The Unspeakable Things Americans Did To Captured Breeding Slaves

In 1807, Great Britain banned the importation of slaves into British territories, and the dominant Royal Navy patrolled the coasts of Africa intercepting “slavers,” slave-ships, en route to the nations that still imported them, whether they were British or not. This cut into the American slave trade as well, reducing the number of people imported into the United States to labor in the fields and homes of the new country – especially the southern part of the USA.

Most slave-traders in America had seen the writing on the wall by this time anyway, for there was a growing and powerful abolition movement in the US that in 1808 successfully pushed for a ban on the importation of slaves. Neither country banned slavery at this time, they just ended the forced kidnapping of Africans for the purpose of enslaving them.

Slavery ended peacefully in Great Britain in 1833. It took a civil war for the US to end “the Peculiar Institution,” – the euphemism used by many Americans, especially in the South, for slavery. When the slave trade was banned, there were two ways for southern slave-owners to get more slaves: the illegal slave trade, which continued into the Civil War, and – reproduction – forced reproduction.

Welcome to History on Fleek! Today we’re going to tell you about an aspect of slavery in America that’s too often forgotten. The breeding of slaves. The Black population in the US before the Civil War In 1810, the year the first census was taken after the law banning slave importation, there were just over 1.3 million black people in America. 1.19 million were slaves, 186,000-plus were free. In 1830, there were 2.32 million slaves and 319,500 “free blacks”. In 1861, the year before the Civil War began, there were 4.4 million slaves and just under 500,000 “freemen,” up 800,000 from the previous census in 1850. If the importation of slaves from Africa was banned, where did these enslaved people come from? Unless you’re completely ignorant of human biology, you know – sexual relations.

Except that many of the women held in bondage in the South had absolutely no choice in the matter. In addition to all of the other cruelties of slavery – the violence, the sub-standard and often horrible living conditions, and the simple fact that enslaved people by definition had no freedom – one of the worst, and perhaps the worst was the sexual slavery that enslaved women were forced to endure – both to increase the labor force, and to satisfy the sexual whims of their owners. And, as odd is it may seem, enslaved men were also victims of sexual violence, only in a different and sometimes more subtle way. We’ll tell you more about that in a moment.

Sally Hemings Though it had been the subject of debate and controversy before, in the 1990s, a debate raged in America about the legacy of one of the most famous and influential of the “Founding Fathers,” Thomas Jefferson, the third president and primary author of the Declaration of Independence.

Even today, historians debate Jefferson’s ideas about slavery, and it can be a polarizing topic, especially in academic and sociological circles. The controversy that erupted in the US in the 90s had to do with the sexual relationship that Jefferson had with Sally Hemings, a slave at his famous Monticello estate in Virginia.

Hemings was actually ¾ Caucasian and ¼ African descent, for her mother, Betty Heming was ½ African. Her mother was an enslaved woman and her father an English captain, John Hemings. Sally’s father, who “owned” Betty Hemings was white – and he was also the father of Jefferson’s wife, Martha.

In reality, Hemings was Jefferson’s sister-in-law as well as his mistress, though Martha Jefferson did pass away before Jefferson’s relationship with Sally began. Sally Hemings was ¾ English. But that did not matter. The “one-drop” rule, a sometimes legal notion, meant that anyone with “black blood” was “black” and subject to being enslaved, and after the end of the Civil War, discriminated against.

No one has accused Thomas Jefferson of forcing himself on Sally Hemings, but, given that she was 14, and Jefferson in his early 40s when she arrived in Paris in 1787, having been , and was also powerful, respected and extremely popular man when he arrived in France, Sally was hardly in a position to say no.

Jefferson had been in Paris since 1784 as Minister of the United States, the precursor to the office of Secretary of State. In France, Sally had a relatively free life, and though some public sources say she was legally free in France, France did not abolish slavery until 1789, the year Jefferson returned to America.

Still, if Sally had remained in France, she would have remained free, but she returned with Jefferson with a promise he had made to her – that their children would be given their freedom. At least that’s the theory. Two of the children died in infancy, and there is no record of the other four being given their freedom, though two of them, Harriet and Beverly, eventually “passed” into white society in pre-Civil War America.

In 2017, archaeologists made a discovery. A bathroom that had been installed in 1941, was actually the bedroom of Sally Hemings. It had been covered years before, excavated in the 40s, then covered again. The decent sized room was adjacent to Jefferson’s bedroom. Only those who worked at Monticello and Jefferson’s closes friends knew there was any kind of relationship between the two – which DNA of Hemings’ and Jefferson’s known descendants confirmed.

Relatively speaking, Sally Hemings had a luxurious life. That doesn’t change her status, or put her “above” the other enslaved women of the time or who came later – women who were encouraged, and more often-times forced to have children, not out of love, but economics. “Breeding Farms” Though it has not been 100% proven by historians, many believe that books, legal testimony, word of mouth, biographies, letters, and documents from the post-slave trade and pre-Civil War 1800s all point to the existence of at least two places in the slave-owning South that were home to “breeding farms” – where black women were treated like domesticated animals and purposefully bred to increase the size of the “herd” of enslaved people. Even if these places, located in Richmond, Virginia, and the Eastern Shore of the Chesapeake Bay in Maryland, did not exist, it is a well-documented fact that women in the slave-owning South were forcibly bred or “encouraged” to have children – the encouragement being a bit of an easier life for a time, or back to heavy labor in the fields or elsewhere on the plantation. The terms used for these women and about these women were no different than those used to refer to the “breeding stock” of cattle, sheep, and goats. “Breeding stock” was actually the preferred term for women AND girls who had a history of child-bearing or women and girls who were, at least on the outside, “built for it,” with wide hips and larger breasts.

Whether at the “breeding farms,” which were thought to have been set up by the biggest slave traders in the country to continue making a profit after the importation of people from Africa was made illegal, or on the plantations and farms, large and small, forced reproduction through sexual assault was common.

As farmers and ranchers do with their cattle, slave owners kept detailed records of which women got pregnant by which man – that is, if the man was also a slave. More about the exceptions to that in a moment. These records had to be kept to avoid inbreeding or forcing women to submit who could not have children – not out of sympathy for the woman, but because of the bottom line: profits and time.

To ensure pregnancy, women were often subject to many assaults, sometimes by the same man, sometimes by many men. Of course, any sexual contact that is not a choice is an assault, but to paint an accurate picture, sometimes the attempts at reproduction were not overtly violent. Sometimes they were.

On many occasions, intercourse between an enslaved man and an enslaved woman was observed – by their owners, overseers, or both. One can only imagine that some sick minds “observed” these “encounters” regularly. Now about the men. Healthy, muscular, “well-endowed” men were the primary “breeding stock” used to impregnate female slaves.

These men were sometimes “rewarded” with the chance to be “with” a woman, but more often, they were ordered to do so – repeatedly until a woman or sexually mature girl became pregnant. Many times, these men were ordered to perform. Not doing so, or not being able to do so – considering there was often an audience to “the act,” and the women and girls might have been terrified and known to them – might result in punishment or an increased workload.

“Partus sequitor ventrum,” Is a Latin phrase adapted into law in the pre-Civil War USA. It means “That which is born follows the womb.” In plain English – a child follows the mother. It’s an important concept because it means that a child born of a white man and a black woman was always considered black – and a slave.

Of course, there were exceptions, but in addition to black men being forced to breed black women, many white “owners,” and their overseers had children by enslaved women. Black women were often the first sexual contact that Southern white males had – because it “meant nothing.” At least not to slave owners. In 2020, American author, poet, and chef Caroline Randall Williams wrote an “op-ed” for the NY Times called “You Want a Confederate Monument? My Body Is a Confederate Monument.”

In it, she wrote:

“I have rape-colored skin. My light-brown-blackness is a living testament to the rules, the practices, the causes of the Old South. If there are those who want to remember the legacy of the Confederacy, if they want monuments, well, then, my body is a monument. My skin is a monument.”

This is History on Fleek, and we’ll see you next time!