List 6 Startling Things About Sex Farms During Slavery That You May Not Know

[sheshe2]

The fertility of enslaved women was examined by owners to make sure they were able to birth as many children as possible. Secretly, slaveowners would impregnate enslaved women and when the child was born and grew to an age where he could work on the fields, they would take the “very same children (of their) own blood and make slaves out of them,” as pointed out in the National Humanities Center Resource Toolbox on Slaveholders’ Sexual Abuse of Slaves.

snip



When enslaved males turned 15 years old–and younger in some cases–they had their first inspection. Boys who were under-developed, had their testicles castrated and sent to the market or used on the farm. Each enslaved male was expected to get 12 females pregnant a year. The men were used for breeding for five years. One enslaved man name Burt produced more than 200 offspring, according to the Slave Narratives.

snip



If the enslaved woman was considered “pretty,” she would be bought by the plantation owner and given special treatment in the house, but often subjected to horrifying cruelty by the master’s wife, including the beheading of a child because he was the product of an enslaved-master affair.

Read More: https://atlantablackstar.com/2014/11/26/6-startling-things-about-sex-farms-during-slavery-that-you-may-not-know/7/

........................................

Our history.

[guillaumeb]

1. Recommended.

Literally treated like cattle.

[sheshe2]

6. I just want to weep for them.

For what we did to them. Still do.

[guillaumeb]

12. Prisons replaced the plantations.

And for-profit prisons exploit prison labor.

Interesting parallel.

[sheshe2]

14. Yep.

Slavery By Another Name. Douglas Blackmon.

Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II, by Douglas A. Blackmon (Doubleday)

The 2009 Pulitzer Prize Winner in General Nonfiction

https://www.pulitzer.org/winners/douglas-blackmon

[First Speaker]

2. We, as a nation, still haven't come to terms with slavery yet...

[Tree-Hugger]

3. ......

Oh my fucking god.

[chowder66]

4. I've learned snippets here and there about some of the abuses but not like this.

This should be taught in every school everywhere, repeatedly, forever.

[sharedvalues]

5. Ugggggggggggggh. Horrifying.

All Americans owe African Americans a great debt.
And the Americans who would today make it harder for minorities to vote are doing great harm to minorities.

[smirkymonkey]

7. Horrifying. There is still so much we don't know and can never repair.

The truth needs to be exposed. Thank you for posting sheshe2.

[democratisphere]

8. Our country has a horrific dark past.

What a disgrace to humanity.

[MLAA]

9. Thank you for posting.

I have learned much this Black History Month. Some of which is very inspiring and some heartbreaking (inadequate description, but words escape me or maybe don’t exist to express the unthinkable treatment in this article).

[csziggy]

10. I was once contacted by someone on Ancestry who was linked to me through DNA

Apparently one of my distant ancestors owned her ancestor and must have had a child by that woman. I would have liked to have kept in touch with the person who contacted me to discuss the history but once she found out I was related to the white master she never contacted me again. I figured my family had done enough harm to hers and never pressed the point.

[LakeArenal]

11. It's important to note: Today, Republicans still View woman like this..

They May coach it in bs but it is there.

[EffieBlack]

13. Thank you for posting this, SheShe - it's important for people to know this history

[sheshe2]

15. I read the book, Effie.

It did not end until WWII and in fact has never ended.

This is a book that should be read by all.

Love ya, Effie.

[EllenJ]

16. My great-great grandmother was the daughter of her master

He raped and fathered numerous children with several of his slaves. His wife was a midwife who delivered all of the children on the plantation. Whenever a slave’s baby was too light-skinned, she smothered it, knowing her husband was the father. She only stopped after he found out and warned her that he would kill her if she murdered any more of his babies.

After that, the light-skin babies survived, but she made them work in her house where she could keep an eye on them and abuse them at will.

True story.

Slavery didn’t only subjugate African people. It also turned the masters into animals.

[femmedem]

28. Welcome to DU and thank you for sharing your family history.

I'm glad your ancestors passed their history down.

[EllenJ]

39. Thank you!

I’ve been a member for awhile, but rarely post anything.

[grantcart]

17. Kick

[c-rational]

18. Horrifying indeed. This needs to be known.

[DirtEdonE]

19. I argued with some right wing slavery defenders

quite a while ago who claimed that less than 10 percent of slaves brought to the "new world" were brought to North America. And they were absolutely right.

They were trying to minimize the impact of U.S. slavery but they failed to realize that in the U.S., unlike all other countries in the new world where slavery was practiced, slave owners here concentrated on birthing new slaves which led to the U.S to have the largest slave population in the new world by far even though only a small percentage of total human beings stolen from their homes were brought to our shores.

Slavery is our national disgrace and we've never addressed it in these nearly 500 years other than to excuse it and defend it. Slavery existed almost since man existed but U.S. chattel slavery was the most cruel form of slavery ever known to mankind. It existed long after the Emancipation Proclamation supposedly freed the slaves.

Historical Context: Facts about the Slave Trade and Slavery

"Well over 90 percent of enslaved Africans were imported into the Caribbean and South America. Only about 6 percent of African captives were sent directly to British North America. Yet by 1825, the US had a quarter of blacks in the New World."

...

"Slavery in the US was distinctive in the near balance of the sexes and the ability of the slave population to increase its numbers by natural reproduction. Unlike any other slave society, the US had a high and sustained natural increase in the slave population for a more than a century and a half."

...

"The domestic slave trade in the US distributed the African American population throughout the South in a migration that greatly surpassed in volume the Atlantic Slave Trade to North America.

Though Congress outlawed the African slave trade in 1808, domestic slave trade flourished, and the slave population in the US nearly tripled over the next 50 years.

The domestic trade continued into the 1860s and displaced approximately 1.2 million men, women, and children, the vast majority of whom were born in America."

https://www.gilderlehrman.org/content/historical-context-facts-about-slave-trade-and-slavery

The Untold History of Post-Civil War 'Neoslavery'

March 25, 200810:00 AM ET
Heard on Talk of the Nation

Slavery By Another Name

"In Slavery by Another Name, Douglas Blackmon of the Wall Street Journal argues that slavery did not end in the United States with the Emancipation Proclamation in 1862. He writes that it continued for another 80 years, in what he calls an "Age of Neoslavery."

"The slavery that survived long past emancipation was an offense permitted by the nation," Blackmon writes, "perpetrated across an enormous region over many years and involving thousands of extraordinary characters."

https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=89051115

[burrowowl]

21. Thanks for info! K&R

[DirtEdonE]

23. You're very welcome!

[Pepsidog]

20. Shocking. More shocking that this is the first tine I have heard of this.

[EffieBlack]

24. Many white people are unaware this history while most black people know it all too well

Which is one of the reasons we get so frustrated when people make glib false equivalencies (like claiming that government workers not being paid on time is tantamount to slavery, etc.) or dismiss slavery as too far in the past to be relevant today.

I'm glad that SheShe is sharing this - it's never too late to learn.

[Pepsidog]

26. Thank you. I agree

[HipChick]

22. Men were raped too..

It was used to try and break them

[Roadside Attraction]

25. Slaves were Virginia's most important crop

http://edu.lva.virginia.gov/online_classroom/union_or_secession/unit/2/slavery_in_virginia

Rapid expansion of cotton planting in the lower South generated its own great demand for slaves, and Richmond emerged as a center of the massive interstate slave trade. By the 1850s, that trade may have been the largest commercial business in the state. Traders annually sent eight to ten thousand Virginia men, women, and children to slave markets in other states. It is likely that sales of slaves brought more money into Virginia than any other exports.

I've read -- can't put my fingers on the source just now -- that by 1840, slaves were the most valuable "crop" exported from Virginia, almost entirely to the "cotton South" -- Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana.

[sheshe2]

29. This.

Slaves were Virginia's most important crop

This.

They were nothing more than a crop. Planted. Picked. Sold.

[Wounded Bear]

38. In 1809, importation of slaves from Africa was made illegal...

How does anyone think they got new slaves after that?

Breeding was inevitable. When you treat human being like a draft farm animal, it's what you end up doing. There was a lot of money in the trading of slaves domestically.

Very sad and ugly side of slavery in America.

[EllenJ]

41. Much of the wealth in white families today was built on this trade.

And not just descendants of slave-owning families.

For example, a big foundation of a lot of the wealth of northern families was based on insuring slaves and other financial investments in the slave trade.

[Roadside Attraction]

27. One of the best-kept secrets in the South . . .

I'm a Mississippi native, great-great-grandson of slave owners. One of the best-kept secrets in the South -- but something that is known by most Southerners -- is the presence of "shadow families" -- mixed-race children, fathered by white men with slaves, usually plantation owners or their sons, cousins, etc., fathering children with slave women.

William Faulkner's great-grandfather, William Cuthbert Falkner (1825 - 1889; the "Old Colonel" of several Faulkner stories) was a slave-owner who had a "shadow family" of mixed-race children born to one of the Old Colonel's female slaves. Several Faulkner biographers tell of the Old Colonel's black mistress, Emeline Lacy Falkner, whose grave is in the Ripley, MS, cemetery, not far from the Faulkner family plot. She had at least one -- possibly two -- daughters by the Old Colonel Falkner. The first, Fannie Forrest Falkner Dogan, was named after the Old Colonel's favorite sister and a Confederate general. The Old Colonel paid for her education at Rust College, a prestigious black Mississippi school where she was class valedictorian.

In my own family, my grandfather's cousin's brother-in-law and his common-law black wife had 11 children. The children carried their mother's name until the early 1950's when they all had their names changed to their father's name . . . much to the chagrin of their white cousins.

During the Civil Rights Era, one of the black students to seek admission to a major Southern state university was blood kin to a white member of the university's Board -- who fought against the black student's admission.

[EllenJ]

40. One of my great grandmothers bore 6 children with her owner and he referred to them in letters as

his “black family” and in his will as “my mulatto woman Minny and her six children,” leaving them substantial property and their freedom.

Our family always partly romanticized this situation as some kind of forbidden love story and many of my ancestors proudly bore his name. But then I read through his papers (he was a wealthy and prominent figure, so his documents are preserved as part of the state’s historical records) and saw that on his 1820 property tax inventory, underneath an accounting of each of his horses, chickens, cows and pigs, he listed all of the people he owned, including “Minny-Mulatto.”

This was no love story. It was bondage, trafficking, rape and abuse.

Btw, although he willed substantial property to Minny and her children, his white children saw to it that they got nothing and even tried to re-enslave them after they were freed upon his death. Fortunately, shortly before he died, he moved his “black family” to another state, so they were able to avoid being recaptured. I at least give him credit for that.

[Empowerer]

43. Thanks for sharing this story

Welcome to DU!

[CatMor]

30. So horrific ...

it is so hard to believe such evil existed, yet it did. To think the Delaration of Independence was written while this was going on, something about all men are created equal.
Makes you wonder how they lived with themselves.

[dalton99a]

31. A must read.

[Apollyonus]

32. I can just weep reading this ....

it is so unconscionable to be unbelievable .... but knowing that it is true shatters one's heart.

I have had the same depressing feelings inside reading about Nazi concentration camps ....

[misanthrope]

33. This entire thread

makes me wish there was a way to "recommend" or "like" individual posts within threads.

[Niagara]

34. Thank you, Sheshe! K&R

Some of this information I already knew. Some of the information I had no idea about, although it doesn't surprise me.

It was distressing and difficult to watch the t.v show "Underground"; I felt that they should have renewed it instead of canceling it. If I remember correctly, they left off with the introduction of Harriet Tubman.

If anyone ever gets a chance to read the book or watch the miniseries "The Book of Negros" I would recommend them both. Again, both are distressing and difficult to read and watch.

[JCMach1]

35. Pretty tame stuff in the article... If you never have,

Go back and read some of the primary source slave narratives...

[CousinIT]

36. And just where do you think modern attitudes against abortion & contraception came from?

Well...behold the hand of present patriarchy which hearkens back to the breeding of slaves - an era to which they would like to return all women to. An era where no woman chooses whether to become pregnant or when or how or by whom. An era where no woman has any choice about if, when or how or why to end a pregnancy. No. That's all up to the white men to decide. Today, they would have white women bred as much as possible whereas dark skinned children (such as those currently ripped away from their parents and placed into Trump concentration camps) would be aborted, made into child laborers or sold into the sex trade. The Jeffery Epsteins and Donald Trumps of the world know all about that. The woman gets no say. Slave breeding is what they want. They wanted it then. They want it now. It's all tied together, folks. Every bit of it.

It's not abortion that is so immoral. Or giving women control over their own bodies and lives. But slavery - is the bigger overshadowing immorality behind all of this. It was then. It is now. And this should be pointed out at every turn. To every patriarchal ass and their supporters who advocate for the enslavement of America's women. It should be tied back to its origins: slave breeding where white men and ONLY white men choose a woman's bodily and life fate, never the woman herself.

Just saying...Realize where the attitudes of today's anti-abortionists and anti-contraception zealots originated from and that this is an era they desperately want to return to - slavery: for ALL of America's girls and women.

https://www.thenation.com/article/reproductive-rights-and-long-hand-slave-breeding/

Breeding a Nation: Reproductive Slavery and the Pursuit of Freedom, presents the most compelling conceptual and constitutional frame I know for considering women’s bodily integrity and defending it from the right.

In brief, her argument rolls out like this. The broad culture tells a standard story of the struggle for reproductive rights, beginning with the flapper, climaxing with the pill, Griswold v. Connecticut and an assumption of privacy rights under the Fourteenth Amendment and concluding with Roe v. Wade. The same culture tells a traditional story of black emancipation, beginning with the Middle Passage, climaxing with Dred Scott, Harpers Ferry and Civil War and concluding with the Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. Both stories have a postscript—a battle royal between liberation and reaction—but, as Bridgewater asserts, “Taken together, these stories have no comprehensive meaning. They tell no collective tale. They create no expectation of sexual freedom and no protection against, or remedy for, reproductive slavery. They exist in separate spheres; that is a mistake.” What unites them but what both leave out, except incidentally, is the experience of black women. Most significantly, they leave out “the lost chapter of slave breeding.”

[MineralMan]

37. The complete reality of slavery in this country is something

that has not been fully exposed, still. It's an ugly, depraved story that needs telling.