Slave breeding in the United States - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

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, sexual relations between master and slave with the aim of producing slave children, 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, and to attempt to improve the health and productivity of slaves. Slave breeding was condoned in the South because slaves were considered to be subhuman chattel, and were not entitled to the same rights accorded to free persons.

Background

The first slaves in English colonial America arrived at Jamestown

Jamestown

-Saint Kitts and Nevis:*Jamestown, the name of a former town on the edge of Morton Bay on Nevis in the late 17th century-United Kingdom:*Jamestown, Rossshire, Scotland*Jamestown, West Dunbartonshire, Scotland*Jamestown, Fife, Scotland...

in 1619. They were about 30-40 Angola

Angola

Angola, officially the Republic of Angola , is a country in south-central Africa bordered by Namibia on the south, the Democratic Republic of the Congo on the north, and Zambia on the east; its west coast is on the Atlantic Ocean with Luanda as its capital city...

ns captured by English pirate ships, the Treasurer and the White Lion after a battle with a Portuguese

Portugal

Portugal , officially the Portuguese Republic is a country situated in southwestern Europe on the Iberian Peninsula. Portugal is the westernmost country of Europe, and is bordered by the Atlantic Ocean to the West and South and by Spain to the North and East. The Atlantic archipelagos of the...

trading ship, San Juan Bautista, bound for Veracruz, Mexico

Veracruz, Mexico

Veracruz, Mexico, may refer to:*The state of Veracruz, one of the 32 component federal entities of the United Mexican States*Veracruz, Veracruz, a major seaport and largest city in that state...

. As the kingdom of Ndongo had converted to Christianity, it is likely the "charter generation" of Angolans were baptized Christians. They joined about 1000 English indentured servants in the colony who performed most of the agricultural labor. For years, slavery did not exist as an institution in the English colonies of North America. Indentured servitude was the common practice as a means for whites and blacks alike to pay their passage to the New World. However, by the time of the American Revolution

American Revolution

The American Revolution was the political upheaval during the last half of the 18th century in which thirteen colonies in North America joined together to break free from the British Empire, combining to become the United States of America...

in 1776, the enslavement of black Africans had become an institution, in large part because of the Atlantic triangle slave trade

Triangular trade

Triangular trade, or triangle trade, is a historical term indicating among three ports or regions. Triangular trade usually evolves when a region has export commodities that are not required in the region from which its major imports come...

.

Slave breeding became a common practice among slave holders

Slavery

Slavery is a system under which people are treated as property to be bought and sold, and are forced to work. Slaves can be held against their will from the time of their capture, purchase or birth, and deprived of the right to leave, to refuse to work, or to demand compensation...

and plantation owners

Plantation

A plantation is a long artificially established forest, farm or estate, where crops are grown for sale, often in distant markets rather than for local on-site consumption...

as a result of several factors, including fears of rebellion from the increasing numbers of newly arrived slaves from Africa

Africa

Africa is the world's second largest and second most populous continent, after Asia. At about 30.2 million km² including adjacent islands, it covers 6% of the Earth's total surface area and 20.4% of the total land area...

, and the economic impact caused by newly passed laws that restricted or eliminated the importation of slaves to Britain

United Kingdom

The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...

and the United States

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

. The laws that ultimately ended the Atlantic triangle trade

Atlantic slave trade

The Atlantic slave trade, also known as the trans-atlantic slave trade, refers to the trade in slaves that took place across the Atlantic ocean from the sixteenth through to the nineteenth centuries...

came about as a result of the efforts of abolitionist

Abolitionism

Abolitionism is a movement to end slavery.In western Europe and the Americas abolitionism was a movement to end the slave trade and set slaves free. At the behest of Dominican priest Bartolomé de las Casas who was shocked at the treatment of natives in the New World, Spain enacted the first...

religious groups such as the Society of Friends, known as Quakers, and Evangelicals

Evangelicalism

Evangelicalism is a Protestant Christian movement which began in Great Britain in the 1730s and gained popularity in the United States during the series of Great Awakenings of the 18th and 19th century.Its key commitments are:...

led by William Wilberforce

William Wilberforce

William Wilberforce was a British politician, a philanthropist and a leader of the movement to abolish the slave trade. A native of Kingston upon Hull, Yorkshire, he began his political career in 1780, eventually becoming the independent Member of Parliament for Yorkshire...

, whose efforts through the Committee for the Abolition of the Slave Trade led to the passage of the Slave Trade Act

Slave Trade Act

The Slave Trade Act was an Act of Parliament of the United Kingdom passed on 25 March 1807, with the long title "An Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade". The original act is in the Parliamentary Archives...

by the British Parliament

Parliament

A parliament is a legislature, especially in those countries whose system of government is based on the Westminster system modeled after that of the United Kingdom. The name is derived from the French , the action of parler : a parlement is a discussion. The term came to mean a meeting at which...

in 1807. This led to increased calls for the same ban in America, supported by members of the U.S. Congress

United States Congress

The United States Congress is the bicameral legislature of the federal government of the United States, consisting of the Senate and the House of Representatives. The Congress meets in the United States Capitol in Washington, D.C....

from both the North and the South as well as President Thomas Jefferson

Thomas Jefferson

Thomas Jefferson was the principal author of the United States Declaration of Independence and the Statute of Virginia for Religious Freedom , the third President of the United States and founder of the University of Virginia...

.

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

Cotton

Cotton is a soft, fluffy staple fiber that grows in a boll, or protective capsule, around the seeds of cotton plants of the genus Gossypium. The fiber is almost pure cellulose. The botanical purpose of cotton fiber is to aid in seed dispersal....

, tobacco

Tobacco

Tobacco is an agricultural product processed from the leaves of plants in the genus Nicotiana. It can be consumed, used as a pesticide and, in the form of nicotine tartrate, used in some medicines...

, sugar cane and rice

Rice

Rice is the seed of the monocot plants Oryza sativa or Oryza glaberrima . As a cereal grain, it is the most important staple food for a large part of the world's human population, especially in East Asia, Southeast Asia, South Asia, the Middle East, and the West Indies...

production in the Deep South and the West as a result of increased immigration, largely from Northern Europe. Slaves were treated as a commodity

Commodity

In economics, a commodity is the generic term for any marketable item produced to satisfy wants or needs. Economic commodities comprise goods and services....

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. Separating slave families for the purposes of assigning workers to the task for which they were best physically suited was a common practice.

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 dehumanization

Dehumanization

Dehumanization is to make somebody less human by taking away his or her individuality, the creative and interesting aspects of his or her personality, or his or her compassion and sensitivity towards others. Dehumanization may be directed by an organization or may be the composite of individual...

of slaves through 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

Religion

Religion is a collection of cultural systems, belief systems, and worldviews that establishes symbols that relate humanity to spirituality and, sometimes, to moral values. Many religions have narratives, symbols, traditions and sacred histories that are intended to give meaning to life or to...

and social mores

Mores, in sociology, are any given society's particular norms, virtues, or values. The word mores is a plurale tantum term borrowed from Latin, which has been used in the English language since the 1890s....

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.

This psychological transformation of slaves from fellow human beings with all the same rights as bestowed by natural law

Natural law

Natural law, or the law of nature , is any system of law which is purportedly determined by nature, and thus universal. Classically, natural law refers to the use of reason to analyze human nature and deduce binding rules of moral behavior. Natural law is contrasted with the positive law Natural...

, to that of chattel, was aided by the view, propagated by slave traders and owners, as well as religious leaders, that slavery was itself grounded in the Bible

Bible

The Bible refers to any one of the collections of the primary religious texts of Judaism and Christianity. There is no common version of the Bible, as the individual books , their contents and their order vary among denominations...

. This was the beginning of the racist view that slavery was a natural state and destiny for Negroes, while Whites were destined by God to be superior. Therefore, subjugation of slaves was taken as a natural right of the white slave owners. The inferiority of the slave was not limited to his relationship with the slave master, but was instead extended to all whites. No matter the situation, no matter the person, be it child to adult, slaves were automatically subject to the whims and wills of all white persons.

The slave point of view

In the antebellum

History of the United States (1789–1849)

With the election of George Washington as the first president in 1789, the new government acted quickly to rebuild the nation's financial structure. Enacting the program of Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton, the government assumed the Revolutionary war debts of the state and the national...

years, numerous escaped slaves became literate (some already were) and 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

E. Franklin Frazier

Edward Franklin Frazier , was an American sociologist. His 1932 Ph.D. dissertation The Negro Family in Chicago, later released as a book The Negro Family in the United States in 1939, analyzed the cultural and historical forces that influenced the development of the African American family from the...

, 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."

Other evidence

The prohibition of the African slave-trade after 1807 limited the supply of slaves in the United States. The invention of the cotton gin

Cotton gin

A cotton gin is a machine that quickly and easily separates cotton fibers from their seeds, a job formerly performed painstakingly by hand...

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

Black Belt (U.S. region)

The Black Belt is a region of the Southern United States. Although the term originally described the prairies and dark soil of central Alabama and northeast Mississippi, it has long been used to describe a broad agricultural region in the American South characterized by a history of plantation...

. 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

Louisville, Kentucky

Louisville is the largest city in the U.S. state of Kentucky, and the county seat of Jefferson County. Since 2003, the city's borders have been coterminous with those of the county because of a city-county merger. The city's population at the 2010 census was 741,096...

on the Ohio River

Ohio River

The Ohio River is the largest tributary, by volume, of the Mississippi River. At the confluence, the Ohio is even bigger than the Mississippi and, thus, is hydrologically the main stream of the whole river system, including the Allegheny River further upstream...

was a major slave market and port for shipping slaves downriver

Downriver

Downriver is the unofficial name for a collection of 18 suburban cities and townships in Wayne County, Michigan south of Detroit along the western shore of the Detroit River....

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.

Demographics

In a study of 2,588 slaves in 1860 by the economist

Economist

An economist is a professional in the social science discipline of economics. The individual may also study, develop, and apply theories and concepts from economics and write about economic policy...

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

External links

Eddie Donoghue, Black Breeding Machines, AuthorHouse 2008
Slave Breeding, Genealogy Trails - not a valid source, no footnotes/citations

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