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Chapter 2

“The Best Ones Who Are Fit to Breed”: The Quest for Biological Reproduction

In 1789, Simon Taylor proposed buying more African women for Golden Grove, one of the six Jamaican sugar plantations he managed.¹ “The first good Eboe ship that comes in,” he wrote, “I will endeavour to get ten women out of her.”² Taylor had dismissed suggestions to increase the female population on the property in 1770, so his proposal surprised his absentee employer, Golden Grove’s proprietor, Chaloner Arcedekne. The transatlantic correspondence between Taylor and Arcedekne about buying more females for Golden Grove was part of a common practice among Jamaican proprietors in which they appointed attorneys to act on their behalf while they returned to live in England. Throughout the eighteenth century, as properties passed from one generation to the next, many heirs never even had to set foot on the island.³ The letter Taylor wrote in 1789 was in response to an earlier one written by Arcedekne discussing the possibility that a slave trading ban would force them to encourage biological reproduction among Jamaica’s bonded workers.

In 1770, Taylor dismissed Arcedekne’s proposal to buy more females from the slave trade because he, like many other Jamaican plantation managers, viewed women as incompetent workers. “In regard to purchasing fifteen females to five Negroes,” he wrote, “it can by no means answer at Golden Grove, for you want men infinitely more than women, for there are many things which women cannot do.”⁴ Planters were reluctant to buy females for their Jamaican sugar estates throughout the seventeenth century and eighteenth century.⁵ They preferred buying males because they considered them more versatile and capable of performing the variously demanding agroindustrial tasks of the sugar plantations. William Beckford, heir to his father’s extensive Westmoreland properties where he spent thirteen years as a resident proprietor before becoming an absentee planter and publishing his experiences, explained, “A Negro man is purchased for a trade or cultivation and different process of the cane.” Women, however, could efficiently perform “only two [roles:] the house, with its several departments, and the supposed indulgences, or the field with its exaggerated labours.”⁶

Despite their repeated assertions that slave women were less capable and less versatile than men, planters willingly exploited them to achieve productivity goals. For example, during the planting season women worked alongside men clearing fields and holing the land for sowing cane. These tasks were among the most physically demanding work on the plantation. Although excluded from artisanal positions as sugar boilers and distillers, women also worked in the factories feeding canes to the mills and supplying fuel for the boilers. During harvest months, women worked in the cane fields from sunrise to sunset, cutting and carrying canes from the fields to the factories for processing into sugar. At night they worked on a shift system to keep apace the processing of sugar.

Planters seeking to maintain productivity and profitability viewed pregnancy and child care as distractions. Those who were not outright hostile toward biological reproduction were ambivalent; reproduction brought the possibility of increasing the work force, but it was a costly investment because childbearing women had to miss work to give birth and attend their newborns, many of whom did not survive beyond age two. Slave trader John Barnes noted, “Planters of the West Indies in most Cases prefer Males [because] they lose the labour of a Female in the latter End of pregnancy, and for a little time afterwards.” Furthermore, Barnes asserted, “the Child is some years before it can be put to Labour.”⁷ Supplies and monies permitting, Governor David Parry noted, planters bought “all males, as they will be more immediately profitable by their Work, whereas Females, above Three parts of their time are taken up breeding and suckling a tedious and precarious Offspring, from which no Profit can be expected for many Years to come.”⁸ Parry emphasized the suckling of infants as time wasted because “precarious” enslaved children rarely survived the materially deprived and diseased conditions into which they were born. Although Jamaican planters profited from the birth and growth of children into adulthood, they were generally reluctant to prioritize pregnancy and childbirth over field and factory work. With few exceptions, before the rise of pronatal abolitionism in the 1780s, planters offered expectant and new mothers only minimal care and relaxation of their labor routines.⁹

By articulating abolition and reform in terms of women’s reproductive ability, abolitionists pressed planters to reconsider their attitudes toward and the treatment of childbearing women. Slaveholders did not simply adopt metropolitan prescriptions on how best to increase biological reproduction, however. They interpreted and shaped policy according to the needs and wants of their sugar plantations as well as their perceptions of the capabilities and intimate lives of captive Africans. Planters determined that revisions in purchasing patterns, as they pertained to the sex, age, and ethnicity of imported Africans, were needed to reverse population decline. Before the slave trade ended, buyers aimed to stock their plantations with women most likely to reproduce. This attentiveness to the childbearing histories and reproductive potential of women in the closing decades of the slave trade (1780s-1807) shifted the importance of women and reproduction in the plantation economies. It marked a major transformation in the policy and practice of previous decades when planters considered pregnancy, childbirth, and child-rearing as liabilities.

The changing value of the reproductive capacity of female captives brought unwelcome interventions in the intimate lives of enslaved men and women. In addition to stocking their plantations with females they perceived as the “best breeding” people, Jamaican planters intervened in the sexual lives of enslaved men and women to capitalize on the reproductive promise of their purchases. Planters’ reproductive interventions not only contrasted with policies proposed by abolitionists, they also conflicted with enslaved people’s own views about the formation of sexual partnerships. The clash that would erupt between enslaver and enslaved reflected the authority slave owners claimed over the bodies of people they owned and the power enslaved people claimed to control their bodies.

Strategies for Breeding: Sex and Age Preferences

Between 1788 and 1807, sugar estate owners and managers aimed to buy females in far greater numbers than in previous decades in order to achieve parity between the sexes or, in some cases, to obtain more women than men. The absentee proprietor of Amity Hall estate, Henry Goulburn, implored his attorney, Thomas Samson, to “purchase [more] women in preference to males until the numbers of each are equal.” This method of buying, Goulburn explained, was the “means alone that we shall be able to keep our stock without diminution.”¹⁰ In another planter’s view, a major obstacle to successfully increasing birthrates was that the estates had “a great many more men than women.”¹¹ An examination of the transatlantic slave trade database confirms that males were likely to outnumber females on Jamaican sugar estates because of a greater number of males traded. In the twenty-year period before the start of Britain’s national campaign to shut down the African labor supply (1769–88), males steadily accounted for at least 60 percent of imported workers (Figure 2a). This pattern persisted into the last twenty years of the trade’s legal existence (1788–1808) with some years showing a 60 to 70 percent purchase of males (Figure 2b).

Figure 2a. Sex and Age Ratio, Jamaica, 1769–87. Source: Data compiled from Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database (2009), http://www.slavevoyages.org (accessed January 29, 2012).

While the slave trade database confirms preponderance of males, individual plantation records of annual slave increase and decrease show a narrower, and sometimes nonexistent, gap between males and females. Records for Worthy Park estate, for example, consistently show that males never outnumbered females by more than 5 percent in any given year between 1784 and 1796 (Figure 3). Similar patterns emerge for Golden Grove estate that show some years when females outnumbered males and other years when only a few slaves accounted for the sex ratio gap (Figure 4). For example, in 1768, the 50.1 percent females (184) surpassed the 49.8 percent males (183). In June 1792, the period that listed the greatest proportion of males (248), the property needed only a 4.7 percent increase in females (205) to achieve sexual parity.

Figure 2b. Sex and Age Ratio, Jamaica, 1788–1808. Source: Data compiled from Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database (2009), http://www.slavevoyages.org (accessed January 29, 2012).

A demographic history of Jamaica’s slave population between 1807 and 1834 not only confirms a small skewed sex ratio in favor of men, it also reveals that in many cases the proportion of women exceeded men on sugar plantations.¹² The slave population profile of Jamaica in 1817, the earliest year with comprehensive census data, reveals a ratio of 117.8 males to 100 females among the African-born population, and 91.4 males to 100 females among the island-born population (Creoles). While the overall sex ratio confirms that Jamaican buyers consistently imported more African males than females, the mortality rate among men was higher. An excessive death rate for males was especially true in the parishes where sugar plantations dominated and had the largest concentration of unfree workers. With the exception of only St. Thomas-in-the-East Parish, the female population surpassed the male population in all the sugar-producing parishes, many of which were home to the estates examined in this study, including Trewlany, St. John, and St. James. Males outnumbered females because of lower male mortality rates in other Jamaican parishes such as Manchester, St. Ann, St. Thomas-in-the-Vale, St. Mary, Port Royal, and St. George, where enslaved workers cultivated other crops and were engaged in diverse economic activities, like pimento and coffee growing as well as livestock rearing. Parishes with larger urban centers like St. Catherine and Kingston show the widest gap in sex ratios, with females outnumbering males by almost twenty to one. Urban economies depended on trade, manufacture, and domestic service, in which more women worked than in agriculture, which dominated the rural parishes. The problem plaguing sugar plantations was not so much a lack of women in general, but rather a deficiency of young women of childbearing age. The relatively quick pace at which the gender gap closed on the sugar estates when buying patterns had not shifted radically in favor of females reflects an aging population of women who outlived men.

Figure 3. Sex Ratio on Worthy Park Estate, 1784–96. Source: Compiled from Michael Craton, Searching for the Invisible Man: Slaves and Plantation Life in Jamaica (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1978), 81.

Figure 4. Sex Ratio on Golden Grove Estate, 1765–1810. Source: Compiled from Betty Wood and T. R. Clayton, “Slave Birth, Death and Disease on Golden Grove Plantation, Jamaica, 1765–1810,” Slavery and Abolition 6, no. 2 (1985): 99–121.

This demographic study further reveals a consistent gap in the age group fifteen to twenty-five across Jamaican parishes. The bulk of the slave population fell between ages twenty-five to forty-four. As one historian noted, “A common feature of the total populations was an erosion of the age pyramid between about 15 and 25 years.”¹³ Individual estates like Golden Grove reflect this pattern; 5.6 percent of its women were above age seventy, well beyond childbearing age. Girls with greatest reproductive promise, aged nine to seventeen, accounted for another 42 of 204 females at Golden Grove estate. Most women were field workers with “reputed age”¹⁴ between thirty and seventy years and therefore had a much lower reproductive potential.¹⁵ The age compositions of these properties tell us that the most pressing need was for greater proportions of women capable of bearing children. Francis Graham, attorney for Georgia estate, made this argument to his absentee employer, the owner of the property, Thomas Miller, when he explained why workers failed to reproduce. The estate simply had too many “old Gangs,” Graham wrote, and the only way to stimulate population growth was to buy young women.¹⁶

Proprietors and attorneys attempted to alter not just the sex ratio of their populations but also the youth profiles of female slaves. In 1804, Rowland Fearon, the Jamaican-based attorney who managed Lord Penrhyn’s sugar estates, promised to buy “as many young girls,” more specifically, “growing women,” for the property.¹⁷ Other planters were more precise in defining what constituted young, “growing women.” The planter-historian William Beckford summarized, “age twelve to sixteen is in my opinion, the age group that is most likely to answer the future” reproductive needs.¹⁸ Females between ages twelve to sixteen were far “too young” to suit Simon Taylor, because they were more vulnerable to sexual abuse. “If girls are bought too young,” Taylor explained, “the fellows play the very devil with them, but after they are 16 or 18 there is no [sexual] danger.”¹⁹ Thomas Barritt, attorney at two estates belonging to Nathaniel Phillips, expressed a similar concern. Men (race unspecified) frequently lured the “young wenches” away from the estates. Unsuspecting young girls inveigled by men into “bad habits” were “being disordered.”²⁰ While sexual activity could increase the conception rate, overindulgence generated diseases with sterilizing effects on female fertility.²¹ Nothing else, testified Stephen Fuller, Jamaican agent in London reporting to Parliament, “impede[s] the natural increase of the Slaves [more] than” venereal diseases.²² Although Jamaican planters wished to purchase a greater number of younger females than they did prior to 1788, they considered captives between ages twelve and sixteen to approximately age twenty-five to be best suited for fulfilling their reproductive goals.

Planter reform was at odds with the more generalized adjustments that abolitionists proposed. Abolitionists like James Ramsay and William Wilberforce insisted on a generally younger female population in order to stimulate population growth. Yet they did not anticipate the difficulties of having a population of females who were too young. Planters who witnessed and participated in the sexual abuse of enslaved women and girls understood the vulnerabilities of young girls. Their refusal to buy girls younger than twelve to sixteen reflected these abusive realities of slavery. Planters did not simply attempt to buy young girls, as abolitionists recommended, but specifically purchased girls old enough to defend themselves from unwanted sexual advances. Ironically, planters recognized and welcomed enslaved people’s agency when it suited their needs. At other times when it interfered with planter power and sexual access, they denounced enslaved people’s efforts to exercise autonomy.

The demand for younger females in their childbearing years increased not only because individual planters diverted their focus toward biological reproduction but also because new governmental trading regulations provided tax relief for the importation of females below age twenty-five. In 1792, Henry Dundas, adviser to the British prime minister, proposed a new bill regulating the age and sex of Africans imported to the British colonies. Echoing the pronatal plans of the imperial bureaucrat Maurice Morgan, who as noted earlier in 1772 devised a plan to wean planters from their dependence on the slave trade, Dundas argued that time should be given to “encourage merchants and planters to try fairly the scheme of rearing a sufficient number of native Negroes to answer the purpose of cultivating the plantations.” This proposal required planters to buy greater proportions of young women because they were “more likely to reproduce than were persons of advanced age.”²³ Although the House of Lords rejected Dundas’s proposal for an imperial adoption of a tax incentive on the purchase of younger females, colonial governments like the Jamaican Assembly adopted a similar measure. In 1797, the Assembly passed “an Act for laying a duty on all Negro slaves that shall be imported into this island from the coast of Africa who shall be above a certain age.” By this act, women above age twenty-five attracted an additional £10 tax. In communicating the successful adoption of the bill, Assembly members reported that it was “readily adapted” because of its “promised advantages.” Restricting imported Africans to those below age twenty-five, Assembly members iterated, not only promised to boost natural increase but also had the potential to reduce the number of “aged” workers incapable of acquiring “habits of industry.”²⁴

Despite increased planter demands and government incentives, young females continued arriving in Jamaica’s ports in fewer numbers than males. The transatlantic slave trade database shows significant growth in total imported Africans within the last decades of legal slave trading. However, the average percentage of males remained consistently greater than females (except for the years 1798–1806 and 1808, for which we have no data on sex ratios).²⁵ Males accounted for 61.80 percent of the total number of Africans brought into Jamaica for the entire period of legal slave trading (1659–1808) and 63.80 percent during the abolitionist period (1788–1808).²⁶ The closest approximation of the age of females imported into Jamaica is reached by looking at the ratio of children, crudely defined by slave traders as young people below four feet four inches.²⁷ The average number of children brought into Jamaica shows a downward trend between 1788 and 1808. In 1788, children were 24.90 percent of African imports. These rates declined steadily for the next seven years (to 1795) when the average import was 11.88 percent. By 1796 the number of children imported to Jamaica fell to 7.22 percent; by 1797 it had increased slightly to 8.27 percent. The following year imported children increased to 16 percent. Broadly speaking, children bought between 1788 and 1808 amounted to just 15.66 percent.²⁸ Of these totals, fewer girls arrived in Jamaica than boys. Over the ten-year period 1788–98, boys arrived in Jamaica at twice the rate of girls for at least four years. In 1789, for the 17.45 percent of slaves who were children landing in Jamaica, there were 8.05 percent who were girls. By 1798, the ratio of boys to girls had more than doubled. Boys approximated 11.5 percent in comparison to 4.5 percent for girls.

Table 1. Negroes Purchased for Worthy Park Estate, 1784–93

Source: Worthy Park Accounts of Increase and Decrease, Worthy Park Estate Plantation Books, 1783–1837, Jamaica Government Archives, Spanish Town, Jamaica.

Purchase patterns for some individual properties, like Worthy Park estate, show some attempt to buy at least equal proportions of women and men throughout the 1780s, and in at least one year (1792) this property made an additional purchase of sixteen boys and sixteen girls plus six children (sex unspecified) (Table 1). The records for other properties, such as Golden Grove estate, show no consistent pattern in gender- or age-specific purchases (Figure 5). In some years, its attorney, Simon Taylor, purchased more men than women, and the reverse in other years. Golden Grove’s purchase accounts inconsistently record age (boys, girls, or children), but its fluctuating buying patterns suggest that uncertainties of the trade could make buying patterns unpredictable. Despite abolitionist insistence and government regulations that planters buy more young women, planter purchases did not reflect such gender preferences.

Figure 5. New Negroes Known to Have Been Purchased for Golden Grove Estate, 1765–94. Source: Compiled from Betty Wood and T. R. Clayton, “Slave Birth, Death and Disease on Golden Grove Plantation, Jamaica, 1765–1810,” Slavery and Abolition 6, no. 2 (1985): 99–121.

The fact that young women did not dominate the number of captive Africans landing in Jamaica suggests that despite preferences planters expressed, the constraints of the slave trade ultimately determined the sex and age of cargo available to Jamaican planters.²⁹ Scholars debate the reasons for the sex and age ratios of Africans imported into the Americas. Some scholars argue that fewer females were available for the transatlantic trade because regional trades in Africa valued women as more important for agricultural production than men.³⁰ Others assert that both women and men were integral to West African agriculture and that other factors such as the type of crop produced, warfare, judicial processes, and strategies of enslavement were important determinants of the slave trade’s age and gendered composition and variation over time.³¹ Social and political conditions in Africa were also important factors that determined the availability of young women and girls for export into the Americas.³²

Market demands also influenced the sex and age of Africans transported into the American markets. Slave traders would buy Africans from dealers not just according to what the market offered but also according to what they calculated would yield greatest profits. From the earliest years of the slave trade, West Indian buyers established their sex preferences. Moreover, when traders did not deliver according to market demands in the Americas, their buyers chastised them and paid very little for the undesired cargo. John Barnes, governor of the slave trading fort of Senegal, reported that merchants rejected African captives for several reasons.³³ Chief among these was that the expected resale value of Africans did not exceed their original purchase price.³⁴ Merchants refused to trade cargo who they calculated “were not worth their freight” for transportation to the Americas.³⁵

While Caribbean planters made clear their preferences for age and sex they were unwilling to buy slaves who were ailing, maimed, or otherwise disabled, even if such consignment suited the other stated desires of buyers. The overriding concern among Jamaican buyers was obtaining healthy, able-bodied workers who would live long and work hard enough to return their investment. Planters readily purchased healthy women despite stated preferences for men. Buyer and seller interests in this regard aligned. Slave traders aimed to depart the African coast rapidly because delayed departures (even if to secure particular cargo) increased demands on food and supplies and greater likelihood of illness, death, and revolts, which meant that the captives who set sail for the Americas were those most quickly acquired and in the best of health.³⁶

Whether one argues that supply conditions in Africa or profit calculations more significantly affected the disparities in sex and age, it is abundantly clear that planter preferences and their purchases were at odds. After 1788, Jamaican planters had a clear preference for young females. However, import records for Jamaica reveal continued male preponderance. These disparities tell us that the fulfilment of abolitionist-inspired pronatal plans did not depend only on planters working out reforms according to property needs or the capabilities of captive women and girls. The supply constraints and unpredictability of the slave trade also imperiled pronatalism. Reform-minded planters, therefore, needed to align their practices to cope with the limitations of the slave trade, placing them further at odds with the proposed policies of abolitionists.

While quantitative analyses are important for calculating trends and the magnitude of the slave trade, they sometimes obscure more than they reveal.³⁷ We know that males dominated Jamaica’s slave imports, but it is not clear what the sex and age ratios were for the period 1798 to 1806, during the height of abolitionist activism.³⁸ This was the most crucial period when planters were unusually attentive to the sex and age of captive Africans. Beyond the unavailability of data, a purely quantitative approach also does not tell us how estate proprietors, attorneys, and overseers solved their quotidian problems of balancing production and reproduction, nor does it reveal the everyday experiences of enslaved men, women, boys, and girls.

Although planters aimed to buy young women below age twenty-five, identifying the age of captive Africans was not an exact science. Buyers and sellers used various idiosyncratic means of telling the age of their cargoes, including the presence or absence of gray hair as well as teeth and skin condition. Testifying to a parliamentary special committee formed to investigate the slave trade, former trader John Fountain revealed that buyers inspected African captives to ensure they had no “defects” that would adversely affect their abilities to labor. “Stamping their foot boldly on the ground and stretching out their arms” would ensure commodities’ soundness. African dealers, Fountain testified, “are very cunning and commit various frauds in their trade with the Europeans.”³⁹ Thus, he reported, buyers spared neither dignity nor humanity as they closely examined the “privies of men and women” to ensure they were “sound in wind and limb [and] to judge their age.”⁴⁰

When it came to identifying the relative age of young women, or more precisely, those within their childbearing years, buyers worked out peculiar methods of determination.⁴¹ Women’s breasts betrayed their childbearing history. Buyers estimated that women with sagging breasts had already given birth or could no longer bear children. One account identified such women as those whose breasts were visible from a distance “hang[ing] down below their Navels.” “Young Negro Virgins,” however, were differentiated by the firmness of their breasts. As planter-historian Richard Ligon explained it, such young women had breasts that were “round, firm, and beautifully shaped.”⁴² Buyers and sellers in the late eighteenth century and the early nineteenth century thus singled out the breasts of captives to estimate the age and reproductive potential of women in addition to inscribing racial meanings as their seventeenth-century predecessors had done. Captive women’s breasts were continuously imbued with meanings that underpinned the economic and racial edifice of slavery.

Yet the shift in language away from sagging breasts primarily meaning African savagery to sagging breasts as prime indicator of childbearing potential marks a crucial transformation in the process of enslavement. Before buying new Africans, plantation physician Dr. David Collins advised, “pains should be taken to discover whether they are really what they appear to be, and pains should be taken to discover whether they have any personal defects which impair their value, if they do not render them entirely unfit for your purpose.” Captive women and girls were poked, prodded, and fondled by traders and buyers to ensure they were of “good stature … without any long breasts hanging down.” They stood in lines, in pairs, “stark naked” with buyers variously “squeezing their joints & muscles, twisting their arms & legs, and examining teeth, eyes and chest, and pinching [their] breasts without mercy.”⁴³

Auctioneers introduced captives to buyers by emphasizing body parts that bespoke their reproductive promise. This was true in not only the Caribbean but North America as well, where the increased value of the womb shaped the slave market. Attempting to solicit the interest of buyers, one New Orleans trader called out, “There’s a breast for you; good for a round dozen before she’s done child-bearing.”⁴⁴ Such selling calls appealed to buyers like Simon Taylor, who assured his absentee employer that the cargo he purchased were “fit for breeding” because they were “young women with cuck up bubbies” (understood to mean pert breasts or from Ligon’s more explicit description “round, firm” breasts).⁴⁵ Thus, bodily traits, particularly the breasts, marked an inclusion of age and reproductive capabilities as determinants of captive women’s value. The emphasis on and examination of women’s breasts further exposed them to gender-specific violence. Such violence was more pronounced because, in the age of pronatal abolitionism, women’s reproductive value was of increasing importance to the system of slavery.

The difficulties in determining the specific age of cargo prompted some buyers to consider other methods of determining women’s reproductive potential. When Thomas Miller, the absentee owner of Georgia estate, instructed his local attorney, Francis Graham, to lay out £1,000 to buy “breeding females,” he was mostly concerned with making sure they appeared capable of bearing children. Both the attorney and owner contemplated whether simply buying women with young children might not be a more effective strategy of stocking Georgia estate with women who had proven reproductive potential. The challenge in buying slave families, Graham explained, was that the estate would wind up with a smaller group of capable workers. According to Graham, if he were to use the £1,000 to buy only “females fit to breed,” he would secure about twelve “able bodied females,” whereas buying women with children would amount to sixteen or eighteen people, a good proportion of them being children who were unable to work at the more demanding tasks on the plantation.⁴⁶ Planter concern about the age of newly purchased slaves was not just about girls’ sexual vulnerabilities but also about laboring abilities. Some planters did not buy slaves below a certain age because they could not work.

Although Georgia estate aimed to increase the proportion of “breeding females,” Graham was reluctant to spend the limited capital to buy captive Africans who were unproductive. A strategy that would not undermine the profit motive of the estate would be to buy only potentially fertile females with all the available money, and gamble on whether they would actually produce children later. As Graham explained, if he were to buy families, then there would be no money left over to hire jobbers to do the work that slave mothers and young children were unable to do. What concerned Graham was how best to use the estate’s limited financial resources to increase the number of workers capable of reproducing, without undermining the estate’s ability to remain productive. Despite abolitionist concern for the colonies’ economic future and, therefore, their gradual approach to ending slavery, they failed to consider the outcomes pronatal reforms would have for the everyday financial and productive concerns of the estates. Planters who refused to adopt pronatal reform carte blanche were primarily concerned with their estates’ finances and production. In working out the details of amelioration, they tried to balance reform against the financial constraints and labor needs of their properties.

The challenges planters faced in the era of pronatal abolitionism not only involved altering the demographic profile of their estates but also calculating how such changes would negatively impact their profit goals. They had to manage the financial risk of investing in children who were too young to work and who might not live into adulthood. The high mortality rates among young people cautioned planters against investing too heavily in slave children. According to the planter-historian Edward Long, it cost planters an average of £12 to maintain a field slave annually (food, clothing, poll tax, and insurance) in the 1780s, and approximately half that amount for children (typically up to about ages six to ten). From these calculations, it was more costly to buy boys and girls because they needed at least eight to ten years to be of significant use as workers.⁴⁷ In fact, in 1805 Francis Graham traded two children for adults because the children were too young to be useful to the estate. One of the children was only twelve months old and Graham feared the boy might not survive into adulthood. Additionally, the labor shortage at Georgia meant that the estate could not invest eight to ten years waiting for these children to become useful workers.⁴⁸

The financial costs, risk of premature death, and incessantly pressing labor needs of the sugar plantations did not make it cost-effective for reform-minded planters to buy slaves who were younger than ten to twelve years old. Abolitionists had not considered these circumstances. Planters, however, assessed these risks and invested in pronatal reforms according to the needs of their sugar estates, but they failed to consider the implications of trading children away from their mothers. The problem of biological reproduction was not just one of high infant and child mortality rates caused by diseases and nutritional deficiencies. How did these policies shape the family life of the enslaved and the willingness of enslaved women to bear children?

Strategies for Breeding: Ethnic Preferences

Jamaican slaveholders had long singled out their preferences for particular ethnic groups whom they thought to be most productive and capable of fulfilling plantation labor needs. Edward Long spent much time explicating the importance of carefully choosing particular ethnic groups according to the “different purposes” for which they were needed on the sugar plantations. Africans, Long wrote, varied in “their passions and bent of mind … according to the constitution of their native climate and local manner [and had] a variety of distempers.” A planter looking to maximize his success would be best served by paying “particular attention” to such idiosyncrasies.⁴⁹ Africans from the Gold Coast, or as buyers and sellers frequently called them “Coromantees,” were highly prized among Jamaican planters, who perceived them as “the only ones fit for Sugar Works.”⁵⁰ “Negro men of Coromantee country,” one attorney asserted, were the best ones to “establish a fine gang of people for the estate.”⁵¹

When it came to buying women for reproductive purposes, their ethnic origin was just as essential.⁵² “Eboe is the country to buy women off to breed,” Nathaniel Phillips advised. Phillips, an absentee owner of two sugar estates, instructed his local attorney, Thomas Barritt, to allocate all monies owed to his property for buying new “Negroes when good ones come in [and] if Eboes take 20 women.” In 1800, Barritt reported to Phillips that he had purchased “14 New Negroes” for the properties of which there were “6 young women [and] 5 women girls.” He assured Phillips, that they were “all fine people, the best kind of Eboes.”⁵³ Simon Taylor similarly reported to his absentee employer, Chaloner Arcedekne, that he “bought the 10 wenches [Arcedekne] desired. [He] sent 5 to G[olden] G[rove] and 5 to B[achelors] H[all].…They are Eboes which we think are the best breeding people.”⁵⁴ In keeping with buyer preferences, sellers littered colonial newspapers with sale advertisements that announced the arrival of precious cargo. One advertisement in the 1790 Daily Advertiser read, “For Sale On Tuesday 4th January 303 Choice Young Eboe From New Calabar.”⁵⁵ Planter preoccupation with the ethnic origins of the captives departs from the emphasis abolitionists placed on sex and youthfulness as criteria for demographic changes needed to promote biological reproduction. Planters determined pronatal reforms based to their perceptions of how ethnicity shaped captive women’s reproductive capacities.

Whether right or wrong, the conclusion proprietors and attorneys made that Ebo women were most prolific came from their years of perceiving these as having more children than other ethnic groups.⁵⁶ Estate doctor David Collins asserted, “the African Negroes, being brought from an extensive range of the continent [had] unequal fecundity … and possess great varieties of character.” While Collins admitted it was “difficult to ascertain from what country they have been drawn, the history of Jamaica exhibits very sanguinary examples of [their] disposition.” Ebo women, or, as he variously labeled them, “Ebboes, Ebboos-bees or Mocco,” are “hardy” and capable of varieties of labor. They “are superior to any other and very little inferior to men.”⁵⁷

In the literature, Ebo women reportedly had larger, more stable families and communities because they were generally more attached to the land, their children, and their spouses. A higher number of fugitive women with children and families were listed as Ebo, because they “placed their lives in great peril to keep their families intact.”⁵⁸ Additionally, Ebo women were arguably more prolific because they formed sexual relationships with males outside their ethnic grouping.⁵⁹ Planter writings represent their presumptions about African women and their family life; and whether or not these assumptions had basis in fact, they directed buying preferences.

Not all planters agreed that Ebo women were most suitable for the “purpose of breeding.” Edward Long believed they were the least fertile of all African women because they were most susceptible to disorders of the womb. “Ebo women,” he wrote, “are subject to obstruction of the mestrua-[tion], often attended with sterility, and incurable.”⁶⁰ It is difficult to assess how many planters shared Long’s views that Ebos were the least prolific among captive women. What we do know, however, is that other planters like Simon Taylor held this view about women he presumed belonged to other ethnic groups. Taylor refused “Angola and Mandingo Negroes,” who, in his view were “soft” and “lazy.”⁶¹ But more important, Angolan and Mandingo women had an “abominable custom [of] dirt eating,” which he, along with other planters and medical practitioners like Thomas Roughley and Dr. James Thomson, understood as a significant cause of low fertility among captive women.⁶² Dirt eating allegedly caused women to fall into “dropsy occasioned by obstructions in their liver, consequently … there is no chance of the women breeding.”⁶³ Clearly, planters developed particular preferences for specific groups of captive Africans, who they thought were the “best breeding people,” and when available they bought women and girls according to such prescriptions. Even as Taylor sought to increase his holdings of females, on more than one occasion he postponed doing so because only Angolan cargoes were available. “For my part,” he protested, “I would not accept a gang of them for nothing.”⁶⁴

There are competing interpretations of the meaning of “Ebo” (in planter terminology) or “Igbo” (among historians).⁶⁵ What did planters mean when they asked for Ebo women? Was the Ebo identity linked to Africans coming from particular ports—Bonny and Calabar (New and Old)—or was it linked to wide geographical regions—Bight of Biafra—which encompassed multiple, changing ethnicities? Did planters really understand the identities of captive Africans? How accurate were the claims of planters and traders that ethnicity correlated with higher or lower levels of fertility? The foundation for these debates is the question of accuracy, both in terms of British identification of their captives’ origins and in terms of Africans asserting and claiming particular identities.⁶⁶ Some historians have dismissed planter-identified African ethnicities as “imposed taxonomies” and sweeping generalizations with neither credible meanings nor accurate reflections of African nations. Others have argued that over time planters learned the various ethnic markers of Africans and correctly deciphered them.⁶⁷

This study is primarily concerned with what such labels meant when planters used them to refer to captive women and girls, and how such signifiers provide us a window into planter constructions of femininity for the purposes of maintaining slavery. The argument here is that these terminologies of ethnicity were “socially meaningful in the context of enslavement.”⁶⁸ For the purposes of reproduction, young women identified as Ebo were considered the most fecund, real or imagined. On plantations like Golden Grove, newly purchased Ebo women received special treatment in order to allow them “every chance of breeding.” Even if these markers inaccurately labeled captives, they reveal planter interest in reproduction. Additionally, planter belief that women who were Ebos were the most suited for bearing children created differences in the daily lives of women and girls under slavery.⁶⁹ The transformations ushered in by pronatalism did not affect all enslaved women evenly, but varied according to perceived ethnic origins of captive women.

Strategies for Breeding: Coerced Sexual Relations

The extent to which planters believed that young women they perceived as Ebo were more fecund than others determined specialized treatment. At Golden Grove estate, Ebo women were forced into unions with enslaved men. The property’s attorney, Simon Taylor, said that he intended “for every man to have his wife” (emphasis added). Thus, as soon as “the first good Eboe ship” docked, he promised to buy as many women as needed to “give each man a wife.”⁷⁰ It is unknown how extensively Taylor paired Ebo women with men on Golden Grove. We do know, however, of at least one occasion in February 1794, when he carried out his matchmaking plans. The men were reportedly “pleased with the wives [he] sent them.”⁷¹ Reports from other properties suggest that at least a few planters paired newly purchased women with men already residing on the plantation. In 1805, Rowland Fearon, attorney for Lord Penrhyn’s properties, announced his plans to have the “New Negro Girls at Coates [estate] intermarried [with the] men at the Penn [Bullard].”⁷²

Several Jamaican planters targeted Ebo in their matchmaking efforts (again bearing in mind the conundrums of this marker). Planters paired Ebo women with Coromantee men. Unlike planters and doctors like Taylor, Phillips, and Collins, who emphasized the reproductive promise of Ebo women as a criterion for specialized treatment, the Ebo women in one historian’s account were singled out because of their presumed disposition. Planters coupled Ebo women with Coromantees because they believed these ethnic groups had opposing temperaments that complemented one another. Ebo women supposedly had more domestic tendencies that would help tame the more unruly, unsettled Coromantee. In return, the more enterprising and mentally resilient Coromantee men would strengthen the suicidal tendencies in Ebo women.⁷³

Planter emphasis on the ethnic origins of African captives they expected to form into intimate unions not only contrasted with the policies abolitionists promoted, reflecting planter determination of the course of reform. By denying enslaved people autonomy over their own sexual partnerships, such coerced unions were also met with resistance. The likelihood of enslaved people rebelling against the arbitrary sexual partnerships prompted Taylor to put a few contingency measures in place. He allocated additional provision grounds and housing spots for the women in the event that they opposed his plans.⁷⁴ The lack of further mention of his efforts to control enslaved women’s intimate relations suggests that the people at Golden Grove refused to cooperate and forced Taylor to abandon the scheme as quickly as he proposed it. The fact that Taylor and other planters complained about enslaved women’s nocturnal wanderings suggests that the freedom enslaved people claimed over bodily pleasures made it difficult to impose sexual relationships upon them and impossible to police their intimate lives.⁷⁵ Attorney Fearon attempted similar interventions at Lord Penrhyn’s properties, but he abandoned the schemes because of enslaved people’s resistance. He reported, “I found it a tiresome and arduous task and gave it up as a bad job.”⁷⁶

Although forced unions victimized both enslaved men and women, the coupling of newly arrived captive women with men already living on the plantation altered the gendered balance of power. Already seasoned into plantation life, enslaved men had the advantage of familiarity with their environment and being less immediately traumatized from the experience of the Middle Passage. It is not coincidental that planters chose recent arrivals to force into sexual unions. Captive women’s weakened state and lack of familiarity with their new surroundings made them most vulnerable to the control and advances of their purchasers and arbitrarily selected husbands. Reports of enslaved men being pleased with their wives raise further difficult questions that are not easy to answer from these sources. To what extent were enslaved men collaborators in the subordination and the sexual abuse of enslaved women? At other times, black men exerted physical and sexual power over black women through rape and domestic violence. At the very least, these records suggest that placing women into men’s households positioned enslaved men as head of household and invoked Europatriarchal standards that granted household heads unrestricted sexual access to their dependents. The occupational hierarchy that privileged men in most status-bearing and leadership roles already promoted black patriarchal power over black women, even though enslaved men were also victims of their masters’ expectations and machinations.⁷⁷

Although planter assumptions about the reproductive capacities and tendencies of Ebo made these young women more susceptible to interference in their intimate lives, all enslaved women were vulnerable to planters scrutinizing their sexuality. Planters, doctors, and government officials denigrated African captives as being licentious, and despite planter efforts to select the best women “who are fit for breeding,” their exertions yielded few positive results because of women’s so-called promiscuity. Such complaints of sexual impropriety, however, reflected women’s refusal to conform to the sexual mores prescribed by reformers. In 1789, the Jamaica Committee of Council reporting to the British House of Commons noted, “Births are not so frequent amongst Negro Slaves in this Island as among the Peasantry of Great Britain, and it is in great measure attributed to their manners and habits of life.…Both sexes [frequently engage in] licentious intercourse.” The report further explained that women patronized “Negro plays or Nocturnal Assemblies, in distant Parts, where they dance immoderately, drink to Excess, sleep on the damp Ground in open Air, and commit such Acts of Sensuality and Intemperance [that] bring on the most fatal distempers.”⁷⁸ By emphasizing sexual habits, witnesses for the slaving interests shifted attention away from the strenuous labor regimes, cruel punishments, and neglect of enslaved people’s material needs that abolitionists focused on as the leading causes of population decline.

Planters and doctors echoed the council’s testimony and added that while the health of men and women suffered immensely from their nocturnal rendezvous, the consequences were far more injurious to female fertility than to male fertility. Fearon noted that “the women [were subject] to cold, obstructions, and other maladies [which are] the enemies to procreation.”⁷⁹ Estate agent Thomas Barritt noted that such activities left the women “disordered and feeble,” minimizing their chances of bearing children.⁸⁰ Enslaved women’s alleged promiscuity became an additional justification for planters to coerce them into intimate unions with arbitrarily chosen men on the plantations. Claiming authority over slaves’ bodies and sexuality, Fearon “did attempt to persuade all [the enslaved] people to intermarry and do away with the rambling at night.”⁸¹

Implicit within these writings is slaveholders’ ignorance of the sociocultural practices of enslaved people. Many Jamaican planters and colonial observers assumed that enslaved women’s late night activities were occasions for overindulgence of their sexual passions “with a multitude of men.” They believed these occasions involved the excessive consumption of alcohol, which they feared caused infertility in women. Plantation doctor William Wright asserted, “There are no causes on a well ordered estate that impede the natural increase of slave Negroes so much so as going to Negroe balls.…They [engage in] venery too early and often with a number of men. They [too easily accept] spirituous liquor and above all they conceal venereal complaints from White people.”⁸² Sharing Wright’s assessments, another estate doctor, Thomas Dancer, emphasized that “the unbound indulgences in venereal pleasures [are] a common cause of sterility” in women. “The parts are left in so morbid a state as to be unfit for impregnation,” he wrote. “The uterine and the vaginal vessels are distended, and a perpetual discharge, or flux albus is the consequence.”⁸³

Enslaved people’s social habits had long been subject to scrutiny and misrepresentation by enslavers across New World slave societies. Several historians have stressed that enslavers constructed stereotypes and images like “Jezebel” in order to legitimize their sexual access to and exploitation of enslaved women and girls.⁸⁴ Indeed, the enslaved remained subjected to these racist and sexist stereotypes during the abolitionist era.⁸⁵ However, their so-called promiscuity not only justified enslavers’ sexual assault. Limitations on the sexual liberties of enslaved women were now legitimized under the veneer of promoting biological reproduction. Enslaved people were not subdued so easily, however. These misunderstood late night excursions proved nothing more than that enslaved people had their own views about their sexual practices and social habits and they found clandestine ways to express them. They insisted on pleasuring their bodies in ways of their choosing.⁸⁶

Although planters acknowledged enslaved men’s nightly excursions had sterilizing effects, they focused mainly on curtailing the activities of women. Of further note, slaveholders were unwilling to acknowledge their own culpability in population failure. Maria Nugent, wife of the governor of Jamaica in 1802, having “amused [her]self with reading Evidence before the House of Commons, on the part of the petitioners for the Abolition of the Slave Trade,” entered the following assessment in her journal,

As far as I can see at present … there would certainly be no necessity of the Slave Trade, if religion, decency, and good order, were established among the Negroes; if they could be prevailed upon to marry … they would increase and render the necessity of the Slave Trade out of the question, provided their masters were attentive to their morals, and established matrimony among them, but White men of all descriptions, married and single, live in a state of licentiousness with their female slaves and until a great reformation takes place on their part, neither decency, nor morality, can be established among the Negroes.⁸⁷

Although Nugent’s concern for slaveholders’ inattentiveness to the moral reform of enslaved women was a backhanded criticism of their sexuality, she did indict planters as being culpable in Jamaica’s failure to achieve self-sustaining populations. Her views conflicted with those of the maledominated Jamaican planter class who did not see their sexual assault of enslaved women and girls as part of the problem. From the perspective of male planters, the challenge to biological reproduction was women’s inability to exercise libidinal restraint.

Ultimately, the question of breeding farms and forced breeding as part of the sugar plantations naturally emerges when we reflect upon planter efforts to buy a greater proportion of young women who were at the beginning of their reproductive cycles, some of whom were arbitrarily coupled with enslaved men. Slavery scholars are at odds on the question of forced breeding on the plantations. Did forced breeding occur? If estate agents coerced enslaved people into sexual relations, how did this occur and how extensive was this practice?⁸⁸

The possibility that enslavers coerced enslaved men and women into sexual relations for the purposes of boosting slave population unearths the extensive spectrum of the trauma and exploitation captive Africans faced. Slave breeding must be understood not with the “unreasonable literalness” of “stud farms,” but rather as cunning manipulation, wherein planters strategized their purchases and interfered in the sexual relations of the enslaved.⁸⁹ Enslavers were not interested in the welfare of enslaved people as an end in itself. Estate agents promoted slave couples to secure their own economic interests. Biological reproduction as a means of amelioration exploited enslaved women.

Jamaican planters took seriously abolitionist threats to cut off their African labor supply. And until 1807, when such threats manifested, they expended a great deal of effort to stock their plantations with young, fertile women they thought could generate future workers. Although planters were at the mercy of the transatlantic slave trade, and experienced limited success in increasing the number of young Ebo women on their properties, it was clear that between 1788 and 1807 a pronatal agenda was firmly in place.

Enslaved women’s ability to reproduce therefore shifted away from being viewed as a distraction that diverted mother-workers away from their more important roles in the fields and factories. Planters bought young women with the intention of harnessing their reproductive potential. Although such transformations occurred because abolitionists articulated the end of slavery through the reproductive capacities of women, the details of reforms were worked out in the colonies and their implementation was more in line with planter assessments of the needs and solvency of their estates as well as the assumptions they held about captive women. The difficulties of pronatal reform were further illustrated in women insisting on maintaining autonomy over their intimacies. The authority metropolitan reformers and local plantation agents claimed over slaves’ intimate relations contrasted with the power enslaved people insisted on exercising over their bodies and sexuality.