Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape (36 page)

A Negress was hung this year in Alabama, for the murder of her child. At her trial, she confessed her guilt. She said her owner was the father of the child, and that her mistress knew it, and treated her so cruelly in consequence, that she had killed it to save it from further suffering, and also to remove a provocation to her own
ill
treatment.

A visitor to Mississippi in
1836
sent a letter to a Northern friend:

The day I arrived at this place there was a man· by the name of C murdered by a Negro man that belonged to him. [The black man was publicly lynched.] C owned the Negro's wife and was in the habit of sleeping with her! The Negro said he had killed him and he believed he should be rewarded in heaven for it.

* Kenneth Stampp unfairly uses this portion of Mrs. Douglass' letter to but tress his contention that "Southern white women apparently believed that they suffered most from the effects of miscegenation."

162
I
AGAINST OUR WILL

The narrative of Charles Ball tells of a mulatto slave woman, Lucy, who rebelled against her forced sexual servitude to her white owner and successfully plotted with her slave lover, Frank, to kill him. Charles Ball himself played a role in their apprehension and confession. Lucy and Frank "were tried before some gentlemen of the neighborhood, who held a court for that purpose," and were hanged at a public gallows.
"It
was estimated by my master," Ball records, "that there were at least fif teen thousand people present at this scene, more than half of whom were blacks; all the masters, for a great distance round the country, having permitted, or compelled their people to come to this hanging."

The case of Peggy and Patrick received considerable notoriety in New Kent County, Virginia, in
1830.
This pair of slaves, who were lovers, were condemned to be hanged for murdering their master. Extenuating circumstances caused the local white citizens of New Kent to submit a petition to the governor asking that punishment for the pair be reduced to "transportation."

One black witness whose testimony was solicited declared

that

the deceased to whom Peggy belonged had had a disagreement with Peggy, and generally kept her confined by keeping her chained to a block and locked up in his meat house; that he [the witness] be lieved the reason why the deceased had treated Peggy in this way was because Peggy would not consent to intercourse with him, and that he had heard the deceased say that if Peggy did not agree to his request in that way, he would beat her almost to death, that he would barely leave the life in her, and would send her to New Or leans. The witness said that Peggy said the reason she would not yield to his request was because the deceased was her father, and she could not do a thing of that sort with her father. The witness heard the deceased say to Peggy that if she did not consent, he would make him, the witness, and Patrick hold her, to enable him to effect his object.

Since it was the slaveholdin"g class that created the language and wrote the laws pertaining to slavery, it is not surprising that legally the concept of raping a slave simply did not exist. One cannot rape one's own property. The rape of one man's slave
by
another
white
man was considered a mere "trespass" in the eyes of

TWO STUDIES IN AMERICAN HISTORY
163

plantation law. The rape of one man's slave by another slave had no official recognition in law at all.*

Moral objections to the "liberties" that the slaveholder and his overseer took as a matter of course were voiced within the oddly angled framework of miscegenation, amalgamation, mixture of the races, licentiousness, degradation and lust. Typically for the power class, the slave's coerced participation in the act was turned on her. Her passive submission-the rule of survival in slavery-was styled as concubinage, prostitution or promiscuity when it was alluded to at all. Even the Northern abolitionists shied away from defining coercive sexual abuse under slavery as criminal rape, preferring to speak emotionally, but guardedly, of illicit passion and lust. Mod ern historians tend to operate under the same set of blinders.

The patriarchal institution of marriage dovetailed with the patriarchal institution of slavery to prevent perception, by even the most enlightened observers, of a concept of sexual rights and bodily integrity for the female slave. In the nineteenth century, a married woman was considered by law to be the property of her husband, and any abuse to her person was considered, by law, to be an abuse to his property.
If
the woman was not married, the abuse was to her father's property. But slaves were not permitted to marry legally, and criminal sexual abuse of a female slave (a rape ) could not be considered by law an affront to her slave "husband" or slave father, who had
no
righ ts of their own. The examples we find in abolitionist literature that express concern over the sexual abuse of female slaves are frequently couched in terms of sympathy for the abused women's husbands! As a Maryland lawyer observed at the time, "Slaves are bound by our criminal laws generally, yet we do not consider them as the objects of such laws as relate to the commerce between the sexes. A slave has never maintained an action against the violator of his bed." Of his bed.

Statutory prohibitions against interracial sex, or more accu rately, against the act of sex between slaveholder and slave, were on

*
Some evidence exists that masters attempted to police, in their own fashion, the more blatant abuses that male slaves committed against females. An
828

advertisement in the Elkton, Maryland, Press for runaway "Negro George Anderson, about
21
or
22
years of age," declared informatively, "A few days before he absconded he attempted to commit a rape upon a young female of his own color, the punishment for which has caused his running off."

i64
I
AGAINST OUR WILL

the books of all the slave states from the time they were colonies of the king. Even in South Carolina, where the slave-trading city of Charleston earned a dubious reputation as the libertine capital of North America (a reputation later claimed by New Orleans ) , and where "interracial liaisons were less carefully concealed than else where on the continent," a grand jury in 1743 took notice of "the too common practice of criminal conversation with Negro and other slave wenches in this province," and scored this conversa tion-or intercourse-as "an Enormity and Evil of general Ill Consequence."

But it was "pollution of the white race" and not concern for the rights of slaves that lay behind such pronunciamentos. The laws against "admixture" that white men wrote were not applied to white men. They were applied by white men against white women

-as several divorce suits and bastardy charges of the time showed-and they were applied with a special vengeance against those black men who entered into liaisons with white women. (The implications and consequences of this sex-race quadruple standard are still with us. See Chapter 7, "A Question of Race.") A Louisiana Supreme Court decision of 1851 af ter some back

ing and filling proceeded to define concubinage as a "mutual" liaison, although one participant was a slaveholder and the other a female slave bound to him by law and force.

The slave is undoubtedly subject to the power of his master; but that means a lawful power, such as is consistent with good morals. The laws do not subject the female slave to an involuntary and illicit connexion with her master, but would protect her against that misfortune.
It
is true, that the female slave is peculiarly ex posed . . . to the seductions of an unprincipled master. That is a misfortune; but it is so rare in the case of concubinage that the seduction and temptation are not mutual, that exceptions to the general rule cannot be founded upon it.

It
is difficult to gain a clear understanding of concubinage as it was practiced in the slave South. I do not mean to argue the point that all sexual liaisons between white masters and black slaves fall within my extended definition of rape, although such an argument is tempting. For many black women, concubinage was the best bargain that could be struck, a more or less graceful accommoda-

TWO STUDIES IN AMERICAN HISTORY
I
165

tion given the hopeless condition of bondage; certainly for some it was as close to emancipation as possible, short of a run for freedom with Harriet Tubman. But first, last and always, concubinage was a male-imposed condition: a bargain struck on male values exclu sively, resting on a foundation of total ownership and control. Accommodation in lieu of forcible seizure could bring a variety of amenities into one's life: relative status, pretty dresses, gold ear rings, and the hope-always the hope-of manumission for one's self and children. This last must have been held out to the black concubine like a carrot on a stick. Several slaveholder wills survive in which freedom for a favored slave and her children is provided, along with bequests of money and real property. Sadly, but not surprisingly, the terms of these wills were often successfully chal lenged in the courts by the slaveholder's lawful heirs.