Sexual Violence and the Enslaved
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As it was elsewhere, sexual violence was a ubiquitous component of enslavement throughout the history of slavery in Virginia. Enslavers exercised almost complete control over the bodies of enslaved individuals and the conditions of their existence, providing themselves with numerous avenues for force and coercion in the intimate lives of the enslaved.
The plantation culture itself, with its strict hierarchy of white male authority, emboldened enslavers to demean and dominate those over which they held power. And the law provided enslaved people with no protection from sexual violence. The rape of an enslaved woman was not a crime under most state laws. In George v. State, the Supreme Court of Mississippi ruled in 1859 that a Black enslaved man could not be proud of raping an enslaved woman because it was only a crime to “commit a rape upon a white woman.”
Because of this absence of legal protection, historians lack an archive of legal cases to determine the extent of sexual violence against the enslaved and must rely on other evidence. For enslaved women in particular, slave narratives speak to the ubiquity and constant threat of sexual violence at the hands of enslavers, their family members, overseers, and others.
As Harriet Jacobs wrote, “My master was, to my knowledge, the father of eleven slaves. But did the mothers dare to tell who was the father of their children? Did the other slaves dare to allude to it, except in whispers among themselves? No, indeed! They knew too well the terrible consequences” (Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, 1861). Reverend Ishrael Massie, who was born into slavery in Emporia, remembered that enslavers and overseers would “[s]end husbands out on de farm, milkin’ cows or cuttin’ wood. Den he gits in bed wid slave himself. Some women would fight and tussle. Others would be ’umble—feared of dat beatin’.”
Elizabeth Keckly, who was born into slavery in the Piedmont region of Virginia and taken by her enslavers to North Carolina, told in her narrative Behind the Scenes: Or, Thirty Years a Slave and Four Years in the White House (1868) of being repeatedly raped by the son of a wealthy plantation owner who lived nearby; eventually she gave birth to son that he fathered.