...Josiah Priest, whose
Slavery as it Relates to the Negro or African Race (1843) was widely read in America prior to the Civil War. Not only did Priest dwell on Ham’s career and character in a manner that was quite uncharacteristic of antebellum writers, he offered the seamy details of Ham’s offense against Noah. Apparently following the rabbinic midrashic tradition, Priest argued that Ham’s outrage "did not consist alone in the seeing his father’s nakedness as a man, but rather in the abuse and actual violation of his own mother." He continued:
This opinion is strengthened by a passage found in Levit. xviii. 8, as follows: "The nakedness of thy father’s wife shalt thou not uncover: it is thy father’s nakedness." On account of this passage, it has been believed that the crime of Ham did not consist alone of seeing his father in an improper manner, but rather of his own mother, the wife of Noah, and violating her.
If this was so, how much more horrible, therefore, appears the character of Ham, and how much more deserving the curse, which was laid upon him and his race, of whom it was foreseen that they would be like this, their lewd ancestor.
Priest’s defamation of Ham and his descendants extended beyond the charge of sexual impropriety. In fact, he asked his readers to imagine a scene in which Noah is explaining to Ham just why his malediction is deserved:
- Oh Ham, my son, it is not for this one deed alone which you have just committed that I have, by God's command, thus condemned you and your race, but the Lord has shown me that all your descendants will, more or less, be like you their father, on which account, it is determined by the Creator that you and your people are to occupy the lowest condition of all the families among mankind, and even be enslaved as brute beasts, going down in the scale of human society, beyond and below the ordinary exigencies of mortal existence, arising out of war, revolutions, and conflicts, for you will, and must be, both in times of peace and war, a despised, a degraded, and an oppressed race.
Considering the broad influence of Priest’s text and its relatively early date of publication – not to mention the widespread conception of the "lascivious African" and the popular notions that blacks were more "sensuous" than intellectual, naturally lewd, and in possession of unusually large sex organs16 – it is remarkable that antebellum slavery advocates did not follow Priest in exploiting the theme of sexual impropriety that is foregrounded in the history of interpretation and implied by the biblical text.
Original Dishonor: Noah’s Curse and the Southern Defense of Slavery
