Harriet smirl rape

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5 INTIMATE MATTERS

search for sexual control. Three patterns stand out that differentiate nine­ teenth-century sexual life from the past. First, both women and men had become more self-conscious about sexuality. as a personal choice and not simply a reproductive responsibility. When sex no longer fell under the regula­ tion of a larger community, each individual had to decide whether to engage in premarital sex or not, whether to have frequent or infrequent marital intercourse, arid whether to yield to or resist the temptation to commit adul­ tery. Second, especially within the middle class, sexual desires had become increasingly fused with a romantic quest for emotional intimacy and even spiritual union. The use of language-a "blending of hearts," "holy kisses," "spiritual joy," when "souls entered Paradise" along "beautiful paths of happi­ ness" to new "joys and blessings"~ontrasted with the frankly physical and reproductive terms in which earlier Americans had spoken of sexuality. Ex­ tramarital relations also echoed with "rapture" and "communion with beloved ones." The exultation of pure physical pleasure-"tall fucking" and the "best fucking matches" -typically appeared within the working class or in rural and frontier areas. Finally, although women and men shared in both the intensifi­ cation of sexuality as a form of interpersonal intimacy and the separation of sexuality from reproduction, gender made an important difference in the ways they experienced these changes. The separate spheres of the middle class, the emphasis on female purity, the double standard, and woman's reproductive role all made the transformation of sexuality more problematic for women. Although they did so in different ways, however, both women and men con­ tributed to the long-term transition of sexuality within the family, from the context of reproduction to the realm of romantic love and physical passion.

CHAPTER

Race and Sexuality

ELIZA GRAYSON was a Mississippi slave whose husband died while fighting in the Union army. In 1893 she applied to the federal government for a widow's pension. In order to determine the legitimacy of her claim, a special examiner took depositions from Mrs. Grayson and a neighbor. The interrogation, con­ ducted by Julius Lemkowitz of the Pension Office, disclosed much about racial differences in sexual practices and attitudes. It also revealed the power whites had to pass judgment on the morality of people of other races.

"Elisha Grayson and I were Mr. Montgomery's slaves before the war," Eliza Grayson told the examiner. "We were married by Jerry Benjaman some time before the war; I cannot say when." "Who is Jerry Benjaman? ... Was he a preacher?" Lemkowitz inquired. "He was no preacher; but being the head man on the plantation and a member of the church he married me and Elisha." "Whose permission did you get to marry? ... Could Jerry Benjaman read and write?" They had their master's permission, she answered, and the headman was literate. The Graysons' first son had died three months after birth, but a second son, Spencer, survived. "How many children have you had before your marriage to Elisha Grayson, and who is their father?" "I had one by my master's son, Frank Montgomery," Mrs. Grayson stated, without further comment. "After the birth of that child" and before marriage, the examiner continued, "have you lived or cohabited with any man?" "No sir," she assured him. "I never lived with any man after that until I took up with Elisha Grayson." "How long after your marriage to Elisha Grayson was Spencer born?" "I do not know," Mrs. Grayson replied, "but we did not 'get' him till after our marriage." Hadn't she cohabited with Elijah Hall, a married man, before Elisha enlisted? "No, sir." Only several years after her husband left the plantation did she "commence cohabiting" with Elijah Hall. "I was a faithful

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86 87 INTIMATE MATTERS

wife as long as Elisha Grayson was at home." In answer to a query about her other children, Eliza Grayson listed four with Hall's last name, and of the remaining two, she explained, "I have had to do with several men and I cannot say really who their fathers are." Since the birth of her last child by Hall, over ten years ago, she swore "that no man has ever touched me." The inquiry closed with the question, "By whom can you prove that your first child was by your master's son?" "By Hanson Clay, if he is living."'

From youth to old age, Eliza Grayson's sexual life was shaped by two worlds, that of black slaves and that of white authorities. Within the slave community, she was no doubt a respectable woman. Serial monogamy and frequent childbearing characterized her life, like that of most slave women. Interactions with whites, however, transformed Mrs. Grayson from a wife and mother into a loose woman. Presumably raped by her master's son, the ambig­ uous phrase "I have had to do" suggests that forced sexual relations may have led to the births of two more of her seven surviving children. Under slavery, white masters assumed Eliza Grayson to be sexually available to them. In freedom, a white government interpreted her history as one of illegitimacy and infidelity. The final requirement that Eliza Grayson prove her own rape reveals how little whites were willing to acknowledge their own role in a system of racial and sexual exploitation. For blacks, as for Indians and Mexicans, this story of sexual stereotyping, sexual difference, and sexual abuse recurred throughout the nineteenth century.

Ever since the seventeenth century, European migrants to America had merged racial and sexual ideology in order to differentiate themselves from Indians and blacks, to strengthen the mechanisms of social control over slaves, and to justify the appropriation of Indian and Mexican lands through the destruction of native peoples and their cultures. In the nineteenth century, sexuality continued to serve as a powerful means by which white Americans maintained dominance over people of other races. Both scientific and popular thought supported the view that whites were civilized and rational, while members of other races were savage, irrational, and sensual. These animalistic elements posed a particular threat to middle-class Americans, who sought to maintain social stability during rapid economic change and to insure that a v:irtuous citizenry would fulfill the dream of republicanism. At a time when middle-class morality rested heavily upon a belief in the purity of women in the, home, stereotypes of immoral women of other races contributed to the belief in white superiority. In addition, whites feared the specter of racial amalgamation, believing that it would debase whites to the status of other races. Thus Thomas Jefferson favored the removal of blacks to avoid racial mixing, for "their amalgamation with the other colour produces a degradation to which no lover of his country, no lover of excellence in the human character,

Race and Sexuality

can innocently consent." The belief in white moral superiority surfaced in relation to all racial and ethnic groups-whether the Chinese in California, who were considered a "depraved class," or the Irish in eastern cities, who were portrayed as an animalistic race with a "love for vicious excitement."2

Indians, Mexicans, and blacks elicited the most extensive commentaries, in part because of the nature of their contact with whites. Patterns differed, but in each region the belief that white sexual customs were more civilized, along with the assumption that Indian, Mexican, and black women were sexually available to white men, supported white supremacist attitudes and justified social control of other races.

Cultural Conflict in the West and Southwest

The interplay of racial and sexual ideology can be seen clearly in the attitudes of whites who moved into and annexed western and southwestern territories. Encountering native American Indians whose sexual practices dif­ fered from their own, whites condemned them as sexually debased. As in the colonial period, the tolerance for cross-dressing and sodomy among some Indians evoked strong censure. One observer cited the berdache as "another illustration of the strange capacities which the California Indians develop for doing morbid and abnormal things." In other tribes, the idea of a bride price, or paying a young woman's family in order to marry her, shocked many Anglo-Americans, who condemned the practice as symptomatic of "a loose state of morals." Europeans and Americans also expressed horror at the practices of polygamy and premarital sex among Indian tribes. In the case of the Plains Indians, for example, whites wrote that polygamy demeaned women. In fact, women in these tribes enjoyed a fairly high status, and polyg­ amy, often the product of an unbalanced sex ratio after wartime losses, offered women the benefit of sharing domestic work with other wives. Polygamous marriage also lessened the reproductive labors of each wife; among the Lakota, for example, plural wives bore an average of six children, monogamous wives an average of eight children. Missionaries to various Indian tribes failed to recognize the advantages of this practice and demanded that Indian converts adhere to strict monogamy.'

At the same time that whites condemned the sexual habits of Indians for degrading women, their own accounts objectified native American women in sexual terms. The image of the good Indian-the beautiful, pure princess who saved white men, as did Pocahontas-gave way in the nineteenth century to the image of the savage and promiscuous squaw. Cowboy lore in particular elaborated on the theme of the Indian whore, who "lays on her back in a cowboy shack, and lets cowboys poke her in the crack." Even more refined

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observers, such as authors of travel accounts or pioneer journals, referred to "dirty little squaws" who slept with or married white men. According to one white woman, intermarriage with Indians was a "shame and disgrace to our country."•

Similarly. Americans used sexual imagery to criticize the Mexicans they encountered in the areas that would later become California, New Mexico, and Arizona. White travelers described residents of northern Mexico as "debased in all moral sense." One writer claimed that all "darker colored" races were "inferior and syphillitic." Mexican women received particular censure. As Richard Henry Dana wrote in Two Years Before the Mast, "the women have but little virtue," and their morals were "none of the best."' White stereotypes rested upon misinterpretations of native cultures. For example. white settlers and Protestant missionaries expected courtship to take place in private and young people to act with extreme decorum. Just as in Eastern cities they found the behavior of working-class youth disturbing, when they observed Mexicans courting in public, celebrating festivals in the streets, and dancing without restraint; they labeled the women "vicious" and disparaged their "low virtue." Similarly, eastern settlers, revealing the ways that white cultural standards of physical privacy had evolved since the colonial era, expressed shock at the sight of women suckling their infants in public.6

These judgmental newcomers failed to appreciate the unique sexual system that had evolved in the Southwest, a combination of Spanish-Mediterranean and indigenous Indian practices. Before the growth of commerce in the mid­ nineteenth century and the inftux of Protestants after the Mexican-American War, Anglo-American notions of internalized sexual controls had not pene­ trated this region. In the traditional preindustrial culture of the area, the Catholic church and the family played important roles in the regulation of morality and the maintenance of individual and familial honor. As in the seventeenth-century English colonies, the family insisted that marriage occur when premarital sex led to pregnancy, and some young couples used premari­ tal sex to win approval for a union not arranged by their parents. In addition, neighbors made public accusations or spread rumors about anyone whose behavior deviated from community standards. A young woman who had illicit sexual relations might have her braids snipped off JlS a form of public humilia­ tion. When an anonymous rumor maligned her virtue, Maria Francisca Mar­ tinez found it impossible to marry in her hometown. Moreover, it was illegal to tolerate sexual immorality among one's kin. In 1836, for example, Luis Rael went to jail for allowing a female relative to commit adultery with a married man.'

Cultural misunderstanding also arose when sexual values in the Southwest differed from those evolving in the rest of North America. Catholics, ·like

Race and Sexuality

Protestants, emphasized the importance of female purity, and they maintained a double standard that allowed men to indulge in pre- or extramarital sexual relations. However, no ideal of passionlessness emerged among the Mexicans. Women could both have and express their sexual desires, as long as they did not betray the honor·of their families. As in the seventeenth-century colonies, both men and women might be tempted by pre- or extramarital relations, and church and community attempted to keep both sexes in line. At a time when reticence characterized white middle-class culture, Mexicans openly expressed sensuality. Thus dancing in public was not in itself offensive. A love poem published in 1858 spoke freely of male and female desire:

I want to gaze at your rising bosom Showing the agitation within your soul. And I want to see your colored cheeks When you awaken with divine calm.

By your side in the silent country side I want to look at your purple aurora. I want to see, by your side In the repose of the night, The seductive moon.•

For the most part, external controls kept sexual desire from threatening com­ munity stability. Only rarely did individuals defy accepted standards. In an extreme case, for example, a woman defended her right to have extramarital relations. In 1844, Juana Lopes's Anglo husband, testifying to the Santa Fe court, complained of rumors that "adulterers knock on the window when they want my wife to go out." Lopes retorted that "it is my ass, I control it, and I'll give it to whomever I want." The judge's plea for reformation no doubt went unheeded.•

Despite the acceptance of sexual desire, in the northern Mexican region marriage continued to be based on economic rather than romantic considera­ tions, and parents continued to play an important, though gradually declining, part in their children's decisions to wed. Marital separation was also likely to be an economic matter. For example, Barbara Roybal complained to the Santa Fe court that her husband had affairs and beat her, but she was more interested in obtaining alimony in order to feed her children than in regaining his affec­ tions. Economic factors also influenced the acceptance among Mexicans of "free unions," which constituted between five and thirty percent ofall Mexican marriages in midcentury California and the Southwest. Adopting Spanish and Indian customs, those who could not afford a wedding or who lived far from

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a local priest simply established households and lived as husband and wife. The children of these unions, recorded in church documents as hijo or hija natural, did not bear the stigma of illegitimacy. To Anglo eyes, however, both parents and children were deemed immoral. 10

Whatever distaste white Americans had for Mexican and Indian sexual customs, some migrants formed interracial unions when they came into con­ tact with natives. The nature of these unions differed, depending on white attitudes, the sex ratio during each period ofcontact, and the changing propor­ tion of whites in the region. Overall, three patterns of interracial sexual rela­ tions formed: the assimilation of whites via marriage into Indian or Mexican society; the assimilation of Indian and Mexican women via marriage into Anglo society; and white sexual dominance, whether through physical violence or through efforts to obliterate "uncivilized" Indian and Mexican sexual prac­ tices.

The assimilation of whites took place in areas where a small number of white men settled near Indians or Mexicans. Typically the earliest white male migrants, such as trappers, traders, miners, and sailors, sought wives of an­ other race because they had no women of their own to marry. These marriages provided an important form of economic alliance between white men and the groups among whom they lived. Some men used them to acquire land or trading rights, and some deserted their wives when they had nothing more to gain. Others expressed sexual attraction for native women. One white settler found "the Eve-like and scanty garments" worn by Indian women both a "little astonishing" and "really graceful, easy-ay, becoming.""

During the early period of white migration, men tended to assimilate into the cultures of their native wives, and their children retained their mothers' racial identity. In 1850, for example, half of the small group of white men in Santa Fe lived with Mexican women, whose culture predominated. Some men adopted the local custom of forming free unions with Mexican or Indian women. In other parts of the West, "squaw men" lived with or married according to native practice, such as French traders who sometimes took several wives. Among the northern and southern California Indians, there were many mixed households. These included informal, or free, unions, in which white men acknowledged the children as their own. ~frequently, white women assimilated through intermarriage. A long tradition of women who married their Indian captors provides one example. More unusual was the experience ofa New England teacher, Elaine Goodale, who married an Indian physician with whom she worked on a Sioux reservation in the 1880s.'2

As more white men and women migrated west, the pattern ofintermarriage and assimilation changed. Men who married Indian or Mexican wives now expected them to conform to Anglo customs, and their children no longer

Race and Sexuality

retained the racial identity of their mothers. In the southeastern states, where intermarriage of white men and Cherokee women accounted for one-fourth of Cherokee marriages, children were taught to observe the legal and sexual rules of white, rather than Indian, society. In addition, whites increasingly defined themselves as racially superior to Cherokees and began to oppose intermar­ riage. Similarly, after 1848, when white families migrated to the territories annexed after the Mexican-American War, racial barriers to intermarriage arose. Not only did the white sex ratio even out, but as Mexican-Americans became the minority, Americans drew on long-standing stereotypes to label them both racially and sexually inferior. Intermarriage persisted, but now when white men married Mexican women, they brought their children up as whites." After the American conquest of California, white men who married Mexican women attempted to transform the earlier image of immoral Mexi­ cans into that of "aristocratic, virtuous Spanish ladies," despite the fact that the women they wed were neither Spanish nor aristocratic. Historian Antonia Castaneda argues that this shift in stereotype was part ofan effort to assimilate Californian women into Anglo-American society. At the same time, it drew a distinction between "good" (Spanish and assimilable) and "bad" (Mexican and unassimilable) women, with the latter usually depicted as prostitutes. In creating this distinction, whites rewrote their genealogies in an effort to purify their bloodlines and deny their Mexican heritage. The distinction was not necessarily effective, for in many western communities, the terms "Spanish woman" or "senorita" remained synonymous with "prostitute."14

A third category of sexual interaction evolved when whites invaded native territory and claimed the right to control the sexuality of individual women or of a whole culture. In the nineteenth century, this pattern was typically one of American dominance over Indians or Mexicans, but it had antecedents in the Spanish treatment of Indians in the Southwest. One means by which Spaniards had subjugated local Indians was rape. As a Spanish man explained, "only with lascivious treatment are Indian women conquered." Seventeenth­ century Pueblo Indians had petitioned the Spanish government because sol­ diers so often forced Indian women to have sex. Some Indians also complained against the Catholic clergy, and at least one priest was accused of raping Indian servants. In a different form of sexual imperialism, the Catholic church tried to force Indians to give up their sexual practices. For example, the church opposed polygamy, and friars physically punished Pueblos who continued this custom. The Spanish also attempted to suppress the cross-dressing berdaches among those Indians who were brought under the influence of the missions."

When white Americans became the conquerors in western territories, they too claimed sexual access to native women and tried to obliterate Indian and Mexican sexual customs. Warfare with western Indian tribes justified, for

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white soldiers, the rape of Indian women. During the Beat Flag Revolt in California; John C. Fremont ordered a Mexican prisoner to deliver her young Indian maid to the officers' barracks. "By resorting to artifices," Rosalia Vallego de Lessee recalled, "I managed to save the unhappy girl from the fate decreed to her by the lawless band." Other Indian women were less fortunate. After winning a battle in 1869, Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer allegedly invited his ofticers to "avail themselves of the services of a captured squaw," while he selected a Cheyenne woman named Monasetah for himself. The absence ofAnglo women at frontier military garrisons encouraged enlisted men to seduce or bribe Indians to become prostitutes. Some army officers were known to.keep "favorite squaws," or mistresses, and several were court-mar­ tialed for their involvements with Mexican or Indian prostitutes. 1•6

In the predominantly male mining areas of California, where local Indian tribes had been decimated by disease and impoverishment, sexual contact between white men and Indian women usually took. the form of rape, and sometimes paid prostitution. Miners seeking temporary sexual outlets assumed the availability of local Indian women. The fact that most of these women did not cover their breasts gave miners the false impression that they had no modesty or were promiscuous. Miners also knew that they could act with impunity, since white men could not be convicted of rape, or of any crime, based on the· testimony . of an Indian. Together, these white stereotypes and legal privileges made Indian women highly vulnerable to sexual attack. In 1850, for example, three Indian women were "bedevilled and tormented" by white men. Some white miners otfered food or money to buy Indian women's sexual favors, but as a California newspaper reported in 1858, if men failed to "obtain a squaw by fair means, [they would] not hesitate to use foul." White men were known "to drag oft"' Indian women as ifthey were literally fair game. As one settler recorded after a hunting trip, he had bagged, "all told, two grizzlys one Antlope and a digger squaw este noche." Indians resisted white men's assaults, either through retaliatory raids or individual effort. During a California military expedition in 1850, a settler approached ''a comely squaw hidden in the brush" and tried to force her to go with him; the woman's response left him "more glad to escape with his life from the clutch of a she bear, than he was to get away from her." Other women fted to the mountains to escape pursuit by drunken white men in search ofsexual partners. For those unable to avoid the assaults, the birth of a mixed-blood child often resulted."