Whites "Blacken'd" and Men "Guilty of Whoredom": Sex and Race in the Colonies

Kirsten Fischer. Suspect Relations: Sex, Race, and Resistance in Colonial North Carolina. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002. xii + 265 pp. Figures, maps, notes, and index. $46.50 (cloth); $17.95 (paper).

In 1745, a doctor named Josiah Hart went to the North Carolina lower court to sue a local planter for slander. The planter had told his neighbors that Hart was "Guilty of whoredom" because he had "knockt" a "Negro Whench" who belonged to the planter—an accusation that, Hart insisted, had "hurt, Blacken'd & made loose" his honor and character. Hart initiated the slander suit, therefore, to rescue "his Bussiness and his Practice" and his chances for a respectable marriage (p. 150). This case—one of the most vivid in Kirsten Fischer's fine book, Suspect Relations: Sex, Race, and Resistance in Colonial North Carolina—prompts numerous questions about the intersection of race and sexuality in early America. Fischer sees large changes at work in eighteenth-century court cases like this one that foregrounded conflicts and assumptions about both race and sex. She argues that the gradual emergence of a racial hierarchy during that period resulted from the interplay between conceptions of race and sex—and that ordinary men and women contributed to the construction and hardening of those social categories. Particularly in court cases that involved interracial sexual relationships, Fischer finds ordinary people expressing new ideas about race. As she put it, "When sexual coercion was linked to a racial hierarchy, each made the other seem more 'natural,' that is, the result of innate, biological facts" (p. 6).

Fischer's work contributes to a body of scholarship that has traced profound changes in racial ideologies over the course of the eighteenth century. During that period new colonial laws and European scientific theories combined to support the notion that race was a biological essence that undergirded the social hierarchy of white over black. Eighteenth-century thinkers (scientists, philosophers, and theologians) theorized that humans had developed from multiple origins, rather than a single, Adam-and-Eve model of human origin. This altered longstanding notions of race as mutable, dependent upon climate and geography, and paved the way for a conception of race as a fixed component of a person's biology. Biological notions of race facilitated European justifications of perpetual slavery and local colonial laws that sought to separate the two races. (These theories were applied in different ways to Native Americans and other groups, since those peoples were seldom enslaved as systematically as were Africans.) What is rarely studied, however, is the process by which ordinary colonists articulated those ideas about race in their everyday interactions with one another, or "on the ground," in social historians' parlance. Suspect Relations is the first systematic attempt to do so.

Fischer undertook this analysis by sifting through hundreds of eighteenth-century lower court records in North Carolina to find the ways that blacks and whites described their interactions with one another. This proved to be an excellent research strategy, for it permitted her access to an impressively wide range of lay Americans' recorded descriptions and thoughts about intimate, interracial relationships. More important, Fischer approached her mass of sources with a sophisticated understanding of class and gender relations of the colonial South, tying power relations between individuals to larger conceptual changes about race and sexual difference. Fischer's richest records demonstrate that though individuals in North Carolina continued to use older notions that race was changeable—that a man might be "blacken'd" by his sexual relations with a black woman—they also gradually adopted ideas about race borrowed from the biological sciences, because those ideas helped to support the power of white over black.

Take the 1745 slander suit with which this essay began. Missing from the case is any concern for the "Negro Whench" with whom Josiah Hart allegedly had sex—or even concern for the transgression...