Southern Women

Black and White in the Old South

Sally G. McMillen

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781119147749
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia de Norteamérica

The third edition of Southern Women relays the historical narrative of both black and white women in the patriarchal South. Covering primarily the years between 1800 and 1865, it shows the strengths and varied experiences of these women—on plantations, small farms, in towns and cities, in the Deep South, the Upper South, and the mountain South. It offers fascinating information on family life, sexuality, and marriage; reproduction and childrearing; education and religion; women and work; and southern women and the Confederacy.

Southern Women: Black and White in the Old South, Third Edition distills and incorporates recent scholarship by historians. It presents a well-written, more complicated, multi-layered picture of Southern women's lives than has ever been written about before—thanks to its treatment of current, relevant historiographical debates. The book also:

• Includes new scholarship published since the second edition appeared
• Pays more attention to women in the Deep South, especially the experiences of those living in Louisiana and Mississippi
• Is part of the highly successful American History Series

The third edition of Southern Women: Black and White in the Old South will serve as a welcome supplementary text in college or community-college-level survey courses in U.S., Women's, African-American, or Southern history. It will also be useful as a reference for graduate seminars or colloquia.

1
Family Life, Sexuality, and Marriage

Family

The family proved a principal source of strength to black and white women, but it also placed some of the greatest demands on their emotions, time, energy, and health. At its best, a family provided solace, support, love, and companionship; at its worst, it meant domestic violence, heartbreak, separation, and pain. High mortality affected black and white family stability. For many enslaved women, the family offered shelter against the brutality and oppression of slavery, but the family was also vulnerable to the whims of slave owners. No laws protected slave marriages. Sales broke up an estimated 20 percent of all slave families. Nevertheless, the family played a key role in enslaved women's struggles to combat oppression and gave them a sense of purpose. For white women, the family was the central institution in their lives, and family members were often their dearest companions.

The emergence of a more advanced plantation system by the late eighteenth century fostered larger and more stable slave communities. With the ending of legal slave importations in 1808, which had brought more males than females to this country, a more balanced sex ratio emerged. By the early antebellum period, many enslaved lived within a nuclear family structure. Finding a marriage partner and creating a family became easier, especially for those living on large plantations. Yet the enslaved could never ensure family stability. The greatest disruption to such stability was the death of an owner or reduced financial circumstances, often prompting the need to sell slaves. A downswing in the economy, a drop in crop prices, or gambling debts could require the need for cash. Slaveholders might rent or sell a slave to minimize expenses, earn money, or rid themselves of a truculent worker. When planter families migrated to start life anew, they might take only a portion of their slaves with them, ignoring family cohesion by splitting up enslaved partners, children, or siblings to fit their needs.

It is important not to oversimplify the structure of enslaved families or to rely on a white model as the norm. The enslaved family was never a fixed institution, and a variety of patterns defined it. Studies of slaves on large plantations reveal multiple family forms and a range of household types, including nuclear, single parent, solitary, and extended. Perhaps typical of those living on large plantations were some 160 slave families residing on sizeable Louisiana plantations. A study shows that nearly three-quarters of these enslaved lived in parent-child groups. Two parents were present in half these families; a single parent, usually the mother, headed 16 percent of these. Slightly less than 20 percent of all slaves lived alone, and nearly all of them were men. These structures could change throughout an individual's lifetime, and a family might incorporate some, or even all, these forms. Family type also varied by the size of the plantation or farm, slaves’ economic activities, slave sales, an owner's character, and the type of cash crop grown. Whatever its form, for enslaved women, the family was the institution that provided moments of joy amidst daily oppression. Home was the setting where they could function, away from the constant scrutiny of their owners.

Enslaved families usually lived in single cabins, although another family, an elderly relative, or a single person might share these quarters as well (Figure 1.1). Masters encouraged slaves to live in family units. They perceived this as a means to provide greater stability in the black community, discourage runaways, and enhance owners’ wealth when slave infants were born. While the nuclear family was important, the enslaved also received support from extended family members. Evidence of this was the value that slaves placed on perpetuating family names. Parents retained a remarkable knowledge of genealogy and often named their children after grandparents, aunts, and uncles on both the maternal and paternal side.

Figure 1.1 Family of slaves at the Gaines House, Hanover County, Virginia. Source: Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC [reproduction number: LC-DIG-ds-05506].

In the slave community, kin or friends might share parenting duties. Older enslaved women or young girls often watched infants while parents labored in the fields. Relatives and friends often assisted single mothers with child-rearing. If mothers had been sold or had died, leaving an enslaved child without a biological parent, aunts, sisters, grandmothers, or women in the slave community helped to raise the youngster. One enslaved woman recalled that with her mother living on one plantation and her father on another, female relatives raised her. Frederick Douglass, former slave and abolitionist, scarcely remembered his mother, for she was hired out to work on another plantation when he was an infant and died when he was seven. Douglass, raised by his grandmother and an older woman, related that he saw his mother no more than four or five times in his lifetime and only at night when she could leave the plantation to visit her son.

White families also depended on broad kin networks. Since family members never lived with the threat of sale, white households were, of course, more stable than slave families were. The extended family was probably less essential in the daily lives of whites but did provide opportunities for sustenance, companionship, business ventures, socializing, and child-rearing. For instance, the Petigru (also spelled Pettigrew) families included a wide assortment of aunts, uncles, cousins, and stepchildren. Spread across two states, some Petigru kin lived in the upcountry near Abbeville and others in Charleston and Georgetown, South Carolina, as well as Lake Phelps in North Carolina. They visited one another sporadically and often summered together on Pawley's, Sullivan's, or Kiawah Islands. Petigru women corresponded frequently, sharing advice, joys, sorrows, as well as family gossip. They sent one another home-produced goods and food; attended family weddings, parties, and debutante balls; and assisted with childbirth and nursing the sick.

Most white families like the Petrigrus existed as nuclear households but expanded to draw in kin, friends, and visitors. The composition of a family could change quickly. Mary and Charles Colcock Jones of Liberty County, Georgia, who were enjoying the tranquility of middle age and an empty nest, unexpectedly took charge of raising their infant granddaughter when their daughter-in-law died in childbirth. After her mother died, three-year-old Virginia Tunstall was sent from North Carolina to Alabama to be raised by her aunt and uncle. When white families moved west, their migration was often in response to the urgings of relatives already settled on the frontier. Frequently groups of families migrated together. The Lides moved to Alabama, and the extended family, including parents, six children, six grandchildren, and a number of slaves, went with them.

Family members helped to offset life's vicissitudes and to provide affection and assistance in times of need. Letters among family members requested and offered advice, shared gossip, updated family members on children's physical growth and delightful antics, and detailed family activities and health. At every age, southern women understood the importance of personal ties to their families. Family bonds among whites sometimes also helped to ameliorate the class divide. Rich and poor relatives might live near one another, and the wealthy might assist their less fortunate relatives. For instance, Gertrude Thomas and her husband Jefferson, living on a plantation near Augusta, Georgia, hired a cousin as their overseer and a poor female cousin as their seamstress. Shared or familial surnames created strong associations in the South, offering comfort and acceptance in a place where friendships were often difficult to establish or maintain and outsiders and strangers were regarded with a wary eye.

Despite the importance of family, relationships were not always harmonious, and family members and kin did not always get along. While southern women rarely aired publicly the details of marital troubles, tension and misunderstanding existed in a number of households. Court and church records reveal that couples quarreled, men drank and gambled, and children fought or fled home. Men and women committed adultery; men fathered or women bore children out of wedlock. Family members who misbehaved could publicly shame an entire family. South Carolinian Thomas Chaplin proved a continuous disappointment to his mother. Females in the Petigru family had no use for the new wife of a nephew, feeling that her common background, poor manners, and bad teeth were well below their standards. They all but snubbed her when she came to visit.

Slave families no doubt also experienced disharmony. It is easy to understand how the enslaved, enduring so much oppression and hardship and living within the close confines of a tiny cabin, might turn their exasperation or anger on family members. Husbands or wives might take out their frustration on a spouse or on their children. Domestic violence and alcoholism in both white and slave families led to troubled familial relationships.

Courtship

Despite a married woman's narrow legal standing and the challenges marriage could bring, most southern women, both black and white, were eager to marry. Southern society expected them to do so. Enslaved women living on large plantations usually had an easier time finding a mate than did the enslaved residing on small farms. On the former, young black men and women interacted on a daily basis as they worked and often socialized during their limited free time. Josiah Collins of Lake Phelps, North Carolina, allowed his slaves frequent opportunities to interact with slaves living on the adjacent Pettigrew plantation, which meant they had additional choices of friends or partners. At church, slaves from several plantations gathered to worship and socialize. Young women dressed gaily, donning their single cotton dress and clean handkerchief, fixing their hair, and primping to attract a man's attention. The enslaved on small farms had limited choices in finding a partner, and bondmen often courted women on nearby farms. Some male slaves crept out at night to woo a young woman. More likely, though, they traveled once a week with their owner's permission slip in hand to court someone living elsewhere.

A number of free black women living and working in southern cities faced a limited selection of eligible men, since fewer free black males lived in urban areas than did females. New Orleans, as one example, had 100 free women of color for every 57 free black men, eliminating marriage for many females. Similarly, free black women in Charleston comprised approximately 61 percent of the population of free blacks there. State laws forbid interracial marriages, and many free black women were unwilling to marry a slave. Yet in some instances, a free black woman formed a liaison with a male slave and might eventually earn enough money to purchase his freedom. Even that became increasingly problematic over time as southern states passed laws requiring manumitted slaves to leave the state. Some free black women preferred not to marry so that they could remain independent agents and claim their wages and property.

Courtship in the slave community varied significantly, from the casual to the ritualized. Practices could be romantic as men pursued a comely woman. Men sometimes solicited the assistance of a conjurer to place a spell on the desired young woman to improve their chances of winning her. Yet many slaves had no time, energy, or use for formal rituals. Jane Johnson, an elderly former slave, testified “‘Dat courtin’ stuff is what white folks does, no nigger knows what dat fancy thing is.” Far more typical were casual interactions enhanced by the tug of mutual attraction.

Prior to marriage, young enslaved women enjoyed relatively open sexual relationships with black men, especially compared to the moral behavior prescribed for and expected of southern white women. Slave babies born out of wedlock were welcomed into the mother's family; the child's parents might or might not eventually marry. Usually by the birth of a second child, a young woman had found a permanent mate. The black community did not condemn premarital sex or the birth of an infant to a single woman. Adulterous relationships, however, were less acceptable.

Nor were plantation owners very disturbed by open sexual behavior in the slave community. Planters accepted slave children born out of wedlock (a number of whom they had sired) since each newborn increased the plantation labor pool and the owner's wealth. On the other hand, someone like John Hartwell Cocke, an unusually paternalistic and moralistic master who hoped to elevate his slaves and send them to the African colony of Liberia, was shocked when he discovered his Alabama slaves living in what he deemed a “state of moral depravity.” Several enslaved couples who were not married were cohabiting, mulatto children were running everywhere, venereal disease was rampant, and several black girls were living with white men. Cocke immediately built additional slave cabins, hired a Baptist preacher to instill Christian morals in the enslaved, and offered wayward slaves a choice of marriage or punishment.

Whites, in reacting to the sexual behavior of their enslaved, often publicly accused black women of being sexually active and provocative, creating the image of temptresses enticing men into illicit relationships. This charge no doubt helped to assuage white male guilt over their own behavior when they had sex with or raped slave women, or was uttered by white women to excuse their husbands’ predatory wanderings. Yet sexuality in the black community was more restrained than whites assumed it to be. Black women exhibited some control over their sexuality and reproduction, for on average, an enslaved woman bore her first child two or three years after her first menstrual period (which, on average occurred when girls were about 15). Many anxious mothers warned their daughters about the sexual nature of black and white men.

Among elite white women, finding a husband could become a full-time pursuit, and families spent a great deal of time, energy, and money on courtship rituals such as balls and parties for teenage daughters. Meeting eligible men often demanded effort, for finding a husband was not always easy, especially for those residing on isolated plantations and in rural settings. With the exception of girls living in cities such as Charleston or New Orleans, where young men and numerous activities created a social whirl, contacts with single men were infrequent. Young people might meet at church, at a party or ball, or at the home of school friends or relatives. Such locations were safe meeting grounds; they attracted young men and women of the same social class who understood proper social boundaries and behavior. For instance, Mary Boykin's future husband, James Chesnut, was the brother of a schoolmate, and they met in Charleston where she was attending school. Though James's wealth and social standing made him a suitable choice, Mary was only 14. Her parents became so concerned about a relationship developing between the two that they pulled Mary out of school and sent her to live on their Mississippi plantation. The two did marry—but later.

Family connections often played a part in the choice of a partner. Most southern white women, whether privileged or poor, had little opportunity to meet men living beyond their county unless they, like Mary, went away to school or visited friends and family far from home. Marrying a first cousin or someone from the same county was common among southerners. Unlike in the North, cousin marriages were legal in the South. Such relationships developed naturally, since social interactions with extended family and neighbors were common. Cousin marriages made sense, for they cemented future family and business ties and could consolidate land holdings. There was no doubt something comforting about marrying a man you knew well. Mary Jones married her first cousin, Charles Colcock Jones, creating a family united by land, tradition, common relations, and deep affection. Even distant family ties could be important. Robert E. Lee married Mary Anna Randolph Custis—the two shared the same great-great grandfather. Three of the eight children in the Thomas Lenoir family of North Carolina married first cousins. Isabella Fraser of South Carolina married her first cousin, and when he died, she wed her second cousin. Among North Carolina planter families, one in ten marriages among that state's elite were between first or second cousins. Other southern states may have exhibited a similar pattern.

Several marriages might occur between two white families, such as two brothers in one family marrying two sisters in another. When Thomas Chaplin of St Helena Island, South Carolina, married Mary McDowell, her sister Sophy moved in with the couple. Mary was bedridden after bearing four children, and Sophy became a surrogate mother to the children as well as a companion to Thomas, a...