4. Adultery Dorothea Bourne and Edmond

Martha Hodes

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4. Adultery Dorothea Bourne and Edmond

Martha Hodes
Martha Hodes

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This chapter is in the book White Women, Black Men

4 Adultery Dorothea Bourne and EdmondIf a married white woman in the antebellum South gave birth to achild whose father was presumably black, she was likely to be the sub-ject of considerable scrutiny and judgment. Even without pregnancy andchildbirth, suspicion of a white woman's adulterous liaison with a blackman could become a fervid topic of local conversation. The seriousness ofthe matter and the actions taken, however, would depend more upon thewoman's white husband. If he chose to remain silent, there might be talkbut no concerted effort either to prove the transgression or to put a stopto it. If, instead, the white husband presented himself as a wronged man,friends and neighbors would be apt to cooperate in the legal investiga-tion to support his claims. A white husband who proved his wife guilty ofadultery with a black man was usually granted the divorce he requested,precisely because authorities had been swayed that the white wife was atfault. Yet white husbands were not guaranteed divorces under such cir-cumstances. The gravity of breaking up a white family through divorcecould outweigh the gravity of illicit sex between a white woman and ablack man. Regardless of the verdict, antebellum divorce cases and otherrecorded instances of adultery based on the transgressions of white wiveswith black men confirm a marked absence of white outrage and violentretribution toward the participating black man, whether slave or free.In 1824, an elderly white man named Lewis Bourne asserted pub-licly that his much younger wife, Dorothea, also called Dolly, made a habitof associating with black men in their Virginia piedmont neighborhoodand specifically that she had been sexually involved with Edmond, one ofJohn Richardson's twenty-five slaves, for the past six or seven years. Thussex between a white woman and a black man entered the historical recordas an offense of adultery. There were no accusations of rape, either byDorothea, her husband, or any other white person, and unlike in the caseof Polly Lane and Jim, white neighbors blamed the white woman from thebeginning. Dorothea was both bullied and shunned, yet in the end the cir-cumstances were not grave enough to permit Lewis a divorce. The storyof Dorothea and Edmond presents another case of white people's uneasyendurance of a sexual liaison between a white woman and a black man inthe slave South. Their story, too, involves dominant ideas about the sexu-

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4 Adultery Dorothea Bourne and EdmondIf a married white woman in the antebellum South gave birth to achild whose father was presumably black, she was likely to be the sub-ject of considerable scrutiny and judgment. Even without pregnancy andchildbirth, suspicion of a white woman's adulterous liaison with a blackman could become a fervid topic of local conversation. The seriousness ofthe matter and the actions taken, however, would depend more upon thewoman's white husband. If he chose to remain silent, there might be talkbut no concerted effort either to prove the transgression or to put a stopto it. If, instead, the white husband presented himself as a wronged man,friends and neighbors would be apt to cooperate in the legal investiga-tion to support his claims. A white husband who proved his wife guilty ofadultery with a black man was usually granted the divorce he requested,precisely because authorities had been swayed that the white wife was atfault. Yet white husbands were not guaranteed divorces under such cir-cumstances. The gravity of breaking up a white family through divorcecould outweigh the gravity of illicit sex between a white woman and ablack man. Regardless of the verdict, antebellum divorce cases and otherrecorded instances of adultery based on the transgressions of white wiveswith black men confirm a marked absence of white outrage and violentretribution toward the participating black man, whether slave or free.In 1824, an elderly white man named Lewis Bourne asserted pub-licly that his much younger wife, Dorothea, also called Dolly, made a habitof associating with black men in their Virginia piedmont neighborhoodand specifically that she had been sexually involved with Edmond, one ofJohn Richardson's twenty-five slaves, for the past six or seven years. Thussex between a white woman and a black man entered the historical recordas an offense of adultery. There were no accusations of rape, either byDorothea, her husband, or any other white person, and unlike in the caseof Polly Lane and Jim, white neighbors blamed the white woman from thebeginning. Dorothea was both bullied and shunned, yet in the end the cir-cumstances were not grave enough to permit Lewis a divorce. The storyof Dorothea and Edmond presents another case of white people's uneasyendurance of a sexual liaison between a white woman and a black man inthe slave South. Their story, too, involves dominant ideas about the sexu-

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