Rape and Race in the Nineteenth-Century South.

Rape and Race in the Nineteenth-Century South. By Diane Miller Sommerville. (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, c. 2004. Pp. xvi, 411. Paper, 24.95, ISBN 0-8078-5560-X; cloth, $59.95, ISBN 0-8078-2891-2.)

Diane Miller Sommerville argues forcefully that southerners did not become preoccupied with a black sexual threat to pure white womanhood until the end of the nineteenth century. Until then, African American men accused of rape faced formal trials, not vigilante mobs. Slave owners' interest in preserving their property, along with misogynistic doubts about the character and veracity of poorer white women, allowed both slave and free black men to avoid conviction, have death sentences commuted, or win pardons with the help of white male patrons. For Sommerville, this history confirms that race was not always the most salient social hierarchy in the South. For in practice both class and gender prejudice mitigated harsh, racially specific laws that made the rape of white women by black men--but not white men--a capital offense. Even during the Civil War and, with notable exceptions, during Reconstruction, Sommerville finds continuity in a southern culture that had not yet become obsessed with anxiety about the black rapist. She explicitly rejects Winthrop Jordan's interpretation, which traced the rape myth to the colonial era, and she replaces his psychosexual explanation of its origins with a predominantly economic one. While her emphasis on antebellum lenience resonates with Martha Hodes's work, Sommerville distinguishes her own analysis by arguing that neither the fact of emancipation nor the politics of the Reconstruction era suffices to explain the relatively late emergence of the racialized rape threat.

Along with the legal statutes and cultural commentary that have informed earlier studies of race, rape, and lynching, Sommerville skillfully utilizes court records, drawn from a data set of 250 cases of black men accused of raping white women and children between 1800 and 1865 throughout the South, along with a smaller set of North Carolina prison registers from the late nineteenth century. Her methods require a few caveats. First, because she has studied trials of black, but not white, men accused of rape, it is not possible to compare overall shifts in criminal justice practice to determine racially specific patterns, as does Sharon Block in making the case for a much earlier racialization of rape. Second, because Sommerville does not provide systematic quantitative overviews, the reader must trust her language that "many," "most," or "few" of the cases studied conform to those illustrating her arguments. Finally, although she criticizes earlier studies for relying only on statutes, her strong social-historical grounding in trial records can substantiate claims only up to 1865 but not her hypotheses about postwar transformations. The evidence of lenience in the antebellum period, however, is very impressive. Sommerville's readings of court cases also reveal patterns of rape accusations, including the predominance of poorer white accusers and severer punishment when slaveholding families were affected.

While she does not diminish the racial bias in legal codes that made even attempted rape a capital crime for slave men, Sommerville emphasizes the effects of both judicial paternalism and a misogyny that "shaped appellate slave law every bit as much as racism did" (p. 88). A kind of gender solidarity emerges in the language of judges who disparaged white women's characters and took seriously black men's complaints about procedural obstacles to justice. Furthermore, she provides an important corrective to earlier generalizations that antebellum laws never recognized the rape of black women as a crime. Postwar legal reforms allowed black women to charge both white and, more frequently, black men with rape, although courts did not necessarily take these charges seriously. That African American women and men could now testify against whites and that the Freedmen's Bureau and Republican Party allies monitored judicial proceedings may have contributed to white southern distrust of the formal legal system and the rise of vigilantism. By the 1890s, the rape myth that had been incubating for decades now escalated and expanded to apply to all black men.

In a historiographical appendix, Sommerville argues that political, economic, and gender insecurity at the turn of the century prompted southern white men to scapegoat black men. Although white supremacist racial politics seemed to triumph over gender or class solidarity, in the long historical view, Sommerville believes, "race represented only one of a number of competing interests, and frequently one of the other interests prevailed" (p. 258). In short, the myth of the black sexual beast has long been tempered by the myth of the promiscuous and deceitful working-class woman. Diane Sommerville provides powerful evidence of the practical effects of these intertwining prejudices and their implications for southern race relations.

ESTELLE B. FREEDMAN

Stanford University