Sexual Exploitation of the Enslaved

The sexual exploitation of enslaved people was a facet of enslavement in Virginia that took many forms for both women and men. Enslavers sexually assaulted and abused enslaved individuals, demanded reproduction from them to enhance their own bottom lines, and otherwise used the bodies of the enslaved for monetary gain, pleasure, and punishment. Western culture’s objectification and sexualizing of Black bodies exacerbated the sexual vulnerability of enslaved men and women. In addition to being detrimental to the well-being of enslaved people, sexual exploitation strained marriages and other interpersonal relationships valued by enslaved people. The historical record speaks to the ubiquity of mixed-race sexual relationships in the era of slavery: Virginia had the largest number of mixed-race enslaved people of all the southern states, totaling approximately 44,000 in 1850. While some of these sexual relationships were long-term and some enslaved men and women navigated sexually intimate relations with their enslavers and other white people in an effort to survive and secure better treatment, historians question whether any relationships under such an unequal power dynamic can be considered consensual.

component of enslavement throughout the history of slavery in Virginia. Enslavers exercised almost complete control over the bodies of enslaved individuals and the conditions of their existence, providing themselves with numerous avenues for force and coercion in the intimate lives of the enslaved. The plantation culture itself, with its strict hierarchy of white male authority, emboldened enslavers to demean and dominate those over which they held power. And the law provided enslaved people with no protection from sexual violence. The rape of an enslaved woman was not a crime under most state laws. In George v. State, the Supreme Court of Mississippi ruled in 1859 that a Black enslaved man could not be convicted of raping an enslaved woman because it was only a crime to “commit a rape upon a white woman.”

Because of this absence of legal protection, historians lack an archive of legal cases to determine the extent of sexual violence against the enslaved and must rely on other evidence. For enslaved women in particular, slave narratives speak to the ubiquity and constant threat of sexual violence at the hands of enslavers, their family members, overseers, and others. As Harriet Jacobs wrote, “My master was, to my knowledge, the father of eleven slaves. But did the mothers dare to tell who was the father of their children? Did the other slaves dare to allude to it, except in whispers among themselves? No, indeed! They knew too well the terrible consequences” (Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, 1861). Reverend Ishrael Massie, who was born into slavery in Emporia, recalled that enslavers and overseers would “[s]end husbands out on de farm, milkin’ cows or cuttin’ wood. Den he gits in bed wid slave himself. Some women would fight and tussel. Others would be ’umble—feared of dat beatin’.”

Elizabeth Keckly, who was born into slavery in the Piedmont region of Virginia and taken by her enslavers to North Carolina, told in her narrative Behind the Scenes: Or, Thirty Years a Slave and Four Years in the White House (1868) of being repeatedly raped by the son of a wealthy plantation owner who lived nearby; eventually she gave birth to son that he fathered.

Indeed, the sons of enslavers often repeated the patterns of sexual exploitation they learned on the plantation. In 1826, two students at the University of Virginia raped a sixteen-year-old enslaved woman and later “stripped her naked and beat her” for giving them a venereal disease, as recounted by Alan Taylor in Thomas Jefferson’s Education (2019).

Women were not the only ones who faced sexual assault. Jacobs noted that in addition to raping enslaved women, enslavers did in some cases “exercise the same authority over the male slaves.” In an 1787 incident in Maryland, an enslaved man was sexually assaulted when he was forced at gunpoint by two white men to rape a free Black woman. As with enslaved women, fighting back was usually futile, as those who resisted would be whipped or sold to a plantation in the Lower South, separated from their families and consigned to a life of even harder labor. Nonetheless, some enslaved people did resist, self-emancipating, fighting back, or, in extreme cases, resorting to the murder of their abusers.

Western culture’s objectification and sexualizing of Black bodies contributed to the sexual vulnerability of enslaved men and women. Black women had long been depicted by early European travelers as especially fertile and hypersexual, a view that was carried over to enslaved women to justify sexual contact without consent.