Sexual and Physical Exploitation of Enslaved People

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Slaveowners sexually exploited enslaved people to increase their own wealth.

Sexual exploitation, especially of women and children, was an inherent part of the institution of slavery. A consistent and growing supply of enslaved people became increasingly critical to the domestic slave trade after the United States legally banned the international slave trade in 1808, and forced reproduction was one method employed to grow slaveowners’ capital. In this perverse reality, enslaved women had no agency over their own bodies and were routinely exploited by white “masters” – both directly, through rape and coercion, and also indirectly through forced marriage and breeding with enslaved men.

The sexual mistreatment of enslaved women spanned every part of the slave trade process, including in slave markets where Black people were stripped naked at the whim of any buyer wishing to inspect their bodies. Stories of sexual abuse were widespread among those who survived enslavement. One formerly enslaved person recalled that slave traders regularly raped the women whom they purchased, while another told of a trader who sexually assaulted a woman being transported for sale and allowed his companions to do the same for several days until she was auctioned.

Enslaved women were stripped of legal rights and had no protection from abuse. In Missouri, 19- year-old Celia, an enslaved Black woman who had been repeatedly raped by her white slaveowner since he bought her at age 14, resisted his abuse by striking him on the head. The man died from the blow and Celia was tried for his murder. The judge refused to consider her claim of self defense and declared that a slave had no legal right to refuse the whims of her master. Celia was convicted, sentenced to death, and hanged on December 20, 1855.

Even enslaved women’s maternal resources were exploited, as they were forced to care for and breastfeed the children of their white slaveowners – often at the expense of mothering their own children. White men and women justified this cruelty by claiming Black people did not have emotional ties to each other. “It is frequently remarked by Southerners, in palliation of the cruelty of separating relatives,” observed one visitor to the South in the 1850s, “that the affection of negroes for one another are very slight. I have been told by more than one lady that she was sure her nurse did not have half the affection for her own children that she did for her mistress’s.”

Enslaved men and boys also suffered sexual assault and exploitation, as victims of rape as well as forced participants in the rape of enslaved women. The experiences of enslaved men are less well- documented but their abuse and inability to prevent the abuse of enslaved women took a psychic toll. As one scholar has described, “the vulnerability of all enslaved Black persons to nearly every conceivable violation” created widespread trauma and suffering that cannot be fully measured.