Slave breeding is the focus of this history of the United States from colonial times to the Civil War. The expansion of cotton cultivation and the closing of the international slave trade increased the demand for slaves in the Southwest and increased slave prices throughout the South. According to Ned and Constance Sublette, the authors of The American Slave Coast, slaveholders in the Chesapeake responded to these higher prices by breeding and selling slaves to traders for southern markets. “[P]rohibiting the African slave trade protected the market so that a new class of American traders could come forward, supplied with homegrown captives born into slavery on Virginia and Maryland farms. The conditions were right for a massive forced migration of enslaved Chesapeake laborers down South, and it did not have to be a one-time drain: a continuing domestic slave-breeding industry was now possible” (p. 362).
Despite its 700+ page length, The American Slave Coast does not include a comprehensive review of the literature on slave breeding. Many of the authors who deny or minimize the economic importance of slave breeding are not discussed in the text. For example, the Sublettes do not discuss Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman's Time on the Cross (Little, Brown & Co., 1974). Nor, for that matter, do they discuss the works of Winthrop Collins or L. C. Gray. The slave-breeding industry is a controversial subject and many scholars have questioned its existence. Consider U. B. Phillips, American Negro Slavery (D. Appleton and Co., 1918), p. 361: “It has been said by various anti-slavery spokesmen that many slaveowners systematically bred slaves for the market. They have adduced no shred of supporting evidence however.” A lack of supporting evidence led scholars to conclude that slaveholders rarely bred slaves for sale. Because The American Slave Coast omits their research, the Sublettes provide an incomplete literature review of slave breeding.
There is no consensus as to what constitutes slave breeding. The Sublettes define the slave-breeding industry as the complex of businesses and individuals “who profited from the enslavement of African American children at birth” (p. xiii). This is not a useful definition. Presumably all slaveholders profited from the enslavement of African American children at birth (otherwise they would have manumitted them). Indeed, using their definition, all slaveholders could be classified as slave breeders. Most scholars define slave breeding as the use of barnyard techniques normally associated with animal husbandry. The choice of definitions is important. When Phillips writes that there is “no shred of supporting evidence” of slave breeding, he implicitly adopts the more widely accepted definition. Kenneth Stampp The Peculiar Institution (Vintage, 1956), p. 245 agrees that “evidence of systematic slave breeding is scarce … But if the term is not used with unreasonable literalness, if it means more than owner-coerced matings, numerous shreds of evidence exist which indicate that slaves were reared with an eye to their marketability—that the domestic slave trade was not ‘purely casual.’ ” The choice of definition affects the amount of evidence of slave breeding.
No one knows how many slaveholders bred slaves for the market. Abolitionists accused slaveholders of breeding slaves for sale and slaveholders vehemently denied it. Contemporary tourists in the South wrote about slave breeding but none actually observe it. Stampp suggests that slaveholders did not record such practices because of its reprehensible nature. Of course, the lack of documentation may also indicate that relatively few slaveholders bred slaves for sale. Regardless, the paucity of documented cases makes it difficult to substantiate the authors’ claims. Consider, for example, their statement that “the southern economy depended on the functioning of a slave breeding industry” (p. 3). Because the number of slave breeders is unknown, one can only speculate about the state of the southern economy in the absence of such an industry.
A final comment concerns the authors' assertions that slaves were used as a type of money (pp. xiii, 42, 292, 640). These statements are simply wrong. Slaves served as a store of value but not as a medium of exchange or as a unit of account. Buyers and sellers commodified slaves via slave markets and commodities have sometimes served as substitutes for money. Slaves, however, were not commodity money. Slaves were heterogeneous and expensive and slave sales involved significant transaction costs. Slaves were not a suitable “commodity” for use as money.
The Sublettes have written a lengthy history of the United States premised on the existence of a slave-breeding industry. Although their use of the word “industry” suggests that many slaveholders bred slaves for the market, they cannot substantiate this claim. The authors have raised an important and troubling aspect of our nation's history but without additional information or analysis, questions regarding the existence of a slave-breeding industry remain unanswered.
