Contested Bodies. Sasha Turner
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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 her pregnancy, ordered the poor creature to be stripped quite naked and to be tied up to a tree in a yard. He then flogged her as hard as he could lick, both with the whip and cowskin, till she was all over streaming with blood. He rested, and then he beat her again and again.…The consequence was that poor Hetty was brought to bed before her time, and was delivered after severe labour of a dead child.
A few days later, Hetty died of her injuries.1
Abolitionists used stories like Hetty’s to garner support for colonial reform and eventual emancipation. Hetty’s experience illustrated why West Indian slave populations failed to reproduce. Planters were unusually cruel in their treatment of enslaved women. According to abolitionists like James Ramsay, who previously resided in the colonies, masters commonly stripped women of their clothes, exposing their naked bodies as they whipped them. They endangered women’s lives and denied them modesty and decency. The special circumstances of pregnancy, abolitionists argued, did not mitigate planter cruelty. As Hetty’s case vividly demonstrated, expectant mothers were vulnerable to their masters’ caprice, cutting short their own and their babies’ lives.
In addition to emphasizing the cruel treatment of women and expectant mothers, abolitionists also singled out strenuous labor regimes as an important factor that negatively affected women’s ability to reproduce. Women worked undifferentiated from men in some of the most physically demanding tasks in the field. The few women who conceived received no relaxation of their work responsibilities. An even smaller number of women had successful pregnancies. Many women suffered miscarriages or prematurely delivered stillborn babies because of the physically taxing labor they performed. The harshness of labor and punishment, abolitionists concluded, made it difficult for the plantations to sustain their slave populations by births. Reforming these areas was vital to stimulate population growth, wean planter dependence on the slave trade, and prepare the colonies for a transition from slavery to freedom.
Local conditions determined the colonial twofold response to abolitionists’ quest to affect reproduction among enslaved women. First, the local government passed a series of legislation to alleviate the aspects of slavery it thought impeded the growth of slave population. Between the 1780s and 1820s, the Jamaican Assembly passed laws based on its own initiatives as well as in accordance with mandates from the Crown. During the 1820s in particular, and with much wrangling and many amendments, colonial assemblies adopted general ameliorative laws insisted on by the imperial Parliament. Second, estate owners and managers enforced abolitionist reforms and colonial laws according to the needs of their properties. The details of amelioration, worked out in the colonies, reflected planter concerns for profit and maintaining productivity, putting them in conflict with metropolitan and local government reformers. Although planters dominated the Jamaican Assembly, its members were among the most elite and idealistic whose visions for the colony as a whole were sometimes out of step with individual planter goals. Legal reforms promised to alleviate some of the worst aspects of slavery that undermined slave population growth. But their immediate and full-scale adoption could cause the collapse of the sugar plantations and undermine the power of slaveholders. In their daily running of the sugar estates, plantation agents managed such risks.
Pronatal policy changes and risk management resulted in multilayered conflicts. One struggle occurred among abolitionists, Parliament, and the local government, over who should control policy relating to women’s reproductive labor. A second struggle took place among abolitionists, who proposed a series of pronatal reforms; the local government, which passed pronatal legislation; and slaveholders, who interpreted and enforced policies according to the need to maintain plantation productivity and protect their power. Attorneys who managed estates conflicted with their England-based employers who insisted on reforms that were more in line with abstract abolitionist proposals than a true understanding of the everyday labor and production needs of their estates.
These contests to control female slaves’ reproductive labor led to the simultaneous contraction and expansion of enslaved people’s liberties. Would-be mothers came more directly under the scrutiny of planters and doctors