Faithful Bodies: Performing Religion and Race in the Puritan Atlantic

Part III: Disciplining

Part III Disciplining In 1652, Thomas Higginbottom, an English man, and “Sarah the malato,” both “servants to Capt Turner of Sandies Tribe,” were convicted of fornication in Bermuda. Higginbottom petitioned the governor and council to spare him the “shamefull punishment of the post.” Having “served [his] countrey with faithfullness” as a soldier, he was “altogether ashamed” that he had “transgressed the law of god & man” in “giving way . . . to lusts” and “committing that hatefull sin of uncleanness.”1 If Sarah spoke in court, the clerk did not record her words. Even if she did, perhaps to plead for the court’s mercy on her, just as her partner was pleading for its mercy on him, she would not have been able to point to any military service for the court to consider as it deliberated on her fate. Her service to the colony would have been quieter, less regarded, more constant, and quite probably more arduous than Thomas’s time as a soldier, although their tasks as bonded labor on the small farms of midseventeenth -century Bermuda may have been similar.2 Thus far, while the lack of any comment in the record on the interracial nature of the case seems noteworthy, little else about it appears to be. Sarah’s presentment in court for fornication with an English man was unusual but not exceptional in the history of African and African-descended women’s interaction with English colonial law in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.3 New England the Chesapeake and recorded similar 216 / disciplining cases, scattered though they might have been. A gendered standard that afforded men more opportunities to avoid punishment for sex outside marriage, or required lesser punishment to begin with, was hardly remarkable.4 In fact, Sarah’s case was one of many instances in which the court attempted to regulate black women’s sexuality by punishing them for fornication and bastardy. Throughout most of the seventeenth century , the island colony’s courts punished Bermudian women of color for unlawful sex, including bastardy, while recognizing marriages involving people of color.5 Moreover, the case contains an implicit acknowledgment of Sarah’s Christian status. Both Thomas and Sarah were required to, and did, “make acknowledgment of their” sin in church, which meant that the justices and the congregation considered Sarah to be enough of a member of the congregation to require reintegration after her transgression .6 But beginning in the 1690s, women of color disappeared from all unlawful sex prosecutions, and the prosecutions themselves shifted away from fornication and incontinency in favor of bastardy. Despite this change, Bermuda’s statutory prohibitions of extramarital sex, unlike those of most other English colonies, continued not to differentiate by racial or religious labels until the 1723 Act against Bastardy decreed that white women convicted of interracial sex could no longer escape corporal punishment by paying a fine.7 That women of color like Sarah, treated like other members of the moral community in unlawful sex cases, disappeared from such cases by the turn of the eighteenth century, coupled with the racial character of the 1723 Act against Bastardy, might suggest a familiar pattern: as slavery became an even more degraded form of coerced labor and racial categories hardened in this period, women like Sarah went from being seen as fellow Christians to being considered merely as property. But that is not exactly what happened. The status of enslaved women did decline from the late seventeenth through the early eighteenth century, and women of color became even more vulnerable to sexual abuse by white men. White Bermudians, however, seemed no more concerned about interracial sex in the later period than they did in the earlier one. Neither case law nor the 1723 Act included any language describing interracial sex as more of a defilement than other kinds of unlawful sex. The disappearance of women of color from unlawful sex cases seems to have more to do with changing relations of church and state than with an overall decline of religion or a turn against the notion that people of color could be Christians and part of the same moral community. Further, the 1723 Act was aimed more at policing white women than at people of color of either disciplining / 217 sex. The developments of slavery and of a mixed-race society in Bermuda have much in common with those developments elsewhere. Yet the uncommon ways that religion, law, race...