1. Wilma King, Stolen Childhood: Slave Youth in Nineteenth-Century America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 110.
2. Daina Ramey Berry, “Swing the Sickle for the Harvest Is Ripe”: Gender and Slavery in Antebellum Georgia (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007); Martha Hodes, White Women, Black Men: Illicit Sex in the Nineteenth-Century South (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1999); Thelma Jennings, “‘Us Colored Women Had to Go Though A Plenty’: Sexual Exploitation of African-American Slave Women,” Journal of Women’s History 1, no. 3 (1990): 45–74; Brenda E. Stevenson, “What’s Love Got to Do with It? Concubinage and Enslaved Black Women and Girls in the Antebellum South,” Journal of African American History 98 (Winter 2013): 99–125; Deborah Gray White, Ar’n’t I a Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South, rev. ed. (1985; New York: W. W. Norton, 1999).
3. For one example, women’s sexual exploitation could lead to pregnancy and childbirth. See, for example, Cheryll Ann Cody, “Cycles of Work and of Childbearing: Seasonality in Women’s Lives on Low Country Plantations,” in More Than Chattel: Black Women and Slavery in the Americas, ed. David Barry Gaspar and Darlene Clark Hine (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 61–78.
4. On the abuse of enslaved women, see, for example, Stevenson, “What’s Love.” On slave narratives as a source that differently portrays women’s and men’s abuses, see Frances Foster, “‘In Respect to Females …’: Differences in the Portrayals of Women by Male and Female Narrators,” Black American Literature Forum 15 (Summer 1981): 66–70.
5. King, Stolen Childhood, 110.
6. Hodes, White Women, Black Men.
7. Berry, Swing the Sickle, 83.
8. bell hooks, Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism (1981; New York: Rout-ledge, 2015), 24.
9. Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 81.
10. Sasha Turner, Contested Bodies: Pregnancy, Childrearing, and Slavery in Jamaica (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017), 63–64.
11. Wilma King, for example, reminds us that sexual assault was both raced and gendered in early America. Wilma King, “‘Prematurely Knowing of Evil Things’: The Sexual Abuse of African American Girls and Young Women in Slavery and Freedom,” Journal of African American History 99, no. 3 (Summer 2014): 173–96.
12. Sharon Block, Rape and Sexual Power in Early America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006).
13. Estelle B. Freedman, Redefining Rape: Sexual Violence in the Era of Suffrage and Segregation (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2013), 3.
14. Block, Rape and Sexual Power, 2.
15. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 4.
16. Ibid., 80.
17. Block, Rape and Sexual Power, 2.
18. bell hooks, Ain’t I a Woman (Boston: South End Press, 1991), 20.
19. Rebecca Fraser, “Negotiating Their Manhood: Masculinity amongst the Enslaved in the Upper South, 1830–1861,” in Black and White Masculinity in the American South, 1800–2000, ed. Lydia Plath and Sergio Lussana (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009), 87.
20. David Doddington, “Informal Economies and Masculine Hierarchies in Slave Communities of the U.S. South, 1800–1865,” 2, in Gender and History File, 2015, http://orca.cf.ac.uk/74559/; David Stefan Doddington, Contesting Masculinity in the American South (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018).
21. Sergio Lussana, My Brother Slaves: Friendship, Masculinity, and Resistance in the Antebellum South (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2016); Lussana, “To See Who Was Best on the Plantation: Enslaved Fighting Contests and Masculinity in the Antebellum South,” Journal of Southern History 76, no. 4 (November 2010): 901–22; Lussana, “‘No Band of Brothers Could Be More Loving’: Enslaved Male Homosociality, Friendship, and Resistance in the Antebellum South,” Journal of Social History 46, no. 4 (Summer 2013): 872–95. On slavery and black masculinity, see also Edward Baptist, “The Absent Subject: African American Masculinity and Forced Migration to the Antebellum Plantation Frontier,” in Southern Manhood: Perspectives on Masculinity in the Old South, ed. Craig Thompson Friend and Lorri Glover (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2004), 136–73; Daniel P. Black, Dismantling Black Manhood: An Historical and Literary Analysis of the Legacy of Slavery (New York: Garland Publishing, 1997); Kathleen M. Brown, “‘Strength of the Lion … Arms Like Polished Iron’: Embodying Black Masculinity in an Age of Slavery and Propertied Manhood,” in New Men: Manliness in Early America, ed. Thomas A. Foster (New York: New York University Press, 2011), 172–94; Doddington, Contesting Masculinity; David Stefan Doddington, “Manhood, Sex, and Power in Antebellum Slave Communities,” in Sexuality and Slavery: Reclaiming Intimate Histories in the Americas, ed. Daina Ramey Berry and Leslie M. Harris (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2018), 148–58; Fraser, “Negotiating Their Manhood.”
22. Sarah N. Roth, “‘How a Slave Was Made a Man’: Negotiating Black Violence and Masculinity in Antebellum Slave Narratives,” Slavery and Abolition 28, no. 2 (August 2007): 255–75.
23. Gregory D. Smithers, Slave Breeding: Sex, Violence, and Memory in African American History (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2012), 103.
24. For a related argument, that in numerous instances throughout history “sexual violence [against men] was simply a form of warfare that aimed at complete subjugation of the enemy,” see Amalendu Misra, The Landscape of Silence: Sexual Violence against Men in War (London: Hurst & Company, 2015), 10.
25. Treva B. Lindsey and Jessica Marie Johnson, “Searching for Climax: Black Erotic Lives in Slavery and Freedom,” Meridians: feminism, race, transnationalism 12, no. 2 (2014): 187.
26. Amber Jamilla Musser has argued that “our understanding of pleasure” relies on “contemporary notions of individuality and personhood, which cannot be grafted onto the historical reality of slavery.” Amber Jamilla Musser, Sensational Flesh: Race, Power, and Masochism (New York: New York University Press, 2014), 165.
27. Hooks and others like Frances Smith Foster argue that healing comes from telling. Frances Smith Foster, ’Til Death or Distance Do Us Part: Love and Marriage in African America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 118, 132.
28. Ann Cvetkovich, An Archive of Feeling: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2003); David L. Eng and David Kazanjian, eds., Loss: The Politics of Mourning (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); Ron Eyerman, Cultural Trauma: Slavery and the Formation of African American Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Hartman, Scenes of Subjection; Dominick LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001); Kidada E. Williams, They Left Great Marks on Me: African American Testimonies of Racial Violence from Emancipation to World War I (New York: New York University Press, 2012). Thanks to Leslie Harris for introducing me to this literature.
1. Kathleen M. Brown, “‘Strength of the Lion … Arms Like Polished Iron’: Embodying Black Masculinity in an Age of Slavery and Propertied Manhood,” in New Men: Manliness in Early America, ed. Thomas A. Foster (New York: New York University Press, 2011), 173.
2. Richard Brilliant, Portraiture (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991), 35; Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby, Extremities: Painting Empire in Post-revolutionary France (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2002), 55; Helen D. Weston, “Representing the Right to Present: The ‘Portrait of Citizen Belley, Ex-Representative of the Colonies’ by A.-L. Girodet,” RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics 26 (Autumn 1994): 83–99.
3. John Saillant, “The Black Body Erotic and the Republican Body Politic,” in Long before Stonewall: Histories of Same-Sex Sexuality in Early America, ed. Thomas A. Foster (New York: New York University Press, 2007), 314.
4. Colored American, October 5, 1839, http://www.accessible-archives.com/.
5. North Star, November 17, 1848, http://www.accessible-archives.com/.
6. Frederick Douglass’ Paper, June 30, 1854, 1, http://www.accessible-archives.com/.
7. Sergio Lussana, “‘To See Who Was Best on the Plantation’: Enslaved Fighting Contests and Masculinity in the Antebellum Plantation South,” Journal of Southern History 76, no. 4 (November 2010): 901–22; Lussana, My Brother Slaves: Friendship, Masculinity, and Resistance in the Antebellum South (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2016).
8. John Andrew Jackson, The Experience of a Slave in South Carolina (London, 1862), 29, http://docsouth.unc.edu/fpn/jackson/jackson.html.
9. Frederick Douglass, The Heroic Slave (Cleveland, 1853), 179, http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/douglass1853/douglass1853.html. See Brown, “Strength of the Lion,” 189.
10. Henson and Smith quoted in Lussana, “To See Who Was Best,” 913–14.
11. Federal Writers’ Project: Slave Narrative Project, Vol. 14, South Carolina, Part 2, Eddington–Hunter, 1936, Manuscript / Mixed Material, https://www.loc.gov/item/mesn142/. See also Jeff Forret, Slave against Slave: Plantation Violence in the Old South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2015), 247–51.
12. Maurie D. McInnis, Slaves Waiting for Sale: Abolitionist Art and the American Slave Trade (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 208.
13. Edward E. Baptist, “‘Cuffy,’ ‘Fancy Maids,’ and ‘One-Eyed Men’: Rape, Com-modification, and the Domestic Slave Trade in the United States,” American Historical Review 106, no. 5 (2001): 1621–22. On the cultural development of the figure of the quadroon as sexual exotic other, see Emily Clark, The Strange History of the American Quadroon: Free Women of Color in the Revolutionary Atlantic World (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013); Sarah N. Roth, Gender and Race in Antebellum Popular Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 12–14.
14. Baptist, “Cuffy,” 1648.
15. Lewis Bourne Papers, Louisa County, 1825, Legislative Petitions Digital Collection, Library of Virginia, Richmond.
16. Lisa Ze Winters, “‘More Desultory and Unconnected Than Any Other’: Geography, Desire, and Freedom in Eliza Potter’s A Hairdresser’s Experience in High Life,” American Quarterly 61, no. 3 (September 2009): 467. For another example, see Armstrong V. Hodges, cited in Martha Hodes, White Women, Black Men: Illicit Sex in the Nineteenth-Century South (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1999).
17. Letters Received by the Office of the Adjutant General, M619, RG 94, NA, reel 201, National Archives, Washington, D.C.
18. Ibid.
19. Ibid.
20. Ibid.
21. John Andrew Jackson, The Experience of a Slave in South Carolina (London, 1862), 12, http://docsouth.unc.edu/fpn/jackson/jackson.html #123#.
22. L. A. Chamerovzow, ed., Slave Life in Georgia: A Narrative of the Life, Sufferings, and Escape of John Brown, a Fugitive Slave, Now in England (London, 1855), 11, http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/jbrown/jbrown.html.
23. Larry E. Hudson, To Have and to Hold: Slave Work and Family Life in Antebellum South Carolina (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1997), 131–32.
24. Richard S. Dunn, A Tale of Two Plantations: Slave Life and Labor in Jamaica and Virginia (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2014), 156.
25. These descriptions quoted in Dea H. Boster, African American Slavery and Disability: Bodies, Property, and Power in the Antebellum South, 1800–1860 (New York: Routledge, 2013), 39.
26. Drew Gilpin Faust, James Henry Hammond and the Old South: A Design for Mastery (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982), 72, 75–76, 81.
27. Richard S. Dunn, A Tale of Two Plantations: Slave Life and Labor in Jamaica and Virginia (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2014), 156–57.
28. I would like to thank Jenny Reynaerts (Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam) and other participants of the “Male Bonds in Nineteenth-Century Art” conference (Museum of Fine Arts, Ghent, Belgium, May 15–16, 2018) for their insights into the presence of the marble bust and the significance of the original title for the purposes of the catalog.
29. Richard Brilliant makes no mention of the genital outline but still concludes that the overall image is one that “reveals a prejudiced attitude” by its “relaxed pose, small head, and sloping profile,” all of which had “racial and ethnic” “negative implications.” Richard Brilliant, Portraiture (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991), 35. See also Helen D. Weston, “Representing the Right to Present: The ‘Portrait of Citizen Belley, Ex-Representative of the Colonies’ by A.-L. Girodet,” RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics 26 (Autumn 1994): 83–99; Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby, Extremities: Painting Empire in Post-revolutionary France (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2002), 55. On Edward W. Clay’s antebellum depictions of black male sexuality as “masterful and potent, lacking in inhibition,” see Roth, Gender and Race, 70. On fetishizing black male bodies via a racist gaze, see Maurice O. Wallace, Constructing the Black Masculine: Identity and Ideality in African American Men’s Literature and Culture, 1775–1995 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002), chap. 1.
30. Philip D. Morgan, Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 398–99.
31. William Seals Brown, Courtesy of © John B. Cade Slave Narratives Collection, box 1, Location Indian Territory, folder 024, Archives and Manuscripts Department, John B. Cade Library, Southern University and A&M College, Baton Rouge, Louisiana, http://star.lib.subr.edu/starweb/l.skca-catalog/servlet.starweb?path=l.skca-catalog/skcacatalog.web.
32. Chamerovzow, Slave Life in Georgia, 4–5, http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/jbrown/jbrown.html.
33. Stephanie M. H. Camp, “The Pleasures of Resistance: Enslaved Women and Body Politics in the Plantation South, 1830–1861,” Journal of Southern History 68 (August 2002): 559.
34. Quoted in [François-Jean,] Marquis de Chastellux, Travels in North America in the Years 1780, 1781, and 1782 (London, 1787), 83, http://books.google.com/books/about/Travels_in_North_America_in_the_years_17.html?id=tPT0MGiYPn4C. See also Kirsten Fischer, Suspect Relations: Sex, Race, and Resistance in Colonial North Carolina (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2002), 163.
35. Winthrop Jordan, White over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro, 1550–1812 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the Institute of Early American History and Culture, 1968), 34–35.
36. Land Records (Deeds and Wills), 1677–92, part 1, c, Henrico County Microfilm Collection, reel 4, pp. 192–96, account of the Katherine Watkins case, Library of Virginia County and City Records, Richmond, microfilm. See also Warren M. Billings, ed., The Old Dominion in the Seventeenth Century: A Documentary History of Virginia, 1606–1689 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1975), 161–63; Mechal Sobel, The World They Made Together: Black and White Values in Eighteenth-Century Virginia (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1987), 149.
37. Military journal of Lt. William Feltman, June 22, 1781, Historical Society of Pennsylvania, as quoted in Jordan, White over Black, 159. Jordan notes that the passage was not included in the 1853 published version of the journal.
38. Charles White, An Account of the Regular Gradation in Man (London, 1799), 61, https://archive.org/details/b24924507. See Craig Steven Wilder, Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America’s Universities (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013), 209.
39. Amber Jamilla Musser, Sensational Flesh: Race, Power, and Masochism (New York: New York University Press, 2014), 49.
40. Chamerovzow, Slave Life in Georgia, 4–5, http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/jbrown/jbrown.html.
41. Inspection and Sale of a Negro (New York, 1854, reproduced between 1960 and 1980), http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/98510180/.
42. See McInnis, Slaves Waiting, 127–30.
43. Art and Picture Collection, New York Public Library, Dealers Inspecting a Negro at a Slave Auction in Virginia, New York Public Library Digital Collections, http://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47e1-4092-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99.
44. National Era, March 17, 1859, 1, http://www.accessible-archives.com/.
45. Gilberto Freyre, The Masters and the Slaves: A Study in the Development of Brazilian Civilization, trans. Samuel Putnam, abridged from the revised edition (1946; New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1956), 379–80.
46. Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul: Life inside the Antebellum Slave Market (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000), 144–45.
47. Jones, “Contesting the Boundaries,” 223; Hilary McD. Beckles, “White Women and Slavery in the Caribbean,” History Workshop Journal 36 (Autumn 1993): 68.
48. Thomas Johns, in Federal Writers’ Project: Slave Narrative Project, Vol. 16, Texas, Part 2, Easter–King, 1936, Manuscript / Mixed Material, https://www.loc.gov/item/mesn162/.
49. Isaac Williams account in A North-Side View of Slavery, ed. Benjamin Drew (Boston, 1856), 59–60, http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/drew/drew.html.
50. McInnis, Slaves Waiting, 127; [G. H. Andrews], “Slave Auctions in Richmond, Virginia,” Illustrated London News, February 16, 1861, 138, http://cdm15942.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/ref/collection/p15942coll18/id/15. See also Gerald G. Eggert, “A Pennsylvanian Visits a Richmond Slave Market,” Notes & Documents, Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 109, no. 4 (October 1985): 571–76.
51. William Benemann, Male-Male Intimacy in Early America: Beyond Romantic Friendships (New York: Harrington Park, 2006), 68–69; Colette Colligan, “Anti-Abolition Writes Obscenity: The English Vice, Transatlantic Slavery, and England’s Obscene Print Culture,” in International Exposure: Perspectives on Modern Pornography, 1800–2000, ed. Lisa Z. Sigel (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2005), 67–99.
52. Karen Halttunen, “Humanitarianism and the Pornography of Pain in Anglo-American Culture,” American Historical Review 100, no. 2 (April 1995): 325. On “white fantasies of black lives and suffering,” see Marcus Wood, Slavery, Empathy, and Pornography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), quote from 21.
53. McInnis, Slaves Waiting, 128–30.
54. Charles Ball, Fifty Years in Chains; or, The Life of an American Slave (Indianapolis, 1859), 86–88, http://docsouth.unc.edu/fpn/ball/ball.html.
55. Henry Banks in Drew, North-Side View, 73–76.
56. Solomon Northrup, Twelve Years a Slave (London, 1853), 44, http://docsouth.unc.edu/fpn/northup/northup.html.
57. Henry Bibb, Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, an American Slave, Written by Himself (New York, 1849), 13–15, http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/bibb/bibb.html. See also Clifton, “Rereading Voices,” 356.
58. A Narrative of the Adventures and Escape of Moses Roper, from American Slavery (Philadelphia, 1838), 42, http://docsouth.unc.edu/fpn/roper/roper.html.
59. Jonathan Plummer, “Dying Confession of POMP” (Newburyport, Mass., 1795), http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/pomp/pomp.html.
60. Bibb, Narrative, 132, http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/bibb/bibb.html.
61. Chamerovzow, Slave Life in Georgia, 62–63, http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/jbrown/jbrown.html.
62. Bibb, Narrative, 132, http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/bibb/bibb.html.
63. The Light and the Truth of Slavery, Aaron’s History (Worcester, Mass., [1845]), 29, http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/aaron/aaron.html.
64. John Andrew Jackson, The Experience of a Slave in South Carolina (London, 1862), 32, http://docsouth.unc.edu/fpn/jackson/jackson.html.
65. Star (Raleigh, N.C.), October 13, 1815, 3, http://www.accessible-archives.com/.
66. Dunn, Two Plantations, 150.
67. Bibb, Narrative, 103–5, http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/bibb/bibb.html.
68. Chamerovzow, Slave Life in Georgia, 62–63, http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/jbrown/jbrown.html.
69. Baltimore city register of wills (petitions), Martin v. Johnson (1862), MSA t621-184, Maryland State Archives, Annapolis.
70. Plummer, “Dying Confession of POMP,” http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/pomp/pomp.html.
71. City Gazette (Charleston, S.C.), September 3, 1812, 3.
72. Henry Banks in Drew, North-Side View, 73–76; see also The Light and the Truth of History: Aaron’s History (Worcester, Mass., 1845), 29, http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/aaron/aaron.html; and Chamerovzow, Slave Life in Georgia, 39, http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/jbrown/jbrown.html.
73. Gordon as he entered our lines. Gordon under medical inspection. Gordon in his uniform as a U.S. soldier (1863), http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/89716298.
74. City Gazette, September 3, 1812, 3, http://www.accessible-archives.com/.
75. Sharon Block, Colonial Complexions: Race and Bodies in Eighteenth-Century America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018), 110, 135–36.
76. Chamerovzow, Slave Life in Georgia, 62, http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/jbrown/jbrown.html.
77. Boston News-Letter, March 3, 1718. See Foster, Sex, 152.
78. SS XVIII, box 1, Magistrates and Freeholders Court, Secretary of State Collection, series 18, box 1, State Archives of North Carolina, Raleigh, Courtesy of the State Archives of North Carolina. See also Fischer, Suspect Relations, 185.
79. Freyre, Masters and the Slaves, 353.
80. Testimony of Dr. Jackson, M.D., in Lambert, House of Commons Sessional Papers, 82:56. See Marisa J. Fuentes, Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), 135.
81. Elaine Forman Crane, Witches, Wife Beaters, and Whores: Common Law and Common Folk in Early America (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2011), 138–39, on Cuff’s case, see chapter 4; Boston Post-Boy, June 18, 1744, image of ad reproduced on page 139 of Crane.
82. Judith K. Schafer, “Sexual Cruelty to Slaves: The Unreported Case of Humphreys v. Utz,” in “Symposium on the Law of Slavery: Criminal and Civil Law of Slavery,” special issue, Chicago-Kent Law Review 68 (1992): 1515, 1313, http://scholarship.kentlaw.iit.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2910&context=cklawreview.
83. S. H. Melcher to Lieut. J. F. Alden, January 16, 1866, Registered Letters Received, series 3379, TN Assistant Commissioner Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, Abandoned Lands, RG 105, National Archives, Washington, D.C. I first encountered this case as “Affidavit of a Tennessee Freedman” (September 13, 1865), Freedmen & Southern Society Project, http://www.freedmen.umd.edu/Vaughn.html.
84. Maude H. Woodfin, ed., and Marion Tinling, trans., Another Secret Diary of William Byrd of Westover, 1739–1741 (Richmond: Dietz Press, 1942), 123; Louis B. Wright and Marion Tinling, eds., The Secret Diary of William Byrd of Westover, 1709–1712 (Richmond: Dietz Press, 1941), 113.
85. January 28, May 26, July 23, July 30, 1756, in In Miserable Slavery: Thomas Thistle-wood in Jamaica, 1750–86, ed. Douglas Hall (London: Macmillan, 1992), 72–73.
86. Melcher to Alden, January 16, 1866. See also “Affidavit of a Tennessee Freedman” (1865), http://www.freedmen.umd.edu/Vaughn.html.
87. Stewart case, Richmond County, divorces for surname “S,” State Archives of North Carolina, Raleigh, Courtesy of the State Archives of North Carolina.
88. Chancery book, 1839–41, 364, Shelby County Historical Society, Columbiana, Ala.
89. Governor and Council (Pardon Papers) Petitions for William Holland, March 1787, box 4, folder 47, 02/46/01/003, S1061-3, Maryland State Archives, Annapolis. See Sharon Block, Rape and Sexual Power in Early America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 85.
90. National Era, August 4, 1853, http://www.accessible-archives.com/.
91. Winthrop D. Jordan, White over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro, 1550–1812 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968), 151.
92. See, for example, Leslie Harris, “From Abolitionist Amalgamators to ‘Rulers of the Five Points’: The Discourse of Interracial Sex and Reform in Antebellum New York City,” in Sex, Love, Race: Crossing Boundaries in North American History, ed. Martha Hodes (New York: New York University Press, 1999), 191–212.
1. John W. Lewis, The Life, Labors, and Travels of Elder Charles Bowles, of the Free Will Baptist Denomination (Watertown: Ingalls & Stowell’s Steam Press, 1852), 194–95, http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/lewisjw/lewisjw.html. I use “autonomy” as a personal ideal of enslaved men. On the term as a political ideal and “not an analytical tool” for historians of slavery, see Anthony E. Kaye, “The Problem of Autonomy: Toward a Political History,” in New Directions in Slavery Studies: Commodification, Community, and Comparison, ed. Jeff Forret and Christine E. Sears (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2015), 164.
2. On black masculinity and varieties of norms and ideals, see, for example, Edward E. Baptist, “The Absent Subject: African American Masculinity and Forced Migration to the Antebellum Plantation Frontier,” in Southern Manhood: Perspectives on Masculinity in the Old South, ed. Craig Thompson Friend and Lorri Glover (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2004), 136–73; Kathleen Brown, “‘Strength of the Lion … Arms Like Polished Iron’: Embodying Black Masculinity in an Age of Slavery and Propertied Manhood,” in New Men: Manliness in Early America, ed. Thomas A. Foster (New York: New York University Press, 2011), 172–94; and Sergio Lussana, “‘To See Who Was Best on the Plantation’: Enslaved Fighting Contests and Masculinity in the Antebellum Plantation South,” Journal of Southern History 76, no. 4 (November 2010): 901–22. On white southern manhood and romantic love, see, for example, Stephen W. Berry II, All That Makes a Man: Love and Ambition in the Civil War South (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).
3. Daniel P. Black, Dismantling Black Manhood: An Historical and Literary Analysis of the Legacy of Slavery (New York: Garland Publishing, 1997), esp. chap. 5.
4. Tera W. Hunter, Bound in Wedlock: Slave and Free Black Marriage in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2017), 20. On marital discord, see, for example, Randy M. Browne, Surviving Slavery in the British Caribbean (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017), chap. 4.
5. Kenneth E. Marshall, Manhood Enslaved: Bondmen in Eighteenth- and Early Nineteenth-Century New Jersey (Rochester, N.Y.: University of Rochester Press, 2011).
6. Many masters articulated what they saw as their Christian responsibility for the morality of those they enslaved. See, for example, Rebecca Fraser, Courtship and Love among the Enslaved in North Carolina (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2007), 41–45.
7. Although marriage was often written about as a manly right denied them by slavery, monogamy should not be conflated with marriage. Some enslaved men also practiced polygyny. Historian Terri Snyder speculates that some men may have seen it as their masculine entitlement to engage in the African practice of polygyny. Richard Dunn in his study of a Virginian plantation noted that among eighteenth-century Moravian missionaries it was “frequently reported” that enslaved men had multiple wives, engaging in polygyny. In her study of James Henry Hammond’s enslaved people, Drew Faust found that monogamy was the norm among enslaved men and women but that some men did have multiple wives. Enslaved men, especially in the eighteenth century, might have followed West African courtship rituals and those infused with a variety of African traditions. See Richard S. Dunn, A Tale of Two Plantations: Slave Life and Labor in Jamaica and Virginia (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2014), 158; Drew Gilpin Faust, James Henry Hammond and the Old South: A Design for Mastery (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982), 84; Terri L. Snyder, The Power to Die: Slavery and Suicide in British North America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 78; James H. Sweet, “Defying Social Death: The Multiple Configurations of African Slavery in the Atlantic World,” William and Mary Quarterly 70, no. 2 (April 2013): 251–72; Sweet, Recreating Africa: Culture, Kinship, and Religion in the African-Portuguese World (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003); Emily West, Chains of Love: Slave Couples in Antebellum South Carolina (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004), 19–42.
8. Warren M. Billings, ed., The Old Dominion in the Seventeenth Century: A Documentary History of Virginia, 1606–1689 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1975), 161.
9. Suffolk County Court General Sessions, 1705, Massachusetts State Archives, Boston, cited in Thomas A. Foster, Sex and the Eighteenth-Century Man: Massachusetts and the History of Sexuality in America (Boston: Beacon Press, 2006), 145–46.
10. Ibid.
11. Rebecca Griffin, “Courtship Contests and the Meaning of Conflict in the Folklore of Slaves,” Journal of Southern History 71, no. 4 (November 2005): 798–99.
12. Stephanie M. H. Camp, “The Pleasures of Resistance: Enslaved Women and Body Politics in the Plantation South, 1830–1861,” Journal of Southern History 68 (August 2002): 540, 534. See also Camp, Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004).
13. Quoted in Rebecca J. Griffin, “‘Goin’ Back Over There to See That Girl’: Competing Social Spaces in the Lives of the Enslaved in Antebellum North Carolina,” Slavery and Abolition 25, no. 1 (April 2004): 107.
14. Ibid., 109. Stephanie Camp shows that socializing and dancing were part of an autonomous world of slave courtship and heterosocializing. Camp, “The Pleasures of Resistance.”
15. Herbert G. Gutman, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750–1925 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1976), 351; Roi Ottley and W. J. Weatherby, eds., The Negro in New York: An Informal Social History (New York: New York Public Library, 1967), 1–8.
16. Gutman, The Black Family, 350; Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 5th series, III (1877): 432–37. See also John Wood Sweet, Bodies Politic: Negotiating Race in the American North, 1730–1830 (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 157–58; Foster, Sex, 20–21; Hunter, Bound in Wedlock, 66–67.
17. Freedom’s Journal, April 6, 1827, 1, https://web.archive.org/web/20150211175514/ http://www.wisconsinhistory.org/pdfs/la/FreedomsJournal/v1n04.pdf.
18. Hunter, Bound in Wedlock, 34.
19. Brenda E. Stevenson, Life in Black and White: Family and Community in the Slave South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 231.
20. Henry Bibb, Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, an American Slave, Written by Himself (New York, 1849), 192, http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/bibb/bibb.html.
21. On The Hunted Slaves, see Maurie D. McInnis, Slaves Waiting for Sale: Abolitionist Art and the American Slave Trade (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 204–9.
22. Charles Stearns, Narrative of Henry Fox Brown, Who Escaped from Slavery Enclosed in a Box 3 Feet Long and 2 Wide. Written from a Statement of Facts Made by Himself (Boston: Brown & Stearns, 1849), 22–23, http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/boxbrown/boxbrown.html.
23. Daina Ramey Berry, “Swing the Sickle for the Harvest Is Ripe”: Gender and Slavery in Antebellum Georgia (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010), 77. On the importance of family units for enslaved people, see Frances Smith Foster, ’Til Death or Distance Do Us Part: Love and Marriage in African America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010); Rebecca Fraser, Courtship and Love among the Enslaved in North Carolina (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2007); Larry E. Hudson, To Have and to Hold: Slave Work and Family Life in Antebellum South Carolina (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1997), esp. chap. 4, 141–76; Tera W. Hunter, Bound in Wedlock: Slave and Free Black Marriage in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2017); West, Chains of Love.
24. Berry, Swing the Sickle, 81, quoting from Albert, The House of Bondage (1890), 108.
25. George P. Rawick, ed., The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1972–79), vol. 7, 161.
26. Hall, In Miserable Slavery, 205, 296–97.
27. Rosa Starke, in Federal Writers’ Project: Slave Narrative Project, Vol. 14, South Carolina, Part 1, Abrams–Durant, 148, 1936, Manuscript / Mixed Material, https://www.loc.gov/item/mesn141/.
28. Charles Ball, Fifty Years in Chains; or, The Life of an American Slave (New York, 1869), 28–29, http://docsouth.unc.edu/fpn/ball/ball.html.
29. December 11 and 14, 1774, and December 6, 1777, in Hall, In Miserable Slavery, 205, 253.
30. L. A. Chamerovzow, ed., Slave Life in Georgia: A Narrative of the Life, Sufferings, and Escape of John Brown, a Fugitive Slave, Now in England (London, 1855), 62–63, http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/jbrown/jbrown.html.
31. William Byrd, February 22, 1709, June 17, 1710, May 22, 1712, all in Documenting Intimate Matters: Primary Sources for a History of Sexuality in America, ed. Thomas A. Foster (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 19–21.
32. Thistlewood, March 16, 1752, in Hall, In Miserable Slavery, 44.
33. Drew Gilpin Faust, James Henry Hammond and the Old South: A Design for Mastery (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982), 85.
34. Bibb, Narrative, 36–37, http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/bibb/bibb.html.
35. Heather Andrea Williams, Help Me to Find My People: The African American Search for Family Lost in Slavery (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012), 57.
36. James Mellon, ed., Bullwhip Days: The Slaves Remember (New York: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1988), 296.
37. Ambrose Douglass, in Federal Writers’ Project: Slave Narrative Project, Vol. 3, Florida, Anderson–Wilson with Combined Interviews of Others, 101, 1936, Manuscript / Mixed Material, https://www.loc.gov/item/mesn030/.
38. John Andrew Jackson, The Experience of a Slave in South Carolina (London: Passmore & Alabaster, 1862), 21–22, http://docsouth.unc.edu/fpn/jackson/jackson.html.
39. Ibid., 29–30.
40. Ibid., 29.
41. Chamerovzow, Slave Life in Georgia, 37–38, http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/jbrown/jbrown.html.
42. Ibid., 38–39.
43. Ibid., 39.
44. Ibid., 40.
45. Ibid., 40–41.
46. Ibid., 43.
47. Foster, Sex, 21–22.
48. Bibb, Narrative, 40, http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/bibb/bibb.html.
49. May 6, 1771, in Hall, In Miserable Slavery, 181–82.
50. Hunter, Bound in Wedlock, 23.
51. Black, Dismantling Black Manhood, 169.
52. Camp, Closer to Freedom, 37, 45, 123.
53. Jackson, The Experience, 29–30.
54. Snyder, Power to Die, 131.
55. The Dying Negro, a Poem (London, 1775), http://www.brycchancarey.com/slavery/dying.htm.
56. Snyder, The Power to Die, 52, quote at 78.
57. William Wells Brown, Narrative of William W. Brown (Boston, 1847), 85–86, http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/brown47/brown47.html.
58. Ibid., 86–87.
59. Ibid., 87.
60. Ibid., 88.
61. Ibid.
1. Ambrose Douglass, in Federal Writers’ Project: Slave Narrative Project, Vol. 3, Florida, Anderson–Wilson with Combined Interviews of Others, 101, 1936, Manuscript / Mixed Material, https://www.loc.gov/item/mesn030/.
2. Richard Sutch, “The Breeding of Slaves for Sale and the Westward Expansion of Slavery, 1850–1860,” in Race and Slavery in the Western Hemisphere: Quantitative Studies, ed. Stanley L. Engerman and Eugene D. Genovese (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1975), 173–210.
3. Sutch, “The Breeding of Slaves,” 191.
4. Robert William Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman, Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1974), 78–79.
5. Richard G. Lowe and Randolph B. Campbell, “The Slave-Breeding Hypothesis: A Demographic Comment on the ‘Buying’ and ‘Selling’ States,” Journal of Southern History 42 (August 1976): 401–12.
6. David Lowenthal and Colin G. Clarke, “Slave-Breeding in Barbuda: The Past of a Negro Myth,” in Comparative Perspectives on Slavery in New World Plantation Societies, ed. Vera Rubin and Arthur Tuden (New York: New York Academy of Sciences, 1977), 510–35.
7. Richard S. Dunn, A Tale of Two Plantations: Slave Life and Labor in Jamaica and Virginia (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2014), 311.
8. Even scholars who examine the implications of the practice generally conclude it was rare: “Not many planters tried to breed slaves through forced pairings” and “forced pairings were uncommon,” concludes Marie Jenkins Schwartz, Birthing a Slave: Motherhood and Medicine in the Antebellum South (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006), 25, 22.
9. One recent nonacademic book takes slave breeding as central to slavery, thus virtually renaming the institution the “slave-breeding industry”: “Every farm where the enslaved had children was a slave-breeding farm, if only because every newborn slave child increased an estate’s net worth.” Ned and Constance Sublette, The American Slave Coast: A History of the Slave-Breeding Industry (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2016), xiii, 31. See also the collection of WPA interviews compiled by Donna Wyant Howell, I Was a Slave: Book 4: The Breeding of Slaves (Washington, D.C.: American Legacy Books, 1996), which contains several examples of “male breeders.”
10. Fogel and Engerman, Time on the Cross, 127.
11. Jones, Labor of Love, 34.
12. Schwartz, Birthing a Slave, 10. See also bell hooks, Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism (1981; New York: Routledge, 2015); Jacqueline Jones, Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work, and the Family from Slavery to the Present (New York: Basic Books, 1985), 11–43; Sasha Turner, Contested Bodies: Pregnancy, Childrearing, and Slavery in Jamaica (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017), chap. 2.
13. His figures seem to undercount the total incidence, finding only seven examples of masters renting a man (or men) from another plantation and sixteen cases of masters using enslaved men to impregnate through visiting or polygamy, and he does not distinguish between men and women for other examples of forced pairing. He also conceded that “reticence” on the part of former slaves to speak openly about such trauma “likely … caused some underreporting” in the interviews. Paul D. Escott, Slavery Remembered: A Record of Twentieth-Century Slave Narratives (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1979), 45.
14. Gregory D. Smithers, Slave Breeding: Sex, Violence, and Memory in African American History (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2012). Other recent books also focus almost exclusively on enslaved women. See, for example, Eddie Donoghue, Black Breeding Machines: The Breeding of Negro Slaves in the Diaspora (Bloomington, Ind.: AuthorHouse, 2008). In a notable exception, Daina Berry examines how “forced breeding” affected “familial connections.” Berry notes that southern planters referred to slave breeding in agricultural journals, mentioning the same practices they engaged in with animals. “Reproductive abuse,” Berry argues, affected both men and women. Daina Ramey Berry, “Swing the Sickle for the Harvest Is Ripe”: Gender and Slavery in Antebellum Georgia (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007), 77, 79. Gregory D. Smithers’s examination of the memory of forced reproduction captures its larger, post-slavery significance, noting that since the nineteenth century “slave breeding became critical to historical explanations of the racial and sexual objectification of black bodies; of the distortion of ideals regarding gender roles between black men and black women; of the fragile nature of black family life; and of the need for African Americans to craft narratives that make sense of the brutal ways in which life can be conceived and snuffed out—for instance, through interracial rape and lynchings—in a racist society.” Smithers does an excellent examination of the meaning and resonance of terms like “stud,” “buck,” and “wench.” He concludes that slaves used the words as agricultural metaphors and sexualized terms of women, respectively, of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Smithers rightly notes that scholars “define slave breeding in much narrower terms” than he does, leading to their conclusions that it did not occur. Smithers, Slave Breeding, 10, 3.
15. Smithers, Slave Breeding, 103.
16. West, Chains of Love, 26.
17. Isaac Williams, Sunshine and Shadow of Slave Life (East Saginaw, Mich., 1885), 6, http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/iwilliams/iwilliams.html.
18. Jennifer L. Morgan, Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 83.
19. John W. Blassingame, The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South, rev. and enlarged ed. (1972; New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 151.
20. Thelma Jennings, “‘Us Colored Women Had to Go Though A Plenty’: Sexual Exploitation of African-American Slave Women,” Journal of Women’s History 1, no. 3 (1990): 45–74, 46.
21. Ibid., 50. See also, for example, Berry, Swing the Sickle, 76–103.
22. Ida Blackshear Hutchinson, in Federal Writers’ Project: Slave Narrative Project, Vol. 2, Arkansas, Part 3, Gadson–Isom, 374, 1936, Manuscript / Mixed Material, https://www.loc.gov/item/mesn023/.
23. John Josselyn, An Account of Two Voyages to New England (Boston, 1638, 1865), 24, http://archive.org/details/accountoftwovoya00joss. On the woman’s “rape” by this enslaved man, see Wendy Anne Warren, “‘The Cause of Her Grief’: The Rape of a Slave in Early New England,” Journal of American History 93, no. 4 (March 2007): 1031–49.
24. Morgan, Laboring Women, 91, 100–101.
25. Planters’ manuals discussed the value in reproduction. See Practical Rules for the Management and Medical Treatment of Negro Slaves in the Sugar Colonies (London: J. Barfield, 1811; repr., Freeport, N.Y.: Books for Libraries, 1971), 9–10, 18, 131, 133 (“it is much cheaper to breed than to purchase” [131]).
26. See Steven Deyle, Carry Me Back: The Domestic Slave Trade in American Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 46–49. See also Stanley, “Slave Breeding.”
27. Thomas Weld, American Slavery as It Is: Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses (New York: American Anti-slavery Society, 1839), 182, http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/weld/weld.html #p182.
28. Ibid., 183.
29. Donoghue, Black Breeding, 347–48. See also Barbara Bush, “Hard Labor: Women, Childbirth, and Resistance in British Caribbean Slave Societies,” in More Than Chattel: Black Women and Slavery in the Americas, ed. David Barry Gaspar and Darlene Clark Hine (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 198–201.
30. William J. Anderson, Life and Narrative of William J. Anderson (Chicago, 1857), 24, https://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/andersonw/andersonw.html.
31. Henry Bibb, Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, an American Slave, Written by Himself (New York, 1849), 40, http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/bibb/bibb.html.
32. David W. Blight, ed., Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself, 2nd ed. (New York: Bedford, 2003), 82–83.
33. Quoted in Smithers, Slave Breeding, 11n29; Christopher Morris, Becoming Southern: The Evolution of a Way of Life, Warren County and Vicksburg, Mississippi, 1770–1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 71.
34. Octavia V. Rogers Albert, The House of Bondage or Charlotte Brooks and Other Slaves (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 107.
35. Tom Douglas, in Federal Writers’ Project: Slave Narrative Project, Vol. 2, Arkansas, Part 2, Cannon–Evans, 195, 1936, Manuscript / Mixed Material, https://www.loc.gov/item/mesn022/. See also numerous examples in Opinions Regarding Slavery, http://star.lib.subr.edu/star/findingaids/Opinions.xml, including Maria Carter, Georgia; Louis Williams, Louisiana; Henery Hickmon, Missouri; Mr. P. T. Harper, North Carolina; Mrs. Minnerva Handley, Texas; William Seals Brown, Indian Territory; David Walker, Kentucky, http://star.lib.subr.edu/starweb/l.skca-catalog/servlet.starweb?path=l.skca-catalog/skcacatalog.web#.
36. Federal Writers’ Project: Slave Narrative Project, Vol. 2, Arkansas, Part 5, McClendon–Prayer, 181, 1936, Manuscript / Mixed Material, https://www.loc.gov/item/mesn025/.
37. Willie Williams, in Federal Writers’ Project: Slave Narrative Project, Vol. 16, Texas, Part 4, Sanco–Young, 1936, Manuscript / Mixed Material, https://www.loc.gov/item/mesn164/. See also Willie Williams, in The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography, ed. George P. Rawick (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1972–79), Supplemental Series 2, vol. 10, pt. 9, p. 4158; Schwartz, Birthing a Slave, 24.
38. J. M. Parker, in Federal Writers’ Project: Slave Narrative Project, Vol. 2, Arkansas, Part 5, McClendon–Prayer, 243, 1936, Manuscript / Mixed Material, https://www.loc.gov/item/mesn025/.
39. Amsy O. Alexander, in Federal Writers’ Project: Slave Narrative Project, Vol. 2, Arkansas, Part 1, Abbott–Byrd, November–December 25, 1936, Manuscript / Mixed Material, https://www.loc.gov/item/mesn021/.
40. Ida Blackshear Hutchinson, in Federal Writers’ Project: Slave Narrative Project, Vol. 2, Arkansas, Part 3, Gadson–Isom, 370, 1936, Manuscript / Mixed Material, https://www.loc.gov/item/mesn023/.
41. Barney Stone, in Federal Writers’ Project: Slave Narrative Project, Vol. 5, Indiana, Arnold–Woodson, 186, 1936, Manuscript / Mixed Material, https://www.loc.gov/item/mesn050/.
42. Sarah Ford, in Federal Writers’ Project: Slave Narrative Project, Vol. 16, Texas, Part 2, Easter–King, 42, 1936, Manuscript / Mixed Material, https://www.loc.gov/item/mesn162/.
43. Carl F. Hall, in Federal Writers’ Project: Slave Narrative Project, Vol. 7, Kentucky, Bogie–Woods with Combined Interviews of Others, 72, 1936, Manuscript / Mixed Material, https://www.loc.gov/item/mesn070/.
44. Federal Writers’ Project: Slave Narrative Project, Vol. 2, Arkansas, Part 6, Quinn–Tuttle, 243, 1936, Manuscript / Mixed Material, https://www.loc.gov/item/mesn026/.
45. Ibid., 73.
46. Lulu Wilson, Federal Writers’ Project: Slave Narrative Project, Vol. 16, Texas, Part 4, Sanco–Young, 1936, Manuscript / Mixed Material, https://www.loc.gov/item/mesn164/. Similar interviews refer to “breeding” women as a type of enslaved person. See, for example, Josephine Howell, in Federal Writers’ Project: Slave Narrative Project, Vol. 2, Arkansas, Part 3, Gadson–Isom, 339, 1936, Manuscript / Mixed Material,http://www.loc.gov/item/mesn023/; Federal Writers’ Project: Slave Narrative Project, Vol. 2, Arkansas, Part 2, Cannon–Evans, 132, 1936, Manuscript / Mixed Material, https://www.loc.gov/item/mesn022/; Alice Wright, in Federal Writers’ Project: Slave Narrative Project, Vol. 2, Arkansas, Part 7, Vaden–Young, 246, 1936, Manuscript / Mixed Material, https://www.loc.gov/item/mesn027/.
47. See, for example, Robert W. Slenes, “Black Homes, White Homilies: Perceptions of the Slave Family and of Slave Women in Nineteenth-Century Brazil,” in More Than Chattel: Black Women and Slavery in the Americas, ed. David Barry Gaspar and Darlene Clark Hine (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 131.
48. Thomas Hall, in Rawick, The American Slave, North Carolina Narratives, vol. 14, pt. 1, p. 360.
49. James Mellon, ed., Bullwhip Days: The Slaves Remember (New York: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1988), 296.
50. Carl F. Hall, in Federal Writers’ Project: Slave Narrative Project, Vol. 7, Kentucky, Bogie–Woods with Combined Interviews of Others, 72, 1936, Manuscript / Mixed Material, https://www.loc.gov/item/mesn070/.
51. Katie Darling, in Federal Writers’ Project: Slave Narrative Project, Vol. 16, Texas, Part 1, Adams–Duhon, 279, 1936, Manuscript / Mixed Material, https://www.loc.gov/item/mesn161/.
52. Frances Anne Kemble, Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation in 1838–1839, ed. John A. Scott (London, 1863; Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1984), 95–96.
53. Eliza Jones, in Federal Writers’ Project: Slave Narrative Project, Vol. 2, Arkansas, Part 4, Jackson–Lynch, 143, 1936, Manuscript / Mixed Material, https://www.loc.gov/item/mesn024/.
54. Thomas Johns, in Federal Writers’ Project: Slave Narrative Project, Vol. 16, Texas, Part 2, Easter–King, 204, 1936, Manuscript / Mixed Material, https://www.loc.gov/item/mesn162/.
55. Willie McCullough, in Federal Writers’ Project: Slave Narrative Project, Vol. 11, North Carolina, Part 2, Jackson–Yellerday, 78, 1936, Manuscript / Mixed Material, https://www.loc.gov/item/mesn112/.
56. Sam Everett, in Federal Writers’ Project: Slave Narrative Project, Vol. 3, Florida, Anderson–Wilson with Combined Interviews of Others, 127, 1936, Manuscript / Mixed Material, https://www.loc.gov/item/mesn030/.
57. Dora Jerman, in Federal Writers’ Project: Slave Narrative Project, Vol. 2, Arkansas, Part 4, Jackson–Lynch, 50, 1936, Manuscript / Mixed Material, https://www.loc.gov/item/mesn024/.
58. Cornelia Andrews, in Rawick, The American Slave, North Carolina Narratives, vol. 14, pt. 1, p. 30.
59. Carl F. Hall, in Federal Writers’ Project: Slave Narrative Project, Vol. 7, Kentucky, Bogie–Woods with Combined Interviews of Others, 72, 1936, Manuscript / Mixed Material, https://www.loc.gov/item/mesn070/.
60. G. W. Hawkins, in Federal Writers’ Project: Slave Narrative Project, Vol. 2, Arkansas, Part 3, Gadson–Isom, 218, 1936, Manuscript / Mixed Material, https://www.loc.gov/item/mesn023/.
61. Julia Cole, in Federal Writers’ Project: Slave Narrative Project, Vol. 4, Georgia, Part 1, Adams–Furr, 228, 1936, Manuscript / Mixed Material, https://www.loc.gov/item/mesn041/.
62. John R. Cox, in Federal Writers’ Project: Slave Narrative Project, Vol. 7, Kentucky, Bogie–Woods with Combined Interviews of Others, 34, 1936, Manuscript / Mixed Material, https://www.loc.gov/item/mesn070/.
63. F. Roy Johnson, “A Sampling of Eastern Oral Folk Humor,” North Carolina Folklore Journal 23 (1975): 5, https://archive.org/stream/northcarolinafol2324nort/northcarolinafol2324nort_djvu.txt. See also Bill Cecil-Fronsman, Common Whites: Class and Culture in Antebellum North Carolina (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1992), 75.
64. Quoted in Charles L. Perdue Jr., Thomas E. Barden, and Robert K. Phillips, eds., Weevils in the Wheat: Interviews with Virginia Ex-slaves (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1976), 291.
65. Willie McCullough, in Federal Writers’ Project: Slave Narrative Project, Vol. 11, North Carolina, Part 2, Jackson–Yellerday, 82, 1936, Manuscript / Mixed Material, https://www.loc.gov/item/mesn112/. For other examples, see Bill Simms, Federal Writers’ Project: Slave Narrative Project, Vol. 6, Kansas, Holbert–Williams, 12, 1936, Manuscript / Mixed Material, https://www.loc.gov/item/mesn060/; Julia Malone, Federal Writers’ Project: Slave Narrative Project, Vol. 16, Texas, Part 3, Lewis–Ryles, 44, 1936, Manuscript / Mixed Material, https://www.loc.gov/item/mesn163/; William Mathews, Federal Writers’ Project: Slave Narrative Project, Vol. 16, Texas, Part 3, Lewis–Ryles, 69, 1936, Manuscript / Mixed Material, https://www.loc.gov/item/mesn163/.
66. Ida Blackshear Hutchinson, in Federal Writers’ Project: Slave Narrative Project, Vol. 2, Arkansas, Part 3, Gadson–Isom, 370, 1936, Manuscript / Mixed Material, https://www.loc.gov/item/mesn023/.
67. Jeptha Choice, in Federal Writers’ Project: Slave Narrative Project, Vol. 16, Texas, Part 1, Adams–Duhon, 218, 1936, Manuscript / Mixed Material, https://www.loc.gov/item/mesn161/.
68. Quoted in Jennings, “Us Colored Women,” 50.
69. Henry Nelson, in Federal Writers’ Project: Slave Narrative Project, Vol. 2, Arkansas, Part 5, McClendon–Prayer, 197, 1936, Manuscript / Mixed Material, https://www.loc.gov/item/mesn025/.
70. G. W. Hawkins, in Federal Writers’ Project: Slave Narrative Project, Vol. 2, Arkansas, Part 3, Gadson–Isom, 218, 1936, Manuscript / Mixed Material, https://www.loc.gov/item/mesn023/.
71. Fred Brown, in Federal Writers’ Project: Slave Narrative Project, Vol. 16, Texas, Part 1, Adams–Duhon, 158, 1936, Manuscript / Mixed Material, https://www.loc.gov/item/mesn161/.
72. Katie Darling, in ibid., 279.
73. Lulu Wilson, in Federal Writers’ Project: Slave Narrative Project, Vol. 16, Texas, Part 4, Sanco–Young, 1, 1936, Manuscript / Mixed Material, https://www.loc.gov/item/mesn164/. Similar interviews refer to “breeding” women as a type of enslaved person. See, for example, Josephine Howell, in Federal Writers’ Project: Slave Narrative Project, Vol. 2, Arkansas, Part 3, Gadson–Isom, 339, 1936, Manuscript / Mixed Material, https://www.loc.gov/item/mesn023/; Alice Wright, in Federal Writers’ Project: Slave Narrative Project, Vol. 2, Arkansas, Part 7, Vaden–Young, 246, 1936, Manuscript / Mixed Material, https://www.loc.gov/item/mesn027/.
74. Mary Reynolds, in Federal Writers’ Project: Slave Narrative Project, Vol. 16, Texas, Part 3, Lewis–Ryles, 236, 1936, Manuscript / Mixed Material, https://www.loc.gov/item/mesn163/.
75. Benjamin Russell, in Federal Writers’ Project: Slave Narrative Project, Vol. 14, South Carolina, Part 4, Raines–Young, 53, 1936, Manuscript / Mixed Material, https://www.loc.gov/item/mesn144/.
76. Bill Simms, Federal Writers’ Project: Slave Narrative Project, Vol. 6, Kansas, Holbert–Williams, 12, 1936, Manuscript / Mixed Material, https://www.loc.gov/item/mesn060/.
77. Ibid.
78. Thomas Johns, in Federal Writers’ Project: Slave Narrative Project, Vol. 16, Texas, Part 2, Easter–King, 203, 1936, Manuscript / Mixed Material, https://www.loc.gov/item/mesn162/.
79. Howell, I Was a Slave, 11.
80. Cornelia Andrews, in Rawick, The American Slave, North Carolina Narratives, vol. 14, pt. 1, p. 31.
81. Willie Williams, in Federal Writers’ Project: Slave Narrative Project, Vol. 16, Texas, Part 4, Sanco–Young, 1936, Manuscript / Mixed Material, https://www.loc.gov/item/mesn164/.
82. Irene Robertson, in Rawick, The American Slave, vol. 10, pt. 6, p. 223. See also Schwartz, Birthing a Slave, 24.
83. Jones, “Contesting the Boundaries,” 223; Hilary McD. Beckles, “White Women and Slavery in the Caribbean,” History Workshop Journal 36 (Autumn 1993): 68; Gilberto Freyre, The Masters and the Slaves: A Study in the Development of Brazilian Civilization, trans. Samuel Putnam, abridged from the revised edition (1946; New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1956), 379–80.
84. Henery Hickman, Courtesy of © John B. Cade Slave Narratives Collection, box 1, Location Missouri, folder 078, Archives and Manuscripts Department, John B. Cade Library, Southern University and A&M College, Baton Rouge, Louisiana, http://star.lib.subr.edu/starweb/l.skca-catalog/servlet.starweb?path=l.skca-catalog/skcacatalog.web.
85. On slavery and childhood, see Wilma King, Stolen Childhood: Slave Youth in Nineteenth-Century America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995). See Rose Williams for an example of a sixteen-year-old girl being forcibly paired with an enslaved man.
86. Jordan Smith, in Federal Writers’ Project: Slave Narrative Project, Vol. 16, Texas, Part 4, Sanco–Young, 37–38, 1936, Manuscript / Mixed Material, https://www.loc.gov/item/mesn164/.
87. George Austin, in Rawick, The American Slave, Supplemental Series 2, vol. 2, pt. 1, pp. 105–6. See also Schwartz, Birthing a Slave, 24.
88. Fred Brown, in Federal Writers’ Project: Slave Narrative Project, Vol. 16, Texas, Part 1, Adams–Duhon, 158, 1936, Manuscript / Mixed Material, https://www.loc.gov/item/mesn161/.
89. J. W. Whitfield, in Federal Writers’ Project: Slave Narrative Project, Vol. 2, Arkansas, Part 7, Vaden–Young, 139, 1936, Manuscript / Mixed Material, https://www.loc.gov/item/mesn027/.
90. Ida Blackshear Hutchinson, in Federal Writers’ Project: Slave Narrative Project, Vol. 2, Arkansas, Part 3, Gadson–Isom, 374, 1936, Manuscript / Mixed Material, https://www.loc.gov/item/mesn023/.
91. Blassingame, The Slave Community; Frances Smith Foster, ’Til Death or Distance Do Us Part: Love and Marriage in African America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010); Herbert G. Gutman, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750–1925 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1976); Ann Patton Malone, Sweet Chariot: Slave Family and Household Structure in Nineteenth-Century Louisiana (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), 5, 14; Philip D. Morgan, Slave Counterpart: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 501; Emily West, Chains of Love: Slave Couples in Antebellum South Carolina (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004).
92. Malone, Sweet Chariot, 2.
93. West, Chains of Love, 39.
94. Stevenson, Life in Black and White, 212.
95. Blassingame, The Slave Community, 149–91.
96. Heather Andrea Williams, Help Me to Find My People: The African American Search for Family Lost in Slavery (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012), 32. On family bonds, see also Foster, ’Til Death; Gutman, The Black Family; and West, Chains of Love.
97. Williams, Help Me, 53, 55.
98. Gomez, Exchanging, 239, 40, 41.
99. Ibid., 50.
100. See, for example, Daniel P. Black, Dismantling Black Manhood: An Historical and Literary Analysis of the Legacy of Slavery (New York: Garland, 1997); Gutman, The Black Family.
101. Jacob Manson, in Federal Writers’ Project: Slave Narrative Project, Vol. 11, North Carolina, Part 2, Jackson–Yellerday, 98, 1936, Manuscript / Mixed Material, https://www.loc.gov/item/mesn112/.
102. Jennings, “Us Colored Women,” 51.
103. Willie Williams, in Federal Writers’ Project: Slave Narrative Project, Vol. 16, Texas, Part 4, Sanco–Young, 1936, Manuscript / Mixed Material, https://www.loc.gov/item/mesn164/.
104. George Austin, in Rawick, The American Slave, Supplemental Series 2, vol. 2, pt. 1, pp. 105–6. See also Schwartz, Birthing a Slave, 24.
105. Ida Blackshear Hutchinson, in Federal Writers’ Project: Slave Narrative Project, Vol. 2, Arkansas, Part 3, Gadson–Isom, 370, 1936, Manuscript / Mixed Material, https://www.loc.gov/item/mesn023/.
106. Lewis Jones, in Federal Writers’ Project: Slave Narrative Project, Vol. 16, Texas, Part 2, Easter–King, 237, 1936, Manuscript / Mixed Material, https://www.loc.gov/item/mesn162/.
107. Jeptha Choice, in Federal Writers’ Project: Slave Narrative Project, Vol. 16, Texas, Part 1, Adams–Duhon, 218, 1936, Manuscript / Mixed Material, https://www.loc.gov/item/mesn161/.
108. Quoted in Perdue, Barden, and Phillips, Weevils in the Wheat, 291.
109. Oscar Felix Junell, in Federal Writers’ Project: Slave Narrative Project, Vol. 2, Arkansas, Part 4, Jackson–Lynch, 174, 1936, Manuscript / Mixed Material, https://www.loc.gov/item/mesn024/.
110. Ida Blackshear Hutchinson, in Federal Writers’ Project: Slave Narrative Project, Vol. 2, Arkansas, Part 3, Gadson–Isom, 370, 1936, Manuscript / Mixed Material, https://www.loc.gov/item/mesn023/.
111. Willie Williams, in Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States from Interviews with Former Slaves, vol. 16, Texas Narratives, pt. 4, www.gutenberg.org.
112. George Austin, in Rawick, The American Slave, Supplemental Series 2, vol. 2, pt. 1, pp. 105–6. See also Schwartz, Birthing a Slave, 24.
113. Irene Robertson, in Rawick, The American Slave, vol. 10, pt. 6, p. 223. See also Schwartz, Birthing a Slave, 24.
114. Daina Ramey Berry, “Swing the Sickle for the Harvest Is Ripe”: Gender and Slavery in Antebellum Georgia (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007), 53, 60–61.
115. Emma Barr, in Federal Writers’ Project: Slave Narrative Project, Vol. 2, Arkansas, Part 1, Abbott–Byrd, November–December 1936, Manuscript / Mixed Material, http://www.loc.gov/item/mesn021/.
116. George Austin, in Rawick, The American Slave, Supplemental Series 2, vol. 2, pt. 1, pp. 105–6. See also Schwartz, Birthing a Slave, 24.
117. Irene Robertson, in Rawick, The American Slave, vol. 10, pt. 6, p. 223. See also Schwartz, Birthing a Slave, 24.
118. Julia Cole, in Federal Writers’ Project: Slave Narrative Project, Vol. 4, Georgia, Part 1, Adams–Furr, 228, 1936, Manuscript / Mixed Material, https://www.loc.gov/item/mesn041/.
119. George P. Rawick, ed., The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography, Texas Narratives, Supplemental Series 2, vol. 2, pt. 1 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1979), 309.
120. Barney Stone, in Federal Writers’ Project: Slave Narrative Project, Vol. 5, Indiana, Arnold–Woodson, 186, 1936, Manuscript / Mixed Material, https://www.loc.gov/item/mesn050/.
121. John R. Cox, in Federal Writers’ Project: Slave Narrative Project, Vol. 7, Kentucky, Bogie–Woods with Combined Interviews of Others, 34, 1936, Manuscript / Mixed Material, https://www.loc.gov/item/mesn070/.
122. Quoted in Perdue, Barden, and Phillips, Weevils in the Wheat, 291.
123. Sarah Ford, in Federal Writers’ Project: Slave Narrative Project, Vol. 16, Texas, Part 2, Easter–King, 42, 1936, Manuscript / Mixed Material, https://www.loc.gov/item/mesn162/. See also Betty Powers, in Federal Writers’ Project: Slave Narrative Project, Vol. 16, Texas, Part 3, Lewis–Ryles, 191–92, 1936, Manuscript / Mixed Material, https://www.loc.gov/item/mesn163/.
124. Thomas Johns, in Federal Writers’ Project: Slave Narrative Project, Vol. 16, Texas, Part 2, Easter–King, 203, 1936, Manuscript / Mixed Material, https://www.loc.gov/item/mesn162/.
125. G. W. Hawkins, in Federal Writers’ Project: Slave Narrative Project, Vol. 2, Arkansas, Part 3, Gadson–Isom, 218, 1936, Manuscript / Mixed Material, https://www.loc.gov/item/mesn023/.
126. Willie McCullough, in Federal Writers’ Project: Slave Narrative Project, Vol. 11, North Carolina, Part 2, Jackson–Yellerday, 1936, Manuscript / Mixed Material, https://www.loc.gov/item/mesn112/.
127. John Henry Kemp, in Federal Writers’ Project: Slave Narrative Project, Vol. 3, Florida, Anderson–Wilson with Combined Interviews of Others, 184–85, 1936, Manuscript / Mixed Material, https://www.loc.gov/item/mesn030/.
128. Sam and Louisa Everett, in Federal Writers’ Project: Slave Narrative Project, Vol. 3, Florida, Anderson–Wilson with Combined Interviews of Others, 127–28, 1936, Manuscript / Mixed Material, https://www.loc.gov/item/mesn030/.
129. Ibid.
130. Jacob Branch, in Federal Writers’ Project: Slave Narrative Project, Vol. 16, Texas, Part 1, Adams–Duhon, 137–38, 1936, Manuscript / Mixed Material, https://www.loc.gov/item/mesn161/.
131. Sam and Louisa Everett, in Federal Writers’ Project: Slave Narrative Project, Vol. 3, Florida, Anderson–Wilson with Combined Interviews of Others, 127–28, 1936, Manuscript / Mixed Material, https://www.loc.gov/item/mesn030/.
132. Rose Williams, in Federal Writers’ Project: Slave Narrative Project, Vol. 16, Texas, Part 4, Sanco–Young, 174–78, 1936, Manuscript / Mixed Material, https://www.loc.gov/item/mesn164/.
133. Wilma King, “‘Suffer with Them till Death’: Slave Women and Their Children in Nineteenth-Century America,” in More Than Chattel: Black Women and Slavery in the Americas, ed. David Barry Gaspar and Darlene Clark Hine (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 159.
134. Jennings, “Us Colored Women,” 49.
135. George P. Rawick, ed., The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1972–79), Supplemental Series 2, vol. 5, pt. 4, p. 1453.
136. Irene Robertson, in Rawick, The American Slave, vol. 10, pt. 6, p. 223. See also Schwartz, Birthing a Slave, 24.
137. Quoted in White, Ar’n’t I a Woman?, 156–57.
138. Ibid., 149.
139. Silvia King, in Federal Writers’ Project: Slave Narrative Project, Vol. 16, Texas, Part 2, Easter–King, 291, 1936, Manuscript / Mixed Material, https://www.loc.gov/item/mesn162/.
140. John Brickell, Natural History of North Carolina (Dublin, 1737), 274–75, http://books.google.com/books?id=p4c5AAAAcAAJ&printsec=frontcover&vq=fifth&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q=fifth&f=false. See Kirsten Fischer, Suspect Relations: Sex, Race, and Resistance in Colonial North Carolina (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2002), 165. See also Jennifer L. Morgan, Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 100.
141. Morgan, Laboring Women, 100.
142. James Mellon, ed., Bullwhip Days: The Slaves Remember (New York: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1988), 296.
143. Kemble, Journal of a Residence, 207.
144. Berry, Swing the Sickle, 81, quoting from Albert, The House of Bondage (1890), 108.
145. Sam and Louisa Everett, in Federal Writers’ Project: Slave Narrative Project, Vol. 3, Florida, Anderson–Wilson with Combined Interviews of Others, 127–28, 1936, Manuscript / Mixed Material, https://www.loc.gov/item/mesn030/.
146. See, for example, Rawick, The American Slave, Texas Narratives, Supplemental Series 2, vol. 8, pt. 7, p. 3332, and vol. 6, pt. 5, p. 1950; Smithers, Slave Breeding, 104, 108; Barney Stone, in Federal Writers’ Project: Slave Narrative Project, Vol. 5, Indiana, Arnold–Woodson, 186, 1936, Manuscript / Mixed Material, https://www.loc.gov/item/mesn050/; Julia Cole, in Federal Writers’ Project: Slave Narrative Project, Vol. 4, Georgia, Part 1, Adams–Furr, 228, 1936, Manuscript / Mixed Material, https://www.loc.gov/item/mesn041/.
1. Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women of the Old South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), 81.
2. See, for example, Thavolia Glymph, Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).
3. Cecily Jones, “Contesting the Boundaries of Gender, Race and Sexuality in Barbadian Plantation Society,” Women’s History Review 12, no. 2 (2003): 197.
4. Gilberto Freyre, The Masters and the Slaves: A Study in the Development of Brazilian Civilization, trans. Samuel Putnam, abridged from the revised edition (1946; New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1956), 351–52.
5. Jones, “Contesting the Boundaries,” 197.
6. Hilary McD. Beckles, “White Women and Slavery in the Caribbean,” History Workshop 36 (Autumn 1993): 72; Marisa J. Fuentes, Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016); Emily West with R. J. Knight, “Mother’s Milk: Slavery, Wet-Nursing, and Black and White Women in the Antebellum South,” Journal of Southern History 83, no. 1 (February 2017): 37–68. See also Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers, “Rethinking Sexual Violence and the Marketplace of Slavery: White Women, the Slave Market, and Enslaved People’s Sexualized Bodies in the Nineteenth-Century South,” in Sexuality and Slavery: Reclaiming Intimate Histories in the Americas, ed. Daina Ramey Berry and Leslie M. Harris (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2018), 109–23; Jones-Rogers, “‘[S]he Could … Spare One Ample Breast for the Profit of Her Owner’: White Mothers and Enslaved Wet Nurses’ Invisible Labor in American Slave Markets,” Slavery and Abolition 38, No. 2 (April 2017): 337–355.
7. Madison Hemings, “Life among the Lowly, No. 1,” Pike County (Ohio) Republican, March 13, 1873, https://www.encyclopediavirginia.org/media_player?mets_filename=evr6448mets.xml.
8. Eugene D. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York: Pantheon Books, 1974), 422.
9. Ibid.
10. Richard S. Dunn, Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies, 1624–1713 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the Institute of Early American History and Culture, 2000), 228.
11. Martha Hodes, White Women, Black Men: Illicit Sex in the Nineteenth-Century South (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1999), 19.
12. Hartwood Baptist Church, June 25, 1785, quoted in Philip D. Morgan, Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 402. Numerous examples can be found in James Hugo Johnston, Race Relations in Virginia and Miscegenation in the South, 1776–1860 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1970), 165–90.
13. Bill Cecil-Fronsman, Common Whites: Class and Culture in Antebellum North Carolina (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1992), 68.
14. Kathleen M. Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the Institute of Early American History and Culture, 1996), 197–99. There is a large body of work on sex between white men and enslaved women. See, for example, Sharony Green, Remember Me to Miss Louisa: Hidden Black-White Intimacies in Ante-bellum America (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2015).
15. Kirsten Fischer, Suspect Relations: Sex, Race, and Resistance in Colonial North Carolina (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2002), 123–24. See also Cecil-Fronsman, Common Whites, 71. On the higher execution rate of black men accused of rape than white in occupied Virginia during the Civil War, see E. Susan Barber and Charles F. Ritter, “‘Physical Abuse … and Rough Handling’: Race, Gender, and Justice in the Occupied South,” in Occupied Women: Gender, Military Occupation, and the American Civil War, ed. LeeAnn Whites and Alecia P. Long (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2009), 63.
16. Trevor Burnard, “‘A Matron in Rank, a Prostitute in Manners’: The Manning Divorce of 1741 and Class, Gender, Race and the Law in Eighteenth-Century Jamaica,” in Working Slavery, Pricing Freedom: Perspectives from the Caribbean, Africa and the African Diaspora, ed. Verene A. Shepherd (New York: Palgrave, 2002), 133–52.
17. A.F.C., “An Early Portuguese Trading Voyage to the Forcados River,” Journal of the Historical Society of Nigeria 1, no. 4 (December 1959): 298n1. See also C. R. Boxer, Race Relations in the Portuguese Colonial Empire, 1415–1825 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1963), 15.
18. Ira Berlin, “Time, Space, and Evolution of Afro-American Society on British Mainland North America,” American Historical Review 85 no. 1 (1980): 69.
19. Brown, Good Wives, 197–99.
20. Warren M. Billings, ed., The Old Dominion in the Seventeenth Century: A Documentary History of Virginia, 1606–1689 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1975), 163.
21. Mechal Sobel, The World They Made Together: Black and White Values in Eighteenth-Century Virginia (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1987), 149. See also Berlin, “Time, Space,” 69; Allan Kulikoff, Tobacco and Slaves: The Development of Southern Cultures in the Chesapeake, 1680–1800 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the Institute of Early American History and Culture), 387, 395–96.
22. Kulikoff, Tobacco and Slaves, 395.
23. Morgan, Slave Counterpoint, 400, emphasis added.
24. Kulikoff, Tobacco and Slaves, 386–87.
25. Ibid., 395; Maryland Gazette, October 12, 1769.
26. Glenda Riley, Divorce: An American Tradition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 35. Riley cites from George E. Howard, A History of Matrimonial Institutions, 3 vols. (Chicago, 1904), 2:32–35.
27. Riley, Divorce, 36.
28. Loren Schweninger, Families in Crisis in the Old South: Divorce, Slavery, and the Law (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012), 25.
29. Cecil-Fronsman, Common Whites, 91; Guion Griffis Johnson, Ante-bellum North Carolina: A Social History; Electronic Edition (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1937), 211, https://docsouth.unc.edu/nc/johnson/titlepage.html. We might question the validity of the claim. One formerly enslaved woman recalled that her master wanted her to claim that his wife “had black men,” but she refused, despite being brutally beaten. George Townsend, The Swamp Outlaws: Or the Lowery Bandits of North Carolina: Being a Complete History of the Modern Rob Roys and Robin Hoods (New York: Robert M. DeWitt Publisher, 1872), 27. Thanks to Seth Rockman and James Schuelke for sharing this case with me.
30. Thomas E. Buckley, S.J., The Great Catastrophe of My Life: Divorce in the Old Dominion (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 123. See also Joshua D. Rothman, Notorious in the Neighborhood: Sex and Families across the Color Line in Virginia, 1787–1861 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 170.
31. Riley, Divorce, 35.
32. Peter Neilson, Recollections of a Six Years Residence in the United States of America (Glasgow, 1830), 297. See Johnston, Race Relations, 264.
33. Henry Bibb, Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, an American Slave, Written by Himself (New York, 1849), 16, http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/bibb/bibb.html.
34. Land Records (Deeds and Wills), 1677–92, part 1, c, Henrico County Microfilm Collection, reel 4, pp. 192–96, account of the Katherine Watkins case, Library of Virginia County and City Records, Richmond, microfilm. See also Billings, Old Dominion, 161–63; and Sobel, The World They Made, 149.
35. [François-Jean,] Marquis de Chastellux, Travels in North America in the Years, 1780, 1781, and 1782 (London, 1787), 83, http://books.google.com/books/about/Travels_in_North_America_in_the_years_17.html?id=tPT0MGiYPn4C. See also Fischer, Suspect Relations, 163.
36. Jones, “Contesting the Boundaries,” 210. On the power imbalance inherent in slavery, see, for example, Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982).
37. Jones, “Contesting the Boundaries,” 223; Beckles, “White Women,” 68.
38. Burnard, Mastery, Tyranny and Desire, 216; see June 11, 1758, in In Miserable Slavery: Thomas Thistlewood in Jamaica, 1750–86, ed. Douglas Hall (London: Macmillan, 1992), 84.
39. Anne Batson v. John Fitchet and Wife Mary (1731), quoted in Morgan, Slave Counterpoint, 401–2.
40. Stephen Bordley to Matt Harris, Annapolis, Maryland, January 30, 1739, quoted in Jordan, White over Black, 154.
41. Maryland Gazette, October 12, 1769, https://msa.maryland.gov/megafile/msa/speccol/sc4800/sc4872/001281/html/m1281-0893.html.
42. Daily New Orleanian, February 12, 1852. See Robert C. Reinders, “Slavery in New Orleans in the Decade before the Civil War,” Mid-America: An Historical Journal 44 (1962): 219.
43. Divorce Graves, Montgomery County Divorce Records, 1848–1907, State Archives of North Carolina, Raleigh, Courtesy of the State Archives of North Carolina.
44. Kennedy Williams v. Mary Williams, 1858, Yadkin County Divorce Records, 1851–1931, State Archives of North Carolina, Raleigh, Courtesy of the State Archives of North Carolina.
45. Rhodias Riley v. Nancy Riley, 1858, Randolph County Divorce Records, 1804–1927, Presnell–York, State Archives of North Carolina, Raleigh, Courtesy of the State Archives of North Carolina.
46. Henry Shouse v. Ann Shouse, 1848, Stokes County Divorce Records, 1816–1941, State Archives of North Carolina, Raleigh, Courtesy of the State Archives of North Carolina.
47. William Hickman v. Nancy Hickman, 1832, Granville County Divorce Records, 1819–1895, 1914, State Archives of North Carolina, Raleigh, Courtesy of the State Archives of North Carolina.
48. Lewis Bourne Papers, Louisa County, 1825, Legislative Petitions Digital Collection, Library of Virginia, Richmond. See Hodes, White Women, Black Men, 68–95. Dianne Sommerville similarly finds that during slavery, the figure of the black rapist had not yet taken hold. On the varied legal reactions to rape cases involving black men and white women accusers, see Dianne Miller Sommerville, Rape and Race in the Nineteenth-Century South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004).
49. Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2001), 46; J. W. Lindsay interview, in Blassingame, Slave Testimony, 400–401.
50. Letters Received by the Office of the Adjutant General, M619, RG 94, NA, reel 201, National Archives, Washington, D.C. I first encountered the testimony in the AFIC records about white women and enslaved men in Hodes, White Women, Black Men, 128–29.
51. Ibid.
52. Ibid.
53. Brown, Good Wives, 239.
54. James Larrimore v. Catherine Larrimore, 1823, Stokes County Divorce Records, 1816–1941, State Archives of North Carolina, Raleigh, Courtesy of the State Archives of North Carolina.
55. Stephen and Mary Cole, Divorce “C,” Richmond County Divorce Records, 1816–1910, State Archives of North Carolina, Raleigh, Courtesy of the State Archives of North Carolina.
56. Betty Wood, “Servant Women and Sex in the Seventeenth-Century Chesapeake,” in Women in Early America, ed. Thomas A. Foster (New York: New York University Press, 2015), 111.
57. Brown, Good Wives, 209.
58. Sharon Block, Rape and Sexual Power in Early America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006). For other examples, see Thomas A. Foster, Sex and the Eighteenth-Century Man: Massachusetts and the History of Sexuality in America (Boston: Beacon Press, 2006), chap. 3; Terri L. Snyder, “Sexual Consent and Sexual Coercion in Seventeenth-Century Virginia,” in Sex without Consent: Rape and Sexual Coercion in America, ed. Merril D. Smith (New York: New York University Press, 2001), 46–60.
59. Letters Received by the Office of the Adjutant General, M619, RG 94, NA, reel 201, National Archives, Washington, D.C.
60. Petition of William McClure to the County Court, Montgomery County, Tennessee, July 16, 1822, in Legislative Petitions, Tennessee State Library and Archives, Nashville, from Schweninger, Families in Crisis, 100–101.
61. Ann Patton Malone, Sweet Chariot: Slave Family and Household Structure in Nineteenth-Century Louisiana (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), 219.
62. Daily New Orleanian, January 15, 1852. See also Reinders, “Slavery in New Orleans,” 219; Weekly Picayune, June 18, July 23, August 27, 1855.
63. Letters Received by the Office of the Adjutant General, M619, RG 94, NA, reel 201, National Archives, Washington, D.C. See also Hodes, White Women, Black Men, 39–67, and for other examples of women accused in this manner once bringing rape charges, see 62–63.
64. Hodes, White Women, Black Men, 57.
65. Ibid., 130.
66. Ibid.
67. James Hugo Johnston, Race Relations in Virginia and Miscegenation in the South, 1776–1860 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1970), 179; Minutes of the Chester County Courts, 1697–1710, p. 24, as recorded by Edward Raymond Turner, The Negro in Pennsylvania: Slavery, Servitude, Freedom, 1639–1861 (Washington, D.C.: American Historical Association, 1911), 30.
68. Letters Received, October 2, 1813, Executive Papers, Archives of Virginia. See Johnston, Race Relations in Virginia, 261–62.
69. Letters Received, June 10, 1826, Executive Papers, Archives of Virginia. See Johnston, Race Relations in Virginia, 267.
70. Armstrong v. Hodges, 41 Ky. 69 (1841) (from Franklin County). I first encountered this case in Hodes, White Women, Black Men, 133–34.
71. Sarah Jane Thomas v. William M. Thomas, 1859, Davidson County Divorce Records, 1831–1944, State Archives of North Carolina, Raleigh, Courtesy of the State Archives of North Carolina.
72. A Narrative of the Adventures and Escape of Moses Roper, from American Slavery (Philadelphia, 1838), 15, http://docsouth.unc.edu/fpn/roper/roper.html.
73. Edward Everett Brown, Sketch of the Life of Mr. Lewis Charlton, and Reminiscences of Slavery (Portland, Maine, undated), 1–2, http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/charlton/charlton.html.
74. Letters Received by the Office of the Adjutant General, M619, RG 94, NA, reel 201, National Archives, Washington, D.C.
75. Jacobs, Incidents in the Life, 46.
76. Letters Received by the Office of the Adjutant General, M619, RG 94, NA, reel 201, National Archives, Washington, D.C.
77. Ibid.
78. Samuel Gridley Howe, The Refugees from Slavery in Canada West: Report to the Freedmen’s Inquiry Commission (1864; New York: Arno Press and New York Times, 1969).
79. Josiah Houston v. Matilda Houston, Talladega County Judicial Building, Talladega, Alabama. See Schweninger, Families in Crisis, 105, 196n13.
1. Notable exceptions are William Benemann, Male-Male Intimacy in Early America: Beyond Romantic Friendships (New York: Harrington Park Press, 2006), chap. 6; Charles Clifton, “Rereading Voices from the Past: Images of Homo-eroticism in the Slave Narrative,” in The Greatest Taboo: Homosexuality in Black Communities, ed. Delroy Constantine-Simms (Los Angeles: Alyson Books, 2000), 358; John Saillant, in Long before Stonewall: Histories of Same-Sex Sexuality in Early America, ed. Thomas A. Foster (New York: New York University Press, 2007); and Vincent Woodard, The Delectable Negro: Human Consumption and Homoeroticism within U.S. Slave Culture (New York: New York University Press, 2014). Activist Charles Clifton, in one of the first essays on same-sex sexuality and enslaved men, hoped that his essay would have “created an opening for the future explorations in gay and lesbian historiography and for a more complete understanding of black sexuality and manhood as denoted in these narratives” (“Rereading Voices,” 358). This chapter takes up his call for further research and continues the project of rereading extant sources for queer experiences. It also builds on literary scholar Vincent Woodard’s Delectable Negro. Woodard’s analysis focused on real and imagined cannibalism and how that very consumption by white men of male bodies was also always homoerotic.
2. P. Gabrielle Foreman, “Manifest Signs: The Politics of Sex and Representation in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl,” in Harriet Jacobs and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: New Critical Essays, ed. Deborah M. Garfield and Rafia Zafar (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 77; Frances Foster, “‘In Respect to Females …’: Differences in the Portrayals of Women by Male and Female Narrators,” Black American Literature Forum 15 (Summer 1981): 67.
3. Richard Goddard and Noel Polk, “Reading the Ledgers,” Mississippi Quarterly 55 (2002): 308n7.
4. William Styron, The Confessions of Nat Turner (1966; New York: Random House, 1967), 226–40. Michael Bibler’s analysis of the fictional Nat Turner notes that there are limits to homoness serving as a bond between men. Michael P. Bibler, Cotton’s Queer Relations: Same-Sex Intimacy and the Literature of the Southern Plantation, 1936–1968 (Charlotte: University of Virginia Press, 2009), 208.
5. Charles I. Nero, “Toward a Black Gay Aesthetic: Signifying in Contemporary Black Gay Literature,” in Brother to Brother: New Writings by Black Gay Men, ed. Essex Hemphill and Joseph Beam (Boston: Alyson Publications, 1991), 232–33; Natasha Tins-ley, “Black Atlantic, Queer Atlantic: Queer Imaginings of the Middle Passage,” GLQ 14, no. 2–3 (2008): 192; Woodard, The Delectable Negro. In contrast, Bibler’s analysis of twentieth-century plantation literature, for example, finds expressions of the radical possibilities for equality among same-gender loving individuals. Bibler, Cotton’s Queer Relations; Goddard and Polk, “Reading the Ledgers.”
6. Sergio A. Lussana, My Brother Slaves: Friendship, Masculinity, and Resistance in the Antebellum South (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2016). Scholarship on same-gender sexual contact within the context of slavery has focused almost exclusively on interactions between white and black men, in particular on abuse at the hands of white enslavers and overseers. Aliyyah I. Abdur-Rahman, “‘The Strangest Freaks of Despotism’: Queer Sexuality in Antebellum African American Slave Narratives,” African American Review 40 (2006): 223–37; Clifton, “Rereading Voices, 342–61; Jim Downs, “With Only a Trace: Same-Sex Sexual Desire and Violence on Slave Plantations, 1607–1865,” in Connexions: Histories of Race and Sex in North America, ed. Jennifer Brier, Jim Downs, and Jennifer Morgans (Springfield: University of Illinois Press, 2016), 15–37; Robert Richmond Ellis, “Reading through the Veil of Juan Francisco Manzano: From Homoerotic Violence to the Dream of a Homoracial Bond,” PMLA 113 (1998): 422–35; Woodard, The Delectable Negro.
7. Ellis, “Reading through the Veil,” 431.
8. Caleb Crain, American Sympathy: Men, Friendship, and Literature in the New Nation (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2001); Martin Bauml Duberman, “‘Writhing Bedfellows’ in Antebellum South Carolina: Historical Interpretation and the Politics of Evidence,” in Hidden from History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past, ed. Martin Bauml Duberman, Martha Vicinus, and George Chauncey Jr. (New York: NAL Books, 1989), 153–69; Richard Godbeer, The Overflowing of Friendship: Love between Men and the Creation of the American Republic (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009); Karen V. Hansen, “‘Our Eyes Behold Each Other’: Masculinity and Intimate Friendship in Antebellum New England,” in Men’s Friendships: Research on Men and Masculinities, ed. Peter M. Nardi (London: Sage Publications, 1992), 35–58; Anya Jabour, “Male Friendship and Masculinity in the Early National South: William Wirt and His Friends,” Journal of the Early Republic 20 (2000): 83–111; Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, “The Female World of Love and Ritual: Relations between Women in Nineteenth-Century America,” Signs 1, no. 1 (1975): 1–29.
9. Karen V. Hansen, “‘No Kisses Like Yours’: An Erotic Friendship between Two African-American Women during the Mid-Nineteenth Century,” Gender & History 7 (1995): 153–82.
10. Delroy Constantine-Simms, ed., The Greatest Taboo: Homosexuality in Black Communities (Los Angeles: Alyson Books, 2000), 147.
11. Woodard, The Delectable Negro, 236.
12. David Bindman and Henry Louis Gates Jr., eds., The Image of the Black in Western Art, vol. 4, From the American Revolution to World War I, pt. 2, Black Models and White Myths, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 2012), 60.
13. Robert Aldrich, Colonialism and Homosexuality (London: Routledge, 2003), 153.
14. Tinsley, “Black Atlantic,” 145, 192.
15. Sergio Lussana, “‘No Band of Brothers Could Be More Loving’: Enslaved Male Homosociality, Friendship, and Resistance in the Antebellum American South,” Journal of Social History 46 (2013): 875; Lussana, “To See Who Was Best on the Plantation: Enslaved Fighting Contests and Masculinity in the Antebellum Plantation South,” Journal of Southern History 76 (2010): 901–22. See also David Doddington, “Informal Economies and Masculine Hierarchies in Slave Communities of the U.S. South, 1800–1865,” in Gender and History File, 2015, http://orca.cf.ac.uk/74559/; Jeff Forret, “Conflict and the ‘Slave Community’: Violence among Slaves in Upcountry South Carolina,” Journal of Southern History 74 (2008): 551–88.
16. Jonathan Ned Katz, Gay/Lesbian Almanac: A New Documentary (New York: Carroll & Graf, 1994), 61.
17. Joseph Addison, Richard Steele, et al., “Tuesday, November 6, 1711,” Spectator 1, no. 215 (1853): 195. See also Terri L. Snyder, The Power to Die: Slavery and Suicide in British North America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 101.
18. Robert J. Allison, ed., The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, Written by Himself (Boston: Medford Books of St. Martin’s Press, 1995), 61.
19. Lussana, “No Band,” 881. On friendship and running away, see Lussana, My Brother Slaves, 114–24.
20. Solomon Northup, Twelve Years a Slave (Auburn: Durby and Miller, 1853), 221–22, http://docsouth.unc.edu/fpn/northup/northup.html.
21. Lussana, “No Band,” 884; Isaac Mason, Life of Isaac Mason as a Slave (1893), 37, http://docsouth.unc.edu/fpn/mason/mason.html.
22. William Parker, “The Freedman’s Story in Two Parts,” Atlantic Monthly Magazine 17 (1866): 155–56, https://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/parker1/parker.html.
23. Louis Hughes, Thirty Years a Slave: From Bondage to Freedom; The Institution of Slavery as Seen on the Plantation and in the Home of the Planter (Milwaukee, 1897), 100, https://docsouth.unc.edu/fpn/hughes/hughes.html.
24. Lussana, “No Band,” 884, 887.
25. Charles I. Nero, “Toward a Black Gay Aesthetic: Signifying in Contemporary Black Gay Literature,” in Hemphill and Beam, Brother to Brother, 233–34.
26. Esteban Montejo, Biography of a Runaway Slave, ed. Miguel Barnet, trans. W. Nick Hill (Willimantic, Conn.: Curbstone Press, 1994), 40; Woodward, The Delec-table Negro, 235.
27. Robert Richmond Ellis, “Reading through the Veil of Juan Francisco Manzano: From Homoerotic Violence to the Dream of a Homoracial Bond,” PMLA 113 (1998): 432.
28. Heather Martel, “Colonial Allure: Normal Homoeroticism and Sodomy in French and Timucuan Encounters in Sixteenth-Century Florida,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 22, no. 1 (January 2013): 34–64.
29. Christina Snyder, Slavery in Indian Country: The Changing Face of Captivity in Early America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010), 145; Bernard Romans, A Concise Natural History of East and West Florida, ed. Kathryn E. Holland Braund (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1999), 128.
30. Ramón A. Gutiérrez, “Warfare, Homosexuality, and Gender Status Among American Indian Men in the Southwest,” in Foster, Long before Stonewall, 19–31.
31. Stephanie M. H. Camp, Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 43; Jeff Forret, Slave against Slave: Plantation Violence in the Old South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2015).
32. Genovese, Roll, 371.
33. Genovese argues that jealousies led to fights at times. Ibid., 632.
34. Gilberto Freyre, The Masters and the Slaves: A Study in the Development of Brazilian Civilization, trans. Samuel Putnam, abridged from the revised edition (1946; New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1956), 72.
35. Ibid., 285–86.
36. Genovese, Roll, 423.
37. Kenneth Scott and Kenn Stryker-Rodda, eds., New York Historical Manuscripts: Dutch, vol. 4, Council Minutes, 1638–1649 (Baltimore, Md.: Genealogical Publishing, 1974), 326–27; Katz, Gay/Lesbian Almanac, 61, 90.
38. Jason R. Zeledon, “The United States and the Barbary Pirates: Adventures in Sexuality, State-Building, and Nationalism, 1784–1815” (PhD diss., University of California at Santa Barbara, 2016), 61.
39. See Marcus Rediker, The Slave Ship: A Human History (New York: Penguin, 2007); Sowande’ M. Muskateem, Slavery at Sea: Terror, Sex, and Sickness in the Middle Passage (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2016), 86–90; Stephanie E. Smallwood, Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007).
40. Arthur N. Gilbert, “Buggery and the British Navy, 1700–1861,” Journal of Social History 10, no. 1 (1976): 72–98, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3786421.
41. B. R. Burg, Boys at Sea: Sodomy, Indecency, and Courts Martial in Nelson’s Navy (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).
42. Jacob A. Hazen, Five Years before the Mast or Life in the Forecastle aboard a Whaler and Man-of-War, 2nd ed. (Chicago: Belford, Clarke, & Co., 1858), 227; see also William Benemann, Men in Eden: William Drummond Stewart and Same-Sex Desire in the Rocky Mountain Fur Trade (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2012), chap. 3; Clifton, “Rereading Voices,” 347.
43. Harold Langley, Social Reform in the United States Navy, 1798–1862 (Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 2015), 172–74.
44. Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby, Extremities: Painting Empire in Post-revolutionary France (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2002), 55.
45. See David Bindman and Henry Louis Gates Jr., The Image of the Black in Western Art, vol. 4, From the American Revolution to World War I, pt. 2, Black Models and White Myths, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 2012), 26–30.
46. Malcolm Elwin, The Autobiography and Journals of Benjamin Robert Haydon, 1786–1846 (1853; London: MacDonald, 1950), 123–24.
47. Ibid., 123–24, 144.
48. Molly Rogers, Delia’s Tears: Race, Science, and Photography in Nineteenth-Century America (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2010).
49. Solomon Northrup, Twelve Years a Slave (London, 1853), 283–84, http://docsouth.unc.edu/fpn/northup/northup.html.
50. Woodard, Delectable Negro, 96, 105, 106.
51. Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom (New York: Miller, Orton, & Mulligan, 1855), 222; Woodard, Delectable Negro, 107.
52. William Grimes, Life of William Grimes, the Runaway Slave, Written by Himself (1825), 22, http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/grimes25/menu.html. I thank David Blight and the participants of the Yale Slave Narratives Seminar (June 2015), especially Martha Eads and Kevin McGruder, for their comments regarding Grimes’s narrative.
53. Ibid.
54. Colette Colligan, “Anti-abolition Writes Obscenity: The English Vice, Transatlantic Slavery, and England’s Obscene Print Culture,” in International Exposure: Perspectives on Modern European Pornography, 1800–2000, ed. Lisa Z. Sigel (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2005), 69; Amber Jamilla Musser, Sensational Flesh: Race, Power, and Masochism (New York: New York University Press, 2014), 47, especially Musser’s use of Fanon and the claim that “sadism” is erotic.
55. William Benemann, Male-Male Intimacy in Early America: Beyond Romantic Friendships (New York: Harrington Park, 2006), 68–69; Colligan, “Anti-abolition Writes Obscenity”; Foster, “Sexual Abuse,” 450.
56. Honour, The Image of the Black, vol. 4, part 1, 119.
57. Saillant, “The Black Body Erotic,” 303–30.
58. Ibid., 310.
59. Trevor Burnard, Mastery, Tyranny, and Desire: Thomas Thistlewood and His Slaves in the Anglo-Jamaican World (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 216. While the term “strange reports” is not precise, Trevor Burnard interprets it as meaning same-sex sexual assault.
60. Woodard, The Delectable Negro, 14. See also Downs, “With Only a Trace.”
61. See, for example, Richard Godbeer, The Overflowing of Friendship: Love between Men and the Creation of the American Republic (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009).
62. Rictor Norton notes that similar interactions occurred between British masters and body servants. Examples include William Beckford’s homoerotic fantasizing about his boy servants; libels against the Duke of Cumberland for murdering one manservant in order to conceal his buggering of another manservant; and the dramatist Samuel Foote, who was charged with buggering his coachman. See http://rictornorton.co.uk/eighteen/1823news.htm. Thanks to Rictor Norton for pointing me to these cases.
63. Bindman and Gates, The Image of the Black, 25–26.
64. Ibid., 194, 75–78, 228–29, 232.
65. Charles Oscar Paullin, Commodore John Rodgers, Captain, Commodore, Senior Officer of the American Navy, 1773–1838 (Cleveland: Arthur H. Clark Company, 1910), 369.
66. Robert Phillip Howell, “Memoirs,” in Southern Historical Collection, in C. W. Harper, “Black Aristocrats: Domestic Servants on the Antebellum Plantation,” Phylon 46 (1985): 132.
67. “From George Washington to Clement Biddle, 28 July 1784,” Founders Online, National Archives, http://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/04-02-02-0014. Original source, The Papers of George Washington, Confederation Series, vol. 2, 18 July 1784–18 May 1785, ed. W. W. Abbot (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1992), 14.
68. Ibid.
69. Alan Taylor, The Internal Enemy: Slavery and War in Virginia, 1772–1832 (New York: W. W. Norton, 2013), 79; W. C. Bruce, John Randolph of Roanoke, 1773–1833, 2 vols. (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1922), 2:700; Robert Dawidoff, Education of John Randolph (New York: W. W. Norton, 1979), 52–53.
70. Benemann, Male-Male Intimacy, 191.
71. Taylor, The Internal Enemy, 79.
72. Dawidoff, Education, 52.
73. Paul Jennings, A Colored Man’s Reminiscences of James Madison (Brooklyn: George C. Beadle, 1865), 15, http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/jennings/jennings.html.
74. Ibid., 18.
75. Ibid., 6, 7–8, 12–13.
76. Harriet Beecher Stowe, The Key to “Uncle Tom’s Cabin”; Presenting the Original Facts and Documents Upon Which the Story Is Founded, Together with Corroborative Statements Verifying the Truth of the Work (Boston: John P. Jewett and Company, 1854), http://utc.iath.virginia.edu/uncletom/key/kyhp.html. On vernacular history, see Edward E. Baptist, “‘Stol’ and Fetched Here’: Enslaved Migration, Ex-slave Narratives, and Vernacular History,” in New Studies in the History of American Slavery, ed. Edward E. Baptist and Stephanie M. H. Camp (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2006), 243–74. For a queer reading of Tom and St. Clare, see P. Gabrielle Foreman, “‘This Promiscuous Housekeeping’: Death, Transgression, and Homoeroticism in Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” Representations 43 (Summer 1993): 51–72.
77. Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Boston: Jewett & Co., 1852), chap. 15, http://utc.iath.virginia.edu/uncletom/uthp.html.
78. Ibid.
79. Ibid. See also Benneman, Male-Male Intimacy, 144–49; David Greven, Gender Protest and Same-Sex Desire in Antebellum American Literature (Burlington, Vt.: Ash-gate Press, 2014), 179.
80. Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, chap. 30.
81. Eliza Potter, A Hairdresser’s Experience in High Life, ed. Xiomara Santamarina (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press), second page of chap. 8. I would like to thank Lisa Ze Winters for pointing me to this source.
82. Ibid., 145–46.
83. Lisa Ze Winters, “‘More Desultory and Unconnected Than Any Other’: Geography, Desire, and Freedom in Eliza Potter’s A Hairdressers Experience in High Life,” American Quarterly 61, no. 3 (September 2009): 466, 467.
84. Linda Brent [Harriet Jacobs], Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself, ed. Jennifer Fleischner (Boston, 1861; New York: Bedford, 2010), 203; Daina Ramey Berry, “Swing the Sickle for the Harvest Is Ripe”: Gender and Slavery in Antebellum Georgia (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007), 86.
85. Ibid.
86. Woodard, Delectable Negro, 146, 135, 138, 127–70.
1. Edward Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (New York: Basic Books, 2014).