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Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, escaped slave Harriet Jacobs provided firsthand testimony that confirmed these fears. Jacobs detailed years of sexual harassment at the hands of her slaveholder. Recounting her entry into the dangerous years of adolescence, she lamented: “But I now entered on my fifteenth year—a sad epoch in the life of a slave girl. My master began to whisper foul words in my ear. Young as I was, I could not remain ignorant of their import.” Jacobs described slaveholders’ and their sons’ licentious and misogynistic behavior that routinely bedeviled the life of a slave girl, writing, “she is whipped or starved into submission to their will.” From such brutal beginnings extended “relationships” often began, producing hundreds of thousands of mixed-race children in America.
Not only did the inherent dynamics of the slavery setting become more corrupt when slave rape occurred, the misconduct often damaged many relationships. The slaveholder’s relations with his wife were undermined; she was often powerless to stop such misbehavior. An illicit sexual liaison also damaged the relationship between the wife and the slave mistress, who in many cases was a house servant forced to live under the same roof. Even when the slave owner was unmarried, the unequal power dynamics between him and his slave mistress eliminated her ability to refuse consent.
Slavery rendered relations between slaveholders and their slave children bizarre in that their children also could be their slaves. Recent scholarship suggests that at least 2-8 percent of slave children born on Southern plantations were fathered by Whites, and testimony by former slaves collected in the 1930s reveals that more than one-third of ex-slave women who broached the topic of parentage claimed to have a White father or at least one child sired by a White father.
The widespread existence in slave societies of light-skinned, or mulatto, children who carried their slaveholder’s features stood as a physical reminder of sex abuse. Slaveholders typically did not care one way or another about their offspring, but even for those who did, it likely took a bold and self-confident slaveholder to withstand the indignation of a wife and provide affection for such children. At best, he might provide them with a trade or set them free, but he also might sell them to remove the evidence and often did.
The fathering of mixed-race children by slaveholders— the federal census counted more than 400,000 mulattoes in the United States in 1860—did more than corrupt human relations. It damaged human psyches, undermined the slaveholders’ pretenses to respectability, and made hypocrisy of their public posturing on the need for racial purity and the separation of the races. Abolitionist literature was filled with descriptions of slaveholders as lascivious managers of harems where animal instincts were easily gratified. Slaveholders may have denounced and denied such accusations but often lived with knowing winks and nods from others nonetheless.
The documents in this exhibition provide no direct evidence of sexual exploitation, but the visitor will notice words such as “mulatto” or “light colored man” and “light yellow boy” in the descriptions of the slaves or indentured servants. Possibly some of these refer to individuals born from a sexually exploitative relationship.
None of the records in this exhibition speak directly to sexual exploitation of the slaves and indentured servants, some very young, who are the subjects of the transactions, but they raise the possibility. It was this possibility, and sometimes reality, that outraged abolitionists like Harriet Jacobs and Harriet Beecher Stowe and like-minded Western Pennsylvanians in the years leading up to the Civil War. Perhaps, amongst others, it was this possibility, and occasional reality, that in the 1790s appalled Hugh Henry Brackenridge, whose satirical novel Modern Chivalry lampooned local slaveholders who were too pious even to shave on Sunday but who nonetheless “held and abused” their slaves.