Frederick Douglass teaches that even men who professed Christianity were corrupted by the decision to own slaves. Other sources tell of the added corruption resulting from the opportunities slavery afforded for the sexual exploitation of female slaves.
By the 18th century, patriotic and religious impulses had turned many Northerners against slavery, but in the 19th century they were repelled even more by the perceived prevalence of sexual abuse under slavery. Abolitionists convinced many that, by giving the slaveholder unfettered access to the bodies of female slaves, slavery promoted sexual exploitatio1 on a scale that further threatened the very moral and ethical fabric of society. They argued that the institution corrupted the slaveholder’s morals, humiliated his wife, defiled his slave women, and produced a progeny of mulatto children who shared the unforgivable burden of being slaves to their own parents.
In her 1861 memoir Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, escaped slave Harriet Jacobs provided firsthand testimony that confirmed these fears. Jacobs detailed years of sexual harassment at the hands of her slaveholder. Recounting her entry into the dangerous years of adolescence, she lamented: “But I now entered on my fifteenth year—a sad epoch in the life of a slave girl. My master began to whisper foul words in my ear. Young as I was, I could not remain ignorant of their import.” Jacobs described slaveholders’ and their sons’ licentious and misogynistic behavior that routinely bedeviled the life of a slave girl, writing, “she is whipped or starved into submission to their will.” From such brutal beginnings extended “relationships” often began, producing hundreds of thousands of mixed-race children in America.
Not only did the inherent dynamics of the slavery setting become more corrupt when slave rape occurred, the misconduct often damaged many relationships. The slaveholder’s relations with his wife were undermined; she was often powerless to stop such misbehavior. An illicit sexual liaison also damaged the relationship between the wife and the slave mistress, who in many cases was a house servant forced to live under the same roof. Even when the slave owner was unmarried, the unequal power dynamics between him and his slave mistress eliminated her ability to refuse consent.
Slavery rendered relations between slaveholders and their slave children bizarre in that their children also could be their slaves. Recent scholarship suggests that at least 2-8 percent of slave children born on Southern plantations were fathered by Whites, and testimony by former slaves collected in the 1930s reveals that more than one-third of ex-slave women who broached the topic of parentage claimed to have a White father or at least one child sired by a White father.
The widespread existence in slave societies of light-skinned, or mulatto, children who carried their slaveholder’s features stood as a physical reminder of sex abuse. Slaveholders typically did not care one way or another about their offspring, but even for those who did, it likely took a bold and self-confident slaveholder to withstand the indignation of a wife and provide affection for such children. At best, he might provide them with a trade or set them free, but he also might sell them to remove the evidence and often did.
The fathering of mixed-race children by slaveholders— the federal census counted more than 400,000 mulattoes in the United States in 1860—did more than corrupt human relations. It damaged human psyches, undermined the slaveholders’ pretenses to respectability, and made hypocrisy of their public posturing on the need for racial purity and the separation of the races. Abolitionist literature was filled with descriptions of slaveholders as lascivious managers of harems where animal instincts were easily gratified. Slaveholders may have denounced and denied such accusations but often lived with knowing winks and nods from others nonetheless.
The documents in this exhibition provide no direct evidence of sexual exploitation, but the visitor will notice words such as “mulatto” or “light colored man” and “light yellow boy” in the descriptions of the slaves or indentured servants. Possibly some of these refer to individuals born from a sexually exploitative relationship.
None of the records in this exhibition speak directly to sexual exploitation of the slaves and indentured servants, some very young, who are the subjects of the transactions, but they raise the possibility. It was this possibility, and sometimes reality, that outraged abolitionists like Harriet Jacobs and Harriet Beecher Stowe and like-minded Western Pennsylvanians in the years leading up to the Civil War. Perhaps, amongst others, it was this possibility, and occasional reality, that in the 1790s appalled Hugh Henry Brackenridge, whose satirical novel Modern Chivalry lampooned local slaveholders who were too pious even to shave on Sunday but who nonetheless “held and abused” their slaves.
Between 1820 and 1847, Pennsylvania waged a back-and-forth battle against the federal government with a series of laws intended to blunt the effect of the federal Fugitive Slave Act of 1793. Ultimately, in 1850, Pennsylvania lost.
In 1820, the Commonwealth passed the first statute in the United States to prohibit state officials from enforcing the federal Fugitive Slave Act of 1793 as it applied to escaped slaves [An Act to Prevent Kidnapping; Law Book No. XVIII, pg. 24].
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This law made the kidnapping of any Black or mulatto for the purpose of making him or her a slave or indentured servant a felony punishable by a fine of $500 to $2,000 and by seven to 21 years’ imprisonment at hard labor. It also prohibited any alderman or justice of the peace under penalty of fine from exercising jurisdiction or taking cognizance of cases of fugitive slaves under the federal Fugitive Slave Act.
Prompted in part by Maryland’s appeal for Pennsylvania to implement the federal Fugitive Slave Act of 1793, Pennsylvania in 1826 passed its own Fugitive Slave Act [Pennsylvania Archives, Ninth Series, VIII, 6417]. While ostensibly designed to assist slaveholders in recovering runaway slaves, the 1826 law actually made recovery virtually impossible. After enactment of the 1826 law, there was virtually no way for a slaveholder to recapture a fugitive slave in Pennsylvania and be safe from prosecution as a kidnapper.
Pennsylvania retreated from its forward movement in 1837 when, in its new state constitution, it repealed that portion of the 1790 Pennsylvania constitution that had given free Blacks the right to vote.
In 1842, the U.S. Supreme Court entered the fray and decimated Pennsylvania’s fugitive slave legislation. In Prigg v. Pennsylvania [41 U.S. 539], the court affirmed Congress’ right to legislate on the subject of fugitive slaves, denied states the power to legislate on fugitive slavery because that subject came within exclusive federal jurisdiction, and allowed state governments to decide whether or not their officials would help to execute the federal Fugitive Slave Act.
In response to Prigg, Pennsylvania enacted the Personal Liberty Law of 1847 [Laws of Pennsylvania, 1847]. This law provided sanctions for purchasing or removing free Blacks with the intention of reducing them to slaves; prohibited state officials from accepting jurisdiction over cases arising under the federal Fugitive Slave Act of 1793; provided penalties for claimants seizing slaves in a violent, tumultuous, and unreasonable manner; repealed the 1780 provision that permitted the temporary residence of slaves in the Commonwealth; and repealed Pennsylvania’s 1826 Fugitive Slave Act.
In exchange for Southern support of California’s admission to the Union as a free state and ending the slave trade in the District of Columbia, Congress enacted the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 to help the South perpetuate slaveholding. This law created a force of federal commissioners empowered to pursue and return to slaveholders runaway slaves in any state. No statute of limitations applied, so that even those slaves who had been free for many years could be returned.