Servants and Slaves

As William Byrd discovered, violence begot violence. After he asserted mastery over his wife's body, there was little to stop him from transferring that control to other women, especially servants and women of colour.

Indentured servitude was a common form of unfree labour in the seventeenth century. In exchange for passage to America, tens of thousands of English men and women contracted to work on the colonial plantations for several years. Throughout the colonies indentured servants were placed under household governance as legal dependants, thus they could be corrected physically by their masters. Like wives, laws protected servants against masters' ‘harsh or unchristianlike usage', although the colonial authorities only intervened in extreme situations.^[436] Instead, masters were expected to keep their young and single servants in line. When William Judson's male servant made ‘filthy' advances towards a female servant, the New Haven court faulted Judson.^[437]

Indentured servants were especially prevalent on the tobacco plantations of early Virginia and Maryland, accounting for 70 to 85 per cent of all emigrants. Servants were overwhelmingly male with only one woman arriving for every six men.

When the colonial authorities did intervene in master-servant relationships, they did so in order to maintain a productive workforce. In 1643 Virginia prescribed additional service for female servants who became pregnant during their indenture. Although this made restitution for the work lost during a woman’s labour, the law was widely abused by ‘dissolute masters' who impregnated their female servants in order to lengthen their indentures. When lawmakers revisited the law twenty years later, they remained suspicious of female servants, claiming that ‘if a woman gott with child by her master should be freed’ then she would claim that all of her children had been fathered by her master. Accordingly, Virginia ordered female servants to serve two years for bearing a child, but allowed them to be sold to a different master.^[439]

Indentured servitude waned over the seventeenth century as fewer English men and women were willing to subject themselves to violent exploitation. Africans and people of African descent quickly took their place in the tobacco fields such that by 1700 black slaves outnumbered white servants in Virginia. Slavery was a significantly more violent institution than servitude, stemming from the fact that slaves did not volunteer for plantation labour but were forced into submission. Initially, colonial laws treated slaves as household dependants, but as slavery became the primary form of southern labour so the laws changed to treat slaves as chattel instead. As this happened, the treatment of Africans and African Americans shifted from correction to deadly violence.

Integral to the violence of slavery was the sexual exploitation of African American women. First, there were economic motives for this. Laws in the southern colonies directed that children born to enslaved women would be slaves for life regardless of their father’s status, thus creating an economic motive for masters to rape their female slaves. Second, sexual abuse was a method of enforcing white supremacy. Sex with unwilling slaves allowed white men to bolster their own self-image as all powerful. Black women had no protection against such assaults as no colony allowed a black woman - either slave or free - to file rape charges against a white man.^[441]

White colonists justified their sexual abuse of African Americans with racist arguments. They averred that blacks were naturally more libidinous than whites because they had greater physicality and lacked the mental capacity to restrain their bodily impulses. English travellers to Africa observed people ‘called Negros, without any apparell', and some speculated about ‘a beastly copulation' between African people and apes. In America, slaveholders made black sexuality seem more profligate by forbidding legal marriages between slaves and forcing the enslaved to expose their bodies by providing only tatters of clothing. These beliefs also created fears of African American male sexuality and led to cruel treatments for black men suspected of assaulting white women.^[442]

African Americans vigorously resisted their sexual exploitation. When he was enslaved in the Caribbean and South Carolina, Olaudah Equiano observed the ‘constant practice' of ‘violent depradations on the chastity of the female slaves'. These stories were prominent in his autobiography - a manifesto of the early anti-slavery movement.

In effect, the English colonists repeated the Spanish practice of using sexual violence to subjugate a non-white population. Miscegenation led to the procreation of mulatto persons, nearly all of whom the colonists racialised as ‘black' and enslaved. The exploitation of African Americans also elevated white women by removing them from the tobacco fields and replacing them as the primary targets of male sexual power. However, the unchallenged rule of masters would not survive the eighteenth century. Although the racialisa- tion of gendered violence outlasted the American Revolution, the unrest­rained power of the household head did not.