TOO FREE
Perhaps the best-kept secret of slavery is that its opponents were also opponents of freedom. Abolitionists continued the movement of the Founding Fathers to replace external controls over the people with strict self-discipline. Accordingly, many opponents of slavery also led a campaign against the use of corporal punishment. Theodore Dwight authored a child-rearing manual in which he argued that “the child must be made his own disciplinarian.” School reformers in Massachusetts wrote that “If internal and moral restraints be not substituted for the external and arbitrary ones that are removed, the people, instead of being conquerors and sovereigns over their passions, will be their victims and their slaves.” Theodore Dwight Weld (no relation to Theodore Dwight), a leader of both the antislavery and school reform movements, aptly declared that inner restraints “are the web of civilized society, warp and woof.”
William Ellery Channing, an intellectual founder of abolitionism, made plain the ugly irony of his movement. The problem with slavery was that slaves were too free:
That the slave should yield himself to intemperance, licentiousness, and, in general, to sensual excess, we must also expect. Doomed to live for the physical indulgences of others, unused to any pleasures but those of sense, stripped of self-respect, and having nothing to gain in life, how can he be expected to govern himself? … What aid does the future give him in withstanding desire? That better condition, for which other men postpone the cravings of appetite, never opens before him. The sense of character, the power of opinion, another restraint on the free, can do little or nothing to rescue so abject a class from excess and debasement.
Of particular concern to the abolitionists was the sexual freedom of slaves. “The state of morals among slaves, especially in regard to licentiousness,” wrote Henry Stanton from Lane Seminary, “is sickening!” James Thome, the son of a Kentucky planter who joined the antislavery cause at Lane, declared that what he had seen growing up was “one great Sodom.” According to Thome, one of very few abolitionists with firsthand knowledge of plantation life, the slaves were having entirely too much fun. They “roam over the village streets, shocking the ear with their vulgar jestings, and voluptuous songs, or opening their kitchens to the reception of the neighbouring blacks, they pass the evening in gambling, dancing, drinking, and the most obscene conversation, kept up until the night is far spent, then crown the scene with indiscriminate debauchery.” What caused this unspeakable freedom? Not biology, said Thome, but the exclusion of slaves from the culture of self-restraint. “This pollution is the offspring of slavery; it springs not from the character of the Negro, but from the condition of the slave.” The Genius of Universal Emancipation, one of the first abolitionist journals, lamented in 1826 that Southern law “takes no notice of Fornication, Adultery, Incest, Polygamy, &c. among slaves,” and that, therefore, “The sensual appetite is left to be gratified by promiscuous indulgence, without any restraint, except what the Negroes impose on themselves.”
The Philanthropist, a leading abolitionist journal published in Cincinnati, explained that because slaves knew “not the laws of God nor comprehend the institutions of men,” they were “enslaved by carnal lusts and licentious practices.” William Lloyd Garrison’s Liberator, the most militant voice of the abolitionist movement, amplified the argument that the master’s reliance on external coercion let loose the slaves’ passions. A correspondent reported from Georgia that “without moral observance, except when urged by fear to conform to rules of moral conduct,” the slaves were “apt to disregard chastity—lewd in the last degree—lovers of obscene language and obscene jests—unthinking starers at every passing object … Hoggish! His bent of genius is vicious, his inclination funny, with starts of mischief, prognostic of greater mischief, if the cow-hide does not operate on his fears. Their lewdness is extreme and appalling.”
Slaves probably didn’t have quite the party imagined by abolitionists, but they certainly enjoyed far greater sexual freedom than did free white Americans, who during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were waging war against their bodily desires.
After the American Revolution, as we have seen, doctors and political leaders believed that for the new nation to flourish, its citizens needed to exert strict control over their bodies. Benjamin Rush argued for the abolition of both slavery and masturbation. He penned several tracts opposing the slave trade and many more against the evils posed to the republic by self-pleasuring. Rush spoke for virtually the entire American medical profession when he declared that this “state of degeneracy” must be avoided by “close application of the mind to business, or study of any kind.” If the patient still succumbed to temptation, Rush prescribed “a vegetable diet, temperance, bodily labor, cold baths, avoidance of obscenity, music, a close study of mathematics, military glory, and, if all else failed, castor oil.”
Sex of any kind was considered dangerous at best, and, accordingly, it was hunted down and caged. According to Estelle B. Freedmen and John D’Emilio, authors of Intimate Matters, the leading history of American sexuality, a “prolific sexual advice literature” in the early nineteenth century “inundated Americans with the message that bodily well-being required that individuals exercise some measure of control over their sexual desires.” To be sure, many free white Americans violated the norm of sexual control—especially among the new urban working class—but those who did were considered to be not only unworthy of citizenship but also, as we have seen during the early national period, threats to the nation itself.
But how powerful were these admonitions against sex? Fornicators and other “persons of infamous character and conduct,” as they were called in a Pennsylvania law, were arrested and prosecuted. A Philadelphia couple was convicted in 1797 of leading a “debauched mode of living that tends to corrupt the morals of the Citizens.” We have seen that thousands of “fallen women”—not just prostitutes but also those who had engaged in any non-marital sex—were placed in asylums where they were trained to repress their desires and become either servants for respectable families or wives of upstanding men. And historians have attributed at least part of the sharp decline in births in the nineteenth century to a culture that proscribed even marital sex if it was not for reproduction.
As for the sex lives of slaves, recent scholars have overthrown attempts made by liberal historians of the 1960s and 1970s to portray slaves as being just as “respectable” as whites and therefore equally repressed. Some slaves certainly did adopt the sexual norms of whites, upholding monogamous marriage and the patriarchal nuclear family as the best forms of intimate relations, but most, according to the historian Brenda Stevenson, “exhibited a diversity of form and relationship, that marked them [as] substantially different from those of European Americans.” While some slaves established informal marriages that, while not legally recognized, imitated the culture of white marriage, others “sweethearted” and “took up” in nonmarital relationships. “Sweethearting” and “taking up” were usually nonmonogamous relationships, which according to historian Anthony Kaye, were “a temporary tie that entailed more prerogatives than obligations and many new feelings and pleasures.” Many sweethearts had children together, but rather than the “bastards” of white culture who bore the shame of their parents’ illicit coupling throughout their lives, these children carried no stigma and were often described as “sweetheart children.” Slaves were also much less willing to subject their relationships to the rules and scrutiny of the broader community. Couples who sweethearted or took up, according to Kaye, preferred to “keep their relationship entirely their own affair. Whereas couples took some pains to enlist both their fellow slaves and their owners to participate in marriage ceremonies or recognize husbands and wives who were living together, sweethearts and couples who were taking up went to great lengths to be left to their own devices.”
Ironically, the definition of slaves as subhuman gave them many advantages, not the least of which was that in regard to sex among themselv
es, they were exempt from many of the repressive laws that governed whites in the South, including those against fornication, adultery, and promiscuity. As one Maryland lawyer explained:
[S]laves 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 … Their propensions in their different sexes, are as ardent and irresistible as those of others, and they need not be more. There is no danger that the consideration of their progeny’s condition will stop propagation, and as the laws do not regulate, neither do they punish, the gratification of them, when the rights of others are not hurt.
Slaves chose to exempt themselves from many of the whites’ unwritten laws as well. Slave women, unlike free women, were not expected to be virgins before marriage, nor were they scorned for having extramarital sex. Once married, slaves did not lock themselves into the relationship, regardless of its quality. As Eugene Genovese, the preeminent historian of slavery, put it, “they saw no reason to live forever with their mistakes.” Divorce rates, therefore, were much higher among slaves than among “free” people. Fertility rates were also much higher among slaves than among free whites, which is proof to many that blacks were less ashamed of sex and therefore inferior. The evidence seems clear that the former assumption is true; it is up to the reader to decide whether a lack of shame about sex is the sign of an inferior or a superior culture.
Even the reader who grants that slaves enjoyed greater sexual freedom than whites might insist that the control slave owners exerted over the bodies of the women they owned made the lives of slave women worse than those of free women. Again, though, the structure of slavery, the repressive logic of American freedom, and the available evidence say otherwise. According to the economic historians Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman, “the main thrust of the economic incentives generated by the American slave system operated against eugenic manipulation and against sexual abuse. Those who engaged in such acts did so, not because of their economic interests, but despite them.” Plantation archives contain many instructions given by slave owners to overseers warning against “undue familiarity” with slaves. One Louisiana planter tolerated no sexual interaction between overseers and slaves: “Having connection with any of my female servants will most certainly be visited with a dismissal from my employment, and no excuse can or will be taken.” An overseer who was known to have crossed the line would not have had an easy time finding employment. “Never employ an overseer who will equalize himself with the Negro women,” the Texas planter Charles Tait counseled his sons. “Besides the morality of it, there are evils too numerous to be now mentioned.” A journal for slaveholders admonished: “Every effort should be used to prevent that sexual intercourse, which degrades the master and is the cause of discontent to the slave. As far as is practical, it would be advisable to have elderly servants only in families, and the young should be employed wholly in agrestic and other manual labours.”
Statistics further suggest that rapes were rare on plantations. Most people of “mixed race” in the South were either slaves who lived in cities, where opportunities for interracial liaisons were far greater, or free. According to the 1860 census, 20 percent of urban slaves and 39 percent of free blacks in southern cities were mulattoes. But among rural slaves, who made up 95 percent of the slave population, only 9.9 percent were mulatto. Of the slave population as a whole, mulattoes made up only 7.7 percent in 1850 and 10.4 percent in 1860. Moreover, only 1.2 percent of the former slaves interviewed by the Works Progress Administration in the 1930s reported being raped by a master, only 5.8 percent reported hearing about the rape of another slave, and only 4.5 said that one of their parents had been white. According to Fogel and Engerman, all of the available evidence taken together indicates that “the share of Negro children fathered by whites on slave plantations probably averaged between 1 and 2 percent.” Even Fogel and Engerman’s most hostile critics concede that it was no more than 8 percent. There is also evidence of significant numbers of consensual relations between white men and slave women, which would make the percentage of children produced by rape even smaller.
While no laws protected the slave from a rapist, masters and overseers had many reasons not to force themselves on enslaved women. For one, such attacks almost inevitably brought reprisals from the victims, their mates, the attacker’s wife, or the surrounding community. The rape of a slave woman disrupted the workings of the plantation, since angry slaves were not hard-working slaves. As Haller Nutt, one of the most prominent planters in Mississippi, counseled in his “General Rules to Govern Time of an Overseer”:
Above all things avoid all intercourse with Negro women. It breeds more trouble, more neglect, more idleness, more rascality, more stealing, & more lieing up in the quarters & more everything that is wrong on a plantation than all else put together … In fact such intercourse is out of the question—it must not be tolerated.
Many slave women also physically attacked pursuers, though a more common response was to run away—usually not forever, but quite frequently for days, weeks, or months at a time. The historian Stephanie Camp has found records from plantations showing that female slaves constituted from 19 percent to 41 percent of truants and that their absences averaged six days. Angry slaves were also dangerous slaves, and in addition to the documented cases of slaves’ lethal vengeance, there were many stories of poison or ground glass mixed in with the master’s food and white children under the care of slave women who died unexpectedly.
Slave mistresses were also a potent force operating against the free exercise of a masters’ sexual desires. Liaisons with slave women were sometimes tolerated, but they were always considered to be shameful and required to be kept hidden. According to historian Catherine Clinton, who was the first to write on this issue, white men “were required in their public lives to obey the plantation culture’s rigid dictates concerning race and sex.” Many prominent members of the Southern gentry lost their place in “decent society” when their encounters with slaves were revealed. Thomas Foster Jr., the son of a wealthy Mississippi planter, was given an ultimatum by his family to either discontinue his love affair with a slave woman or exile himself from his home and Southern society. He chose the latter. Richard Johnson, who served as vice president under Martin Van Buren, may very well have won the presidency were it not for the scandal concerning his mulatto mistress, with whom he had two children. Because he refused to deny the “monstrous rumor,” Johnson was widely attacked for his “scorn of secrecy” and for threatening to bring “amalgamation” to the White House.
And how many free white women were forced to have sex against their will? One advantage that slave women had over free women was that a rapist who attacked a woman he owned would have to live, face-to-face and every day, with the shame, resentment, disruption, and threats of violence that his act produced. Many if not most rapes of free white women, on the other hand, went unreported or unsolved, and the attacker remained anonymous. For these reasons, according to the historian Sharon Block, “rape in early America was both pervasive and invisible.” In fact, coerced sex was commonplace among free women. Nearly all free women in the nineteenth century were married at some point, and husbands held legal dominion over their bodies. Until the twentieth century, American laws and customs regarding marriage were derived from the English Lawes Resolutions of Women’s Rights of 1632, which declared that it was “a locking together,” that a wife’s identity became her husband’s, and that “[h]er new self is her superior; her companion, her master.” The American publication in 1806 of the British legal manual A Treatise of the Pleas of the Crown, declared that “a husband cannot by law be guilty of ravishing his wife, on account of the matrimonial consent which she cannot retract.” A popular advice book in the 1830s told young American women, “[I]n whatever situation of life a woman is placed from her cradle to her grave, a spirit of obedience and submission, pliability of temper, and humility of mind, are required from her.” This c
oncept of “coverture” meant that a husband not only legally owned every piece of property in his family but also was, according to law and American culture, incapable of raping his wife.
Without doubt, the sale of a slave that broke apart a family was one of the most brutal aspects of being enslaved. There is disagreement over exactly what percentage of families were disrupted this way, but during the lifetime of slavery in America, at least tens of thousands of people were forcibly removed from their loved ones. Whatever the exact number, however, it is certainly smaller than the number of free people who were forced from their homes by compulsion or obligation. More than five million free Americans, a large percentage of whom were conscripted, participated in the War of Independence, the War of 1812, the Mexican-American War, and the Civil War. More than six hundred thousand never returned from the battlefield. Economic transformations forced millions more to leave their families. The rise of large-scale commercial farming and the growth of manufacturing before the Civil War dissolved family farms and compelled not just fathers and sons but also mothers and daughters to relocate to support themselves or their families. Sometimes families would shut down their farms and move together to a city, but more often the children able to work were sent off on their own.
A Renegade History of the United States Page 9
