain discussions of “licentiousness” during slavery (see p. 98-101 for example), the index entry for “Amalgamation” did not point to these pages.
This struck me as quite interesting — and it suggests the usefulness of looking at an index for insight into ideas about categories and language. In what I think might be a useful research move, it also led me to question how abolitionists used the term “amalgamation” in their own writings.
Before this, my sense had been that the term “amalgamation” was almost always used by the opponents of abolitionism. (For examples, see the American Antiquarian Society‘s online exhibit of the “Practical Amalgamation” series). Opponents of emancipation could take advantage of the slippery meaning of the word — it could refer to benign social mixing, a mixed labor force that threatened white workingmen’s jobs and social status, or the more illicit subjects of sex and interracial marriage.
Abolitionists – like James Thome and his editor, Theodore Weld – rarely used this term to describe themselves or their plans for emancipation in the United States – or so I had thought. In thinking about what I’ve read, it seems that abolitionists in the 1830s almost only referred to “amalgamation” when they were discrediting accusations that they were “amalgamationists.” Instead, they would point to licentious white southern slaveholders as the real culprits of “amalgamation.”
So why did Thome and Weld include “Amalgamation” in their index? Were they trying, in some small way, to reclaim the word and to distinguish it from its sexual connotations? It looks like they might have been trying to do just that, and if I hadn’t looked at the index, I would have missed this point. They didn’t use the word very much in the text of the book, but the pages in the index under “Amalgamation” included descriptions of families clearly distinguished by their race (negro/colored/white) who were not intermarrying but worshipping together in church, dining together in “civilized” dining rooms, and discussing the issues of the day together in middle-class parlors.
