Rape and Race in the Nineteenth-Century South (review)

Sommerville challenges conventional wisdom by asserting that the myth of the black male rapist did not pervade Southern or American thinking until late in the nineteenth century, concomitant with the rise of white supremacy, black disfranchisement, and changing social constructions of sexuality. Historians who have argued that Southern whites have always feared that black men posed a threat to the purity and chastity of white women are perpetuating an "invented tradition"; in the antebellum South, the myth of the black rapist did not prevail, even if black male sexuality may have been suspect. Even as Southern white men went off to fight for the Confederacy, they were unafraid to leave women on the farm with black male slaves.

To make her case, Sommerville has extensively mined local criminal trial and state appellate court records, state statutes, governors' papers, executive journals, federal census reports, pardon papers, prison and county records, private collections, newspapers, and periodicals. Her research focuses mostly on Virginia and North Carolina. Although Sommerville states that the book is not a legal history per se, she relies heavily on legal sources. She falls into the "law and society" school when she posits a symbiotic relationship between the law and those who make, enforce, and interpret it. She also invokes the "law in action" advocates when she demonstrates how the draconian rape law on the books differed from the more practical law practiced by local courts. Sommerville's study of the myriad cultural sources produced within local communities primarily employs the methods of social history. She shows the ways in which community members tended to elide local customs into antebellum rape trials.

Sommerville's study of black-on-white rape yields some significant findings. Most whites of the antebellum South acquiesced in the legal process and abided by the outcomes, whether for or against the defendant, in cases that saw black men charged with raping white women. The lynching of black men accused or acquitted of the rape of a white woman was rare before the Civil War. She also finds that the white community did not always support a white woman's claim of rape. The antebellum South's social construction of gender played a significant role in deciding rape cases, but Sommerville asserts that a woman's class rather than her sex tended to be the most important factor in her believability. Rape cases in the antebellum South demonstrate a lack of concern for the protection of females, especially poor ones, and most of the women who charged slaves or free black men with rape were poor and socially marginal. According to Sommerville, white men were better able to identify with male slaves accused of rape than with their female accusers. Whiteness was not necessarily a unifying factor in antebellum rape trials.

Sommerville also notes that although the law mandated death for a slave convicted of raping a white woman, Southern lawmakers were aware of the financial consequences and provided alternative punishments. Slaveholders routinely hired lawyers to defend slaves against a rape charge and appealed guilty verdicts to state appellate courts. White community members often petitioned the governor to commute the sentences of black men convicted of raping a white woman from execution to transportation out of state, and their requests were granted with a fair degree of regularity. Such actions would hardly be expected from people preoccupied with the notion that all black males were rapists. Only after emancipation did Southern whites begin to perpetrate extensive violence against black men for the rape of white women. Nonetheless, not until after Redemption and the return to "Home Rule" in the South did violence against black males accused of rape became significant, though even then accusations might be mitigated by the socioeconomic status of the female accuser. Sommerville also found evidence to corroborate what Ida B. Wells called the "old threadbare lie" that black men were predisposed to rape white woman and were...