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American Abolitionism and Slave-Breeding Discourse: A Re-evaluation

2011; Frank Cass & Co.; Volume: 33; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/0144039x.2011.622119

1743-9523

Gregory D. Smithers,

Colonialism, slavery, and trade

Abstract Slave-breeding is a topic that has long divided American historians. Since the late nineteenth century, historians have sought out empirical evidence to prove or disprove the idea that some slave owners deliberately bred slaves for sale or to augment their own labour force. As a result, the historiographical treatment of slave-breeding has become bogged down in what Herbert Gutman called 'the numbers game'. This essay re-examines the question of slave-breeding and challenges us to consider the broader historical meaning of such sensational accusations. It does this by focusing on the rhetoric of black and white abolitionists in the United States between 1830 and 1861. The author argues that slave-breeding discourse provided abolitionists with a narrative focal point with which to attract public attention to their concerns about the westward extension of slavery, the physical and emotional toll slavery wrought on enslaved women, and the trauma associated with the break-up of slave families. Acknowledgements For their thoughtful comments on earlier versions of this essay, the author thanks Brian Behnken, Trevor Burnard, Rebecca Fraser, Alan Gallay, Kwasi Konadu, Brooke Newman, Peter Onuf and the anonymous readers for Slavery & Abolition. Notes Charles R. Wilson, Baptized in Blood: The Religion of the Lost Cause, 1865–1920 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1980); David Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002); Bruce Baker, What Reconstruction Meant: Historical Memory in the American South (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2007); Julie Roy Jeffrey, Abolitionists Remember: Antislavery Autobiographies and the Unfinished Work of Emancipation (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008). Legal scholar Pamela Bridgewater has bravely addressed slave-breeding in American history. Professional historians remain relatively silent on – and, from personal professional experience, dismissive of – this topic. Pamela Bridgewater, Breeding a Nation: Reproductive Slavery, the Thirteenth Amendment, and the Pursuit of Freedom (Boston: South End Press, 2010). Ronald G. Walters, 'The Erotic South: Civilization and Sexuality in American Abolitionism', American Quarterly 25, no. 2 (1973): 177–201; Chris Dixon, Perfecting the Family: Antislavery Marriages in Nineteenth-Century America (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1997); Christopher Morris, Becoming Southern: The Evolution of a Way of Life, Warren County and Vicksburg, Mississippi, 1770–1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995). Major historical works that address abolitionism include: Arthur Zilversmit, The First Emancipation: The Abolition of Slavery in the North (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967); Merton Dillon, The Abolitionists: The Growth of a Dissenting Minority (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1974); David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1975); Jean Soderlund, Quakers and Slavery: A Divided Spirit (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985); and Richard S. Newman, The Transformation of American Abolitionism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002). For studies of the politics, philosophies and protest tactics of American abolitionism after the 1830s, see Richard Blackett, Building an Antislavery Wall: Black Americans in the Atlantic Abolitionist Movement, 1830–1860 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1983); Aileen Kraditor, Means and Ends in American Abolitionism: Garrison and His Critics on Strategy and Tactics, 1834–1850 (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1989); Robert Abzug, Cosmos Crumbling: American Reform and the Religious Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994); Lewis Perry, Radical Abolitionism: Anarchy and the Government of God in Antislavery Thought (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1995); Paul Goodman, Of One Blood: Abolitionism and the Origins of Racial Equality (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); and Stanley Harrold, The Abolitionists and the South (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1999). James Taylor Carson, 'State Rights and Indian Removal in Mississippi, 1817–1835', Journal of Mississippi History 57 (1995): 25–42; Mary Hershberger, 'Mobilizing Women, Anticipating Abolitionism: The Struggle against Indian Removal in the 1830s', Journal of American History 86, no. 1 (1999): 15–40; Alisse Portnoy, Their Right to Speak: Women's Activism in the Indian and Slave Debates (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005); Tiya Miles, '"Circular Reasoning": Recentering Cherokee Women in Antiremoval Campaigns', American Quarterly 61, no. 2 (2009): 221–243. John D'Emilio and Estelle B. Freedman, Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), xviii–xix; Gail Hawks, Sex and Pleasure in Western Culture (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2004), 110–112. See Ronald G. Walters, ed., introduction to Primers of Prudery: Sexual Advice to Victorian America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), i. Leslie M. Harris, 'From Abolitionist Amalgamators to "Rulers of the Five Points": The Discourse of Interracial Sex and Reform in Antebellum New York City', in Sex, Love, Race: Crossing Boundaries in North American History, ed. Martha Hodes (New York: New York University Press, 1999), 191–212; Philippa Levine, Prostitution, Race and Politics: Policing Venereal Disease in the British Empire (New York: Routledge, 2003), 181–189; Marie Jenkins Schwartz, Birthing a Slave: Motherhood and Medicine in the Antebellum South (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006); Gregory D. Smithers, 'The "Pursuits of the Civilized Man": Race and the Meaning of Civilization in the United States and Australia, 1790s–1850s', Journal of World History 20, no. 2 (2009): 245–272. Michael Tadman, Speculators and Slaves: Masters, Traders, and Slaves in the Old South (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996); Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul: Life inside the Antebellum Slave Market (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001); Steven Deyle, Carry Me Back: The Domestic Slave Trade in American Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006). Tadman, Speculators and Slaves, 122. Shirley J. Yee, Black Women Abolitionists: A Study in Activism, 1828–1860 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1992); Julie Jeffrey, The Great Silent Army of Abolitionism: Ordinary Women in the Antislavery Movement (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998); Michael D. Pierson, Free Hearts and Free Homes: Gender and American Antislavery Politics (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003); Alisse Portnoy, Their Right to Speak: Women's Activism in the Indian and Slave Debates (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005); Beth A. Salerno, Sister Societies: Women's Antislavery Organizations in Antebellum America (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2005). Recent studies of British abolitionism suggest that anxiety about slave-breeding existed in abolitionist discourse as early as the late eighteenth century. See Marcus Wood, Slavery, Empathy, and Pornography (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003); Adam Hochschild, Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire's Slaves (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2005), 323. Walters, 'Erotic South'; Edward E. Baptist, '"Cuffy", "Fancy Maids", and "One-Eyed Men": Rape, Commodification, and the Domestic Trade in the United States', American Historical Review 106, no. 5 (2001): 1619–1650; Michael D. Pierson, '"Slavery Cannot Be Covered up with Broadcloth or a Bandanna": The Evolution of White Abolitionist Attacks on the Patriarchal Institution', Journal of the Early Republic 25, no. 3 (2005): 383–415; Christine Levecq, Slavery and Sentiment: The Politics of Feeling in Black Atlantic Antislavery Writing, 1770–1850 (Hanover: University Press of New England, 2008). Michael A. Morrison, Slavery and the American West: The Eclipse of Manifest Destiny and the Coming of the Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 88; Lorri Glover, Southern Sons: Becoming Men in the New Nation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007), 88, 182; James Henry Hammond, William Gilmore Simms, Thomas Roderick Dew and William Harper, The Pro-Slavery Argument; as Maintained by the Most Distinguished Writers of the Southern States, Containing the Several Essays, on the Subject of Chancellor Harper, Governor Hammond, Dr. Simms, and Professor Dew (Charleston: Walker, Richards, 1852), 237. Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War (1975; New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 60, passim; Morrison, Slavery and the American West, 45; Robin L. Einhorn, American Taxation, American Slavery (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 62, 246. Einhorn, American Taxation, 201. Seymour Drescher, The Mighty Experiment: Free Labor versus Slavery in British Emancipation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 152. Monthly Review, July 1839, 313. See also George Bourne, Slavery Illustrated in Its Effects upon Woman and Domestic Society (Boston: Isaac Knapp, 1837), 37–38, 65; George Barrell Cheever, God against Slavery: And the Freedom and Duty of the Pulpit to Rebuke It, as a Sin against God (New York: Joseph H. Ladd, 1857), 225. Eugene D. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York: Vintage Books, 1976), 3–4; Tadman, Speculators and Slaves, 179; Mia Bay, The White Image in the Black Mind: African-American Ideas about White People, 1830–1925 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 135–136; Lacy K. Ford, Deliver Us from Evil: The Slavery Question in the Old South (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 7–8. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll, 4, 178, 338–340, 402; Ford, Deliver Us from Evil, 497. Plantation Manual 1857–1858, James Henry Hammond Papers, Container 35, Reel 18, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC, LC-MS-24695-1. See also Drew Gilpin Faust, James Henry Hammond and the Old South: A Design for Mastery (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982), 88–91; Robert Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman, Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery (Boston: Little, Brown, 1974), 84–85. Monthly Review, July 1839, 312. Theodore Parker, An Address Delivered by the Rev. Theodore Parker before the New York City Anti-Slavery Society (New York: American Anti-Slavery Society, 1854), 43. See, similarly, R.L.C., 'Our Concern with American Slavery', Christian Reformer; or Unitarian Magazine and Review new ser. 9, no. 105 (1853): 556; Alexander Marjoribanks, Travels in South and North America, 5th ed. (London: Simpkin, Marshall, 1854), 363; and Westminster Review, July 1855, 97. Christian Spectator, July 1863, 392. Dew, quoted in Hammond et al., Pro-Slavery Argument, 359. Theodore Dwight Weld, American Slavery as It Is: Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses (New York: American Anti-Slavery Society, 1839), 182; Bourne, Slavery Illustrated, 9, 14; Theodore Dwight Weld, Slavery and the International Slave Trade in the United States of North America (London: T. Ward, 1841), 13–14. Elizabeth Margaret Chandler, quoted posthumously in Liberty (New York: Anti-Slavery Society, 1839), 52. Weld, American Slavery, 182; William A. Link, Roots of Secession: Slavery and Politics in Antebellum Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), 155. See, similarly, Christopher Phillips, Missouri's Confederate: Claiborne Fox Jackson and the Creation of Southern Identity in the Border West (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2000), 151–152; Hubert H. Wubben, Civil War Iowa and the Copperhead Movement (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1980), 7–8; Morrison, Slavery and the American West, 33, passim; Laird Bergad, The Comparative Histories of Slavery in Brazil, Cuba, and the United States (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 263; and John C. Hammond, Slavery, Freedom, and Expansion in the Early American West (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2007). Morrison, Slavery and the American West, 113. William E. Channing, A Letter to the Honorable Henry Clay, on the Annexation of Texas to the United States (Boston: James Munroe, 1837), 36. Ecclectic Review, July 1835, 114. Channing, Letter, 37. The Congressional Globe, vol. 12 (Washington, DC: Globe Office, 1843), 195. See also Joshua R. Giddings, Speeches in Congress (Boston: John P. Jewett, 1858), 474. Philip M. Parker, ed., Defects: Webster's Timeline History, 415 BC–1975 (San Diego: Icon, 2009), 86. Ezra Champion Seaman, Essays on the Progress of Nations, in Productive Industry, Civilization, Population, and Wealth (New York: Baker and Scribner, 1846), 215. Ibid., 425. See also Orville Dewey, Discourse on Slavery and the Annexation of Texas (New York: Charles E. Frances, 1844), 13–14. John Quincy Adams, Address of John Quincy Adams, to His Constituents of the Twelfth Congressional District, at Braintree, September 17th, 1842 (Boston: J.H. Eastburn, Printer, 1842), 16. See, similarly, Dorothy B. Porter, ed., Early Negro Writing, 1760–1837 (Boston: Beacon Press, 1971), 460; John W. Blassingame, ed., The Frederick Douglass Papers. Series One: Speeches, Debates, and Interviews, vol. 2, 1847–54 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982), 26; Charles J. Heglar, ed., The Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2001), 38, 189–190; Dixon, Perfecting the Family, 50; and Nancy F. Cott, Jeanne Boydston, Ann Braude, Lori Ginzberg and Molly Ladd-Taylor, eds., Root of Bitterness: Documents of the Social History of American Women (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1996), 253, 255, 260–261. David M. Potter, The Impending Crisis, 1848–1861 (New York: Harper and Row, 1976); Holman Hamilton, Prologue to Conflict: The Crisis and Compromise of 1850 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2005), xiv. For the 'new slave-breeding Guinea', see Richard Hildreth, Archy Moore, the White Slave; or, Memoirs of a Fugitive (New York: Miller, Orton and Mulligan, 1856), 351. See, similarly, Marshall Hall, The Two-Fold Slavery of the United States: With a Project of Self-Emancipation (London: Adam Scott, Charterhouse Square, 1854), 24–26; Marjoribanks, Travels, 320, 322; C.B. Boynton and T.B. Mason, Journey through Kansas: With Sketches of Nebraska (Cincinnati: Moore, Wilstach, Keys, 1855), 131; Frederick Law Olmstead, A Journey in the Seabord Slave States: With Remarks on Their Economy (New York: Dix and Edwards, 1856), 283; J. Mayland M'Carter, Border Methodism and Border Slavery: Being a Statement and a Review of the Philadelphia Annual Conference Concerning Slavery (Philadelphia: Collins, 1858), 8; Hinton Rowan Helper, The Impending Crisis of the South: How to Meet It (New York: A.B. Burdick, 1860), 54; and Henry Wilson, No Rights, No Duties: Or, Slaveholders, As Such, Have No Rights; Slaves, as Such, Owe No Duties (Boston: Printed for the Author, 1860), 5. Hall, Two-Fold Slavery, 27. See, similarly, James F.W. Johnston, 'Notes on North America', London Quarterly Magazine, July 1851, 48; Frances E. Brewster, Slavery and the Constitution: Both Sides of the Question (Philadelphia, 1850), 9; Gerrit Smith, The True Office of Civil Government: A Speech in the City of Troy (New York: S.W. Benedict, 1851), 6–8; Cheever, God against Slavery, 225; Caleb S. Henry, Plain Reasons for the Great Republican Movement: What We Want; Why We Want It; and What Will Come if We Fail, 2nd ed. (New York: Dix, Edwards, 1856), 17; and John Dixon Long, Pictures of Slavery in Church and State: Personal Reminiscences, Biographical Sketches, Etc., Etc. (Philadelphia: Published by the Author, 1857), 39–40. Hall, Two-Fold Slavery, 29. See also, 'Slavery', Dublin University Magazine, December 1856 [excerpt from Harriet Beecher Stowe, Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp (London: Sampson, Low, Son, & Co., 1856)], 684; Evangelical Christendom, 1 November 1862, 562; Long, Pictures of Slavery, 2; M'Carter, Border Methodism, 61; Hildreth, Archy Moore, 325; J.E. Cairnes, The Slave Power: Its Character, Career and Probable Designs (London: Macmillan, 1863), 127–128; Marjoribanks, Travels, 321–322; Charles Elliot, Sinfulness of American Slavery: Proved from Its Evil Sources, vol. 1 (Cincinnati: L. Swormstedt and J.H. Power, 1851), 330; Horace Mann, Slavery: Letters and Speeches (Boston: B.B. Mussey, 1851), 82; William Jay, Miscellaneous Writings on Slavery (Boston: John P. Jewitt, 1853), 129–130; Westminster Review 72 (July 1859): 151; and Philip Drake Revelations of a Slave Smuggler: Being the Autobiography of Capt. Richard Drake, an African Trader for Fifty Years – From 1807 to 1857 (New York: Robert M. Dewitt, 1860), 52. Philip S. Foner and Robert J. Branham, eds., Lift Every Voice: African American Oratory, 1787–1900 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1998), 322–323. See also Dixon, Perfecting the Family, 38–39, 42–43; Nancy F. Cott, Public Vows: A History of Marriage & the Nation (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002), 34; Bergad, Comparative Histories of Slavery, 105–107; and Benjamin Quarles, Black Abolitionists (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969), 122. Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom (New York: Miller, Orton, 1857), 411–412. See, similarly, Moses Grandy, Narrative of the Life of Moses Grandy, Formerly a Slave in the United States of America (Boston: Oliver Johnson, 1844), 35; Stuart Sprague, ed., His Promised Land: The Autobiography of John P. Parker, Former Slave and Conductor on the Underground Railroad (New York: Norton, 1996), 26. My thinking on this point has been informed by Thavolia Glymph's Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008). Catherine Clinton, The Plantation Mistress: Women's World in the Old South (New York: Pantheon Books, 1982); Deborah Gray White, Ar'n't I a Woman? Female Saves in the Plantation South (New York: Norton, 1985); Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women of the Old South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988); Glymph, House of Bondage, 5–6. Douglass, My Bondage, 48. Blassingame, Frederick Douglass Papers, 96. See also Douglass, My Bondage, 80; Grandy, Narrative, 36–37; and Josiah Henson, Father Henson's Story of His Own Life, with an Introduction by H.B. Stowe (Boston: John P. Jewitt, 1858), 15. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll, 453. Moses Roper, A Narrative of the Adventures and Escape of Moses Roper, from American Slavery (Philadelphia: Merrihew and Gun, 1838), 44. See, similarly, Grandy, Narrative, 36; Henry Highland Garnet, 'To the Slaves of the United States of America' [1843], in A Memorial Discourse; By Rev. Henry Highland Garnet, Delivered in the Hall of the House of Representatives, Washington City, D.C. on Sabbath, February 12, 1865. With an Introduction, by James McCune Smith, M.D. (Philadelphia: Joseph M. Wilson, 1865), 45. Jacqueline Jones, Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work, and the Family from Slavery to the Present (New York: Vintage Books, 1985), 38; Emily West, Chains of Love: Slave Couples in Antebellum South Carolina (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004), 34, 36; Schwartz, Birthing a Slave, 13; Fraser, Courtship and Love among the Enslaved in North Carolina (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2007). Harriet A. Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: Written by Herself, ed. L. Maria Child (Boston: Published for the Author, 1861), 79–80. For an analysis of Jacobs' life, see Jean Fagan Yellin, Harriet Jacobs: A Life. The Remarkable Adventures of the Woman Who Wrote Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (Cambridge, MA: Basic Civitas Books, 2004). Harriet A. Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: Written by Herself, ed. Jean Fagan Yellin (1861; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), 5. Ibid., 8. Ibid., 27 (see also 32, 39). Ibid., 49. See, similarly, Cott et al., Root of Bitterness, 258. Grandy, Narrative, 6, 16–17; Experience and Personal Narrative of Uncle Tom Jones, Who was Forty Years a Slave (Boston: Farewell & Co., 1858), 10, 14; Henson, Father Henson's Story, 13, 15, 30, 42; J.D. Green, Narrative of the Life of J.D. Green, A Runaway Slave (Huddersfield, UK: Henry Fielding, 1864), 20–21. Green, Narrative, 22. James Ford Rhodes, History of the United States from the Compromise of 1850, 4 vols. (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1892–1919). Ibid., 1: 27, 310. See also Hugh Dunn Fischer, The Gun and the Gospel: Early Kansas and Chaplain Fischer, 2nd ed. (New York: Medical Century Company, 1899), 11; Joseph W. Keifer, Slavery and Four Years of War: A Political History of Slavery in the United States, vol. 1 (New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1900), 40; and Emerson Fite, History of the United States (New York: Henry Holt, 1916), 299. W.E.B. Du Bois, The Suppression of the Slave-Trade to the United States of America, 1638–1870 (New York: Longman, Green, 1896), 154. See also W.E.B. Du Bois, 'The Study of the Negro Problem', Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences 11 (1898): 3. W.E.B. Du Bois, Darkwater: Voices from within the Veil (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Howe, 1920), 186. W.E.B. Du Bois, 'Race Relations in the United States', Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 140 (1928): 8. W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880 (1935; New York: Free Press, 1992), 45 (see also 3, 33, 90, 431). Carter G. Woodson, 'The Beginnings of the Miscegenation of the Whites and Blacks', Journal of Negro History 3, no. 4 (1918): 351; Carter G. Woodson, The Negro in our History, 2nd ed. (Washington, DC: Associated Publishers, 1922), 102; Carter G. Woodson and Charles H. Wesley, The Story of the Negro Retold (Washington, DC: Associate Publishers, 1935), 99; E. Franklin Frazier, The Negro Family in the United States (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1939), xi, 45–46. Editorial Comment, Mississippi Valley Historical Review 12, no. 4 (1926): 628–629. William Archibald Dunning, Essays on the Civil War and Reconstruction and Related Topics (New York: Macmillan, 1898), 204–207. Claude G. Bowers, The Tragic Era: The Revolution after Lincoln (Cambridge, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1929), 51. Ulrich Bonnell Phillips, American Negro Slavery: A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regimes (New York: D. Appleton, 1918), 222. Ibid., 306. Kenneth Stampp, The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South (New York: Knopf, 1956), 245. Stanley M. Elkins, Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959); Nathan I. Huggins, 'The Deforming Mirror of Truth: Slavery and the Master Narrative of American History', Radical History Review 49 (1991): 29. Fogel and Engerman, Time on the Cross, 78–79. See, similarly, Richard G. Lowe and Randolph B. Campbell, 'The Slave-Breeding Hypothesis: A Demographic Comment on the "Buying" and "Selling" States', Journal of Southern History 42, no. 3 (1976): 401–412; Eugene D. Genovese, The Political Economy of Slavery: Studies in the Economy and Society of the Slave South (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1989), 281; and Tadman, Speculators and Slaves, 124–125. John Boles, Black Southerners, 1619–1869 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1984), 69. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll; Herbert Gutman, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750–1925 (New York: Vintage Books, 1977); John W. Blassingame, The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979). Herbert Gutman and Richard Sutch, 'Victorians All! The Sexual Mores and Conduct of Slaves and Their Masters', in Reckoning with Slavery: A Critical Study in the Quantitative History of American Negro Slavery, ed. Paul A. David, Herbert G. Gutman, Richard Sutch, Peter Temin and Gavin Wright (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), 154. Gutman qualified his statements about the impact of slave-breeding on black family life in The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750–1925 (New York: Vintage Books, 1976), 148–150. For further analysis, see Alfred H. Conrad and John R. Meyer, 'The Economics of Slavery in the Ante Bellum South', Journal of Political Economy 66, no. 2 (1958): 95–130; Herbert G. Gutman, Slavery and the Numbers Game: A Critique of Time on the Cross (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1975); and Christopher Morris, 'The Articulation of Two Worlds: The Master–Slave Relationship Reconsidered', Journal of American History 85, no. 3 (1998): 993. Jennifer L. Morgan, Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 6. Sterling Stuckey, Slave Culture: Nationalist Theory and the Foundations of Black America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987); Ann P. Malone, Sweet Chariot: Slave Family and Household Structure in Nineteenth-Century Louisiana (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992); Brenda E. Stevenson, Life in Black and White: Family and Community in the Slave South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996); Wilma King, Stolen Childhood: Slave Youth in Nineteenth-Century America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997). Christopher Morris, Becoming Southern, 71; Christopher Morris, 'Articulation of Two Worlds', 993. Morris, Becoming Southern, 70–72. Bourne, Slavery Illustrated, 37. Vincent Harding, There is a River: The Black Struggle for Freedom in America (Orlando, FL: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1981); Quarles, Black Abolitionists, 47, 49, 118; William E. Gienapp, 'Abolitionism and the Nature of Antebellum Reform', in Courage and Conscience: Black and White Abolitionists in Boston, ed. Donald M. Jacobs (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 41. Celeste M. Condit & John L. Lucaites, Crafting Equality: Americas Anglo-African Word (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 72. Frederick Douglass, 'An Address to the Colored People of the United States' [29 September 1848], in Howard Brotz, ed., African-American Social and Political Thought, 1850–1920 (New York: Basic Books, 1966), 210. Additional informationNotes on contributorsGregory D. SmithersGregory D. Smithers is in the Department of History, Virginia Commonwealth University, PO Box 842001, Richmond, Virginia 23284-2001, USA.