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Abstract:
The history of interracial sex is often told from the perspective of either legislatures or lynch mobs. The approach has a certain appeal; it allows us to track the ideological currents of the dominant society, as they ebb and flow from passive acceptance of the practice to outright hostility. But the approach also minimizes the role of the participants, routinely casting them as unimportant players in the overall history of sex and race in this country. In this book chapter, I look at the subject of interracial intimacy from the perspective of the people involved: one story involves a white man and black woman from slavery times, and the other involves a black man and white woman from the turn of the century. The purpose is to add some depth and detail to our understanding of some of these relationships, in the process upending some of our basic assumptions about what they might have been like. Indeed, by shining a light on individual cases, we begin to appreciate both the contradictions and complexities of interracial unions, breathing life into a portion of history too often left untold.

race, slavery, interracial, legal history, Texas

Abstract:
This Article analyzes in detail a case involving a slave accused of raping a white woman in the 1850s to offer a provocative challenge to our basic assumptions about sex and race in the slave South. Joining a new group of "cultural-legal historians," the author looks beyond the legal language of Southern legislatures and high courts, and focuses instead on the surviving local and trial records of one case: State v. Pleasant. In doing so, the author uncovers the stories of ordinary men and women - the slave, his master, his accuser, his attorney, the jurors, and others - to see how the laws and official ideologies governing sex, race, and slavery affected everyday lives. This approach adds both specificity and complexity to the debate over how the socio-legal regime responded to interracial relationships. Ultimately, the author concludes that an accusation of black-on-white rape did not produce the hysteria that traditional thought presumes. Demands for retributive justice were tempered by the interests of the master and his slaveholding neighbors, and by Southern notions about the honor and character of white men, white women, and black slaves.

race and the law, legal history, slavery

Abstract:
This Article examines in detail the local and trial records of a nineteenth-century Texas case to tell the story of a white slave master who had a thirty-year relationship with a female slave. This is a story of complexities and contradictions, and it is a story designed to add depth and detail to our current assumptions about the content of sex between the races during slavery times. Indeed, through these local records - a source traditionally underused by legal historians - the Article provides us with a pathway into the consciousness of ordinary people, and suggests a world with much more flexibility and fluidity along the lines of race and slavery than traditional accounts allow. The amount of sexual exploitation that took place under slavery will surprise no one; but, to hear the former slaves who lived on this plantation talk about it, this couple, at least, lived together as man and wife. It is this story - the story of the everyday life of slavery - that this Article seeks to tell, illuminating in the process a social order that was predicated on racial domination yet where men and women, white and black, often defied those ideologies. Ultimately, this Article concludes that the master narrative of rape so familiar to students of the subject is inadequate to account for a case like this, and urges us instead to focus on the fissures and blind spots created in the logic of slavery to further our understanding of the South and the relations between the races.

race and the law, legal history, slavery

Abstract:
The history of race and slavery is often told from the perspective of either the oppressors or the oppressed. This Article takes a different tact, unpacking the rich and textured story of the Ashworths, an obscure yet prosperous free family of color who came to Texas beginning in the early 1830s. It is undoubtedly an unusual story; indeed in the history of the time there are surely more prominent names and more famous events. Yet their story reveals a tantalizing world in which--despite legal rules and conventional thinking - life was not so black and white. Drawing on local records rather than canonical cases, and listening to the voices from the community rather than the legislatures, this Article emphasizes the importance of looking to the margins of society to demonstrate how racial relations and ideological notions in the antebellum South were far more intricate than we had previously imagined. The Ashworths never took a stand against slavery; to the contrary, they amassed a fortune on its back. But their racial identity also created complications and fissures in the social order, and their story ultimately tells us as much about them as it does about the times in which they lived.

race, slavery, legal history, Texas