Slave breeding in the United States

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Slave breeding in the United States were those practices of slave ownership that aimed to influence the reproduction of slaves in order to increase the wealth of slaveholders.

Slave breeding included coerced sexual relations between male and female slaves, promoting pregnancies of slaves, and favoring female slaves who produced a relatively large number of children.

The purpose of slave breeding was to produce new slaves without incurring the cost of purchase, to fill labor shortages caused by the termination of the Atlantic slave trade.

Slave breeding

See also: Field slaves and House slaves

Slaveholders looked at the fertility of slave women as part of their productivity, and intermittently forced the women to have large numbers of children.

The laws that ultimately ended the Atlantic Slave Trade came about as a result of the efforts of abolitionist Christian groups such as the Society of Friends, known as Quakers, and Evangelicals led by William Wilberforce, whose efforts through the Committee for the Abolition of the Slave Trade led to the passage of the Slave Trade Act by the British Parliament in 1807. This led to increased calls for the same ban in America, supported by members of the U.S. Congress from both the North and the South as well as President Thomas Jefferson.

At the same time that the importation of slaves from Africa was being restricted or eliminated, the United States was undergoing a rapid expansion of cotton, sugar cane and rice production in the Deep South and the West. Invention of the cotton gin enabled the profitable cultivation of short-staple cotton, which could be produced more widely than other types; this led to King Cotton throughout the Deep South. Slaves were treated as a commodity by owners and traders alike, and were regarded as the crucial labor for the production of lucrative cash crops that fed the triangle trade.

The slaves were managed as assets in the same way as chattel; slaveholders passed laws regulating slavery and the slave trade designed to protect their financial interests; there was little protection for the slaves. On large plantations, slave families were separated for different types of labor. Men tended to be assigned to large field gangs. Workers were assigned to the task for which they were best physically suited according to the overseer.

Breeding in response to end of slave imports

The prohibition of the African slave-trade after 1807 limited the supply of slaves in the United States. The invention of the cotton gin enabled expanded cultivation in the uplands of short-staple cotton, leading to clearing lands cultivating cotton through large areas of the Deep South, especially the Black Belt. The demand for labor in the area increased sharply and an internal slave market expanded. At the same time, the Upper South had an excess supply of slaves because of a shift to mixed crops agriculture, which was less labor-intensive than tobacco. During this time period, the terms "breeding slaves", "child bearing women", "breeding period", "too old to breed", etc., became familiar.

Planters in the Upper South states started selling slaves to the Deep South, generally through slave traders. Louisville, Kentucky, on the Ohio River was a major slave market and port for shipping slaves downriver by the Mississippi to the South. New Orleans had the largest slave market in the country and became the fourth largest city in the US by 1840 and the wealthiest, mostly because of its slave trade and associated businesses.

Slave accounts

See also: Slave narrative

In the antebellum years, numerous escaped slaves wrote about their experiences in books called slave narratives. Many recounted that at least a portion of slave owners continuously interfered in the sexual lives of their slaves (usually the women). The slave narratives also testified that slave women were subjected to arranged marriages, forced matings, sexual violation by masters, their sons or overseers, and other forms of abuse.

The historian E. Franklin Frazier, in his book The Negro Family, stated that "there were masters who, without any regard for the preferences of their slaves, mated their human chattel as they did their stock." Ex-slave Maggie Stenhouse remarked, "Durin' slavery there were stockmen. They was weighed and tested. A man would rent the stockman and put him in a room with some young women he wanted to raise children from."

Dynamics

Personhood to thinghood

Several factors coalesced to make the breeding of slaves a common practice by the end of the 18th century, chief among them the enactment of laws and practices that transformed the view of slaves from "personhood" into "thinghood." In this way, slaves could be bought and sold as chattel without presenting a challenge to the religious beliefs and social mores of the society at large. All rights were to the owner of the slave, with the slave having no rights of self-determination either to his own person, or to that of his spouse, or his children.

Slaveholders began to think that slavery was grounded in the Bible. This view was inspired by a reinterpretation of the Genesis passage "Cursed be Canaan; The lowest of slaves Shall he be to his brothers" (Genesis 9); Ham, son of Noah and father of Canaan, was deemed the antediluvian progenitor of the African people. Whites used the Bible to justify the economic use of slave labor. Subjugation of slaves was taken as a natural right of the white slave owners. The second class position of the slave was not limited to his relationship with the slave master, but was to be in relation to all whites. Slaves were considered subject to white persons.

Demographics

In a study of 2,588 slaves in 1860 by the economist Richard Sutch, he found that on slave-holdings with at least one woman, the average ratio of women to men exceeded 2:1. The imbalance was greater in the "selling states", where the excess of women over men was 300 per thousand.

Contrasting scholarly views

Slaves dancing on a South Carolina plantation (The Old Plantation), c. 1790.

Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman reject the idea that systematic slave breeding was a major economic concern in their 1974 book Time on the Cross. They argue that there is very meager evidence for the systematic breeding of slaves for sale in the market in the Upper South during the 19th century. They distinguish systematic breeding—the interference in normal sexual patterns by masters with an aim to increase fertility or encourage desirable characteristics—from pro-natalist policies—the generalized encouragement of large families through a combination of rewards, improved living and working conditions for fertile women and their children, and other policy changes by masters. They point out that the demographic evidence is subject to a number of interpretations. The reports from witnesses are apocryphal in that they never specify any particular place in which breeding practices were alleged to have taken place.

Ned Sublette, co-author of the The American Slave Coast: A History of the Slave-Breeding Industry states that the reproductive worth of "breeding women" was essential to the young country's expansion not just for labor but as merchandise and collateral stemming from a shortage of silver, gold, or sound paper tender. He concludes that slaves and their descendants were used as human savings accounts with newborns serving as interest that functioned as the basis of money and credit in a market premised on the continual expansion of slavery.

See also

• Children of the plantation
• Goodbye Uncle Tom

General:

• Eugenics
• Breeding
• Treatment of slaves in the United States
• History of slavery in the United States

Further reading

• Randall M. Miller, John David Smith (1988). Dictionary of Afro-American Slavery, Greenwood Press. ISBN 0-313-23814-6
• Frederic Bancroft (1931). Slave Trading in the Old South, American Classics. ISBN 978-1-57003-103-8
• Eddie Donoghue, Black Breeding Machines: The Breeding of Negro Slaves in the Diaspora, AuthorHouse, 2008, pp. 134–36. This is a self-published book, not considered a Reliable Source by Wikipedia guidelines.
• Robert William Fogel and Stanley Engerman (1995). Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery, New York, W. W. Norton & Co. ISBN 0393312186.