Leon Kwasi Kuntuo-Asare
October 13, 2026
History 41A: Early African American History (CCSF)
Midterm AJA Review
In the academic journal article “The Sexual Abuse of Black Men under American Slavery,” published in the Journal of the History of Sexuality in 2011, the historian Thomas A. Foster shines a needed bright light on a painfully dark, and purposely overlooked chapter in the history of American chattel slavery: the sexual abuse and exploitation inflicted on enslaved African American men. For almost every generation since the end of the Civil War, public conversations and historical research has focused almost entirely on the sexual victimization of enslaved Black women by their white male abusers. Foster addresses this critical and historical omission and examines how white male masters, overseers, and even white women directly exploited the bodies of enslaved black men. The main thesis of Foster’s arguement asserts that the sexual assault of enslaved Black men took numerous forms, ranging from direct homosexual penetrative rape and forced human breeding to manipulative sexual coercion and severe mental and spiritual degradation. To construct his paradigm shifting argument, Foster bases his work in diverse primary sources: legal pardon records from eighteenth century Maryland featuring the testimony of Elizabeth Amwood, the personal plantation journals of eighteenth century Jamaican slaveholder Thomas Thistlewood, and Harriet Jacobs’ landmark 1861 autobiographical narrative, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl.
Foster presents his first shocking takeaway through the heart-wrenching 1787 Maryland pardon case involving Elizabeth Amwood, an incident that demonstrates the demonic weaponization of enslaved Black male bodies. In the case, two white men, William Holland and John Pettigrew, forced an unnamed enslaved Black man at gunpoint to rape Amwood, a free Black woman. Holland boldly and proudly stood by and taunted them, treating the horrific scene like simple livestock breeding, and later claimed to onlookers that he had simply been “putting a Mare to a horse”. This incident exposes the absolute savagery and brutality of white supremacy at the time, and how white power operated by stripping Black people of all human agency. Rather than acting as a willing and lustful participant, the enslaved man was forced at gunpoint and risked being shot and killed if he did not allow himself to serve as a physical tool to terrorize another Black person, who was suffering an unspeakable and immoral violation of their personal sovereignty under threat of immediate death. The case also reveals that white slaveholders viewed enslaved Black men not as men at all, but rather as dehumanized tools of violence and biological domination.
A second crucial takeaway is Foster’s examination of systematic forced coupling and reproductive exploitation, which historians commonly refer to as slave breeding.
Through the autobiographies of former slaves and Works Progress Administration (WPA) interviews, Foster shows how planters treated enslaved men like prized livestock, designating them as “stock men” or “bulls”. For example, one former slave recounted that an enslaved man named Joe was hired out to other plantations across Virginia simply because he was considered “de breedinges’ nigger in Virginia,” while another remembered being forced to father numerous children with approximately fifteen women against his will. Slave owners and overseers routinely put together these forced unions, sometimes watching couples consummate under direct threat of physical punishment or death. This practice exposes the absolute control and domination white masters exercised over Black families and their bodily autonomy. For enslaved Black men this meant they were denied the role of fatherhood, had their bonds with their biological children severed,
and were deeply humiliated, physically, spiritually, and emotionally on a daily basis, they also received long lasting anger and resentment from enslaved Black women who were forced into sexual relationships with them.
The third insightful takeaway in the article debunks the traditional myths of antebellum white womanhood by documenting how white women actively coerced, sexually assaulted, and exploited enslaved Black men.
Using testimony from the 1863 American Freedmen’s Inquiry Commission (AFIC) alongside abolitionist accounts, Foster established that white women often initiated and demanded sexual contact with enslaved servants and riverboat workers. Because antebellum white culture elevated white women as paragons of virtue and purity and painted Black men as dangerous predators, white women held absolute power over enslaved men. For example, a Union Army recruiter testified about a young white woman who lured a Black man into the woods and explicitly threatened to accuse him of rape if he refused to engage in sexual relations with her. In a time where a simple accusation from a white woman meant immediate torture or public lynching, enslaved men were left completely defenseless against female masters and mistresses who exploited that power dynamic for their own deep, dark and dirty sexual desires.
Overall, Foster provides a brave, compelling and well organized and researched, academic paper that challenges mainstream historical assumptions. His narrative clearly separates the legal frameworks, homosexual abuse, forced reproduction, and female coercion, while mixing in primary sources that allow the raw data and historical reality to speak for itself.
If there is anything that can be critiqued about Foster’s article, it is that it occasionally relies on white abolitionist literature and third party white observations, such as European travelers or military journals, which often carried their own racial biases and paternalistic rhetoric. A deeper, more expansive integration of firsthand African American oral histories and postwar freedmen pension claims could have improved our understanding of how enslaved men themselves survived and internally processed their personal trauma. That being said, the article is a must read for high school and college students, grassroots activists, and anyone committed to studying the full, and sometimes uncomfortable truth of the African diaspora. By destroying the myth of the invulnerability of Black men and confronting the complex dimensions of racialized and sexualized violence, Foster’s work deepens our understanding of the sick and twisted history of slavery in Antebellum America .
For Additional Information And Sources Use Links Below:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/41305880
https://www.aaihs.org/sexual-violence-against-enslaved-men/
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