Family Money: Race and Economic Rights in Antebellum US Law and Fiction

Abstract

Through the efforts of historians and literary critics over the last few decades, we now possess much greater understanding of enslaved women's sexual exploitation. Under the law requiring the condition of the child to follow that of the mother, sexual violation of enslaved women without any economic responsibility on the part of white men, and indeed, often to their remuneration, was essentially sanctioned. Yet we have less understanding of a possibility that existed at the margins of slavery's sexual economy: what if a sexual relationship between an enslaved woman and a white owner resulted in a bond that, in turn, led a southern patriarch to go against prevailing social and legal norms by financially providing for the woman, perhaps even including an effort to treat her financially as if she were his legal wife?1 Rather than the fancy dresses, isolated cabins, and other accoutrement that notoriously accompanied enslaved women's sexual abuse, I refer more specifically to white owners' attempts to transfer property to their concubines. These property transfers usually occurred through the owner's will, as he sought to move white wealth to enslaved persons who had been freed either before he died or by declaration in the will itself. Historian Dorothy Sterling notes the existence of nearly 100 such wills in the antebellum South (29). Efforts to transfer property holdings from whites to blacks raise issues more complex than the false payoffs and ugly bribery that, for example, Harriet Jacobs excoriates in her denunciation of Dr. Flint's plan to build a sex cabin for her away from the main plantation in her well-known autobiography.2 As the court cases and novels I discuss below disclose, these attempted property transfers hinge on more than owners' bribery or romantic largesse. A crucial part of this story is the effort of black former slaves to claim white-owned property, to establish themselves as economic agents, and thereby demand what would legally be theirs as a wife or as a child but for the law's refusal to attach legally enforceable rights to interracial coupling.