During the first decades of the new republic, a small, but significant, number of nabobs, former employees of the British East India Company who made spectacular fortunes in India, immigrated to the newly independent United States of America. The most significant of these was Thomas Law. Born in 1756 to an aristocratic British family, Law went to India as a “writer,” or clerk, and rose through the East India Company ranks. More than a mere fortune-seeker, he became a major reformer of British policy who transformed the basis of land tenure and taxation among the natives of Bengal and other neighboring provinces.
Soon after returning to England, Law chose to turn his back on Britain's rising empire in the East in order to seek his fate in the new nation that had arisen from Britain's first empire in the West. One of the major determinants of this decision was his desire to secure the future of his three illegitimate sons, born of an Indian bibi, or concubine. In 1794, he, along with the young boys, immigrated to the United States. There he invested large portions of his fortune in buying land and developing the nation’s new capital at Washington, D.C. In 1796, he succeeded in insinuating himself into the highest ranks of American society by marrying Elizabeth Parke Custis, George Washington’s beloved step-granddaughter.
By examining the reactions of American men and women toward Law’s mixed-race children, this paper will explore the complexities and contradictions of racial boundaries in the early United States. Illuminating the importance of class issues as well as skin color and physical featrues, it will compare and contrast racial attitudes in Britain, British India, and the early American republic during a key period of transition in racial ideologies.
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