Laws and cultural norms militated against interracial sex in
Virginia before the Civil War, and yet it was ubiquitous in cities,
towns, and plantation communities throughout the state. In
"Notorious in the Neighborhood," Joshua Rothman examines the full
spectrum of interracial sexual relationships under slavery--from
Thomas Jefferson, Sally Hemings, and the intertwined interracial
families of Monticello and Charlottesville to commercial sex in
Richmond, the routinized sexual exploitation of enslaved women, and
adultery across the color line. He explores the complex
considerations of legal and judicial authorities who handled cases
involving illicit sex and describes how the customary toleration of
sex across the color line both supported and undermined racism and
slavery in the early national and antebellum South.
White Virginians allowed for an astonishing degree of
flexibility and fluidity within a seemingly rigid system of race
and interracial relations, Rothman argues, and the relationship
between law and custom regarding racial intermixture was always
shifting. As a consequence, even as whites never questioned their
own racial supremacy, the meaning and significance of racial
boundaries, racial hierarchy, and ultimately of race itself always
stood on unstable ground--a reality that whites understood and
about which they demonstrated increasing anxiety as the nation's
sectional crisis intensified.
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