The
death-rate amongst slaves was high. To replace their losses, plantation
owners encouraged the slaves to have children. Child-bearing started
around the age of thirteen, and by twenty the women slaves would be
expected to have four or five children. To encourage child-bearing
some population owners promised women slaves their freedom after they
had produced fifteen children.
Young women were often advertised for sale as "good breeding
stock". To encourage child-bearing some population owners promised
women slaves their freedom after they had produced fifteen children.
One slave trader from Virginia boasted that his successful breeding
policies enabled him to sell 6,000 slave children a year.
(1)
Charles
Ball was married and living in Maryland when he was sold to a
master in South Carolina.
About sunrise we took up our march on the road to Columbia, as we
were told. Hitherto our master had not offered to sell any of us,
and had even refused to stop to talk to any one on the subject of
our sale, although he had several times been addressed on this point,
before we reached Lancaster; but soon after we departed from this
village, we were overtaken on the road by a man on horseback, who
accosted our driver by asking him if his niggars were for sale. The
latter replied, that he believed he would not sell any yet, as he
was on his way to Georgia, and cotton being now much in demand, he
expected to obtain high prices
for us from persons who were going to settle in the new purchase.
He, however, contrary to his custom, ordered us to stop, and told
the stranger he might look at us, and that he would find us as fine
a lot of hands as were ever imported into the country - that we were
all prime property, and he had no doubt would command his own prices
in Georgia.
The
stranger, who was a thin, weather-beaten, sunburned figure, then said,
he wanted a couple of breeding wenches, and would give as much for
them as they would bring in Georgia. He then walked along our line,
as we stood chained together, and looked at the whole of us - then
turning to the women; asked the prices of the two pregnant ones. Our
master replied, that these were two of the best breeding-wenches in
all Maryland - that one was twenty-two, and the other only nineteen
- that the first was already the mother of seven children, and the
other of four - that he had himself seen the children at the time
he bought their mothers - and that such wenches would be cheap at
a thousand dollars each; but as they were not able to keep up with
the gang, he would take twelve hundred dollars for the two.
(2)
Olaudah
Equiano,
The Life of Olaudah Equiano the African
(1789)
While I was thus employed by my master, I was often a witness to cruelties
of every kind, which were exercised on my unhappy fellow slaves. I
used frequently to have different cargoes of new Negroes in my care
for sale; and it was almost a constant practice with our clerks, and
other whites, to commit violent depredations on the chastity of the
female slaves; and these I was, though with reluctance, obliged to
submit to at all times, being unable to help them. When we have had
some of these slaves on board my master's vessels, to carry them to
other islands, or to America, I have known our mates to commit these
acts most shamefully, to the disgrace, not of Christians only, but
of men. I have even known them to gratify their brutal passion with
females not ten years old; and these abominations, some of them practised
to such scandalous excess, that one of our captains discharged the
mate and others on that account. And yet in Montserrat I have seen
a Negro man staked to the ground, and cut most shockingly, and then
his ears cut off bit by bit, because he had been connected with a
white woman, who was a common prostitute. As if it were no crime in
the whites to rob an innocent African girl of her virtue, but most
heinous in a black man only to gratify a passion of nature, where
the temptation was offered by one of a different color, though the
most abandoned woman of her species.
(3)
W.
L. Bost, aged 88 from Asheville, North Carolina, interviewed as part
of the Federal
Writers Project in 1937.
Plenty
of the colored women have children by the white men. She know better
than to not do what he say. Didn't have much of that until the men
from South Carolina come up here and settle and bring slaves. Then
they take them very same children what have they own blood and make
slaves out of them. If the missus find out she raise revolution. But
she hardly find out. The white men not going to tell and the nigger
women were always afraid to. So they just go on hoping that things
won't be that way always.
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