With the amount of slave-owning men having sex with female slaves, surely their wives would have snuck around sometimes too? The resentment these women must have had towards their husbands for having sex with female slaves (plus these men not even being home often) would probably drive some of them to have affairs themselves? Whether it be for the thrill of it, for romance, or good old fashioned casual sex. This is my layman's justification for this, anyway.
This is the only article I've found with some information and it's a couple years old. Can anyone chime in here?
White women, black men : illicit sex in the nineteenth-century South by Martha Elizabeth Hodes (Yale University Press, 1997) addresses this topic. According to some of the sources, there was an understanding that among white women on hotels and riverboats that the black porters were available for "services". However, the founding myth of this society was the fear of black men getting and at white women, and therefore any such contact would have been a deep secret, without much historical record.
Addendum
During the Civil War, people testified before the American Freedman’s Inquiry Commission, founded by the War Department to integrate emancipated slaves into American society. [Pg.127] These stories were suppressed by the AFIC. [Pg.128]
James Redpath, a white abolitionist, testified second-hand:
One black informant, when pressed on how liaisons with a white women came to pass, said: “’I will tell you how it is here. I will go up with the towels, and when I go into the room the woman will keep following me with her eyes, until I take notice of it, and one thing leads to another. Others will take hold of me and pull me on to the sofa, and others will stick out their foot and ask one to tie their boot, and I will take hold of their foot, and say “what a pretty foot!’”” This did the black men inform their white Northern listeners that a white woman from a planter family could force a black man to have sex. [Pg.130]
Follow-up question: do we have any evidence of widespread abortificant use in the antebellum period?
What about lesbianism? Is their much evidence of lesbianism between black women and white women in antebellum America?