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Bloody Terrain: Freedwomen, Sexuality and Violence During Reconstruction Author(s): Catherine Clinton Source: The Georgia Historical Quarterly, Vol. 76, No. 2, THE DIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN GENDER AND RACE: WOMEN IN GEORGIA AND THE SOUTH (Summer 1992), pp. 313-332 Published by: Georgia Historical Society Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40582538 . Accessed: 10/08/2013 14:21

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Bloody Terrain: Freedwomen, Sexuality and Violence During Reconstruction

By Catherine Clinton

continue to unravel layers of evidence surrounding the cataclysmic episode in our past known as Reconstruction.

It appears that after Appomattox the conquered Confederacy did not so much surrender, as it refought old, familiar battles on the homefront. Conflict reconfigurated: from the South's streets to its statehouses, in kitchens and courtrooms, terrain remained contested. Although Reconstruction has spawned a vital and prize-winning historical literature, many aspects of the era remain unexplored. And the African- American women of this and other generations remain buried beneath historians' disclaimers about sources and neglect, but buried nonetheless. *

Respite historians' sensitive and extensive treatment of questions of race, region and class in most comprehensive studies - especially Eric Foner, Reconstruction: AmeHca's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877 (New York, 1988); Leon F. Litwack, Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery (New York, 1979); and equally compelling, Clarence Mohr, On the Threshold of Freedom: Masters and Slaves in Civil War Georgia (Athens, Ga., 1986); and George C. Rable, But There Was No Peace: The Role of Violence in the Politics of Reconstruction (Athens, Ga., 1984) - these works rarely focus on women and provide little or no mention of sexual coercion and rape. This conspicuous neglect of the topic is not due to a lack of evidence, as Gerda Lerner's Black Women in White Amenca: A Documentary History (New York, 1972); Jacqueline Jones' Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work, and the Family from Slavery to the Present (New York, 1985); and Leslie Schwalm's, "The Meaning of Freedom: African- American Women and their Transformation from Slavery to Freedom in Lowcountry South Carolina" (Ph.D. disser- tation, University of Wisconsin, Madison, 1991), demonstrate. Rather mainstream his- torical literature consistently ignores these issues. Critiques which attack or even ac- knowledge such omissions are belittled, stifling legitimate complaint. Further, those who allow the conspirators to bask in their malignant neglect are assuredly collaborators and history remains the poorer.

This essay is adapted from "Reconstructing Freedwomen" in Catherine Clinton and Nina Silber, eds., Divided Houses: Gender and the Civil War (forthcoming, Oxford Univer- sity Press). The author would like to thank the American Council of Learned Societies for their support.

Catherine Clinton teaches in the Afro- American Studies Department at Har- vard University.

The Georgia Historical Quarterly Vol. LXXVI, No. 2, Summer 1992

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314 Georgia Historical Quarterly

Memoirs from this period are sparse. We have some black autobiographies, but most narratives by women are from the antebellum era or deal with the period following Reconstruc- tion. Some manuscript material in southern archives offers evi- dence, but these traditional sources have severe limitations as most are written by whites and tell us more about white views than black lives. More valuable and indeed more exciting are the records of the Freedmen's Bureau. Three published vol- umes of edited documents offer scholars considerable insight into the power and possibilities afforded by this rich primary material.2 Further, black newspapers are crammed with un- exploited material. In Georgia alone, Augusta's Colored Amencan and Loyal Georgian, and Atlanta's Weekly Defiance yield important insights into the struggles of this dynamic era, and women's roles in them.3

The testimony of former slaves provides us with poignant images and, indeed, perhaps casts new light on the central dramas of this "dark and bloody" ground, as the era has been characterized. The suffering and violence experienced during this exceptionally savage era of racial realignment cannot be underestimated. George Wright and others have cautioned that the underreporting of both lynchings and murders, as well as beatings and threats, was notorious.4 The problem is not to compare the violence against men to that against women in order to weigh in winners and losers, but rather to assess the scope of this violence and its role in the larger politics of Recon- struction.

African- Americans had an enormous, sprawling agenda in the months and years following emancipation. Their concerns were titanic; and certainly political equality and economic justice headed the list. But it is equally clear that the integrity of family and the protection of black women were top priorities for the leaders of the black community as well as the emancipated

2Ira Berlin, et al., eds., Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, Series I, Vols. 1-3 (New York, 1982-1990).

3I would like to thank David Katzman for calling my attention to the black newspaper collection at Widener Library, Harvard University.

4George Wright, Racial Violence in Kentucky, 1865-1940: Lynchings, Mob Ruh, and " Legal Lynchings" (Baton Rouge, 1990).

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Freedwomen, Sexuality, and Violence 315

people at large. It is just as clear, if we confront the evidence which may sicken but nevertheless informs us, that white su- premacists continued the exploitation of black women, clinging to the sexual tactics rampant during slavery as a means of main- taining racial control. The laws may have changed, but habits died hard.5

Before the war, Georgia, like other southern states, segre- gated its statutes into laws for whites and blacks, free and slave.6 This triple-tiered system (with free blacks suffering partial but nevertheless significant legal disabilities) was explicit in matters of rape, a sex crime with which the white South was preoccupied. From 1770 on, Georgia law provided for capital punishment of those "slave, free negro, Indian, mulatto or mustizoe" defen- dants found guilty of rape or attempted rape of a white - while the death penalty was rarely applied to whites convicted of identical crimes.7 An enslaved woman was classed as property by Georgia statute and could not charge rape under the law.8 In 1861 the Georgia Code amended: "Rape is the carnal knowl- edge of a female, whether free or slave, forcibly against her will." Despite this newly-egalitarian definition of the crime, the punishment did not yield to this spirit of fairness: conviction for rape of free white females merited two to twenty years' imprisonment while "if committed upon a slave, or free person of color," the fine and imprisonment was left to "the discretion of the court."9

While statutory differential based on race diminished after the Civil War, extralegal means perpetuated the system of racial injustice. Postbellum appellate court opinions concerning rape in Georgia reveal forty-seven cases presented between 1865 and

5See Catherine Clinton, "Southern Dishonor: Flesh, Blood, Race and Bondage," in Carol Bleser, ed., In Joy and Sorrow: Women, Family, and Marriage in the Victorian South, 1830-1900 (New York, 1991), 52-68; Herbert Gutman, The Black Family in Sfovery and Freedom (New York, 1976), 83-84, 395-99; and Sara Rapport, "The Freedmen's Bureau as a Legal Agent for Black Men and Women in Georgia: 1865-1868," Georgia Historical Quarterly 73 (Spring 1989): 39-41.

6Peter Bardaglio, "Families, Sex and the Law: The Legal Transformation of the Nineteenth Century Southern Household" (Ph.D. dissertation, Stanford University, 1987), book forthcoming, University of North Carolina Press.

7Digest of the Laws of the State of Georgia (Savannah, 1802), 430. 8See Clinton, "Southern Dishonor, 65-66. *The Code of the State of Georgia (Atlanta, 1861), 4248 Sec. XXXIII, p. 824.

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316 Georgia Historical Quarterly

In one of several of Thomas Nast's graphic displays of Reconstruction violence against southern blacks, the cartoonist acknowledged women as victims by laying the bloody corpses of a woman and her children at the base of a monument summarizing recent atrocities. Detail of Nast cartoon from Harper's Weekly, October 10, 1868.

1900, in virtually all of which the victims were white. In only nine cases were those convicted on rape charges black - six for attempted rapes and three for completed rapes, including an attack upon a prostitute. In only two cases were guilty verdicts overturned: a thirteen-year-old boy found guilty of rape was granted a new trial, and the court reversed a lower court con- viction of a man with no evidence of attempted rape, holding him over for trial on robbery charges instead. Fitzhugh Brun- dage has noted that in Georgia, between 1880 and 1930, sixty- three victims of mob violence (lynched men) were accused of

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Freedwomen, Sexuality, and Violence 317

rape: sixty African-Americans and three whites.10 Although these numbers provide only partial and inconclusive statistical evidence, they nonetheless push us toward the logical conclusion that black men suspected of rape were given no day in court, but turned over to the mob. And what of black women during this period? Are we to assume that African- American women were spared the indignities which plagued their white southern sisters? The records of the Freedmen's Bureau indicate other- wise. Several annual state reports included a category of "Mur- ders and Outrages," that chronologically cataloged rapes.

In the fall of 1868, sex crimes and murders appeared fre- quently in Louisiana records: Pamala Casillo accused Macrae of attempted rape and although he was arrested, authorities allowed him to escape from St. Martin's Parish.11 In Franklin, a party of white men attacked a freedwoman and whipped her. The agent reported "the negroes have not reported to the Bureau, as they fear to be seen about the Bureau office."12 In Lafourche Parish, the daughter of James Heart was sexually assaulted by Collyer, a plantation overseer. Although the case was referred to a local judge, no action was taken.13 In De Soto, Mariah Ramkly was brutally beaten by Frank Bell but no action was taken, leading bureau agent Michael Cary to complain, "justice cannot be obtained in civil courts."14 On August 30, in Winn County, a "colored girl" was raped by Victor Thompson. When Justice Curry issued a warrant, the accused was not ar- rested, as he was hiding in the woods, complained agent D. W. White.15 By October over one hundred freedmen had been killed in Louisiana and the life of an agent in Bossier County threatened. On Halloween in Claiborne Parish, agent William Stokes grimly reported that nine or ten men armed and dis-

10See Fitzhugh Brundage, "Lynching in the New South: Georgia and Virginia, 1880-1930" (Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard University, 1988), book forthcoming, Univer- sity of Illinois Press.

nThe Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands (hereinafter cited as BRF&AL), National Archives, Record Group 105, Entry 1322, Vol. 30, La., Murders and Outrages, W 226, W 238, and W 248, St. Martin's Parish, May 20, 1868.

l2Ibid., R 466, Franklin County, June 14, 1868. 13/M., Β 317, Lafourche Parish, July 31, 1868. "Ibid., C 142, DeSoto County, Tune 20, 1868. l5Ibid., W 390, Winn County, August 30, 1868.

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318 Georgia Historical Quarterly

guised had "ravished and severely beaten" a freed woman. Stokes commented, "The freedpeople will not divulge anything for fear of death."16 And so the patterns of racial violence and reprisals, echoes from the days of slavery, continued after eman- cipation.

Black leaders railed against these conditions and defiantly confronted the issue in speeches and editorials. The Rev. Henry McNeal Turner's oration celebrating the first anniversary of black freedom on January 5, 1866 - published in local black papers across the South - included the following remarks: "For- merly there was no security for domestic happiness. Our ladies were insulted and degraded with or without their consent. Our wives were sold and husbands bought, children were begotten and enslaved by their fathers, we therefore were polygamists by virtue of our condition. But now we can marry and raise our children and teach them to fear God, O! black age of dissi- pation, thy days are nearly numbered."17 Turner's optimism was premature, serving more as a rhetorical device to challenge white smears, he boldly asserted:

It was also said, and Southern fanatics rode that hobby everywhere, "That if you free the negro he will want to marry our daughters and sisters," that was another foolish dream. What do we want with their daughters and sisters? We have as much beauty as they. Look at our ladies, do you want more beauty than that? All we ask of the white man is to let our ladies alone, and they need not fear us. The difficulty has heretofore been, our ladies were not always at our own düposal.18

Freedpeople clearly understood the hypocrisy of sexual and racial relations in the wake of emancipation. Nearly twenty years later, little had changed. Some African- Americans directly con- fronted these charges against black women. A letter from "Old Pelican," published in Atlanta's Weekly Defiance, countered the libel that "colored women are not moral and virtuous" by claim- ing that nine out often white/black liaisons are rape, and "there is no place of redress."19 When a black man was charged with

"Ibid., S 507, Claiborne Parish, November 10, 1868. "Colored American, January 13, 1866. "Ibid. "Weekly Defiance, February 24, 1883.

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Freedwomen, Sexuality, and Violence 319

rape of a white woman and sentenced to twenty years in prison, a Louisville paper complained: "Had the color of the parties been changed Rucker would now be a free man, such is justice in Kentucky."20

White observers condemned husbands who considered wifebeating a "right" and resisted bureau intervention. Ex-slaves reported that before emancipation masters prohibited slave men from striking their wives - and agents revealed that they as- sumed this paternalistic role after abolition. However, this is a much more complex dynamic when we consider that the very same masters who may have "protected" slave wives from being struck by their husbands might also have considered it their own right to strike the woman - to exert control and preserve authority on the plantation - a right they wished to maintain as employers.

Most freedwomen resisted bringing agents into domestic matters.21 They recognized the limited role the bureau could play in their lives and the temporary nature of federal force. Indeed, former slaves more than Union troops probably sensed how short-lived this experiment of northern involvement would be. Reliance on bureau agents, allied by color with former mas- ters, was dangerous for blacks in the short term and might result in long-term retaliation. The long arm of paternalism - clothed in blue uniform or tattered grey - was grasped only in utter desperation.

Women without alternatives sought assistance when frantic or destitute. In January 1867, a Madison, Georgia petitioner asked the bureau to help a family with a "43 year old mother raising her six children (from 2 to 12 yrs. old) and keeping her sixty- five year old blind mother."22 Equally common was the complaint of women run off the land just before getting paid. Some women complained about their husbands who left them in times of economic crises - but not to force apprehension or punishment, merely to justify their claims for assistance.23

20The Bulletin, September 24, 1881. But such a sentence was of course less brutal than the lynch mobs to which most "black rapists" were consigned.

21See Rapport, "The Freedmen's Bureau as a Legal Agent," 39-41. 22BRF&AL, Letters Received, Microfilm, M798, Reel 15, Madison, Ga., January 2,

1867. "Rapport, "The Freedmen's Bureau as Legal Agent." BRF&AL, Letters Received,

M1048, Reel 26, 0516, Gordonsville, Va., May 17, 1867, and M798, Reel 17, Greensboro, Ga., August 15, 1867.

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320 Georgia Historical Quarterly

Mothers were most severely affected by emancipation's ad- versities, as Jacqueline Jones has so eloquently demonstrated.24 First and foremost, the care and feeding of children were re- sponsibilities shouldered by women with few and rapidly deplet- ing resources. A bureau agent reported from King Williams County, Virginia that "there is little call for female help, and women with children are not desired."25 This comment does not begin to convey the dimensions of this crisis. Among the thousands of freedpeople negotiating contracts and selling their labor, women with children were discriminated against and often "blackballed" by employers.

Mothers had few alternatives and little recourse. When Cor- nelia Whitley and her sick child were thrown out of the house of her employer, Allen Dickenson of Orange County, Virginia, in September 1865, she complained to the bureau. An agent reported that Mrs. Dickensen then assaulted Whitley for going to the agency for help.26 Women were trapped and in some cases rendered senseless by the ordeal of survival.

A tragic tale from the records reveals the depths of one woman's despair. In October 1868, Polly Jennings of Halifax County, Virginia was sentenced to hang for infanticide. The previous fall, her employer, a Mr. Jennings, had told her not to have any more children as she was unmarried and already supported five offspring. He threatened to dismiss her if she bore another child - pushing Polly and her children even further along poverty's downward spiral. She found herself pregnant again, and murdered her newborn in May, leaving it in the woods. A bureau officer attempted to get her death sentence for that crime commuted to life imprisonment. Polly Jennings' sacrifice of one child for the welfare of the five older ones was dramatic and unusual, but the fact that women were confronted with life and death issues on a daily basis was not.27

Whites often used children as weapons - to keep all workers, especially mothers, docile and submissive. A bureau agent re-

24Jones, Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow. 25BRF&AL, Letters Received, M 1048, Reel 10, 0580, King Williams County Va

Tune 30, 1866. 26Ibid., Reel 12, 0073, Gordonsville, Va., January 6, 1866. "Ibid., Reel 33, 0827-30, Halifax County, Va., October 29, 1868.

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Freedwomen, Sexuality, and Violence 321

ported in January 1866 that two freedwomen were bullied into signing a contract: the bonding of their children and possible separation were threatened if they failed to cooperate.28 Scores of these accounts appeared annually in bureau records. And once women secured their children they would next have to figure out how to feed and educate them during times of decline and hardship.

We know that southern whites were unwilling to expand their prewar definitions of "manhood" and "womanhood" to include formerly enslaved persons. Although postwar law might recognize an African- American woman as a person and a wife, and a black man a citizen and a voter, Lost Cause ideologues promoted white supremacy with a vengeance. Emancipation and federal conquest created unprecedented levels of anxiety that spurred former Confederates into refighting the war on ideological grounds.

Within this new contest, gender and sexual roles were re- wrought in a complex tangle of conflict and compromise. Cer- tainly white supremacists intended to reassert their dominance by playing on antebellum themes - the "Sambo" incompetence of the black male and the "promiscuity" of black women. Both of these racist stereotypes were woven from white fears - that the black man might exact revenge against his oppressor for generations of inhumanity; and second, that the growing seg- ment of the black population labelled "mulatto" might not be a result of slave women's licentiousness, but rather of white sexual coercion. Simultaneously, ex-Confederates, especially veterans, concocted new and important projections of their own fears - none more complex and potent than the "black rapist." Equally powerful within the ideological warfare was the de- feminizing mythology launched at black womanhood during this era. Certainly Angela Davis, bell hooks, Deborah White and Patricia Morton have made important inroads into this historical field imbedded with landmines.29

28Ibid., M826, Reel 13, 0513-17, Jackson, Miss., January 11, 1866. 29 Angela Y. Davis, Women, Race fcf Class (New York, 1981); bell hooks, Ain't I a

Woman: Black Women and Feminism (Boston, 1981); Deborah Gray White, Ar'n't I a Woman?: Female Slaves in the Plantation South (New York, 1985); Patricia Morton, Disfig- ured Images: The Historical Assault on Afro-American Women (Westport, Conn., 1991).

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322 Georgia Historical Quarterly

Emancipation created few opportunities for African- Amer- ican women in the political economy beyond freedom. Women nevertheless seized the opportunity to express themselves, pioneering new avenues for individual and collective identity. In October 1866, Patience Thompson stated her case against a white man, Thomas Gross of Irwin County, Georgia. When she refused to sell him soap, Gross became verbally abusive and she replied in kind. He responded by beating her. When the case went to the grand jury, it refused to support her for fear of establishing a precedent of support for "every Negro who choose[s] to come before them." Thompson was forced to pay court costs and requested to "make up with Gross." She paid her fine but would not "make up" as the court had ordered.30 Thompson was a strong example of this new model of freedwoman.

In July 1868, four black women in Prince Edwards County, Virginia, were in their own house singing when John Schofield, a white man, asked them to stop. When they refused he entered the house and beat them with his fists, then took out a knife and cut one of the women on the hand. Subsequently, Schofield was tried and fined, but "let go without reproof or caution from Court."31 In Clinch County, Georgia, Viney Scarlett was arrested and given sixty-five lashes for verbally abusing a white woman.32 Both the character and tone of black women's challenges shifted during Reconstruction, and were met with mighty resistance from white individuals and their legal system.

Black women, fighting against the labels attached to them by former slaveowners, not only challenged these stereotypes directly but some also retaliated violently against whites. One tragic outcome is revealed in the 1866 records of Culpepper County, Virginia, where Jane Twyman, working for Isaiah Perry and his son George, accused Perry's wife and daughter of sleep- ing with other men. Twyman made her accusations in front of other servants. Alerted, Isaiah Perry grabbed his gun and con- fronted the woman and then shot at her. After Twyman was

30BRF&AL, Murders and Outrages, M798, Reel 13, Irwin County, Ga., October 15, 1866.

"Ibid., M1048, Reel 59, Prince Edwards County, Va., July 1868. ™Ibid., M798, Reel 13, Clinch County, Ga., August 8, 1866.

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Freedwomen, Sexuality, and Violence 323

wounded, Perry apologized - saying he did not mean to shoot her, only to frighten her. Twyman said she believed him in the presence of witnesses, and the two were reconciled. But while Twyman was having the bullet removed, Perry's son, in a drunk- en rage, pistol-whipped the wounded woman and "stomped" all over her. The case was reported, though not prosecuted, and ended when Isaiah Perry suddenly died, Jane Twyman died of her injuries, and two other witnesses to these attacks disappeared or died before George Perry could be brought to trial.33

It is difficult to fathom the fear created by a black woman fighting back - a force so strong that, in this particular case, it caused one white man to shoot at her and another to beat her to death. Such vocal and direct black female resistance, com- bined with the fear of male retaliation, fueled white hysteria during the postwar era.

The mechanism by which the nation was in physical reality linked by the end of the nineteenth century - the railroad - iron- ically supplied the means by which the country came to be divided ideologically: the railway coach.34 An 1866 article in the Loyal Georgian asked: "Why is it that the wives and daughters of freedmen, though they be chaste as ice, and pay the same fare that white people do on railways, are put into filthy freight cars and compelled to submit to all kinds of vulgar and insulting language?"35 Many distorted interpretations of this and other evidence have led some scholars to suppose that blacks were preoccupied with purity as a means of emulating white para- gons. Perhaps models of white womanhood were cherished - but most likely to protect black women from errant white males whose techniques ranged from teasing to threats to gang rape. The status of "lady" was a plea for gentlemanly behavior from white males who had corrupted the status of slave women and intended to perpetuate this degradation past emancipation.

Few were able to challenge the hypocrisy of the sexual double standard explicitly, but African- American women openly de-

5SIbid., Letters Received, M1048, Reel 12, 0220-0240, Culpepper County, Va., Feb- ruary 1866.

34Segregation legislation began in Tennessee in 100I, a railway case, and Messy v. Ferguson (1896) which also stemmed from a railway discrimination suit.

S5Loyal Georgian, February 17, 1866.

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324 Georgia Historical Quarterly

In 1884, twenty-two-year-old Ida B. Wells was ejected from a Tennessee train for refusing to give up her seat in the ladies' car. Her lawsuit against the rail- road company launched her on a lifetime crusade against racial injustice. Photograph from the Schomberg Center for Research inBfock Culture, New York, Ν. Y.

manded the same protection and privilege afforded white women by law. Increasingly newspapers carried reports of ex- changes where black women chided authorities for referring to them as "colored females," not because of the racial classifica- tion, but because they wished to be referred to as ladies. African- Americans were forced to tackle the barriers imposed by labels and language, as well as physical impediments. In 1868, three "colored females" brought a case before the U.S. District Court because they were "put out of ladies car" at Gordonsville, Vir- ginia by the railroad "on account of color."36 Ida Wells-Barnett, only twenty-two, had her dress torn when ejected from the ladies car and pushed off a train in Tennessee in 1884. Humiliated but not humbled, she struck back through the courts and was awarded $500 in damages (although a higher court

36BRF&AL, Murders and Outrages, M 1048, Reel 59, Gordonsville, Va., February 21, 1868; ibid., Letters Received, M 1048, Reel 31, Gordonsville, Va., February 21, 1868.

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Freedwomen, Sexuality, and Violence 325

reversed the verdict). This formative experience launched her on a career of reform and protest.37

Whites campaigned vigorously to insure that the image of black women remained tarnished after slavery. Southern white newspapers chronicled crime and ignorance among freed- people, featuring any violence and depravity detected among African- American women. This libel and certainly slander created a constant war of words and images. Both as assailants and assailed, black women were stereotyped in journalistic ac- counts. On July 30, 1867, the Raleigh Register reported:

Another Horrible Murder in Richmond - Richmond is ex- cited over another horrible and mysterious murder. This time a colored woman is found dead in the suburbs of the city with signs of violence about her. At the coroner's inquest, strong circumstantial evidence was educed [sic], which implicates her paramour - a colored man - as the murderer, and he was ar- rested and committeed for examination.38

A week later another headline announced: "A Fiendish Nurse Poisons a Child" followed by: "On Saturday last a negro nurse employed by Mr. Wm. A. Pettaway in Richmond County, N.C. poured laudanum down the throat of his child, causing its death. On the previous day the female fiend had attempted to kill it by making it drink indigo. She was arrested."39 During this same period the paper reported that a black wife had been shot through the head by a jealous husband, who then tried to conceal his crime by burning her body.40 Whether victims or perpe- trators, black women were involved in brutish horrors according to the sensational accounts reported by the white press. Rarely were they accorded the dignity of mention as clubwomen, churchwomen, educators or reformers.41

The message was clear and consistent. Before and during the Civil War black women were portrayed as aggressive, unre-

37See Paula Giddings, "Ida Wells-Barnett," in GJ. Barker-Benfield and Catherine Clinton, eds., Portraits of Amencan Women (New York, 1991), 367-85.

>»Raleigh Register, July 30, 1867. *9Ibid.. Auerust 8. 1867. 40Ibid., July 30, 1867. This incident anticipated Richard Wright's Native Son (New

York, 1940) by over half a century. 41See also Richmond Enquirer, July 24, 1864.

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326 Georgia Historical Quarterly

strained, and pathological. In this way whites justified their custodial care - they were preventing African- Americans from destroying one another. With emancipation, ex-Confederates lamented, former slaves were thrust into a free state for which they were unprepared.42

The white South spent time and energy discrediting freed- women's campaigns for dignity. The courtesies or niceties af- forded black women were the subject of parody. A copy of the Black Republican and Office-Holder's Journal, a handwritten and viciously racist lampoon of a Radical Republican newspaper, contained the following article:

WHITE OUTRAGE: Yesterday afternoon, in de ebening, about thirteen o'clock, a cupple ob colored ladies pushed a white gal off de sidewalk, when de purposterous white wench gib sass to dem two epectable colored ladies, and told dem dey ought to be ashamed! - We blush at the thought! We axes what was the police doing all dat time - where am de war power and de militia commission?43

This form of humor was both crude and effective. Indeed, these images filtered into the national press during Reconstruction, especially Harper's Weekly.

On the matter of the transformations wrought by freedom, many black men and women anticipated a strengthening of gender roles and conventional, if not puritanical, sexual moral- ity within the black community once white coercion could be minimized. Black men hoped by establishing themselves as pro- tectors of wives and daughters, they would lay claim to manhood while improving the lot of loved ones and kin. In 1865 Jenny Scott's husband stood up to soldiers who struck her and suffered a severe beating because of his heroism.44 The following year a Georgia freedman complained to a bureau commissioner that his wife was accused by a "white lady" of "having intercourse" with another man. When the wife lashed back with verbal abuse,

42See Mrs. N.B. De Sassure, Old Plantation Days: Being the Recollections of Southern Life Before the Civil War (New York, 1909), 18.

4SBlack Republican and Office-Holder's Journal, August 1865. Available at Widener Library, Harvard University.

"BRF&AL, Murders and Outrages, M1048, Reel 59, 0120-0123, Richmond, Va., June 8, 1865.

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Freedwomen, Sexuality, and Violence 327

This depiction of a quarrel between two African- American women appeared on the front page of Harper's Weekly on November 8, 1873 under the title "Having It Out." A lengthy caption suggests it may have originated in the saloon and concludes that "whatever the cause of the wrangling," the artist has "depicted the quarrel and its incidental accessories with great humor and effect."

she was arrested, tried, sentenced to pay $16 in court costs and ordered sixty lashes. The husband wrote to the federal officer, "believing that the days for corporeal punishment of the colored race are past, and knowing that this is by far not an isolated case."45

"Ibid., M798, Reel 13, Clinch County, Ga., July 2, 1866.

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328 Georgia Historical Quarterly

The beating, whipping, abuse and coercion of black women under slavery is, as I have argued elsewhere, underemphasized in historical accounts.46 The casual way in which ex-slaves ad- dress these issues weighs in favor of its commonality. C. W. Hawkins of Little Rock, Arkansas, reported in the WPA narra- tives on coercion of slaves: "The women were beat and made to go to them. They were big fine men and the master wanted the women to have children by them. And there were some white men, too, who joined the slave women to do what they wanted to. Some of them didn't want to stop when slavery stopped."47 Indeed, many of these attacks appear more violent and brutal in the postwar era. Whether their motives were humanitarian or mercenary, planters had a vested interest in keeping their slaves healthy and alive. As ex-slaves, freedpeople could be maimed or killed with minimal interference from the ruling elite. The violent response that befell black resistance helped muzzle protest.

A Freedman's Bureau agent reported on September 10, 1866 that Rhoda Ann Childs of Henry County, Georgia was "taken from her house, in her husband's absence, by eight white men who stripped her, tied her to a log, beat and sexually abused her."48 The victim's own account of this incident ap- peared on October 13 in the Loyal Georgian: "Myself and hus- band were under contract with Mrs. Amanda Childs of Henry County and worked from January 1, 1866 until the crops were laid by, or in other words until the main work of the year was done without difficulty. Then (the fashion being prevalent among the planters) we were called upon one night." In Rhoda Childs' testimony, we have evidence of a political conspiracy to deprive freedpeople of their share of their labor. But far more chilling is her account of what followed. After a severe beating, she was

thrown upon the ground on my back, one of the two men stood upon my breast, while two others took hold of my feet and

46See Clinton, "Southern Dishonor." 47George P. Rawick, ed., The American Shve: A Composite Autobiography, 19 vols.

(Westport, Conn., 1972), 9: 218. 48BRF&AL, Letters Received, M798, Reel 14, September 10, 1866.

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Freedwomen, Sexuality, and Violence 329

stretched my limbs as far apart as they could while the man standing upon my breast applied the strap to my private parts until they were satisfied that I was more dead than alive. Then a man supposed to be an ex-Confederate soldier, as he was on crutches, fell upon me and ravished me. During the whipping one of the men had run his pistol into me, and said he had a great mind to pull the trigger. . . .49

In this and in many other cases, the wife of a former Union soldier or the wife of a labor activist were victims of gang rape or individual assault. In some ways such attacks might be viewed as "symbolic," as a violation of the race - but regardless of the intent, these acts of specific violence against individual women had human as well as political consequences. The black women who suffered these brutal and dehumanizing attacks in this bloody power struggle in the postwar South were not just sym- bols of their race, but persons subjected to torture.

The attack upon the black wife or daughter provided a threat to communities as well as families. Hannah Travis recalled that "the Ku Klux never bothered us. They bothered some people about a mile from us. They took out the old man and whipped him. They made his wife get up and dance and she was in a delicate state. They made her get out of bed and dance, and after that they took her and whipped her and beat her, and she was in a delicate state, too."50 For all the horror Hannah Travis' neighbor endured, she still escaped with her life, and we hope that of her unborn child. George Band's wife was not so lucky. Because her husband was a local leader, known as someone who could always defend himself, "the Klan came to his house, took his wife, hung her to a tree, hacked her to death with knives." Band sought revenge by killing fourteen of these vigilantes, surprising them with a Winchester rifle, but he was forced to flee the county.51

The ideological stand-off during Reconstruction included sexual as well as political dimensions. Myrta Lockett Avary's Dixie After the War, published in 1906, confidently claimed that

49Loyal Georgian, October 13, 1866. 50Rawick, The American Slave, 10: 350. "Ibid., 6: pt. 2, 134-36.

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330 Georgia Historical Quarterly

"the rapist is a product of the reconstruction period."52 Like most white southerners and most white Americans until the modern period, A vary did not bother to assign race to get her meaning across: she clearly expected readers to assume that the rapist was a black man and the victim a white female. Her explanation of the "Crime Against Womanhood" reflected popular ideology about the era: the ruin of innocent women by bestial blacks - a horror that justified lynching.53 Further, Avary went on to argue that this crime "was a development of a period when the negro was dominated by political, religious and social advisors from the North and by the attitude of the Northern press and pulpit. It was practically unknown in war- time, when negroes were left on plantations as protectors and guardians of white women and children."54 Avary, of course, damns the North for their indignation against southern lawless- ness and "not one word of sympathy or pity for the white victim of negro lust."55

During Reconstruction these sexual libels and attacks upon the North were popular and frequent. An 1868 article in the Atlanta Constitution reported in earnest "that Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe is going to establish a school in Aiken, Ga., for the benefit of mulatto children that have been born in the South since its invasion by Yankee school-marms."56 While these white supremacists smeared northern women, southern white women were exalted. Indeed the editors of the Atlanta Constitution even encouraged white women to fill the gallery of Georgia's Recon- struction legislature, commenting that "the ladies are welcome and we think their presence there will have a good effect upon that piebald body."57 Much of this anxiety over blood, race and sex reveals the torrents of hypocritical rage among white south- erners at this juncture.

Unfortunately for southern black women, emancipation es- calated the degree of sexual violence to which they might be

52Myrta Lockett Avary, Dixie After the War (New York, 1906), 377. 5SEven women reformers like jane Addams and Frances Willard were unwilling to

denounce the lynching of "rapists." 54Avary, Dixie After the War, 384. 55Md. 5t 'Atlanta Constitution, June 27, 1868. 5Ubid., July 18, 1868.

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Freedwomen, Sexuality, and Violence 331

Another of Thomas Nast's depictions of southern brutality against freedwomen ap- peared in Harper's Weekly on September 14, 1867. This one was entitled "Whipping a Negro Girl in North Carolina by 'Unreconstructed' Johnsonians."

subjected. Freedwomen struggled to avoid the daily harassments imposed by white men. The so-called withdrawal of women from the labor force were actually attempts by black women to shift their productive roles into the family economy whenever possible, escaping white overseers and employers who proved an enduring threat. Freedwomen did not have the luxury of being interested in the status assigned to women ensconced in the domestic realm; they required protection. Black women wanted respectability and the public image of virtue first for survival and then, as a foundation for their own and their fam- ily's prosperity.

Ironically, African-American women's strategies and strug- gles in the nineteenth century have created bitter debate in the twentieth century as we attempt to reconcile the matrifocality

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332 Georgia Historical Quarterly

of black households with racist and sexist assumptions about the role of families within modern culture. Further, the abolition of slavery shifted notions of appropriate sexual conduct and gave black women, if not more opportunities to resist coercion, at least the hope that their horizons could expand while sexual abuse diminished. Reconstruction in many ways offered black women their rights, but little means to exercise those new legal privileges. It afforded women a voice, but denied African- Amer- icans a forum within which to speak and be heard without reprisals.

The sexual terrorism of race politics during Reconstruction is evident. White women's bodies became sacred territory over which ex-Confederates organized and battled, refighting the war and reexerting regional and race pride. Black women's bodies were just as critical. For too long shame and silence cloaked their sexual violation. Almost all the scholarly literature published on the topic of rape in the South deals exclusively with white victims, even the works devoted to interracial rape. This reflects racism pervasive within both the academy and society at large. But indictments are finally emerging - as there is no statute of limitations for historians. Voices ring loud and clear - compelling us to listen, to examine our shortcomings and to incorporate critical issues of gender and sexuality into our reconstructions of freedwomen.

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  • Article Contents
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  • Issue Table of Contents
    • The Georgia Historical Quarterly, Vol. 76, No. 2, THE DIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN GENDER AND RACE: WOMEN IN GEORGIA AND THE SOUTH (Summer 1992), pp. 237-549
      • Front Matter
      • Introduction [pp. 237-240]
      • Of Lily, Linda Brent, and Freud: A Non-Exceptionalist Approach to Race, Class, and Gender in the Slave South [pp. 241-259]
      • Free African-American Women in Savannah, 1800-1860: Affluence and Autonomy Amid Adversity [pp. 260-283]
      • Northern Women in the South, 1860-1880 [pp. 284-312]
      • Bloody Terrain: Freedwomen, Sexuality and Violence During Reconstruction [pp. 313-332]
      • Encounters, Likely and Unlikely, Between Black and Poor White Women in the Rural South, 1865-1940 [pp. 333-353]
      • Rebecca Latimer Felton and the Wife's Farm: The Class and Racial Politics of Gender Reform [pp. 354-372]
      • Lillian Smith and the Transformation of American Liberalism, 1945-1950 [pp. 373-392]
      • Review Essay
        • Dixie's Daughter: Margaret Mitchell Reconsidered [pp. 393-409]
        • Hidden Lives: Georgia's Free Women of Color [pp. 410-419]
        • In Search of Southern Women's History: The Current State of Academic Publishing [pp. 420-427]
      • Notes and Documents
        • Myths of Mary Musgrove [pp. 428-435]
        • "Writing Is Fighting, Too": The World War II Correspondence of Southern Women [pp. 436-458]
      • Georgia History in Pictures
        • Clothing as an Expression of History: The Dress of African-American Women in Georgia, 1880-1915 [pp. 459-471]
      • Book Reviews
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      • Book Notes [pp. 542-546]
      • News and Notices [pp. 547-549]
      • Back Matter