Family Money Property, Race, and Literature in the Nineteenth Century [Paperback]

Family Moneyexplores the histories of formerly enslaved women who tried to claim inheritances left to them by deceased owners; the household traumas of mixed-race slaves; post-Emancipation calls for reparations; and the economic fallout from anti-miscegenation marriage laws. Authors ranging from Nathaniel Hawthorne, Frank Webb, and Harriet Beecher Stowe to Charles Chesnutt and Lydia Maria Child recognized that intimate interracial relationships took myriad forms, often simultaneously sexual, marital, coercive, familial, pleasurable, and painful. Their fiction confirms that the consequences of these relationships for nineteenth-century Americans meant thinking about more than the legal structure of racial identity. Who could count as family (and when); who could own property (and when); and how racial difference was imagined (and why) were emphatically bound together. Demonstrating that notions of race were entwined with economics well beyond the direct issue of slavery,Family Moneyreveals interracial sexuality to be a volatile mixture of emotion, economics, and law that had dramatic, long-term financial consequences.

Introduction
Family Money

Chapter 1

Chapter 2
Blood, Truth, and Consequences: Partus Sequitur Ventrem and the Problem of Legal Title

Chapter 3
Plantation Heiress Fiction, Slavery, and the Properties of White Marriage

Chapter 4
Reparations for Slavery and Lydia Maria Child's Reconstruction of the Family

Chapter 5
The Properties of Marriage in Chesnutt and Hopkins

Coda

Engaging and smartly conceived,Family Moneyshows the way interracial sex and intimacy has functioned as a volatile 'switching point' for distributions of wealth among black and white Americans. By examining legal cases, economic patterns, and racialized inheritance plots in fiction, Jeffory Clymer contends that the race concept itself is the product of an economic struggle. This innovative andls