This study also relies on the more traditional sources used to capture the material conditions of slavery. Those include the correspondence of planters, the daily work logs, and inventories of slave populations that list workers’ sex, age, occupation, pregnancies, miscarriages, health conditions, work exemptions, and recent births. Examining these records using a body approach offers insights into how, for example, the physical and sexual development of young people and the changing contours, size, and weight of women’s bodies during pregnancy defined their particular experiences of labor and punishment. Studying a wide array of such documents from several sugar estates also shows us that reforms were neither uniform nor consistently implemented across all Jamaican sugar estates. Research into public records, like court cases and newspaper advertisements, also reveals that enslaved fathers and husbands played key roles in helping women to preserve maternal customs and to contest the intrusions slaveholders made upon their intimate and family lives.
Taken as a whole, Contested Bodies uses a wide array of sources to examine the struggles for the control, regulation, and rewards of biological reproduction as they played out in the working and intimate lives of enslaved women and children from the rise of British abolitionism in the 1780s to the end of slavery in 1834. Abolitionists, slaveholders, doctors, and the imperial and local governments, as well as enslaved men, women, and children, were locked in ongoing conflicts because they held contrasting views about how the young and female bodies of enslaved African-descended people fit into their goals. They disagreed on what these bodies represented and how they should be treated, used, and cared for. Studying these conflicts uncovers how the links abolitionists made between biological reproduction, abolition, and reform transformed the experiences of enslavement, and fostered new forms of resistance, social relations, and cultural life among the enslaved.
Chapter 1
Conceiving Moral and Industrious Subjects: Women, Children, and Abolition
Until the 1780s, female slaves’ reproductive potential was tied to capitalistic ventures and racial ideologies that justified slavery. Slave owners claimed the offspring of their female slaves as natural extensions of their rights of ownership. Rewriting centuries-old European practices in which children took the status of their fathers, colonial legislators wrote new laws that fixed descent upon mothers—partus sequitur ventrem. Yet few slave owners benefited from the capital claims placed on the womb. As noted earlier, brutal punishment, exhausting work regimes, and inadequate diets combined to depress women’s fertility. Of the few women who conceived and gave birth, more than half buried their babies before their second birthdays. Diseases as well as material and medical lack, which plagued the environments into which slave infants were born, made their deaths more likely than their survival.
Faced with low birthrates and high mortality rates (for infants as well as adults), planters in the West Indian sugar colonies depended on the slave trade for replacing workers. The slaving ships that traversed the Atlantic from West Africa to the Americas supplied planters with human cargo who barely survived the pestilent Middle Passage. The fact that women who served as replacement laborers were Middle Passage survivors further worked against the calculations buyers made to capitalize on females’ reproductive potential. As victims of physical and sexual abuse who were chained in their own and their fellow captives’ filth, the disease-ridden, malnourished women who landed in the Americas arrived almost incapable of fulfilling their reproductive potential. Moreover, having experienced or witnessed family loss through sale, premature death, or forceful removal from home, captive women were likely reluctant to birth and raise children destined for shortened, uncertain, and impoverished lives.
Appalled by the vicious cycle of destitution, disease, and death that marked slavery and the slave trade, evangelicals and humanitarians in Britain spoke against enslavement. Beginning at first with the singular efforts of evangelicals like John Wesley and the Quakers, abolitionists demanded an immediate end to what they viewed as an immoral and inhumane system. The extreme brutalities of slavery and the denial of liberty “violated all the Laws of Justice, Mercy, and Truth,” Wesley proclaimed, and should be abolished at all cost, even at the collapse of the sugar plantation system.1 Despite these early efforts in the 1760s and 1770s, it would take at least another decade before an identifiable national campaign was firmly under way. What was different in the 1780s was the strategy of campaigners.
Abolitionists were up against a deeply rooted and politically well supported economic system that was instrumental in building the naval power and wealth of Britain. Slavery and the slave trade therefore were sanctioned and protected by the imperial Parliament and wealthy influential elites.2 From the previous generation of activists, campaigners in the 1780s learned that a platform of “moral absolutism” alone could not uproot a deeply entrenched, profitable, and politically privileged system.3 A successful abolition campaign needed to avoid radical positions like those taken by earlier lobbyists, such as Wesley, who believed that the economic cost of abolition was immaterial compared to ending the moral evils slavery inflicted. Because due consideration had to be given to the money of investors and viable alternatives to slave labor, a strategic and gradual approach was needed.4 Enslaved women’s reproductive ability offered a way to balance these imperatives.
Abolitionist writers of the 1780s proposed improving the material and medical conditions of young enslaved women in order to promote biological reproduction. Balancing sex ratios and encouraging monogamous marriages were also central to the proposed reforms to resolve the problem of female infertility and low birthrates. Additionally, abolitionists promoted educating and socializing children born of such efforts through religious instruction and missionary schools. The socialization of enslaved children would center on Christian values, particularly those relating to marriage and sexuality. It would also include a labor apprenticeship system whereby children would learn to be diligent and obedient workers. Separate training for boys and girls would further facilitate children’s learning their appropriate gender roles. Promoting biological reproduction by reforming slavery as well as improving the moral and work ethics of enslaved children was not just about abolition. Abolitionists were against slavery, but they were not opposed to the economic, political, and cultural missions of British colonialism. How well enslaved people adapted to British cultural institutions determined their readiness to become civilized, free subjects. The reproductive bodies of young enslaved women linked abolitionist goals for ending slavery and promoting reform and the civilization of blacks.
Despite revised strategies, the second generation of abolitionists did not avoid entanglements. The ideological struggles between activists, government officials, the slaving interests, and the enslaved were many and varied. Activists, like William Wilberforce and James Ramsay, conflicted with one another because they had different ideas about how to control women’s reproductive labor. Collectively, reformers clashed with the imperial government, which was concerned about financially ruining the colonies or interfering with rights of governance. Abolitionist visions further contradicted the beliefs of the proslavery vanguard. Slave owners rejected the notion that as an inferior people, Africans and their descendants could ever be fit for freedom or could share the rights and privileges of Englishmen. Plantation owners and agents were also not confident that black people could be productive without the coercion of slavery. Finally, the bodily and moral reforms abolitionist had in mind for enslaved women and their children reflected British cultural values. Such ideals were at odds with what people of African descent living in the West Indies practiced and envisioned for their lives once they obtained freedom. The contests over abolition and reform hinged on competing ideas about how to control reproductive labor and who benefited from women’s reproductive potential.
The Biological Reproduction Argument for Abolition
Several abolitionists emphasized how slavery and the slave trade undermined the reproductive potential of captive women, and how best to harness it as a resource for colonial improvement and a path to freedom. By offering proposals for gradual reform, spearheaded by slave owners rather than Parliament, James Ramsay and William Wilberforce gained significant influence