imperial ambitions. Children were invaluable assets for the navy, army, and factories. Thus, in preparation for the Seven Years’ War, the government approved significant funding for the Foundling Hospital, tasked with saving the lives of destitute children who could be repurposed in war roles.21
Mutual gender and class biases made slave owners supporters of similar reforms in the colonies. They shared the views held by British reformers that reproduction was a resource for fulfilling the ambitions of empire, including individual economic drive. Moreover, the property rights whites claimed in the ownership of black bodies invested slaveholders with the liberty to do as they pleased with their slaves. The hesitation over slavery reforms resulted from concerns about profits. While the state absorbed poor relief costs for British mothers and children, individual planters in the colonies would have to withstand all costs associated with ameliorating the conditions of their slaves—their private property. Thus, while colonial legislators rejected what they calculated were costly improvements, like exempting women from field work, they more willingly conceded to low or zero cost interventions. The benefits and low cost of encouraging slave owners to buy younger slaves, for instance, likely drove the Jamaican Assembly to impose a ten-pound tax on the importation of captives above the age of twenty-five.22 The economic cost of amelioration was a major cause of disagreement between the local Jamaican state, still in its infancy, and the moral-minded abolitionist reformers.
The Pronatal Plan of Abolitionists
Abolitionists readily agreed on the inhumanity of slavery and the slave trade. They also concurred on the negative effects slavery had on the ability and desire of enslaved women to bear children and to raise families. But beyond general consensus on the need to outlaw the slave trade as an important first step in initiating pronatal reforms, there was much disagreement about the precise changes needed to capitalize on women’s reproductive potential.23 Disputes, for example, emerged over the provision of material rewards for enslaved mothers and their trustworthiness to assume responsibilities for childcare. The divergent pronatal plans proposed by abolitionists would further clash with the economic goals of planters, the constraints on government powers, and the visions of freedom and bodily autonomy enslaved people held.
For William Wilberforce, forging family ties and building communities would best harness the reproductive capabilities of enslaved women. In his pronatal plan, he first encouraged enslaved women and men to marry and settle into independent cottages. He disagreed with other pronatal plans, like those offered by James Ramsay, that stressed giving material incentives to mothers for bringing their pregnancies to term and for rearing children. Nature alone, Wilberforce declared, “would take care of this for them.” It is not by material rewards that women nurture their children, but rather by assurances of the well-being of their families. Furthermore, Wilberforce wrote, “maternal tenderness, domestic sympathy, and paternal interest” will grow and blossom once masters guaranteed slaves a domestic sanctuary. Conception and full-term pregnancies would occur abundantly once enslaved women had a “home” where children were “safely born with a tolerable prospect of happiness.” Wilberforce therefore implored masters to “let mothers be allowed immunities and indulgencies, especially a little time from field work, morning and evening, to attend to their infants.” Such indulgence, he asserted, would encourage “domestic affections [to] spring up and flourish” in women.24
Even as Wilberforce’s plan offered greater opportunities for safeguarding family bonds, enslaved families’ comfort and gratification were not the primary aims of enhancing family security. Instead, it offered a less coercive way of keeping colonial economies intact as they gradually transited from slavery to freedom. Wilberforce was not opposed to the economic benefits of colonialism. He hoped to find a way in which investors’ economic ambitions could coexist with the moral imperatives of reformers. In his widely circulated 1807 Letter on the Abolition of the Slave Trade Wilberforce advocated the formation of families among the enslaved as a means of assuring masters that if they treated slaves humanely by allowing them family and community security, the enslaved would return loyalty and duty to them. Having experienced the value and rewards of “good character,” enslaved mothers, he posited, would strive to maintain it, out of fear of reaping the displeasure of their masters and losing family privileges. In the final push for abolition in 1807, Wilberforce’s Letter emphasized master paternalism as indispensable to the future success of the colonies. His definition of success included the amelioration of enslaved women’s conditions, the security of their families, and masters’ realizing that coercion and physical abuse were not necessary to regenerate laborers or maintain labor output. If masters implemented such reforms, he proclaimed, “the slaves will daily grow happier [and] the planters [grow] richer.”25 Despite the fact that Wilberforce gave due consideration to how pronatalism could affect the productivity of the plantations, tensions between the slaving interests and abolitionists persisted because of the attack on slavery and the slave trade. In the minds of slaveholders, the African trade was the lifeblood of colonial economy and they could not envision plantation cultivation without it or the coercive powers slavery gave them.
Like Wilberforce, Ramsay articulated a plan for abolition and reform through women’s reproductive ability, but his was radically different and more elaborate. Ramsay encouraged slaveholders to follow the example of the few progressive plantations where owners and managers paid attention to the nutritional and medical needs of their laborers and regulated women’s workloads. Every plantation should have a hospital for enslaved patients, decked with at least two chambers dedicated solely to mothers and children. One chamber, he explained, would serve as a delivery room and the other as a nursery for suckling children. Mothers would leave their infants in the nurseries and for the first six months would work “near the hospital, to be at hand to suckle their children, from time to time.” During this six-month period, Ramsay suggested, masters should refrain from giving new mothers strenuous tasks, assigning them instead to “moderate labour.” Mother-workers should resume the “ordinary work of the plantation” only when they had regained their strength and had weaned their infants. Upon returning to work, “two elderly hand women” would attend their children. Ramsay also suggested that plantation owners and their managers assign nurses to wash and feed infants while their mothers worked. To incentivize mothers further, masters should indulge them with “extraordinary allowance of food both in quality and quantity” and at the time of “presenting” their weaned children to the overseer reward them with a “complete suit of clothes.” Overall, as motivation to birth a greater number of children, all mothers bearing more than three children should receive full exemption from field work. Ramsay concluded that if plantation owners and managers implemented these reforms, birthrates among the enslaved would steadily increase.26
Ramsay’s experience as vicar, doctor, and slaveholder in the West Indies gave him firsthand knowledge of the challenges of maternal and infant health. The material and medical reforms he proposed were therefore sorely needed. They promised to improve the survival chances of enslaved mothers and babies, as well as help women balance labor demands with caring for their children.27 Imposed hospital accommodations for expectant and new mothers shifted the responsibilities of maternity and neonatal care away from enslaved people’s communities and placed them into the clutches of masters. Instead of advocating public health facilities, operated by state authority and therefore less subject to the arbitrary power of individual slaveholders, Ramsay advocated building private hospitals, owned, funded, and managed by the slaving interests.28
Moreover, in promoting the removal of children from their mothers’ care and enforcing a shortened lactation period of six months, Ramsay’s pronatal plan disrupted mother-child relations and customary maternal practices that had developed in Jamaica. Commonly, enslaved women nursed for eighteen to twenty-four months, but fought to continue nursing for up to thirty-six months.29 Ramsay’s six months weaning timetable reduced what enslaved mothers already thought was a short time to nurse their babies. His proposal neglected to consider the value of child-rearing practices already in place in Jamaica. The conflicts that would evolve on the ground between planters, doctors, and enslaved women throughout the 1780s to 1830s would be over such
