On the Lowest Rung

The following article contains references to sexual assault. 

On April 8, 1861, Susan Williford pleaded with the magistrates of the Granville County court of North Carolina to allow her to maintain custody of her two youngest children, Nancy, age eight, and Louisa, age six. Williford charged two planters of the county with forcibly removing the girls from her home despite her urgent objections. In defending her right to raise her own daughters, Williford declared in an affidavit that although she was poor, she had always supported Nancy and Louisa comfortably through "industry and frugality," and further that she was an "honest and hardworking woman . . . much distressed at being separated from her children of such tender years." The court ordered the matter investigated but appears not to have rescinded the apprenticeships.¹ 

Beginning with her own apprenticeship as an illegitimate child in 1815, Williford was in and out of court most of her life. At one point her mother sought to void her apprenticeship on grounds that Susan had been abused by her master. As an adult she was indicted at least three times for fornication and at least four times for bastardy. Five of her six illegitimate children, four of them fathered by Peter Curtis, a free black man with whom she lived for at least 15 years, were at some point apprenticed out.² 

The predicament of Susan Williford was not unusual. It was common for courts in the ante-bellum South to apprentice children judged to be indigent, ill-raised, illegitimate, orphaned, or of free black parentage. In essence, the apprenticeship of many illegitimate or free black children meant their removal from the homes of their parents (usually single women) to those of court-appointed masters (usually white men) for whom they were bound by contract to labor in return for their livelihood. Rarely did the contracts specify that a skill be taught the children other than farming for boys and spinning for girls. 

Although Susan Williford, a white woman, might truthfully argue that she loved and took good care of her children, the fact that they were also the illegitimate offspring of a racially mixed union labeled her a social deviant incapable of raising her children properly. For committing the crime of miscegenation she was reduced, in a legal sense, to the lowest rung in the Southern social hierarchy outside of slavery — a position usually reserved for the free black woman.³ From childhood to middle age, Susan Williford's life presents a microcosm of the response of Southern courts to women who contradicted the sexual and racial constructs of a slave-based white patriarchy. 

By their very existence, free black and poor white women blurred the boundaries of ante-bellum Southern society. The society's roots in white male hegemony and black slavery, and its organization around bonds of kinship and property, assured that poor women would be seen as outsiders. Compounding their inferior status was the fact that poor women often behaved in ways which contradicted their society's cherished beliefs about women's natural delicacy, servility, and virtue. "Respectable" white Southerners thus labeled sexually active, unmarried, free black women as "naturally" lascivious and amoral by virtue of their race; deviant white women, considered an inferior strain of white humanity, were "vile," "lewd," and "vicious." Labeling women's deviant behavior or economic poverty as immoral and potentially polluting to the society at large in turn legitimized the power of the state to punish such behavior and to limit the movement of poor women in society.⁴ 

The courts' treatment of free black and poor white women mirrored the structure of racial and class relationships while it pointed up the special problems associated with gender in the antebellum South; yet little has been researched or written on the subject. Neglect of so illuminating a topic seems due to an artificial separation of the fields of Southern history and women's history. Historians of the nineteenth-century South who have focused on issues of region, class, and race have for the most part ignored gender, while historians of Southern women are only beginning to explore the complex configuration of region, class, and race, as well as gender, which bounded Southern women's lives. 

As in other societies, the application of the law in North Carolina was an evolving process in which court procedures and statute law were continually adjusted to suit the needs of the state's dominant social order. The eruption of the Civil War, however, dramatically altered the priorities of the North Carolina courts and crippled their ability to function efficiently. Many of the courts' traditional governing mechanisms broke down during the war and, as a result, many poor women gained an unfamiliar freedom from the state's interference in their lives. 

More positively, the ascendance to power of a different class and race of men under Radical Reconstruction allowed many poor women to maintain or reclaim custody of their children. Ultimately, however, the decade of the 1860s ushered in no new age of opportunity for poor Southern women. The rise of the Ku Klux Klan and the return of North Carolina conservatives to power in 1872 restored traditional boundaries of race and class, albeit without slavery. 

To understand the impact of war and reconstruction on the lives of certain poor women, we examine their comparative treatment by local courts in three North Carolina Piedmont counties — Granville, Orange, and Montgomery — as revealed through such court procedures as bastardy bonds, prostitution and fornication indictments, and, most directly, apprenticeship contracts. Despite their close geographic proximity, these counties provide contrasting economic and demographic features. Granville and Orange both produced tobacco and some cotton for market, but only Granville was a major slaveholding area. In 1860 almost 50 percent of Granville's population were slaves, while free blacks constituted 4 percent of the population. The county boasted many wealthy planters but also substantial numbers of white yeoman farmers. 

Orange County was more diverse; the town of Chapel Hill, housing the University of North Carolina, was a hub of intellectual activity, while the nearby crossroads of Durham presented a rowdy clustering of yeoman farmers, free black and white laborers, and a few planters around the community's cotton factory and railway station. Slaves constituted 30 percent, and free blacks 3 percent of Orange County's population. The third county, Montgomery, was relatively isolated from market centers, had not one major city, and many of its villages bordered the untamed Uwharrie Mountain forests. Although Montgomery County contained some planter families, the majority of its farmers owned few or no slaves. Slaves constituted just 23 percent of its population, and there were hardly any free blacks.⁵ 

In all three counties, the absence of punishments between 1850 and 1860 for sexual assault pointed up the non-protection society offered poor women. Because many upper-class Southerners believed that inferior morals rather than societal conditions accounted for the greater sexual activity of single poor women, they were considered — particularly if black — a sexual proving ground for men too "gentlemanly" to disturb the "finer" sensibilities of a wealthier woman, whose most prized possession was her purity — a body reserved exclusively for her future or present husband. 

Trials involving rape were extremely rare in ante-bellum North Carolina because women depended more on male vigilante justice than on the courts for protection of their honor.⁶ But kinless, poor, and free black women had less access to both family protection and the courts than other women. Insights into contemporary attitudes about rape and its relationship to women of "bad" reputation are scattered throughout the documents of the time. A letter from J.G. Gulley to Governor Bragg, accompanied by a petition of April 1, 1856, demonstrates that where a valuable slave would be lost if executed for rape, white men would admit that some white women willingly had sexual intercourse with black men. But such a woman was a "base prostitute" whether she sold her services or not.⁷ 

The protection and control of white middle- and upper-class women generally occurred in the male-headed households rather than in the courts. Wives and daughters of planter and yeoman households were valued, even idealized, as caretakers of male property and producers of heirs to that property. But as the works of Anne Firor Scott and Catherine Clinton clearly show, the price of such exalted and indispensable status was the necessity of control by males over the social and sexual behavior of "their" women.⁸ Control over unmarried, propertyless, white or free black women was a different matter; these women were not the vessels through which white male property and progeny passed. Their sexual and reproductive behavior was often outside the realm of a family-centered white patriarchy, especially since class and caste boundaries limited their marital choices. Not surprisingly, single poor women defied norms of social behavior in greater numbers than did daughters of planters or yeomen; they had less status to lose and therefore more incentive to experiment.⁹

In his discussion of miscegenation Bertram Wyatt-Brown does not consider the possibility of a subculture existing in which outcast or marginal women formed a code of behavior congruent with their own needs and limited opportunities. Rather, he concludes that white women who consorted with black men displayed a "defective" notion of their social position, and suggests many may have been "mentally retarded."¹⁰ Wyatt- Brown's evidence for their retardation is the frequency with which many claimed in court to have been bewitched or conjured by their black lovers. There is no reason to believe, however, that poor white women were any less capable of feigning ignorance in the hope of escaping fines or imprisonment than were male slaves who affected "Sambo" roles to lessen work loads and avoid punishment by masters. Single white women who led active sex lives with either white or black men probably had an accurate sense of their social options. And because many single poor women lacked control and protection by a male, it fell upon the courts to monitor their behavior; as for protection, they received little — privately or publicly. 

The biracial communities of Orange and Granville counties relied heavily on statutes geared toward racial control, while predominantly white Montgomery County had less need for such controls until the eruption of the Civil War. Both the Orange and Granville courts used laws against fornication and prostitution primarily to punish miscegenation and limit sexual contact between free blacks and slaves.¹¹ The fact that Montgomery County rarely indicted anyone for such offenses, despite evidence from divorce petitions and criminal records that such practices existed, and apprenticed far fewer children than either Orange or Granville, indicates that the primary goal of such laws was racial control.¹² 

In seeking to control bastardy, the state was more concerned with economic than racial consequences. Bastardy laws were designed to prevent illegitimate children from becoming charges upon the county. Because fathers of bastards were often wealthier than mothers, the women were required to name in court the fathers of their children so they could be bonded for the future support of their illegitimate children.¹³ Between 1850 and 1860, Montgomery County magistrates showed a greater tendency to prosecute cases of bastardy than their counterparts in Orange and Granville. That difference reflected the feet that Montgomery County had far less disparity of wealth, fewer blacks, and less tenancy — but not necessarily a higher incidence of illegitimate births. Both mothers and fathers of bastards in Montgomery tended to be from the white yeoman class and were able in most cases to post bond.¹⁴ Conversely, in Granville, many fathers of bastards were slaves, propertyless free men, or white men wishing to remain anonymous.¹⁵ Court magistrates seldom prosecuted cases of bastardy where males were unable to post bond or where white men fathered mulatto children. These factors make it difficult to assess trends in illegitimacy; still, when one considers the counties' varying use of court procedures involving fornication, apprenticeship, and prostitution, as well as bastardy, the priorities of each are evident. 

With the onset of war, the priorities of the local courts shifted to issues more immediately threatening to their communities — crimes against public and private property. During the war indictments for sexual misconduct decreased in all three counties while indictments against women for larceny increased dramatically — from eight between 1850 and 1860 to 88 between 1861 and 1871.¹⁶ 

Women who stole almost invariably took food, clothing, bedding, or kindling. Runaway slaves and, later, freed black women often stole from former masters; likewise, free blacks sometimes stole from whites to whom they had previously been apprenticed.¹⁷ Some farming-class women rioted at and pillaged local flour mills or stole from merchants thought to be speculating in staples.¹⁸ In the struggle to feed themselves and their families, women often vented their rage at long-standing enemies or those whom they believed responsible for their suffering. 

As the war drove more women into the public sphere, violent assaults took a new form. Prior to the war's outbreak, most prosecuted threats and assaults upon women were committed by male family members; during the war they were more often committed by unrelated males. Except in Montgomery County, where Union sympathizers and Confederates engaged in internal warfare, reported violence against women increased very little. Indictments for prostitution and fornication decreased during the war, as the courts faced a more immediate and direct threat to the institution of slavery.¹⁹ Thus, amid the suffering and deprivation of war, poor white and free black women gained some freedom from the courts' traditional control. 

The laxity of court regulation in wartime North Carolina, followed by Radical Reconstruction, contributed to an unprecedented challenge to the apprenticeship system. Poor women had long resisted this system in various ways: by hiding their children upon court notice that they were to be bound; by charging apprenticeship masters with mistreatment; or by striving to influence their children's placement.²⁰ Rarely did they attempt, however, to challenge the court's authority to order apprenticeship. Susan Williford's effort to do so in 1861 foreshadowed an upsurge of such petitions that followed the war's end. In contrast to the ruling in Williford's case, between 1868 and 1870 the reconstructed courts and the state government of North Carolina aided blacks who demanded the release of their children from apprenticeship contracts.²¹ 

In 1869 Lila McDonald, an illiterate black woman of Montgomery County, challenged the legality of her children's apprenticeship contracts because they failed to provide for their education, an omission her petition cited as "contrary to the provisions of the Fourteenth article of the United States [Constitution and] . . . the spirit of the Reconstruction acts of the congress."²² Successful challenges to the apprenticeship system by blacks also occurred in Granville and Orange during Radical Reconstruction. This success was due largely to black fathers rather than single mothers initiating many of the suits during an era in which black men briefly wielded political power. Nevertheless, poor white and black women gained greater control over their children when postwar challenges to the apprenticeship system precipitated the system's demise by 1872 in all three counties.²³ 

The defeat of Southern secessionists by Union forces thus altered the class and racial dynamics of political power in North Carolina, but the exclusively male leadership of postwar governments left some women, as before, unprotected by the law. The freed black woman was particularly vulnerable. Following the Emancipation Act of 1865, a freed black woman who gave birth to an illegitimate child was required, like other free women, to identify her bastard's father in court. Certain well-documented cases clarify the untenable position in which a freed black woman might find herself if pregnant and unmarried. Not only were there complications if the child's father was white; there was also the necessity of supporting a child who would formerly have been provided for by its white master. A letter written in 1866 to an Orange County magistrate by county solicitor John W. Graham explained one white male point of view. 

Wrote Graham: 

 

Pattie, duaghter [sic] of Peter formerly slave of Judge Ruffin . . . is now pregnant and . . . must declare the father of the child. . . . Negro testimony is rather inconvenient to some who have been prowling around too promiscuously [and] I think we might let the young fellow go for what was done before Negroes were allowed to testify."²⁴ 

 

Graham arranged the posting of Patsy Ruffin's bond and the paying of her fine in return for her silence in court. He offered the magistrate a reward for his cooperation in the matter and enjoyed success from his carefully laid plans: two days later Patsy Ruffin was bonded in court for bastardy but refused to name her child's father.²⁵ 

In postwar Montgomery County plans did not proceed so smoothly for the white family that coerced Linda McQuean, a freed black mother, into falsely naming Harry Butler, a local freedman, as the father of her illegitimate child.²⁶ Too poor to post bond, Butler was forced to apprentice himself to a white farmer of the county in exchange for the bond. The facts of the case came to light when Benjamin F. Simmons, a sympathetic and wealthy white lawyer of the county, obtained a new trial for Butler through the Freedmen's Bureau Headquarters in Raleigh. Harry Butler's eventual acquittal was a rare happy ending to one black man's trouble, but the case highlights Linda McQuean's double burden of race and gender. McQuean was subjected first to coercion, then to a humiliating trial in which she was labeled a liar and her past sexual relationships were examined. Finally, she was left to support her child as best she could, while the child's true father was apparently never identified.²⁷ 

Dilemmas such as Ruffin's and McQuean's accounted for the rising numbers of infanticide cases appearing on the court dockets shortly after the war's end. In an age that offered few methods of birth control, women of all classes and races had occasionally been accused of the ancient crime. We will never know their exact numbers, for the individual situation depended on a woman's ability to hide her pregnancy or gain the complicity of a friend or lover. Those caught faced charges of manslaughter and up to 12 months' imprisonment.²⁸ In the decade just before the war, the three counties reported only four cases of infanticide, but between 1861 and 1871 this number increased to 13. All but two of the accused women were black.²⁹ The decision by these women to murder their infants illuminates the depth of postwar poverty and the continued sexual exploitation of black women. 

Depending on a woman's race or class, then, Radical Reconstruction aided some and ignored the plight of others. At any rate Republican power in North Carolina was soon shattered by the political success of Southern conservatives. The Civil War and Reconstruction had uprooted the lives of many women, but, with the exception of those who had been slaves or were of the propertied classes, their legal and social status were left essentially unchanged. In coming years many poor women were absorbed into the textile and tobacco factories that accompanied the commercialization of agriculture in the North Carolina Piedmont.³⁰ Poor Southern women too often traded domestic drudgery for public harassment. Although a significant minority flaunted the courts' authority and stole for themselves a small sphere of autonomy, the heart of their struggle remained the same: to sustain themselves and their families in a society which too often granted and denied resources along lines of class, race, and gender. 

 

NOTES 

1. Affidavit of Susan Williford, Apprentice Bonds, Granville County, April 8, 1861, North Carolina State Archives. 

2. See Granville County Apprentice Bonds, November 6, 1821 and November 1822, also between 1850 and 1860; Criminal Action Papers, February 1852 and February 1861; Bastardy Bonds, 1836, 1845, 1849. See also U.S. Manuscript Census for Granville County, 1860. 

3. See Midgett v. McBride, 48 N.C. 36 (1855) for the state supreme court's declaration that the county court "has power to bind out all free base-born children of color, without reference to the occupation or condition of the mother." Thus both unmarried white mothers of mulatto children and all unmarried free black mothers were subject to having their children apprenticed regardless of their abilities as parents. Stanley R. Keyser, in "The Apprenticeship System in North Carolina to 1840" (M.A. Thesis, Duke University, 1950), found this law a refinement of colonial statutes requiring mulatto children of white servant women to be bound until age 31 and providing for the binding of all free black children. It was not common to bind the children of free blacks, however, until the nineteenth century, when their numbers increased dramatically. 

4. As Phyllis M. Palmer comments in "White Women/Black Women: The Dualism of Female Identity and Experience in the United States," Feminist Studies 9 (Spring 1983): 157, "The dualism of good/bad was usually connected with race and class, but it could be used to chastise any woman moving out of her assigned place." Mary Douglas's anthropological study, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London, 1966) provides interesting insights into how beliefs concerning the "dangerous contagion" of those outside the boundaries of a society function to uphold the moral values and system of relationships within a society. 

5. Population data copied from the records of the U.S. Census Office, 1860, and contained in the Governor's Papers, 1861, North Carolina State Archives. 

6. See Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, "'The Mind That Bums in Each Body': Women, Rape, and Racial Violence," elsewhere in this issue; Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South (New York, 1982), pp. 388-89; Guion G. Johnson, Antebellum North Carolina, A Social History (Chapel Hill, 1937), pp. 508-10. 

7. Letter of J.G. Gulley and accompanying petition, April 1, 1856, Governor's Papers, 1840-1860, North Carolina State Archives. 

8. Anne Firor Scott, The Southern Lady: From Pedestal to Politics 1830-1930 (Chicago, 1970); Catherine Clinton, Plantation Mistress: Woman's World in the Old South (New York, 1983); and Johnson, Antebellum North Carolina. 

9. Less opportunity and incentive for marriage is discussed in the case of free black women for an earlier period by Suzanne Lebsock in Free Women of Petersburg (New York, 1983). My own research into county marriage bonds and manuscript censuses indicates that the same was true to a lesser extent, and for somewhat different reasons, for poor white women. On the subject of the state and families, Rayna Rapp points out that the concept of the male-headed nuclear family is a "false universalization" that serves the state's power to define what are legitimate and illegitimate family forms. See Rayna Rapp, Ellen Ross, and Renate Bridenthal, "Examining Family History," Feminist Studies 5 (Spring 1979): 178. 

10. Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor, pp. 315-16. 

11. Criminal Action Papers, 1850-60, Orange and Granville Counties, North Carolina State Archives. 

12. Criminal Action Papers, 1850-60, Montgomery County, North Carolina State Archives. All six of Montgomery's divorce petitions prior to 1860 charged spouses with fornication; several wives charged their husbands with visiting local prostitutes. Most of the seven white couples indicted for fornication were accused by individuals engaged in long-standing feuds with one or the other defendant. 

13. Rev. St., N.C., ch. 31, sec. 37. See also State v. Pate, 47 N.C. 14 (1854). 

14. Bastardy Bonds, 1850-60, Montgomery County, North Carolina State Archives. U.S. Manuscript Census, 1860, Montgomery County, North Carolina State Archives. 

15. Both Apprenticeship Bonds and Criminal Action Papers, North Carolina State Archives, reveal significant numbers of women in Granville who were never bonded for giving birth to illegitimate children. For example, free blacks Mary and Kate Durham had at least five children apprenticed by the court in 1861. They were indicted together in 1864 for illegal cohabitation (fornication) with two different slaves of the same plantation. Yet neither woman was ever bonded for bastardy, presumably because of their mates' slave statuses. 

16. Criminal Action Papers, Montgomery, Granville, Orange Counties, 1850, 1871, North Carolina State Archives. 

17. Ibid., 1860-1871. Indictments for larceny against freed people frequently specified their previous enslavement to the plaintiff; identical last names between defendant and plaintiff suggest the same. The link between defendants and plaintiffs as apprentices and masters was made for Granville County by comparing criminal cases with apprenticeship contracts. 

18. Ibid., 1860-65. One attack on a flour mill by Martha Briggs, Sally Fuller, and Lucy Fuller, tried in Granville County during the May Term, 1864, is discussed in a letter from J.F. Coghill to Mit Coghill, March 28, 1864, Durham, North Carolina, in James O. Coghill Papers, Manuscript Dept., Duke University. J.T. Coghill, the son of plaintiff James O. Coghill, bragged that had he been present, the women "would have known which side of thare bread was buttered . . . [after] I throwed my paws on the side of her head a time or two." Two of the women were nearby neighbors of the Coghills according to the Manuscript Census of 1860 for Granville County. 

19. Criminal Action Papers, Montgomery, Granville, Orange Counties, 1850-1871, North Carolina State Archives. 

20. Apprenticeship Bonds, 1840-60, North Carolina State Archives. In a few instances court officials noted that children ordered to be bound were "not to be found." Twelve mothers between 1840 and 1860 petitioned for cancellation of their children's contracts on grounds they were mistreated by their masters. Eight stated in letters written for them (with their marks as signatures) to whom they preferred their children bound. 

21. Eric Foner, in Nothing But Freedom: Emancipation and Its Legacy (Baton Rouge, 1983), argues persuasively that black and white radicals wielded considerable power over the local courts during Radical Reconstruction. The Apprenticeship Bonds, 1840-75, Montgomery, Granville, Orange Counties, North Carolina State Archives, record 23 parents who sued for custody of their children between 1865 and 1872 as compared to 12 between 1840 and 1860. Only seven of the postwar suits were filed by single women; all of the ante-bellum suits were. The Freedman's Bureau Papers, Rg. 105, National Archives, Washington, DC, show many examples from all over the state of similarly successful suits during the period of Radical Reconstruction. See Herbert G. Gutman, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750-1925 (New York, 1976), pp. 402-12, for similar findings. 

22. Civil Action Papers, April 12, 1869, Montgomery County, North Carolina State Archives. 

23. Keyser, "The Apprenticeship System in North Carolina," claims the system was not entirely disbanded until the early twentieth century, but it was rarely used after 1872 in the counties of this study. 

24. Graham's letter is lying loose among the Bastardy Bonds of Orange County, August 19, 1866, North Carolina State Archives. 

25. Ibid., August 21, 1866. 

26. Ibid., Montgomery County, August 29, 1867. 

27. Criminal Action Papers, Montgomery County, September 11, 1867, North Carolina State Archives. 

28. Johnson, Antebellum North Carolina. Criminal Action Papers, Montgomery, Granville, Orange Counties, 1820-1875. 

29. Criminal Action Papers, 1850-65. 

30. Dolores E. Janiewski, "From Field to Factory: Race, Class, Sex, and the Woman Worker in Durham, 1880-1940" (PhD diss., Duke University, 1979), traces the transformation of patriarchy within an industrializing region (Durham, North Carolina) and demonstrates how societal beliefs and practices concerning race and gender were incorporated into management policies and worker relationships.