No, But We Have a Word For That, Pt 2

Seems to me we need a different word; what happened to the slaves was horrible in a different way to the stranger-rape of modern times, and – having experienced that close hand (not first hand) – it’s soul destroying in a different way: shock, surprise, acute horror, followed by an opportunity for healing that sometimes helps but leaves you oh so lonely.

Where as what those slaves experienced was no surprise, and not shock, and no acute horror, nor – mostly, so far as the stories report, lonely. Instead, a horror drawn out over a life time, rubbed in with it’s inevitability and generational horror, it’s irresistability. It needs a new word that marks it different to ‘rape’ in the first sense

Then we could use that word for domestic violence too, where it belongs.

I agree with Just An Australian (and with what you hint at when you mention the kicking and screaming criteria): there is a spectrum of experience, all horrendous but not all alike, and employing a single word to describe it can somehow obscure the reality which we want to convey.

In the case under discussion, the definition of rape you recall obviously applies to sexual relations with slaves as well as someone raping a random woman at knifepoint but also equally well to (at least a good proportion of) ordinary sexual relations at the time. Likewise, 99% of all child rearing in the Western world between 1500 and 1900 fits the current legal and usual definition of child abuse, and yet there is certainly a non-neutral rhetorical effect in recalling it systematically (as in “Thomas Jefferson, a victim of child abuse, went on to…” though an expert can correct me if Jefferson’s childhood turned out to have been in the remaining 1%).

All that doesn’t change the fact that, even correcting for the foreign language, the choice of the word “fathered” sounds pretty creepy to me.

“Commanded children from her” ?

John’s hypothesis was that, to some degree, the rapine part of slavery is baked into the enslavement, with the result that further rape doesn’t seem like the most salient thing?

Social Death

Lisa Marie Cacho

No Selves to Abolish

“The slave relation, [Orlando] Patterson argued, is rather defined by a threefold condition: a) general dishonourment (or social death), b) natal alienation (i.e. the systematic rupture of familial and genealogical continuities), c) gratuitous or limitless violence. This threefold combination gives rise to a being experientially and socially devoid of relationality: the slave relation is a type of social relation whose product is a relationless object”

And of course, Geoffrey de Ste Croix.

I disagree with Just An Australian and Z, women fought for a long time to get marital rape recognised in law as rape. And also people have fought for a long time to get rape which is from non-physical coercement to also be called rape. The word rape is a strong word, and people who are raped in marriage, or raped through non-physical coercement should be able to use that word, and not be questioned about the use of the term.

I remember around ’97 watching on TV something about Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemmings, and the black descendants of them today.

At the time I was reading a book of USA constitutional and revolutionary texts, I may have had one or two maps from Revolutionary America on my walls (okay, I did).

I didn’t want to imagine the Thomas Jefferson who I was reading about in my (outdated secondhand) history books, I talked about it with a friend, and tried to say how it must have been a great forbidden romance between them and Sally Hemmings loved Thomas Jefferson. This was based on no evidence, and based only on my not wanting to read constitutional texts and look at old revolutionary maps of America thinking about Thomas Jefferson inheriting Sally Hemmings as a slave and most likely raping her/coercing her to have sex with him multiple times over years.

I wanted Thomas Jefferson to be a better person than that, I wanted to go back to reading my book of constitutional texts and looking at my map reproductions without being disturbed by inconvenient facts about Thomas Jefferson’s life.

In terms of whether you should say Thomas Jefferson was the father of children Sally Hemmings bore, despite the likelihood of rape and definite coercion in the relationship, I think that not saying Thomas Jefferson was the father is problematic because that was exactly what happened all those years, the descendants had to wait until DNA evidence proved that they were Thomas Jefferson’s descendants…

The tricky part for many men, including myself, is imagining how as a slave-owner, I wouldn’t be wandering down to the slave quarters after brandy, cards, and cigars night, after night, after night. Let’s see, how would that work exactly

‘You boys go ahead. I’ll just set a spell here longer sippin.” ? Not likely.

And the habit, once started might be even trickier to break. Lest we forget, however, this sort of abuse/rape is a direct consequence of taking absolute power over someone, and is not restricted to any particular place, or time. I’m thinking parts of India, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia. Once people end up as property, just about anything can and will happen.

What was that saying about absolute power? For my part, I do introduce Franklin, Jefferson, Washington, and Elizabeth I as popular and highly respected slave owners. Have to say many students are shocked.

Count me out? I’d like to think so. But if I’m owing slaves, I figure I’m more likely to go full Jefferson. Best people don’t. Own other people, that is, in any sense.

“In his “I Have a Dream” speech, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke about the sons of former slaves and slave owners “sitting down at the table of brotherhood.” One historic family has literally done that and much more to advance the work of racial harmony.

Members of the family insist they’re at least part descendants of one of America’s Founding Fathers.

“I’m the sixth great-grandson of Thomas Jefferson through his wife, Martha,” said David Works, a Jefferson descendant.

“I’m the fifth great-grandchild of Thomas Jefferson,” said descendant Julia Jefferson Westerinen.

“And I’m the sixth great-granddaughter of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings,” said Shay Banks-Young, another descendant.

Westerinen’s father discovered that his great-grandfather, Eston Jefferson, was black, but passed as a white man.

“It was a secret in our family,” Westerinen said. “My father and his two brothers decided that the secret would die with them.”

Others had a hard time accepting what some historians have alleged for years — that Jefferson, after the death of his wife Martha, developed a relationship with a slave on his plantation with whom he fathered several children.

It’s something the Jefferson family had challenged for years.

“It was my great-great-great-grandmother and her brother that came up with the story about the Carrs — that they were the fathers of Sally Hemings’ children,” Works said.

Yet in 1998, DNA testing provided answers that were hard to refute.

“They found my brother was a straight male descendant,” Westerinen said. “And they took the samples to England and all nineteen markers tested positive with my brother.”

Westerinen’s brother’s DNA proved that the Hemings and Jeffersons were related. Also, she learned the truth about her black ancestry.

“As I told the press, it made me more interesting than I thought I was,” Westerinen said.

Some worried about what the Hemings would do with the new information.

“It was clear to me that the Hemings were going to push their way into our vaunted graveyard and that we had to stop that,” Works said.

For Banks-Young, it wasn’t about a plot of land at Monticello.

“My grandfather came out of there as a free man, moved to Ohio, and lived his life,” she said. Why would I want to go back to where he was enslaved to be buried?”

It’s a legacy she can leave with her children. A journey she can trace back not only to Sally Hemings, but to Hemings’ grandmother, a young African woman who came to America on a slave ship.

“And when I think about the fact that an African girl survived the Middle Passage and then all the things that they endured through enslavement. The fact that we’re here today and alive is a miracle to me,” Banks-Young said. “So, I celebrate who they are and I feel like I owe them much. It’s an honor to me to represent them.”

Last fall, the three were honored for their work bridging the family divide and trying to heal the legacy of slavery. Their breakthrough came when the Hemings family hosted a reunion and invited the Jeffersons to attend.

“Twelve of us came, and we had a very good time,” Works described. “I had a blast, actually.”

The reunion got them talking, and they formed a group known today as the Monticello Community. It’s open to descendants from various families who lived and worked at Jefferson’s estate.”

http://www.cbn.com/cbnnews/us/2011/february/jefferson-descendants-heal-family-division/?mobile=false

Incidentally, Bob’s Patterson quote is helpful, but I think says both too much and too little. We don’t normally consider social death and rupture of social ties, though they’re bad, to be as bad as slavery. And the third consideration suggests that if there’s a social (Some have suggested that Latin American slavery of Africans and Indians fit this description, but everyone agrees they were slave systems.)

Can feminists write anything without their obnoxious hatred for white men shining through? Can feminists write anything honest — written without the intent of creating click-bait outrage or the intention of sticking a thumb in someone’s eye, like little children seeking attention?

I’m really starting to doubt it.

If you want people to take you seriously, make serious arguments that don’t amount to calling everyone who isn’t you evil.

“Can feminists write anything without their obnoxious hatred for white men shining through? ”

I could point out how messed up it is that you are taking that as the message of Belle’s post but I would prefer not to.

If I had been assigned to write that article, I would have struggled with the wording. I think I would have written:

“In the DNA, the researchers found the marks of slavery’s cruelties, including further evidence that white slave owners routinely mated with women held as slaves.”

(“Buried in the DNA, the researchers …” is rather terrible writing which even I know better than.)

Some people may associate “mating” with white-dress weddings, but (without looking it up) I think the scientific meaning is those actions which satisfy the procreative instinct.

I would go on to speculate that most of those matings were of the rape character, but as an objective journalist I would have to leave the option for an American of dark skin color to imagine that his European genes resulted from pairs of young mammals being attracted to each other.

Alternately, we could all imagine that most of our gene heritage resulted from rapes. That is also probably true, if we trace back far enough.

On further thought, I think I would refuse the assignment (to write the article).

Erratum: “his European genes” should have been “his or her European genes”.

I would have caught that in editing – I hope.

Please ban Soullite.

I’m very interested in bianca steele’s point….but that sort of distinction is incredibly hard to navigate without – at least seeming to – condone some pretty awful systems of oppression. Isn’t it?

Is “fathered children” inherently problematic? It seems like some of this is just economical use of language. What’s the appropriate substitute? “Thomas Jefferson raped children into his slaves?” It just doesn’t scan as well. You can of course add an explanatory sentence emphasizing the rape aspect like in the article referenced, but I don’ t know if it’s really some attempt at whitewashing to not do so, even if we might be better off if that was done more often.

Oops above reply probably should have been to Part I, which I read last night. Did not notice Part II had also been posted.

The rape of lower-class women has not been restricted to enslaved Africans; lords have forced themselves on peasant women throughout history. Even men with roughly the same status of women they have violated have been able to force them to marry by raping them and creating the possibility of having impregnated them.

Steak -> stems, auto correct is a cruel mistress

The oppression of African slaves was similar to and different from the oppression of other oppressed agricultural workers. There was few to no customary protections against violence and rape and limitless exploitation. The control over culture and family (outright selling of children and break up of families for profit) was much greater; the possibilities for mobility were much more restricted.

When there are children involved it adds a different dimension to the act of rape, because having children involved adds a different dimension to everything. Having fathered children, were they thrown out with the chamberpot? It adds more counts to indictments such as TJ’s.

Maybe “fathered children” dog whistles as “say what you will, at least the Man was virile! Yuuuge paws!”

Get better soon.

Belle,

Thanks, and I did have in mind the Gawker Media obsession with pointing out the ubiquity of rape, and also somewhat this sentence: “Rather, it seems as if people think you can only be raped so many times before…something other than rape is taking place?”. Because I do think some people do think this, to some extent (like whether a person is under compulsion depends on whether they think they are, therefore, for those people, they can change the way they think and then they’ll be happier). And you do occasionally see the claim that women in forced marriages are raped throughout their lives. Something about the conjunction of this question with the history of actual American enslavement of people from Africa bothers me.

And taking your examples a different way, a woman who’s been brainwashed or beaten down to the point where she believes it’s okay that if any of a bunch of men have sex with her whenever they feel like it, and that she would be wrong to refuse: at what point do we say, or not say, it’s rape, in what cases? Do we really understand this as rape, and should we?

There is some recent science about the impact of trauma on the genetic level which means the egg kinda does know: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/extra/daily_videos/can-trauma-be-passed-to-next-generation-through-dna/

I feel like such a contrarian atm but consensual slavery is definitely a thing: http://biblehub.com/exodus/21-5.htm

In the NYT piece I found Alondra Nelson’s criticism compelling. It’s also surprising that none of the controversy over racial medicine is even mentioned. For example, thinking of sickle cell in racial terms makes little sense as many of those susceptible to it would not be considered black or African and not all Africans are susceptible to it. This is rather well-known. There was the whole controversy over that drug which had failed FDA testing but was then marketed perhaps cynically as effective for those with a “black” genotype. Reporter should have talked to Nelson more.

Also Africans in the US did not come only from West Africa as Zimmer says but would have to check about %’s estimated to have come from present day Congo through present day Angola.

bianca steele @ 14 I think to use one word to cover all the known cases of forced sex such as the cases you and Belle mention—well, it doesn’t work, I agree, because that word conveys different things in different contexts. Without specific context, it can become almost meaningless. Which isn’t to say that rape isn’t the right word for each context, but it needs to be exegeted carefully, one context at a time, to remain meaningful.

Sometimes it isn’t the most helpful word, either, even if it is accurate. To veer into personal anecdote: When I was in my twenties I worked at a menial job with two Pakistani sisters, also in their twenties, whose parents were arranging marriages for them with men from Pakistan. The younger sister cried all the time over this. Then the mother died, throwing the family into turmoil. The father was too wracked with grief to function so the oldest brother became acting head of the family. The younger sister came to work with bruises from his beatings.

Then she got married, and not another word was said against her husband. The entire situation was so foreign to me, and so wrong, that to pick out different aspects as “domestic violence” and “rape” (She didn’t want to get married; she certainly didn’t want to have sex with this man she had never met) seem utterly inadequate. I lost touch with the sister when we all stopped working at the same place. Never heard the ending to that story.

14, 37, 41, 44:First, if you can’t agree that 100% of all sexual intercourse between masters and slaves is rape then there really is no such thing as rape. That’s why the words are masters and slaves – consensusal slavery is an oxymoron if ever there was one.

Yeah, after posting 7 I did give some thought to de Ste Croizx and ancient slavery. The classic story is of the Roman slave who could accumulate personal wealth and purchase his freedom, with the caveat of course that his master could kill him and take the money at any time. There is also GdsC story of the Roman Empire by an expansion of clientalism and a diminution of social status moving both freemen and slaves into serfs who did have some social status as tied to the land. The point in slavery was that interpersonal relationships were socially, politically, and legally irrelevant.

In any case what I wondered about in considerations of the complexity of social death was whether we are wildly overrating the value and meaning of interpersonal relationships and personal choices anymore. There is movement back to a more social position that the individual of any age or status cannot define the terms and meaning of sexual consent (or workplace etc; campus guidelines etc) which has echoes to more reactionary positions but doesn’t need to be a move backwards.

No answers, but I have long been skeptical toward definitions of personal consent in racist, patriarchal, and capitalistic societies.

PS: de Ste Croix does share with the MUTE piece about Afro-pessimism the opinion that freedom, the very categories of consent and rape, is totally and absolutely generated from and dependent on a category of beings (also citizens:aliens) toward which those concepts are unthinkable and can never apply. Romans had laws because they had slaves.

The “new word” suggested is perhaps the very first step on the road to denial of the historically unpleasant. In fact, “rape” is a better word, because it’s honest. It didn’t take very long at all, less than 100 years, for an America that suffered the Civil War to produce historical fantasies such as Birth of a Nation and Gone with the Wind. It took Republicans only minutes after the passage of the Civil Rights laws to generate the “Southern Strategy.” Our “natural” psychology of self-deception needs to be countered by honesty where ever possible, in the interests of our future and the futures of our children.

“Possibly threadrot, but consensual slavery really is a thing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master/slave_(BDSM)”

Man… so not the same thing,

Wow, the consensual slavery thing is a weird tangent — I would’ve thought the more point is that consensual sex is in principle possible within a non-consensual master/slave relation, even if the chances of such a thing actually happening are vanishingly small.

Anyway, I like ZM’s rewording @12, and agree with JimV that the “buried” thing needs to go.

It also occurs to me that we used to say “fathered children on her”, and maybe it’s the replacement by “with” that makes it sound more consensual than it should. I’m not sure, actually, that “fathered with” is even idiomatic.

I think the normal view would be that slaves can consent or withhold consent to what is done to them but are deprived all legal and practical means of giving force to their wishes. Jefferson’s slaves were raped because they didn’t consent to sex with him, not because they couldn’t.

@ various
How about I grant that in some theoretical sense there might be a very particular case where one time, possibly, the slave in question sorta, if you look at it just right, on a not too sunny day, maybe there was something resembling consent and we move on from the notion of whether there is 100% no such thing as consensual slavery.

Clearly the point is such instances are, as js suggests @59 ‘vanishingly small.’ Belle’s point (I believe) is to not to excuse the tens of thousands of cases of absolute rape, some of which were quite likely brutal by standards of any time or place, in favor of a few absolutely not-documented-in-history instances that may in the minds of people who can only see gray, have occurred.

Maybe “forcing children upon them” would do.

js, I took your comment as trying to honour the woman’s agency. That within a situation she didn’t consent to, there might still be ways she could make the best of it.

I think Belle’s point is correct, and maybe one way to rephrase would be something like “enslaved women bore their masters’ babies”.

Bianca, “fathered” is a strange word, in a way, especially as a verb contrasted with “to mother.” I think Belle’s right that rape gets normalized by being glossed over.

Sort of related, I once read a discussion about the scientific knowledge gained from Nazi experiments, where the issue was whether or how, when alluding to the results of the experiments, some of which were medically groundbreaking, to reference the fact that this knowledge came from Nazi experiments. The conclusion was that it should be referenced, every time.

In the case of enslaved women having babies against their will, I’d go for it being referenced every time.

By the way, Belle, it is lovely to have you back. I’m sorry you are unwell, and hope you feel better soon, and also that your daughter is better. I was thinking of her just the other day.

The extent to which, for a slaveholder in the southern US, “My slaves” were just another way of saying, “my family” is rather shocking. They enslaved their own children.

Jefferson, after the death of his wife Martha, developed a relationship with a slave on his plantation with whom he fathered several children

And a big part of the attraction for Jefferson was that his slave was his dead wife’s look-alike half sister.

I think that 16.7% number is pretty low compared to what others have estimated.

I’m on boat with this kind of thinking. The more one white-washes (no pun) history to make it seem filled with great men of perfect moral character the more idiocy one faces in today’s world (ie blame people for their economic situation etc). I for one am all for saying
“noted statesman and confirmed serial rapist Thomas Jefferson exercised extraordinary taste in designing his home.”

“Buried in DNA, the researchers found concrete evidence of slavery’s cruelties, including the fact that enslaved women often became pregnant as the result of being repeatedly raped by their white masters.”

“The researchers found concrete evidence of slavery’s cruelties, including the fact that white masters raped and impregnated enslaved women.”

Speaking of language, and whitewashing of the horrible things whites did to blacks: today is the 95th anniversary of the Tulsa race riots (according to some) or the Tulsa massacre (according to others). An episode that, as I understand it, was excised from local history textbooks & school curricula until relatively recently.

To understand sex between master and slave in the antebellum South there are two accounts a worth looking at:
Harriet Jacobs’ “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl” Jacobs was subjected to campaign of harassment that included everything, but force(although there was a constant stream of threats). The master, who Jacobs calls “Dr. Flint” is something out of the DSM. Harriet eventually defends herself by becoming the mistress of another white man, who can act as her protector, and then escaping slavery altogether.
In “Celia, A Slave” a 19 year old fights back against her master, and kills him, then is tried for murder. A slave woman had no legal right of self defense against being sexually assaulted. The master’s exploitation of Celia(which started when she was fifteen) was known by his family and simply ignored, as were Celia’s attempts to recruit the white women of the household to persuade the master to stop.

Stephenson: I suppose the previous description did leave open the possibility of some kind of innocent master-slave romance resulting in children

Yeah. I think the issue here is that at at time where we have white male novelists writing stories from Sally Heming’s POV about how it wasn’t all that bad,* and more people buying that book, we should use the most blunt, clear vocabulary we have. No room for gauzy romanticized notions of what it could have been like.

* Revulsion warning for that book review link. The reviewer breathlessly uses the terms “concubine” “lover” “passion” and “beguiled”, while giving a vague nod in the direction of “consent.”

And no, I don’t think a new word will do. New words can’t hope to have the emotional punch and visceral recoil of old ones — it takes time to acquire that. I don’t like the idea that we can divide up different types of rape, anyway — it gets way too close to the problem we already have, where only some kinds of rape are viewed as “real” rape.

11: as popular and highly respected slave owners

Popular with whom? Respected by whom? I can’t imagine it was by the people they owned, unless the enslaved people’s “respect” was just “in relation to an even more horrific slave owner, you’re not quite as bad”. And how would we have documentary evidence of that anyway? There are few memoirs of enslaved people who were later freed, and approximately zero of enslaved people who were freed and were writing in a time and place free of economic and social coercion/pressure.

First, what in the fuck does this have to do with feminists? Geez, some people.

Do I understand correctly that “father” as a verb, perhaps also as a noun, connotes meanings too positive to tolerate in this context? Either because generally we think positively of fathers or because the act of fathering at its best entails loving and nurturing–you know, Father Knows Best–behaviors utterly antithetical to rape? OED is a bit circular about the matter. The first entry for the verb reads, “To be or become the father of; to beget.” And the first entry for the noun reads, “The male parent of a human being; a man in relation to his child or children. Also occasionally: a male animal in relation to its offspring. (The male counterpart of mother n.1 1a.)”

Maybe the shock of catachresis is a good thing.

If science is the message, softening the tone through ‘fathering of children’ and the like increases the chance that science remains the focus of the article. A different article can and should cover the points made in the OP.

I couldn’t disagree more. This isn’t like glossing over the domestic violence of a sports star in a sports article. It’s a fundamental concern of the article. There is no discussing African-Americans’ white heritage, in the US of the 21st century, without an open and explicit acknowledgement of where that heritage likely originated.

Agree completely with Lynne’s 68.

77: Has the case that it the rapist/father in question was actually Thomas rather than one of his brothers or other close relatives gotten significantly stronger in the past few decades? I mean, that’s obviously the more interesting/useful/ironic version of events, but as I recall the genetic evidence did not support actual certitude there.

I’m not picking on you specifically, but this is a perfect example of the dehumanization and figurative un-personing that continues to be done to enslaved people’s histories. We had hundreds of years of oral history from Hemings’s descendants, long before anyone knew of such a thing as DNA. We still have that history.

And while as a general principle memory is fallible and human beings’ recountings are imperfect, when the energy of “B-b-b-but it could have been a male cousin instead of Jefferson!!” is being driven by mostly white Jefferson descendants and slavery apologists, while they continue to dismiss black Jefferson/Hemings descendants’ stories…it’s time to step back and ask who benefits from a power dynamic that fixates on “science” as the sole* arbiter of truth.

*I love science and am happy to include it as a powerful and important tool, but it’s not the only way to get at truth. Especially since “science” is carried out by those pesky, fallible human beings.

Val @87: Not a joke in the “ha ha!” sense at all. I meant it as a roundabout way, a rhetorical question, of asking how “the tendency” of feminists–all of them at once, all of the man haters, because of course all feminists hate men–has any bearing on a query about the aptness of a loaded word–“father”–to stand for “beget.” The query is serious. The response is bullshit.

Val @89: Needless complexity here. I was p.o.’d that somebody would respond to this post with comments about “the tendency of feminists,” which is 1) meaningless, and, anyway, 2) totally beside the point.

As for “fathering” as euphemism for “rape,” yes, I get that, except it doesn’t fully compute. Rape doesn’t always result in “fathering.” The use of the term, as I read it, is to signify a subset of rapes out of which a child emerges. I think Belle is (rightly) lamenting the cozy quality of the verb, but that quality is a product of the baggage with which we burden it. There’s tension between a more or less literal sense of the term and the way the word operates (as in the NYT story) to avoid being quite explicit about violence and force.

We should say things like “noted statesman and confirmed serial rapist Thomas Jefferson exercised extraordinary taste in designing his home.”

I’m sceptical that this policy would help in making rape less culturally tolerated. It’s perhaps comparable to images of violence in news or prevalence of graphic descriptions of crimes in sections of press – do they help to make the world less violent or reduce crime? It seems at least arguable they don’t. That doesn’t necessarily mean it’s the wrong thing to do – it might be necessary for accuracy or respect to the victims – just that one can reasonably disagree imo about whether the cultural consequences of such a shift would be positive.

Always been really disturbed by concept of men getting children via any level of rape etc that they were content to deliver into a life of horror through slavery. On the whole humans do love their children …

Isn’t the right word for Tulsa “pogrom”?

“We had hundreds of years of oral history from Hemings’s descendants, long before anyone knew of such a thing as DNA. We still have that history.”

@ 86: It’s not “dehumanizing” to ask for evidence. Family legends can be wrong, or dubious, as Elizabeth Warren can attest. The Woodson family had/have a similar oral tradition related to Jefferson. DNA testing did not back it up.

If you were saying, “We shouldn’t rely exclusively on DNA evidence” then I would agree with you. There was significant circumstantial evidence pointing to Jefferson as the father of Sally’s children that was downplayed or ignored for decades. Jeff R. is right to remind us that the DNA evidence is not definitive. It does, however, support other things we already know.

Agree generally with what Cervantes said at #75 – although some of the acts committed Warren Jeffs and his confreres are accused would constitute rape under most definitions.

Jefferson promised his dying wife that he would not marry again. Martha had had disagreeable stepmother experiences and feared the same for her daughters. John Wayles, Jefferson’s father-in-law, formed a long-term liaison with one Betty Hemings after the death of his third wife. One of their children was Sally and as rea notes she bore a close resemblance to Martha Jefferson. (Wayles died in debt, like Jefferson, and none of his children by Betty were freed. All of Sally’s children were eventually freed one way or another.)

@ 11: Not all slaveowners partook, despite brandy, cigars, and peer pressure. Also, you are giving those who did rather too much credit by attributing their behavior to simple human weakness. A lighter-skinned slave was a more valuable slave. Jefferson was far from the worst.

@49, you can check data here afaik. I don’t have time to look properly at the minute but have put in rough categories that should give an idea

http://www.slavevoyages.org/assessment/estimates

Slavery seems to be an ever-present theme of much of human history, but the more recent form in the Americas seems to be on a different scale of inhumanity. In much slavery there seems to be two elements that were missing in American slavery – that there was a responsibility of the slave owner for the welfare of the slave, and that the slave had some hope of freedom. Perhaps American slavery needs a different term to distinguish it from historic slavery elsewhere.

Some historical bits I found interesting:
– mitochondrial DNA seems to show most Icelandic women have Irish ancestry but far fewer Icelandic men have Irish ancestry, evidence that the Vikings took captive Irish women to Iceland.
– some British (and Irish) were captured in the 17th century by North African slavers and sold (http://www.anti-slaverysociety.addr.com/haf-general.htm). There was a BBC program on this a while back. Helen Gloag was captured as a slave but eventually became an Empress in Morocco. One of the main pirate captains had an islamic name but was actually Dutch and had converted for reasons of convenience.
– Whilst Britain was implicated in the slave trade up to the mid 1800’s, in the later years it was very anti-slavery and justified imperial activities in Africa partly through fighting against Arab slavery – see .https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_George_Gordon. The fact that Arabs were prominent in much of African slavery seems to have been forgotten in much of the debate on slavery.

@ Philip

I just found it interesting, that’s all. I’m not sure what it is relevant to.

“The Scramble For Africa” by Thomas Pakenham is a great book which I keep going back to. One of the features of it is the amount of discussion at the time and disagreement on the morality of various points. Nowhere is that seen more than in the David Livingstone / Henry Morton Stanley contrast. Worth an article in itself.

I mean I can see how it might not be relevant in this conversation, but in general ? It’s pretty central

Dean C. Rowan @ 90: Given that the article expressly characterized this “fathering” as one of “slavery’s cruelties,” I’m not sure it’s really avoiding all that much.

Assertions about Jefferson and Hemings were not infrequently reported during their lifetimes: https://www.monticello.org/site/plantation-and-slavery/thomas-jefferson-and-sally-hemings-brief-account. So it’s not dependent on “family tradition.” And that family tradition was reported in writing by Sally Heming’s son, so it’s not as if it’s generations later.

Ronan, yeah I didn’t explain that well. They are two tropes that are brought up and prefaced with something like ‘and what no one ever says is . . .’ but someone says it pretty much every time. It’s as though it is meant to be some kind of gotcha when discussing the slave trade to the Americas but I am never sure why.

@ Philip – that’s why at the beginning of my comment I said “[the slavery] in the Americas seems to be on a different level of inhumanity.”

112 Amelia Murray decided to leave England and visit North America in 1854. She was wrote repeatedly against slavery in her account, but compared the treatment of slaves in the Americas favorably to the treatment of ‘free’ people of color in European administered jurisdictions. She also took a page from Marx and Dickens and claimed that the quality of life for slaves in the American slave states was generally better than that of the poor in England. We cannot today easily imagine a world where the loss of liberty is preferable to the loss of life, or the loss of life of one’s children. Her book must be seen as an apologia for slavery. Yet, Murray draws a sharp contrast between slavery in the United States and slavery in Spanish possessions, such as Cuba.

For me the enslavement of another is the inhumanity – the subsequent abuses naturally follow. What are we to make of Jefferson, who wanted his slaves freed after they could no longer warm his bed? A family of slave-owners I study freed their slaves once they decamped back to Europe?Are we supposed to applaud this act of benevolence? Some folks actually do.

Or, how about the really generous slave owners who free their slaves after a certain period, and then offer the liberated slave a present, or some form of payment?

How do we construct any of the previous as acts of virtue? Tis an ugly system that has yet to be fully eradicated. I’d personally much prefer to see modern forms of slavery identified and prosecuted than safely attacking the powerless and the dead, no disrespect to Belle intended.

If you didn’t want me to comment here, you could have just said so instead of going to the trouble to organize this nauseating collection of comment postings.

“What are we to make of Jefferson, who wanted his slaves freed after they could no longer warm his bed?”

Huh?

Jefferson freed only those slaves who were his children or Sally Hemmings’ brothers. A grand total of six if I am not mistaken. He never freed Sally Hemmings herself. Jefferson’s daughter Martha de facto freed Sally Hemmings after Thomas Jefferson’s death. Recall that Sally was Martha’s aunt.

There were, IIRC, well over 100 other enslaved people owned by Jefferson who were never freed.

What do you make of that?

Kaleberg@96: I realise this is a bit off topic, but when you write “Fritz Haber, the convicted German war criminal” could you please improve my education by letting me know what war crimes he was convicted of, and by which court?

@ 123
I understand what you mean. Some of the comments here have totally gob-smacked me. However it is an enormously difficult subject Belle has raised. One of the key points is the one I think she raised in the first section, kind of incidentally – that in a society where the ruling class habitually and publicly uses extreme and terrifying violence, such as hanging and flogging, as a means of control, life is very different to what we are used to.

in a society where the ruling class habitually and publicly uses extreme and terrifying violence, such as hanging and flogging, as a means of control, life is very different to what we are used to

It’s perhaps worth noting in this connection that 1 in 9 black men aged 20-34 are in prison in US, that mainstream American culture appears to tolerate or expect the likelihood of prisoners being raped, and that the US prisons have routinely made use of the death penalty and torture.

I have to say though – going back to the point about gob-smacking comments – that comment about ‘siring’ being a better word than ‘fathering’, that was just a terrible comment. The commenter seemed well-intentioned, but it was just – words fail me. The one about how wrong it was for feminists to comment on rape was bad enough, but to be followed by that one – that’s the point at which I temporarily gave up.
What were people thinking?

Val @133: I genuinely assume you are not intending my first comment, which you earlier questioned and which Belle and I independently tried to explain. But just in cae: when I wrote, “what in the fuck does this have to do with feminists?,” I was not for a nanosecond intimating that it is wrong for feminists to comment on rape. As Belle noted, I was expressing my dismay with soullite’s ad hominem posts about “the tendency of feminists” to behave in certain ways in certain kinds of disputes. Those comments gobsmacked me, too. In some ways and in some circumstances I believe only a feminist can reliably comment on rape. (See Christine Littleton’s “Reconstructing Equality” for a preliminary discussion of what being a feminist entails.) The matter of the lexicon of paternity, however, doesn’t seem to me to be so exclusive, although I recognize that we should credit feminism for giving it salience in the first place.

Yeah somehow I missed a whole sequence of comments including Belle’s.

@114: Prolapsed uteruses were common among female slaves, attributable to being sent back to work too soon after childbearing, among other things.

“:On the other hand, you have George Washington, who made detailed provision for the immediate or eventual manumission of his slaves in his will and went beyond that to make sure that the means would be there to make their freedom possible – in fact, much of the text of Washington’s will is given over to this. Depriving human beings of their liberty is inherently inhumane, but it is possible to make distinctions within the constraints of that premise (and also to treat people who lived in another time with different assumptions as if they were, well, people living in a different time with different assumptions). To me, that speaks well for Washington and poorly for Jefferson – in this matter, at least.”

There is a wonderful new display at Independence Mall in Philadelphia where the exposed archeological dig of the foundations of Washington’s home when he was President are visible, including the slave quarters. There is also extensive commentary, including excerpts from the slaves own accounts (some were literate, others recorded by observers). Washington did indeed make provisions for the freedom of his slaves in his will. He also was careful to quickly sell off those he did not consider worthy of freedom. His criteria, iirc, was hard-working, thrifty, obedience, etc. and I believe he was quite harsh on his slaves that tried to escape. So like all slave owners, even such benevolence was closely tied to the power to exert benevolence or cruelty according to ones whims.

The display on Washington’s slaves is quite excellent and is by the entrance to the Liberty Bell pavilion, Across the street from the Constitution Museum and in plain sight of Independence Hall. One has to literally walk past it in order to see the Liberty Bell and on summer days the line snakes right through the display, giving visitors ample time to explore the contradiction.

Dean C Rowan @ 135
I’ve re-read and tried to make sense of it all and I definitely owe you an apology. Your comments prior to 135 were a bit cryptic (especially as I didn’t see Belle’s and didn’t get the context) but they weren’t gob-smacking, just a bit hard to understand. I was careless in lumping them together with the comment about ‘siring’ as a suitable word.

That suggestion – and also I’d like to add the ones about ‘bastards’ – are really surprising to me, and make me wonder if people have thought at all about the weight of meaning those words carry, and how perverse it is to use them in this historical context.

Slaves and black people generally were stigmatised as more ‘animalistic’ than whites, and ‘bastards’ were children born to mothers who were shamed because the male parent of the child had not chosen to marry them. The child, likewise, carried that stigma.

It does really surprise me that people could, so apparently casually, use words that reference the very animalistic and shaming stigma that slaves and women were oppressed by. OK, I’m a historian by training, and I’ve researched and written about maternity and racism (in Australia) so I suppose I’m more aware of all that background, but I’m still a bit shocked. Maybe I’m not getting what people mean (again) but I don’t think so.

@141 & 142: I didn’t mean to suggest that being a slave for George Washington was a picnic (and please note I didn’t say so). Henry Wiencek is very good on the complexities of Washington’s relationship to slavery and his own slaves. At the last, Washington behaved more responsibly than Jefferson with regard to them, and that speaks well for him. IMO only, of course.

George and Martha did have their differences on the subject and Martha’s own slaves were not freed. Washington’s will did have a sort of “Throw Momma from the Train” proviso that his own slaves were not to be freed till after Martha’s death, leading to fears at Mount Vernon of what we would call today a perverse incentive, and as the linked article notes his slaves were freed early.

As for the Liberty Bell – without the wealth created by slavery American independence might not have been possible. So there we are – and the country is still living with the contradiction.