Slave breeding was the practice inslave states of the United States ofslave owners systematically forcing slaves to have sexual relations and bear children.^[1] It included coercedsexual relations between slaves;forced pregnancies of female slaves; and forced breeding of specific slaves in hopes of producing relatively stronger future slaves.^[1][2] The objective was for slave owners to increase the number of people they enslaved without incurring the cost of purchase, to fill labor shortages caused by theabolition of the Atlantic slave trade, and to promote desired physical characteristics.^[3][4]

The laws that ultimately abolished theAtlantic slave trade came about as a result of the efforts ofBritish abolitionist Christian groups such as theSociety of Friends, known as Quakers, andEvangelicals led byWilliam Wilberforce, whose efforts through theCommittee for the Abolition of the Slave Trade led to the passage of the1807 Slave Trade Act by theBritish parliament in 1807.^{[5][page needed]} However it was not until 1937 that the trade of slaves was made illegal throughout the British Empire, withNigeria andBahrain being the last British territories to abolish slavery.^[6][7][8][9]

This led to increased calls forabolition in America, supported by members of theU.S. Congress from both the North and the South, as well as PresidentThomas Jefferson.^[10]

At the same time that the importation of enslaved Africans was being restricted or eliminated, the United States was undergoing a rapid expansion ofcotton,sugarcane, andrice production in theDeep South and the West. The invention of thecotton gin enabled the profitable cultivation of short-staple cotton, which could be produced more widely than other types; this led tothe economic preeminence of cotton throughout the Deep South. Enslaved people were treated as acommodity by owners and traders alike, and were regarded as the crucial labor for the production of lucrative cash crops that fed thetriangular trade.^{[11][12][page needed]}

The enslaved people were treated aschattel assets, similar to the legal treatment of farm animals. Enslavers passed laws regulating slavery and the slave trade, designed to protect their financial investments. The enslaved workers had no more rights than a cow or a horse, or as infamously put by theU.S. Supreme Court in the case ofDred Scott v. Sandford, "they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect".^[13] On large plantations, enslaved families were separated for different types of labor. Men tended to be assigned to large field gangs. Workers were assigned to the task for which they were best physically suited, in the judgment of theoverseer.^[14][15]

Theprohibition on the importation of slaves into the United States after 1808 limited the supply of slaves in the United States. This came at a time when the invention of the cotton gin enabled the expansion of cultivation in the uplands of short-staple cotton, leading to clearing lands cultivating cotton through large areas of the Deep South, especially theBlack Belt. The demand for labor in the area increased sharply and led to an expansion of the internal slave market. At the same time, theUpper South had an excess number of enslaved people because of a shift to mixed-crops agriculture, which was less labor-intensive than tobacco. To add to the supply of enslaved people, enslavers looked at the fertility of enslaved women as part of their productivity, and intermittently forced the women to have large numbers of children. During this time period, the terms "breeders", "breeding slaves", "child bearing women", "breeding period", and "too old to breed" became familiar.^[16]

Planters in the Upper South states started selling enslaved people to the Deep South, generally through slave traders such asFranklin and Armfield. Louisville, Kentucky, on theOhio River was a major slave market and port for shipping slaves downriver by the Mississippi to the South.New Orleans had the largest slave market in the country and became the fourth largest city in the US by 1840 and the wealthiest, mostly because of its slave trade and associated businesses.^[17]

In theantebellum years, numerous individuals who escaped from slavery wrote about their experiences in books called slave narratives. Many recounted that at least a portion of enslavers continuously interfered in the sexual lives of the enslaved people, usually the women. The slave narratives also testified that enslaved women were subjected to rape; arranged marriages; forced intercourse and sexual violation by enslavers, their sons or overseers; and other forms of abuse.

The historianE. Franklin Frazier, in his bookThe Negro Family, stated that "there were masters who, without any regard for the preferences of their slaves, mated their human chattel as they did their stock."^[18] Ex-slave Maggie Stenhouse remarked, "Durin' slavery there were stockmen. They was weighed and tested. A man would rent the stockman and put him in a room with some young women he wanted to raise children from."^[19]

Some experts suggest that there may have been several factors that coalesced to make theforced reproduction of enslaved people a common practice by the end of the 18th century, chief among them the enactment of laws and practices that transformed the view of enslaved people from "personhood" into "thinghood". In this way, enslaved people could be bought and sold as chattel without presenting a challenge to thereligious beliefs andsocial mores of the society at large. All rights were to the enslaving owner, with the enslaved individual having no rights ofself-determination either to their own person, spouse, or children.

Slaveholders began to assert that slavery was grounded in theBible. This view was inspired in part by an interpretation of theGenesis passage "And he said, Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren." (Genesis 9);Ham, son of Noah and father of Canaan, was deemed theantediluvian progenitor of the African people. Some white people used theBible to justify the economic use of slave labor. The subjugation of the enslaved person was taken as a natural right of the white enslavers. The second-class position of the enslaved person was not limited to the relationship with the enslaver but was to be in relation to all white people. Enslaved people were considered subject to white persons.^{[citation needed]}

In a study of 2,588 slaves in 1860 by theeconomist Richard Sutch, he found that on slave-holdings with at least one woman, the average ratio of women to men exceeded 2:1. The imbalance was greater in the "selling states",^{[clarification needed]} where the excess of women over men was 300 per thousand.^{[clarification needed][20]}

Ned Sublette, co-author ofThe American Slave Coast, states that the reproductive worth of "breeding women" was essential to the young country's expansion not just for labor but as merchandise andcollateral stemming from a shortage ofsilver,gold, or soundpaper tender. He concluded that enslaved people and their descendants were used as human savings accounts, with newborns serving asinterest that functioned as the basis of money andcredit in amarket premised on the continual expansion of slavery.^[21]

Robert Fogel andStanley Engerman reject the idea thatsystematic forced reproduction was a major economic concern in their 1974 bookTime on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery.^[22] They argue that there is very meager evidence for the systematic breeding of slaves for sale in the market in the Upper South during the 19th century. They distinguish systematic "breeding"—the interference in normal sexual patterns—by enslavers with an aim to increase fertility or encourage desirable characteristics—frompronatalist policies, the generalized encouragement of large families through a combination of rewards, improved living and working conditions for fertile women and their children, and other policy changes by masters. They point out that the demographic evidence is subject to a number of interpretations. Fogel argues that when slave owners intervened in the private lives of slaves, it actually had a negative impact on population growth.^[3]

• Dred Scott v. Sandford, 60, 393 (U.S. March 6, 1857) ("I am of opinion that so much of the several acts of Congress as prohibited slavery and involuntary servitude within that part of the Territory of Wisconsin lying north of thirty-six degrees thirty minutes north latitude and west of the river Mississippi, were constitutional and valid laws...The judgment of the Circuit Court should be reversed, and the cause remanded for a new trial.").
• Davis (December 10, 2014). Campbell, Gwyn; Elbourne, Elizabeth (eds.).Sex, Power, and Slavery. Ohio University Press.ISBN 978-0-8214-4490-0.
• Berlin, Ira (1998).Many thousands gone: the first two centuries of slavery in North America. Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.ISBN 978-0-674-81092-1.
• Finkelman, Paul; Miller, Joseph Calder, eds. (1998).Macmillan Encyclopedia of World Slavery. Macmillan Reference USA, Simon & Schuster Macmillan.ISBN 978-0-02-864781-4.
• Floyd Smith, Julia (1991).Slavery Rice Culture: Low Country Georgia, 1750-1860. Univ. of Tennessee Press.ISBN 978-0-87049-731-5.
• Fogel, Robert William; Engerman, Stanley L. (January 3, 1995).Time On The Cross: The Economics Of American Negro Slavery. W. W. Norton & Company.ISBN 978-0-393-31218-8.
• Galenson, David W. (March 31, 1986).Traders, Planters and Slaves: Market Behavior in Early English America. Cambridge University Press.ISBN 978-0-521-30845-8.
• Hornsby, Alton Jr., ed. (August 23, 2011).Black America: A State-by-State Historical Encyclopedia [2 volumes]. Bloomsbury Publishing USA.ISBN 978-1-57356-976-7.
• Marable, Manning (2000).How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America: Problems in Race, Political Economy, and Society. South End Press.ISBN 978-0-89608-580-0.
• Schneider, Dorothy; Schneider, Carl J. (2000).Slavery in America: From Colonial Times to the Civil War. Facts on File.ISBN 978-0-8160-3863-3.
• Shores, Mahalia (January 1, 1936).Federal Writers' Project: Slave Narrative Project, Quinn-Tuttle. Vol. 2, Part 6. Arkansas.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
• Sublette, Ned; Sublette, Constance (October 1, 2015).The American Slave Coast: A History of the Slave-Breeding Industry. Chicago Review Press.ISBN 978-1-61374-823-7.
• Sutch, Richard (1972). Engerman, Stanley; Genovese, Eugene (eds.).The Breeding of Slaves for Sale and the Westward Expansion of Slavery, 1850-1860. Institute of Business and Economic Research, University of California.

• Bancroft, Frederic (1996) [1931].Slave Trading in the Old South. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press.ISBN 9781570031038.
• Miller, Randal M.; Smith, John David (1997).Dictionary of Afro-American Slavery (Updated ed.). Westport, CONN.: Praeger.ISBN 9780275957995.
• Smithers, Gregory D. (2012).Slave Breeding: Sex, Violence, and Memory in African American History. Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida.ISBN 9780813042381.

• Slavery in the United States
• Social history of the United States
• Pre-emancipation African-American history
• Eugenics in the United States
• History of the Thirteen Colonies
• Cultural history of the United States
• African-American demographics
• Sexual slavery
• Rape in the United States
• Human reproduction in the United States
• Reproductive coercion

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