Enslaved women and their children were essential to abolitionist goals of transforming the colonies from slave to free societies. Having received improved treatment, women were expected to birth a greater number of children, who would then be trained from their infancy to become moral and industrious free people. Children were far more crucial to the project of creating free societies than adults. Although the foundations of creating a free society rested on women’s ability to reproduce, the difficulties of reconditioning the minds of adults made them somewhat of a lost generation to the ultimate project of freedom. Abolitionist pronatal plans made it clear that the question was not simply one of changing status from slave to free. Imperial reformers envisioned enslaved people acculturated to British morality and values that included subordinating women as homemakers and elevating men as heads of their households, which would help to achieve the reformers’ goals for population growth. Abolitionist plans therefore firmly lodged the future of the sugar colonies within enslaved women’s bellies. Once their offspring were “raised up in the knowledge of their duty,” they would become “at last civilized” and capable of being “lifted into equality with Englishmen.”69 The rhetoric and plans of abolitionists gave new meanings and significance to biological reproduction, motherhood, and childhood. Enslaved women could be sources of freedom if their offspring could be groomed to adopt British cultural practices and social organization.
The practical steps of achieving such plans—building hospitals and nurseries, enforcing early weaning, rewarding mothers with clothes, food, and labor exemption, and allowing missionaries to proselytize among slaves—established a blueprint for amelioration. The plans remained largely conceptual, however, because their implementation depended on estate owners and agents in the colonies. Ideological differences over the capacity of African-descended people to adopt British habits and values engendered tensions between abolitionists and planters. The slaving interests defined Africans and their descendants as innately inferior and incapable of reform or working without brute force. Abolitionists argued, however, that the enslaved were a people corrupted by slavery. Given the right training and incentives, their children at least could be reformed and fitted for freedom.
The ideological entanglements between abolitionists and planters stretched beyond the articulation of abolition and reform through the reproductive lives of enslaved women. As the next two chapters show, the contested nature of pronatalism centered on the fact that colonial capitalists were driven not by moral but rather by economic imperatives. The working out of reforms in the colonies was subordinated to planter interests, who prioritized maintaining sugar production and increasing profits. Because concerns for day-to-day productivity and profitability of sugar estates dictated reproductive interventions, abolitionist moral ambitions were subordinated to the economic ambitions of plantation agents and owners.
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.