Va-Hist subscribers may find food for thought in this review of Joshua
Rothman's new book on interracial sex in antebellum Virginia.

Please respect the letter and spirit of the copyright notice at the end
of the review.


H-NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by [log in to unmask] (July 2003)

Joshua D. Rothman. _Notorious in the Neighborhood: Sex and Families
across the Color Line in Virginia, 1787-1861_. Chapel Hill and London:
University of North Carolina Press, 2003. 341 pp. Table, notes,
bibliography, and index. $49.95 (cloth), ISBN 0-8078-2768-1; $19.95
(paper) ISBN 0-8078-5440-9.

Reviewed for H-SHEAR by Christie Anne Farnham <[log in to unmask]>,
Department of History, Iowa State University

How Sex Confounds Race

Today's historians see race--not as a scientific category--but as a
social construction. Populations are insufficiently isolated from others
to develop unique gene pools. Human phenotypes vary on a continuum, so
that marking boundaries between races becomes an impossible task.
Because those boundaries are so difficult to maintain and shift over
time, historians view race as constructed by the changing demands of the
dominant social group. Joshua Rothman's excellent study of interracial
sex in early national and antebellum Virginia provides an important
illustration of how sexual attraction across racial boundaries confounds
racial categories.

Although monogamy was the ideal, social norms accepted a double standard
that was exacerbated by chattel slavery. Since slave women were the
physical property of their owners, they were not protected against
crimes such as rape. However, it has been only in recent years that
historians have examined the existence of interracial relationships that
were the equivalent of marriages and consensual relationships of white
women with black men. The latter is of particular interest because,
during the high tide of lynchings from the 1880s to the 1930s, such
relationships were not tolerated. White supremacy was undergirded by the
development of the myth of the black rapist that charged every black man
with an inherent lust for white female flesh. This myth served as the
rationale for actions against black men and black communities that could
better be described as emanating from economic competition. The fact
that such relationships existed unchecked during earlier periods only
serves to demonstrate how the supposedly unchanging characteristics of
race changed over time.

Rothman begins his study with the most famous interracial relationship
of Virginians--that of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemmings. Most
historians of the past had viewed the question of whether such a
relationship existed in the context of Jefferson's character and found
it inconceivable. Today's debate focuses on DNA. Rothman, however,
focuses his analysis on the society within which Jefferson moved. The
great strength of Rothman's scholarship lies in his ability to ferret
out all possible reasons for a set of actions by examining the
consequences of choices available to the historic actors. For example,
although it would have been theoretically possible for Hemmings to
establish her freedom while she was in France, it was practically
impossible. Rothman then follows the lives of some of the couple's
descendants as they established kin networks in Charlottesville.
Charlottesville was also the home of a Jewish merchant who had the
equivalent of a marriage with a free black woman, and Rothman details
the trials of their financial attempts to maintain independence for
themselves and their children. Although they were respected members of
the community, they were vulnerable to white efforts to take advantage
of their precarious legal status.

One of the most important contributions of the study is Rothman's
demonstration of how toleration of interracial sex in Richmond changed
in the 1840s and 1850s, something which previous authors assumed did not
occur until after the Civil War. Prior to the 1840s interracial
prostitution was contained by the police, but with the growth of the
population, whites became concerned about jostling with strangers on the
streets and white men felt threatened by black male sexuality. This
combined with the impact of evangelicalism and industrialism to change
attitudes from a tolerated dislike to an attempt to deter such behavior
altogether.

Although neighbors might gossip, they seldom intervened in cases of
slave abuse, and slaves were so disadvantaged that they seldom fought
back. Rothman examines two cases where they did violently resist. He
also analyzes legislative divorces down to 1851, finding that they were
granted to just under 70 percent of the men who charged their wives with
adultery with a black man and to only 55 percent of women who charged
their husbands with keeping a black mistress. Interestingly, the charge
of interracial relationships was seldom the primary reason given by the
petitioner and petitions were not instigated immediately upon such a
finding. On the one hand, some historians might find this to be evidence
that interracial sex was not as important as one might assume. Rothman,
on the other hand, examines the consequences that would have ensued had
the petitioner set forth the illicit relationship as the principle cause
of the desire for divorce. It is his ability to reason as the historical
actor might and to consider all the options and their consequences which
make Rothman's reading of the evidence both brilliant and compelling.

Finally, Rothman looks at the definition of black. For contemporary
Americans used to the "one-drop rule" of segregation, it is surprising
to find that colonial Virginia set the boundary at one-eighth black
ancestry. In 1785, for reasons that Rothman cannot understand, the
boundary was changed to one-fourth. By these definitions there were
white slaves and free white citizens with African ancestry. By
Jefferson's own explication of this legality, it appears he might not
have considered Hemmings to have been black. Most Native Americans had
vanished from Virginia by the antebellum period, leaving Virginia
society bi-racial, but there were enough "mixed bloods" that when the
legislature passed a number of laws following Nat Turner's Rebellion
further restricting free blacks, it was unclear if these were also
applicable to them. As a consequence legislation was passed allowing
such persons to get a certificate from a county court stating that they
were "not a negro." Circumstances continually forced the refining of the
definition of race.

Rothman's research makes clear that illicit sex across racial boundaries
was ubiquitous and conducted by all classes and both genders. Such
interracial congress was tolerated if white men were considered
respectable and kept their relationships quiet. Enslaved men, however,
had higher status than poor, promiscuous white women; but an enslaved
male never had higher status than a white male. Whether one was found to
be white or black was based on more than racial ancestry. Courts decided
such cases on a case-by-case basis, balancing social stability with the
enforcement of the law by basing their decisions on the social context
(e.g., was the individual treated by whites as one of them).

The silence of society on such sensitive issues means that Rothman had
to base his findings on those incidents in which public exposure left
court records and newspaper accounts. Unfortunately, such materials make
it difficult to understand the meaning of interracial sex to the lower
class, especially women. Although Rothman is a master at explaining the
logic of different behavioral choices, this reader would like to have
seen a greater effort made to retrieve the viewpoint of white
prostitutes and a discussion of why they were treated differently from
lower-class white males engaging in illicit sex. Nevertheless, Rothman
is to be commended for increasing our understanding of the social
construction of race and demonstrating how central interracial congress
was to that construction.

Copyright (c) 2003 by H-Net, all rights reserved. H-Net permits the
redistribution and reprinting of this work for nonprofit, educational
purposes, with full and accurate attribution to the author, web
location, date of publication, originating list, and H-Net: Humanities &
Social Sciences Online. For other uses contact the Reviews editorial
staff: [log in to unmask]

To subscribe, change options, or unsubscribe, please see the instructions
at http://listlva.lib.va.us/archives/va-hist.html