Intimacy with and without Manumission

Violence was intrinsic to sexual relations during the era of slavery. But despite abundant evidence, until recent years, many historians tended to romanticize sexual liaisons between slave owners and enslaved women.

In some contexts, enslaved women could definitely receive material advantages from having sexual relations with their owners and therefore could have strategically engaged these relations with the hope of being emancipated. Consider the example of the eighteenth-century captaincy of Minas Gerais, a gold and diamond mining region in southeast Brazil. Most of the population in this area was composed of males, including enslaved men, but most freed individuals were women. In this very specific context where a large white and mixed male population predominated, enslaved women had more access to manumission by engaging in sexual relationships with their male owners. As a result, these male slave owners made provisions in their wills to emancipate the women upon their deaths. Despite these opportunities, most freedwomen purchased their own freedom, and very few of them were granted manumission without providing their owners any compensation. Even fewer bondswomen were emancipated by their owners when the owners were still alive.⁷⁶

Consider the case of Francisca da Silva de Oliveira, known as Chica da Silva.

But Sardinha’s sexual exchanges with Chica were again disturbed in 1753, when the representatives of the Portuguese Inquisition returned to Tejuco one more time. As now Chica was a mother of a newborn, the crime of concubinage was established. For the Inquisition officer, there was no doubt that Sardinha purchased Chica with the goal of having sex with her.⁷⁸ Thus, after signing an agreement committing to break ties with the enslaved women who lived under his roof, Sardinha sold Chica to João Fernandes de Oliveira, a Portuguese businessman and owner of a gold mine. Oliveira had arrived in Tejuco a few months earlier to represent his father, a diamond contractor who succeeded in obtaining the fourth monopoly contract of diamond extraction in the region. But weeks after purchasing Chica, on Christmas Day, December 25, 1753, Oliveira officially freed her. This unusual, quick, and unconditional manumission suggests that like Chica’s previous owner, Oliveira had selected his new enslaved property based on her sexual attractiveness. But here, the situation was different.

Stories comparable to that of Chica and Oliveira happened in other parts of Latin America and the West Indies during the era of slavery as well.⁸⁰ Similar cases also occurred in Louisiana but were rare elsewhere in the United States. Admittedly, there were periods in which manumission laws restricted the ability of slave owners to free enslaved women. But even when manumission was possible, unlike Brazil, the United States did not witness a trend of slave owners emancipating the enslaved women with whom they had had sexual liaisons. Take the example of Elizabeth Hemings, born in Virginia in 1735, nearly the same year as Chica da Silva. Like Chica, she was the daughter of an African woman and a white man, in this case a certain Captain Hemings, after whom she received her last name. Elizabeth’s owner John Wayles was the father of Martha Wayles Skelton, the future first lady Martha Jefferson. After the death of his wife, Wayles had six children with Hemings. But unlike Chica, Elizabeth was never emancipated by her owner. After Wayles’s death in 1773, Martha Jefferson inherited Elizabeth and her ten children, six of whom were her half-siblings. None of these children was freed. None of these children received college education. None of these children inherited property. The most famous of them, Sally Hemings, was impregnated by her owner, the US President Thomas Jefferson. Like her mother, Sally also had six children fathered by her owner, all of whom became his property.⁸¹ Jefferson was not the only politician to have ever maintained a long-lasting relationship with a bondswoman. Richard Mentor Johnson, who served as the US vice president from 1837 to 1841, owned an enslaved woman, Julia Ann Chinn, who is referred to as his enslaved common-law wife and with whom he had two children.⁸² But in contrast with Brazil’s Chica da Silva, the US enslaved women Elizabeth Hemings, Sally Hemings, and Julia Chinn were never freed by their eminent owners.