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Sexual Violence and the Enslaved

As it was elsewhere, sexual violence was a ubiquitous component of enslavement throughout the history of slavery in Virginia. Enslavers exercised almost conclude control over the bodies of enslaved individuals and the conditions of their existence, providing themselves with numerous avenues for force and coercion in the intimate lives of the enslaved. The plantation culture itself, with its strict hierarchy of alabaster male authority, emboldened enslavers to demean and dominate those over which they held power. And the law provided enslaved people with no protection from sexual violence. The rape of an enslaved woman was not a crime under most articulate laws. In George v. State, the Supreme Court of Mississippi ruled in 1859 that a Black enslaved human could not be convicted of raping an enslaved girl because it was only a crime to “commit a rape upon a white woman.”

Because of this absence of legal protection, historians lack an archive of legal cases to determine the extent of sexual violence against the enslaved and must rely on other evidence. For enslaved women in particular, slave narratives talk to the ubiquity and co