Tara Revisited by Catherine Clinton

Author:Catherine Clinton [KIMBERLY KLEIN]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780789260116
Publisher: Abbeville Publishing Group

Emancipation stirred up frenzied accounts of interracial sex, promoting racist response in both the North and, especially, the South.

The rapes of black women were publicly revealed in the Northern press during this period, but their victims remained unnamed unless they swore out a complaints against their attackers or sought legal redress—which was extremely rare. Confederate accounts of rape are few, black or white, although examples are found in the writings of some physicians. Dr. Daniel Heywards Trezevant of Columbia, South Carolina, described a vicious Yankee incursion full of murder and mayhem, including “the case of Mr. Shane’s old Negro woman, who after being subjected to the most brutal indecency from seven of the Yankees, was, at the proposition of one of them to ‘finish the old bitch’ put into a ditch and held under water until life was extinct.” In a case of a white victim of attempted rape, Trezevant uses initials to mask her identity. “Mrs. T.B.C. was seized by one of the soldiers, an officer, and dragged by the hair and forced to the floor for the purpose of sensual enjoyment,” he wrote. “She resisted as far as practical—held up her young infant as a plea for sparing her and succeeded, but they took her maid, and in her presence, threw her on the floor and had connection with her.” Both Trezevant and the abolitionist press were willing to use the rapes of black women as evidence, but each for their own purpose.

Trezevant identified only black Southern women as rape victims, with the sole exception of a woman who was driven insane by the experience. “Mrs. G. told me of a young lady about 16, Miss Kinsler, who … three officers brutally ravished and who became crazy from it,” he wrote. While gang rape could and perhaps did result in a complete mental breakdown, propriety nevertheless dictated that any lady named in such a circumstance be banished from society.

Southern culture demanded a wall of silence around almost all sexual matters in the mixed company of men and women, a rule to which Southern matrons and belles universally subscribed. Only exceptional Southern white women even hinted at their fears or their experiences, among them Clara D. MacLean. In her postwar account, MacLean recounted one of the “last raids,” when a Union soldier invaded her home on a farm in North Carolina. She had sewn her money into the side of her dress, but lied to the soldier about it. “‘This is all the money I have in the world,’ I said, holding up the sixpence, ‘but you can have it if you wish.’ He threw it aside with an impatient gesture and another oath and walked off. Before I was aware of his intention, he had locked the door. I rose and walked toward it. ‘Come,’ I said, ‘and I will show you the trunks in the other room, as there is nothing here, you see, in the way of arms.’ But he had stationed himself in front of the door, his back toward it.

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