“All Intent on Seeing the White Woman Married to the Red Man”: The Parker/Sackett Affair and the Public Spectacle of Intermarriage

Abstract

This article examines the events surrounding the 1867 wedding ceremony of Ely Parker, the Seneca sachem and Civil War general, to Minnie Sackett, a young, white socialite. It uses, as its main source of evidence, the newspaper coverage of and public discourse about this fascinating event. The Washington DC public obsessed over the wedding, and even though this was a very public interracial marriage at a particularly tense historical moment that could have motivated outrage and even violence in the nation’s capitol, this article argues that it was Parker’s public presentation of middle–class ideals and standards of Victorian manhood that made him an acceptable husband for a white woman. Furthermore, this article asserts that through the complex interplay of discourses of race, class, and gender, Parker represented the embodiment of primitive masculinity, and yet he was a non–threatening object of public fascination for a sentimentalized, feminized, middle–class audience.