By Brooks Chinembiri

ABSENT from the traditional story of slavery is the fact that slave breeding was an integral component of slavery and the slave experience for the majority of the female slave population.

In fact, according to researchers, while initially enslaved men outnumbered women, by the end of slavery, especially in America the population of women slaves by far outnumbered those of male slaves.  Thanks to their ability of carrying the child in the womb.

Slave breeding is no different from animal husbandry. 

The slave owner just like a cattle rancher controls and manages reproduction of all his slaves in order to get rich. 

Much like a cow, chicken or any other domesticated animal controlled propagation options were available to the slave owner to increase his ‘property’ value by numbers.

To coerce the female slaves to reproduce more often, some slave owners offered rewards such as less work, food and decent clothes. 

In some few cases slave owners made good their promise of freeing the female slave after giving birth to an agreed number of children. 

In most cases this was fifteen.

Female slaves just like any sane human being resisted the sexual and reproductive exploitation from their masters. 

The resistance manifested in the murder of the slave owner, running away, infanticide or self-imposed abortions. 

In some cases some female slaves committed suicide in order to avoid increasing the slave population.

Former American President Thomas Jefferson and founder of the State of Virginia in the North was a slave breeder just like many other American Presidents that period. 

He recognised the value of slave breeding when he stated that his male slaves paled in comparison to that of his female slaves who bore children for sale.

Is the Caucasian race normal?

According to Dorothy Sterling, writing in the book “We are your black sisters: Black women in the nineteenth century” a male slave owner did not have to buy a male slave or rent a stud to inseminate the female slaves or use an agent. 

He could propagate himself and not share the profits with anyone.

Owning a female slave with reproductive promise was a must for people in pursuit of upward mobility.  

As one slave owner calculated; “I own a woman who cost me $400 when a girl in 1827. Admitshe made me

nothing-only worth her victuals and clothing. She now has three children worth over $3 000 …I would not this night touch $700 for her. Her oldest boy is worth $1 250 cash and I can get it.” 

To encourage slave breeding, a South Caroline Court, in 1809 passed a judgement stating that (slave) children could be sold away from their mothers at any age because the young slaves…stand on the same footing as animals and property of the slave owner.

To strengthen the slave breeding programme, fraud in the sale of infertile females was a common civil action. 

The common law policy which governed most of these cases was that if a buyer took possession of a woman who had been certified as fit to bear children by the seller, and it could be demonstrated that the seller knew the woman was incapable of having children, the sale was voided and proceeds refunded.

It is very difficult to accept let alone understand the white man’s sudden turn around to embrace a black man as an equal.  

In some cases the child of a slave was willed away from the mother even before birth. 

According to the Negro Year Book, in 1727, Isaac Warner bequeathed his wife, Ann, an unborn child of a slave woman called Sarah. 

In South Carolina about the same time, a slave owner Mary Kincaid bequeathed a slave woman named Sillar to her grandchild and Sillar’s two children to other grand children in a will providing that, if Sillar should bear a third child, he or she would go to yet another unborn grandchild. 

Slave owners were granted carte blanche to rape and impregnate their slaves. 

Since slave owners had unfettered sexual access to their slaves, a slave owner was able to be the biological owner of many slave children on his plantation. 

The state of the law made sexual assault a wise investment strategy for a cash-strapped slave owner who was interested in increasing the number of his slaves.

In pursuing that ‘wise investment policy’ a slave owner in most cases did not discriminate his own biological daughters from those fathered by his friends resulting in him impregnating his own daughters. 

The so-called human rights preachers and defenders called it ‘wise investment policy’. What a shame.

Contrary to the public perception of that day which saw adjudged female slaves as lascivious and sex-crazed, many female slaves intentionally avoided sexual encounters, especially when it involved a slave owner or his designee. 

Numerous female slaves took great pains to avoid the sexual advances as a way to avoid reproduction, despite the understanding that resistance would often bring about punishment or sale.

As such, sex and reproduction avoidance became an unquestionably political form of resistance towards slave breeding. 

In addition to abstinence, many historians and anthropologists believe that female slaves used a number of birth control techniques in order to avoid pregnancy in the event they could not avoid sex. 

By ingesting certain plants and berries, female slaves avoided pregnancy and thereby resisted and fought slave breeding.

Some female slaves who could not successfully avoid sex consequently became pregnant, but did not carry their babies to term due to self-imposed abortions. 

These women were subject to horrendous ill-treatment such that very few barely reached the age of twenty.

As the tobacco plantations of Virginia in the South increased in number so was the demand for more slaves. 

The planters were delighted when their women slaves turned out to be prolific: ‘every baby’, exulted one Virginia planter, was worth US$200…the moment it drew breath”.

A credulous reporter for a paper in Lynchburg scooped a story about a “very remarkable” slave woman who by the age of 41 was reported to have borne 41 children ‘including doublets’. 

The proud owner of a Virginia plantation named ‘Prairie’ boasted that among his slaves, Carolina had given birth to 10 children in 20 years, but that Milly was catching up with nine children born in only nine years.

According to Oliver Ransford in his book, The Story of Transatlantic Slavery, no one considered it unusual when members of the Presbyterian Church of Prince Edward County, invested in two girl slaves for breeding purposes. 

Indeed their foresight was applauded 60 years later in 1835 when it had produced over 70 descendants who had been sold to the Church’s great profit.

Sam and Louisa Everett, in interviews with the Slave Narrative Project in 1936 spoke of a harrowing story of how they were forced to marry and produce babies for sale. 

“Marse  (master) Jim called me and Sam ter (to)him and ordered Sam to pull off his shirt-that was all McClain niggers wore — without under paints-and he said to me: Nor “do you think you can stand this big nigger?”. He had that old bull whip flung across his chest and lawd (Lord) that man could hit so hard! I jes said: “yassur, I guess so, and tried to hide my face so I couldn’t see Sam’s nakedness but he made me look at him anyhow”.

“Well, he told us that we must git busy and do it in his presence, and we had to do it. After that we were considered man and wife. On this plantation we were more than 100 slaves who were mated indiscriminately and without regard to family relationship”.

Breeding of slaves in the Southern States led to incestuous relationship. Slave owners could have as many children as possible with their female slaves. 

Of course, their white wives were aware of what was going on. Wise investment, they called it.

According to William J Anderson, in his book, Twenty Four Years a Slave, published in 1857, there was a man in the South who had six children with his female slave.  

Then there was a fuse between him and his mistress, ‘wife’ and he sold all the children and the concubine serve for the oldest slave daughter. 

A few months later he had a child with his daughter, and sold mother and child before birth. Incest was common and encouraged in order to get rich quickly.

Maria was a 13-year-old servant. One day receiving no response to her call the mistress began searching the house for her. 

Finally she opened the parlour door and there was the child with the master. The master ran out of the room, mounted his horse and rode off to escape though well he knew that the full fury would fall upon the young head of his victim. 

The mistress beat the child and locked her up in a smokehouse. For two weeks the child was constantly whipped. Some of the elderly slaves attempted to plead with the mistress on Maria’s behalf and even hinted that it was the master that was to blame. 

The mistress reply was typical. “She will know better in future”.