In Louisiana, there were probably more free blacks than in anywhere else in the south. The French instituted a set of laws called the Code Noire, or black code that specifically governed what blacks could do, and who they could marry. Mixed blood blacks, the mulattos (mules) the Quadroons, and Octaroons were specifically banned from interbreeding with full blooded blacks. The Quadroon women were highly sought after by the Creole (local whites who were descendants from the first colonists. It is not a racial term, and means native or local, creole cooking describes cooking whatever its origin if it is made with local ingredients). In the French Quarter, there was a Quadroon Ball, where the young mixed race women were expected to show themselves off in hopes of attracting the attention of a rich white creole to become his mistress. The book, The French Quarter: a History of the New Orleans Underworld, by the same author who wrote Gangs of New York, details all this. The Code Noire was kept in affect until after the civil war. Then the Quadroons intermarried at will. It seems the number of Creole men diminished due to the numbers killed on battle fields across the south. Rampart Street the 3rd street north of Bourbon Street was where at one time, the Quadroon mistresses were kept in nice white cottages by their white sugar daddies. Halle Berry, Vanessa Williams and the like would have been categorized as Quadroons or quarter bloods. It is interesting that in the old slavery days, it was the slaver’s definition the “one drop” rule that caused people to be discriminated as being “black”. Today those with African American blood, choose to be defined by that definition. I have a great great great grandmother who was a “high yellar” in Virginia. That is, she would have passed for white, being a Quadroon or Octaroon. My grandfather and his sister had the recessive black genes and it showed. I myself look Caucasian but am a lot darker than any of my sibling sisters, with only about 1/98th African American ancestry in me.
The Ottoman Empire had court eunuchs (slaves in the case of the OE) until the end of WWI. A lot of times if you wanted to use a male servant or slave as someone who works inside a house/palace (speaking more broadly than American slavery), you would want them to be eunuchs. You wouldn’t trust an intact male around say, your harem or your wife.
At least Broomstick is still about the place to see your answer…
I can’t cut and paste this academic paper but it seems clear that slave breeding farms were a figment of prurient writer’s imaginations. That is with the exception of the British Island of Barbuda:
There can be no doubt however that slaves were routinely abused in every way imaginable. The ‘cattle’ analogy is a good one except that farmers do not usually have sex with the cows. Any slave owner would take the more attractive females for his and his son’s pleasure, and to breed. As with cattle, it would be natural for them to selectively breed to improve the ‘herd’.
The only saving grace I can think of, is that for the most part they wanted slaves to be fit to work, unlike the Nazis with the death camps.
As mentioned, slave treatment varied from the brutally sadistic to the strict to the somewhat benign, depending on the master(s). Never underestimate the sadistic or neglectful tendencies of human beings. Even at the best, there are plenty of stories of slaves promised by a dying master that they would be freed, only to have the children realize that a thousand dollars or more was a lot of money to “give away” and the slave was simply sold down the river. Even Feynman mentions in his observations of Barbados that the problem with black culture is that the entire traditional culture was actively destroyed.
There are plenty of obvious indicators - many owners did not want their slaves to learn or know very much; many did not see value in teaching them even religion. The slave communities on plantations consisted to individuals from multiple ethnic groups and social backgrounds simply tossed together and treated like livestock. The traditional social controls disappear. men have no restraint - the biggest and meanest get what they want, and nobody other than the master can tell them what the can’t do. Elders may not get respect, Women were not restrained by morality - after all, traditional morality was about preventing a woman from becoming pregnant before marriage, or from creating strife among competing males - all that disappears when the ultimate authority really does not care - or worse, encourages breeding early and often. The only restraint would be that males who injured each other fighting over women would find themselves punished for injuring property.
As for claims of breeding slaves… other than the obvious - producing children is profitable, and healthy offspring are better - I’m pretty skeptical about eugenics programs. IIRC it was Jared Diamond in Guns, Germs, and Steel who mentioned that plants like oaks (for acorns) had never actually been bred, given the long cycles needed to create purebreds; similarly, even elephants were actually just caught and tamed, never actually bred like livestock - due to the extremely long breeding cycle. The same to me would be true of slaves, to get crass. I doubt that anyone had the time and ability to institute breeding programs beyond the very obvious - in a harsh situation, only the hardy survived so of course the males were bigger and stronger. To be blunt, even if the master did not “select” the mating pairs, odds are the guy with the biggest muscles got what he wanted.
As for the variety and cleverness of human cruelty, no location or time has a monopoly on that; read of the tortures dreamed up in Roman times, in the middle ages, by Cathay in Marco Polo’s journeys, and so on.
I know the post was an old one, but Broomstick, as I understand, a lot of Roots was later found to be plagarized, and that much of it could not be verified, when they checked his sources.
Not that raping one’s slaves didn’t happen, of course.
After 12 years, I think this. . .
is worth revisiting. Anyone???
You may want checkout Mandingo:This controversial potboiler set in antebellum Louisiana chronicles the decline of the slave-breeding Maxwell family.
I seem to remember that it was just the part of the Roots story based in Africa was questioned. I guess because of the lack of records and the reliance on anecdote. The parts of the story based In the US, may have had more evidence to go on.
Kinda dumb, too. Most of this never went on.
A lot of “Booga Booga White Devil” tales.
It takes 5 or more years to breed a human to where he can’t even stop shitting himself. That’s a big expense, and a lot of trouble. Then, you have to train him/her to do things, another X number of years.
Any ‘breeding slaves’, or what-have-you, are just sort of like the big daddy slave-he gets to/does have sex with all the slave women; they have kids-this doesn’t mean that the paternalistic slave owner said “Uncle Tom, get out there and start making me a slave farm; don’t give me no sass, and quit being uppity; go out there and mate with Jemimah or I’ll whip you again”. It’s more like
Uncle Tom: Hey, babe, sup?
Jemimah: Dunno, sup with you?
UT: Just jammin…wanna come to my slave shack and hear some Lil Wayne?
J: I dunno…you gots a bad reputation…(giggle)
Followed by standard mating rituals.
THAT’S the breeding process on slave owners’ land.
If it makes it any better, what I read from Booker T. Washington was that after the slaves were freed the former slaveowners basically fell themselves into poverty because over the years they had not learned any of the skills involved in farming, raising livestock, growing cotton, or raising children. He said his former masters children, whom he kept in contact with, never amounted to anything. Plus from what I’ve read is that most slave plantations were later sold to the carpetbaggers and the owners lost everything. Other times the plantations were burned to the ground by freed slaves or Union troops.
So in the long run the slaveowners gained nothing. You people who live in the south will need to help me if you know of any old plantations still owned by the original families descendants.
Booker also says that OTOH, many slaves prospered because their skills in things such as blacksmithing, carpentry, and farming were highly prized.
I concur that slavery was different depending upon the circumstances. George Washington Carver’s mother was bought to be a household servant of an elderly Missouri couple and when she was stolen, the Carver family raised little George as their own.
These “slave narratives” below are an oral history given by former slaves to WPA writers during the depression. While you must read them with some discernment (The writers were largely young caucasian men. If I were being interviewed, even now, there are many areas of my life I would never tell)-- You can see that “breeding” or marriage were done differently in different states, different times, different plantations.
Some slaves felt great allegiance or love toward their owners, and said that their lives were easier under slavery (very few wanted to return to it tho). They worked. They ate. They had some freedoms. Sounds to me like modern prison inmates who become institutionalized.
Of course, some reported great brutality (and those who were brutalized the worst didn’t live long enough to be interviewed). These stories really opened my eyes as to what life was really like, and why the institution lasted so long. Most of what we think we know about slavery was written by or with abolitionists. They had a noble agenda, but they had to simplify the complicated relationship between slave and owner by emphasizing brutality over the slavery of the mind.
I’ve worked in the domestic violence community for decades and the similarities are shocking. Most folks who haven’t seen domestic violence firsthand have a very different idea than those who have. The media presents brutality because it is easier to understand than the more subtle aspects.
Anyway, I highly recommend these tho some are better written than others:
As it happens, I’ve just been reading ‘How to manage your slaves’ which covers slavery in the Roman era. It’s an interesting book and I recommend it. Slaves didn’t seem to be bred deliberately; rather, children were an occupational hazard of being a concubine and a good master encouraged marriages between his slaves. And children of slaves were themselves slaves.
Interestingly, in Twelve Years a Slave, Solomon Northup recounts one owner being told that he could lose his slaves if he was excessively cruel. So there may have been, in places, some small restrictions on torture and summary executions.
We had a thread about that just recently. IIRC, there was a South Carolina slaveowner who was imprisoned for murdering one of his slaves.
I was thinking that Twelve Years a Slave is likely accurate, and so an interesting random cross-section of slave life in the South. Some owners were OK, some really bad, and everything in between. Some took out their frustrations (or sadism) on slaves. Some recognized that slaves could be smart and resourceful, others (like some office co-workers) felt threatened by being shown up by someone smarter.
Interesting, browsing the slave narratives:
“…dey got him fresh of de ship from Africa. He sho’ was a man; he run all the other niggers away from my mammy and took up wid her widout askin’ de marster.”
“You see, dey would have two or three women on de plantation dat was good breeders and dey would have chillum pretty regular fore freedom come here. You know, some people does be rightf ast in catchin chillum [getting pregnant]. Yes’um dey must be bless wid a pile o’ dem, I say…”
"my mother name Ann. Her b’long to my marster, James Barber. Dat’s not a fair question when you ask me who my daddy was. Well, just say that he was a white man and dat my mother never did marry nobody, while he lived. I was de onliest child my mother ever had. "
Reading about a dozen narratives, most of people born not long before the civil war, and the results vary but generally no suggestion that any applied effort was made to “breed” more slaves. It seems leaving slaves to their own devices provided plenty. other than the first quote, most narratives seemed to suggest that pairing, common law marriage, and even formal marriage was common among the slaves.
(One interesting quote- one ex-slave said they weren’t taught to read and write because the owners were afraid the slaves would write their own permission passes - apparently slave one did just that and they think he made it to the North.)
Slavery was very different in the Roman era. In fact, most other slave cultures, I don’t think there was a racial component. Roman slaves were people indebted and spoils of war. Many cultures, slaves had assorted rights, were allowed to own property, and could even buy their own freedom. Some Roman slaves were very educated - a rich man might have an educated slave who was essentially the manager and treasurer for the household.
C.J. Cherryh, was a teacher as well a being an SF writer. In one of her discussions of Romans and their empire, she says this:
Yes, and the earlier contention that slaves were legally and socially non-human is just false. It was certainly true that a white man who killed a slave wasn’t likely to face any sort of consequences. But that doesn’t mean slaves were legally animals.
I’m not an expert on the subject by any means, but it seems to me the process was this - as the more enlightened part of society claimed that enslaving a fellow human was simply wrong on a moral level, there was a push-back from the regions that relied on slavery. Their self-justification was to limit slavery as much as possible to Africans, and then claim their distinct difference in appearance was proof they were less than human compared to Europeans and therefore did not merit the same moral consideration. The Dredd Scott decision is an example of this, asserting that slaves were property not persons under the law. the more the abolitionists pushed, the more the slave society pushed back, ratcheting up the rhetoric on both sides.
The pro-slavery side in antebellum America wasn’t arguing that blacks were not “persons”, but that they were inferior persons–that they were somehow innately “child-like” and in need of (allegedly benevolent) white guidance in order to provide them with food, shelter, and clothing; to provide them with jobs doing useful labor; and of course to “Christianize” the “savage” Africans.
Thus, the Declaration of the Causes which Impel the State of Texas to Secede from the Federal Union calls blacks “an inferior and dependent race”, essentially designated by God to be servants of whites. From that same source, it was asserted that slavery was a “beneficent and patriarchal system” and even that it was “mutually beneficial to both bond and free”. Similarly, Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens did not say that blacks weren’t people, but he did say that “the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery – subordination to the superior race – is his natural and normal condition” and, again, the claim is made that the enslavement of blacks by whites provides for a “harmonious working for the benefit and advantage of both”.