Editing Concubinage (section)

=== United States ===
Relationships with slaves in the United States and the Confederacy were sometimes euphemistically referred to as concubinary.{{citation needed|date=May 2023}} From lifelong to single or serial sexual visitations, these relationships with enslaved people illustrate a radical power imbalance between a human owned as [[Personal property|chattel]], and the legal owner of same. When personal ownership of slaves was enshrined in the law, an enslaved person had no legal power over their own [[Legal person|legal]] [[personhood]], the legal control to which was held by another entity; therefore, a slave could never give real and legal [[consent]] in any aspect of their life. The inability to give any kind of consent when enslaved is in part due to the ability of a slave master to legally coerce acts and declarations including those of affection, attraction, and consent through rewards and punishments. Legally however, the concept of chattel slavery in the United States and Confederate States defined and enforced in the law owning the legal personhood of a slave; meaning that the proxy for legal consent was found with the slave's master, who was the sole source of consent in the law to the bodily integrity and all efforts of that slave except as regulated or limited by law. With slavery being recognized as a [[Crimes against humanity|crime against humanity]] in the United States law, as well as in [[Customary international law|international customary law]], the legal basis of slavery is repudiated for all time, as are any rights which owner-rapists had had to exercise any proxy consent, sexual or otherwise for their slaves.<ref>"Sexual Relations Between Elite White Women and Enslaved Men in the Antebellum South: A Socio-Historical Analysis", J. M. Allain, Inquiries Journal, 2013, Vol. 5 No. 08, p. 1</ref><ref>Foster, Thomas A. "Sexual Abuse of Black Men Under American Slavery". Journal of History and Sexuality 20, 3 (2011): 445–64.</ref><ref>Susan Bordo, "Are Mothers Persons?", Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body, Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 2003, 71–97.</ref><ref>Rule 93. Rape and other forms of sexual violence are prohibited., 161 rules of customary international humanitarian law identified in volume I (rules) of the International Committee of the Red Cross's study on customary IHL, Cambridge University Press 2005.</ref>

Free men in the United States sometimes took female slaves in relationships which they referred to as concubinage,<ref name=Matthaei/> although marriage between the races was prohibited by law in the colonies and the later United States. Many colonies and states also had laws against [[miscegenation]] or any interracial relations. From 1662 the Colony of Virginia, followed by others, incorporated into law the principle that children took their mother's status, i.e., the principle of ''[[partus sequitur ventrem]]''.<ref name="Kolchin17">[[Peter Kolchin]], ''American Slavery, 1619–1877'', New York: Hill and Wang, 1993, p. 17</ref> This led to generations of [[multiracial]] slaves, some of whom were otherwise considered legally white (one-eighth or less African, equivalent to a great-grandparent) before the [[American Civil War]].

In some cases, men had long-term relationships with enslaved women, giving them and their mixed-race children freedom and providing their children with apprenticeships, education and transfer of capital. A [[Jefferson–Hemings controversy|relationship]] between [[Thomas Jefferson]] and [[Sally Hemings]] is an example of this.<ref name="Hemings">[http://www.monticello.org/plantation/hemingscontro/hemings-jefferson_contro.html "Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: A Brief Account"] {{Webarchive |url=https://web.archive.org/web/20100430175449/http://www.monticello.org/plantation/hemingscontro/hemings-jefferson_contro.html |date=30 April 2010 }}, Monticello Website, [[Thomas Jefferson Foundation]]. Retrieved 22 June 2011. Quote: "Ten years later [referring to its 2000 report], TJF and most historians now believe that, years after his wife's death, Thomas Jefferson was the father of the six children of Sally Hemings mentioned in Jefferson's records, including Beverly, [[Harriet Hemings|Harriet]], [[Madison Hemings|Madison]] and [[Eston Hemings]]...Since then, a committee commissioned by the Thomas Jefferson Heritage Society, after reviewing essentially the same material, reached different conclusions, namely that Sally Hemings was only a minor figure in Thomas Jefferson's life and that it is very unlikely he fathered any of her children. This committee also suggested in its report, issued in April 2001 and revised in 2011, that Jefferson's younger brother Randolph (1755–1815) was more likely the father of at least some of Sally Hemings's children."</ref> Such arrangements were more prevalent in the [[Southern United States|American South]] during the [[Antebellum South|antebellum period]].<ref>{{Cite web |title=Antebellum slavery |url=https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part4/4p2956.html |access-date=2022-11-21 |publisher=PBS}}</ref>