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Sexual Violence in the Slaveholding Regimes of Louisiana and Texas: Patterns of Abuse in Black Testimony

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Sexual Violence in the Slaveholding Regimes of Louisiana and Texas: Patterns of Abuse in Black Testimony Sexual Violence in the Slaveholding Regimes of Louisiana and Texas: Patterns of Abuse in Black Testimony Thesis submitted in accordance with the requirements of the University of Liverpool for the degree of Doctor in Philosophy by Andrea Helen Livesey June 2015 UAbstract This study is concerned with the sexual abuse of enslaved women and girls by white men in the antebellum South. Interviews conducted by the Federal Writers’ Project in the 1930s are studied alongside nineteenth-century narratives of the formerly enslaved in order to make calculations of the scale of abuse in the South, but also to discover which conditions, social spaces and situations were, and possibly still are, most conducive to the sexual abuse of women and girls. This thesis is separated into two parts. Part One establishes a methodology for working with testimony of the formerly enslaved and determines the scale of sexual abuse using all available 1930s interviews with people who had lived in Louisiana and Texas under slavery. This systematic quantitative analysis is a key foundation from which to interpret the testimony of abuse that is explored according to different forms of sexual violence in Part Two. It is argued that abuse was endemic in the South, and occurred on a scale that was much higher than has been argued in previous studies. Enslaved people could experience a range of white male sexually abusive behaviours: rape, sexual slavery and forced breeding receive particular attention in this study due to the frequency with which they were mentioned by the formerly enslaved. These abuses are conceptualised as existing on a continuum of sexual violence that, alongside other less frequently mentioned practices, pervaded the lives of all enslaved people. Common features existed along the continuum. Abuse was intergenerational in nature for both the abusers and the abused. Light-skinned enslaved children born of rape were far more likely to become victims of abuse themselves and young enslaved girls were prematurely sexualised. Sexual abuse was brought into the white domestic space through the institution of sexual slavery, white children were thus unconsciously schooled in the abusive sexual mores of southern society from an early age. Abuse was quite open among white male family members. Other institutions existed that normalised and legitimised abuse, such as the fancy-girl trade and sexual interference through forced breeding practices that included eugenic manipulation and the use of ‘studs’. Despite this, enslaved women showed remarkable levels of emotional survival and initial reflections are made on the ways in which women could resist and cope with sexual abuse. Testimony suggests that abuse was discussed amongst the black community, support was rarely denied to victims, and there was no stigma was attached to children born of rape. With recent revelations on the scale of the institutionalised sexual abuse of women and children, as well as vast modern sex-trafficking networks, there are special opportunities presented through the current cultural climate in order to understand the southern experience. The South is reframed as a ‘culture of abuse’ where sexual violence against enslaved people was naturalised and culturally reproduced. Acknowledgements First of all I would like to thank Dr Mike Tadman and Dr Stephen Kenny for their supervision of this thesis, I am especially grateful to Mike for taking so much time out of his early retirement to do so. I would also like to thank other members of staff in the School of History for their advice, in particular Dr Dmitri Van Den Bersselaar and Dr Richard Huzzey. Staff at the University of Georgia have been extremely helpful both over email and while I was on the Franklin-Liverpool exchange, and particular thanks are extended to Dr John Inscoe and Dr Stephen Berry. I am grateful to Dr Connie Atkinson at the University of New Orleans for her hospitality during the course of my research, and to archivists at the Earl Long Library at the University of New Orleans, and the Amistad Research Centre at Tulane University. I would like to thank the University of Liverpool for funding the first year of this project, and the Economic and Social Research Council for funding the remainder. I would also like to thank my parents, Ann and David, and my family for their support and understanding throughout some very busy times. Natalie Parkinson and Rebecca Williams have proof-read drafts of my early work and provided valuable support throughout this thesis. Finally I would like to thank my son, Harper, who has sacrificed the most in order that I could finish this thesis, and has brought so much joy to the time I have spent away from my work. Contents Page Abstract Acknowledgements Abbreviations List of tables List of figures Introduction 1 Part One Chapter One: Historiography 13 Ulrich B. Phillips and the white view of the Jim Crow Era 15 Genovese and the Civil Rights Era: Chaos and Community 17 Second wave feminism and the emergence of black female academics 21 Intersections 25 Rape laws, legal definitions, and a continuum of sexual violence 27 Grooming, consent and sexual slavery 29 Forced breeding 34 Capitalism and the ‘second slavery’ 39 Existing quantitative studies of WPA interviews 42 Resistance and survival 45 Understanding the impact of rape and exploitation: new approaches 48 Chapter Two: Sources of testimony (methodology I) 55 The Louisiana Writers’ Project 61 The Texas Writers’ Project 72 Narratives of the formerly enslaved 83 Chapter Three: Working with 1930s interview testimony (methodology II) 93 Age of interviewees 94 The interviewers 101 Further reflections on white interviewers: the case of Fred Dibble 106 Race of interviewers 108 State level editing 117 Chapter Four: Quantitative results of 1930s interviews 127 Existing quantitative studies 129 Initial indications of the scale of sexual abuse 132 White fathers 136 Rape 148 Forced breeding 152 Sex slaves and sexual slavery 154 Unpacking a fuller understanding of the scale of abuse 156 Conclusions 168 Part Two Chapter Five: Testimony on rape: evidence spoken and unspoken 171 Scale in former slave sources 177 Undercounting 179 The black body and evidence of white rape 181 Trauma 183 ‘Consent’ and premature sexualisation 187 The southern slaveholding family and collusion with abuse 197 Callous disregard 206 The transformation of ‘rape’ into ‘benevolence: my family black and white 209 Conclusions 213 Chapter Six: Sexual slavery 217 The question of scale: nineteenth-century autobiographies versus 1930s interviews 222 Undercounting of sexual slavery in 1930s interviews 226 Light skinned sex slaves 231 Occupation of sex slaves 237 Black and white children: secondary victimhood and cycles of abuse 241 The slaveholding woman: complicity and victimhood 249 Conclusions 255 Chapter Seven: The typical case of Louisa Picquet 257 Background of the narrative 262 The life of Louisa Picquet 265 Reverend Hiram Mattison and the wider context of Picquet’s narrative 267 Sexual slavery in the Picquet narrative 270 Picquet’s participation in the ‘fancy trade’ of New Orleans 278 ‘Whiteness’ and sexual slavery 281 Premature sexualisation, corrupted childhood and the ‘culture of abuse’ 285 Resistance, coping and survival 291 Chapter Eight: Experiences of ‘forced breeding’ in Louisiana and Texas 299 Historiographical context 300 Scale in interviews and longer narratives 305 WPA interviews: Issues of skew/undercount 306 Themes of forced breeding in 1930s interviews 319 Conclusion: sexual exploitation and the trauma of forced breeding 343 Conclusion 349 Bibliography 365 Abbreviations DWP Dillard Writers’ Project FWP Federal Writers’ Project LWP Louisiana Writers’ Project MCC, UNO Marcus Christian Collection, University of New Orleans TAS G. P. Rawick, (ed.), The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography (Westport, 1972) TAS SS (I&II) G. P. Rawick, (ed.), The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography, Supplement Series One and Supplement Series Two (Westport, 1979) TWP Texas Writers’ Project WPA Works Progress Administration Tables Table Page Number number 2.1 Occupations of interviewees by state 70 3.1 Average ages of Louisiana and Texas interviewees in 95 1865 by subsample 3.2 Sexual issues recorded by selected Texas interviewers 104 3.3 Selected interviewers and references to white fathers 107 3.4 Louisiana: Correlation between the race and gender of 109 interviewer and discussion of sexual issue 3.5 Issues omitted from Texas interviews sample 123 4.1 Louisiana and Texas: Frequency with which sexual issues 133 were mentioned in 1930s interviews 4.2 Size of slaveholding on which interviewees with white 137 fathers lived 4.3 Size of slaveholding in which interviewees without white 137 fathers lived 4.4 Race and occupation of fathers of Louisiana and Texas 138 interviewees by the size of the slaveholding unit where interviewee lived before emancipation 4.5 Types of references to white fathers who were identified 141 as neither master nor overseer 4.6 Correlation between gender and occupation of 143 interviewees under slavery and mentioning of a white father. 4.7 Correlation between occupation of mother of interviewee 144 and race of interviewee’s grandfather 4.8 Types of references to rape: subset of 26 interviews 148 mentioning rape 4.9 Rape references: Identity of rapist 150 4.10 Rape references: Size of unit where rape occurred 150 4.11 Correlation between the size of slaveholding unit with 153 mention of forced breeding 4.12 Types of reference to sex slaves and sexual
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