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