Abusing Hugh Davis: Determining the Crime in a Seventeenth-Century American Morality Case

O n a f a t e f u l m i d -S e p t e m b e r day in 1630, Hugh Davis found himself accused of a horrifying litany of crimes. He had shamed Christians. He had dishonored God. Moreover, he had abused himself. Davis had committed all of these crimes by lying with a Negro, and he paid a fearsome price for his transgression: the court ordered him to be flogged—publicly brutalized and humiliated—in front of an assembly of both whites and Africans. While Hugh Davis’s life must have left other marks in the historical record, the court’s sentence, a mere forty-three words long, is the only document about him to have survived. Starting with Carter Woodson, who wrote in 1918, most historians have assigned the Davis case to the history of American race relations and particularly to the hostility toward miscegenation so prevalent in the seventeenth century. If Davis committed fornication, then the case fits. Scholars have long recognized, as Jennifer M. Spear argues, that “throughout colonial