Remember Me to Miss Louisa: Hidden Black-White Intimacies in Antebellum America by Sharony Green (review)

In Remember Me to Miss Louisa: Hidden Black-White Intimacies in Antebellum America, Sharony Green adds to other recent studies of interracial sexual relationships in antebellum urban spaces—notably New Orleans, Charleston, and Richmond—through the introduction of Cincinnati as a northern safe house for a very southern relationship. The study centers on slaveholding men who chose to relocate women with whom they had previously had sexual relationships, as well as their mutual offspring, from the South to this free city. Cincinnati, as a rapidly urbanizing, increasingly multiethnic space, allowed for a manner of anonymity for the white men involved, as well as better education and employment opportunities for formerly enslaved people.

The overriding question in Green’s book is precisely why slaveholders would take the trouble to move their enslaved sexual partners away from the South, in addition to occasionally emancipating them and providing material support. Green’s central thesis is that intimacy in any form had real emotional consequences. White men made “financial and emotional investments” in enslaved women; and enslaved women took advantage of these investments in order to provide materially for themselves and their children: affection could even be reciprocated (p. 2).

The work is framed by the story of a wealthy slave trader, planter, and native of Virginia, Rice C. Ballard. In 1838 Avenia White, an African American woman and a former slave of Ballard’s, sent a letter from Cincinnati in which she asked for money for food and fuel; she also sent her “love” (p. 1). Ballard’s business and personal acquaintances provide Green with a series of case studies of the intimate relationships between white men and enslaved or free black women. In the relationships probed, African American women emerge as powerful actors within unequal power relationships that would, in other circumstances, remove any agency. Green puts forward a thesis that “white men’s attachment and generosity made African Americans also act in independent, assertive, even defiant ways” (p. 7). The clear agenda that Green states in the epilogue serves to explain an optimistic approach that sometimes overpowers the element of tragedy inherent to the lives of women living in sexual slavery. Louisa Picquet, a formerly enslaved woman whose narrative is detailed in chapter 3, is said to have “capitalized on her unfortunate condition to enhance her life” (p. 71). Green overlooks the death threats that Picquet’s sexually abusive master made to her; instead, she remarks that it was “probably security” that kept Picquet with him (p. 76).

Nevertheless, that white men acted “inconsistently and deliberately” in their efforts to enhance and protect certain enslaved individuals is not surprising (p. 27). Michael Tadman’s “key slave” theory has long since illuminated the possibility that some slaveholders were likely to become emotionally bonded to some enslaved people (key slaves) while exploiting and displaying cruelty toward others (“The Persistent Myth of Paternalism: Historians and the Nature of Master-Slave Relations in the American South,” Sage Race Relations Abstracts, 23 [February 1998], 7–23). Key slaves, as Tadman argues, dominate the letters and diaries of slaveholders; these sources are the primary reference point for this book alongside the amanuensis-written narrative of Louisa Picquet. Overall this study achieves its aim, that is, to illuminate the inconsistencies in human behavior. In the case studies examined, slaveholders did indeed look after the material well-being of some of their formerly enslaved women. Green’s desire to find love in relationships that could not have originated on a firm consensual grounding does, however, encourage other historians to probe further the extent to which an enslaved person could consent to any intimate relationship with a master.