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Quadroon

In an American historical context, quadroon is a term used to describe a person of one-quarter African descent. In most instances, quadroons had one black grandparent and three white grandparents. Quadroon is a cognate of the Spanish term cuarterón, with which it shares a meaning. Similarly, individuals with one black great-grandparent and seven white great-grandparents were known as octoroons, as octo is a Latin-based prefix indicating eight.

Quadroons in American History

Because of policies based on hypodescent, whereby children born of mixed unions are assigned to the subordinate ethnic group, quadroons and mulattoes of African American and European lineage were considered to be black. As such, in antebellum America, quadroons were subject to existing slave laws. Even for those without African ancestry who were labeled as quadroons or mulattoes (including those of Native American and Caucasian descent), the categorization meant that they could be sold into slavery legally in the United States. Similarly, Jim Crow laws regulated the rights of quadroons, along with black Americans.

During slavery and well into the 20th century, many quadroons and mulattoes enjoyed privileges that most African Americans did not, especially those who were closer in phenotype to white Americans. Some inherited property from their white parents, and a very small number owned enslaved people themselves. As such, some with lighter complexions and phenotypes atypical of most individuals of African descent posed as white, Native American, Arab, or Asian to avoid the discrimination African Americans faced. In addition, the phenomenon of racial passing, which occurs when a person of one ethnic background presents himself or herself as a member of a different ethnic group, may have been commonplace among multiethnic Americans in the 18th, 19th, and early 20th centuries.

In the 1910s, 1920s, and 1930s, several southern states, including Virginia, Texas, Arkansas, Tennessee, Oklahoma, and Georgia, codified laws that defined Americans with any African ancestry, irrespective of the percentage, as black. Other states, including North Dakota, Utah, Florida, Missouri, Nebraska, and Maryland, established the threshold for identification as African Americans as one black great-great-grandparent or one great-great-great-grandparent.

Quadroons in Literature

The social tribulations faced by mixed-race people—especially when they resulted in racial passing—were a common trope in 19th- and early 20th-century American literature. In particular, in abolitionist literature beginning in the 1840s, quadroons, along with mulattoes, were used to evoke sympathy from white audiences for the plight of black Americans. These stories featured characters who looked like the white readers but suffered as African Americans did. Furthermore, this genre often featured a biracial heroine who was light-complexioned enough to pass for white, and she struggled because she was unable to find full acceptance from either black or white communities. Once her true ethnic background was made public, she lost her comfortable station in society and was reduced to bankruptcy, sexual victimization, slavery, and/or death.

These plays and novels were aimed at white women readers; their intention was to warn audiences of the dangers of racism by way of identification with a character who shared their social class and appearance. Quadroon characters, many of whom are ill-fated, are depicted in the following works: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's poem “The Quadroon Girl” (1842); Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852); “Song of Myself,” an 1855 poem by Walt Whitman; Louisa May Alcott's Little Women (1868); George Washington Cable's Old Creole Days (1879); Kate Chopin's Désirée's Baby (1893); James Weldon Johnson's The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912); Anne Rice's The Feast of All Saints (1979); and Gabriel Garcia Márquez's Love in the Time of Cholera (1985).

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