The Systemic Sexual Violence Hidden in Plain Sight During America’s Slave Trade

Even before enslavement provided European explorers with a financial interest in dehumanizing Africans, they harbored a deep mistrust of Blackness and the darkly pigmented skin associated with it: “White and black connoted purity and filthiness, virginity and sin, virtue and baseness, beauty and ugliness, beneficence and evil, God and the devil.”

They took a particularly harsh view of African women, whom they regarded as hedonistic, licentious, and dangerous. Not only because the women’s shapely and robust figures were bathed in richly black and brown hues but also because the women wore less clothing—European men cast their nudity as crude solicitation, rather than as a cultural difference appropriate for the climate.

They told tall tales of the women pouncing and sexually coercing them, in many ways likening African women to the succubae of night terrors. And yet, in the face of such unfathomable peril, white men could not stay away.

By the 1660s, so multitudinous was the rape of enslaved African women that colonists had to create a new law to address the growing and worrisome presence of “mulattoes.” Under customary English law and traditions, the status of a child followed that of the father.

But as increasing numbers of brown babies dotted the landscape, legislatures moved decisively to stem the tide. Virginia led the pack in 1662, with an “act that defined all children born of the bodies of black women as slaves, even if their fathers were free and white.” To make it plain: if your mother was a slave, you, too, would be enslaved from birth for life. And so it began.

[pullqote]By the 1660s, so multitudinous was the rape of enslaved African women that colonists had to create a new law to address the growing and worrisome presence of “mulattoes.”[/pullquote]

As other colonies quickly followed suit, the legal changes effectively incentivized rape and other forms of sexual coercion, such as forced breeding given that enslaved women’s offspring served to enhance enslavers’ wealth. Few expressed any concern about the plight of the women or their condemned children.

As far as white men were concerned, as the South Carolina Gazette noted in 1736, African women could serve lovers “by Night as well as Day.” And, according to Johann Schoepf, they counted “it an honor to bring a mulatto into the world.”

The staying power of such myths was reinforced by the very nature of enslavement. For example, in addition to rape and forced breeding, Black women were often immodestly clothed and routinely stripped in public as they were beaten. Formerly enslaved women’s and men’s accounts are rife with scenes of Black women’s exposed “naked quivering flesh.”

Henry Bibb lamented the conditions: “Licentious white men can and do enter at night or day the lodging places of slaves, break up the bonds of affection in families, destroy all their domestic and social union for life; and the laws of the country afford them no protection.” Worse, planters like “Big Jim” McClain in Virginia, “entertained his friends by allowing them to rape the enslaved women he owned while their loved ones watched.”

This revolting sadism was echoed in myriad rulings such as the George v. State verdict in Mississippi in 1859, which overturned the conviction of an enslaved man who sexually assaulted an enslaved girl. As far as the law was concerned the “rape of a female slave under the age of ten by a slave was not a crime.”

It was as his attorney argued: “The crime of rape does not exist in this State between African slaves…their sexual intercourse is left to be regulated by their owners.” He added, “their intercourse is promiscuous, and the violation of a female slave by a male slave would be a mere assault and battery.”

Such denigration was widespread, and the Quaker City was no exception. Even as the region had a history of abolitionism early on, it nonetheless countenanced slavery. The practice had been occurring before the arrival of William Penn in 1682, and it continued in a de facto sense, with the status of owned Black people being ill-defined.

For example, even as they were considered as separate and below whites, an enslaved woman named Prudence, who was summoned to court in 1687 to answer “all such Complaints as shall be layd against her,” went before the same court as whites. However, beginning in the 1700s, Pennsylvania followed colonies such as Virginia, South Carolina, New York, and Massachusetts by “legislatively and judicially sanctioning racial slavery within its borders.”

Dehumanizing rules and mandates sprang up in the aftermath, underscoring an unfortunate and enduring truth: the legal system has always failed Black people, and it did so right at the start.

Even if we put aside its sanctioning of lifelong racial enslavement in the 1640s and its wholesale disregard for Black women’s and girls’ bodies, historically it consigned Black people to separate, unequal systems of criminal justice. To begin with, enslaved Africans were subject to whatever punishments enslavers and overseers cared to dish out.

If enslaved or free Black people were involved in incidents that rose to the level of the local judiciary, most could not offer testimony against whites, rarely did they have counsel, and they were usually sent to separate “Negro Courts” like those adopted in Pennsylvania after enslavement was codified into law.

These “courts,” which would be made up of two justices of the peace and a handful of freeholders, were designed with the needs of white enslavers in mind—they could be called together quickly to hear cases to avoid depriving whites of their free laborers. The punishments were overwhelmingly corporal, as opposed to fines or indenture, and despite the nature of the origins, both enslaved and free Black people were tried in them.

Across the burgeoning country, Black people, whether enslaved or free, faced a biased and unequal justice system. Key bedrocks of American jurisprudence, such as a trial by one’s peers, were denied to Black people for centuries, as historian Nikki M. Taylor notes, “In fact, it was not until 1860 that the first African Americans were impaneled to serve on juries in the United States.”

Rape laws further cemented the racialized hierarchy by simultaneously placing Black women and girls in jeopardy while subjecting Black men to unequal discipline. Statutes that laid out specific, harsh punishments for the rape and attempted rape of white women and white girls also took pains to define the severity of the sentences in accordance with the race of the perpetrator. In Pennsylvania, for example, a Black man would face the gallows for rape, while a white man would be publicly whipped and subject to seven years of indentured service.

These same laws made no mention of any punishment at all for the rape or attempted rape of Black women or Black girls, by either white or Black men. As a consequence, Black men faced grave punishment even as Black women were deprived of legal redress altogether.

Lacking recourse in a legal system that operated wholly against them, enslaved women resisted extralegally. They damaged property, feigned illness, and took flight, and scores of enslaved women turned to arson or poisonings as they resigned to kill cruel enslavers. Some even targeted the enslavers’ kin. Such was the case of Cloe, an enslaved teenager executed in 1801 for murdering two of her enslaver’s three daughters in Carlisle, Pennsylvania.

By all accounts, the mistress of the house, Mary Carothers, was exceptionally brutal toward Cloe. She meted out vicious discipline for small infractions, and her daughters routinely informed on the girl, which led to more violent punishments.

Cloe drowned four-year-old Lucetta in a nearby creek in late January. When the child’s body was discovered, the assumption was that she had fallen victim to a tragic accident. It was not until the second death, that of six-year-old Polly, that Cloe’s actions would be uncovered. Cloe explained that almost immediately after the funeral for Lucetta, Mary “made me strip off my short-gown and gave me a severe whipping, with a cowskin.”

After that beating, Cloe was beaten again on Tuesday and again a few days later on Saturday. It was then that she decided to take “further revenge” on the family by murdering Polly.

Cloe’s case foregrounds enslaved women’s own sense of justice and the lengths to which some would go to enact violent retribution. Further, amid nearly insurmountable odds, they passed fierce lessons down through the generations.

Cornelia, a formerly enslaved Black woman in Tennessee, said as much when she recalled her own enslaved mother’s survival stance: “The one doctrine of my mother’s teaching which was branded upon my senses was that I should never let anyone abuse me. ‘I’ll kill you, gal, if you don’t stand up for yourself,’ she would say. ‘Fight, and if you can’t fight, kick; if you can’t kick, then bite.'”

Countless enslaved women adopted and practiced a similar credo, as historical accounts teem with details of their efforts to fend off rapes and other forms of sexual violence. This legacy of systemic lawlessness begets, in part, the history of Black women finding ways to defend themselves.

They paid the price for it too.

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Excerpted from Vengeance Feminism: The Power of Black Women’s Fury in Lawless Times by Kali Gross. Copyright © 2024. Available from Seal Press, an imprint of Hachette Book Group, Inc.