Just by coincidence, I was reading a Lancaster County chancery suit
last night, Elizabeth E. Yerby v. George W. Yerby, 1793, that bears on
contemporary attitudes to interracial sex. Elizabeth was accusing
George of physical abuse and had gone home to Mother. She also
complained that he did not treat her well (what we might call
psychological abuse). A couple of the depositions mentioned that she
accused her husband of having children by slave women.

William Brown testified that "[having eaten] he [George] turned round
to this deponent, & said, in a laugh shakeing his Belly at the same
time, all clean fat, as a Girl said, when at the same time she was
with child, with that Mrs Yerby Reply'd that she knew what girl that
was, and the Def't asked her who, and she said yr sister Sarah
Boatman, when she had a Mulatto Bastard, & further said Mrs Yerby,
that it Runs in your family, to have Mulatto Bastards." She pointed to
a house slave and said that her child looked like George.

So whether or not interracial sex was practiced (and we know it was),
it clearly was not approved of by Elizabeth, or by most white women
(George's sister perhaps excluded--I have no independent evidence that
Elizabeth's accusation was true). Elizabeth was outraged and wanted
her neighbors to join her in condemning George. Anne Firor Scott's
work on Southern women indicates that the same attitudes were
prevalent.

Kathleen Much

On 8/18/07, Richard Dixon wrote:
>  In the current issue of the UVA Magazine, there is an article "Anatomy of a Mystery" which addresses the issue of Jefferson's alleged paternity of slave children. In the article, Lucia Stanton is quoted as saying that Edmund Bacon (the overseer at Monticello who asserted he knew the father of Sally Hemings' daughter and that it was not Thomas Jefferson) had a reputation among Jefferson's grandchildren as "a great tale teller and exaggerator." Also, in the article, Peter Onuff was quoted as saying that, "What we take as the big taboo—crossing the racial boundary—was the norm in this period. What we think is the worst was then probably the most acceptable behavior. It happened all over the place." Does anyone have any references that Bacon was known as "a great tale teller and exaggerator"? As to whether interracial sex was the "norm" I guess depends on how "norm" is defined. However, there were laws against it, so how was it "acceptable"?
>