Economic Shifts in American Slavery (1808)

• Enslaved women were taken to market as mothers, both real and potential
• The law sanctioned valuing individuals prior to conception , impacting market values
• The 1662 Virginia legislation, Partus Sequitur Ventrem, said slavery was based on the status of the mother.

Adeline’s Story

• Adeline was auctioned with her son
• The auctioneer emphasized her youth and childbearing potential as valuable assets
• Despite being praised as a housekeeper and seamstress, she was at the mercy of the bidders

Robert's Mother

• Robert (enslaved) recalled that his mother was sold three times before he was born
• After being separated from Robert, she had violent outbursts, leading to her return to her previous owner, reunited with her children, signifying the importance of familial bonds and the impact of forced separation

Value of Children

• Tempe Herndon noted enslaved women were valued based on the number of children they had
• The more enslaved children a woman had, the more valuable she was considered
• Josephine Howell explained her grandmother was prized as a cook and a "breeding woman

Commodification

• Enslaved women and children were treated as commodities that meant they suffered dehumanizing practices
• They were compared to livestock, and their reproductive capabilities were exploited

Assessing Monetary Value

• The last four decades of the 18th century set the tone for assessing enslaved women's monetary values, and they were affected by their age, skill, and reproductive status
• Some enslavers rejected childbearing women, while others preferred them, reflecting economic interests and personal preferences
• Buyers put a price tag on unborn children, determining the fiscal value of enslaved people at preconception based a mother's uterus

KG Hall example

• K.G. Hall advertised a "Young Negro Woman" for sale, noting the labor skills but highlighting her status as a "breeding wench
• The ability to procreate led to her sale

Value Expansion

• Reproductive values were crucial to slavery expansion, particularly after the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade in 1808
• This shifted the focus to coerced reproduction of enslaved women in America.

Women's Role

• Women played an important role, as the shift to import more enslaved women assured enslavers that they could produce additional labor sources on their farms and plantations
• Women became catalysts of nineteenth-century economic development.

Philips's Argument

• U.B. Phillips argued that a fertile woman commanded no higher price than a barren one
• He also argued the prospective increment of children was offset by the loss of the woman's service during pregnancy and suckling and by the possible loss of either mother or infant during childbirth

Factors That Influence Values

• Female values were dependent on factors like ethnicity, location, age, and time period
• Women across the South had higher financial values than younger girls and older women, with childbearing age range between fifteen and thirty-five

Tamar’s story

• Tamar was an enslaved woman from Camden County, North Carolina
• She was sold because her owner thought she was giving birth too often
• She fled an auction but was forced to leave behind her eighteen-month-old child, an incident which showed the difficult decisions enslaved mothers faced
• She had three more children in hiding with her husband, but was eventually discovered and resold several times, illustrating the complexities and trauma of enslaved women's lives and the patterns of trafficking of the enslaved

Mother's role

• Tamar's nine pregnancies and the separations from most of her children explained the meaning of "home" and "marriage" under slavery
• Women ran away to seek partners who had been traded, suggesting the importance of marital bonds and the desire for intimacy

Classifications

• Three classifications of women were described in in the antebellum period -"breeders", "fancies", and "skilled laborers"
• Childbearing women had higher monetary values than men.

Women's roles

• Five types of female workers were identified by enslavers: house servants, field hands, cooks, laundresses, and seamstresses, and their wage varied.
• Newspaper ads specified women's skills and health conditions, a significant factor that influenced their role and value as salves.

Manson Case

• Two women in South Carolina were advertised by John Manson
• The secondary woman, only nineteen years old was labelled as attentive "Breeding Wench

Family Separation

• Family separation became increasingly common by the late antebellum era, and some enslaved women blamed forced breeding
• Women were sold for the purposes of forced reproduction

Northern States

• Enslaved women in the northern colonies as well as in the North were also advertised for sale because of breeding
• An ad from Pennsylvania sought to trade a 23-year-old enslaved named an enslaved woman who was skilled in "country or town work" for “another wench”

Some women dreaded children

• When asked if "she could turn out a child a year," an enslaved women replied, "No masa, I never have any more, and I sorry I got these
• These should not be read as a rejection of motherhood, but rather an assertion of her own (unfree) will

Antislavery Literature

• Frances Ellen Watkins Harper and John Collins both published poems of the time entitled “The Slave Mother
• One verse described the anguish that resulted from a mother experiencing anguish over her children
• The image of a child being torn from his mother's arms is reminiscent of the auction experience of Adeline and her ten-week-old son.

Health factors

• Health influenced some buyers' decisions, where people lived in fear of widespread epidemics and wanted a healthy workforce

Isaac Gifffin story

• Isaac Griffin witnessed the sale of a "yellow girl with child" on a flatboat on the Mississippi River
• To be sold without her children she had to claim she had not children, where her six week old infant was given to a white woman

Brian Cape story

• Brain Cape, a slave trader, placed a "family of field Negroes" up for sale, so Cape’s calculations permitted a family being split apart.

Dinah's'Story

• The case of Dinah from Prince George's County, Maryland, filled the pages of a lengthy trial determining the ownership rights over her and her offspring

Moses Grandy story

• Moses Grandy, the narra- tor of one published account, shared the story of his and Tamar's mother
• Their "mother gave birth to eight children and did all she could to avoid separation and sale.

###James Redpath witnessed

• The witnessing by Northern abolitionists the large auctions where those enslaved were appalled by "the babies in the arms of their poor distressed mothers!"
• The remembrance of a read poem recalled, “of another North Carolina slave-mother's reply, THE SLAVE-MOTHER’S REPLY”
• Separations and sales had an enduring and devastating impact of children being taken away from their mother.
• American-born women experienced sales and auctions through internal trade, while African women arrived in the colonies as part of the international trade
• Planters and traders assessed enslaved individual monetary values of those enslaved.