Do we have records of contemporary objections to sexual relationships between North American slaveowners and their slaves as exploitation of the slaves' vulnerable position rather than as adultery or miscegenation?

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Absolutely. Generally speaking, historians distinguish between the anti-slavery movement and the abolitionist movement in the English-speaking world; one could be profoundly racist and still be anti-slavery (and thus oppose sexual relationships on the ground of anti-miscegenation), but abolitionists were more broadly sympathetic to African Americans themselves. Though many abolitionists held views we might still considered backward or morally repugnant today, there were certainly many abolitionists who were deeply and profoundly concerned about sexual abuse and exploitation within the institution of slavery. In fact, depraved sexuality is a strong theme in abolitionist criticism of the institution of slavery in the antebellum South in the 19th century; neither its prevalence nor its significance were lost on contemporaries opposed to the institution. Though certainly there were many anti-slavery advocates who were concerned about the degradation of white owners through their sexual exploits, many abolitionists were deeply troubled about the impact on black victims.

I would emphasise that we are not simply talking about sexual exploitation in the form of of enslaved women being forced into sexual relationships with white male owners on an ad hoc basis, as something that happened as a general but unintentional consequence of the slave system. Sexual exploitation in within the system of slavery, and particularly within the plantation economy, was extraordinary complex. Sexual exploitation and abuse was absolutely endemic in plantation society; increasingly, historians are viewing it as an integral and defining feature of slavery - there is growing evidence that within the internal slave trade of the southern United States, there was a massive (if obscured) market for sexual slaves as a commodity in their own right, coexisting with but functionally distinct from the market for slave labour in general. Slave traders were keenly aware that quieter, young, lighter-skinned women and girls with basic domestic skills would fetch disproportionately high prices. Their appeal almost certainly lay not in their physical labour but in their perceived suitability for sexual exploitation, being closer to white ideals about female beauty and disposition.

The most extraordinary advocates for paying attention to sexual exploitation within slavery as an inherent evil were so-called Garrisonian abolitionists; supporters of William Lloyd Garrison, who was a leading advocate for female suffrage a century before it was a constitutional right, as well as a passionate anti-slavery activist. Garrisonians recognised that the sexual exploitation of slavery offered an extraordinary opportunity to critique the legitimacy of the entire institution, and they seized upon sexual abuse as a means by which to cast slavery was intrinsically incompatible with the social norms and morality of the era. In doing so, they hoped also to rehabilitate their own movement in the eyes of the public - with the protofeminist elements of its philosophy, those abolitionists had similarly been accused of moral decadence by profoundly sexist contemporaries. Their genuine concern for the wellbeing of the South's black population is perhaps reflected in the complex and pragmatic way in which they dealt with questions of gender and sexuality: even as they fought for greater equality and a breaking down of gendered barriers in the North, they argued against slavery by painting it as an institution that distorted the 'natural', gendered order of the world. As Kristin Hoganson alludes to, they pragmatically sacrificed some of their protofeminist principles in pursuit of what they saw as the more important goal of dismantling slavery.

When Garrisonian abolitionists highlighted the role of sexuality and gender in slavery, they were not concerned with either miscegenation or adultery - or at least, not in the way that racially-motivated anti-slavery advocates might have been. They argued that the moral decadence lay not in the fact that white men were subverting social norms by having sex outside of their marital unions, or in having sexual relations that sullied the purity of the white race, but rather that sexual abuse was degrading to its victims. They argued that the extremely sexual fashion in which women were humiliated - from being denied adequate clothing, to forced prostitution, to violent rape - were all part of the process by which they were dehumanised and degraded. Garrisonian literature routinely advanced the view that by being placed in a position of profound sexual vulnerability, slave women were being denied the opportunity to assert their feminine nature and virtue. Henry Clarke Wright is perhaps the perfect embodiment of how Garrisonians presented complex arguments against sexual abuse in slavery that simultaneously, in different ways, reinforced and undermined their protofeminist ideals. His writings on slavery describe enslaved women as akin to workers in a brothel, passive victims who need rescuing by strong and chivalrous men; yet Wright's books on marriage argued that women should be the ones who have power over sexual relations in marriage and society, because it is women who have to bear the consequences of sex (i.e., pregnancy and childbirth). In both positions, Wright is clearly sympathetic to women as a victim of sexual exploitation for the harm it does to them; yet whilst his views on sex in marriage seriously challenge contemporary attitudes toward sexuality, his views on slavery serve to reinforce them.

Other writers highlighted how sexual abuse denied women one of the powers Southern culture afforded them exclusively. Though within marriage they were generally expected to be at the mercy of their husbands, Southern women did have significant power in being able to reject offers of marriage; before they were married, young women were entitled to exercise - at least on paper - a degree of agency and power in determining who they would grant the exclusive privilege of sexual favour and access to. Slave women, protofeminist abolitionists argued, were denied this intrinsic right of womanhood by masters and overseers who sexually abused them. Their rape and sexual humiliation deprived them of the opportunity to be the chaste, virtuous woman idealised by southern society, and thus they argued slavery was incompatible even with the ethics of the Southern elite. Some considered this essentially a form of female castration: just as castrating a male slave as punishment sought to destroy completely his claim to masculine identity, so too did raping a female slave deny her her claim to authentic womanhood.

Here too though, Garrisonian abolitionist critique of sexual abuse served as a strange double-edged sword in the realisation of their agenda. Just as they argued that slave rebellions showed that the plantation economy had failed to break the naturally violent manhood of enslaved men, so too they argued that the value slaves placed on family and motherhood reflected the inherent femininity of enslaved women no matter how they were abused. That attitude reflects an extraordinarily complex use of contemporary stereotypes about gender. On the one hand, it completely undermines what they were saying about men and women in the North, arguing men should be more peaceful and women be empowered. Yet it also subverted pro-slavery claims that African people were not really Human by showing how their own gender stereotypes manifested themselves in slave communities and families, indicating a shared Humanity that could not be denied no matter how hard slave owners tried to crush it. And it also, in its own curious way, emphasised the agency and autonomy of slave women - at the same time as it portrayed them as naturally inclined and supportive of sexist, gendered patterns of behaviour, it also portrayed them as subversive and autonomous beings who were determined to realise their own destiny. Some abolitionists highlighted the ways in which men endured violent torture, and women endured sexual degradation, as fundamentally Christian too, recalling early Christian martyrs who endured torturous persecution for their faith.

These abolitionists then had an enormously complicated approach to sexuality and slavery. They absolutely recognised and condemned sexual abuse for being the exploitation of vulnerable women, rather than for how it undermined white families or complicated racial hierarchies. Sexual abuse was also recognised as something that could be taken up as a powerful and emotive weapon in the struggle to demonstrate the evils of slavery. In order to do that though, they had to compromise with their own protofeminist ideals and values. Garrisonians were far too aware of the dangers in challenging both racial and gendered hierarchies in questioning slavery: most made a pragmatic decision to work with rather than against Southern ideas about masculinity and femininity, and though they occasionally found subtle ways to undermine them, their rhetoric generally reinforced them.

It must be stressed that sexual exploitation was not a phenomenon that uniformly involved male exploiters and female victims. Though this is the form of abuse that was undoubtedly the most overwhelmingly prevalent, and the form that comes through most clearly in the historical record, we know that men were also sexually exploited - and not just by other men. This is where abolitionist ideology on the subject becomes especially complex and murky.