the best women “who are fit for breeding,” their exertions yielded few positive results because of women’s so-called promiscuity. Such complaints of sexual impropriety, however, reflected women’s refusal to conform to the sexual mores prescribed by reformers. In 1789, the Jamaica Committee of Council reporting to the British House of Commons noted, “Births are not so frequent amongst Negro Slaves in this Island as among the Peasantry of Great Britain, and it is in great measure attributed to their manners and habits of life.…Both sexes [frequently engage in] licentious intercourse.” The report further explained that women patronized “Negro plays or Nocturnal Assemblies, in distant Parts, where they dance immoderately, drink to Excess, sleep on the damp Ground in open Air, and commit such Acts of Sensuality and Intemperance [that] bring on the most fatal distempers.”78 By emphasizing sexual habits, witnesses for the slaving interests shifted attention away from the strenuous labor regimes, cruel punishments, and neglect of enslaved people’s material needs that abolitionists focused on as the leading causes of population decline.
Planters and doctors echoed the council’s testimony and added that while the health of men and women suffered immensely from their nocturnal rendezvous, the consequences were far more injurious to female fertility than to male fertility. Fearon noted that “the women [were subject] to cold, obstructions, and other maladies [which are] the enemies to procreation.”79 Estate agent Thomas Barritt noted that such activities left the women “disordered and feeble,” minimizing their chances of bearing children.80 Enslaved women’s alleged promiscuity became an additional justification for planters to coerce them into intimate unions with arbitrarily chosen men on the plantations. Claiming authority over slaves’ bodies and sexuality, Fearon “did attempt to persuade all [the enslaved] people to intermarry and do away with the rambling at night.”81
Implicit within these writings is slaveholders’ ignorance of the sociocultural practices of enslaved people. Many Jamaican planters and colonial observers assumed that enslaved women’s late night activities were occasions for overindulgence of their sexual passions “with a multitude of men.” They believed these occasions involved the excessive consumption of alcohol, which they feared caused infertility in women. Plantation doctor William Wright asserted, “There are no causes on a well ordered estate that impede the natural increase of slave Negroes so much so as going to Negroe balls.…They [engage in] venery too early and often with a number of men. They [too easily accept] spirituous liquor and above all they conceal venereal complaints from White people.”82 Sharing Wright’s assessments, another estate doctor, Thomas Dancer, emphasized that “the unbound indulgences in venereal pleasures [are] a common cause of sterility” in women. “The parts are left in so morbid a state as to be unfit for impregnation,” he wrote. “The uterine and the vaginal vessels are distended, and a perpetual discharge, or flux albus is the consequence.”83
Enslaved people’s social habits had long been subject to scrutiny and misrepresentation by enslavers across New World slave societies. Several historians have stressed that enslavers constructed stereotypes and images like “Jezebel” in order to legitimize their sexual access to and exploitation of enslaved women and girls.84 Indeed, the enslaved remained subjected to these racist and sexist stereotypes during the abolitionist era.85 However, their so-called promiscuity not only justified enslavers’ sexual assault. Limitations on the sexual liberties of enslaved women were now legitimized under the veneer of promoting biological reproduction. Enslaved people were not subdued so easily, however. These misunderstood late night excursions proved nothing more than that enslaved people had their own views about their sexual practices and social habits and they found clandestine ways to express them. They insisted on pleasuring their bodies in ways of their choosing.86
Although planters acknowledged enslaved men’s nightly excursions had sterilizing effects, they focused mainly on curtailing the activities of women. Of further note, slaveholders were unwilling to acknowledge their own culpability in population failure. Maria Nugent, wife of the governor of Jamaica in 1802, having “amused [her]self with reading Evidence before the House of Commons, on the part of the petitioners for the Abolition of the Slave Trade,” entered the following assessment in her journal,
As far as I can see at present … there would certainly be no necessity of the Slave Trade, if religion, decency, and good order, were established among the Negroes; if they could be prevailed upon to marry … they would increase and render the necessity of the Slave Trade out of the question, provided their masters were attentive to their morals, and established matrimony among them, but White men of all descriptions, married and single, live in a state of licentiousness with their female slaves and until a great reformation takes place on their part, neither decency, nor morality, can be established among the Negroes.87
Although Nugent’s concern for slaveholders’ inattentiveness to the moral reform of enslaved women was a backhanded criticism of their sexuality, she did indict planters as being culpable in Jamaica’s failure to achieve self-sustaining populations. Her views conflicted with those of the maledominated Jamaican planter class who did not see their sexual assault of enslaved women and girls as part of the problem. From the perspective of male planters, the challenge to biological reproduction was women’s inability to exercise libidinal restraint.
Ultimately, the question of breeding farms and forced breeding as part of the sugar plantations naturally emerges when we reflect upon planter efforts to buy a greater proportion of young women who were at the beginning of their reproductive cycles, some of whom were arbitrarily coupled with enslaved men. Slavery scholars are at odds on the question of forced breeding on the plantations. Did forced breeding occur? If estate agents coerced enslaved people into sexual relations, how did this occur and how extensive was this practice?88
The possibility that enslavers coerced enslaved men and women into sexual relations for the purposes of boosting slave population unearths the extensive spectrum of the trauma and exploitation captive Africans faced. Slave breeding must be understood not with the “unreasonable literalness” of “stud farms,” but rather as cunning manipulation, wherein planters strategized their purchases and interfered in the sexual relations of the enslaved.89 Enslavers were not interested in the welfare of enslaved people as an end in itself. Estate agents promoted slave couples to secure their own economic interests. Biological reproduction as a means of amelioration exploited enslaved women.
Jamaican planters took seriously abolitionist threats to cut off their African labor supply. And until 1807, when such threats manifested, they expended a great deal of effort to stock their plantations with young, fertile women they thought could generate future workers. Although planters were at the mercy of the transatlantic slave trade, and experienced limited success in increasing the number of young Ebo women on their properties, it was clear that between 1788 and 1807 a pronatal agenda was firmly in place.
Enslaved women’s ability to reproduce therefore shifted away from being viewed as a distraction that diverted mother-workers away from their more important roles in the fields and factories. Planters bought young women with the intention of harnessing their reproductive potential. Although such transformations occurred because abolitionists articulated the end of slavery through the reproductive capacities of women, the details of reforms were worked out in the colonies and their implementation was more in line with planter assessments of the needs and solvency of their estates as well as the assumptions they held about captive women. The difficulties of pronatal reform were further illustrated in women insisting on maintaining autonomy over their intimacies. The authority metropolitan reformers and local plantation agents claimed over slaves’ intimate relations contrasted with the power enslaved people insisted on exercising over their bodies and sexuality.
Chapter 3
When Workers Become Mothers, Who Works? Motherhood, Labor, and Punishment
My master flew into a terrible passion, and notwithstanding
