(also posted at r/askhistory)
I recently read America's Breeding Farms: What History Books Never Told You, a Medium article by William Spivey. He claims that Virginia's chief export was slaves and that people ran jail-like farms where women were raped to produce children to be sold. I do not see sources on that article.
What do we know with sourced material about slave breeding programs in the antebellum USA?
WARNING TO READERS: This answer involves extended discussions of rape and other forms of sexual violence.
Before getting to the article and some of its accurate and inaccurate claims, it's worth talking a little bit about forced reproduction (a term that most historians of the subject prefer to "breeding," given the latter's dehumanizing implications) in American slavery and what we know about it.
Scholars of slavery in the antebellum United States are actually still debating whether or not forced reproduction occurred. In my opinion, people who deny that some slaveholders attempted to coerce the people they owned into having children in the name of profit are a bit naive, and ignoring plenty of direct testimony speaking to the practice.
If you have enough interest in American slavery to be seeking out articles like the one you linked above, you might be familiar with the WPA Slave Narratives, a collection of testimonials from formerly enslaved people recorded by writers employed by the Works Progress Administration during the Great Depression. As you might imagine, this is a problematic source base. All of the participants were advanced in age, many of the interviewers were white (which, in the Jim Crow South, might seriously skew the information a black interviewee was willing to provide or elaborate on), and many of the interview subjects -- after decades of poverty, disenfrachisement, violence, and fear in the Jim Crow south -- spoke of childhood experiences under slavery (most of the interviewees had been children when slavery ended) with a nostalgia that could easily be misinterpreted. All that said, some of the interviewees were old enough to have been adolescents or adults when slavery finally ended, and some of them provide harrowing accounts of their experiences. One such person was a woman named Rose Williams. I'm going to share a pretty big chunk of her testimony below, but first just a little context.
Williams had explained up to this point that her enslaver, a man named Hawkins, wasn't as awful as her previous enslaver, a man named Black. Williams remembered brutal working conditions, frequent incidents of torture, and insufficient food while Black owned her. Hawkins, in contrast, was less violent and cruel, and provided better food. He also did something that Williams expressed gratitude for even decades later: he purchased her and her father and her mother together, after her father begged him not to tear apart their family. From this we can see how uncommon such behavior was from slaveholders. But Williams had more to say about Hawkins (the following excerpt contains racial slurs which I have not censored. It is possible that Williams's interviewer exaggerated her dialect in transcribing her testimony, as many WPA interviewers did, but we can't know for certain):
"Dere am one thing Massa Hawkins does to me what I can't shunt from my mind. I knows he don't do it for meanness, but I allus holds it 'gainst him. What he done am force me to live with dat nigger, Rufus, 'gainst my wants.
"After I been at he place 'bout a year, de massa come to me and say, 'You gwine live with Rufus in dat cabin over yonder. Go fix it for livin'.' I's 'bout sixteen year old and has no larnin', and I's jus' igno'mus chile. I's thought dat him mean for me to tend de cabin for Rufus and some other niggers. Well, dat am start de pestigation for me.
"I's took charge of de cabin after work am done and fixes supper. Now, I don't like dat Rufus, 'cause he a bully. He am big and 'cause he so, he think everybody do what him say. We'uns has supper, den I goes here and dere talkin', till I's ready for sleep and den I gits in de bunk. After I's in, dat nigger come and crawl in de bunk with me 'fore I knows it. I says, 'What you means, you fool nigger?' He say fer me to hush de mouth. 'Dis am my bunk, too,' he say.
"You's teched in de head. Git out,' I's told him, and I puts de feet 'gainst him and give him a shove and out he go on de floor 'fore he know what I's doin'. Dat nigger jump up and he mad. He look like de wild bear. He starts for de bunk and I jumps quick for de poker. It am 'bout three foot long and when he comes at me I lets him have it over de head. Did dat nigger stop in he tracks? I's say he did. He looks at me steady for a minute and you's could tell he thinkin' hard. Den he go and set on de bench and say, 'Jus wait. You thinks it am smart, but you's am foolish in de head. Dey's gwine larn you somethin'.
"'Hush yous big mouth and stay 'way from dis nigger, dat all I wants,' I say, and jus' sets and hold dat poker in de hand. He jus' sets, lookin' like de bull. Dere we'uns sets and sets for 'bout an hour and den he go out and I bars de door.
"De nex' day I goes to de missy and tells her what Rufus wants and missy say dat am de massa's wishes. She say, 'Yous am de portly gal and Rufus em de portly man. De massa wants you-uns for to bring forth portly chillen.
"I's thinkin' 'bout what de missy say, but say to myse'f, 'I's not gwine live with dat Rufus.' Dat night when him come in de cabin, I grabs de poker and sits on de bench and says, 'Git 'way from me, nigger, 'fore I busts yous brains out and stomp on dem.' He say nothin' and git out.
"De nex' day de massa call me and tell me, 'Woman, I's pay big money for you and I's done dat for de cause I wants yous to raise me chillens. I's put yous to live with Rufus for dat purpose. Now, if you doesn't want whippin' at de stake, yous do what I wants.'
"I thinks 'bout massa buyin' me offen de block and savin' me from bein' sep'rated from my folks and 'bout bein' whipped at de stake. Dere it am. What am I's to do? So I 'cides to do as de massa wish and so I yields.
"When we'uns am given freedom, Massa Hawkins tells us we can stay and work for wages or share crop de land. Some stays and some goes. My folks and me stays. We works de land on shares for three years, den moved to other land near by. I stays with my folks till they dies.
"If my mem'randum am correct, it am 'bout thirty year since I come to Fort Worth. Here I cooks for white folks till I goes blind 'bout ten year ago.
"I never marries, 'cause one 'sperience am 'nough for dis nigger. After what I does for de massa, I's never wants no truck with any man. De Lawd forgive dis cullud woman, but he have to 'scuse me and look for some others for to 'plenish de earth."
According to Williams, Hawkins wanted her to have children with an enslaved man named Rufus whom he also owned. When she appealed to Hawkins (who, remember, she's described as being a slaveholder who was generally less awful than others), he told her that he had purchased her explicitly for the purpose of having children (thereby increasing his property in humans) and that he would torture her if she refused. It's hard not to be affected reading Williams's account of her own reasoning. How an act that she perceived as an exceptional kindness is so close to the threat of torture from the man who did her that kindness as she tries to think through her extremely limited options. In the end she realized she had no realistic options to resist, so she did her best to reconcile herself to living and having sex with a man she despised. But the end result of this relationship seems to have ruined romantic love for her. After gaining her freedom, she never married or had any more children. It's not clear what happened to Rufus, or whether Williams ever gave birth to any children where he was the father. But what is clear is that Williams's enslaver sought to coerce her into having children, and that it was deeply traumatic and painful for her.