Lynching: A Practice with a History

In “What We See and Can’t See in the Past,” a Round Table published in the Journal of American History (March 1997), historian Robin D.G. Kelley was asked to be one of several referees for an essay by Joel Williamson. Noting the absence of much new scholarship from Williamson’s piece, Kelly called on Williamson—and all subsequent readers—to “acknowledge all the wonderful work being done” by young scholars in the history of lynching, race, and African Americans. ¹ Martha Hodes was among those scholars. With her book White Women, Black Men: Illicit Sex in the Nineteenth-Century South, Hodes takes her place at the forefront of the field.

One of Hodes’ main objectives in White Women, Black Men is to debunk the widely-held view that sex between white women and black men has always been met with disbelief and violence. Rather, she argues, “it is an historical development that evolved out of particular social, political and economic circumstances” (p. 1). She dates that development to the 1850s, but it reached critical mass in the aftermath of Emancipation. It was at that historical moment that sex between white women and black men was understood by white men to be a particular kind of a threat to their social control, a threat to be met with murder. Only then, she argues, did the mere prospect of interracial sex between white women and black men generate the blind fury that has literally become legendary.

The core sources for the book are legal documents, some of which date back to the late seventeenth century but most of which cluster in the nineteenth. Hodes structures the book both chronologically and thematically. Each of the first five chapters, all set before the war, centers around the close reading of a single case, with corroborating and divergent evidence from the era in question to frame that reading. In later chapters, she broadens her palette to include newspapers, antilynching pamphlets, and Congressional records, particularly of the American Freedmen’s Inquiry Commission, and the 1871 Ku Klux Klan investigation. In each chapter her research base is deep and thorough, and her analysis is carefully and methodically rendered, teasing out the assumptions, speculating carefully when the evidence was thin or missing, and circling around the issues to draw out a sense of the whole.

In the pre-Revolutionary era, at least a handful of these relationships were licit rather than illicit. For the 1681 wedding of Nell Butler (a white servant) and Charles (a slave), the question was whether the two could legally marry, and if so, whether Nell—and their children—would be free. “The marriage,” Hodes argues, “was a problem not so much because it transgressed boundaries of race but because it confused issues of freedom, slavery and labor” (p. 28). Furthermore, the way white townspeople understood the marriage changed over several generations. When the descendants of Nell and Charles sued for their freedom, eighty-six years after the marriage, the witnesses at their trial conceived of Nell differently, given a now stricter definition of race and freedom: “Although white neighbors may have thought of Nell more as “Irish Nell” in her own lifetime, it seems that their eighteenth-century descendants thought of Nell more as a white woman. By the second half of the eighteenth century, when the descendants tried to resolve the dilemma of Nell’s status as slave or free, they were largely unable to imagine a white person as a slave” (p. 37). The equation of whiteness and freedom, solidified by the Revolution, made subsequent cases problematic, and made the unions of white women and black men illicit: the issue was now not marriage, but bastardy, adultery and racial identity.

The ensuing chapter, “Bastardy,” explores the nature of the relationship between a white woman named Polly Lane and the slave Jim. Here the dramatic difference between the early and late nineteenth century is perhaps most compellingly revealed. Local...