Confederate "Heritage" Month, April 26: Another complication of slavery

This is another post on a Civil War article from the New York Review of Books, Dangerous Liaisons by C. Vann Woodward (link behind subscription) 02/19/1998, reviewing White Women, Black Men: Illicit Sex in the Nineteenth-Century South by Martha Hodes.

No, the book he's reviewing isn't a porno book. It's about one of the everyday features of slavery, sexual involvements between masters and slaves. It usually involved male masters with female slaves, and was a cause of much complaint and resentment among white society ladies. Abolitionists also made a point of reminding the public that this was a part of the allegedly noble system of slavery in the American South, masters coercing sex from slaves. Such unions not uncommonly resulted in the master owning his own offspring as human property.

Formal restriction of the union of white women with slaves came early. Woodward observes:

Early Maryland lawmakers used the phrase "Negroes and other slaves" in their statutes. A law of 1664, however, declared that free women who married slaves would themselves be enslaved during the lifetime of their husbands and that the children of the union would be slaves for life. The law might have served one or perhaps all of three purposes: first to discourage black access to white women, second to discourage white women from such marriages, and third to ensure that a couple's master could claim their children as his property.

For the slave system, with its Southern honor conception of the sanctity of womanhood, white females becoming pregnant with black offspring was treated as far more problematic than white slave owners having children by slave mothers:

White wives of black men were far from the only source of "mulattoes." A white Virginian observed in 1757 that "the country swarms with mulatto bastards," descendants of a "black father or mother." In fact, most mulattoes had white fathers who were either slave owners or in a position to impose themselves on women slaves. But children of a black slave mother were the property of her owner whoever the father. It was only the mulatto children of white mothers who were the cause of problems for a white society that had turned slavery into a racial institution. The most common resort of a white woman who found herself pregnant by a slave was to charge him with rape. To produce a bastard was officially a crime for a woman, but did not carry the penalty of death, as did rape. (my emphasis)

This occurred not only among female slaveowners but also with free non-slaveholding whites, as well. And while they were not as common as the white male/black female cases, Woodward writes:

Such liaisons were not anomalies in the Southern states, but unless they resulted in pregnancy and childbirth they rarely left a trace in the public record. White communities could put up with liaisons of the kind without outcry when they were not flaunted, or when the offenders lived within the black community. Then, too, evidence for liaisons of the more well-to-do white women could be more easily concealed than those of poor women such as Polly. Not only was resort to abortion and concealment of infanticide more feasible, but family influences over opinion, courts, and officials could be brought to bear. (my emphais)

Woodward's account describes how the taboo against black men being sexually involved with white women became even more intense after the Civil War:

Civil War, emancipation, and Reconstruction brought drastic changes in Southern racial attitudes and policies, including those concerned with liaisons between white women and black men. Black freedmen inspired both fear and brutal behavior on the part of white men. The word "miscegenation" was coined in the election of 1864 by Northern Democrats, who used it to denounce Lincoln Republicans as advocates of interracial sex. Issues previously left to custom, gossip, and personal anguish in local communities and courts suddenly became prominent in national party politics. During the war Democratic politicians introduced the specter of white women victims of black soldiers and freedmen into congressional debates. White abolitionists collected sensational stories about the racial promiscuity of Southern white women, stories that Hodes urges readers to approach with caution. Southern whites reciprocated with stories about Northern missionaries and teachers seeking black lovers in the South.

Among the losses of the Lost Cause were not only slave property and racial hierarchy but patriarchal authority - not only control over family and property but, for a time, monopoly of political power. And along with the gains of emancipation, the freedmen suffered losses in personal security that had, paradoxically, been provided by slavery. No longer property of great value, the freedman lost the protection of an owner and such limited toleration as white communities and courts were willing to accord his liaisons with white women. If he had brothers or children of mixed blood they became more vulnerable. Offended masters could be cruel and brutal but rarely as fierce and murderous as enraged white mobs. The discipline of slavery was soon replaced by that of terrorism. (my emphasis)

Sexual accusations and accusations of rape because part of the justification for "lynch law" during Reconstruction and especially afterward.

Though dedicated to the protection of "white womanhood," Klansmen inflicted violent punishment upon women of both races accused of sexual transgressions, black women by assault and rape, white women of the lower class by whipping and sexual mutilation. Accusations of political as well as sexual transgressions were made against women as well as men. Sex, politics, and the assertion of "manhood" became conflated during this period, and Hodes describes a society in which political life became infused with sexual obsession. Klan violence in early Reconstruction occurred in parts of the South where sex between white women and black men had not produced such violence before the war.

Klan assaults were largely replaced in the 1880s and later by lynchings carried out by mobs in daytime and without disguise, the spectacle attended by whites of all classes. "In the last decades of the century," Hodes writes, "whites accused black men of rape more than at any time before or since, and black men could be lynched for all manner of objectionable behavior toward white women." A black minister warned his listeners in 1892: "If one of our men look at a white woman very hard and she complains he is lynched for it." Notices of lynchings were printed in local papers, and extra cars added to trains for spectators from miles around, sometimes thousands of them. Schoolchildren might get a day off to attend the lynching.

The spectacle could include castration, skinning, roasting, hanging, and shooting. Souvenirs for purchasers might include fingers, toes, teeth and bones, even genitals of the victim, as well as picture postcards of the event. Newspapers published detailed accounts, including the coroner's report of the cause of death as being "at the hands of persons unknown."

This violence and sexual fears and taboos bound up with it were very much a part of the post-Civil War Southern society that adopted the Lost Cause as it ideological framework for politics and history.

And I haven't seen it traced in precise detail, but I'm convinced that the torture policy of the current administration has its roots in some important ways in the culture of lynching in the Jim Crow South.

Tags: confederate heritage month 2008, racism, slavery