Abusing Hugh Davis: Determining the Crime in a Seventeenth-Century American Morality Case

September 17th, 1630: Hugh Davis to be soundly whipped, before an assembly of Negroes and others for abusing himself to the dishonor of God and shame of Christians, by defiling his body in lying with a negro; which fault he is to acknowledge next Sabbath day.¹

On a fateful mid-September day in 1630, Hugh Davis found himself accused of a horrifying litany of crimes. He had shamed Christians. He had dishonored God. Moreover, he had abused himself. Davis had committed all of these crimes by lying with a Negro, and he paid a fearsome price for his transgression: the court ordered him to be flogged—publicly brutalized and humiliated—in front of an assembly of both whites and Africans. While Hugh Davis’s life must have left other marks in the historical record, the court’s sentence, a mere forty-three words long, is the only document about him to have survived.

Starting with Carter Woodson, who wrote in 1918, most historians have assigned the Davis case to the history of American race relations and particularly to the hostility toward miscegenation so prevalent in the seventeenth century.² If Davis committed fornication, then the case fits. Scholars have long recognized, as Jennifer M. Spear argues, that “throughout colonial North America it was often through the regulation of sex that racial categories were first defined and, by criminalizing interracial sex, efforts to maintain racial boundaries were made.”³ In his Sexual Revolution in Early America, Richard Godbeer argues that the English elite sought to “impose their blueprint for an orderly and virtuous society” and that “sexual mores took on additional significance in a colonial setting.” Virginia’s elite had to contend with the habits of not only the English settlers from the lower reaches of the social order but also the “apparently savage Indians and Africans, who threatened to contaminate the colonists and further compromise their civility.”⁴ Knowing that the elite’s racial fears were expressed in sexual norms, it is hardly surprising that historians have cited the Davis case as a flashpoint in the creation of the colony’s race-sex boundaries. Nevertheless, as Godbeer also notes, the extant court records indicate that no white man was flogged for a definitively heterosexual interracial sex crime.⁵ Indeed, prior to 1662 Virginia’s magistrates had not made legal distinctions between fornication cases based on the races of the offenders. Additionally, the fear of racial amalgamation did little to stop white men’s sexual access to black women.⁶ Hugh Davis, it seems, must have done something different from other white men who crossed the racial line for sexual gratification. Something about the Davis case must have brought together race and sex in a way that helped limn the race-sex boundaries of colonial America, but I will argue that it does not fit the antimiscegenation narrative into which it is so frequently forced.

In colonial Virginia, sentences for fornication—interracial or otherwise—typically involved penance, a fine, or both. Historians have cited the 1662 statute that mandated doubling the fine for fornication when an offending couple crossed the racial divide as evidence of a racial distinction in sexually related crimes.⁷ Indeed, that act was the first in the colony to explicitly define interracial fornication as deserving of harsher punishment than fornication between two people of the same race, yet it did not impose corporal punishment for the crime, and it came thirty years after the court ordered Hugh Davis “soundly whipped.” Such a stark difference in punishments led historians Lawrence J. Friedman and Arthur H. Shaffer to argue that “though it was no novelty to punish sexual offenses, this case was obviously different from the usual crimes of adultery and fornication.”⁸ Friedman and Shaffer made this argument in 1970, and it is unclear what they thought Davis and the unnamed African had done, but they clearly saw the case as a signal of Africans’ “special status” in the colony. Only two years earlier Winthrop Jordan had speculated that Davis’s partner...