The financial costs, risk of premature death, and incessantly pressing labor needs of the sugar plantations did not make it cost-effective for reform-minded planters to buy slaves who were younger than ten to twelve years old. Abolitionists had not considered these circumstances. Planters, however, assessed these risks and invested in pronatal reforms according to the needs of their sugar estates, but they failed to consider the implications of trading children away from their mothers. The problem of biological reproduction was not just one of high infant and child mortality rates caused by diseases and nutritional deficiencies. How did these policies shape the family life of the enslaved and the willingness of enslaved women to bear children?
Strategies for Breeding: Ethnic Preferences
Jamaican slaveholders had long singled out their preferences for particular ethnic groups whom they thought to be most productive and capable of fulfilling plantation labor needs. Edward Long spent much time explicating the importance of carefully choosing particular ethnic groups according to the “different purposes” for which they were needed on the sugar plantations. Africans, Long wrote, varied in “their passions and bent of mind … according to the constitution of their native climate and local manner [and had] a variety of distempers.” A planter looking to maximize his success would be best served by paying “particular attention” to such idiosyncrasies.49 Africans from the Gold Coast, or as buyers and sellers frequently called them “Coromantees,” were highly prized among Jamaican planters, who perceived them as “the only ones fit for Sugar Works.”50 “Negro men of Coromantee country,” one attorney asserted, were the best ones to “establish a fine gang of people for the estate.”51
When it came to buying women for reproductive purposes, their ethnic origin was just as essential.52 “Eboe is the country to buy women off to breed,” Nathaniel Phillips advised. Phillips, an absentee owner of two sugar estates, instructed his local attorney, Thomas Barritt, to allocate all monies owed to his property for buying new “Negroes when good ones come in [and] if Eboes take 20 women.” In 1800, Barritt reported to Phillips that he had purchased “14 New Negroes” for the properties of which there were “6 young women [and] 5 women girls.” He assured Phillips, that they were “all fine people, the best kind of Eboes.”53 Simon Taylor similarly reported to his absentee employer, Chaloner Arcedekne, that he “bought the 10 wenches [Arcedekne] desired. [He] sent 5 to G[olden] G[rove] and 5 to B[achelors] H[all].…They are Eboes which we think are the best breeding people.”54 In keeping with buyer preferences, sellers littered colonial newspapers with sale advertisements that announced the arrival of precious cargo. One advertisement in the 1790 Daily Advertiser read, “For Sale On Tuesday 4th January 303 Choice Young Eboe From New Calabar.”55 Planter preoccupation with the ethnic origins of the captives departs from the emphasis abolitionists placed on sex and youthfulness as criteria for demographic changes needed to promote biological reproduction. Planters determined pronatal reforms based to their perceptions of how ethnicity shaped captive women’s reproductive capacities.
Whether right or wrong, the conclusion proprietors and attorneys made that Ebo women were most prolific came from their years of perceiving these as having more children than other ethnic groups.56 Estate doctor David Collins asserted, “the African Negroes, being brought from an extensive range of the continent [had] unequal fecundity … and possess great varieties of character.” While Collins admitted it was “difficult to ascertain from what country they have been drawn, the history of Jamaica exhibits very sanguinary examples of [their] disposition.” Ebo women, or, as he variously labeled them, “Ebboes, Ebboos-bees or Mocco,” are “hardy” and capable of varieties of labor. They “are superior to any other and very little inferior to men.”57
In the literature, Ebo women reportedly had larger, more stable families and communities because they were generally more attached to the land, their children, and their spouses. A higher number of fugitive women with children and families were listed as Ebo, because they “placed their lives in great peril to keep their families intact.”58 Additionally, Ebo women were arguably more prolific because they formed sexual relationships with males outside their ethnic grouping.59 Planter writings represent their presumptions about African women and their family life; and whether or not these assumptions had basis in fact, they directed buying preferences.
Not all planters agreed that Ebo women were most suitable for the “purpose of breeding.” Edward Long believed they were the least fertile of all African women because they were most susceptible to disorders of the womb. “Ebo women,” he wrote, “are subject to obstruction of the mestrua-[tion], often attended with sterility, and incurable.”60 It is difficult to assess how many planters shared Long’s views that Ebos were the least prolific among captive women. What we do know, however, is that other planters like Simon Taylor held this view about women he presumed belonged to other ethnic groups. Taylor refused “Angola and Mandingo Negroes,” who, in his view were “soft” and “lazy.”61 But more important, Angolan and Mandingo women had an “abominable custom [of] dirt eating,” which he, along with other planters and medical practitioners like Thomas Roughley and Dr. James Thomson, understood as a significant cause of low fertility among captive women.62 Dirt eating allegedly caused women to fall into “dropsy occasioned by obstructions in their liver, consequently … there is no chance of the women breeding.”63 Clearly, planters developed particular preferences for specific groups of captive Africans, who they thought were the “best breeding people,” and when available they bought women and girls according to such prescriptions. Even as Taylor sought to increase his holdings of females, on more than one occasion he postponed doing so because only Angolan cargoes were available. “For my part,” he protested, “I would not accept a gang of them for nothing.”64
There are competing interpretations of the meaning of “Ebo” (in planter terminology) or “Igbo” (among historians).65 What did planters mean when they asked for Ebo women? Was the Ebo identity linked to Africans coming from particular ports—Bonny and Calabar (New and Old)—or was it linked to wide geographical regions—Bight of Biafra—which encompassed multiple, changing ethnicities? Did planters really understand the identities of captive Africans? How accurate were the claims of planters and traders that ethnicity correlated with higher or lower levels of fertility? The foundation for these debates is the question of accuracy, both in terms of British identification of their captives’ origins and in terms of Africans asserting and claiming particular identities.66 Some historians have dismissed planter-identified African ethnicities as “imposed taxonomies” and sweeping generalizations with neither credible meanings nor accurate reflections of African nations. Others have argued that over time planters learned the various ethnic markers of Africans and correctly deciphered them.67
This study is primarily concerned with what such labels meant when planters used them to refer to captive women and girls, and how such signifiers provide us a window into planter constructions of femininity for the purposes of maintaining slavery. The argument here is that these terminologies of ethnicity were “socially meaningful in the context of enslavement.”68 For the purposes of reproduction, young women identified as Ebo were considered the most fecund, real or imagined. On plantations like Golden Grove, newly purchased Ebo women received special treatment in order to allow them “every chance of breeding.” Even if these markers inaccurately labeled captives, they reveal planter interest in reproduction. Additionally, planter belief that women who were Ebos were the most suited for bearing children created differences in the daily lives of women and girls under slavery.69 The transformations ushered in by pronatalism did not affect all enslaved women evenly, but varied according to perceived ethnic origins