Exploring such texts as the Federalist poetry about Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings and the 1863 pamphlet in which the word "miscegenation" was first used, this work examines the steps by which whiteness became a sexual category and same-race desire came to seem a biological imperative.

Looking instead to the North, and to such texts as the Federalist poetry about Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, James Fenimore Cooper's "Last of the Mohicans", Edgar Allan Poe's "Murders in the Rue Morgue," and the 1863 pamphlet in which the word "miscegenation" was first used, Lemire examines the steps by which whiteness became a sexual category and same-race desire came to seem a biological imperative.

List of IllustrationsIntroduction: The Rhetorical Wedge Between Preference and Prejudice1. Race and the Idea of "Preference" in the New Republic: The Port Folio Poems About Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings2. The Rhetoric of Blood and Mixture: Cooper's "Man Without a Cross"3. The Barrier of Good Taste: Avoiding A Sojourn in the City of Amalgamation in the Wake of Abolitionism4. Combating Abolitionism with the Species Argument: Race and Economic Anxieties in Poe's Philadelphia5. Making "Miscegenation": Alcott's Paul Frere and the Limits of Brotherhood After EmancipationEpilogue: "Miscegenation" TodayNotesBibliographyIndexAcknowledgments