Nothing made the Southern defenders of the peculiar institution more hot than the accusation that Southern men dallied with their slave women. An oblique reference to it by Senator Sumner was what got Congressman Brooks to near cane him to death.
Sally Heming, concubine to Jefferson or one of his near male relatives.
The accusation got them so hot because there was obvious truth to it. Quadroons and octaroons were sold in finery on the auction blocks of New Orleans. But New Orleans was a notoriously loose city, a Creole city, hardly Southern, indeed, hardly American. In the real South, Southerners pointed out, preying on slave women was shameful and condemned.
Black Americans are 20% white.
Preying on slave women was shameful and condemned. Black Americans are 20% white.
Ann Todd Jealous, psychotherapist and mother of the recent NAACP President Benjamin Jealous
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In the Old Testament, a handmaid was a female servant. (Remember too that the word “servant,” which has a religious and antique air to us, simply meant the same as “slave” to them. Re-read the scriptures sometimes replacing servant and service with slave and slavery. The flavor changes considerably. “When y e are enslaved to your fellow beings ye are only enslaved to your God.” So what a handmaid was was a female slave). Those were polygamous days. It was not considered shameful for a master to sleep with his handmaid. It was not condemned. Unsurprisingly, then, the Old Testament uses “handmaid” in sexual contexts fairly frequently.
Now Sarai Abram’s wife bare him no children: and she had an handmaid, an Egyptian, whose name was Hagar.
And Sarai said unto Abram, Behold now, the Lord hath restrained me from bearing: I pray thee, go in unto my maid; it may be that I may obtain children by her. And Abram hearkened to the voice of Sarai
When Leah saw that she had left bearing, she took Zilpah her maid, and gave her Jacob to wife.
Then there is the passage where Ruth lays at Boaz’ “feet” and calls herself his handmaid, and he takes it as a proposal that they enter a marriage relationship, which is exactly how she meant it.
And it came to pass at midnight, that the man was afraid, and turned himself: and, behold, a woman lay at his feet.
And he said, Who art thou? And she answered, I am Ruth thine handmaid: spread therefore thy skirt over thine handmaid
Or this passage, where the handmaid stepping in to her mistress’ shoes after the mistress died is mentioned as one of the archetype evils of people getting above themselves.
For three things the earth is disquieted, and for four which it cannot bear:
For a servant when he reigneth; and a fool when he is filled with meat;
For an odious woman when she is married; and an handmaid that is heir to her mistress.
The law of Moses has explicit rules about handmaids: either the master or his son will take the handmaid into a relationship. If not, her family can buy her back. In fact, if he takes another wife and ceases to give the handmaid her “duty of marriage,” i.e., the privileges of the marital bed, she is freed.
And if a man sell his daughter to be a maidservant, she shall not go out as the menservants do.
If she please not her master, who hath betrothed her to himself, then shall he let her be redeemed: to sell her unto a strange nation he shall have no power, seeing he hath dealt deceitfully with her.
And if he have betrothed her unto his son, he shall deal with her after the manner of daughters.
If he take him another wife; her food, her raiment, and her duty of marriage, shall he not diminish.
And if he do not these three unto her, then shall she go out free without money.
In one story, the Bible even treats handmaid and concubine as synonyms. Compare
And Laban gave to Rachel his daughter Bilhah his handmaid to be her maid.
Genesis 29:29, with
Reuben went and lay with Bilhah his father’s concubine
For a long time I was puzzled to know what the difference between a wife and a concubine was. But then reading a bit about St. Augustine and an introduction to Roman law, I figured it out. A concubine was a wife who didn’t have the same legal status as her husband. In other words, in most cases a concubine was a wife who was a handmaid.
Behold the handmaid of the Lord. Mary said that. In context, it has very strong connotations of Behold the concubine of the Lord. In order to bring about the Lord’s purposes, Mary was announcing that she would accept second-class marital status to bring forth a child on behalf of the barren wife, Israel. Her humility was greater than we usually think when we just read ‘handmaid’ as ‘obedient person.’ Mary was a free woman of royal lineage, betrothed to a free man of royal lineage. Their families had both come down very far in the world. But like most people in that circumstance, they would have clung all the more tightly to their pride and resisted all the more fiercely anything that acted as a sign of low birth. They are two scions of threadbare Southern families, wrapped in memories of Before the War.
Behold the handmaid of the Lord. Mary’s humility was profound.
[Editor’s Note: this topic touches on some very sensitive areas. Please be careful and thoughtful in your comments.]
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