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I want to learn more about the history, trauma, and details about slavery that wasn't taught to me from a more clear crystal view no sugarcoating.

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Throughout the deep south one of many crucial ways they would try to emasculate enslaved men and boys was by denying them the right to wear pants. They were forced to dress-like shirts attempting to feminize and humiliate enslaved males.

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Although nearly fifty-seven years have passed since Stanley Elkins' provocative thesis on the effects of slavery rocked the historical community, scholars are still grappling with some of the basic premises he put forth. While the effects of slaveholders' psychological terrorism still inspire intense debates, it should prove helpful for scholars to focus on how severely the enslaved were mentally tortured. Perhaps one of slave owners' more innovatively cruel strategies concerned the ways they sought to completely emasculate enslaved boys and men-by denying them the right to wear pants. By forcing young African American boys and men to wear dress-like shirts, the owners of flesh attempted to feminize and humiliate enslaved males on a daily basis. According to scores of interviews with the formerly enslaved, denying black boys and young men the right to wear pants was a relatively widespread practice throughout the Deep South.

This custom certainly becomes even more interesting when slaveholders' beliefs about slave breeding and the virility of young "bucks" is taken into consideration. Countless owners commented time and again in diaries and letters about the supposedly highly-sexualized nature of young black men, and the emasculation of the enslaved must have allowed slaveholders some type of psycho-sexual superiority complex. By feminizing African American males, slave owners likely reassured themselves that they were the most masculine men on the plantation, which could be demonstrated, of course, by the rape and sexual abuse of enslaved women and girls.

Unsurprisingly, the practice of withholding pants seemed to occur commonly on large plantations, where the concentrated number of slaves required constant surveillance and discipline. Richard Orford, enslaved as a young boy in Georgia, remembered, "The children wore a one piece garment not unlike a slightly lengthened dress. This was kept in place by a string tied around their waists." Another Georgian described it similarly, claiming "The one little cotton shirt that was all children wore in summertime then weren't worth talking about; they called it a shirt but it looked more like a long-tailed nightgown to me." Ed McCree concurred. "Summertime us children wore shirts what looked like nightgowns. You just pulled one of them slips over your head and went on cause you was done dressed for the whole week, day and night."

On some plantations boys wearing shirt-dresses were finally supplemented with pants during the coldest part of winter. "Boys wore plain shirts in summer," Addie Vinson recalled, "but in winter they had warmer shirts and quilted pants." Similarly, Jefferson Franklin Henry reported, "In summer boys wore just one piece and that looked like a long nightshirt. Winter clothes was jeans pants and homespun shirts." One man raised on a Texas plantation said that all enslaved children wore "the straight-cut slip. They give the lil gals the slip dress and lil panties. In wintertime they give the boys the lil coat and pants and shoes, but no drawers or underwear."

Yet not every enslaved male was lucky enough to receive pants when the weather turned cooler. Harrison Beckett pointed out the precariousness of the situation: "The way they dress us lil nigger boys then, they give us a shirt what come way down between the knees and ankles. When the weather was too cold, they sometimes give us pants."

Indeed, some of the enslaved were not even allowed pants during the freezing winters. Charlie Hudson explained that in "Winter time they give children new cotton and wool mixed shirts what come down to their ankles. By the time hot weather come the shirt was done wore thin and shrunk up and besides that, we grew enough for them to be short on us, so we just wore them same shirts right on through the summer."

Still, regardless of whether or not enslaved boys received winter pants, they realized that there was no gendered difference in the clothes. As Will Sheets put it, "Gals and boys was dressed in the same way when they was little chaps."

Perhaps the most psychologically damning aspect of denying boys and young men pants was the age at which they were finally granted the garment. During the mid-nineteenth century children matured very early, and boys were often drinking alcohol and becoming sexually active as young teenagers. It seems that many slaveholders withheld the privilege of wearing pants well past the point that boys were acting like young men, courting girls and trying to establish their masculine identity. Peter Ryas did not receive a pair of pants until he was ten years old; Ben Kinchlow of Texas and G.W. Hawkins of Arkansas were around twelve. Stearlin Arnwine painfully remembered wearing "my first pants when I was fourteen years old, and they stung till I was miserable...It was what we called dog-hair cloth."

More troubling still were the accounts of young black men being forced to wear the shirt-dresses until they were fully grown. "For the boys from five to fifteen years old, they would make long shirts out of this cloth," one man remembered, and "No young fellow wore pants until he began to court." Jerry Boykins, enslaved in Georgia, claimed that he "wore home weaved shirts until I was grown, then I had some pants and they were homemade, too." Pricilla Gibson commented that "little boys wore long-tail shirts, with no pants till they's grown." Another man from South Carolina recalled that he "was a big boy grown when I get my first pants."

The long-term psychological effects wrought by denying these men pants may never be fully known. No doubt the embarrassment and humiliation caused many of the enslaved untold worries over masculinity and identity. Yet at least in some cases, African American males did not allow their deprivations to temper their activities. As Mary Johnson reported, "My brother Robert was a powerful big boy and he wasn't allowed to have no pants until he was 21 years old, but that didn't discourage him from courting the gals. I try to tease him about going to see the gals with that split shirt." Indeed, Robert did the best that he could with what he had been given-but it was likely not as easy for the countless others who suffered under the psychological cruelties of the slaveholders.

Keri Leigh Merritt is a historian of the 19th-century American South who works as an independent scholar in Atlanta. Her first book, Masterless Men: Poor Whites and Slavery in the Antebellum South, will be published in 2017 by Cambridge University Press. Follow her Twitter @kerileighmerrit.

Copyright © AAIHS. May not be reprinted without permission.

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Men without Pants: Masculinity and the Enslaved

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Although nearly fifty-seven years have passed since Stanley Elkins' provocative thesis on the effects of slavery rocked the historical community, scholars are still grappling with some of the basic premises he put forth. While the effects of slaveholders' psychological terrorism still inspire intens

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Forcing Enslaved men and women to have sex.

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Forcing Enslaved men and women to have sex.

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Enslavers would force enslaved men to have sex w/ other enslaved women, no matter the relations between. They would make them engage in coerced reproduction so that the number of enslaved individuals would go up and they could sell them off. Causing trauma for both enslaved men and women.

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In Rethinking Rufus: Sexual Violations of Enslaved Men, historian Thomas Foster examines how the conditions of slavery gave rise to sexual violence against enslaved men in the Americas during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Drawing from historical studies of sexual violence against enslaved women, Foster uses a range of sources including early American newspapers, enslavers' journals, court records, visual art, and abolitionist literature to illuminate how various forms of sexual violence, including physical assault and coerced reproduction, affected enslaved men and their communities. Rethinking Rufus also centers the experience of enslaved men by using testimonies, autobiographies, and interviews to shed light on how they responded to and navigated sexual violence in order to maintain autonomy and independence in their intimate lives. Rethinking Rufus analyzes the "history of the peculiar conditions that enslavement established, nurtured, and expanded that enabled those in power to dominate many enslaved men through sexual violence" (10). In this way, Foster's study interrogates broader systems of power and domination that led to the sexual abuse of enslaved men.

Rethinking Rufus makes an important intervention into the historiography of slavery in the Americas. Foster uses feminist theories of sexual assault to examine how corporeal punishments functioned as displays of power that constituted sexual violence against enslaved men. Foster builds upon historians such as Daina Ramey Berry, Deborah Gray White, and Jennifer Morgan, who have used gender as an analytic to more fully understand how enslaved women experienced and challenged sexual abuse under enslavement. Foster's combination of historical methods and feminist theories of sexual assault inform one of Rethinking Rufus's main arguments, that enslaved men could not consent to sexual activity given their legal status as property and vulnerable position in the social order of slavery.

Through five chapters, Foster examines the multiple forms of sexual violence against enslaved men from a variety of perspectives. The book's title, Rethinking Rufus, is in reference to the story of Rufus, an enslaved man who was forced to bear children with an enslaved woman named Rose in Texas during the mid-nineteenth century. Foster uses Rose's interview published by the Works Progress Administration (WPA), where she negatively recounts her sexual experiences with Rufus and describes him as a "bully," as an example of how sexual violence affected both enslaved men and women. Foster notes that while Rose's interview documents the trauma of coerced reproduction, a form of sexual violence in which enslavers forced enslaved men and women to bear children in order increase the population of enslaved people, sources that highlight the sufferings of coerced reproduction from the perspective of Rufus are nonexistent. Foster theorizes the absence of a counternarrative by Rufus and many other enslaved men as another type of sexual violation that stemmed from a broader cultural failure to consider men as victims of sexual violence. The repeated absence of narratives from enslaved men that document their experiences with sexual violence propels Foster's deeper exploration into the conditions of slavery that gave rise to the sexual abuse and exploitation of enslaved men.

Foster begins Rethinking Rufus by examining how enslaved men's bodies were depicted in Western art and sculptures that were widespread in the visual culture of slavery. Foster argues that enslaved men's bodies were "symbols of enslaved manhood and sites of violation" that were objectified through a number of cultural forms including art and literature (12). The objectification of enslaved men depicted in paintings often resembled everyday acts of terror including the public inspection of Black men's genitals, whippings and lashings, and bodily exposure due to lack of adequate clothing. Visual depictions of enslaved men that emphasized their genitalia and sexual prowess gave way to the prevailing myths of Black hypersexuality and the Black male rapist, an archetype that ensured the extralegal protection of white women from Black men who purportedly lacked control over their sexual urges. Foster also argues that while visual depictions of enslaved men's bodies often highlighted their athleticism, strength, and muscularity, this same imagery eroticized enslaved men's bodies in ways that fueled the physical abuses and sexual exploitation of enslaved men. Foster notes that these stereotypes found in eighteenth-century visual art contributed to the eventual punishment and national disenfranchisement of Black men.

Rethinking Rufus also sheds light on how enslaved men viewed marriage and family as potential avenues for maintaining independence and autonomy. Foster notes that while the possibility of establishing a household and assuming the role as guardian of the family was severely limited for enslaved men, love affairs and the ability to choose one's own partner served as a key component for developing models of manhood. Using court records and eighteenth-century newspapers, Foster documents how enslaved men understood the importance of choosing their own partners despite the likely possibility of separation and loss. Because enslaved men and women were frequently sold to different plantations across various regions, enslaved men and women who married and attempted to establish families remained vulnerable to the interference of enslavers through sales and punishments. Foster notes that they often negotiated independence by adhering to the will of masters and mistresses in order to be granted partial autonomy in their intimate lives. Foster's analysis provides a glimpse into how enslaved men navigated the power dynamics of enslavement in hopes of maintaining autonomy while minimizing the possibility of sexual violence as a punishment.

The latter part of Rethinking Rufus examines the role of reproduction in slavery's sexual economy, and how sexual violations of enslaved men affected interpersonal relationships between enslaved men and women. To this end, Foster argues that coerced reproduction was a type of sexual assault against Black men in addition to Black women. Using interviews and testimonies from formerly enslaved men, Foster highlights how those who were valued for their reproductive capabilities were often singled out from their communities, relocated to different regions, and forced to couple with multiple women. Men who were forced to procreate were also excused from preforming certain types of labor that enslavers feared could negatively affect their reproductive capabilities. Foster also considers how forms of sexual violence against enslaved men were enacted by both white women and men. Foster's use of WPA interviews and slave narratives that center the perspectives of Black men illuminates how the separation of enslaved men from their communities for the purpose of reproduction often severed intracommunal relationships that resulted in psychological pain and generational trauma.

In sum, Rethinking Rufus illuminates new dimensions of how sexual violence operated during slavery by incorporating the perspectives of Black men. Rethinking Rufus sheds light on how sexual assault, exploitation, objectification, and coerced reproduction affected enslaved men and their communities. Foster's gendered analysis of sexual violence opens up new avenues for further research on the interrelatedness between masculinity, reproduction, and slave labor. Rethinking Rufus is a great contribution to the fields of Early American History, Gender Studies, and African American Studies. Rethinking Rufus should be of interest to a wide range of scholars of African American history, the history of American slavery, and the history of sexuality.

Copyright © AAIHS. May not be reprinted without permission.

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In Rethinking Rufus: Sexual Violations of Enslaved Men, historian Thomas Foster examines how the conditions of slavery gave rise to sexual violence against enslaved men in the Americas during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Drawing from historical studies of sexual violence against enslaved

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1. Henry Box Brown a 19th-century Virginia slave escaped to freedom at the age of 33 by arranging to have himself mailed in a wooden crate in 1849 to abolitionists in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
2. Men from the south was made not to wear pants to emasculate them.
3. they would be forced to have sex w/ other enslaved women.
4. They would make enslaved men battle each other in fist fights for money among other enslavers which is considered "Mandingo fighting".
5. Tom Molineaux was a Virginia slave who won his freedom—and, for his owner, $100,000—after winning a match against another slave.

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To assist with making sure your facts are specific, include dates, years, names and locations. If you're using a quote make sure you have used quotation marks.

Men where?
Where the fist fights called something?