https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/reproductive-rights-and-long-hand-slave-breeding/tnamp/
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~~ recommended by collectivist action ~~
(Collectivist Action note - "These articles were written before Roe vs Wade was overturned.")
America’s economy was built on the availability of cheap labor.
I’ve been writing about America’s slave breeding farms for years. Over time, I’ve not only gained additional knowledge but perspective. As in many investigations, the best way to understanding is to follow the money. At the same time, racism is a major factor in the treatment of enslaved people. It’s always been about the enrichment of others. The form of chattel slavery practiced in America was different and far more insidious than that practiced in most countries. Almost everywhere else, slavery was for a limited-term, and if not, the children of enslaved people were born free. In 1662, the Virginia House of Burgesses instituted a practice that soon became law throughout the colonies.
Partus Sequitur Ventrem dictated that any child born to an enslaved person follows the mother’s bloodline, deviating from past practices of following the father’s bloodline. This had the dual effect of perpetuating slavery through generations of Black people and absolving fathers, many of them white, of any responsibility. It effectively made the rape of enslaved women by their owners legal and removed any fathers’ obligation to care for or even acknowledge their children.
America’s economy was built on the availability of cheap labor, which came from two competing sources. Initially, much of that labor was provided by indentured servants, many of whom entered into five to seven-year contracts, after which they would be free and possibly receive a parcel of land and equipment to work it. Indentured servants were often treated harshly and had few liberties. While most of the initial indentured servants were European, there were also Black indentured servants. Don’t be confused into thinking they were treated the same. In 1640, five indentured servants, four white and one Black ran away to escape their harsh treatment. The four white ones were whipped and had four years added to their contract. John Punch, the Black indentured servant, was commanded to continue his service for the rest of his life. He became the first enslaved person in America. However, slavery wouldn’t become legal for another year in the colonies with the passage of the inaptly named Body of Liberties in Massachusetts.
Back to following the money. The initial economy of America was all agriculture-based. Sugar, tobacco, rice, and cotton were among the leading crops and highly labor-intensive. The two economic models, indentured servitude vs. slavery, trended toward enslavement being more profitable. The terms of indentured servitude eventually came to an end, and they were usually owed land and/or equipment at the end of their service. Enslaved people served for their lifetime and received no death benefit or retirement plan. Enslaved people often worked alongside indentured servants until Nathaniel Bacon upset the applecart.
Before 1676, there wasn’t even a thing called the white race. Then Nathaniel Bacon, a wealthy white property owner, led a coalition of white and Black indentured servants and Black enslaved people in an attack on the Virginia government and Native American tribes whose land Bacon wanted. The fear of indentured servants and enslaved people joining together by class against the elite struck fear into white hearts and minds. Indentured servitude was dumped in favor of slavery. It was more profitable, and the Black enslaved were more readily identifiable, which helped keep them in place.
Jamestown’s events were alarming to the planter elite, who were deeply fearful of the multiracial alliance of [indentured servants] and slaves. Word of Bacon’s Rebellion spread far and wide, and several more uprisings of a similar type followed. To protect their superior status and economic position, the planters shifted their strategy for maintaining dominance. They abandoned their heavy reliance on indentured servants in favor of the importation of more black slaves.
“The events in Jamestown were alarming to the planter elite, who were deeply fearful of the multiracial alliance of [indentured servants] and slaves. Word of Bacon’s Rebellion spread far and wide, and several more uprisings of a similar type followed. In an effort to protect their superior status and economic position, the planters shifted their strategy for maintaining dominance. They abandoned their heavy reliance on indentured servants in favor of the importation of more black slaves.” ~ Michelle Alexander
A century later, slavery was well entrenched as the engine that made America’s economy roar. Even the northern states, with their fledgling industrial economy, benefitted from the enslavement of people. Cotton had taken on a larger role, and the North and South were intertwined in its dependency. Simultaneously, tobacco production was falling because farmers had failed to rotate crops and use other techniques now in use in England and elsewhere. The soil was becoming depleted in minerals, and there was no longer the same need for enslaved people in the once tobacco rich states like Virginia and Maryland. Cotton producing southern states had an ever-increasing need for enslaved people. It wasn’t as simple as northern or Mideastern states selling their excess slaves further south. They were competing against the cheaper imported slaves from Africa, the majority of whom arrived in Charleston, South Carolina.
The plan to eliminate the import of the cheaper international slaves took root in the United States’ Constitution in Article One, Section Nine: Clause One, which indicated that the practice of importing slaves could not end for at least twenty years. Rewriters of history like to suggest that it was all part of a plan to gradually eliminate slavery when it was no such thing. The group of founders from South Carolina were able to get a twenty-year reprieve before their cash cow went away in favor of those from Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, and elsewhere that outnumbered them. James Madison gets credit for writing the majority of the Constitution. He was in constant communication with Thomas Jefferson, who had previously written the Virginia Constitution, which greatly influenced the national document. I don’t know whether Jefferson had direct input into the wording of the clause. He certainly was the driving force in implementing the end of the international slave trade in America and aiding the domestic slave trade. Jefferson himself personally benefitted from the increased demand for domestic or homegrown slaves.
Thomas Jefferson became President in 1801 and was still in office when the twenty-year ban on ending the international slave trade expired. He spent much of 1807 preparing for the January 1, 1808 date on which he could implement the ban. He got all the paperwork done and legislation passed. He expressed his concern about the human rights violations imposed on the African slaves, noting no concern for the several hundred he personally owned. He made a speech to Congress, congratulating them for the good they had done. What he proclaimed was in the country’s best interest also happened to be in the best interest of himself and his fellow Virginia landowners.
“I congratulate you, fellow-citizens, on the approach of the period at which you may interpose your authority constitutionally, to withdraw the citizens of the United States from all further participation in those violations of human rights which have been so long continued on the unoffending inhabitants of Africa, and which the morality, the reputation, and the best interests of our country, have long been eager to proscribe.” Thomas Jefferson
Having got what they long wanted, the elimination of the competition. Virginia plantation others and owners had the new problem of meeting the increased demand. Cotton, sugar, and rice still demanded manual labor, and one primary source had been cut off. The solution was to increase the production of domestic enslaved people, which meant slaves having more babies. That the number of children born to enslaved people went way up is well documented. Many historians and educators attributed it to a “natural increase,” as if Black slaves arbitrarily decided to have more children. The ugly truth is that masters forcibly bred their female slaves. Often pairing them with large, strong males to produce good workers. The larger the child, the better the market price.
Other children resulted from female enslaved people being raped by their white owners (or their friends and family). There was a separate market for lighter-skinned slaves who could work as house servants and sometimes as “fancies,” which is a more pleasant word for prostitutes. Not only was the rape of Black women about power and pleasure, but to the owners, it was also a good business practice.
America does not generally teach about the practice of slave breeding in its schools. It excuses those who were simply following the practice of the times. There has been no offer of restitution of reparations to Black descendants. It was something preferred forgotten or, better yet, never known. I will keep learning more about slave breeding and writing about it because until the schools teach it, somebody should.
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Reproductive Rights and the Long Hand of Slave Breeding
March 21, 2012
I hate liberalism’s language of “choice.” I always have. Redolent of the marketplace, it reduces the most intimate aspects of existence, of women’s physical autonomy, to individualistic purchasing preferences. A sex life or a Subaru? A child or a cheeseburger? Life, death or liposuction? In that circumstance, capitalism’s only question is, Who pays and who profits? The state’s only question is, Who regulates and how much? If there is an upside to the right’s latest, seemingly loony and certainly grotesque multi-front assault on women, it is the clarion it sounds to humanists to take the high ground and ditch the anodyne talk of “a woman’s right to choose” for the weightier, fundamental assertion of “a woman’s right to be.”
That requires that we look to history and the Constitution. I found myself doing that a few weeks back, sitting in the DC living room of Pamela Bridgewater, talking about slavery as the TV news followed the debate over whether the State of Virginia should force a woman to spread her legs and endure a plastic wand shoved into her vagina. Pamela has a lot of titles that, properly, ought to compel me to refer to her now as Professor Bridgewater—legal scholar, teacher at American University, reproductive rights activist, sex radical—but she is my friend and sister, and we were two women sitting around talking, so I shall alternate between the familiar and the formal.
“What a spectacle,” Pamela exclaimed, “Virginia, the birthplace of the slave breeding industry in America, is debating state-sanctioned rape. Imagine the woman who says No to this as a prerequisite for abortion. Will she be strapped down, her ankles shackled to stir-ups?”
“I suspect,” said I, “that partisans would say, ‘If she doesn’t agree, she is free to leave.’ ”
“Right, which means she is coerced into childbearing or coerced into taking other measures to terminate her pregnancy, which may or may not be safe. Or she relents and says Yes, and that’s by coercion, too.”
“Scratch at modern life and there’s a little slave era just below the surface, so we’re right back to your argument.”
Pamela Bridgewater’s argument, expressed over the past several years in articles and forums, and at the heart of a book in final revision called Breeding a Nation: Reproductive Slavery and the Pursuit of Freedom, presents the most compelling conceptual and constitutional frame I know for considering women’s bodily integrity and defending it from the right.
In brief, her argument rolls out like this. The broad culture tells a standard story of the struggle for reproductive rights, beginning with the flapper, climaxing with the pill, Griswold v. Connecticut and an assumption of privacy rights under the Fourteenth Amendment and concluding with Roe v. Wade. The same culture tells a traditional story of black emancipation, beginning with the Middle Passage, climaxing with Dred Scott, Harpers Ferry and Civil War and concluding with the Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. Both stories have a postscript—a battle royal between liberation and reaction—but, as Bridgewater asserts, “Taken together, these stories have no comprehensive meaning. They tell no collective tale. They create no expectation of sexual freedom and no protection against, or remedy for, reproductive slavery. They exist in separate spheres; that is a mistake.” What unites them but what both leave out, except incidentally, is the experience of black women. Most significantly, they leave out “the lost chapter of slave breeding.”
I need to hit the pause button on the argument for a moment, because the considerable scholarship that revisionist historians have done for the past few decades has not filtered into mass consciousness. The mass-culture story of slavery is usually told in terms of economics, labor, color, men. Women outnumbered men in the enslaved population two to one by slavery’s end, but they enter the conventional story mainly under the rubric “family,” or in the cartoon triptych Mammy-Jezebel-Sapphire, or in the figure of Sally Hemmings. Yes, we have come to acknowledge, women were sexually exploited. Yes, many of the founders of this great nation prowled the slave quarters and fathered a nation in the literal as well as figurative sense. Yes, maybe rape was even rampant. That the slave system in the US depended on human beings not just as labor but as reproducible raw material is not part of the story America typically tells itself. That women had a particular currency in this system, prized for their sex or their wombs and often both, and that this uniquely female experience of slavery resonates through history to the present is not generally acknowledged. Even the left, in uncritically reiterating Malcolm X’s distinction between “the house Negro” and “the field Negro,” erases the female experience, the harrowing reality of the “favorite” that Harriet Jacobs describes in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl.
We don’t commonly recognize that American slaveholders supported closing the trans-Atlantic slave trade; that they did so to protect the domestic market, boosting their own nascent breeding operation. Women were the primary focus: their bodies, their “stock,” their reproductive capacity, their issue. Planters advertised for them in the same way as they did for breeding cows or mares, in farm magazines and catalogs. They shared tips with one another on how to get maximum value out of their breeders. They sold or lent enslaved men as studs and were known to lock teenage boys and girls together to mate in a kind of bullpen.They propagated new slaves themselves, and allowed their sons to, and had their physicians exploit female anatomy while working to suppress African midwives’ practice in areas of fertility, contraception and abortion.Reproduction and its control became the planters’ prerogative and profit source. Women could try to escape, ingest toxins or jump out a window—abortion by suicide, except it was hardly a sure thing.
This business was not hidden at the time, as Pamela details expansively. And, indeed, there it was, this open secret, embedded in a line from Uncle Tom’s Cabin that my eyes fell upon while we were preparing to arrange books on her new shelves: “’If we could get a breed of gals that didn’t care, now, for their young uns…would be ’bout the greatest mod’rn improvement I knows on,” says one slave hunter to another after Eliza makes her dramatic escape, carrying her child over the ice flows.
The foregoing is the merest scaffolding of one of the building blocks of Bridgewater’s argument, which continues thus. “If we integrate the lost chapter of slave breeding into those two traditional but separate stories, if we reconcile female slave resistance to coerced breeding as, in part, a struggle for emancipation and, in part, a struggle for reproductive freedom, the two tales become one: a comprehensive narrative that fuses the pursuit of reproductive freedom into the pursuit of civil freedom.”
Constitutionally, the fundamental civil freedom is enshrined in the Thirteenth Amendment. The amendment’s language is unadorned, so it was left to the political system to sort out what the abolition of slavery meant in all particulars. In a series of successive legal cases, the courts ruled that in prohibiting slavery the amendment also prohibits what the judiciary called its “badges and incidents,” and recognized Congress’s power “to pass all laws necessary and proper for abolishing all [of those] in the United States.”
Bridgewater argues that because slavery depended on the slaveholder’s right to control the bodies and reproductive capacities of enslaved women, coerced reproduction was as basic to the institution as forced labor. At the very least it qualifies among those badges and incidents, certainly as much as the inability to make contracts. Therefore, sexual and reproductive freedom is not simply a matter of privacy; it is fundamental to our and the law’s understanding of human autonomy and liberty. And so constraints on that freedom are not simply unconstitutional; they effectively reinstitute slavery.
The courts and Congress of the nineteenth century understood contracts, and even a little bit about labor. Women they understood wholly by their sex and wombs, and those they regarded as the property of husbands once owners exited the stage. It is not our fate to live with their failings. It is not our fate to live with the failure of later courts to apply the Thirteenth Amendment to claims for sexual and reproductive freedom or even to consider the historical context out of which the Fourteenth Amendment also emerged. It is not our fate, in other words, to confine ourselves to the pinched language of choice or even of privacy—or to the partial, white-centric history of women’s struggle for reproductive rights.
Since that conversation in Pamela’s living room, the anti-woman spring offensive has come on in full. Virginia lawmakers ended up imposing a standard ultrasound mandate rather than the “transvaginal” version, one of at least ninety-two new regulations or restrictions that states have imposed on abortion since 2011, and one of at least 155 introduced in state legislatures since the start of the year. Rush Limbaugh revealed himself to be astoundingly ignorant of female sexuality. Rick Santorum demonstrated many times over that, for him, no idea in “the sexual realm” is too outlandish. They and their anti-woman allies have lobbed so many bombs it’s easy to get distracted, to assume a posture of defensive, and sometimes politically dicey, defense: but no federal money pays for abortion; women who delay child-bearing are more productive; the Pill eases painful periods; most of what Planned Parenthood does has nothing to do with abortion; contraceptives help against rheumatoid arthritis; Mrs. Santorum might have died under the fetal personhood platforms her husband touts; Sandra Fluke is not a slut…
What of it if she were? By any other name, ain’t she a woman? A human being? The descendants of slave masters have no more right to control her sexuality and reproductive organs, to deny her self-determination, than did their predecessors. Mother or slut, prostitute or daughter, law student or lazybones who just wants to have sex all day, she is heir in her person to a promise of universal freedom, one that does not make such distinctions but that recognizes an individual’s right to her life, her labor, her body and self-possession all as one. Forget trying to shut up a gasbag on the radio; there is a basic constitutional liberty to uphold.
The preachers and lay men and women now raising the “personhood” banner for their side have taken to calling the fetus and fertilized egg the new slave, and the movement for their legal personhood the new civil rights movement. The director of Personhood Florida compares himself to William Wilberforce, the nineteenth-century English abolitionist. A Catholic priest posting on Planned Parenthood’s “I Have a Say” video thread likens defenders of women’s bodily autonomy to slave traders. On their blogs and other propaganda the foot soldiers of this movement call Roe v. Wade a latter-day Dred Scott decision; they invoke the Thirteenth Amendment and vow to fulfill its promise.
These people are not stupid, and some are sincere, but they are wrong. They pervert morality and history in the guise of honoring both, and thing-ify women according to the logic of our cruelest past. There is another logic, and it calls us to complete the unfinished business of emancipation.
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