![]() Anna Matilda King of Georgia assured her daughter that she would inherit not only the slave Christiann but also “her child and future children.” This wish to benefit future generations of slaveholding families pressed owners to look for ways of ensuring that enslaved mothers bore plenty of children. Human reproduction was so important to the continuation of slavery that members of the South’s ruling class willed their heirs the unborn children of slaves as well as living people. Former slave Boston Blackwell, who witnessed the sale of two women in Memphis, Tennessee, reported that a girl of fifteen who had no children sold for $800, but a breeding woman sold for $1,500. Women entering their childbearing years-especially those who had proven their fertility through the birth of a baby-sold easily and for a high price. If enslaved mothers did not bear sufficient numbers of children to take the place of aged and dying workers, the South could not continue as a slave society. The idea was at once both powerful and seductive and shaped the way women experienced enslavement, the way owners thought about the future of slavery, and the way doctors practiced medicine.Īs of 1808, when Congress ended the nation’s participation in the international slave trade… the only practical way of increasing the number of slave laborers was through new births. Women’s childbearing capacity became a commodity that could be traded on the open market.ĭuring the antebellum era the expectation increased among members of the owning class that enslaved women would contribute to the economic success of the plantation not only through productive labor but also through procreation. Emboldened by law and custom to do with human chattels as they wished, (slave) owners felt entitled to intervene in even the most intimate of matters. Control of one’s body was not a fundamental right of slaves. …an important aspect of slavery… has been all too often ignored: slaveholders expected to appropriate and exploit the reproductive lives of enslaved women. Upon reading this, you will understand how lacking in humanity and dignity this peculiar institution was: I’ve provided some excerpts from that chapter below. The first chapter of the book, titled “Procreation,” has a gripping account of the stakes involved in the reproductive ability of slave women. The book tells the history of a somewhat esoteric subject: the need of slaveholders, and the doctors they hired, to control and manage the bodies and reproductive lives of slave women.īut while the subject is esoteric, the details of how this played out in plantation life are chilling and disturbing. Some insights on this are given in the book Birthing a Slave: Motherhood and Medicine in the Antebellum South , by Marie Jenkins Schwartz. Most of us don’t “get” what it was about inhuman bondage that made it so inhuman.įor example: what was it like to be slave mother? But for many of us, we don’t have a grasp on how horrible the institution was, in the day to day life of an enslaved person. We might understand what it’s like to be denied freedom or dignity at an intellectual level. Specifically, we don’t know how dehumanizing it was to be a slave. Most people know of slavery, but we don’t know about slavery.
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