"Don't Let Nobody

Bother Yo' Principle" The Sexual

Economy of
American Slavery
ADRIENNE DAVIS
Many .. . young women are afraid to speak,
let alone write. When I witness their fear, their
silences, I know no woman has written enough.
-bell hooks, Remembered Rapture
I was an Afro-American studies major in college. Yes, Afro-
PERSONA . d. N
STATEMENT Amencan stu 1es, so you can 1mag1ne th1s was the 1980s. ot
the hard-edged black studies of the 1970s or the gentle chicness
of African American or Africana studies in the 1990s. Afro-American. Language
. .:.
situates us in time and politics.
The two events that remain most impressed upon my mind from college
occurred in the course of pursuing my major. I was a student of black feminist
theorist bell hooks, Gloria Watkins, who taught courses in literature, specializing
in fiction by black women. For Gloria, as we called the woman, and her classes
into which we crowded, the rigorous study of literature yielded the greatest gift
of all : mastery of language, the fundamental Western tool of self-articulation and
representation. The students of all races who "took Gloria" learned how, through
language, one acquires a voice, thus demanding recognition by others. Through
these linguistic eruptions into existence, people achieve subjectivity, agency,
humanity. Her courses, unable to contain the student excitement over the pos-
sibilities that language suggested for our agency, spilled over into her office.
There, she encouraged black undergraduate women to use the study of literature
to reclaim our sexuality, our lives, to realize that in a world structured to deny our
humanity, we had choices, options. Through language, we could represent and
thus reclaim, our intimate selves.
This conversation, which continued over the course of two years, was punc-
tuated by a moment when Toni Morrison came to campus to speak. Post-Sula
and The Bluest Eye, pre-Beloved and Paradise, she talked about the paucity of
103
104 ADRIENNE DAVIS
language to describe the horror of American slavery. What language can we use
to represent human bondage, to describe the conversion of humans into prop-
erty, to capture the experience of being possessed or, even more grimly perhaps,
of possessing another? The emptiness of language to describe the process of
enslavement mirrors the void of slavery in the nation's memory.
Yet slavery, like our sexuality, lies continually at the periphery of our con-
sciousness; eluding representation, it hovers over us. It disrupts our lives with
unpredictable eruptions. Mimicking the American conspiracy of silence around
slavery, black women often avoid speaking of sex and intimacy. But in its
repression, black women continually create images, representations, which we
then either embody in flat unidimensional cartoons of "respectable good girls"
or reject thereby risking sanction by our sisters. Without language, slavery
and black women's sexuality each remains unspeakable-repressed, yet ever
present.
Comprehending and filling the linguistic vacuums around slavery and black
women's sexuality are directly linked to the project of this book: representing
black women's work. What I now realize, as a scholar and a woman with her
own sexual battlegrounds to conquer, is how the unspeakability of slavery con-
tains the seeds of the unspeakability, for black women, of our own sexuality. As
I say in my essay, the economy of American slavery systematically expropriated
black women's sexuality and reproductive capacity for white pleasure and profit.
As their descendants, we continue to suffer from the silence. The failure of lan-
guage to document and archive the sexual abuse of reproductive exploitation of
enslaved women is the origin of the absence of language to articulate for. con-
temporary black women sexual identities that are empowering, fulfillinJ. and
joyous.
In much of my professional adult life, through my research and my writing,
I have tried to restore and engage that voice, to offer myself and other black
women a voice sketched through history and law. My essay in this volume tries
to combine and, to an extent reconcile those two defining moments from a
decade ago in my life when Toni Morrison and bell hooks urged me and other
black women students to see that understanding both history and ourselves lay
in mastering language and its mysteries. Without a vocabulary to describe slav-
ery, contemporary black women have been without a voice to describe and con-
front the history of sexual and reproductive expropriation and exploitation that
slavery entailed. In my essay, I propose to label slavery as a "sexual economy,"
hoping that thismay give us the tools we need to excavate black women's his-
tory, document our exploitation, and archive our resistance. We can use this
vocabulary to understand our collective sexual histories and then confront our
choices, realizing that each of us makes different ones.
"Don't Let Nobody Bother Yo' Principle" 105
Toni Morrison and bell hooks were right without language we can't repre-
sent; without representation, we can't imagine; without imagination, we can't
comprehend; without comprehension, we can't move forward.
rneyond the backbreaking, soul-savaging labor that all enslaved people
performed, American slavery extracted from black women another form of
"work" that remains almost inarticulable in its horror: reproducing the slave
workforce through giving birth and serving as forced sexual labor to countless
men of all races. The political economy of slavery systematically expropriated
black women's sexuality and reproductive capacity for white pleasure and
profit. Yet what discourse has confronted and accused this national horror?
What documents record its effects on enslaved women? In the face of this
unspeakable work, chroniclers of American history have all but erased its exis-
tence. This essay attempts to initiate the beginnings of just such a conversation
by naming the world of these legal conflicts a "sexual economy."
Voice and vocabulary are vitally important in and antisexist
politics. Vocabulary is much more than grammatical choice, as represented
in debates as diverse as the validity of I;Qonics and whether "sex worker" or
"prostitute" is the better word. Word cho'ices represent political views of
the world, especially when describing the topic of this book: work. We may
need new terms, such as economy," to capture that history and reality
and begin a discourse of national confrontation and, ultimately, of personal
reconciliation.
This essay examines two cases in which enslaved black women's sexuality
was at the heart of the dispute. It starts with an 1806 Virginia case in which two
enslaved women used slavery's rules of reproduction and race to argue that
they were not legally black and hence should be set free. The second case, an
1859 Mississippi case, involved the rape of an enslaved girl. I use these cases to
investigate some of the primary legal doctrines that enabled elite white men to
extract forced sexual and reproductive labor from enslaved women. Taken
together, these cases and rules reveal how law and markets of the antebellum
South seized enslaved women's intimate lives, converting private relations of
sex and reproduction into political and economic relations. This interplay of
sex and markets leads me to name this world a sexual political economy.
The idea of a "sexual economy of slavery" may seem odd on first impres-
sion. We divide our economic relationships in the workplace from our intimate,
family interactions. We view these relations as taking place in two segregated
spheres: the market and our intimate lives. It is in this latter space that we feel
enabled to make our decisions, conduct our lives, love our own families. We
106 ADRIENNE DAVIS
may experience dissonances when sex and economics are juxtaposed. In addi-
tion, many of us imagine slavery as an institution of racial hierarchies, not
gender hierarchies. But the cases and rules I will examine expose a different
relationship between sex and markets for enslaved black women. In the
process, they expose the brutal gender subordination that slavery entailed.
One quick caveat: slavery varied from region to region and slaveholder to
slaveholder. It also evolved and mutated during its 250-odd years. I use two
cases from two significantly different regions and periods (Virginia in 1806
and Mississippi in 1859). I do not mean to suggest that these cases are repre-
sentative of slavery. However, I use them because individually and taken
together they raise intriguing questions about the central and distinctive role
that black women's sexuality and reproductive capacity played in the southern
political economy.
1
A Life of Labor: Production and Reproduction
When we think of enslavement, we think of labor. Recent studies of
enslaved women have shown that they labored no less than enslaved men.
As activist-scholar Angela Davis put it, "As slaves, compulsory labor over-
shadowed every other aspect of women's existence. It would seem, therefore,
that the starting point for any exploration of Black women's lives under slavery
would be an appraisal of their role as workers."
2
Historian Jacqueline Jones
discovered that "in the 1850s at least 90 percent of all female slaves over six-
teen years of age labored more than 261 days per year, eleven to thirteen hpurs
each day."
3
I
But the labor that slavery compelled of enslaved women was distinct from
the way others worked in two ways. First, unlike white women, they performed
the same work as men, while also doing the domestic work typically reserved
for women, free and enslaved. In the middle of the nineteenth century, seven-
eighths of enslaved people, regardless of sex, were field workers.
4
In 1800,
when the Santee Canal was built in North Carolina, enslaved women consti-
tuted SO percent of the construction crew.
5
Deborah Gray White notes: "[I]t
appears that [enslaved women] did a variety of heavy and dirty labor, work
which was also done by men. In 1853, Frederick Olmsted saw South Carolina
slaves of both sexes carting manure on their heads to the cotton fields where
they spread it with their hands between the ridges in which cotton was planted.
In Fayetteville, North Carolina, he noticed that women not only hoed and
shoveled but they also cut down trees and drew wood."
6
Thus, enslaved women
performed much of the same productive labor done by men who shared their
race and status as slaves/ Jones notes that while the form of extracting their
,.
"Don't Let Nobody Bother Yo' Principle" 107
labor differed from that of a free labor system, the content of what enslaved
men did could be analogized at some level to the work that all men did on
farms, including in New England and on smaller southern farms.
8
This was
not so for enslaved women, whose labor differed markedly from that per-
formed by white women.
In colonial American society, privileged white women rarely worked in the
fields. Occasionally, white female indentured servants were forced to work in
the fields as punishment for misdeeds, but this was not a common practice.
In the eyes of colonial white Americans, only debased and degraded members
of the female sex labored in the fields. And any white woman forced by cir-
cumstances to work in the fields was regarded as unworthy of the title
"woman."
9
Historians caution us not to overstate the point: there was gender
differentiation in enslaved men's and women's labor.
10
Still, enslaved women
did not perform gender-segregated labor nearly to the same extent that white
women did.
11
Performance by enslaved women of conventionally male work distin-
guished their labor from that of black men, white women, and white men.
Enslaved men, and free whites of both sexes, worked in accord with gender
roles. In fact, when enslaved men were "women's work:' it was often
for the specific purpose of humiliation or discipline.
12
And historians Nell
Painter and Chris Tomlins reinforce the intriguing point that, for those white
women who did work in the fields, the reality of their daily lives departed from
the rhetoric of white femininity.
13
The existence of this disjuncture in the lives
of many working white women stemmed from the cultural and racialized
importance of rigid gender roles. "[W]hile white women's field labor chal-
lenged gender roles, African women's field labor confirmed racial roles.
Enslaved Mrican women's substitution for white women field workers (occur-
ring far earlier than the late 17th/ early 18th century 'transition to slavery'
would suggest) then increased opportunities for white women's participation
in household formation, stabilizing white culture with an approximation of
'good wife' domesticity."
14
Within a society that enforced strict adherence to
sex roles, only enslaved women were compelled to labor consistently across
gender boundaries. This aspect of their physical work is one of the distin-
guishing features of their experience.
But slavery's political economy forced enslaved women to labor in a sec-
ond way that was not required of any other group. As the remainder of this
essay shows, enslaved women, and only enslaved women, were forced to per-
form sexual and reproductive labor to satisfy the economic, political, and
personal interests of white men of the elite class. Even more so than crossing
gender boundaries in physical labor, this second distinguishing feature of their
108 ADRIENNE DAVIS
experience under slavery foregrounds their gender and demonstrates how
embedded their sexuality was in slavery's economic markets.
In an 1806 case, Hudgins v. Wrights, two enslaved women, Hannah and her
unnamed daughter, sued for their freedom.
15
They alleged the wrongful en-
slavement of the woman who was, respectively, their mother and grandmother,
Butterwood Nan. Let me consider in some detail the arguments of both Han-
nah and her daughter (the plaintiffs) and the man claiming to be their master
(the defendant). Ultimately, Hannah and her daughter's freedom turned on
how the law decided to characterize Butterwood Nan's reproduction.
The defendant, who claimed ownership of Hannah and her daughter, did
so based on a fundamental rule of slavery: partus sequitur ventrem, Latin for
"the child follows the mother." Under this law, adopted in every enslaving state,
children inherited their status as enslaved or free from their mothers. This rule
dictated that enslaved women gave birth to enslaved children and free women
gave birth to free children. Accordingly, the slaveholder argued that because the
ancestral matriarch, Butterwood Nan, had been enslaved, her daughter Han-
nah had inherited her enslaved status and subsequently passed it on to her own
daughter, akin almost to tainted blood.
As early as 1662, Virginia adopted the rule that enslaved black women gave
birth to enslaved children.
16
By the time of the founding of our democratic
nation, all of the enslaving states dictated that enslaved black women gave birth
to enslaved children, regardless of the father's status or race. As one judge said,
"The father of a slave is unknown to our law:'
17
This is a striking conclusion,
given the general patriarchal and patrilineal nature of antebellum Anglo
7
American law. But, it is not a surprising one, given the direction of the politi-
cal economy and wealth holding. Historians agree that "land and slaves became
the two great vehicles through which slaveholders realized their ambitions of
fortune .... The usefulness of land increased in proportion to the availability
of black slaves."
18
Peter Kolchin documents the need for growing numbers of
forced laborers as early as the colonial period: "Cultivating [tobacco and rice],
however, required labor; in an environment where land was plentiful and
people few, the amount of tobacco or rice one could grow depended on the
number of laborers one could command."
19
Of course, the United States was
not alone in basing its economy on black slave labor. It did distinguish itself,
however, in how it met the ongoing need to replenish its workforce.
Other New World slave systems continued to kidnap Africans through the
international slave trade to meet their labor needs. Varying combinations of
higher ratios of men to women, low fertility rates, and extreme mortality rates
meant that natural reproduction did not sustain the enslaved populations of
Latin America and the Caribbean. The demography of these slave societies
"Don't Let Nobody Bother Yo' Principle"
109
stood in stark contrast to the United States slave system. One "unquestion-
able-indeed unique-mark of slavery in the Southern states was the natural
increase of the slave population. In all other slave societies of the New World,
the slave population failed to reproduce itself and was sustained or increased
only by constant injections of new slaves from Africa:'
20
This had striking
demographic effects. "Jamaica, Cuba, and Haiti each imported many more
slaves than the whole of the North American mainland. Yet, in stark contrast,
by 1825 the Southern states of the United States had the largest slave popula-
tion of any country in the New World, amounting to well over one-third of the
total."
21
Thus, the rule that children's status followed their mothers' was a foun-
dational one for our economy. It converted enslaved women's reproductive
capacity into market capital to serve economic interests. In the United States,
it was enslaved women who reproduced the workforce.
Thus, childbearing by enslaved women created economic value independ-
ent of the physical, productive labor they performed. Southern legal rules har-
nessed black reproductive capacity for market purposes, extracting from it the
profits one might expect from a factory or livestock. According to historian
James Oakes, "The distinguishing function of slaves in the South's market
economy was to serve not only as a labor but also as capital assets."
22
Law and markets operated synthetically in converting black reproductive
capacity into capital creation. Slaveholders used the same logic of reproductive
profits to get courts to void sales of enslaved women who couldn't bear chil-
dren.
2
3 Functionally, reproductive relations were market relations of incredible
economic significance. In its centrality to the political economy, enslaved
women's reproduction was arguably the most valuable labor performed in the
entire economy.
Thus, when the slaveholder in Hudgins invoked the rule that a child inher-
its its status from its mother, he was drawing on a foundational cultural
assumption. Slaveholders owned all of the offspring of women they enslaved.
The legal rule had immense economic and political significance for antebellum
culture. Not only did slaves constitute the overwhelming proportion of the
southern labor force, but this rule meant that it was a workforce that repro-
duced itself. Enslaved women gave birth to enslaved children and did so in a
system that set considerable economic importance on this fact.
One of the nation's earliest and most prominent leaders, President
Thomas Jefferson, personally proclaimed the unique, dual value of an enslaved
workforce. Jefferson, who enslaved more than 144 people, said, "'I consider a
woman who brings a child every two years as more profitable than the best
man on the farm; what she produces is an addition to capital."'
24
The value of
short-term productive labor, such as that provided by the male slaves, or by the
110 ADRIENNE DAVIS
female slaves when viewed as mere field hands, "disappeared in mere con-
sumption."25 In keeping with this, Jefferson instructed his plantation manager
to monitor the overseers and ensure that they were encouraging female slave
reproduction, the source of his wealth. Repeated references to enslaved females'
fertility in advertisements and negotiations for sales indicate that Jefferson was
not alone in his sentiments.
26
The secretary of the treasury and president of Georgia Cotton Planters
Association estimated that a slaveholder's workforce would double every fif-
teen years through the process of normal reproduction.
27
Slavery scholar Deb-
orah Gray White estimates that 5 to 6 percent of profit came from the increase
of slaves due to reproduction.
28
Indeed, many members of the planting aris-
tocracy owed their success to initial large gifts or inheritances of enslaved per-
sons from their families.
29
Gray White notes, "Many farmers made their first
investment not in a male slave, but in a young childbearing woman."
30
As one
judge stated: "With us, nothing is so usual as to advance children by gifts of
slaves. They stand with us, instead of money."
31
Historian Cheryl Ann Cody
found that one of the men she studied "acquired slaves, once his estate was well
established in the 1790s, primarily to give his sons their economic start rather
than to expand his own labor force."
32
Finally, southern judges drew analogies to rules governing livestock.
Owners of female animals also got legal possession of their offspring. Should
there be any doubt that southern whites grasped this analogy, one South Car-
olina judge declared that "the young of slaves ... stand on the same footing
as other animals."
33
Meanwhile a famous observer of the American So)lth,
Frederick Olmsted, concluded from his travels that "a slave woman is dom-
monly esteemed least for her working qualities, most for those qualities which
give value to a brood mare."
34
The date of the case, 1806, is significant. The United States Constitution
provided that no enslaved people could be imported (legally) from abroad
after 1808.
35
Yet the expanding economies of the Deep South required larger
and larger workforces. In 1806, Old South slave states, such as Virginia, were
poised to take over the (legal) international slave trade with a domestic trade
in slaves.
36
With enormous profits from reproduction anticipated, rules deter-
mining status became more crucial than ever.
37
Therefore, the slaveholder in Hudgins drew upon the strong cultural
expectation that personal economic profit would and should stem from an
enslaved woman's childbearing. His lawyers cast his case as a question of
"rights of property, those rules which have been established, are not to be
departed from, because freedom is in question."
38
In other words, white eco-
nomic rights trumped black liberty rights.
39
"Don't Let Nobody Bother Yo' Principle" 111
Against this American backdrop of property rights in people, how could
Hannah and her daughter have possibly responded? One would assume that
the force of this law and custom would have dictated the outcome of the case:
the law would side with the slaveholder, declaring him to be the legal owner of
Hannah and her daughter. But, as central as these property rights were in the
slaveholding South, they were countered by another, equally fundamental tenet
of slavery, the rules of race. Hannah and her daughter argued that they could
not be enslaved because, by law, they were legally not black.
Under Virginia law, only people of African descent could be enslaved.
40
Proving membership in the Native American or white races constituted a legal
defense to slavery. Southern law dictated that blacks were presumptively slaves,
while whites and Native Americans were presumptively free.
41
Judge Roane
stated the law in Hudgins: "In the case of a person visibly appearing to be a
negro, the presumption is, in this country, that he is a slave, and it is incum-
bent on him to make out his right to freedom: but in the case of a person vis-
ibly appearing to be a white man, or an Indian, the presumption is that he is
free, and it is necessary for his adversary to shew that he is a slave."
42
Accord-
ingly, Hannah and her daughter claimed that Butterwood Nan was Native
American and therefore illegally enslaved.Jf Butterwood Nan had been wrong-
fully enslaved, then as a free woman she could not have transmitted any
enslaved status to her daughter, Hannah, who, in turn, could not transmit it to
her own daughter. In a fascinating instance of valuing white racial privilege
over white wealth, the laws of race trumped the law that enslaved the children
of female slaves. From within this legal box of race and status, Hannah and her
daughter asserted the only legal argument that could win their freedom, their
own nonblackness.
The plaintiffs' argument rested on gender as well as racial rules of slavery.
Mother and daughter claimed their freedom through Butterwood Nan. To
counter this, the slaveholder argued that Nan was, in fact, black and that it was
her sexual partner who was Native American. Therefore, the nonblack (and
legally free) ancestor was male. The establishment of nonblack ancestry had to
be done through the maternal line to a female ancestor to be grounds for a
claim of wrongful enslavement. Strikingly, within this deeply patriarchal cul-
ture, neither the father's race nor his status was relevant to the legal inquiry.
43
Free black men who took up with enslaved women fathered children who were
enslaved by law. Moreover, showing white ancestry through one's father's side,
indeed, showing that one's father was white, was no defense to enslavement. As
noted before, by American law, the child of an enslaved black mother had no
father. An enslaved woman who was black could not alter the status of her chil-
dren through selecting either a free black or a white sexual partner.
112 ADRIENNE DAVIS
Even more brutally, because the race of the father did not alter the status
of an enslaved black woman's child, tens of thousands of white men were able
to sexually abuse and coerce individual enslaved women without the risk that
the women would bear children whose legal status would be affected in any
way by their own. Such a child would not be construed by law as white or free,
but as black and the father's slave.
Within what we now understand to be an absurd system, the assertions of
both the slaveholder and the women he claimed as his property raise fascinat-
ing questions. Was Butterwood Nan exempted from the rule by virtue of being
Native American? Had she lived her entire life held illegally as a slave? Were
Hannah and her daughter free or enslaved? The arguments of both sides illus-
trate the centrality of enslaved women's reproduction to the political economy
and culture of American slavery.
Let me finally reveal the outcome of the case. Judge Roane decided: "No
testimony can be more complete and conclusive than that which exists in this
cause to shew that Hannah had every appearance of an Indian. That appear-
ance ... will suffice for the claim of her posterity, unless it is opposed by
counter-evidence shewing that some female ancester [sic] of her's [sic] was a
negro slave, or that she or some female ancestor, was lawfully an Indian
slave."
44
The court never described Butterwood Nan's appearance. Most likely
she was deceased or had been sold out of the area and away from her family.
But because Hannah and her daughter did not look black, they were pre-
sumptively free. The burden was on the slaveholder to prove that Butterwood
Nan had been legally enslaved. He failed to do so. Hannah and her, daughter
went free. I
Hannah's successful efforts to seek a racial exemption from slavery's status
classifications left intact legal assumptions that relegated the overwhelming
majority of blacks to enslavement. So, is this a case to be celebrated? Con-
demned? How do we evaluate the efforts of Hannah and her daughter to escape
from the grip of partus sequitur ventrem? Their lawyer started his argument
before the court, "This is not a common case of mere blacks suing for their free-
dom."45 Looking backwards from the twenty-first century, should we blame
Hannah for seeking her family's freedom with such arguments? What other
argument could she make within a racial logic that drew a legal equivalent
between blackness and enslavement? What else could Hannah argue, except
that she was not black?
Earlier, this essay identified black women's deployment across the conven-
tional sexual division of labor as one of the things that distinguished their lives
from those of other groups. The physical labor of enslaved women differed
from white women's work both absolutely and relative to the work done by
"Don't Let Nobody Bother Yo' Principle"
113
enslaved The case of Hannah and her daughter exposes a second, more
brutal way that the economic roles that slavery assigned enslaved women dis-
tinguished their labor from other groups. White men and black men (free and
enslaved) could father children either free or enslaved, and white women
could give birth only to free children.
46
Laws of race and gender merged with
partus sequitur ventrem's status classifications to condemn the wombs of en-
slaved black women. This is a point about race and gender: only black women
could give birth to enslaved children, and every black woman who was enslaved
and gave birth did so to an enslaved child. In other words, the class that repro-
duced the workforce was limited to black women.
47
It is this terrorizing aspect
of enslaved women's lives that also distinguished their role in the political
economy from that of black men, white women, and white men. At labor in the
fields and in labor in the birthing bed-the enslaved woman was both a mode
of production and a mode of reproduction. . .
I turn now from reproductive relations to sexual relat10ns. Like reproduc-
tion, from a contemporary perspective, many of us tend to U:ink of sexual rela-
tionships as intimate, noneconomic relationships. But, again like
enslaved women's sexuality played an essential role in the antebellum pohtKal
economy. If the rule of partus sequitur;, yentrem reflected the southern invest-
ment in enslaved women's reproductive capacity, then the law of rape reveals
the interests, economic and in their sexuality.
Pleasure, Profit, and Punishment:
Sexual Exploitation of Enslaved Women
In Mississippi in 1859, an enslaved man was accused of raping an
unnamed enslaved girl, under ten years old.
48
Convicted at trial, the defendant,
named only as George, appealed to the Mississippi Supreme Court. The lawyer
representing him argued: "The crime of rape does not exist in this State
between African slaves. Our laws recognize no marital rights as between slaves;
their sexual intercourse is left to be regulated by their owners. The regulations
of law, as to the white race, on the subject of sexual intercourse, do not and
cannot, for obvious reasons, apply to slaves; their intercourse is promiscuous,
and the violation of a female slave by a male slave would be a mere assault and
battery:'49 Influential legal commentator Thomas Cobb agreed: "The violation
of the person of a female slave, carries with it no other punishment than the
h
. "50
damages which the master may recover for the trespass upon IS property.
This meant that an enslaved woman's master could prosecute her rape as a
crime against his property, but the state would not prosecute her rape as a crime
against her person. The court agreed and overturned George's conviction.
114
ADRIENNE DAVIS
Nearly every southern court that ruled on rape and enslaved women followed
this ruling. 5
1
As Carolyn Pitt Jones, a student, succinctly summarized it, within
slavery's sexual subtext, the female slave was an extralegal creature who could
not use the law to protect herself. 52
It would be folly to overgeneralize about a society's sexual norms based
solely on its laws of rape. But criminal laws of rape define the boundaries of sex-
ual access to bodies, especially women's and children's. 5
3
And the doctrine in
George v. State shows how white institutions, including law, created and legit-
imized black women's sexual vulnerability. The refusal of law to protect en-
slaved women from rape institutionalized access to their bodies. Their exclusion
from rape doctrine enabled their sexuality to be seized for multiple purposes.
First, slaveholders could force the relations they had with enslaved women
as their laborers beyond the economic arena and into the sexual one without
significant social disruption. Not only productive labor and reproduction
could be demanded of enslaved women, but sexual gratification as well. The
refusal of law to recognize sexual crimes against enslaved women enabled mas-
ters to compel sex.
"Since the white male could rape the black female who did not willingly
respond to his demands, passive submission on the part of the enslaved black
women cannot be seen as complicity. Those women who did not willingly
respond to the sexual overture of masters and overseers were brutalized and
punished. Any show of resistance on the part of enslaved females increased the
determination of white owners eager to demonstrate their power:'s4 Sexual
relations were part and parcel of what women were expected to do as members
of an enslaved workforce. I
Under this theory of law, and on a brutal daily basis, enslaved women's
sexuality was under the direct control of men in the slaveholding class. But it
is important to note that sexual abuse of enslaved women was not limited to
white men in slaveholding families. This group comprised only a small per-
centage of whites in the South. Other men, poorer, nonslaveholding whites and
black men, took advantage of enslaved women's sexual vulnerability. Overseers
frequently sexually assaulted or coerced enslaved women. In addition, a slave-
holder could compel an enslaved woman to have sexual relations with his
friends or to "initiate" a son or younger nephew, much as he might hire her out
for her productive labor. In the alternative, he might by his silence authorize
sexual access for men related to him by blood or economics. In short, law
granted masters not only economic and political authority, but sexual author-
ity as well.
Sadly, there is a need for intraracial as well as interracial critiques of sex-
ual abuse. Recall that the case of George v. State involved the rape of a ten-year-
"Don't Let Nobody Bother Yo' Principle"
115
old enslaved girl by an enslaved man. This may be one of the reasons the case
was ever prosecuted. While certainly many black men of this era respected
black women's sexual integrity and rights over their own bodies even in the
absence of legal dictates to do so, others did not. Black women's sexual vulner-
ability was created and legitimized by white institutions of law and social
power, but black men as well as white took advantage of it. Intraracial sexual
abuse of black women surely has a different social meaning and significance
than their abuse by white men. But that should not preclude our investigating
what that different meaning is, and why some black men and not others took
advantage of their sisters. 5
5
Second, some white slaveholders embraced the sexual exploitation of
enslaved women to defend slavery against abolitionists who charged sexual
abuse as one of the evils of slavery. According to Chancellor Harper, a judge:
"And can it be doubted that this purity [of the white woman] is caused by, and
is a compensation for, the evils resulting from the existence of an enslaved class
of more relaxed morals? ... I do not hesitate to say that th.e intercourse which
takes place with enslaved females is less depraving in its effects than when it ~ s
carried on with females of their own caste ... [The white man] feels that he 1s
connecting him with one of an infer,ijj)r and servile caste, and there is some-
thing of degradation in the act. The intercourse is generally casual; he does not
make her habitually an associate, and is less likely to receive any taint from her
habits and manners."56 Southern white men openly justified their exploitation
of enslaved women as resulting in the better treatment of white women. The
same sexual norms that protected (white) female chastity with vigilance and
brutality (sometimes directed at the women themselves) construed _enslaved
women as perpetual "outlets:'
57
Elite white women, represented as d e h c a ~ e and
often asexual, found their own sexual relations closely guarded and momtored
by these same men. "Whereas the lady was deprived of her sexuality, the black
woman was defined by hers:'
58
Sexual access to enslaved women was central in
the creation and maintenance of this repressive ideology of white femininity.
Black enslaved women were therefore excluded from, yet essential to, the gen-
der ideology of white masculinity and femininity. .
Third, sexual abuse of enslaved women must be understood as an exerctse
of political power as well as sexual license. Contemporary feminists have
demonstrated that rape entails power relations as much as sexual relations.
Men rape women not only for personal pleasure, but to discipline women into
conforming to certain behaviors: to achieve women's submissiveness in per-
sonal relationships or adherence to conservative dress codes or to dictate phys-
ical activity, i.e., where and when women feel safe. Slavery offers a primary and
stark example of the power relations embedded in forced sexual relations.
ll6
ADRIENNE DAVIS
An enslaved woman might be sexually punished for any number of per-
ceived or actual offenses. Forced sex reminded an enslaved woman of her pow-
erlessness in the hands of her master or his agent, the overseer. It functioned to
humiliate her and demonstrate that the legal system had given control over her
body to the man who enslaved her. Angela Y. Davis offers the following charac-
terization: "Rape was a weapon of domination, a weapon of repression, whose
covert goal was to extinguish slave women's will to resist, and in the process, to
demoralize their men." 5
9
Rape under slavery was an extremely powerful tool of
disciplining women workers. 60
In addition, rape helped to maintain racial hierarchy by reminding black
women and men of black men's subordinate status to white men. As noted, a
hallmark of southern antebellum culture was the protection of female chastity
by male family members. An enslaved man who sought to do the same risked
his life and that of the woman. "Clearly the master hoped that once the black
man was struck by his manifest inability to rescue his women from sexual
assaults of the master, he would begin to experience deep-seated doubts about
his ability to resist at all."
61
Rape of enslaved women demoralized the entire
black community. Law thus endorsed the use of sexual power as a mechanism
of labor, racial, and gender control.
Finally, in addition to serving antebellum interests of pleasure and politics,
enslaved women's sexuality was a source of economic profits for those inclined
to reap them. Historians have identified an active market in enslaved women
for prostitution, called the "Fancy Trade." "Slaves selected for their grace,
beauty and .li.ght skins. were shipped to the 'fancy-girl markets' of New
and other cities. At a time when prime field hands sold for $1,600, a 'fancy girl'
brought $5,000. Some ended up in bordellos, but the majority became the
mistresses of wealthy planters, gamblers, or businessmen."
62
Sex might be
extracted from any enslaved woman or girl. However, an enslaved woman sold
primarily for sex commanded a higher price than other enslaved women.63
The market assigned economic value directly related to sexual attractive-
ness. The seller reaped as extra profit the market's valuation of their sexuality,
whether in skin color, hair, or whatever the buyer happened to personally value
as erotic. As Brenda Stevenson incisively puts it, "What, after all, could be more
valuable than a woman of 'white' complexion who could be bought as one's
. t ' 1 '?"64 'T' d
pnva e sex s ave. . accommo ate these buyers and ensure that they were
getting what they expected, fancy-girl traders might allow the buyer to
"inspect" his proposed purchase alone. At this juncture, sexual abuse and eco-
nomic profits brutally collided.
The appearance of enslaved women as explicit sexual commodities in
markets illuminates yet another way in which the South profited from enslaved
"Don't Let Nobody Bother Yo' Principle" ll7
women's sexuality. The fancy-girl trade offers perhaps the most vivid image of
how enslaved women's sexual relations were integrally tied to market relations
in the antebellum political economy. Many historians now acknowledge that
white men used enslaved women for sexual gratification. But with the above
analysis I have tried to point out the nuances of their sexual labor. At the south-
ern antebellum juncture of sex and markets, enslaved women were sexually
exploited for a variety of purposes: pleasure, politics, punishment, as well as
profit. In addition, as I have described earlier, slavery replenished its workforce
through black women. This convergence of sexual and reproductive relations
with market and political relations is what leads me to name slavery a sexual
political economy.
A Sexual Economy
A political economy is characterized in some part how wealth is
defined, who owns it, and who creates it. In their descriptiqns of expected prof-
its, ways to maximize yield, and transmissions of wealth between generations,
elite members of antebellum society characterized enslaved women's repro-
ductive capacity in the language of assets. Judges, cabinet members, and
at least one president declared the economic value of enslaved women's child-
bearing capacity. This reproduction was integral to the plantation economy,
which required a steady flow of cheap, largely unskilled labor. Hence black
reproduction yielded economic profits, creating value for the slaveholding
class. Enslaved black women gave birth to white wealth.
A political economy is also characterized by the interests it prioritizes and
how those are served. White men established enslaved women as sexual outlets,
forcing them to perform sexual labor. In the process, their sexuality could be
exploited to reinforce gender conventions among elite whites and to defend
slavery against northern charges. In addition, enslaved women could be sexually
terrorized in order to coerce economic work or quell political resistance. Their
exploitation could also be used to discipline enslaved men. Finally, as the fancy-
girl trade illustrates, economic profits were to be made in slavery's sexual mar-
kets. Pleasure, punishment, politics, and profit: once laws of rape authorized
elite white male legal and economic control over enslaved women's sexuality,
their sexuality could be manipulated to serve any number of interests.
Taken together, Hudgins v. Wrights and George v. State show how law
extracted and markets expected dual labor from enslaved women. Like
enslaved men, they were coerced into performing grueling physical productive
labor. But they were also compelled to do sexual and reproductive labor
required of no other group. This suggests the need for attention to gender to
118 ADRIENNE DAVIS
fully understand the economics and effects of U.S. enslavement. Economists of
slavery have characterized the political economy of slavery as a system in which
blacks transferred millions of dollars of uncompensated labor to white slave-
holders. " [Slavery] directly enriched those who bought, sold, transported,
financed, bred, leased, and managed slaves in agriculture. But it was also
important in other sectors, including mining, transportation, manufacturing,
and public works-roads, dams, canals, levees, railroads, clearing land-and so
on."
65
Wealth not only was transferred from blacks to whites, as scholars have
noted, but, in addition, was transferred from black women to white men.
Hence, the economics of slavery were gendered as well as racialized.
In addition, the economic impact of its sexual exploitation distinguishes
the antebellum South from other enslaving systems. Other slave societies
entailed sexual and reproductive exploitation.
66
Indeed, some cultures enslaved
primarily women (and children). In this sense, they were more gendered than
U.S. slavery with its relatively equal sex ratios. But, what I have tried to show in
this essay is the extent to which enslaved women's sexual and reproductive
labor was an integral and critical part of the economic and political viability of
the South. One measure of slavery is how central or peripheral it is to the
immediate economic functioning of the society. People might be enslaved to
serve primarily as servants, political officials, soldiers, wives, or concubines. 67
Enslavement in the United States stands in stark contrast to all of these. David
Brion Davis elaborates the relationship of slavery to the U.S. market economy:
"No slave system in history was quite like that of the West Indies and the
Southern of America. Marked off the free population by raci1l and
cultural dtfferences, for the most part depnved of the hope of manumission,
the Negro slave also found his life regimented in a highly organized system that
was geared to maximize production for a market economy."68 Enslaved women
both labored in and reproduced this workforce. I have also shown how their
sexual exploitation was inextricably tied not only to economic viability, but
also to maintaining and defending the social order, ranging from pleasure to
punishment to politics. In sum, slavery's legal and cultural institutions system-
atically made enslaved women's reproductive and sexual capacity available to
serve any number of political and economic interests of elite white men. For all
these reasons, I name the antebellum South a sexual political economy. Rules
of race, rape, gender, and partus sequitur ventrem formed the legal core of slav-
ery's sexual economy.
What, then, do we gain from viewing slavery as a sexual economy? I would
suggest three things. One purpose in labeling the antebellum South a sexual
economy is to draw attention to the extent to which slavery drew distinctions
on the basis of sex as well as race. It was a gendered and sexualized as well as a
"Don't Let Nobody Bother Yo' Principle" 119 I
racial institution. Or, in the language of subordination, a language that may
more aptly characterize slavery's brutal hierarchies, American slavery, while
obviously racially supremacist, was also fundamentally a system of gender
supremacy. Designating it as a sexual economy draws attention to its axes of
male power as well as racial power, thereby shedding light on the lives and
exploitation of both enslaved women and enslaved men.
Viewing slavery through the sexual economy lens also suggests insights
about the very nature of gender itself. "Masculine" and "feminine" mean dif-
ferent things in different races, classes, and ethnicities. Sexual roles and norms
evolve over time and across cultural boundaries. Enslaved women offer an
early, dramatic example of the political, cultural, economic, and violent forces
that can shape gender. Angela Davis offers an excellent description of the
manipulation of enslaved women's gender: "Expediency governed the slave-
holders' posture toward female slaves: when it was profitable to exploit them as
if they were men, they were regarded, in effect, as genderless, but when they
could be exploited, punished and repressed in ways suitt;d only for women,
they were locked into their exclusively female roles."
69
Jacqueline Jones con-
curs: "The master took a more crudely opportunistic approach toward the
labor of slave women, revealing the interaction (and at times conflict) between
notions of women qua 'equal' black workers and women qua unequal repro-
ducers."70 Against the feminine delicacy and chastity ascribed to most white
women in this society, enslaved women were clearly gendered differently. They
were gendered as masculine when performing conventionally male work or
suffering the same brutal physical discipline as enslaved men. But an enslaved
woman might have her sexuality or childbearing capacity seized for pleasure,
profit, or punishment at any moment, suffering rape or giving birth to white
wealth. She was male when convenient and horrifically female when needed.
In this sense, she was "gendered to the ground;' as legal feminist theorist
Catharine MacKinnon would say.
71
Comprehending gender as brutally mal-
leable may uncover deeply buried historical facts.
Finally, seeing slavery in this way challenges the way we divide the intimate
from the economic. For enslaved women, sexual and reproductive relations
were economic and market relations.7
2
While their family lives and personal
relationships offered some solace from the daily brutality of slavery, white men
could invade this sphere at will, abusing women sexually or reproductively.
Excellent work by historians Darlene Clark Hine and Nell Painter invites our
attention to the ongoing sociological and psychological effects of slavery's sex-
ual economy. Clark Hine makes the powerful argument that all of these
manipulations and abuses of sexuality were primary factors in shaping cultures
of resistance in southern black women. Dissemblance, flight northward, and,
120
ADRIENNE DAVIS
most tragically, violence targeted at their own bodies were tactics black women
employed.7
3
And Painter argues that because sexual abuse of enslaved women
was woven into the fabric of southern households and families, its cultural,
sociological, and psychological effects reached far beyond enslaved females or
even the larger enslaved and black communities.7
4
In the black community too often we still view sexuality as something to
be kept private and not spoken about. Black women's magazines are filled with
stories of the trauma and loss of self-esteem this repression causes. Perhaps
understanding black women's sexual history as something under public con-
trol for so long can help us to see the inherently political nature of our sexual-
ity.
75
For black women to reclaim our sexuality, our intimate selves, from all of
the people and forces who would seek to expropriate it, regulate it, define it,
and confine it, we must first become comfortable speaking about it. The lan-
guage of the sexual economy may help in this process.
To summarize, enslaved black women shared the world of productive
labor with white men, black men, and white women but also inhabited a sepa-
rate world of compelled sexual and reproductive labor. By understanding
American slavery as a sexual economy in which black women's reproduction
and sexuality were appropriated for any number of white economic and politi-
cal interests, we can see more clearly how slavery was a deeply gendered and
sexualized institution in which there was a constant interplay between black
sexuality and white economic profits. Such an understanding collapses the dis-
tinctions we draw between sex and work, families and markets, also showing
how this distinction was itself largely under male control. It also enables us to
see more clearly the institutions, including law, that slavery erected, iJstitutions
that systematically made enslaved women's reproductive and sexual capacity
available for sale and consumption.
Afterword: Reclaiming Ourselves
Grandma Baby said people look down on her because she had eight
children with different men. Colored people and white people both look
down on her for that. Slaves not supposed to have pleasurable feelings on
their own; their bodies not supposed to be like that, but they have to have as
many children as they can to please whoever owned them. Still, they were
not supposed to have pleasure deep down. She said for me not to listen to
that. That I should always listen to my body and love it.
-Toni Morrison, Beloved
Beyond the brutal exploitation and abuse of the slave economy, black
women have reclaimed productive work as something that can be fulfilling and
"Don't Let Nobody Bother Yo' Principle" 121
affirming. But much of the labor that slavery extracted from women in the
enslaved workforce was sexual and reproductive. Toni Morrison's Pulitzer
Prize-winning novel, Beloved, is a story about a black woman who is thor-
oughly brutalized and haunted by the sexual economy of slavery described
above. Morrison poetically renders her character's exhausting struggle to
reclaim herself, and her family, from the terror of her past.
Have we, today, fully reclaimed our own intimate lives from that horror?
What are the ongoing effects of slavery's systemic expropriation of black
women's reproduction and sexuality for market and political purposes? How
does the sexual economy of slavery continue to affect the policing of black
women's sexuality? From current national debates about welfare reform to
local debates within the black community about sexual aggression by black
men against black women, our intimate lives cannot be tidily defined as and
confined to a private space. This essay has used cases and legal doctrine that
document and record the real lives and experiences of black women who were
enslaved, not only for academic insight, but to enable us to. combat the effects
of sexual economies, past and present.
NoTES
The title of this essay comes from Minnie Folkes, a former Virginia slave. Her full statement
was, "Don't let nobody bother yo' principle, 'cause dat wuz all yo' had:' John Blassingame,
The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South (New York and Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1972), 163
1. On the specificity of slavery, see Peter J. Parish, Slavery: History and Historians (New
York: Harper and Row, 1989), 3-6, 97-112.
2. Angela Y. Davis, Women, Race, and Class (New York: Random House, 5.
Schwalm's study of enslaved women on South Carolina rice plantations also remforces th1s
point. Leslie A. Schwalm, A Hard Fight for We: Women's Transition from Slavery to Freedom m
South Carolina (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997), 19-46.
3. Jacqueline Jones, Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work, and the Family
from Slavery to the Present (New York: Basic Books, 1985), 18.
4. Davis, Women, Race, and Class, 5.
5. Ibid., 10.
6. Deborah Gray White, "Female Slaves: Sex Roles and Status in the Antebellum
tion South," in Half Sisters of History: Southern Women and the Amencan Past, ed. Cathenne
Clinton (Durham, N.C. : Duke University Press, 1994), 56, 59.
7. See also Brenda E. Stevenson, Life in Black and White: Family and Community in the
Slave South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 159, 187-192; Schwalm, A Hard Fight
for We, 19-23; Carole Shammas, "Black Women's Work and the Evolution of Plantation Soci-
ety in Virginia;' Labor History 5 (1985) : 5-6.
8. Jones, Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow, 12. Brenda Stevenson notes that this was .n?t the
case in many African tribes. Stevenson, Life in Black and White, 171 ( sexual dlVls.wn of
labor in many African tribes, men did not perform agricultural labor, wh1ch was cons1dered
women's work).
122 ADRIENNE DAVIS
9. bell hooks, Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism (Boston: South End Press,
1981), 22.
10. For instance, Deborah Gray White warns:" [I]t would be a mistake to say that there was
no differentiation of field labor on southern farms and plantations . . .. Yet the exceptions to
the rule were so numerous as to make a mockery of it." Gray White, "Female Slaves;' 59-60
(emphasis added). In addition, "Pregnant women, and sometimes women breastfeeding
infants, were usually given less physically demanding work." Ibid., 60 (footnote omitted). See
also, Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America
(Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1998), 56, 135, 168 (describ-
ing the evolution of sexual division of labor); Stevenson, Life in Black and White, 192-193.
11. See hooks, Ain't I a Woman, 22-23. Ira Berlin notes, "Only rarely-for the very young
and the very old-did household labor occupy slave women on a full-time basis." See also
Berlin, Many Thousands Gone, 168, 270-271, 311-312; Eugene D. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll:
The World the Slaves Made (New York: Pantheon Books, 1972), 495; Schwalm, A Hard Fight
for We, 19-28.
12. See, e.g., Peter Kolchin,American Slavery: 1619-1877 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1993),
121-122 (describing one slaveholder who used this tactic).
13. Nell Irvin Painter, "Soul Murder and Slavery: Toward a Fully Loaded Cost Accounting;'
in U.S. History as Women's History: Feminist Essays, ed. Linda Kerber et al. (Chapel Hill: Uni-
versity of North Carolina Press, 1995), 125, 142; Chris Tomlins, "Why Wait for Industrialism?
Work, Legal Culture, and the Example of Early America;' Labor History 40 (February 1999):
5.
14. See Tomlins, "Why Wait for Industrialism?" 32.
15. Hudgins v Wrights, 11 Va. (1 Hen. and M.) 134 (1806).
16. Act XII, 2 Laws of Virginia 170 (Hening 1823) (enacted 1662). For further discussion
of this rule in Virginia, see Karen A. Getman, "Note, Sexual Control in the Slaveholding
South: The Implementation and Maintenance of a Racial Caste System," Harvard Women's
Law Journal 7 (1984): 115, 130-132; A. Leon Higginbotham Jr. and Barbara K. Kopytoff,
"Racial Purity and Interracial Sex in the Law of Colonial and Antebellum Virginia;' George-
town Law Journal?? (1989): 1967, 1970-1975; hooks, Ain't I a Woman, 39-44; Wi\bert E.
Moore, "Slave Law and the Social Structure," Journal of Negro History 26 (1941): 171, M4-191
(intriguing early discussion about definitions of enslavement).
17. Frazier v Spear, 5 Ky. (2 Bibb) 385, 386 (1811).
18. James Oakes, The Ruling Race: A History of American Slaveholders (New York: Knopf,
1982), 73.
19. Kolchin, American Slavery, 6-7.
20. Parish, Slavery, 23. "[T]he North American mainland was one of the smallest
importers of slaves from Africa, and yet became the home of the largest slave population in
the Western hemisphere:' Ibid., 112, see also 16. See also Albert J. Raboteau, Slave Religion:
The "Invisible Institution" in the Antebellum South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978),
91. Slavery in the United States was not static, however, and at times failed to reproduce by
natural increase. See, e.g., Berlin, Many Thousands Gone, 149 (through most of the eigh-
teenth century, the slave population in the low country did not naturally reproduce); Parish,
Slavery, 16 ("the first generation of slaves did not even reproduce their own population, let
alone produce a natural increase").
21. Parish, Slavery, 12 (footnote omitted).
22. Oakes, The Ruling Race, 26.
23. Margaret Burnham discusses such cases in her excellent article on the legal treatment
of enslaved families. Margaret A. Burnham, "An Impossible Marriage: Slave Law and Family
Law;' Law and Inequality (1987): 187, 198-199.
"Don't Let Nobody Bother Yo' Principle" 123
24. Letter from Thomas Jefferson to Joel Yancy (17 January 1819), reprinted in Thomas Jef-
ferson's Farm Book: With Commentary and Relevant Extracts from Other Writings, ed. Edwin
Morris Betts (Princeton: American Philosophical Society, Princeton University Press, 1953).
42, 43.
25. Ibid.
26. Stevenson, Life in Black and White, 245.
27. Herbert G. Gutman, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750-1925 (New York:
Pantheon Books, 1976), 76.
28. Deborah Gray White, Ar'n't I a Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South (New
York: Norton, 1985), 177 n. 22. She describes the economics in excellent detail. Ibid., 67-70.
29. In 1818, one southerner wrote: "For a young man, just commencing life the best stock,
in which he can invest Capital, is, I think, negro Stock .. . ; negroes will yield a much larger
income than any Bank dividend." Oakes, The Ruling Race, 73. Quoted in Leslie Howard
Owens, This Species of Property: Slave Life and Culture in the Old South (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1976), 16. Similarly, an uncle advised his young nephew: "Get as many
young negro women as you can. Get as many cows as you can .... It is the greatest country
for an increase that I have ever saw in my life. I have been hear [sic] six years and I have had
fifteen negro children born and last year three more young negro women commenced breed-
ing which added seven born last year and five of them is living and doing well." Oakes, The
Ruling Race, 74 (quoting Alva Fitzpatrick to Phillips Fitzpatrick, Aug. 20,. 1849, Fitzpatrick
Papers, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, N.C.).
30. Gray White, Ar'n't I a Woman?, 67-70.
31. Jones v Mason, 22 Va. (1 Rand.) 577, n. ~ ~ A u g . 1827) (Carr, J., concurring).
32. Cheryl Ann Cody, "Naming, Kinship, and Estate Dispersal: Notes on Slave Family Life
on a South Carolina Plantation, 1786 to 1833;' in Black Women in United States History: From
Colonial Times through the Present, ed. Darlene Clark Hine (New York: Carlson Publishing,
1990), 242.
33. M'Vaughters v Elder, 4 S.C.L. (2 Brev.) 307, 314 (1809). See also Parish, Slavery, 80
(describing a South Carolina planter who registered the births of enslaved children and of
colts, naming the horses' sires but not the slaves' fathers).
34. GrayWhite,Ar'n't I a Woman? 177 n. 22 (quoting DeBow's Review 30 [1857] : 74, which
is quoting Frederick Olmsted, The Cotton Kingdom, ed. David Freeman Hawke [Indianapo-
lis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1971], 12, 72.)
35. U.S. Constitution, art. I, 9, cl. 1.
36. See, e.g., August Meier and Elliott Rudwick, From Plantation to Ghetto, 3rd ed. (New
York: Hill and Wang, 1976), 40-41 (describing the role of the United States in ongoing ille-
gal trade). On the slave trade generally, see Philip D. Curtin, The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Cen-
sus (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969); Herbert S. Klein, The Middle Passage:
Comparative Studies in the Atlantic Slave Trade (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press,
1978); Stanley L. Engerman and Joseph E. Inikori, eds., The Atlantic Slave Trade: Effects on
Economies, Societies, and Peoples in Africa, the Americas, and Europe (Durham, N.C.: Duke
University Press, 1992). On the domestic slave trade see, e.g., Stevenson, Life in Black and
White, 175-176; Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market (Cam-
bridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999); Michael Tadman, Speculators and Slaves:
Masters, Traders, and Slaves in the Old South (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989);
see also Parish, Slavery, 56-57 (summarizing the debate over extent and effects of domestic
slave trade).
37. The scope, design, and profitability of breeding enslaved females remains deeply con-
tested among historians. See Parish, Slavery, 63 n. 33; Richard Sutch, "The Breeding of Slaves
for Sale and the Westward Expansion of Slavery, 1850-1860," in Race and Slavery in the
124 ADRIENNE DAVIS
Western Hemisphere: Quantitative Studies, ed. Stanley L. Engerman and Eugene D. Genovese
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1975); Richard G. Lowe and Randolph B. Camp-
bell, "The Slave Breeding Hypothesis: A Demographic Comment on the 'Buying and Selling'
States;' Journal of Southern History 42 ( 1976): 401--412.
38. Hudgins v Wrights, 11 Va. (1 Hen. and M.), 136 (italics in original).
39. The Hudgins ruling suggests a different outcome when the contest is between white
economic versus white liberty interests. See Hudgins v Wrights, 11 Va. ( 1 Hen. and M.),
140-141. For further discussion of this point, see Adrienne D. Davis, "Identity Notes Part
One: Playing in the Light," American University Law Review 45 (1996): 695, 702-707.
40. Native Americans could be enslaved in Virginia only during a certain period of time,
and whites could not be enslaved at all.
41. In an earlier essay, I joined other commentators in arguing that the decision in the case
exemplifies the role of law in shaping the existence and meaning of racial categories, such as
black, white, and Native American, in the U.S. law that protected those who were not black
from being enslaved. One of the judges, for instance, said, "The distinguishing characteristics
of the different species of the human race are so visibly marked, that those species may be
readily discriminated from each other by mere inspection only." Hudgins v Wrights, 11 Va. ( 1
Hen. and M.), 141. The essay calls this assignment of race based on visual appearance a
"scopic" determination of race, which it contrasts with assignments based on ancestry or
genealogy. While many slave laws protected white economic interests, I argue that Hudgins's
scopic rule of racial classification identified a second legally protected interest, the white lib-
erty interest. Not surprisingly, under such a rule, the definition of "black" itself became a
matter of legal contestation. See, e.g., Davis, "Identity Notes Part One;' 702-711; see also
Ariela J. Gross, "Litigating Whiteness: Trials of Racial Determination in the Nineteenth-Cen-
tury South;' Yale Law Journal108 (1998): 109; Higginbotham and Kopytoff, "Racial Purity
and Interracial Sex," 1975-1988.
42. Hudgins v Wrights, 11 Va. (1 Hen. and M.), 141 (italics in original).
43. See Frazier v Spear, 5 Ky. (2 Bibb) 385, 386 (1811).
44. Hudgins v Wrights, 11 Va. (1 Hen. and M.), 142 (italics in original).
45. Hudgins v Wrights, 11 Va. (1 Hen. and M.), 135 (italics in original). ,
46. At various points, white women, too, suffered regulations not unlike those suffered by
enslaved black women. At times, white women giving birth to children deemed to be black
could be sold into indentured servitude, and their children could be indentured. If an inden-
tured white woman had a child, it could extend the period of her own indenture (the child
would be indentured until an adult, as well). In one extreme iteration, in 1664, Maryland
enslaved white women marrying enslaved men for the lifetime of the husband, enslaving also
any children. This law was repealed due to fear of its abuse by white masters seeking to extend
white female servants' period of service. See, e.g., James Hugo Johnston, Race Relations in
Virginia and Miscegenation in the South: 1776--1860 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts
Press, 1970); 172-179; Thomas D. Morris, Southern Slavery and the Law: 1619-1860 (Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 23; Martha Hodes, White Women, Black Men:
Illicit Sex in the Nineteenth-Century South (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 24-25.
47. Darlene Clark Hine concurs: "Slave women were expected to serve a dual function in
this system and therefore suffered a dual oppression. They constituted an important and nec-
essary part of the work force and they were, through their child-bearing function, the one
group most responsible for the size and indeed the maintenance of the slave labor pool." Dar-
lene Clark Hine, "Female Slave Resistance: The Economics of Sex;' in Hine Sight: Black
Women and the Re-Construction of American History, ed. Darlene Clark Hine (New York:
Carlson Publishing, 1994) 27, 34.
48. State v George, 37 Miss. 316 (1859).
49. Ibid., 317.
"Don't Let Nobody Bother Yo' Principle" 125
50. Thomas Cobb, An Inquiry into the Law of Negro Slavery in the United States of America
(Philadelphia: T. & J. W. Johnson and Co.; Savannah, Ga.: W. T. Williams, 1858), 107.
51. See, e.g., Higginbotham and Kopytoff, "Racial Purity and Interracial Sex"; Morris,
Southern Slavery and the Law, 304-307.
52. Carolyn Pitt Jones, "Litigating Reparations for African-American Female Victims of
Coerced/Uninformed Sterilization and Coerced/Uninformed Norplant Implantation," 1999,
41 (memorandum written for class, on file with author).
53. "Serious prohibitions of rape strengthen the bargaining power of the weaker sexual
player by making the stronger obtain consent from the weaker rather than force the sexual
transaction. The various possible incarnations of rape-stranger rape, statutory rape, mari-
tal rape, acquaintance rape, and rape by abuse of familial or professional authority-mark
the boundaries of one person forcibly claiming access to another's body without their con-
sent and accordingly are central in setting the terms of such consent .... The law governing
forcible rape also reflects the core beliefs of a society about the role of sexual access." Linda
R. Hirshman and Jane E. Larson, Hard Bargains: The Politics of Sex (New York: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 1998), 6.
54. hooks, Ain't I a Woman, 25-26.
55. Brenda Stevenson, for instance, describes a variety of factors that may have led some
enslaved men to sexually objectify enslaved women. Stevenson, Life in Black and White,
242-243.
56. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll, 420, quoting Robert Goodloe Harper, Cotton Is King and
Pro-Slavery Arguments, ed. E. N. Elliott (New York: Vintage Books, 1976), 44--45, 61. See also
Painter, "Soul Murder and Slavery;' 142 (describing the complex reasoning of apologists
defending the sexual norms of slavery). .n
57. Darlene Clark Hine notes: "Another major aspect of black women under slavery took
the form of the white master's consciously constructed view of black female sexuality. This
construct, which was designed to justify his own sexual passion toward her, also blamed the
female slave for the sexual exploitation she experienced at the hands of her master." Hine,
"Female Slave Resistance," 28.
58. Katherine Fishburn, Women in Popular Culture: A Reference Guide (Westport, Conn.:
Greenwood Press, 1982), 10-11.
59. Davis, Women, Race, and Class, 23-24.
60. Enslaved men may have been sexually victimized for similar purposes; this topic is
underexplored in the literature. For discussion, see Painter, "Soul Murder and Slavery;'
137-138; Stevenson, Life in Black and White, 181, 195-196. Judith Kelleher Schafer discusses
the sexual torture of an enslaved boy in "Sexual Cruelty to Slaves: The Unreported Case of
Humphreys v. Utz;' Chicago-Kent Law Review 68 (1993): 1313. In Beloved, Toni Morrison
alludes to sexual abuse of black men on the chain gang. Toni Morrison, Beloved (New York:
Knopf, 1987), 107-108.
61. Angela Y. Davis, "Reflections on the Black Woman's Role in the Community of Slave.s;'
in The Angela Y. Davis Reader, ed. Joy James (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 1998) 111, 124 (ong-
inally published in The Black Scholar 3/4 [1971]: 3, 13); see also Stevenson, Life in Black and
White, 240.
62. Dorothy Sterling, ed., We Are Your Sisters: Black Women in the Nineteenth Century (New
York: W. W. Norton, 1984), 27. Deborah Gray White notes that the cities of New Orleans,
Charleston, St. Louis, and Lexington seem to have been the centers of the trade. Gray White,
Ar'n't I a Woman? 37. One trader insisted on separating a mother and daughter, speculating
that when the daughter was a few years older, "there were men enough in New Orleans who
would give five thousand dollars for such an extra handsome, fancy piece as Emily would be."
Ibid., 38 (quoting Solomon Northrup, "Twelve Years a Slave: Narrative of Solomon
Northrup;' in Puttin' on Ole Massa, ed. Gilbert Osofsky [New York: Harper and Row, 1969],