| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Rape & Race in the Nineteenth-Century South. By Diane Miller Sommerville. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004. xvi, 411 pp. Cloth, $59.95, ISBN 0-8078-2891-2. Paper, $24.95, ISBN 0-8078-5560-X.)
Diane Miller Sommerville's new book, like earlier works by Martha Hodes, Jane Dailey, and others, argues that some of what we think we know about interracial sex and violence in the antebellum and Reconstruction South is not necessarily so. Drawing on careful readings of a large number of rape and other sexual assault cases in nineteenth-century Virginia, Sommerville argues that right where we thought they were the strongest the bonds of whiteness were limited.	1
Judicial paternalism characterized the response of antebellum Virginia courts to sexual assault cases. While the law permitted them to impose death on African American men accused of interracial rape, judges, juries, higher courts, and governors sometimes reduced charges, commuted punishments, transported convicted men out of state, or sent them to the penitentiary. Courts were most lenient when white female accusers came from the lower classes of Virginia society. Slave owners wanted to protect their property. Perhaps, Sommerville speculates, common gender also made male judges and jury members sympathetic to enslaved men whose white lovers had gotten pregnant and had then cried rape.	. . .

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