Finding Charity's Folk

Enslaved and Free Black Women in Maryland

Jessica Millward, Richard Newman, Patrick Rael, Manisha Sinha

• Publisher: University of Georgia Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780820348797
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

Finding Charity's Folk highlights the experiences of enslaved Maryland women who negotiated for their own freedom, many of whom have been largely lost to historical records. Based on more than fifteen hundred manumission records and numerous manuscript documents from a diversity of archives, Jessica Millward skillfully brings together African American social and gender history to provide a new means of using biography as a historical genre.

Millward opens with a striking discussion about how researching the life of a single enslaved woman, Charity Folks, transforms our understanding of slavery and freedom in Revolutionary America. For African American women such as Folks, freedom, like enslavement, was tied to a bondwoman's reproductive capacities. Their offspring were used to perpetuate the slave economy. Finding loopholes in the law meant that enslaved women could give birth to and raise free children. For Millward, Folks demonstrates the fluidity of the boundaries between slavery and freedom, which was due largely to the gendered space occupied by enslaved women. The gendering of freedom influenced notions of liberty, equality, and race in what became the new nation and had profound implications for African American women's future interactions with the state.

CHAPTER 1

Reproduction and Motherhood in Slavery, 1757–1830

And whether one member suffer, all the members suffer with it; or one member be honored, all the members rejoice with it.

—I Corinthians 12:26 (KJV)

Motherhood under slavery was the farthest thing from freedom. During the late eighteenth century, the power of mothering came to the forefront in the form of the moral mother. The moral mother was white, privileged, and dedicated to instructing her children about how to be productive citizens. In this role, white women suffered from gender oppression, as their day-to-day lives often fell short of the ideal. However, their struggles were nothing compared to that of enslaved women. Enslaved women were considered property, meaning that there was a fiscal value attached to the most intimate of processes, the birthing of a child. Sasha Turner notes that when Britain ceased participation in the Atlantic slave trade, planters in Jamaica altered punishment and labor regimes for enslaved women.¹ Camillia Cowling’s work on Cuba suggests that reproduction served as the site of freedom.² Differing colonial models aside, scholars agree that giving birth under slavery meant reconciling one’s own role as a reproducer of the slave system with the joys and heartbreaks associated with pregnancy.

Attention to the private and intimate worlds of enslaved women is essential for excavating bondwomen’s resistance to everyday slavery, because women’s history does not merely add to what we know; it changes what we know and how we know it.³ Indeed, the true stakes of enslaved resistance resided somewhere in the quiet spaces, often outside of that which could be archived. This chapter, then, is particularly attuned to resistance and agency as it relates to enslaved mothers. By investigating reproduction and motherhood through agency and resistance, this chapter argues that although enslaved women did not possess legal power, they used whatever tools were available to carve an area of freedom in their life. How did enslaved women socialize their children in the midst of the horrors of slavery? How did those who were exploited sexually by their masters develop strategies to help their children avoid the same fate?

Many studies suggest that sex with their owners often resulted in certain privileges for bondwomen and their children. Indeed, the evidence that the manumitted children of such interracial encounters comprised a noteworthy proportion of elite free black communities is strong.⁴ But interracial sex was but one path that enslaved women used as an avenue to freedom. To complicate the narrative of interracial sex as an avenue to freedom, I examine enslaved women’s sexual relationships with both white and black men, reproduction, and motherhood to ask what these three categories have to do with freedom.

Black women’s enslavement included exposure to rape or the threat of rape; the knowledge that the most intimate of acts made them breeders, multiplying the enslaved population; and the heartbreak of separation from partners or children. Sexualized violence was a common form of physical punishment and psychological torture.⁵ Difference was coded on the enslaved African body, and whites’ perceptions about black women’s morality were distinctly different from those about white women.⁶ Slaveholders’ notions about black women’s sexuality were quite literally inflicted on enslaved women’s bodies. Sexual experiences, pregnancy, and childbirth forced enslaved women to reconcile intimacy and violence, the pain of slavery and the joy of motherhood.

Motherhood held the potential to be revolutionary. Slavery and freedom intersected at motherhood as women instructed their biological and fictive children on how to behave; how to respond to physical and sexual violence; and how to dream, if they dared to do so. Women taught their children strategies of resistance. Children learned to avoid drawing undue attention to themselves. Daughters learned to avoid white men and overseers at any cost as well as the heartbreak of losing a loved one as a consequence of circumstances beyond their control. The range of sexual experiences and reproductive realities reveal that despite difference, enslaved mothers used all available resources to protect themselves and their families. Parenting provided space in which to pass on stories and traditions to assist one’s descendants as they negotiated a life in and (ideally) out of slavery.

Birthing Children in Slavery

Early laws of colonial America reveal planter dependence on the natural reproduction of the enslaved population. In 1662, the Virginia state legislature determined that racial chattel slavery would be a permanent, inheritable condition by asserting that the status of the child followed that of the mother. If the mother was enslaved, so too were the children, regardless of the status of the children’s father.⁷ This law ensured that children of free black men and enslaved women as well as children of free white men and enslaved women faced a lifetime of enslavement and barred children descended from white men from laying claim to their fathers’ free or Christian status. Similar laws developed throughout the South during the late seventeenth century, all of them upholding the notion that whiteness equaled freedom and blackness equaled slavery.⁸

Sex between slave owners and enslaved women was openly practiced, but sex between black men and white women was forbidden. Late seventeenth-century law privileged white male authority: whereas the 1662 Virginia law upheld a slaveholder’s power to engage in relations with enslaved women, a 1664 Maryland law criminalized relationships between white women and black men.⁹ A white woman who married a black man was declared a slave for the duration of the life of her spouse. Legalized slavery was also extended to the children of black men and white women, who were to be enslaved regardless of the children’s age. Thus, interracial relationships had legal consequences for those excluded from the power structure.¹⁰

Laws specifying slavery as a permanent, inheritable condition represented one end of a spectrum of statutes that governed the status of those with African ancestry. At the other end of this spectrum were laws that stipulated the conditions under which enslaved individuals could gain their freedom. Manumission laws initially developed in the early Chesapeake so that slaveholders could free children they had fathered with bondwomen. As wage labor began to replace slave labor, planters used manumission as a means of relieving themselves of the costs of maintaining a permanent enslaved labor force.¹¹

By the middle of the eighteenth century, New World planters relied on natural reproduction rather than on imports to replenish their chattel population. As slave traders and owners realized the importance of women in reproducing the enslaved population, the nature of African chattel slavery was transformed.¹² Because slavery was permanent and inheritable through one’s mother, slaveholders expanded their dominion to inside the bodies of enslaved women.¹³

Reproducing an enslaved population meant that enslaved women formed families willingly or unwillingly. Birth rates among the black population of what would become the United States were higher than rates in the Caribbean, where planters actively discouraged the nuclear family.¹⁴ American slave owners encouraged enslaved people in places like Maryland to form families so that as the enslaved population grew, so did the owners’ wealth in human capital.¹⁵

The recognition that women’s reproductive labor was a site of future wealth attuned slaveholders to methods for assuring the birth of healthy children. Sowande Mustakeem notes that the health of enslaved persons during the Atlantic Middle Passage was a priority, not only to protect the value of the cargo but also because keeping the enslaved healthy meant that the crew of the ships transporting Africans to the New World would not succumb to disease.¹⁶ The attention to the health of the enslaved gained greater importance as abolitionist sentiment grew. Sasha Turner suggests that the end of British participation in the international slave trade significantly altered the work lives of enslaved women in Jamaica.¹⁷ Cut off from one source of new laborers, planters protected another source by protecting the health of pregnant women by varying their work assignments and degrees of punishment. For example, some believed that whipping a pregnant woman caused fewer complications if the woman lay over a hole in the ground so that her belly was protected from the lash. Marie Jenkins Schwartz argues that by the nineteenth century, slaveholders protected their investments in current and future slaves by paying formally trained doctors to deliver the children.¹⁸

Maryland slaveholders valued highly fertile women, and their sale could bring in cash. In 1772, Maryland planter Francis Ware sold eight enslaved people, two of them “breeding women.”¹⁹ Conversely, planters hesitated to purchase women who were not perceived as fertile. In 1780, Cornelius Conaway, the overseer at John Galloway’s Tulip Hill plantation, doubted that they should buy “Billy’s wife” because although she was a “strong young wench,” he did not “know that she will breed.”²⁰ A month later, Conaway repeated his anxiety: “Sims wants to part with his wife in exchange for [Billy]. I have wrote before. I don’t think that Billy’s wife will have children.”²¹

Yet while slaveholders’ commonly equated a bondwoman’s worth to the children she could bear, enslaved women found that practice traumatic. Enslaved in Texas, Rose Williams was confused when she learned that she had been paired with fellow bondman Rufus to make “portly children” for her owner.²² Williams did not understand that “marriage” for enslaved people often meant breeding more bondpeople for the ruling class regardless of the partners’ feelings for each other.²³ Such experiences indicate how for women, the painful reality of reproduction in slavery meant sleeping with men they had not chosen for themselves.

The binary between enslavement and freedom was constructed through the rape of enslaved women. White men could legally marry white women and at the same time force themselves on enslaved women. By failing to criminalize the rape of black women, the laws of slaveholding supported violations of enslaved women. Legislation also erased evidence of bondwomen’s intimate relationships with enslaved men. In 1767, Maryland attorney Daniel Dulany argued that enslaved women and men were legally “incapable of civil marriage” because they were property.²⁴ Assumptions about the normativity of white relationships vis-à-vis those of the people they owned stood at the center of the paradoxes of slavery. African Americans were subjects under the law only to the extent that their existence held up the institution of slavery.

The embodied history of enslaved women as property and as mothers meant that they lived in a world where sexual violence was legally sanctioned. The rape of bondwomen was well known in white and black communities. Former Maryland bondman James W. Pennington remembered that his owner purchased a girl for “no honorable purposes.”²⁵ But enslaved women are largely invisible in the rape cases presented in court since violating an enslaved woman was not a crime. Sharon Block suggests that rape cases in early America hinged on the notion of consent—but only for white women.²⁶ Enslaved women lacked legal personhood and indeed human attributes and thereby fell outside legal definitions of rape.²⁷ Notions about black women’s sexuality, then, were worked out on enslaved women’s bodies.²⁸

Enslaved women suffered from other forms of violence not only from male slave owners but also often from their wives. According to Thavolia Glymph, white women were the “female face” of slave owners’ often-violent power.²⁹ Former slave Richard Macks observed that “black women have had many hard battles to fight to protect themselves from assault by employers. They were subjected to many impositions by the women of the household through woman’s jealousy.” Macks remembered a doctor “who bought a girl and installed her on the place for his own use; his wife hearing of it, severely beat her.”³⁰ The condition of enslaved women worsened when wives felt threatened or when relationships developed between male slave owners and their female chattel. Countless enslaved women were sold when their owners’ sexual interest provoked jealousy from the slave mistress.³¹

Enslaved women raised children and tried to ho...