Perfect example of the Simpson style of lying -- the insinuation that I claim to be an expert about rape accusations. I've never made such a claim, anywhere, ever.
Um... know better than what?
I said, regarding rape, that the huge, vast majority of the folks of the South did not rape as part of slavery or for any other reason, and most slaves were not raped. "Folks" in this case, would refer to white men.
Simpson gives this ludicrous, kneejerk reply. "Do you really believe that enslaved women were not raped by their masters and other whites? Seriously?"
Nothing I've said indicates I believe that. I simply don't believe it occurred as much as the evilizers of Southern whites believe, and want others to believe, and say it did. So this is a Simpson lie in the form of a question.
Then he sez, "Female slaves were raped. We don’t know how many."
Meaning the reverse is also true ... we don't know how few....
He also sez, "Were all those children of mixed race products of voluntary unions??"
All WHAT children of mixed race? How many were there? Hmmmm? We don't know how many women were raped, but we can get a reasonable count of how many mixed race people there were back then...and today.
But first, an introduction.
Back in the early 2000s or so, I met a man online who had just discovered he had Confederate soldier ancestors. This sparked a flame of curiosity in him, and like so many in that situation, he wanted to learn more. But he was willing to do the scholarship a lot of descendants don't have the time or expertise to do, and he wrote about his findings, quite extensively.
His short bio:
Michael T. Griffith holds a Master’s degree in Theology, a Graduate Certificate in Ancient and Classical History, a Bachelor of Science degree in Liberal Arts, and two Associate in Applied Science degrees. He also holds an Advanced Certificate in Civil War Studies and a Certificate in Civil War Studies. He is a two-time graduate of the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California, and of the U.S. Air Force Technical Training School in San Angelo, Texas. He has completed advanced Hebrew programs at the University of Haifa in Israel and at the Spiro Institute in London, England. He has written five books on Mormonism and ancient history and one book on the JFK assassination.Here's an index to his articles: http://www.mtgriffith.com/index.php?p=1_5_Civil-War
His writings are copyrighted, and I use these excerpts under the fair use doctrine. The emphasis is added by me.
~~~Excerpt One~~~
Antebellum critics of slavery . . . accused slaveowners and overseers of turning plantations into personal harems. They assumed that because the law permitted slaveowners to ravish black women, the practice must have been extremely common. They also assumed that black women were, if not more licentious, at least more promiscuous than white women, and hence less likely to resist sexual advances by men, whether black or white. Moreover, the ravishing of black women by white men was not the only aspect of sexual exploitation which devastated the slave family. There was also the policy of deliberate slave-breeding, under which planters encouraged promiscuous relationships among blacks. . . .
The evidence on which these assumptions and conclusions were based was extremely limited. While none of the various travelers through the South had seen deliberate slave-breeding practiced, they had all heard reports of it. Some travelers published conversations with men who admitted to fathering a large number of the slaves on their plantations. Others wrote of the special solicitude shown by one or another master to mulatto offspring, a solicitude which in their minds strongly implied parenthood. There were also the descriptions of the treatment of especially pretty slave women on the auction block and of the high prices at which such women sold, prices too high to be warranted by field labor and which could be explained only by their value as concubines or as prostitutes.
Even if all these reports were true, they constituted at most a few hundred cases. By themselves, such a small number of observations out of a population of millions, could just as easily be used as proof of the infrequency of the sexual exploitation of black women as of its frequency. . . . The prevalence of mulattoes convinced not only the northern public of the antebellum era, but historians of today, that for each case of exploitation identified, there were thousands which had escaped discovery. For travelers to the South reported that a large proportion of the slaves were not the deep black of Africans from the Guinea coast but tawny, golden, and white or nearly white. Here was proof beyond denial of either the ubiquity [widespread occurrence] of the exploitation of black women by white men, or of the promiscuity of black women, or both.
But this seemingly irrefutable evidence is far from conclusive. It is not the eyesight of these travelers to the South which is questionable, but their statistical sense. For mulattoes were not distributed evenly through the Negro population. They were concentrated in the cities and especially among freedmen. According to the 1860 census, 39 percent of freedmen in southern cities were mulattoes. Among urban slaves the proportion of mulattoes was 20 percent. In other words, one out of every four Negroes living in a southern city was a mulatto. But among rural slaves, who constituted 95 percent of the slave population, only 9.9 percent were mulatto in 1860. For the slave population as a whole, therefore, the proportion of mulattoes was just 10.4 percent in 1860 and 7.7 percent in 1850. Thus it appears that travelers to the South greatly exaggerated the extent of miscegenation because they came into contact with unrepresentative samples of the Negro population. . . . Far from proving that the exploitation of black women was ubiquitous [widespread], the available data on mulattoes strongly militate against that contention.
The fact that during the twenty-three decades of contact between slaves and whites which elapsed between 1620 and 1850 only 7.7 percent of the slaves were mulattoes suggests that on average only a very small percentage of the slaves were fathered by white men. This inference is not contradicted by the fact that the percentage of mulattoes increased by one third during the last decade of the antebellum era, rising from 7.7 to 10.4 percent. For it must be remembered that mulattoes were the progeny not just of unions between whites and pure blacks but also of unions between mulattoes and blacks. Under common definition, a person with one-eighth ancestry of another race was a mulatto. Consequently, the offspring of two slaves who were each one-eighth white was to be classified as a mulatto, as was the offspring of any slave, regardless of the ancestry of his or her mate, whose grandfather was a white.
~~~Excerpt Two~~~
A demographic model of the slave population . . . shows that the census data alone cannot be used to sustain the contention that a large proportion of slave children must have been fathered by white men. And other available bodies of evidence, such as the W.P.A. survey of former slaves, throw such claims into doubt. Of those in the survey who identified parentage, only 4.5 percent indicated that one of their parents had been white. But the work of geneticists on gene pools has revealed that even the last figure may be too high. Measurements of the admixture of “Caucasian” and “Negro” genes among southern rural blacks today indicate that the share of Negro children fathered by whites on slave plantations probably averaged between 1 and 2 percent.
That these findings seem startling is due in large measure to the widespread assumption that because the law permitted masters to ravage their slave women, they must have exercised that right. As one scholar recently put it, “Almost every white mother and wife connected with the institution [of slavery] either actually or potentially shared the males in her family with slave women.” The trouble with this view is that it recognizes no forces operating on human behavior other than the force of statute law. Yet many rights permitted by legal statues and judicial decisions are not widely exercised, because economic and social forces militate against them.
To put the issue somewhat differently, it has been presumed that masters and overseers must have ravished black women frequently because their demand for such sexual pleasures was high and because the cost of satisfying that demand was low. Such arguments overlook the real and potentially large costs that confronted masters and overseers who sought sexual pleasures in the slave quarters. The seduction of the daughter or wife of a slave could undermine the discipline that planters so assiduously strove to attain. Not only would it stir anger and discontent in the families affected, but it would undermine the air of mystery and distinction on which so much of the authority of large planters rested. Nor was it just a planter’s reputation in the slave quarter of his plantation that would be at stake. While he might be able to prevent news of his nocturnal adventure from being broadcast in his own house, it would be more difficult to prevent his slaves from gossiping to slaves on other plantations. . . .
For the overseer, the cost of sexual episodes in the slave quarter, once discovered, was often his job. Nor would he find it easy to obtain employment elsewhere as an overseer, since not many masters would be willing to employ as their manager a man who was known to lack self-control on so vital an issue. “Never employ an overseer who will equalize himself with the negro women,” wrote Charles Tait to his children. “Besides the morality of it, there are evils too numerous to be now mentioned.”
Nor should one underestimate the effect of racism on the demand of white males for black sexual partners. While some white men might have been tempted by the myth of black sexuality, a myth that may be stronger today than it was in the antebellum South, it is likely that far larger numbers were put off by racist aversions. Data on prostitutes support this conjecture. . . . The substantial underrepresentation of Negroes, as well as the complete absence of dark-skinned Negroes, indicates that white men who desired illicit sex had a strong preference for white women. . . .
The contention that the slave family was undermined by the widespread promiscuity of blacks is as poorly founded as the thesis that masters were uninhibited in their sexual exploitation of slave women. Indeed, virtually no evidence, other than the allegations of white observers, has ever been presented which sustains the charge that promiscuity among slaves was greater than that found among whites. . . .
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Yep, Simpson is right. We don't know how many slave women were raped; but this data suggests it was very few, which is bound to distress and anger the evilizers of Southern whites....
