On Thu, 1 May 2008 18:14:36 -0400, [log in to unmask] wrote:

>Sex between a slave woman and a free man was inherently coercive and
nonconsentual.  

Let me dissent very slightly here to urge that we avoid categorical
statements such as this.  Unquestionably, yes, sex between a slave woman and
a free man was usually coercive and nonconsensual; the documentary record
bears that out abundantly, just as one would expect.  

But not always.  

Most obviously, there was the common practice of black men who were born
free or managed to obtain freedom marrying or otherwise sexually involving
themselves with slave women in long-term relationships--and, if they could,
often buying these women eventually and in many cases freeing them, despite
all the weight of Southern law that militated against manumission.  So I
would be inclined to think that sex between a slave woman and a free black
man was frequently noncoercive; instead, it was sometimes marriage or
something approaching marriage in a society brutally unconcerned with black
marital legitimacy.

Beyond that, however--and I realize Kevin was referring to sex between slave
women and free white men--even slave women/white men sexual relationships
were not always coercive.  This particularly subject is not my area of
research, but my research has immersed me in the documentary record of slave
life in Virginia and surrounding states, and to my surprise I have from time
to time--certainly not often, but not extremely rarely, either--come across
situations such as the following:

* a slave woman and a white male indentured servant who form a liaison and
"run away" together

* a white man of relatively little means who owns a few slaves, one of whom
lives with him as his wife in all but name, bears him children, and who is
freed with her children and inherits his property upon his death;

* a white man who leases a slave woman for work, has children with her,
purchases her and her children, frees them all, and marries her;

* a relatively well-off white man whose liaison with a slave woman causes
scandal to his family, whereupon he frees the woman and moves west with her
to a non-slaveholding area and they establish a permanent household and
family there;

* a slave woman who forms a long-term liaison with a well-to-do white man
not her owner and despite her owner's opposition to the relationship.

Obviously, it is possible that some or all of these relationships and the
unknown number of others similarly anomalous began coercively.  But the more
I study slavery, the more I am struck by how its structural cruelty and
injustice, and its capacity to elicit genuinely evil behavior in so many
instances from otherwise "normal" men and women, nevertheless failed to
eradicate altogether the human capacity for humane connection and
interaction--sexually as well as maternally, filially, companionably, and in
other ways.  

Slavery made such bonds inherently unlikely, not least by actively favoring
their opposites.  It did not, however, make them impossible.   And while the
structure of slave society entitles us to presume coercion in any free white
male/slave female sexual liaison for which we have no evidence to the
contrary, it seems to me that we ought not to preemptively eliminate from
our historical understanding the possibility of genuine humanity even in the
most unpromising and improbable of circumstances if the evidence so
suggests.  It was, after all, just such common humanity that slavery itself
was designed to deny.  I am disinclined to grant its engines of
dehumanization any victories it may not have won.

--Jurretta Heckscher

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