Anyone Have Sources on BM/WW in the 1800's

Anyone of you scholars out there can point me in the right direction on how widespread black men and white women relationships were in the 1800's. How widespread was it?. Were these relationships in secret liaisons. We know about white men who saw it was a badge of honor to have sexual relations with black women. What about white women, especially those in the so-called high society of the times? The white abolitionist women comes to mind for me.

So much of the sexual history between blacks and whites is hushed or to speak quietly on. Can you assist with resources to research.

 

Since such a relationship (in US) would probably lead to the BM being killed by some angry mob (also in the stateswhere it wasn't illegal), and the WW would be disowned by the whole white society, giving her little to no chance to provide for herself, this didn't happen a lot. When black-white relationships occured, it was "always" WM-BW.

I can recomend the book "Interracial intimacies" by Randall Kennedy, it has several stories of black-white relationships during US history. Also, for someone not american, it can help explain why this is still so controversial in many parts of the US.

 

Interracial "University-Research" MLA-report

Introduction:

In 1800, a minister of the name Gloria Dei Church in Philadelphia refused to marry an interracial couple. "A negro came with a white woman," he wrote. "I referred him to the negro minister, not willing to have blame from public opinion, having never yet joined black and white. As a result, these frequent mixtures would soon force matrimonial sanction in early America. [1] Interracial couples were subject to harsh criminal actions, including the death penalty.

Early 1800-1824 (Time line)

[2]In one 1824 case in Virginia, an elderly man named Lewis Bourne unsuccessfully sued for divorce claiming that his much younger wife was involved in a seven-year relationship with a local slave. The court apparently concluded that Bourne had failed to adequately control his wife’s behavior and denied his petition. The next year, a poor North Carolina white woman named Polly Lane accused a slave named Jim of rape. Although Jim was quickly found guilty of the charge, the discovery that Polly was pregnant prior to the alleged rape led the court to reopen the case and ultimately acquit Jim. A slave was simply too valuable a capital asset to execute under such circumstances. After the Civil War, Hodes argues, consensual sex between a black man and a white woman became unimaginable in the white southern mind. White southerners conflated black male autonomy with sexual transgressions across thecol or line and justified terrorism and lynching on the grounds that they were necessary to protect the purity of white womanhood--even though less than a third of all lynchings even involved accusations of sexual assault. Interracial sex became transgressive in a way it had never been under slavery. Hodes’s overarching argument is that sexual liaisons between white women and black men were not always met with violent outrage in the South. Before the Civil War, southern law could tolerate a liaison between a white woman and a black man.

Works cited

Hodes, Martha. White Women, Black Men: Illicit Sex in the Nineteenth-Century South. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997. xii + 338 pp. Bibliographical references and index. $30.00 (cloth), ISBN 0-300-06970-7.

 

I recommend the book White Women, Black Men: Illicit Sex in the 19th-Century by martha rhodes

It has the best facts, insight, stories, and history on IR. It didn't get much play by the media of course :roll: Maybe because it was founded by martha rhodes as she states in the book that some documents were hidden on interracial marriage between ww&bm, she gets deep in that book and exposes a lot of things. You and anyone else on here that reads should check it out.

 

Martha Hodes did extensive work on IR in the 19th Century. Find out the location of the university where she works and hope she can hook you up.

 

Thank you all who responded to my thread. I got some good leads from you.