A TERRIBLE INTIMACY

Historical study of the “networks of personal connection” between Black and white people in the antebellum South.

Drawing on archival data from pre–Civil War Virginia, William & Mary historian Ely charts “peculiar kinds of intimacy” that emerged in slaveholding households and communities. As Ely notes, in the two decades leading up to the Civil War, about a quarter of the South’s enslaved population lived on plantations with 50 or more forced workers—“in essence, work camps, where contact with whites might be limited and mostly utilitarian.” But more than half of enslaved people lived in households with fewer than 20 such laborers, putting them in more direct contact with their white enslavers. Examining court records, Ely limns several aspects of interracial engagement. His first case is that of an enslaved man who, defending himself from assault on the part of an overseer, wound up on the docket. The deceased man’s sister testified that her brother was habitually drunk and violent, and other testimony held that the enslaved man, known to history only as Tom, was innocent of murder. Even so, the mores of the time essentially dictated a guilty verdict, though, as Ely shows, Tom’s sentence, like about two-thirds of the sentences of Virginia’s enslaved population, was commuted—meaning he was deported out of the South to “a life of banishment and bondage somewhere in the tropics.” In other cases, Black people resisted various indignities, such as the breakup of the forbidden wedding of an enslaved couple, planned by both Black and white women, at the hands of white vigilantes “in direct retribution for the Black–white intimacy that produced the wedding.” But in yet other cases, Ely shows, relations were much more amicable, sometimes daringly so, highlighting “the complexity of a society that encompassed millions of diverse people over the decades.”

A book with its share of surprises about how enslaved and enslaver found ways to navigate the “curious institution.”