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 an average of £12 to maintain a field slave annually (food, clothing, poll tax, and insurance) in the 1780s, and approximately half that amount for children (typically up to about ages six to ten). From these calculations, it was more costly to buy boys and girls because they needed at least eight to ten years to be of significant use as workers.47 In fact, in 1805 Francis Graham traded two children for adults because the children were too young to be useful to the estate. One of the children was only twelve months old and Graham feared the boy might not survive into adulthood. Additionally, the labor shortage at Georgia meant that the estate could not invest eight to ten years waiting for these children to become useful workers.48
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,
