Jim Green is believed to be the brother or uncle of Catherine Payne, and he came to the Gettysburg area when Mary Maddox first manumitted the enslaved people she had inherited from her husband. Jim was not captured or caught up in the legal drama following Catherine’s kidnapping, but from then on, he carried a pistol on him.

In the Menallen area, Jim married a widow who had children from her previous marriage. In early spring of 1852, Sam’s adult stepson, John, was moving from Yellow Hill to a bigger piece of land a bit further north. Jim had shown up and was helping to move furniture. His stepdaughter Nancy was there, too, and Sam Mars also showed up. Sam kept a jug of whiskey in his wagon. He drank from it periodically as the day wore along. He watched Sam interact with Nancy, thought of her working and him coming upon her, and his rage burned hot. Finally, he went into the house on the pretext of getting a last few things out. He saw Sam and bellowed at him, “I don’t fear any man, Mars. What about you?”

Sam turned around and stepped toward him, coming almost chest to chest. He was bigger than Jim, and he looked at him sharply and said, “I don’t fear no man, neither.”

Jim poked Sam in the chest hard with his index finger. “Stay clear of me. Stay clear of my family. No cause for you even to be here today.”

Sam pressed the back of his hand against Jim’s chest, pushed him, and said, “Stay out of my way.”

In a flash, Jim whipped out the pistol from his waist, pointed it squarely at Sam’s chest, and fired twice. Then, he turned and walked swiftly to his wagon. “Green!” he heard Sam’s voice behind him. A stick landed in the grass near him. He stopped for a moment, turned, and saw Sam standing just past the front step. Sam wavered, another stick in his hand, then toppled to the ground.

The local papers of the day captured the drama as follows.

There was never a doubt who committed the shooting, as Green immediately reported to a Justice of the Peace and made clear he had shot Mars. At the trial, tavern-keeper Charles Myers revealed that Green had confided in him that Mars had hired his stepdaughter Nancy and that Green disapproved because he assumed that Mars wanted her for “his personal accommodation.”

Nothing in the record we have today indicates Mars was guilty of any such thing, but the fear of sexual trauma and violence was real for any survivor of slavery. In this chapter, I have suggested that such fear is one of the reasons that drives Jim’s reaction. In doing so, I have given Jim a back story that may or may not be accurate for him but was, in fact, accurate for thousands of black men in the antebellum South. Whether or not he has forced to participate in these practices, his fear of sexual violence against women he loved was rooted in reality. To research the subject in depth, readers may want to start with the compilation Sex, Power, and Slavery, edited by Gwyn Campbell and Elizabeth Elbourne. I have drawn for some of my own background research the article found therein by David Brion Davis, “Slavery, Sex, and Dehumanization.” For a more concise overview, readers may want to try this article by William Spivey.

As well, DNA testing now daily confirms what was obvious in people’s appearances for the last two hundred years—white men frequently fathered children with their enslaved women. In many cases, this was done purposely in order to increase the volume of human “property” on the plantation. Scholars continue to debate the why of the practice. Most people note that the trans-Atlantic slave trade was banned in 1808 in the new United States with bipartisan support. Many scholars then suggest that, in a tale of perverse outcomes, slaveholders sought to increase the enslaved population through “breeding” (whether through white or black men made little difference), when the banning of the transatlantic trade was meant to push slavery toward its death. However, other scholars note Southern support for the ban and suggest that it was a form of protectionism for human property owners. With less external “property” coming in, the value of held property increased. Likewise, the incentive to produce more enslaved people increased.

Whatever the case, the power dynamic makes these practices forms of sexual abuse and rape. W.E.B. DuBois said plainly, “The rape which your gentlemen have done against helpless black women in defiance of your own laws is written on the foreheads of two millions of mulattoes, and written in ineffaceable blood.”