That the rate of slave child mortality was high both absolutely and relative to the white rate no one disputes. But for historians bent on portraying slaveholders as “economic men” the phenomenon has precipitated much teeth-gnashing, for it confronts directly “the strange paradox” of economic men apparently not, for a change, in pursuit of their own best interests. Nor for that matter is the image of the benign, paternalistic master enhanced by the possibility that his plantation graveyard was dominated by plots containing little black bodies.

The planter did not know biology, nutrition, and disease, however, as he knew cotton, sugar, and rice. Doubtless he could have prevented some deaths by improving the physical environment of the slaves. Yet the thrust of this chapter is that much slave mortality stemmed from nutritional difficulties that the planter was not able to understand, let alone correct.

A case has been made that because of such difficulties as lactose intolerance, problems with vitamin D, and other genetic factors, a significant portion of the slave population was seriously deprived of calcium and iron. If true, then many slave children were in severe nutritional straits, in some instances even before birth. It is true that the fetus is parasitic for these minerals, meaning that even if the mother is deficient, it will do its best to satisfy its own needs by drawing on her stores.