Notorious in the Neighborhood: Sex and Families across the Color Line in Virginia, 1787-1861

Rating:
Summary: Race and reality in Virginia
Review: Joshua Rothman's "Notorious in the Neighborhood: Sex and Families across the Color Line in Virginia, 1787-1861" is a book in the tradition of C. Vann Woodward's "The Strange Career of Jim Crow." Both treatments on the history of race relations in the American South explode popular myths about how whites and blacks acted in a slave society. The common misconception about the color line, still very much in vogue today outside academia, posits that whites managed to maintain a nearly complete separation of the races from the colonial era to the end of the Civil War. Rothman, Woodward, and other American historians know differently. Woodward forcefully argued that segregation, the institution held dearly by generations of southerners, only gradually came into being from the 1880s forward. Rothman examines another aspect of slavery and segregation, namely interracial unions and relationships, to arrive at the conclusion that many whites in the South engaged in liaisons with blacks regardless of their social standing or class. The author focuses on Virginia because that region often personified the opinions and stature of the South as a whole.

Rothman's sources-including the requisite court records, divorce filings, newspapers, government records, and narratives that are the bread and butter of the social historian-easily bolster his thesis. The author argues that during the early national and antebellum period, relationships between the races flourished as long as the people involved followed an important caveat. His first example is the Thomas Jefferson/Sally Hemings entanglement. Rothman argues that nearly everyone in Albemarle County, Virginia, where the founding father resided, knew about his relationship with one of his slaves. The white population tacitly accepted this technically illegal union because such relationships were frequent but kept under wraps. In other words, as long as those involved remained quiet about their sexual activities with slaves, no one called them on it. The author claims that the attempt to expose Jefferson's relationship for political gain actually had the reverse effect: white southerners resented having their double standard exposed to the light of day. The other example Rothman cites, the David Isaacs/Nancy West attachment, provides reinforces the author's conclusions about the Jefferson/Hemings acquaintance while also providing a counterpoint. In this case, whites brought charges against the two because they openly flaunted their illicit liaison. Again, as long as people involved in an interracial affair kept the matter close to the vest, little usually came of it.

Interactions across the color line involved every level of Virginia society. Rothman examines criminal cases in Richmond, slave crimes, interracial divorce and adultery, and the position of mixed bloods in this white/black culture. Repeatedly, the book uncovers evidence that race was not intractable but rather a nebulous conception upon which generations of whites erected increasingly baroque legal, political, and economic policies. For instance, the relations between blacks and whites in Richmond unfolded with a minimum of constraint for decades as long as the authorities contained these contacts to a specific part of the city. Murders of whites by slaves did not automatically result in a death sentence, but often involved a careful consideration of the mitigating factors that led to the crime. Whites who sued for divorce on the grounds of interracial adultery rarely made race the central argument in their petition. And the legal codes created to determine who was white and who was black in Virginia led to utter chaos because such laws failed to account for the increasing mixed blood population, a population that did not fall easily into either category. Rothman finds again and again that the 1850s saw a hardening of racial attitudes as the South came under increasing attack from the North on the issue of slavery.

"Notorious in the Neighborhood" excels in providing yet further proof that race is a socially constructed notion owing more to ideology than biology. The author proves that race, at least in Virginia during the period in question, meant different things to different people at different times. The legal codes defining race changed several times, something that could never happen if race was a fixed category. Rothman discovers that efforts to tighten up racial categories, to institute a precursor to the notorious "one-drop" rule of the later Jim Crow era, deeply concerned many lawmakers who believed that meddling with blood quotients could redefine many white people as black. If race never changes, how could someone suddenly become black or white with the flick of a pen? The racial policies of the South assumed idiotic heights as judges, politicians, and other civil authorities navigated through the strange new world created by the increasing mixed blood population. When confronted with the reality of interracial offspring, laws defining racial separation and identification hiccupped. The best example Rothman gives of the ambiguity of the race system sits at the beginning of chapter six where he spells out sixty-one different racial categories recognized in Virginia during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Rothman's book stumbles slightly when it fails to examine the role of religion in these forays across the color line. Obviously, as the other evidence presented in the book easily proves, southern churches failed to prevent interracial sex. Why? White southerners certainly were a church going people, and we know that the pulpit served as a major dissemination hub of racist theories and doctrines. Did southern churches follow the arc of other institutions by subscribing to a "don't ask, don't tell" policy regarding interracial relations in the early national and antebellum period only to harden their stance as the Civil War loomed on the horizon? What was the position adopted by the churches concerning mixed blood offspring? Did the churches influence the political debates on racial legislation, divorce and adultery petitions, and interracial crime? It would seem Rothman relegates religion to a subservient position in society more at home with modern America than the pre-Civil War South.



Rating:
Summary: brilliant
Review: This is a brilliant work on a subject that has been shrouded in silence. Although it's obvious that interacial matches have been going on since Jamestown there has been little scholarly work on the topic. Love and sex across the color line was a dangerous business in most of America but in Virginia it was particularly complicated. Mr. Rothman's book deserves to be in the library of anyone who is serious about history.