TonioTimeDaily

"Excerpted from Birthing a Slave: Motherhood and Medicine in the Antebellum South by Marie Jenkins Schwartz. Published by Harvard University Press.

By the 1820s planters and would-be planters were moving in large numbers to places previously unavailable for settlement and growing the fiber for sale in Europe and New England, where a textile industry was beginning to thrive. The extension of the so-called Cotton Kingdom required new laborers. As of 1808, when Congress ended the nation’s participation in the international slave trade, planters could no longer import additional slaves from Africa or the West Indies; the only practical way of increasing the number of slave laborers was through new births. With so much at stake, black women’s reproductive role became politically, as well as economically, decisive. If enslaved mothers did not bear sufficient numbers of children to take the place of aged and dying workers, the South could not continue as a slave society.

Every woman of an appropriate age needed to bear children. Early in the 19th century, slaveholders looked to both heaven and Earth for answers to why childless women had not given birth. They were willing to attribute a role to providence, but they also scrutinized the behavior of the woman herself and the circumstances in which she lived. Generally, owners adhered to a racist assumption that all black women were fecund—more so than whites—and would breed if given the chance.1

Most provided an opportunity for woman to become a mother by ensuring that she had access to a mate, even if it meant tolerating the visits of an enslaved man living on another plantation or purchasing additional slaves. One planter, Bill Alford of Mississippi, first purchased Jacob Dickerson. Shortly after, he bought Sally. When he brought Sally home, he said to Jacob, “I brung you a good woman, take her an’ live wid her.” The couple consented, and according to their son, lived contentedly thereafter.2

Not all slaves accepted planter matchmaking docilely, but the willingness of some couples to mate under such circumstances is not hard to understand given that the majority of enslaved people wanted to marry and have families. Any couple who did not have the approval of an owner might be denied access to material resources as well as the owner’s assistance in maintaining family ties.3 Although no slave couple could be certain that they would be allowed to remain together, everyone knew that an owner was more likely to respect a union that had been approved. Only those couples who gained an owner’s consent for marriage obtained separate housing with furnishings, patches of land for growing foodstuff, passes to visit one another if husband and wife lived on separate plantations, and other accouterments of married life. For these reasons, a woman or man would have thought long and hard before rejecting a spouse proposed by the owner."

--- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/antonio-myers4/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/antonio-myers4/support