Were African American female slaves forced to bare children?

by [deleted]

I know that the slave owners would rape them creating biracial children. But were two slaves forced to procreate to give out more slaves to own and sell? I just can't imagine wanting to have a child knowing the horrible outcome. I understand that mistakes happen, but I'm still just curious.

sowser

I addressed this question a while ago in another answer here about slave reproduction, which you might find interesting.

The essential answer is no, this was not a fundamental experience of slavery in the same way that sexual abuse by owners and their overseers was. There is some limited evidence of individual planters engaging in forced breeding practices like the ones you describe, but these are exceptionally rare and we have no reason to believe they were in anyway the norm. For one thing, forcing two people to have sex isn't the easiest thing in the world as I'm sure you can appreciate. Some owners did take an interest in trying to regulate who their slaves entered into actual relationships with, which may have included purposefully pairing people off in the hope that they would have offspring. Most planters though would not go much further than demanding male slaves marry within the plantation (to ensure their offspring would be born the property of their master and not some other plantation owner). And slaves were still Human beings with full agency and morality; just because the planters tried to make something so doesn't mean slaves would not try to resist and subvert them however they could. Secret relationships, even cross-plantation ones, were very much possible on plantations where owners did take a disturbing interest in the minutiae of sexual and family life.

Something to appreciate is that there wasn't much of an incentive to try and practice any kind of aggressive forced breeding anyway, even if it had been easily possible. The US' slave population is remarkable for how self-sustaining it was; slaves in America enjoyed a much more consistently robust experience of family life than those in the Caribbean did, especially in states where the internal slave trade found its supply from. The states that were exporting slaves generally did so because they were ending up with more slaves than they either needed or wanted, and so were selling on their surplus; those where demand was outstripping the capacity for slave families to reproduce had easy access to a vast internal slave trade to fill their numbers, which they had a vested interest in supporting the growth and sustainability of (particularly as the expansion of slavery beyond its existing borders depended on a healthy slave trade to facilitate it). For the exporting states, selling slaves on was as much about boosting profit as it was keeping the black population at an acceptable level in the eyes of the white establishment, who feared too many black people in any one place - free or enslaved - increased the risk of rebellion.