The American Slave Coast: A History of the Slave-Breeding Industry

Maryland.

Introduction

THIS IS A HISTORY of the slave-breeding industry, which we define as the complex of businesses and individuals in the United States who profited from the enslavement of African American children at birth.

At the heart of our account is the intricate connection between the legal fact of people as property—the chattel principle—and national expansion. Our narrative doubles, then, as a history of the making of the United States as seen from the point of view of the slave trade.

It also traces the history of money in America. In the Southern United States, the peculiar institution of slavery was inextricably associated with its own peculiar economy, interconnected with that of the North.

One of the two principal products of the antebellum slave economy was staple crops, which provided the cash flow—primarily cotton, which was the United States’ major export. The other was enslaved people, who counted as capital and functioned as the stable wealth of the South. African American bodies and childbearing potential collateralized massive amounts of credit, the use of which made slaveowners the wealthiest people in the country. When the Southern states seceded to form the Confederacy they partitioned off, and declared independence for, their economic system in which people were money.

Our chronology reaches from earliest colonial times through emancipation, following the two main phases of the slave trade. The first phase, importation, began with the first known sale of kidnapped Africans in Virginia in 1619 and took place largely, though not entirely, during the colonial years. The second phase, breeding, was the era of the domestic, or interstate, slave trade in African Americans. The key date here—from our perspective, one of the most important dates in American history—was the federal prohibition of the importation of persons as of January 1, 1808. After that, the interstate trade was, with minor exceptions, the only slave trade in the United States, and it became massified on a previously impossible scale.

The conflict between North and South is a fundamental trope of American history, but in our narrative, the major conflict is intra-Southern: the commercial antagonism between Virginia, the great slave breeder, and South Carolina, the great slave importer, for control of the market that supplied slave labor to an expanding slavery nation. The dramatic power struggle between the two was central to the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787 and to secession in 1860–61.

Part One is an overview, intended as an extended introduction to the subject.

Part Two, which begins the main chronological body of the text, describes the creation of a slave economy during the colonial years.

Part Three centers on the US Constitution’s role as hinge between the two phases of slave importation and slave breeding.

Parts Four through Six cover the years of the slave-breeding industry, from the end of the War of 1812 through emancipation: the rise, peak, and fall of the cotton kingdom.

Note: This book describes an economy in which people were capital, children were interest, and women were routinely violated. We have tried to avoid gratuitously subjecting the reader to offensive language and images, but we are describing a horrifying reality.

The Capitalized Womb

  1

The Mother of Slavery

VIRGINIA WAS THE MOTHER of slavery, wrote Louis Hughes.

It wasn’t just a figure of speech.

During the fifty-three years from the prohibition of the African slave trade by federal law in 1808 to the debacle of the Confederate States of America in 1861, the Southern economy depended on the functioning of a slave-breeding industry, of which Virginia was the number-one supplier. When Hughes was born in 1832, the market was expanding sharply.

My father was a white man and my mother a negress, Hughes wrote.¹ That meant he was classified as merchandise at birth, because children inherited the free or enslaved status of the mother, not the father. It had been that way in Virginia for 170 years already when Hughes was born.

Partus sequitur ventrem was the legal term: the status of the newborn follows the status of the womb. Fathers passed inheritances down, mothers passed slavery down. It ensured a steady flow of salable human product from the wombs of women who had no legal right to say no.

Most enslaved African Americans lived and died without writing so much as their names. The Virginia legal code of 1849 provided for stripes—flogging—for those who tried to acquire literacy skills. A free person who dared assemble with negroes for the purpose of instructing them to read or write could receive a jail sentence of up to six months and a fine of up to a hundred dollars, plus costs.² An enslaved person who tried to teach others to read might have part of a finger chopped off by the slaveowner, with the full blessing of law.

So it was an especially distinguished achievement when in 1897 the sixty-four-year-old Louis Hughes published his memoir, titled Thirty Years a Slave: From Bondage to Freedom: The Institution of Slavery as Seen on the Plantation and in the Home of the Planter. Like the other volumes collectively referred to as slave narratives, it bears witness to a history slaveowners did not want to exist: the firsthand testimony of the enslaved.

By the time Hughes was twelve, he had been sold five times. The third time, he was sold away from his mother to a trader. It was sad to her to part with me, he recalled, though she did not know that she was never to see me again, for my master had said nothing to her regarding his purpose and she only thought, as I did, that I was hired to work on the canal-boat, and that she should see me occasionally. But alas! We never met again.

Louis Hughes’s author photograph.

The trader carried the boy away from the Charlottesville area that had been his home, down the James River to Richmond. There he was sold a fourth time, to a local man, but Hughes suffered with chills and fever, so the dissatisfied purchaser had him resold. This time he went on the auction block, where he was bought by a cotton planter setting up in Pontotoc, Mississippi—a booming region that had recently become available for plantations in the wake of the delivery of large areas of expropriated Chickasaw land into the hands of speculators.

Slaves were designated by geographical origin in the market, with Virginia-and Maryland-born slaves commanding a premium. It was held by many that [Virginia] had the best slaves, Hughes wrote. So when Mr. McGee found I was born and bred in that state he seemed satisfied. The bidding commenced, and I remember well when the auctioneer said: ‘Three hundred eighty dollars—once, twice and sold to Mr. Edward McGee.’³

McGee had plenty of financing, and he was in a hurry; he bought sixty other people that day.⁴ A prime field hand would have commanded double or more, but even so, the $380 that bought the sickly twelve-year-old would be more than $10,000 in 2014 money.⁵

Like the largest number of those forcibly emigrated to the Deep South, McGee’s captives were all made to walk from Virginia to Mississippi, in a coffle.

Southern children grew up seeing coffles approach in a cloud of dust.

A coffle is a train of men or beasts fastened together, says the Oxford English Dictionary, and indeed Louis Hughes referred to the coffle he marched in as a herd.⁶ The word comes from the Arabic qafilah, meaning caravan, recalling the overland slave trade that existed across the desert from sub-Saharan Africa to the greater Islamic world centuries before Columbus crossed the Atlantic. With the development in the late fifteenth century of the maritime trade that shifted the commercial gravity of Africa southward from the desert to the Atlantic coast, coffles were used to traffic Africans from point of capture in their homeland to point of sale in one of Africa’s many slave ports.

But the people trudging to Mississippi along with Louis Hughes were not Africans. They were African Americans, born into slavery and raised with their eventual sale in mind. Force-marched through wilderness at a pace of twenty or twenty-five miles a day, for five weeks or more, from can’t-see to can’t-see, in blazing sun or cold rain, crossing unbridged rivers, occasionally dropping dead in their tracks, hundreds of thousands of laborers transported themselves down south at gunpoint, where they and all their descendants could expect to be prisoners for life.

Perhaps 80 percent of enslaved children were born to two-parent families—though the mother and father might live on different plantations—but in extant slave-traders’ records of those sold, according to Michael Tadman’s analysis, complete nuclear families were almost totally absent. About a quarter of those trafficked southward were children between eight and fifteen, purchased away from their families. The majority of coffle prisoners were male: boys who would never again see their mothers, men who would never again see wives and children. But there were women and girls in the coffles, too—exposed, as were enslaved women everywhere, to the possibility of sexual violation from their captors. The only age bracket in which females outnumbered males in the trade was twelve to fifteen, when they were as able as the boys to do field labor, and could also bear children.⁷ Charles Ball, forcibly taken from Maryland to South Carolina in 1805, recalled that

The women were merely tied together with a rope, about the size of a bed cord, which was tied like a halter round the neck of each; but the men … were very differently caparisoned. A strong iron collar was closely fitted by means of a padlock round each of our necks. A chain of iron, about a hundred feet in length, was passed through the hasp of each padlock, except at the two ends, where the hasps of the padlocks passed through a link of the chain. In addition to this, we were handcuffed in pairs, with iron staples and bolts, with a short chain, about a foot long, uniting the handcuffs and their wearers in pairs.⁸

As they tramped along, coffles were typically watched over by whip- and gun-wielding men on horseback and a few dogs, with supply wagons bringing up the rear. In the country coffles slept outdoors on the ground, perhaps in tents; in town they slept in the local jail or in a slave trader’s private jail. Farmers along the route did business with the drivers, selling them quantities of the undernourishing, monotonous fare that enslaved people ate day in and day out.

Sometimes the manacles were taken off as the coffle penetrated farther South, where escape was nearly impossible. But since the customary way of disposing of a troublesome slave—whether criminally insane, indomitably rebellious, or merely a repeated runaway—was to sell him or her down South, drivers assumed that the captives could be dangerous. Coffles were doubly vulnerable, for robbery and for revolt, so security was high.

The captives were not generally allowed to talk among themselves as they tramped along, but sometimes, in the midst of their suffering, they were made to sing. The English geologist G. W. Featherstonhaugh, who in 1834 happened upon the huge annual Natchez-bound chain gang led by trader John Armfield, noted that the slave-drivers … endeavour to mitigate their discontent by feeding them well on the march, and by encouraging them—encouraging them?—to sing ‘Old Virginia never tire,’ to the banjo.⁹ Thomas William Humes, who saw coffles of Virginia-born people passing through Tennessee in shackles on the way to market, wrote: It was pathetic to see them march, thus bound, through the towns, and to hear their melodious voices in plaintive singing as they went.¹⁰

Sometimes coffles marched with fiddlers at the head. North Carolina clergyman Jethro Rumple recalled them stepping off with a huzzah: On the day of departure for the West the trader would have a grand jollification. A band, or at least a drum and fife, would be called into requisition, and perhaps a little rum be judiciously distributed to heighten the spirits of his sable property, and the neighbors would gather in to see the departure.¹¹ Rumple was speaking, needless to say, of heightening the spirits of young people who had just been ripped away from their parents and were being taken to a fate many equated, not incorrectly, with death.

A coffle might leave a slave jail with more people than it arrived with. The formerly enslaved Sis Shackleford described the process at Virginia’s Five Forks Depot (as transcribed by the interviewer):

Had a slave-jail built at de cross roads wid iron bars ’cross de winders. Soon’s de coffle git dere, dey bring all de slaves from de jail two at a time an’ string ’em ’long de chain back of de other po’ slaves. Ev’ybody in de village come out—’specially de wives an’ sweethearts and mothers—to see dey solt-off chillun fo’ de las’ time. An’ when dey start de chain a-clankin’ an’ step off down de line, dey all jus’ sing an’ shout an’ make all de noise dey can tryin’ to hide de sorrer in dey hearts an’ cover up de cries an’ moanin’s of dem dey’s leavin’ behin’.¹²

An enslaved person could always be sold to another owner, at any time. When Louis Hughes’s coffle reached Edenton, Georgia, McGee sold twenty-one of his newly purchased captives, taking advantage of the price differential in the Lower South to post an immediate profit on a third of his Virginia transaction and thereby hedge his debt to his financier.

Charles Ball described a deal that took place on the road in South Carolina:

The stranger, who was a thin, weather-beaten, sunburned figure, then said, he wanted a couple of breeding wenches, and would give as much for them as they would bring in Georgia…. He then walked along our line, as we stood chained together, and looked at the whole of us—then turning to the women; asked the prices of the two pregnant ones.

Our master replied, that these were two of the best breeding-wenches in all Maryland—that one was twenty-two, and the other only nineteen—that the first was already the mother of seven children, and the other of four—that he had himself seen the children at the time he bought their mothers—and that such wenches would be cheap at a thousand dollars each; but as they were not able to keep up with the gang, he would take twelve hundred dollars for the two. The purchaser said this was too much, but that he would give nine hundred dollars for the pair.

This price was promptly refused; but our master, after some consideration, said he was willing to sell a bargain in these wenches, and would take eleven hundred dollars for them, which was objected to on the other side; and many faults and failings were pointed out in the merchandise. After much bargaining, and many gross jests on the part of the stranger, he offered a thousand dollars for the two, and said he would give no more. He then mounted his horse, and moved off; but after he had gone about one hundred yards, he was called back; and our master said, if he would go with him to the next blacksmith’s shop on the road to Columbia, and pay for taking the irons off the rest of us, he might have the two women.¹³ (paragraphing added)

Women with babies in hand were in a particularly cruel situation. Babies weren’t worth much money, and they slowed down coffles. William Wells Brown, hired out to a slave trader named Walker, recalled seeing a baby given away on the road:

Soon after we left St. Charles, the young child grew very cross, and kept up a noise during the greater part of the day. Mr. Walker complained of its crying several times, and told the mother to stop the child’s d——d noise, or he would. The woman tried to keep the child from crying, but could not. We put up at night with an acquaintance of Mr. Walker, and in the morning, just as we were about to start, the child again commenced crying. Walker stepped up to her, and told her to give the child to him. The mother tremblingly obeyed. He took the child by one arm, as you would a cat by the leg, walked into the house, and said to the lady,

Madam, I will make you a present of this little nigger; it keeps such a noise that I can’t bear it.

Thank you, sir, said the lady.¹⁴

From the first American coffles on rough wilderness treks along trails established by the indigenous people, they were the cheapest and most common way to transport captives from one region to another.

The federally built National (or Cumberland) Road, which by 1818 reached the Ohio River port of Wheeling, Virginia (subsequently West Virginia), was ideal for coffles. It was the nation’s first paved highway, with bridges across every creek. Laying out approximately the route of the future US 40, its broken-stone surface provided a westward overland transportation link that began at the Potomac River port of Cumberland, Maryland. From Wheeling, the captives could be shipped by riverboat down to the Mississippi River and on to the Deep South’s second-largest slave market at Natchez, or further on to the nation’s largest slave market, New Orleans.

Beginning after the War of 1812 and continuing up through secession, captive African Americans were trafficked south and west by every possible method, in an enormous forced migration. A drove of slaves on a southern steamboat, bound for the cotton or sugar regions, wrote William Wells Brown in his 1849 autobiography, is an occurrence so common, that no one, not even the passengers, appear to notice it, though they clank their chains at every step.¹⁵

As railroads extended their reach, captives were packed like cattle into freight cars, shortening the time and expense to market considerably. Some passenger trains had servant cars, though a cruder term was more commonly used. On his first trip to the South, in January 1859, the twenty-one-year-old New Englander J. Pierpont Morgan noted: 1000 slaves on train.¹⁶

They were trafficked by sea in oceangoing vessels that sailed the hard passage from the Chesapeake around the Florida peninsula to New Orleans, as well as in shorter voyages within that route. Ocean shipment was more expensive than a coffle, but it was quicker, so it turned the capital-intensive human cargo over more efficiently. Though exact figures do not exist, it is safe to say that tens of thousands of African Americans made the coastwise voyage from the Chesapeake and from Charleston to New Orleans and up the Mississippi to Natchez, as well as to Pensacola, Mobile, Galveston, and other ports. Maryland ports alone (principally Baltimore) shipped out 11,966 people for whom records exist between 1818 and 1853, and an unknown number of others before, during, and after that time.¹⁷

More slave ships came to New Orleans from the East Coast of the United States than from Africa. In a shorter recapitulation of the Middle Passage of a century before, the captives were packed into the hold with ventilation slats along the side to keep them from suffocating. Upon arrival, they were discharged into one or another of New Orleans’s many slave pens, where they were washed, groomed, and fed, their skin was oiled, and their gray hairs, if they had any, were dyed or plucked out. On sale day, they were put into suits of the finest clothes many of them would ever wear, with perhaps even top hats for the men. Most would be sent to the cotton fields, where inhuman levels of work would be extracted from them through torture, or to Louisiana’s death camps of sugar.

Following the precedent set by the Europeans, who referred to the coastal regions of Africa by their exports—the Ivory Coast, the Gold Coast, the Slave Coast—some writers have referred to the Chesapeake region as the Tobacco Coast.

But it would also be appropriate to call it the American Slave Coast.

  2

Protectionism, or, The Importance of 1808

Industry: A particular form or branch of productive labour.

—Oxford English Dictionary

BY HEMISPHERIC STANDARDS, THE African slave trade to English-speaking North America was petty.

According to database-backed estimates by David Eltis and David Richardson, only about 389,000 kidnapped Africans were disembarked in the ports of the present-day United States, the majority of them before independence. We say only: that’s an enormous number of captives to be dragged across the ocean, but Africans trafficked to the United States territory account for less than 4 percent of the estimated hemispheric total. An estimated 10.7 million Africans arrived alive to the Americas—out of an estimated 12.5 million embarked, leaving 1.8 million dead at sea.¹

There is no way to figure the collateral damage to African populations from slave-raiding with even a rough level of accuracy. Slave-raiding, which was typically conducted by Africans, was notoriously wasteful of life, since only the young were taken and often the rest were killed. If one died for every one taken captive in slave raids—a speculative and possibly conservative number—that would mean the transatlantic slave trade killed or enslaved some twenty-five million Africans. It may have been double that; there’s no way to know.

Barbados, an island about the size of the New York City borough of Queens, appears to have taken in more Africans than the entire territory of the present-day United States—493,000, according to Eltis and Richardson.²

Estimates vary, of course; historian James McMillin believes that the number for the United States and its colonial predecessors exceeded 500,000. But that difference is not an order of magnitude.³ Some captives were brought to North America from Barbados and other places in the West Indies, especially in the seventeenth century; while documentation is scarce, the numbers were small by comparison.

Africans were only the seed. By 1860, those few hundred thousand Africans had given way to four million African Americans. Each birth was, as Thomas Jefferson described it, an addition to the capital.⁴ The South did not only produce tobacco, rice, sugar, and cotton as commodities for sale; it produced people.

Virginia had been slave breeding since the seventeenth century. It had the oldest, most deeply rooted African American population, and the largest. With far more slaves than any other state, and with much of the land already burned out for tobacco farming by the time of the Declaration of Independence, the agricultural productivity per laborer in Virginia was low. The most profitable thing for Virginia planters to do with their growing slave population was to sell young people to traders for shipment down South.

The existence of slavery in the United States was taken for granted by the delegates to the Constitutional Convention in 1787; there was little or no discussion of abolishing it. The African slave trade, however, was very much in contention.

None of the delegates assembled at the Constitutional Convention could know that there would soon be a revolution in Saint-Domingue (the future Haiti), much less that as a consequence Napoleon Bonaparte would make a snap decision to sign his claim to Louisiana over to the United States in 1803. But it was commonly understood that territorial expansion was coming. Everyone knew that the upriver hinterlands of New Orleans were being invaded by Anglo-American settlers who would eventually take the territory over through force of numbers. Charleston merchants had a long-established web of overland trade that spread a thousand miles, across Georgia and what we now call Alabama and Mississippi into Louisiana. The frontiersmen of Kentucky and Tennessee were itching to drive the Native Americans out of Alabama and take their rich, black land. Spanish Florida had from the beginning been a security threat to South Carolina and Georgia; it, too, would come under US control. The market for slaves was about to explode in volume, and everyone knew it.

The question of who would have the concession to supply slave labor to this plantation-empire-to-come was an obstacle to unity at the Constitutional Convention. Slaveowners in Virginia, and in smaller numbers Maryland, were uniquely positioned to sell slaves into the emerging markets. Unlike the sugar slaves in the rest of the Americas or the rice slaves of South Carolina, the tobacco slaves of the Chesapeake didn’t die off. It was an unprecedented phenomenon in the hemisphere: their numbers increased every year.

Prohibiting the African trade, as the New England delegates wanted to do, would create a grand bonanza for Virginia slaveholders—at the expense of South Carolina. But the delegates from Virginia had to compromise if they wanted South Carolina and Georgia to be part of the nation instead of an independent, belligerent, slave-importing competitor for power next door—one, moreover, whose territory was the overland gateway to territorial expansion into the Deep South.

Charleston, meanwhile, was the major receiving port in North America for kidnapped Africans, and South Carolina’s delegates wanted no federal interference in their market-driven opening and closing of the trade. Chesapeake slaveowners, who were the only ones with sufficient surplus labor to sell off, wanted the African trade permanently closed. They compromised on a twenty-year guarantee that the foreign slave trade could exist on a state-by-state basis.

Accordingly, Article 1, Section 9 of the United States Constitution reads:

This 1762 map portrays Virginia, Carolina, and Georgia as extending all the way out to Louisiana, across densely forested territories held by different Native American confederations.

The Migration or Importation of such Persons as any of the States now existing shall think proper to admit, shall not be prohibited by the Congress prior to the Year one thousand eight hundred and eight, but a tax or duty may be imposed on such Importation, not exceeding ten dollars for each Person.⁵

Importation of persons was a euphemism; the framers were not so indelicate as to use the word slave. It was an anomalous provision, containing as it did the only date in the Constitution, and moreover the only price—the ten-dollar duty limit, which guaranteed that the African slave trade could not be taxed out of existence but implied that the slave trade might contribute revenue to the federal budget.*

That constitutionally stipulated deadline of January 1, 1808, is, from our perspective, one of the most important dates in American history, signaling as it does the transformation of the United States slavery industry.

For this reason, 1808 is also an essential date for understanding the making of African American culture. Kidnapped Africans had been arriving for almost two hundred years, repeatedly re-Africanizing American culture. No longer. The child was separated from the ancestors. With the changeover to a domestic slave trade, the long-established Afro-Chesapeake culture of Virginia and Maryland was diffused southward over several decades. Meanwhile, there was an overland march westward of the more recently Africanized Lowcountry of Carolina and Georgia across Alabama and into Mississippi and Louisiana, as well as vessels sailing around Florida to New Orleans. The two collided with each other in the presence of the smaller but potent creolized culture of Catholic Afro-Louisiana.

While the forces involved were greater than any single historical figure, individuals do make a difference in history. We will interpret key events and figures of American history in the light of their relationship to the profit-seeking machine African Americans were caught in. In particular, three slaveowning politicians loom large in our narrative as principal enablers of the territorial expansion of slavery and, consequently, of the slave-breeding industry: Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, and James K. Polk—a Virginian and two Tennesseans. All three were slaveholders, and like all slaveholders, their wealth was primarily stored in the form of captive human beings, so their entire financial base—personal, familial, social, and political—depended on high prices for slaves. To that end, they restricted the supply of captives by keeping the African trade closed; by opening new territory for US slavery to expand into, they expanded the demand for that restricted supply, greatly increasing as they did so the wealth and political power of the slaveowning class.

Fourteen years after the Constitution went into effect, on December 20, 1803, the territorial area of the new nation approximately doubled when French governor Pierre Clément de Laussat handed New Orleans over to President Jefferson’s men, the Virginia-born W. C. C. Claiborne and the Maryland-born James Wilkinson. From that date until Louisiana became a state in 1812, the territory was effectively a colony of Virginia.

Jefferson’s pointedly undemocratic rule of the Louisiana Territory assured favorable regulatory treatment for Virginia slaveowners. He asked Congress for, and got, monopolistic commercial restrictions on the slave trade into Louisiana: importation into Louisiana of slaves from outside the United States was prohibited, but importation into Louisiana of slaves from within the United States was allowed.

With the Constitution having set the rules of the match, Virginia and South Carolina were in direct competition to supply the growing Louisiana slave market. It was an enormous business opportunity for Charleston’s slave dealers, but time was running out. The twenty-year constitutional guarantee of protection for the African slave trade that South Carolina had insisted on had only four years to run. While Jefferson proactively worked to be sure that window was closed at the first possible moment, the Carolina merchants scurried to take maximum advantage of it.

South Carolina legislators knew full well that the prohibition of the African slave trade by federal law was on President Jefferson’s action list; accustomed to turning the trade on or off as economic conditions dictated, they rescinded their previous ban against the African trade as soon as the news of the acquisition of Louisiana arrived at the end of 1803. Disregarding the anger the move provoked elsewhere, they opened the port of Charleston to cargoes of kidnapped Africans. Louisiana couldn’t legally import Africans but South Carolina could, and could then resell the Africans to Louisiana via the domestic trade. Even with a substantial markup, they could still undercut the price Virginia farmers charged for African Americans.

The Constitution did not require the federal prohibition of importation of persons as of 1808; it merely stipulated that federal law could not prohibit it before that date. But Jefferson, who legally owned more than six hundred people during his lifetime, proactively made sure that importation of persons would indeed be prohibited as of the earliest constitutionally permissible date. So as not to have slave importation one day more than necessary, on December 2, 1806, he gave his Sixth Annual Message and asked Congress for a measure to end the African trade—more than a year before it could become effective. It was a move that was to his personal financial advantage as a Virginia slaveowner and to the disadvantage of South Carolina’s wholesale slave importers.

To be sure, Jefferson framed ending importation of persons as a humanitarian act, and many historians have treated it that way, but it was not. Ending the African slave trade was protectionism on behalf of Virginia. It kept out the cheaper African imports so as to keep the price of domestically raised people high. Nobody in Chesapeake politics wanted more Africans coming in and devaluing their most significant assets. Over the long term, ending the African trade was a business coup on behalf of the slaveowners of Virginia, who were Jefferson’s most loyal constituents throughout his increasingly disastrous second term as president (1805–1809).⁶

Moreover, ending the foreign slave trade to the United States was popular among other groups as well. Few white people wanted more black people in the country. Antislavery people wanted the African trade suppressed. The Southern public approved of ending the foreign slave trade as an antiterrorism measure: they were alarmed by the discovery of Gabriel’s planned uprising in 1800, terrified by the bloody chain of events that had produced the newly declared nation of Haiti, and always frightened of the ever-present possibility of slave rebellion at their door.

But not everyone was happy about the prohibition of the African trade. Louisiana and Mississippi’s burgeoning planter population wanted all the slave labor it could get, but once foreign sources were shut off pursuant to Jefferson’s signature, no states besides Virginia and Maryland had quantities of laborers ready to sell. The French Creoles of Louisiana were particularly angry at having to pay high prices to the Virginians for English-speaking slaves when they could have gotten Africans much cheaper via Havana. But the United States shifted over to an entirely domestic slave trade in African Americans as of 1808—albeit with some ill-documented smuggling of captives from outside for ten more years or so, particularly by the Lafitte brothers’ operations in Louisiana and Spanish Texas.

In a frenzy of last-minute stocking-up during the last legal year, in 1807 South Carolina merchants imported the highest one-year volume of Africans in the history of the North American trade, with the result that the market became glutted and captives from diverse parts of Africa died on Gadsden’s Wharf awaiting sale.

Though the end of the African slave trade was a major commercial shift, its immediate impact was eclipsed by a mercantile catastrophe. Only a few days before the African trade ban went into effect, in one of the most radical economic actions ever taken by a president, Jefferson put an embargo on all foreign commerce rather than respond militarily to naval aggression by the British and the French. From then until 1815, American business was paralyzed—first by embargo, then by war—during which time the large-scale domestic slave trade could not develop. But it grew spectacularly after that.

With the African trade halted, those slaves that continued to be bought and sold brought profit to US slaveowners, speculators, and slave trading firms instead of to British syndicates and African royals.

Slavery required a slave trade, and with the trade in kidnapped Africans shut off, there was no slave trade without slave breeding. By deliberately creating a scarcity of slave labor from which profit could derive for those who could supply it, the 1808 cutoff of the African trade created an economic incentive for farmers to deliver as many homegrown laborers to market as possible, as fast as possible.

The Maine-born Episcopal clergyman Joseph Holt Ingraham, writing under deep cross-gendered cover as Kate Conyngham, reported from Virginia in the 1850s that:

So necessary is the annual decimation of slaves by sale to support these old decayed families, that it has become a settled trade for men whose occupation is to buy slaves, to travel through the Old Dominion, from estate to estate…. Here he gets one, there another, and in a few weeks he enters Lynchburg, Alexandria or Richmond with a hundred or more…. As it is, slaves are raised here more as a marketable and money-returning commodity than for their productive labor.⁷

For Virginia’s African Americans, Jefferson’s legacy was unspeakably cruel. When the prohibition of importation of Africans made a massive business out of the already existing interstate slave trade in African Americans, black Virginians and Marylanders were trafficked in mass quantities to the newly opened territories, destroying family ties with every sale. The human cargoes that were driven in coffles and loaded onto ships were assembled by a network of traders’ agents who fanned out through the farming territories of the Chesapeake, combing the slave-producing region to buy—one could say harvest—young people from farmers, often one at a time.

With the acreage under cultivation vastly expanding, the slave-selling industry touched the lives of everyone in the slave-trade zone, free or enslaved. It put a price on everyone—including on slaveowners, whose wealth was stored in the bodies of their always-liquidatable slaves and whose available credit was a function of the size of their slaveholdings. In the absence of a domestic supply of coin, slaves collateralized the credit that created new money.⁸

The growing nation of fortune hunters exerted a popular pressure to wrest more cotton-growing land from the Native Americans, a mission notably carried out by General Andrew Jackson under cover of the War of 1812, creating the land-and-slaves boom remembered as Alabama Fever. Jackson’s subsequent taking of Florida by military conquest and removing the South’s remaining Native Americans from their ancestral lands—we now call it ethnic cleansing—made the entire Deep South safe for plantation slavery and further increased the demand for slave labor.

President James Monroe—a Virginian, as were all his predecessors in the office except John Adams—cracked down on what remained of the clandestine African trade, signing into law in 1820 a bill that declared participation in the foreign slave trade to be piracy and, as such, punishable by death. For the next forty-five years, the enslaved population of the United States was a closed system that expanded its numbers through sexual reproduction, more politely referred to as natural increase. As W. E. B. DuBois described it, slaves without [the African] slave trade became more valuable; with cotton culture their value rose still further, so that they were fed adequately and their breeding systematically encouraged.⁹ Over time, more states, including South Carolina, got into the business of exporting African Americans to new territories.

While the North developed cities and industry, the South failed to build an infrastructure through which consumer goods could be distributed, and thus furnished no domestic market; instead, its profitable system of plantation-prisons expanded to new lands through imperial and military effort. After the worst depression the nation had yet suffered, President James K. Polk prosecuted the Mexican War to annex Texas for the Southern cotton kingdom, an action hotly contested by John Quincy Adams in the House and generally unpopular in the North. Once Texas was in the Union, Southern slave prices continued to climb, with only brief dips, until secession.

Polk’s success in extending the Southern slave regime to Texas instantly—and predictably—revalued slaveowners’ human portfolios upward. Including his own: Polk bought slaves in secret from his office in the White House on an ongoing basis during his presidency in the hope of building up his nest egg while he worked to extend the reach of American slavery.¹⁰

A century and a half later, what vocabulary to use in talking about this is still something of a work in progress.

It’s hard to describe business without employing a business vocabulary. That said, economists who have written on the subject have sometimes used the antebellum business vocabulary too readily, as in the 1958 study that made the hypothetical assumption that each prime field wench produced five to ten marketable children during her lifetime.¹¹ The history of slavery is a study in euphemisms, beginning with the near-universal use by refined whites of the polite term servant to refer to the individuals they legally owned. The colloquial term of choice used by slave traders, more often spoken than written, was, of course, nigger, or, more politely, Negro, which was considered synonymous with slave; judging from available evidence, the n-word was used by the enslaved themselves as freely as it is on playgrounds today, even as the vocabulary of slavery times echoes in colloquial black speech: bitch, buck, and the ultimate curse, motherfucker.*

A number of people presently prefer to say enslaved person or some similar construction instead of slave, arguing that Africans and African Americans never accepted their enslaved condition. This phrasing can become cumbersome in an extended discussion, and in talking about our subject, it can lead to a paradox of parallel constructions. If one was not a slave, then one had no owner, and one could not be sold. True enough on a moral level, but unfortunately, what we are describing is precisely the legal ownership and sale of slaves. We have chosen generally, and perhaps not entirely consistently, to use the words enslaved or captive to refer to people in their human aspect and slave to refer to their economic function and social position, and we hope the reader will cut us some slack.

The term slave breeding was much in use when it was happening—hurled as a charge on the floor of Congress and denounced as a damned lie by slaveowners.* But it wasn’t merely an allegation: slave breeding was an ugly term that described a horrific reality.

Our ambivalence about terminology extends to the naming of wars, which is a highly political pursuit. Slavery ended as a consequence of what American history generally chooses to remember by the name of the Civil War, and which in official US documents was called the War of the Rebellion. But revolutions generally are civil wars, and vice versa; we argue that, depending on one’s perspective, the most common names for the two great national conflicts—the Revolutionary War and the Civil War—could be flipped.

In recent years, it has become more common for scholars to speak of the War of Independence from Britain (commonly memorialized as the Revolutionary War) as a civil war, as indeed it was frequently described during the independence struggle. We will argue that the War of Independence not only did not intend to end slavery, but was fought in part to protect slavery from the growing power of British abolitionism. From the perspective of the enslaved, meanwhile, the war usually called the Civil War was the revolutionary war, because it ended chattel slavery and, in removing the appraised resale value of human beings from the balance sheets, remade the basis of American money.

*The ten-dollar duty was never imposed; South Carolina congressmen reacted with such fury when a Northern legislator proposed it that the measure was killed, and slave importation remained tax exempt.

*Unlike the words funk, the blues, or, for that matter, nigger (in its one-g form, Niger), the formerly unprintable motherfucker doesn’t seem to have come from Britain. It’s not clear how far back it goes, but it probably reaches back to slavery days as part of a vocabulary that ultimately became hipster lingo and emerged into print and recordings only slowly. The earliest written forms cited by the Oxford English Dictionary are two court cases from the South: in 1889 in Texas, that God damned mother-fucking, bastardly son-of-a-bitch! and, even more provocatively, in 1918, when the twenty-two-year-old African American soldier Sidney Wilson of Tennessee was court-martialed and sentenced to ten years at hard labor for having written a letter to the Memphis Commercial Appeal that said, You is a line Mother Fucker, an’ don’t think the boys from Memphis is the onlyest one said that. We is goin’ to straiten up this country, just as soon as we get some amonation, and another letter to his draft board that said, you low-down Mother Fuckers can put a gun in our hands but who is able to take it out? See Ellis, 89–90.

*The general usage of the word breeding in reference to people was more common than it is today, as per the still occasionally heard phrase well-bred.

  3

A Literature of Terror

Were I about to tell you the evils of Slavery … I should wish to take you, one at a time, and whisper it to you. Slavery has never been represented; Slavery never can be represented.¹

—William Wells Brown, address to the Female Anti-Slavery Society of Salem, Massachusetts, 1847

SLAVERY IS TERRIBLE FOR men; but it is far more terrible for women, wrote Harriet Jacobs, under the pseudonym Linda Brent. "Slaveholders have been cunning enough to enact that ‘the child shall follow the condition of the mother,’ not of the father; thus taking care that licentiousness shall not interfere with avarice."

Jacobs’s memoir, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Written by Herself, describes her abuse by Mr. Flint, whose real name was James Norcom of Edenton, North Carolina. One of only a few nineteenth-century slave narratives written by a woman, it is perhaps the frankest in its treatment of sexual exploitation:

The slave girl is reared in an atmosphere of licentiousness and fear. The lash and the foul talk of her master and his sons are her teachers. When she is fourteen or fifteen, her owner, or his sons, or the overseer, or perhaps all of them, begin to bribe her with presents. If these fail to accomplish their purpose, she is whipped or starved into submission to their will…. Resistance is hopeless.²

Like Louis Hughes’s memoir, Jacobs’s was one of more than a hundred slave narratives published in book form in the nineteenth-century United States. All but forgotten until the 1960s, these testimonies have now become more familiar outside specialist circles and are understood not only as an essential body of historical witness, but also a fundamental corpus of American literature. Frederick Douglass and William Wells Brown, foundational figures of African American letters, both wrote autobiographies detailing their experiences in slavery. Solomon Northup’s Twelve Years a Slave (1853)—one of the best-written of the slave narratives, specific in its details, well-authenticated by scholars, and forgotten until the 1960s—is now well known because of the 2013 movie version, but there are many others. The narratives participate in literary tropes and publishing conventions of the day, and many bear the influence of editors and cowriters. But even discounting for occasional possibly exaggerated or invented scenes in some of them, their composite picture of the workings of the regime of slavery is remarkably consistent, mutually corroborating, and credible. They speak up for one another.

A runaway ad for Harriet Jacobs placed by James Norcom in the Norfolk Daily Beacon of July 4, 1835. This description of an abused slave makes clear the abuser’s close familiarity, and stalker’s fascination, with her, while affirming that the enslaved girl absconded without any known cause or provocation.

Bethany Veney, from Paige County, Virginia, reinforced the testimony of Jacobs when she wrote in her 1889 memoir:

My dear white lady, in your pleasant home made joyous by the tender love of husband and children all your own, you can never understand the slave mother’s emotions as she clasps her new-born child, and knows that a master’s word can at any moment take it from her embrace; and when, as was mine, that child is a girl, and from her own experience she sees its almost certain doom is to minister to the unbridled lust of the slave-owner, and feels that the law holds over her no protecting arm, it is not strange that, rude and uncultured as I was, I felt all this, and would have been glad if we could have died together there and then.³

Also essential to our understanding is the collection of more than twenty-three hundred oral histories of formerly enslaved elders taken under the general direction of folklorist John A. Lomax by the Federal Writers’ Project of the Works Progress Administration between 1936 and 1938, and by earlier researchers from Fisk and Southern University in 1929 and 1930. These twentieth-century narratives are of variable quality and reliability. There are some issues of mistrust of white interviewers by black subjects (though some interviewers were black); questions of reliability without recording (though a few were recorded); questions of memory (interviewees were recalling seventy years previously, and some were too young to remember their lives in slavery, though older respondents could recall events as early as the 1840s); and a heavily dialectized transcription style (though the emphasis on phonetic precision is not without value). But even so, this collection provides the most extensive description extant of slavery from the inside, and, as with the nineteenth-century slave narratives, the many voices corroborate each other over and over again. It has served as a significant source for many books about slavery published since the 1970s and has a major advantage over the nineteenth-century narratives in the much higher percentage of women represented. Unfortunately, about half the Virginia interviews were lost or destroyed, and there are no interviews from Louisiana at all.⁴

The silence from the eighteenth century is deafening. There were no slave narratives published in North America during the colonial era; there is only one known diary by a white indentured servant.⁵ With only a few exceptions, the essential witness of the enslaved is largely missing from the historical record for the colonial years, which is why there will be few black voices in that section of our book.

No less than any other form of capitalism, American slavery capitalism was premised on continual expansion. The growth of the Southern economy was tied directly to the productivity of the capitalized womb, a term we use to refer to the way enslaved women’s bodies functioned as the essential production engine of the slave-breeding economy, which in turn fueled a global economy that processed slave-grown cotton into mass-produced cloth.

That individual plantation owners practiced slave-breeding through the rape of enslaved women is attested to repeatedly in the testimony of the formerly enslaved and elsewhere. But beyond that, we argue, with the importation of African captives shut off, antebellum slavery was in the aggregate a slave-breeding system.

One of the functions of this slave-breeding machine was to chew up the black family, systematically, in every generation. Why might elite whites want a machine with which to destroy the black family? Most immediately, because the family was the strongest unit of social cohesion and resistance to slavery. But longer term, because destroying family webs systematically in every generation was the best way to guarantee the perpetual existence of an abject underclass whose labor and upkeep would remain as cheap as possible.

With every generation, the American elite became collectively more entrenched as its family structures expanded while the enslaved became collectively more entrenched as an underclass as its family ties were systematically, recursively cut.

For enslaved women, who could be freely violated in the cellar, the barn, the field, or anywhere else a captor chose, it was a system of terror. Beyond the purely venal incentive of unrestrained sexual activity, the existence of a market in young people created a financial incentive for slaveowners to intrude into the reproductive lives of enslaved women, leading to what Richard Follett calls an intrusive policy of demographic engineering.⁶ A blunter way of saying it is forced mating: enslaved women could be assigned to enslaved men by slaveowners, or impregnated by white men who had access to them.

Forced mating was sufficiently widespread to be documented in a surfeit of examples, from the presidential-slaveholder level on down. During James K. Polk’s presidency, his brother-in-law Robert W. Campbell, who was watching the plantation for him, promised the president in a letter to purchase young girls for him with the purpose of force-mating them with Polk’s young men:

when I go down [to the plantation] I [will] act according to my best Judgment about the husbands & wives of your people[.] I want to take down likely young girls for wives for your young men as there are to[o] gr[e]at a proportion of men on your farm for the women.⁷

The formerly enslaved Lueatha Mansfield of Bastrop, Louisiana, recalled that if a slaveowner saw a fine woman or man on another plantation, he would buy him or her for breeding purposes in order to continue to have good able workers. If he didn’t bring them on the same farm, he would arrange for them to breed from each other.⁸

Charles Grandy, enslaved in Virginia, recalled that Marsa would stop de ole nigger-trader and buy you a woman. Wasn’t no use tryin’ to pick one, cause Marsa wasn’t gonna pay but so much for her. All he wanted was a young healthy one who looked like she could have children, whether she was purty or ugly as sin.⁹

James Green, half Native American and half African American, sold away from his mother at the age of twelve for $800, recalled at the age of ninety-seven in 1938 in San Antonio, Texas, that no one had no say as to who he was goin’ to get for a wife. All de weddin’ ceremony we had was with Pinchback’s [the slaveowner’s] finger pointin’ out who was whose wife.¹⁰ Much less did the wife have any say.

Before abolitionists made the term too notorious to use beginning in the 1830s, slave-sale advertisements might bluntly extol one or another woman as a breeder, meaning that she had proven her ability to give birth to healthy children and recover to reproduce again at a time when many women died from childbirth. If a woman wern’t a good breeder she had to do work with de men, said Green, but Pinchback tried to get rid of women who didn’t have chillen.¹¹

Fannie Moore, interviewed in North Carolina in 1937, recalled that (as transcribed): De ‘breed woman’ always bring mo’ money den de res’, [even the] men. When dey put her on de block dey put all her chillun aroun her to show folks how fas she can hab chillun.¹² Mary L. Swearingen of Bastrop, Louisiana, paraphrasing her enslaved grandmother, said, Whenever a woman was an extraordinary breeder, she was mated by the master to his own accord. Only sometimes the couples were happily married, and occasionally when a couple was happy, the master separated them by selling one or the other.¹³

Resistance to forced breeding was described by Mary Gaffney, enslaved in Texas, who described chewing cotton root as a contraceptive (as transcribed):

Fact is, I just hated the man I married but it was what Maser said do. When he came to Texas he took up big lots of land and he was going to get rich. He put another negro man with my mother, then he put one with me. I would not let that negro touch me and he told Maser and Maser gave me a real good whipping, so that night I let that negro have his way. Maser was going to raise him a lot more slaves, but still I cheated Maser, I never did have any slaves to grow and Maser he wondered what was the matter. I tell you son, I kept cotton roots and chewed them all the time but I was careful not to let Maser know or catch me, so I never did have any children while I was a slave.¹⁴

We can’t quantify forced mating; Eugene Genovese, who tried, estimated that forced marriages affected perhaps one out of ten.¹⁵ Every slaveowner was free to set his own rules; just as some provided better material conditions for their captives than others, some allowed them leeway in choosing partners, and some did not. According to quantitative historian Daniel Scott Smith, the average slave lived on a plantation with forty-one slaves; on larger plantations, there would presumably have been somewhat more choice of mates while on smaller ones there were fewer options.¹⁶ But by virtue of being enslaved, no slave had fully free choice.

Most Americans’ familiarity with the notion of slave breeding comes from popular fiction—in particular, from the 1957 Southern gothic novel Mandingo, set on an imaginary slave-breeding plantation.

The general reputation of Mandingo among critics is as a benchmark for bad writing. The first novel by the Illinois-born Kyle Onstott (1887–1966), previously the author of The New Art of Breeding Better Dogs, it was published by Denlinger’s, an independent publisher of dog books in—where else?—Richmond, Virginia. Though it has been out of print for years as of this writing, Mandingo sold more than five million copies, mostly in mass-market paperbacks that sold for under a dollar at a time when strict controls on movie and television content made books the place to go for explicit material. It generated a franchise of fourteen novel-length sequels by various writers over thirty years; a Broadway play with Adolphe Menjou and Dennis Hopper that opened in May 1961 for eight performances; and, in the heyday of blaxploitation pictures, two big-budget movies with remarkably hateful dialogue.¹⁷*

With its fictional stud-farm plantation—Falconhurst, it was called—that bred and raised people for market, Mandingo disseminated an inaccurate and exaggerated vision, to say nothing of the stereotypes it promoted.

Not that Mandingo got it all wrong. As antebellum historical fantasy goes, its brutal, lascivious dystopia was closer to the truth of slavery than the nostalgic Gone With the Wind of a generation earlier, in which slaves were never sold and captive women loved their masters’ children more than their own. But much is missing from Mandingo’s fetishistic gaze.

A generation of scholarly search has turned up no confirmed documentation of plantations devoted exclusively to breeding slaves, and some scholars have concluded they did not exist as such.¹⁸

There is a compelling reason why such a plantation wouldn’t make economic sense: human beings grow too slowly to raise them as a cash-producing monocrop. The overwhelming majority of the enslaved on such a plantation would be children, but children brought very little money on the market, so they would have to be raised to maturity. Meanwhile, most of the adults would have been women weakened from pregnancy, so the farm would not be able to produce income from the sale of staple commercial crops. It would take seventeen to twenty years of raising the farm’s children until they reached peak sale age, adding up to a huge barrier to entry for all but the very well capitalized.

Some farmers seem to have tried it. Drawing on a data sample from 1860 on farms in the Deep South—not even including the major slave-selling states of Virginia and Maryland—of 9,185 enslaved women between the ages of fifteen and forty-four and of 9,098 men, the economist Richard Sutch in 1972 identified forty-seven suspected breeding farms on which enslaved women and children substantially outnumbered enslaved men. A farm in Drew County, Arkansas, had only two men but twenty-two women and twenty-seven children. Another in Wake County, North Carolina, counted 28 men, 38 women, and 120 children.¹⁹ Michael Tadman, whose Speculators and Slaves is the landmark study of the demographics of the interstate slave trade, suggests that there might be other explanations for the gender imbalance of Sutch’s data; abroad marriages to another plantation, for example, were common, though it seems unlikely that that could explain away the Drew County farm.²⁰ The meaning of Sutch’s data, suggestive as it is, remains within the realm of speculation. But perhaps the most plausible explanation for the Drew County farm is that it was a slave-raising plantation, possibly relying on what several Federal Writers’ Project interviewees called stock men—portly men who were used as studs for large numbers of women, as dramatized in Mandingo, and who did not have to do as much fieldwork.

There is some testimony—although not a lot—from diverse parts of the South that at least a few such breeding men existed. Jeptha Choice, born in 1835 in Texas, noted that (as transcribed) his master was mighty careful about raisin’ healthy nigger families and used us strong, healthy young bucks to stand the healthy nigger gals. When I was young they took care not to strain me and I was as handsome as a speckled pup and was in demand for breedin’. Later on we niggers was ’lowed to marry.²¹ West Turner of Whaleyville, Virginia, told of a stud man: Joe was ’bout seven feet tall an’ was de breedinges’ nigger in Virginia. Didn’t have no work to do, jus’ stay ’round de quarters sunnin’ hisself ’till a call come fo’ him.²² Ida Blackshear Hutchinson, born enslaved in Alabama in 1865 and interviewed in Arkansas in 1937, recalled family lore:

My grandfather on my father’s side, Luke Blackshear, was a stock Negro … six feet four inches tall and near two hundred fifty pounds in weight…. Luke was the father of fifty-six children and was