A Fancy Girl, sometimes called a Fancy Maid, was a young woman of African descent with a lighter complexion sold with the intent of forced prostitution and concubinage. [1] This sale was often referred to as the Fancy Trade within the larger history of Slavery in the United States.
Fancy girls were purchased and sold within the southern United States by slave traders such as Rice C. Ballard and Robert Jardine. The young women were often sold at auctions with other enslaved people, though they were kept in separate quarters from other enslaved individuals. It was common for the Fancy girl to be sold in New Orleans [2] markets at prices much higher than the average enslaved person was sold for. One bill of sale for the purchase of a young woman named Clary declared she was purchased for fifty pounds, [3] or nearly five-thousand dollars in modern currency.
Fancy girls were characterized as "smart," "honest," or "temperate," in public advertisements, and often decorated in nice clothing and accessories before being sent to sale. [4] Preconceived notions of black women as being promiscuous [5] contributed to slaveowners motivations for purchase and their wive's disdain for the enslaved women Afterwards, the young women were kept either in their own quarters of the home or in a special building on the slave owner's property, as to not draw attention. [5] Information about the Fancy girl's time enslaved is limited, as most information is only available about their lives before the sale and after their freedom.
Avenia White and Susan Johnson were two women purchased by Rice C. Ballard in 1832 and kept on his plantation for many years. Their importance to Ballard is highlighted by continuous time spent living on his property, often traveling with him during repeated moves. [5] The two women both had children and their births were logged in Ballard's personal records, signifying their importance to him.
Eventually, the pair were freed by Ballard and moved to Cincinnati in 1838, where they spent the remainder of their lives. [5] Ballard moved the women and their children to the city himself, traveling in the same train car and sleeping in the same lodging room with the women. At the time, Cincinnati held a large population with previously enslaved women and their mixed children, and functioned as somewhat of a safe-haven for those in situations similar to White and Johnson. [5] White continued to write Ballard after her empancipation, updating him on her life or requesting assistance from him. Ballard continued to visit the women semi-often on "business." [5]
Louisa Piquet was 14 years old when she was separated from her mother and purchased by John Williams in 1841. Sold at a slave market in Mobile, Piquet was auctioned for $1,500. By her own account, she was instructed to undress immediately after her purchase so that Williams would be assured that his purchase was worth it. [6]
Piquet was born into slavery, and was not originally sold as a Fancy girl, but claims she and her mother endured sexual abuse at the hands of their previous owners. [6] She lived with Williams for six years, bearing four of his children and taking care of him up until his death. Afterwards, he left Piquet all of the furniture in his house and gave her and her children freedom. Williams encouraged her to move to New York, but she decided instead to move to Cincinnati since she had friends or relatives there. [5]
Sexual slavery and sexual exploitation is an attachment of any ownership right over one or more people with the intent of coercing or otherwise forcing them to engage in sexual activities. This includes forced labor that results in sexual activity, forced marriage and sex trafficking, such as the sexual trafficking of children.
The legal institution of human chattel slavery, comprising the enslavement primarily of Africans and African Americans, was prevalent in the United States of America from its founding in 1776 until 1865, predominantly in the South. Slavery was established throughout European colonization in the Americas. From 1526, during the early colonial period, it was practiced in what became Britain's colonies, including the Thirteen Colonies that formed the United States. Under the law, an enslaved person was treated as property that could be bought, sold, or given away. Slavery lasted in about half of U.S. states until abolition in 1865, and issues concerning slavery seeped into every aspect of national politics, economics, and social custom. In the decades after the end of Reconstruction in 1877, many of slavery's economic and social functions were continued through segregation, sharecropping, and convict leasing. Involuntary servitude as a punishment for crime is still legal in the United States.
"Children of the plantation" is a euphemism used to refer to people with ancestry tracing back to the time of slavery in the United States in which the offspring was born to black African female slaves in the context of the trans-Atlantic slave trade and Non-Black men, usually the slave's owner, one of the owner's relatives, or the plantation overseer. These children were often considered to be the property of the slave owner and were often subjected to the same treatment as other slaves on the plantation. Many of these children were born into slavery and had no legal rights, as they were not recognized as the legitimate children of their fathers. The men who fathered these children often used their power and authority to force themselves upon the black females who were under their control.
The internal slave trade in the United States, also known as the domestic slave trade, the Second Middle Passage and the interregional slave trade, was the mercantile trade of enslaved people within the United States. It was most significant after 1808, when the importation of slaves from Africa was prohibited by federal law. Historians estimate that upwards of one million slaves were forcibly relocated from the Upper South, places like Maryland, Virginia, Kentucky, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Missouri, to the territories and states of the Deep South, especially Georgia, Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, Arkansas, and Texas.
White slavery refers to the enslavement of any of the world's European ethnic groups throughout human history, whether perpetrated by non-Europeans or by other Europeans. Slavery in ancient Rome was frequently dependent on a person's socio-economic status and national affiliation, and thus included European slaves. It was also common for European people to be enslaved and traded in the Muslim world; European women, in particular, were highly sought-after to be concubines in the harems of many Muslim rulers. Examples of such slavery conducted in Islamic empires include the Arab slave trade, the Barbary slave trade, the Ottoman slave trade, and the Black Sea slave trade, among others.
Isaac Franklin was an American slave trader and plantation owner. Born to wealthy planters in what would become Sumner County, Tennessee, he assisted his brothers in trading slaves and agricultural surplus along the Mississippi River in his youth, before briefly serving in the Tennessee militia during the War of 1812. He returned to slave trading soon after the war, buying enslaved people in Virginia and Maryland, before marching them in coffles to sale at Natchez, Mississippi. He introduced John Armfield to the slave trade, and with him founded the Franklin & Armfield partnership in 1828, which would go on to become one of the largest slave trading firms in the United States. With a base of operations in Alexandria, D.C., the company shipped massive numbers of the enslaved by land and sea to markets at Natchez and New Orleans.
Living in a wide range of circumstances and possessing the intersecting identity of both black and female, enslaved women of African descent had nuanced experiences of slavery. Historian Deborah Gray White explains that "the uniqueness of the African-American female's situation is that she stands at the crossroads of two of the most well-developed ideologies in America, that regarding women and that regarding the Negro." Beginning as early on in enslavement as the voyage on the Middle Passage, enslaved women received different treatment due to their gender. In regard to physical labor and hardship, enslaved women received similar treatment to their male counterparts, but they also frequently experienced sexual abuse at the hand of their enslavers who used stereotypes of black women's hypersexuality as justification.
Slavery was a major institution and a significant part of the Ottoman Empire's economy and traditional society.
Slavery among Native Americans in the United States includes slavery by and enslavement of Native Americans roughly within what is currently the United States of America.
Slave breeding was the practice in slave states of the United States of slave owners systematically forcing slaves to have children to increase their wealth. It included coerced sexual relations between enslaved men and women or girls, forced pregnancies of enslaved women and girls due to forced inter inbreeding with fellow slaves in hopes of producing relatively stronger future slaves. The objective was for slave owners to increase the number of people they enslaved without incurring the cost of purchase, and to fill labor shortages caused by the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade.
Slavery in Virginia began with the capture and enslavement of Native Americans during the early days of the English Colony of Virginia and through the late eighteenth century. They primarily worked in tobacco fields. Africans were first brought to colonial Virginia in 1619, when 20 Africans from present-day Angola arrived in Virginia aboard the ship The White Lion.
The treatment of slaves in the United States often included sexual abuse and rape, the denial of education, and punishments like whippings. Families were often split up by the sale of one or more members, usually never to see or hear of each other again.
The history of forced labor in the United States encompasses to all forms of unfree labor which have occurred within the present day borders of the United States through the modern era. "Unfree labor" is a generic or collective term for those work relations, in which people are employed against their will by the threat of destitution, detention, violence, lawful compulsion, or other extreme hardship to themselves or to members of their families.
The history of sexual slavery in the United States is the history of slavery for the purpose of sexual exploitation as it exists in the United States.
Enslaved women were expected to maintain the enslaved populations, which led women to rebel against this expectation via contraception and abortions. Infanticide was also committed as a means to protect children from either becoming enslaved or from returning to enslavement.
Concubinage in the Muslim world was the practice of Muslim men entering into intimate relationships without marriage, with enslaved women, though in rare, exceptional cases, sometimes with free women. If the concubine gave birth to a child, she attained a higher status known as umm al-walad.
Slave marriages in the United States were typically illegal before the American Civil War abolished slavery in the US. Enslaved African Americans were legally considered chattel, and they were denied civil and political rights until the United States abolished slavery with the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. Both state and federal laws denied, or rarely defined, rights for enslaved people.
Samuel Stillman Boyd, often referred to as S. S. Boyd or Judge Boyd, was a prominent attorney in early 19th-century Mississippi and one of the Natchez nabobs who stood at the apex of antebellum Mississippi society. He also served briefly as a judge, invested in cotton agriculture, speculated in real estate, engaged in large-scale enslavement, and advocated for pro-slavery causes. Boyd wielded significant political influence in his community, initially as a leader in the Whig Party. His name was considered for a seat on the U.S. Supreme Court in 1852 and 1860.
Calvin Morgan Rutherford, generally known as C. M. Rutherford, was a 19th-century American interstate slave trader. Rutherford had a wide geographic reach, trading nationwide from the Old Dominion of Virginia to as far west as Texas. Rutherford had ties to former Franklin & Armfield associates, worked in Kentucky for several years, advertised to markets throughout Louisiana and Mississippi, and was a major figure in the New Orleans slave trade for at least 20 years. Rutherford also invested his money in steamboats and hotels.
{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location (link)