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Chapter 1

Conceiving Moral and Industrious Subjects: Women, Children, and Abolition

Until the 1780s, female slaves’ reproductive potential was tied to capitalistic ventures and racial ideologies that justified slavery. Slave owners claimed the offspring of their female slaves as natural extensions of their rights of ownership. Rewriting centuries-old European practices in which children took the status of their fathers, colonial legislators wrote new laws that fixed descent upon mothers—partus sequitur ventrem. Yet few slave owners benefited from the capital claims placed on the womb. As noted earlier, brutal punishment, exhausting work regimes, and inadequate diets combined to depress women’s fertility. Of the few women who conceived and gave birth, more than half buried their babies before their second birthdays. Diseases as well as material and medical lack, which plagued the environments into which slave infants were born, made their deaths more likely than their survival.

Faced with low birthrates and high mortality rates (for infants as well as adults), planters in the West Indian sugar colonies depended on the slave trade for replacing workers. The slaving ships that traversed the Atlantic from West Africa to the Americas supplied planters with human cargo who barely survived the pestilent Middle Passage. The fact that women who served as replacement laborers were Middle Passage survivors further worked against the calculations buyers made to capitalize on females’ reproductive potential. As victims of physical and sexual abuse who were chained in their own and their fellow captives’ filth, the disease-ridden, malnourished women who landed in the Americas arrived almost incapable of fulfilling their reproductive potential. Moreover, having experienced or witnessed family loss through sale, premature death, or forceful removal from home, captive women were likely reluctant to birth and raise children destined for shortened, uncertain, and impoverished lives.

Appalled by the vicious cycle of destitution, disease, and death that marked slavery and the slave trade, evangelicals and humanitarians in Britain spoke against enslavement. Beginning at first with the singular efforts of evangelicals like John Wesley and the Quakers, abolitionists demanded an immediate end to what they viewed as an immoral and inhumane system. The extreme brutalities of slavery and the denial of liberty “violated all the Laws of Justice, Mercy, and Truth,” Wesley proclaimed, and should be abolished at all cost, even at the collapse of the sugar plantation system.¹ Despite these early efforts in the 1760s and 1770s, it would take at least another decade before an identifiable national campaign was firmly under way. What was different in the 1780s was the strategy of campaigners.

Abolitionists were up against a deeply rooted and politically well supported economic system that was instrumental in building the naval power and wealth of Britain. Slavery and the slave trade therefore were sanctioned and protected by the imperial Parliament and wealthy influential elites.² From the previous generation of activists, campaigners in the 1780s learned that a platform of “moral absolutism” alone could not uproot a deeply entrenched, profitable, and politically privileged system.³ A successful abolition campaign needed to avoid radical positions like those taken by earlier lobbyists, such as Wesley, who believed that the economic cost of abolition was immaterial compared to ending the moral evils slavery inflicted. Because due consideration had to be given to the money of investors and viable alternatives to slave labor, a strategic and gradual approach was needed.⁴ Enslaved women’s reproductive ability offered a way to balance these imperatives.

Abolitionist writers of the 1780s proposed improving the material and medical conditions of young enslaved women in order to promote biological reproduction. Balancing sex ratios and encouraging monogamous marriages were also central to the proposed reforms to resolve the problem of female infertility and low birthrates. Additionally, abolitionists promoted educating and socializing children born of such efforts through religious instruction and missionary schools. The socialization of enslaved children would center on Christian values, particularly those relating to marriage and sexuality. It would also include a labor apprenticeship system whereby children would learn to be diligent and obedient workers. Separate training for boys and girls would further facilitate children’s learning their appropriate gender roles. Promoting biological reproduction by reforming slavery as well as improving the moral and work ethics of enslaved children was not just about abolition. Abolitionists were against slavery, but they were not opposed to the economic, political, and cultural missions of British colonialism. How well enslaved people adapted to British cultural institutions determined their readiness to become civilized, free subjects. The reproductive bodies of young enslaved women linked abolitionist goals for ending slavery and promoting reform and the civilization of blacks.

Despite revised strategies, the second generation of abolitionists did not avoid entanglements. The ideological struggles between activists, government officials, the slaving interests, and the enslaved were many and varied. Activists, like William Wilberforce and James Ramsay, conflicted with one another because they had different ideas about how to control women’s reproductive labor. Collectively, reformers clashed with the imperial government, which was concerned about financially ruining the colonies or interfering with rights of governance. Abolitionist visions further contradicted the beliefs of the proslavery vanguard. Slave owners rejected the notion that as an inferior people, Africans and their descendants could ever be fit for freedom or could share the rights and privileges of Englishmen. Plantation owners and agents were also not confident that black people could be productive without the coercion of slavery. Finally, the bodily and moral reforms abolitionist had in mind for enslaved women and their children reflected British cultural values. Such ideals were at odds with what people of African descent living in the West Indies practiced and envisioned for their lives once they obtained freedom. The contests over abolition and reform hinged on competing ideas about how to control reproductive labor and who benefited from women’s reproductive potential.

The Biological Reproduction Argument for Abolition

Several abolitionists emphasized how slavery and the slave trade undermined the reproductive potential of captive women, and how best to harness it as a resource for colonial improvement and a path to freedom. By offering proposals for gradual reform, spearheaded by slave owners rather than Parliament, James Ramsay and William Wilberforce gained significant influence as abolitionists. The still fresh wounds of Parliament’s infringement on the constitutional rights of North American colonists made abolitionists cautious of arousing the disapproval of government ministers who wished to avoid a similar debacle. Although unsuccessful, gradualism with the promise of increased returns seemed best to avoid conflicts and opposition from Parliament, colonial governments, and planters. Ramsay also derived prestige because previously he resided in the West Indies as a vicar, doctor, and slave owner. His rendering of the “facts” he witnessed firsthand in a pamphlet, An Enquiry into the Effects of Putting a Stop to the African Slave Trade (1784), and book, An Essay on the Treatment and Conversion of African Slaves in the British Colonies (1784), received mass support. Subsidizing their reprinting and distribution, the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade, formed in 1787, distributed these writings across Britain.⁵

Wilberforce also garnered national attention because his position as member of Parliament uniquely placed him to present petitions and legislation to Parliament. His sheer persistence enhanced his notoriety. In 1790 alone, for instance, Wilberforce submitted at least eight bills to Parliament. Moreover, Wilberforce adjusted his arguments for abolition along the lines of what he thought would gain support from detractors in the government. Rejection by parliamentarians who believed it their duty to defend “traditional imperial interest” forced him, for example, to expand his arguments beyond moral and religious reasons. By 1806, Wilberforce appealed to previously rejected arguments that colonial slavery was a backward, inefficient system.⁶ He suggested prohibiting the slave trade as a necessary first step to persuade West Indian stakeholders to initiate reforms that would enhance reproduction among enslaved women. As Wilberforce argued, reproducing laborers locally would best allow colonial authorities to nurture the desired habits of the subject population.

Abolitionists aligned abolition and colonial reform with the reproductive capacities of female slaves in several ways. However, the most fundamental link they made was through shutting down the slave trade. From an abolitionist perspective, the slave trade encouraged various habits of cruelty, which once removed would secure new generations of laborers. James Ramsay firmly believed that as long as the slave market remained open slaveholders would continue to depend on it as they viewed it as a more expedient measure to maintain productivity. “From their eagerness to push on the cultures of the estates,” he wrote, they would continue to make their demands for the trade. Under such circumstances, the “question concerning the buying or breeding of slaves” would always yield a preference for buying.⁷

From his experience as a West Indian resident, Ramsay witnessed how brutally plantation managers and overseers treated enslaved women during pregnancy. Planters believed that pregnancies and young children undermined labor productivity. They therefore did little to alleviate the conditions of pregnant women and mothers, or to ensure the survival of enslaved youths. Moreover, Ramsay explained, plantation managers aimed to secure maximum and immediate profits, and generally, they were unconcerned about the future or morality of the colonies. Unless the slave trade ended and the estate owners and agents developed a sense that their long-term interests relied on women reproducing, Ramsay insisted, no improvement could be guaranteed, and more importantly, their dependence on enslaving Africans would only deepen.⁸

In order to capitalize on enslaved women’s reproductive potential as a resource for producing potentially free people, abolitionists thought it necessary to ban the slave trade. A slave trade embargo would awaken the inborn, mothering instinct “naturally” found in females. The various stages of the slave trade, from capture in Africa and captivity on the coast to transportation and subsequent sale in the Americas, disrupted communities and separated captives from their families. As buyers and sellers traded Africans like cattle, Wilberforce protested before Parliament, “husbands [were] torn from their wives, wives from their husbands, and parents from their children.”⁹ Despite captive women’s efforts to retain family ties, traders remained unmoved by scenes of heartbreak as they quickly summoned whips and chains to break apart mothers clinging to their children and wives cleaving to their husbands. Abolitionist and statistical analyst Thomas Cooper, who calculated the mortality of the slave trade as roughly one fifth of the world’s population, stressed, “If these instances of separation should happen, if relations, when they find themselves about to be parted, cling together, if filial, conjugal, or parental affection should detain them a moment longer in each other’s arms, than their second receivers should think fit, the lash instantly severed them.”¹⁰ Thus, Cooper concluded, although “Negresses have the maternal character as strongly impressed on them as any [English] woman” the tyrannical experiences they endured extinguished their mothering desires. They became “callous to every natural feeling,” and preferred to “destroy their fruit” than allow it to live.¹¹ Ultimately, captive African women failed and refused to reproduce because of the traumatic experiences and memories of their capture and sale.

While these arguments accurately portrayed the disruption of families caused by the slave trade and possible reasons women had for restricting their fertility, they presumed a “natural” desire among women to become mothers. Reformers failed to consider the possibility that enslaved women rejected motherhood not only because of slavery but simply because they had no wish to become mothers. Enslaved women’s desire to bear children seemed irrelevant to activists like Wilberforce, who argued that “Negroes were … by nature peculiarly prolific,” and closing the portal of Africa would restore their reproductive ability.¹² The difficulties planters encountered with enslaved women, as subsequent chapters show, reflect an ideological conflict between enslaved women and male planters and abolitionists. Male reformers naturalized motherhood, while women understood motherhood as a matter of choice. Both despite and because of the impoverished conditions of bondage, enslaved women persisted in choosing for themselves.

The positive comparisons Cooper made between “Negresses” and English women reflect the representational conflicts between abolitionists and proslavery supporters. Abolitionists distanced themselves from proslavery literature that, in defense of slavery, assigned a natural, inferior status to Africans. From the formation of Atlantic world slave societies in the seventeenth century, Europeans distinguished African-descended people as inferior and used biological markers, including skin color, facial features, and hair texture, to mark Africans as uncivilized and naturally suitable for slavery.¹³ Abolitionists aimed to prove that captive Africans lacked civilization and diverged from so-called higher moral standards because of slavery and the slave trade, and not biology.¹⁴ Claiming the possibility of colonial reform as a likely consequence of biological reproduction hinged on abolitionists proving that the conditions of slavery caused certain undesirable qualities in the “Negress.” Activists had to prove that captive Africans would not reproduce negative traits generationally because their brutishness was environmentally induced. Tensions emerged between pro-slavery and antislavery activists because the former aimed to prove that people of African descent were inherently inferior, incapable of reform, and ultimately unsuitable for freedom and subject-citizenship.

Abolitionists solidified the links between reproduction, abolition, and reform by highlighting the particular ways in which the material conditions of slavery undermined the reproductive potential of women. Abuse, overwork, inadequate diets, and neglect combined to depress women’s fertility. “How can population be favoured where there is a want of food, clothes, and every convenience necessary for its encouragement? Can they rear [children] for him, who demands bricks without straw, that they may be oppressed at his caprice?” Ramsay asked. Masters ignored the proper gendered division of labor by forcing enslaved women to work the same tasks as men, even while pregnant. Writing from personal experience in the colonies, Ramsay recalled that expectant mothers continued in their exhausting labor routines as long as their strengths prevailed, which was usually until their pregnancies terminated by miscarriage or birth, often prematurely.¹⁵

While granting expectant mothers time off from work promised to soften some of the harsher elements of slavery, it conflicted with beliefs planters held that the plantations could only remain productive through coercion and strict labor discipline. Relaxed labor routines, antiabolitionists argued, made slaves idle and insubordinate. These conflicting beliefs were at the heart of the struggles between the slaving interests and abolitionists. Even after abolitionists secured a parliamentary ban on slave trading in 1807, they pushed for additional imperial mandates. Their insistence that the British government pass ameliorative laws in the 1820s that limited the whipping of women, for example, reflected the conviction among abolitionists that reforms initiated by planters were inadequate because coercion continued to dominate the working lives of the enslaved in ways that made reproduction nearly impossible.

What abolitionists found most shocking was that slave owners and estate agents made little or no special accommodation to receive newborns or to care for mothers even though they profited from the birth of slave children. Ramsay did not exaggerate when he wrote that the neglect of enslaved mothers and children extended to the absence of simple items of care, like rag and cloth to swaddle and cleanse their babies. Women delivered babies in their homes with the aid of their community members. Mothers returned to work less than three weeks after delivery, and they had no choice but to carry along their infants with them. As mothers toiled, Ramsay recalled, infants lay in the “furrow, near [them], generally exposed naked, or almost naked, to the sun and rain, on a kid skin, or such rags as [they] can procure.”¹⁶ Under these conditions, one could hardly expect infants to survive, which, as far as abolitionists were concerned, largely explained why West Indian slave populations failed to reproduce.

As a doctor who resided in the West Indies, Ramsay saw firsthand the rudimentary nature of health, maternal, and infant care before the 1780s. Yet he was disinterested in how enslaved women used planter neglect to seize autonomy over childbirth and maternal care. His criticism that the only facility available to the few women who gave birth was “a dark smoky hut” reflected how little he understood how women capitalized on planter disregard for their reproductive needs. These huts were the homes of women where assistance networks and herbal remedies flourished. Ramsay’s belief that an estate hospital staffed with European doctors would best serve the medical needs of reproductive women clashed with how enslaved people approached maternal and neonatal care. Smoking apparatuses and fires were essential to the birth customs that thrived within the private residences of the enslaved, which were relatively free from the oversight of masters. Birth rituals were symbols of autonomy and authority mothers and caregivers claimed over labor and delivery. Abolitionist ideals about reproductive care not only diverged from those held by enslaved women. The proposed reforms also foreshadowed the struggles to come between enslaved mothers and caregivers, on one hand, who fought to retain reproductive autonomy, and doctors, on the other hand, who sought to restructure plantation childbirth practices along the lines of European medicine.

Abolitionists believed that slavery’s assault on womanhood and maternity persisted because sugar plantation owners and managers calculated that it was more cost-effective to work their slaves to death and replace them with fresh imports than invest in their long-term care and self-rejuvenation. Given a choice “between the breeding system on the one hand, and the working down and buying system on the other,” Wilberforce explained in a public address, they “deliberately gave in to the latter as the most economical in the full view of all its horrid conditions.”¹⁷ The economic drive of West Indian planters made them insensitive to the need for sexual parity among their slaves. Viewing male workers as stronger and more productive workers, planters prioritized them in their purchases. The resulting imbalanced sex ratio in favor of men, Wilberforce argued, limited women’s opportunities to form partnerships and create stable families. Had planters adopted a practice of buying equal proportions of males and females, population increase would have occurred “naturally.”¹⁸ Abolitionist exaggeration of the disparity between the sexes conflicted with the supply dynamics of the slave trade and the buying patterns of planters. Despite a stated preference for men, planters readily bought women and tasked them with some of the most demanding work on the plantation. Enslaved women, for example, dominated field labor, one of the most demanding aspects of plantation work. The central problem was not the sex ratio of captives, but their age.

Few abolitionists recognized the links between an aging slave population and low fertility and high mortality rates. In his 1792 speech before Parliament Wilberforce called attention to age as a factor that retarded natural increase. Supporting Wilberforce was Henry Dundas, adviser to the British prime minister. Dundas introduced a bill in Parliament to impose a tax on the importation of Africans above age twenty-five. Given the recent fallout in the American colonies over the right of the imperial Parliament to tax the colonies, the idea of taxing the West Indian colonies was not one welcomed by the British government. The House of Lords therefore rejected Dundas’s proposed tax.¹⁹ New tariffs as a method of correcting the negative population growth caused by a surplus old population clashed with what Parliament believed was within the reaches of its power.

The contests between reformers and parliamentarians about monitoring reproduction rates reflect not just government ministers wishing to avoid conflicts with the colonies over constitutional rights of governance. The question was also whether the state had the right to scrutinize reproductive patterns, which many in England feared as a step toward intervention in intimate relations. These were viewed as private matters, and Britons in the mid to late eighteenth century were ambivalent about state scrutiny of marriage, sexuality, and family. Parliamentary approval for legislation like the 1762 Act for Keeping Regular, Uniform and Annual Registers of Poor Infants and the 1767 Act for the Better Regulation of Parish Poor Children evidence steps taken by the government to secure the welfare of children in England. The government’s simultaneous rejection of bills calling for a national census and the establishment of mandatory and annual registers of marriages, births, and deaths, however, suggests limitations on parliamentary measures that could lead to intervention in citizens’ reproductive and intimate lives.²⁰

Such limits were class and gender based, however. Elite and middle-class men opposed marriage and birth censuses. However, they were not averse to local parishes registering the birthrate among poor women. Neither were they disinclined to promote motherhood as the natural and patriotic duty of British women. Eighteenth-century male English social commentators and medical practitioners, for instance, disparaged women who chose not to have children and scorned mothers who did not suckle their children. They deemed such women as profane, abnormal, and in violation of “natural law.” These criticisms partly emerged out of concern for the growing labor needs of Britain’s expanding empire. Reformer Jonas Hanway, for example, made a strong case for how preserving poor children’s lives served British imperial ambitions. Children were invaluable assets for the navy, army, and factories. Thus, in preparation for the Seven Years’ War, the government approved significant funding for the Foundling Hospital, tasked with saving the lives of destitute children who could be repurposed in war roles.²¹

Mutual gender and class biases made slave owners supporters of similar reforms in the colonies. They shared the views held by British reformers that reproduction was a resource for fulfilling the ambitions of empire, including individual economic drive. Moreover, the property rights whites claimed in the ownership of black bodies invested slaveholders with the liberty to do as they pleased with their slaves. The hesitation over slavery reforms resulted from concerns about profits. While the state absorbed poor relief costs for British mothers and children, individual planters in the colonies would have to withstand all costs associated with ameliorating the conditions of their slaves—their private property. Thus, while colonial legislators rejected what they calculated were costly improvements, like exempting women from field work, they more willingly conceded to low or zero cost interventions. The benefits and low cost of encouraging slave owners to buy younger slaves, for instance, likely drove the Jamaican Assembly to impose a ten-pound tax on the importation of captives above the age of twenty-five.²² The economic cost of amelioration was a major cause of disagreement between the local Jamaican state, still in its infancy, and the moral-minded abolitionist reformers.

The Pronatal Plan of Abolitionists

Abolitionists readily agreed on the inhumanity of slavery and the slave trade. They also concurred on the negative effects slavery had on the ability and desire of enslaved women to bear children and to raise families. But beyond general consensus on the need to outlaw the slave trade as an important first step in initiating pronatal reforms, there was much disagreement about the precise changes needed to capitalize on women’s reproductive potential.²³ Disputes, for example, emerged over the provision of material rewards for enslaved mothers and their trustworthiness to assume responsibilities for childcare. The divergent pronatal plans proposed by abolitionists would further clash with the economic goals of planters, the constraints on government powers, and the visions of freedom and bodily autonomy enslaved people held.

For William Wilberforce, forging family ties and building communities would best harness the reproductive capabilities of enslaved women. In his pronatal plan, he first encouraged enslaved women and men to marry and settle into independent cottages. He disagreed with other pronatal plans, like those offered by James Ramsay, that stressed giving material incentives to mothers for bringing their pregnancies to term and for rearing children. Nature alone, Wilberforce declared, “would take care of this for them.” It is not by material rewards that women nurture their children, but rather by assurances of the well-being of their families. Furthermore, Wilberforce wrote, “maternal tenderness, domestic sympathy, and paternal interest” will grow and blossom once masters guaranteed slaves a domestic sanctuary. Conception and full-term pregnancies would occur abundantly once enslaved women had a “home” where children were “safely born with a tolerable prospect of happiness.” Wilberforce therefore implored masters to “let mothers be allowed immunities and indulgencies, especially a little time from field work, morning and evening, to attend to their infants.” Such indulgence, he asserted, would encourage “domestic affections [to] spring up and flourish” in women.²⁴

Even as Wilberforce’s plan offered greater opportunities for safeguarding family bonds, enslaved families’ comfort and gratification were not the primary aims of enhancing family security. Instead, it offered a less coercive way of keeping colonial economies intact as they gradually transited from slavery to freedom. Wilberforce was not opposed to the economic benefits of colonialism. He hoped to find a way in which investors’ economic ambitions could coexist with the moral imperatives of reformers. In his widely circulated 1807 Letter on the Abolition of the Slave Trade Wilberforce advocated the formation of families among the enslaved as a means of assuring masters that if they treated slaves humanely by allowing them family and community security, the enslaved would return loyalty and duty to them. Having experienced the value and rewards of “good character,” enslaved mothers, he posited, would strive to maintain it, out of fear of reaping the displeasure of their masters and losing family privileges. In the final push for abolition in 1807, Wilberforce’s Letter emphasized master paternalism as indispensable to the future success of the colonies. His definition of success included the amelioration of enslaved women’s conditions, the security of their families, and masters’ realizing that coercion and physical abuse were not necessary to regenerate laborers or maintain labor output. If masters implemented such reforms, he proclaimed, “the slaves will daily grow happier [and] the planters [grow] richer.”²⁵ Despite the fact that Wilberforce gave due consideration to how pronatalism could affect the productivity of the plantations, tensions between the slaving interests and abolitionists persisted because of the attack on slavery and the slave trade. In the minds of slaveholders, the African trade was the lifeblood of colonial economy and they could not envision plantation cultivation without it or the coercive powers slavery gave them.

Like Wilberforce, Ramsay articulated a plan for abolition and reform through women’s reproductive ability, but his was radically different and more elaborate. Ramsay encouraged slaveholders to follow the example of the few progressive plantations where owners and managers paid attention to the nutritional and medical needs of their laborers and regulated women’s workloads. Every plantation should have a hospital for enslaved patients, decked with at least two chambers dedicated solely to mothers and children. One chamber, he explained, would serve as a delivery room and the other as a nursery for suckling children. Mothers would leave their infants in the nurseries and for the first six months would work “near the hospital, to be at hand to suckle their children, from time to time.” During this six-month period, Ramsay suggested, masters should refrain from giving new mothers strenuous tasks, assigning them instead to “moderate labour.” Mother-workers should resume the “ordinary work of the plantation” only when they had regained their strength and had weaned their infants. Upon returning to work, “two elderly hand women” would attend their children. Ramsay also suggested that plantation owners and their managers assign nurses to wash and feed infants while their mothers worked. To incentivize mothers further, masters should indulge them with “extraordinary allowance of food both in quality and quantity” and at the time of “presenting” their weaned children to the overseer reward them with a “complete suit of clothes.” Overall, as motivation to birth a greater number of children, all mothers bearing more than three children should receive full exemption from field work. Ramsay concluded that if plantation owners and managers implemented these reforms, birthrates among the enslaved would steadily increase.²⁶

Ramsay’s experience as vicar, doctor, and slaveholder in the West Indies gave him firsthand knowledge of the challenges of maternal and infant health. The material and medical reforms he proposed were therefore sorely needed. They promised to improve the survival chances of enslaved mothers and babies, as well as help women balance labor demands with caring for their children.²⁷ Imposed hospital accommodations for expectant and new mothers shifted the responsibilities of maternity and neonatal care away from enslaved people’s communities and placed them into the clutches of masters. Instead of advocating public health facilities, operated by state authority and therefore less subject to the arbitrary power of individual slaveholders, Ramsay advocated building private hospitals, owned, funded, and managed by the slaving interests.²⁸

Moreover, in promoting the removal of children from their mothers’ care and enforcing a shortened lactation period of six months, Ramsay’s pronatal plan disrupted mother-child relations and customary maternal practices that had developed in Jamaica. Commonly, enslaved women nursed for eighteen to twenty-four months, but fought to continue nursing for up to thirty-six months.²⁹ Ramsay’s six months weaning timetable reduced what enslaved mothers already thought was a short time to nurse their babies. His proposal neglected to consider the value of child-rearing practices already in place in Jamaica. The conflicts that would evolve on the ground between planters, doctors, and enslaved women throughout the 1780s to 1830s would be over such limits reform-minded planters tried to impose on how long enslaved women nursed their children.

Ramsay’s proposal seems even more arbitrary when one considers emergent ideas in late eighteenth-century Britain that encouraged breastfeeding for at least twelve months. British medical opinion had begun to shift away from supporting wet nursing and toward encouraging mothers nursing their own children because doctors deemed it better for infant growth and development.³⁰ Reformers also advocated lactation because, in the words of one medical writer, it stimulated “maternal affection” and it gave the child “a greater sense of security and confidence about the world and increases its attachment to its mother.” The burgeoning British obstetrics community not only urged mothers to nurse their children but also sanctioned their doing so for at least the full first year of their babies’ lives. Ramsay’s proposal for enslaved mothers was half the time advised for British women.³¹ Briefer lactation periods expedited enslaved women’s return to the sugarcane fields. In this regard, Ramsay’s pronatal plan not only offered masters a way to balance their productive goals with reproductive ones, it also reaffirmed the authority masters claimed over slave women’s bodies and maternal customs. Under the plan, male abolitionists and planters would determine the length of breastfeeding, not the mothers themselves. Such affirmation of mastery conflicted with the autonomy women carved out for themselves in the preabolitionist years when masters neglected childbirth and childrearing.

But beyond creating a way for enslavers to balance the dual labor demands they placed on enslaved women, there was another, more fundamental effect of Ramsay’s not simply borrowing lactation recommendations for British mothers and applying them to enslaved mothers. His policies inscribed differences between black and white women. The reproductive ability of both sets of women were appropriated in service of the British nation, which needed people to work, sail ships, and defend the empire. English women were not just reproducers, they also were mothers, whose civic duty it was to bear children and raise them to become good, loyal citizens. Conversely, enslaved women were vessels that bore future workers, viewed with only a dim possibility of sharing the same political rights and privileges as whites. As adults corrupted by slavery, captive Africans were not fit to prepare their children for freedom. Ramsay therefore advocated two sets of reforms. One focused on improving the material conditions of slavery that would facilitate and encourage conception and reduce maternal and infant mortality. The second set of reforms centered on preparing children for freedom. Enslaved mothers were to have only a limited role in preparing their children to become free people.

Ramsay believed that moral institutions like the church best secured the social conditioning of young people. In his 1784 essay that the Abolition Society reprinted and distributed widely, he argued, “Religion brings conscience in to the aid of social regulations, and fits the man for acting his part in his proper station.” Ramsay believed that soon after weaning, enslaved children should learn Christian teachings that emphasized humility and long suffering. “Begin by drawing their attention particularly to the sufferings and crucifixion of our savior,” he wrote. “When this is found to have an impression on their minds, and filled their hearts of grateful sentiments, make them connect with repentance and a good life, submission to their masters and full obedience to their commands, even to working on the plantations when so ordered.” They should learn these lessons when “their minds are tender” before the “impositions of slavery corrupted them.”³²

Ramsay’s writings reflected the principle of the “conditioned child,” which stressed creating desirable habits in young people for them to become “natural in them” in their adult life. A child was like a “blank slate” upon which adults could write the social actor they desired.³³ With the new generation of enslaved people, Ramsay proposed abandoning the system of punishment upon which slavery had been built, and replacing it with Christianity. Christian-based obedience, gratitude, and morality would prove more “powerful incentives to the mind [that would] incline them to the right.”³⁴ Successful emancipation depended on indoctrinating enslaved children from their infancy in the “knowledge of their duty” as obedient, moral subjects.³⁵

Because of the centrality of retaining the purity of enslaved children’s minds, Ramsay did not expect enslaved mothers to socialize their children. British missionaries would have such responsibilities.³⁶ Recalling the challenges one minister faced in proselytizing grown-ups, Ramsay doubted whether enslaved adults could be rescripted sufficiently into new ways of thinking and being in order to train children properly. Imported adults, he insisted, generally resisted change and sulked when persuaded to abandon their old prejudices. Enslaved parents could not be trusted to discard fully their old habits. Ramsay firmly believed that adults were products of their childhood, and as such, enslaved mothers who had converted in their adult years were constantly at risk for relapsing into the habits of their youth. It is for this reason he advocated that enslaved mothers play limited roles in caring for and socializing young people. Early weaning reflected such limitations. As Ramsay promoted lead roles for missionaries in raising enslaved children, parents stood to lose what little rights and liberties they fought to preserve in socializing their sons and daughters before the 1780s era of pronatalist abolitionism.³⁷ For the few children born during slavery, mothers competed with masters for influence and control over them. Ramsay’s proposal magnified the already fraught relationships between enslaver and enslaved over the control and raising of enslaved children.

Amelioration and the Future of Slavery

Despite the contrasting views Ramsay and Wilberforce held on the roles enslaved mothers should play in raising their children, they agreed that successful emancipation was contingent upon women’s ability to reproduce and the acculturation of enslaved children to British values. Ramsay and Wilberforce were not the first to appropriate women’s reproductive ability in the service of abolition and reform, however. They echoed the writings of other imperial policymakers, especially those of Maurice Morgan, a colonial bureaucrat who, in 1772, had anticipated the end of the slave trade and designed a plan for how the British government could safely liberate the enslaved. Promoting biological reproduction and the resocialization of enslaved children and establishing a date for an embargo on slave trading were the hallmarks of Morgan’s plan. It would be impracticable to “liberate the present race of slaves,” Morgan argued, not because they were “incapable of receiving freedom [but because] their ignorance and their habits effectually forbids it.” He therefore proposed that the British government allow the slave trade to continue for fifteen years (he offered no precise date) during which time plantation owners would buy “a certain number of male and female children annually.” These new young recruits, he explained, would be sent to Britain, where they would attend English “Charity schools” until they turned age fourteen. At the end of their formal education (Morgan was never clear on what the curriculum should include) trainees would receive further practical instruction in the areas of gardening, agriculture, and manufacture.³⁸

Having received the requisite schooling, colonial protégés should be married at the age of sixteen and then sent to an experimental settlement, which Morgan proposed would be a “district near Pensacola,” a new British settlement in west Florida. Early marriage, he asserted, was important in order to capitalize on black female fecundity. “The black women are mothers at fourteen, and often sooner,” Morgan wrote, and “they continue to breed till six and twenty.” By this calculation, he estimated that these specially trained youths would increase the number of settlers, quickly peopling the “deserts of Florida with freemen.” The British government should grant them land and the same support as had been given to migrants in the seventeenth-century founding of the North American and West Indian colonies. Morgan intended his scheme for the new west Florida settlement, but he urged, “this plan will admit of being greatly varied.” Pensacola could serve as a positive example that people of African descent were capable of improvement and could successfully plant the colonies as free workers.³⁹

Morgan proposed a slight alternative to his Pensacola plan for the West Indies. He suggested a period of ten years instead of fifteen for the importation of children, who should be no older than six years old. Like the children for Pensacola, those purchased for the West Indies would attend school in England. When they returned to the colonies, as married and civilized men and women, they would work in lower government positions—“a magistracy of blacks” as Morgan called it, where they would be under “the controul of a Governor.” Most importantly, they would serve as an example to which the enslaved masses could aspire, and would offer a ready confirmation to the planter class that blacks could be trained to become industrious free laborers, and people who could be trusted with political responsibility.⁴⁰

What distinguishes Maurice Morgan from abolitionists like James Ramsay and William Wilberforce was that he served the imperial government, and that his writings were never widely circulated among the British public. His work was not part of abolitionist propaganda, and it predated the national campaigns to ban the slave trade. It emerged out of a privately distributed imperial policy memorandum, in which Morgan laid out plans on how Britain could fortify control over its North American territories, beginning with west Florida. Morgan had served the British government in various capacities. In 1763 he was secretary-adviser to William Fitzmaurice Petty, president of the Board of Trade and responsible for administering territories gained in North America at the 1763 Peace of Paris. In 1767, Morgan served as emissary to Quebec and executive secretary to Sir Guy Carleton, commander at the British army headquarters in New York. Despite his various posts, he remained consistently responsible for devising measures to strengthen Britain’s control over its territories. One historian has concluded that Morgan “embraced empire” and spent much of his career trying to “make the empire work.”⁴¹ The Pensacola proposal for promoting biological reproduction and freeing carefully tutored black children was an important part of such a mission.

Morgan’s Plan for abolition was one of several proposed policies aimed at stabilizing Britain’s colonies. Significantly, it also revealed that alternatives to slavery were necessary for the British government to consider abolition. Parliament was concerned about financial losses the slavery interests would incur as well as the political repercussions of a disgruntled merchant and planter class. The publication of Morgan’s plan in 1772 marked a shift in antislavery thought. Breaking with the antislavery writings of the 1760s that had failed to attract support, Morgan’s work extended beyond the condemnation of slavery, and offered alternatives. Envisioning “an empire without slaves,” Morgan proposed that free back men and women, invested with “with certain limited rights and liberties traditionally enjoyed by British subjects” would supply the labor needs of the colonies.⁴²

In addition to the promotion of reproduction as the key to any successful emancipation plan, a common theme that runs through the writings of 1780s abolitionists is the need to protect British economic interests by taking gradual steps toward freedom. Parliament’s hesitation to act and the conflicts that emerged between the slaving interests and abolitionists hinged on concerns for profit loss. The previously discussed Thomas Cooper, for example, who projected Africa’s population loss due to the slave trade at 180 million, strongly believed it was wrong for “Negroes to be deprived of their liberty, and of everything which belongs to them as human beings and British subjects.” He also thought that due consideration had to be given to the financial interests of investors, because it was equally “wrong” for them to “lose their money.”⁴³

James Ramsay shared these concerns, and despite viewing slavery “as a vile institution” that sank “human nature to the lowest depth of wretchedness,” he hesitated to advocate immediately freeing those held in bondage.⁴⁴ In his 1784 text Ramsay avoided the question of emancipation. Four years later, however, he offered a more concrete, though long-term, timetable for freedom. He disclaimed that his plan aimed “only at the abolition of the African slave trade.”⁴⁵ Emancipation, he declared, “is not even suggested till their improvement shall have made it the master’s interest freely to bestow.”⁴⁶ Concerns that liberty would financially ruin proprietors, investors, and the colonies stopped Ramsay short of fully advocating a plan for immediately freeing those enslaved.⁴⁷ Although he was an ardent supporter of free trade and wage labor economies, and he agreed that prohibiting the slave trade would lead to new trade patterns and new markets, he strongly believed in a gradualist approach that included reforming the laboring populations of the colonies to advance progressively toward a free labor system.⁴⁸ The economic and political disputes that demanded a gradual approach to freedom made framing abolition through women’s reproductive ability an effective strategy. Time was needed to conceive, birth, and socialize children fit for freedom.

Ramsay therefore emphasized that he did not envision “full emancipation” until some distant point in the future, after a number of conditions were satisfied.⁴⁹ Primary among such conditions for “improvement” was having a reliable and sustainable population that would not only provide plantations with a stable and abundant supply of laborers but would also contribute to the socioeconomic and cultural advancement of the colonies. In addition to demonstrating that they were “capable of “procur[ing] the conveniences and comforts of life, in the same manner as other civilised people,” enslaved people had to exhibit a willingness to yield to the “government of the law.”⁵⁰ A demonstrated disposition to submit to governmental authority was also a requisite for freedom in Wilberforce’s plans for emancipation. “Our poor degraded Negro Slaves,” he wrote, “are as yet incapable of enjoying freedom,” and to grant them immediate liberty “would be the grossest violation and the merest mockery of justice and humanity, [that] would insure not only their masters’ ruin, but their own.” A training and transitional period was therefore necessary to prepare Africans and their children for the enjoyment of true liberty, which, as Wilberforce underscored, included acceptance of “reason and law,” religious instruction, and moral improvement.⁵¹

Although abolitionists used the word citizen loosely in their writings, none of them made a clear case for enslaved people to share equal political rights with whites after emancipation. Instead, they concentrated their arguments on the possibility of the enslaved becoming moral, industrious, and obedient to the rule of law—civilized. The different cultural habits and behaviors of the enslaved, which also justified the marginalization of the poor in other places, including Britain, marked blacks as unprepared for citizenship and justified their unequal status. Abolitionists framed the abolition of the slave trade as a litmus test for masters to wean their dependence on cruelty in their treatment of slaves, thereby giving them an opportunity to reproduce naturally and to adopt British cultural practices. Successful biological reproduction and a reform of slavery as well as the character of the enslaved brought the possibility of freedom, which further constituted the basis for evaluating their readiness to enjoy rights and liberties extended to British subjects.

Contingent upon biological reproduction and cultural improvement, subject citizenship remained unattainable for blacks in Britain’s colonies.⁵² When the 1807 ban on the slave trade failed to stimulate population growth and improve the moral and material conditions of the enslaved, abolitionists in the 1820s insisted on an imperial reform. The Crown’s 1820s amelioration program to create policies and laws for colonial adoption would not only miss the mark in reforming slavery. It would also plunge the colonies into chaos and crises that ignited rebellions among the enslaved across the British Caribbean.

By 1833, political instability made slavery untenable. The possibility of reform prevailed with Parliament’s passage of the Emancipation Act, which put forth a six-year apprenticeship system designed to train enslaved people to work like free people and masters to hire these newly freed workers. Parliament terminated the apprenticeship system two years ahead of schedule; and the labor conflicts, fears about population decline, rebellion, and brutal reprisals that marked the 1840s to 1860s period convinced the Crown that former slaves were not ready to become subject-citizens. The Jamaican legislature and the British government denounced the formerly enslaved as unfit for freedom and citizenship, and abolished the island’s already limited self-government in 1866. The imposition of Crown colony government (colonial rule from England) suspended the possibility of formerly enslaved people governing themselves until 1944, and the limited constitutional reforms of the 1880s that allowed propertied men the franchise ensured that only an elite minority participated in formal politics.⁵³ Autonomy and citizenship, it seemed, was always beyond the grasp of Africans and their descendants living in the West Indies. This meant that Afro-Caribbean people’s access to power was often informal and ephemeral, and like the struggles over childbirth, infused the ongoing tensions that marked slavery and colonialism.

Abolitionist activists of the 1780s concentrated their campaigns on the ability of enslaved people to become moral and productive subject-citizens. As Maurice Morgan explained, for the enslaved to be able to “talk the same language, read the same books, profess the same religion, and be fashioned by the same laws” as Englishmen, abolitionists needed to persuade Parliament that slaves could be reformed.⁵⁴ Unlike some proslavery advocates, including Edward Long, who asserted inherent African inferiority as a justification for their enslavement, activists and strategists like Morgan, Ramsay, and Wilberforce worked hard to convince the British public that Africans and their descendants were capable of improvement.⁵⁵ The proposed plan to harness the reproductive potential of women as a pathway to freedom and citizenship could only make sense if abolitionists avoided arguments about the inherent inferiority of African-descended people. Activists had to make the case that mothers would not reproduce their vices in their children. Abolitionist campaigns, therefore, concentrated on amendable external and environmental factors. They decried the works of philosophers like David Hume who argued for the inherent inferiorities of Africans and their descendants and only opposed the system of slavery because he viewed it as inefficient and exemplary of the wastes of imperial expansion.⁵⁶

Abolitionists countered arguments like Hume’s by arguing that environmental conditions dictated morals, values, and accomplishments, but inherited bodily differences, like skin color and hair texture, had no bearing on mental capacities or achievements. For example, Morgan argued that “even though our bodies may be varied by colour, or any other corporeal distinction” there is no inherent difference in capabilities.⁵⁷ He declared that captive Africans and their descendants existed in a state of moral and intellectual void because plantation societies had not stimulated the development of such capacities. Morgan, and later Ramsay and Wilberforce, insisted that freed children sent from the colonies to England improved in intelligence and social aptitude. The difference, they explained, was that such youths had been conditioned and socialized from their infancy to a different way of life. Encouraging births and socializing enslaved children in a manner compatible with the abolitionist goal of creating moral and free colonies would allow planters to capitalize on youths’ capacity for reform.

Although abolitionist writers generally avoided the racial inferiority arguments because of their potential to undermine their moralizing project, age introduced an exception to this rule. The writers believed it was far more difficult, if not impossible, for adults to unlearn behaviors of a lifetime. Thus, they proposed two separate Christianization programs: one for adults and another for youths. In their plans, children would be isolated and indoctrinated exclusively by white missionaries, whereas evangelists as well as successful (enslaved) converts would teach adults. Missionaries would create a privileged class of converts who would receive greater rations and finer quarters in exchange for encouraging conversion and virtuous living among their fellow enslaved. This elite group of believers would check against all un-Christian practices and habits that could undermine the work of proselytizers. Privileged disciples would “superintend” fellows of the same sex. Thus, a woman who sinned privately should be “mildly reproved in private” by another person of the same sex. The individual should be brought before the congregation to account for offenses that were more public. However, if the offender “obstinately persist[ed] in the fault” she should be banished from the congregation. Those who remained devout, were obedient to their masters, and kept the Sabbath should be rewarded with such indulgences that will further “encourage them in their work,” betterment, and uprightness.⁵⁸

The private sins of enslaved people of particular concern to abolitionists were their sexual relations. Abolitionists upheld Christian marriage as foundational for preparing future generations of free people. In their misguided assumptions about what constituted intimate relationships between people of African descent, abolitionists echoed slaveholders’ refrain that enslaved people exercised no libidinal restraint and were like “perfect brutes” who engaged in “promiscuous intercourse.” “A man,” Ramsay claimed, “may have what wives he pleased, and either of them may break the yoke of their caprice.” Christian marriage was necessary to eradicate such loose sexual conduct and promote morality. Marriage “is the embryo of society, it contains the principles, and feeds every social virtue. The care of family,” Ramsay stressed, “would make them considerate, sober, frugal, and industrious.” In married men, he wrote, one finds “a more useful and trust worthy citizen than he who is single” (emphasis added).⁵⁹ In articulating abolition and reform through the reproductive lives of women, these proposals for encouraging marriage were not just about improving morals. The prevalence of venereal diseases in the colonies that undermined conception and birthrates meant that monogamous, Christian marriage also could eradicate what abolitionists thought was another obstacle to population growth.

Christian marriages promised to eliminate perceived sexual promiscuity as well as engineer gender relationships. By placing women in the fields and breaking apart families, slavery and the slave trade prevented women from occupying their rightful place within the households of their fathers and husbands. Abolitionist criticism of demographic failure was therefore a critique of slavery’s disruption of the supposed natural gender order in which women related to men as dependents and men ruled over their wives and children. Plans to abolish the slave trade by encouraging biological reproduction were part of a much larger vision for ultimate emancipation that involved placing women in subordinate positions as wives and mothers while elevating men as husbands, fathers, workers, and ultimately citizens. Only by becoming heads of their families could enslaved men share the privileges of Englishmen. In effect, claims of citizenship were beyond women’s reach. The ability to belong and participate in colonial society as citizens relied on embracing British cosmologies and an elite gender order, like those imparted by Christianity and Christian marriages.⁶⁰

Abolitionist critique of the gender disorder slavery produced extended to masters’ paternalism, which negated the autonomy of males. Like many proslavery writers, abolitionists used children as symbols of primitivism, characterizing male slaves as childlike and not self-reliant because they depended on their masters. Paternalism emboldened the power slaveholders held over their bonded laborers precisely because it undermined the masculinity of enslaved men. Enslaved men in Ramsay’s perception were not prepared to assume the full responsibilities of freedom. “Like children,” he argued, “they must be restrained by authority and led to their own good” (emphasis added). In order to partake of the liberties extended to English men, enslaved men had to unlearn their dependence on their masters, marry, and assume authority and responsibility for their own households and families.⁶¹

Although these claims perpetuated the infantilized image of captive Africans used to rationalize slavery, abolitionist arguments were very different from those used by slavery defenders. In Ramsay’s postulations, children were “unspoiled by human nature” and consequently possessed the greatest potential for reform.⁶² Though childlike, enslaved adults lacked the innocence and open-mindedness of children. Missionaries were therefore more hard-pressed to realize their transformation. Tainted by the sociocultural circumstances of slavery and the slave trade, adults were irredeemable. This view reflected a more enlightened (though no less self-serving) view of African-descended people insofar as it avoided the argument that they were inherently inferior.⁶³ Such reasoning was essential to abolitionist articulation of colonial reform through the reproductive capacities of women because this framing reiterated that biological reproduction would not regenerate perceived African inferiority. The image of captive Africans as perpetual children unable to live independent of their masters would contradict a reform agenda elaborated through women’s reproductivity.

To strengthen the argument that Africans and their descendants were capable of improvement, Ramsay extolled enslaved people born in the colonies, called “Creoles,” as having higher worth than those who were African born. Africans domesticated for “three or four generations in our colonies or made free three or four generations back were more intelligent than those who were born in Africa and had recently arrived in the colonies.” Creoles, he asserted, were more suited for cultivating the colonies, since they were more “hardy, diligent and trusty” than Africans.⁶⁴ Using earlier estimates presented by planter Edward Long, Ramsay argued that Creoles were more productive than new captives. According to Long’s estimate, Creoles produced 250,000 hogsheads more sugar than imported captive Africans.⁶⁵ Although Ramsay denounced the slave trade and slavery as immoral, he praised what in his estimation were improvements among African-descended people born in the colonies. “The farther back the negro can trace his Creolism,” he argued, “the more he valued himself and the more he was valued.”⁶⁶ In commending what he presumed as the more civilized Creoles, Ramsay once more exposed his latent view that slavery was not the only reason he perceived African-descended people as culturally inferior. The African homeland also played a part in shaping its people’s supposed backwardness. Such postulations reiterated his position that reform through biological reproduction would not replicate African vices because they were learned, not inherited.

Believing that mixed-race children were even more sophisticated than Creoles, abolitionists advocated for their immediate freedom to the custody of churchwardens. Appointed custodians would act as guardians of colored children and ensure their placement into a “trade or business [in keeping] with their inclination and the demands of the colony.” The white fathers and owners of mixed-race children should bear the expenses of apprenticeship. In cases where the child’s father was not its owner, the father should secure its freedom by paying the mother’s owner the “right pounds sterling, as soon as the child is weaned.” The manumitted colored child should then be apprenticed to an appropriate trade. Fathers who refused to secure their children’s freedom and apprenticeship should be “fined an annuity equal to their [children’s] maintenance.”⁶⁷

This proposal resembled the eighteenth-century British apprenticeship system in which family members or government ministries apprenticed young people. Private arrangements allowed children to learn the operations of a particular enterprise from a family friend or a business associate. In some cases, apprenticeship was simply girls working alongside their mothers to learn domestic chores, or boys working with their fathers to become carpenters, bricklayers, or farmers. In the more formal arrangements organized by individual parishes, the state placed apprentices with employers who would train them in service, agriculture, or industrial manufacture. The British apprenticeship system aimed to inculcate habits of industry and place children into their proper gender and class roles. Apprenticeships were not just about learning a skill; they also aimed to prepare girls for their life of domesticity and boys for more public roles.⁶⁸ The heteropatriarchy of the apprenticeship program for mixed-race boys and girls implicitly promoted biological reproduction among the more “advanced” segments of the unfree population, whose freedom ahead of the blacks (meaning no racial intermixing) positioned them as exemplars of appropriate gender order. In singling out mixed-race children for immediate freedom and apprenticeship, the proposal promoted the racial hierarchy that built slavery.

Enslaved women and their children were essential to abolitionist goals of transforming the colonies from slave to free societies. Having received improved treatment, women were expected to birth a greater number of children, who would then be trained from their infancy to become moral and industrious free people. Children were far more crucial to the project of creating free societies than adults. Although the foundations of creating a free society rested on women’s ability to reproduce, the difficulties of reconditioning the minds of adults made them somewhat of a lost generation to the ultimate project of freedom. Abolitionist pronatal plans made it clear that the question was not simply one of changing status from slave to free. Imperial reformers envisioned enslaved people acculturated to British morality and values that included subordinating women as homemakers and elevating men as heads of their households, which would help to achieve the reformers’ goals for population growth. Abolitionist plans therefore firmly lodged the future of the sugar colonies within enslaved women’s bellies. Once their offspring were “raised up in the knowledge of their duty,” they would become “at last civilized” and capable of being “lifted into equality with Englishmen.”⁶⁹ The rhetoric and plans of abolitionists gave new meanings and significance to biological reproduction, motherhood, and childhood. Enslaved women could be sources of freedom if their offspring could be groomed to adopt British cultural practices and social organization.

The practical steps of achieving such plans—building hospitals and nurseries, enforcing early weaning, rewarding mothers with clothes, food, and labor exemption, and allowing missionaries to proselytize among slaves—established a blueprint for amelioration. The plans remained largely conceptual, however, because their implementation depended on estate owners and agents in the colonies. Ideological differences over the capacity of African-descended people to adopt British habits and values engendered tensions between abolitionists and planters. The slaving interests defined Africans and their descendants as innately inferior and incapable of reform or working without brute force. Abolitionists argued, however, that the enslaved were a people corrupted by slavery. Given the right training and incentives, their children at least could be reformed and fitted for freedom.

The ideological entanglements between abolitionists and planters stretched beyond the articulation of abolition and reform through the reproductive lives of enslaved women. As the next two chapters show, the contested nature of pronatalism centered on the fact that colonial capitalists were driven not by moral but rather by economic imperatives. The working out of reforms in the colonies was subordinated to planter interests, who prioritized maintaining sugar production and increasing profits. Because concerns for day-to-day productivity and profitability of sugar estates dictated reproductive interventions, abolitionist moral ambitions were subordinated to the economic ambitions of plantation agents and owners.