RAPE

Early Americans understood rape to be a crime of forced heterosexual sex—in their words, carnal knowledge of a woman against her will. Most states set ten as the age of consent, which meant that sex with a girl under ten years old was rape, regardless of her consent or resistance. For an adult victim, a rape prosecution generally required proof that she had resisted with all her might; that she had visible injuries; that she had attempted to call for help; and that she had no way to escape her attacker. Men's most common defense to a rape accusation was that the woman had consented to the sex.

For most of the eighteenth century, rape was a capital crime, punishable by death. Beginning in the 1790s many states revised their criminal codes to abolish the death penalty for many crimes. Instead of a death sentence, many states punished convicted rapists with incarceration for anywhere from ten years to life. However, southern slave states continued to punish black—slave and free—rapists with death sentences if their victims were white, even as they abolished the death penalty for white rapists. Overall, about three-quarters of the men executed for rape in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were of African descent. Black men were also sometimes executed for attempted rape, whereas white men were usually punished with a fine, whipping, or, more commonly after the Revolution, imprisonment.

Indeed, the clearest determinant of the outcome of a rape prosecution was the racial identities of the victim and defendant. In both the North and South, black men were far more likely to be charged, convicted, and executed for rape than were white men. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, black men were convicted of rape at least twice as often as were white men. Part of the reason for this discrepancy is that enslaved blacks were often tried at separate courts without the standard legal protections afforded to whites. Many colonies and states also passed laws specifically condemning to death or harsh corporal punishments slaves who attempted to rape white women. Because most states did not have statutes about white men's crime of attempted rape until after the American Revolution, many incidents of white men's attempted rapes were prosecuted as lesser charges such as fornication, lewd behavior, or simple assault.

Rape cases were often difficult for any victim to bring to court. In order to complain about sexual assaults, young victims frequently had to overcome fear, manipulation and an attacker's social or economic power over her and in the community. White women who accused white men of rape might be humiliated in public court trials that regularly disparaged the victims' chastity and virtue. Nonwhite (especially African American) victims almost never brought successful prosecutions against white or black rapists. More than 95 percent of identifiable victims in rape prosecutions in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were white. Although African American women could theoretically ask for legal redress for a rape, white communities and courts generally did not value African American women's sexual chastity enough to prosecute such cases. Further, many colonies and states did not allow slaves to testify against white defendants, which made rape convictions of such men exceedingly difficult. Accordingly, historians have been unable to find a single conviction of a white man for raping an enslaved woman during this period. Courts and law enforcement officials usually ignored the rape of slaves by other slaves, although some individual masters punished such behavior.

See alsoCapital Punishment; Crime and Punishment; Interracial Sex .

bibliography

Block, Sharon. "Lines of Color, Sex, and Service: Comparative Sexual Coercion in Early America." In Sex, Love, Race: Crossing Boundaries in North American History. Edited by Martha Hodes. New York: New York University Press, 1999.

Dayton, Cornelia Hughes. Women before the Bar: Gender, Law and Society in Connecticut, 1639–1789. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995.

Fischer, Kirsten. Suspect Relations: Sex, Race, and Resistance in Colonial North Carolina. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2002.

Snyder, Terri L. Brabbling Women: Disorderly Speech and the Law in Early Virginia. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2003.

Sharon Block