Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty

Rose Williams was a 16-year-old slave when her owner sent her to live in a cabin with a male slave named Rufus. At first, she thought that she was there to be a servant. She quicky learned that her owner, Hawkins, expected her to bear and raise children with Rufus. He threatened to whip her if she didn’t yield to his wishes. Rose assented.

From the beginning of their time in the Americas, women of African descent—particularly their childbearing—has been the subject of social regulation. In bondage, procreation had little to do with personal liberty and often occurred in the context of systemic oppression.

An enslaved woman’s commercial value often relied on her fertility, as procreation could increase profit by 5-6%. One report confirmed that a fertile woman was worth anywhere from one-sixth to one-quarter more than one who couldn’t breed. After the US instituted a ban on importing slaves after 1808, enslaved women’s childbearing became more important. Thomas Jefferson told his plantation manager in 1820 that he considered a woman who bore a child every two years to be more profitable than the best enslaved man on the farm. Unlike other slave societies in the Americas, the slave population in the US was self-perpetuating. However, an enslaved woman’s productivity mattered more than her fertility, leading slave owners and overseers to overwork their female slaves. Owners tried “to maximize both capacities as much as possible” (29).

Slave owners had numerous methods to incentivize enslaved women to bear children. Some offered relief from work in the field, as well as more clothing and food supplies. Others provided new mothers with livestock. Some enslaved women received presents that acknowledged their femininity, such as calico dresses or hair ribbons. Still others received freedom if they bore a lot of children. Rhoda Hunt, a woman born into slavery, recalled that her mother’s owner promised her freedom after bearing 12 children, but she died one month before the baby was due.

Fertile women were less often sold, so women had babies to remain close to their loved ones. Some enslaved women received relief from work during the last months of their pregnancy, but records show that they received little to no relief during the critical first and second trimesters. In addition, enslaved women began to have children at a younger age than white women did, and the first generation of women enslaved in the colonies had more children than their African mothers. These factors increased the slave population to 1.75 million by 1825.

Women who were infertile or somehow avoided childbearing were either sold off or, in some instances, flogged to death. Enslaved women who weren’t fecund were treated and sold like damaged goods, usually to unsuspecting buyers. This practice made Southern courts establish rules to address sellers’ and traders’ “misrepresentations about the fertility of slave women similar to rules governing the sale of other sorts of commodities” (30).

In 1974, historians Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman published Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery. Fogel and Engerman debunked the notion that slave owners bred slaves as they did livestock, claiming that slaves would have rebelled against the practice of massive breeding. Instead, the authors argued, owners encouraged reproduction through the incentives that Roberts outlines. Still, Fogel and Engerman didn’t rule out the likelihood of forced breeding to enhance productivity on plantations and increase a slave’s market value. In her review of slave narratives, scholar Thelma Jennings found that around 5% of women and 10% of men who were former slaves referred to the practice of forced breeding. Frederick Douglass mentioned in his autobiography that notorious slave breaker Edward Covey purchased a 20-year-old slave named Caroline specifically as a “breeder.” Others rented enslaved men in excellent physical shape to be studs. A former slave named Elige Davison recalled that his owner forced him to have sex with around 15 women. He estimated that he’d fathered more than 100 children. Some slave owners engaged in a different form of reproductive engineering—negative breeding. In this instance, they castrated enslaved men who they thought wouldn’t produce strong, healthy children.

In many cases, slave owners had sex with enslaved Black women, sometimes for the purpose of creating more slaves. By 1860, about 10% of the enslaved population was of the “mulatto” classification. Even after emancipation, Black women were sexually vulnerable. Black Episcopalian minister Alexander Crummel expressed this concern in The Black Woman of the South: Her Neglects and Her Needs (1881). He decried how a Black woman’s modesty received no concession and that, from childhood, “she was the doomed victim of the grossest passion” (32). To remain chaste, Crummel explained, “she had to fight like a tiger for the ownership…of her own person” (32).

The law reinforced the sexual exploitation of enslaved women by considering any child born to her to be a slave—and by failing to recognize the sexual assault of enslaved women as a crime. Rape was a weapon of terror with which many slave owners regularly reinforced the sense that enslaved women were human property. Hence, the Ku Klux Klan’s reign of terror during the late-19th and early-20th centuries often included the rape of Black women. This crime, Roberts asserts, belongs in the discussion of reproductive control because rape can lead to pregnancy, interfering with a woman’s decision about whether to have a baby.

During slavery, owners had an in futuro interest in any children their slaves might conceive—that is, wills determined who would inherit a slave’s potential children. The 1823 case Banks’ Administrator v. Marksberry “confirmed a master’s property interest in the reproductive capacity of his slaves” (36). Rachel Marksberry, the court decided, owned not only an enslaved woman named Pen, whom she inherited from her father, but also Pen’s “potential to bear future goods” (37). The law thus ensured that the relationship between owner and slave preceded that between mother and child.

Estimates hold that mainland North America received about 500,000 Africans by ship between 1700 and 1861. Some slave owners kept young children with their families so as not to harm productivity by inducing emotional distress. A South Carolina court ruled in the 1800s, however, that enslaved children, no matter how young, were sellable, as “the young of the slaves…stand on the same footing as other animals” (37). In addition, slaves were often wagers in gambling and assets in lawsuit awards. Sometimes, if an heir decided not to continue slaveholding, the result was separation of bonded enslaved families. The slave trade took children away from parents when they were “hired or apprenticed out to labor for others,” sometimes for as long as a decade (37). Slave traders sometimes sold away a baby from its mother while chaining her to other slaves and marching them to a market. Usually government-sponsored events, slave auctions often took place in front of courthouses.

On the plantation, if an enslaved woman was able to keep her children, she may not have been able to spend time with them. Slaves worked from sunup to sundown in most cases. Babies and young children usually stayed with other slaves who were too old, weak, or young to work in the fields. The infant mortality rate among enslaved communities in 1850 doubled that of white communities, and “fewer than two out of three Black children surviv[ed] to age ten” (39). These deaths were often due to malnutrition and illnesses. Some enslaved women brought their infant children with them to the fields. One woman tragically lost her child after creating “a makeshift cradle” in the ground (39) when a thunderstorm flooded it and the baby drowned.

Enslaved women, meanwhile, had the dual status of producer and reproducer. This created conflict in their existences. Owners and overseers whipped pregnant slaves after forcing them to lie down “in a depression in the ground” (42). The oversight of a pregnant enslaved woman’s relationship to her unborn child is “the first example of maternal-fetal conflict in American history” (42-43). Maternal-fetal conflict explains the way in which laws, social policies, and medical practices privilege a fetus over the pregnant woman’s interests. Today, this conflict results in a doctor wanting to treat a fetus apart from the pregnant woman. Slave owners regarded fetuses as separate entities that would result in future profits.

Slave owners used children to prevent enslaved women from running away or convince runaways to return to the plantation. To gain obedience, owners sometimes threatened to sell children. Thus, fewer women in bondage ran away from plantations than did men. Typically, runaway slaves were young men between ages 16 and 35. Enslaved women who did escape usually tried to take their children with them. Of the 151 female runaway slaves that New Orleans newspapers advertised in the 1850s, none left their children behind. Those who did abandon their children thought they could depend on the owner to feed and clothe them properly and could rely on other enslaved women on the plantation to raise them.

The control of enslaved people’s reproduction objectified them. Enslaved people also became devoid of any sense of when they were born, their connections to relatives, and their sense of ancestry. Sociologist Orlando Patterson termed this “natal alienation,” which resulted in creating human tools that the slave owner could dispose of however he wished.

Black women, however, often resisted slave owners’ efforts to control their reproduction. Some escaped, while others feigned illness. Still others “endured severe punishment” and even “fought back rather than submit to slave masters’ sexual domination” (47). Those who became pregnant sometimes “played the lady” (46)—that is, pretended to be in a more delicate condition due to pregnancy. Although these women’s complaints of illness annoyed plantation owners and overseers, they couldn’t verify the complaints through external symptoms. Still, these women, typically forced to work into the final months of their pregnancy, often had just cause to complain about feeling ill.

Some enslaved women avoided pregnancy through folk remedies that provided contraception and induced abortions. However, how many miscarriages were intentional and how many resulted from harsh labor conditions is difficult to know. Dr. E.M. Pendleton of Georgia wrote in 1849 that his enslaved patients “had many more abortions and miscarriages than white women” (49). Some plantation owners held that Black people knew secrets that allowed them to end pregnancies in the first trimester. While many enslaved women used herbal methods to terminate pregnancies, some caused trauma to their bodies. One woman shoved a two- or three-inch roll of rags into her vaginal canal. In addition, midwives helped enslaved women induce abortions. Despite these methods, enslaved women were less successful than white women in avoiding pregnancy. Birth rates among white women declined, in fact, during the 19th century.

Infanticide was yet another form of enslaved women’s resistance to reproductive control. A Missouri court convicted an enslaved woman named Jane of suffocating her infant daughter, Angeline, to death in 1831. Historian and former judge A. Leon Higginbotham, Jr. asks two key questions about Jane’s case: Did Missouri prosecute the woman because it cared about the life of the child, or did it prosecute because Jane’s act denied her owner his profits from the potential sale or exploitation of Angeline? Higginbotham also wonders what motivated Jane to kill her daughter. He posits that it may have been “an act of mercy” (50). Roberts wonders if Jane killed her child to defy the institution in which she lived—that is, taking one small step toward the end of slavery: By having children, enslaved women perpetuated the system.

On the other hand, infanticide wasn’t a sensible means to overthrow slavery. The sporadic occurrence of the act wouldn’t have affected the institution. Moreover, enslaved people had low suicide rates—one-third that of white people during the antebellum era—and were less inclined to view death as a viable means of escape from their circumstances. Still, accusations of enslaved mothers smothering their infants—either deliberately or by carelessly rolling over the babies in bed—were common. Recent research has shown that the cause of the high rate of infant mortality among slaves was likely “poor prenatal care” (51). Enslaved American children had lower survival rates than white and European children—and even lower than those among Caribbean slave populations.

The increase of slave populations despite the blights of abuse, disease, and endless toil testifies to enslaved mothers’ love and care for their children. Some, when they learned that their owners intended to sell their children, worked to find ways to keep their children close by. One group of enslaved women owned by farmer St. George Tucker wrote to him after hearing news that he’d sell two of them from Missouri to Texas, asking that he keep the women local. They offered the names of four potential buyers within Missouri. Freed Black women often purchased their female relatives’ freedom. A woman named Polly, wrongfully held in bondage, successfully sued a white man in 1842, demanding that he return her daughter, Lucy.

Enslaved people had a broad understanding of family and kinship, and they typically formed close bonds with those who weren’t blood relations. Black adults expected children to address them as “uncle” or “aunt.” After the Civil War, many former slaves informally adopted Black children orphaned due to displacement or their parents’ deaths. This flexible family structure still exists among Black families today. Sociologist Robert Hill estimated that extended relatives informally adopted more than 15% of Black children in the latter part of the 20th century due to their parents’ youth, unemployment, or inability to care for them for other reasons.