Shadow Family
A shadow family was an unacknowledged child or children created by a white male slave owner with a female black slave. Often they lived in physical proximity to their father, and a "married maverick reared a white family in the front of the house even as he reared a mulatto family in the back." In 1834, abolitionist George Bourne wrote, "In the houses of slave-holders, you behold young ladies elegantly attired and attended by their coloured sisters, children of the same father, and yet slaves. You recognise the driver of the carriage, the footman, and other domestics as manifestly the planter's own offspring...Two ladies of the first rank in Virginia affirmed, that the Northern citizens were totally incompetent to form any correct idea of a slave plantation. One of them remarked: 'We are called wives, and as such are recognised in law; but we are little more than superintendents of a coloured seraglio.' When the old slave-driver is dead, the 'boy' who is most like him is generally ...
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