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Illicit Sex Across the Color Line: White Women and Black Men in the Civil War South
"I will tell you a fact that I have never seen alluded to publicly, and I suppose a man would be scouted who should allude to it publicly; but my relations with colored people have led me to believe that there is a large amount of intercourse between white women and colored men." So Captain Richard J. Hinton told the American Freedmen's Inquiry Commission in 1863. Despite Hinton's suspicion that anyone who spoke out about sexual relations between white women and black men would be "scouted" - that is, dismissed as absurd or scornfully rejected - he talked on.
This paper is a code reading of Captain Hinton's testimony before the American Freedmen's Inquiry Commission in an effort to understand the intimate connections between racial slavery and a particular category of illicit sex in the antebellum and Civil War South. Sex between white women and black men was subversive for its transgression of boundaries. The crossing of the color line meant that the free and the unfree were consorting; further, women and black men was subversive for its transgression of boundaries. The crossing of the color line meant that the free and the unfree were consorting; further, women were defying legal and social sanctions set and enforced by men, and blacks were defying legal and social sanctions set and enforced by whites.
White women who entered sexual liaisons with black men had an interest in concealing their actions for fear of sullied reputations and ostracism; for the black men involved, the imperative of silence rested upon fears of violence and death at the hands of whites. By locating some of the arenas in which conversations about sex between white women and black men took place, historians can move beyond both law and ideology about this particular proscription. Three such arenas emerge from Captain Hinton's testimony, all of which were discourses among men: first, black men talked among themselves; next, black men talked to Hinton, a white abolitionist from the North; and last, Hinton talked to the American Freedmen's Inquiry Commission, a small group of white men who shared his political persuasions. The members of the commission then decided against...