American slave-owners claimed to sell the people they owned for a litany of reasons. They sold enslaved people for debt, for running away, for being recalcitrant, because they were unwell and because they could not, or would not, bear children. They sold particular groups of enslaved women, namely light-skinned, typically racially-mixed females, also known as “fancy girls,” to white men for sexual purposes. And of course, they sold them simply because they wanted to. But in 1821, a Norfolk, Virginia man decided to sell a thirty-year-old “mulatto” woman named Sally into the New Orleans slave market for a completely different reason. Sally, it would seem, “had been in the habit of intimacy with her father previous to his death.” Once made aware of this fact, Sally’s owner asked his agent to sell her “to the best advantage.” She was bartered for “first quality sugar” along with her “white” five-year-old son, John, a boy who was likely her father’s child, and hence, her brother too.
At its center, this paper is about Sally, her son John, and the unusual letter that revealed the sexual violence her father perpetrated against her. But it is also a reflection upon the archives of slavery. It asks how acts of sexual violence, such as those which Sally endured, could be so strikingly visible in a municipal archive developed by bureaucrats who never meant to record what had been done to her, all while white southerners, like Sally’s owner, attempted to render these acts unintelligible through their words and to distance themselves from it by selling the victims and their mixed race children into southern slave markets. More profoundly, it considers how such (in)visibility shapes the way historians understand the gendered experience of enslavement in the nineteenth-century South.
