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.