Sexual Violence as Systemic Instrument of Slavery

Sexual violence against enslaved women was endemic, documented, and legally protected throughout the antebellum period. No Southern state recognized the rape of an enslaved woman as a crime; courts explicitly ruled that enslaved women could not be raped by their enslavers. Slaveholders exercised total sexual access as a recognized feature of ownership. Slave narratives — Harriet Jacobs, Solomon Northup, Mary Prince, Frederick Douglass — document this consistently. The 1850 census showed approximately 588,000 mixed-race people (termed 'mulatto') in the South, nearly all the product of white male sexual violence against enslaved women. Enslaved women who resisted sexual assault could be whipped, sold, or killed with legal impunity.