Last night I started a new book for my bedtime reading. The Sublettes’ American Slave Coast will probably take me a couple of weeks to finish. I got through only 65 pages last night, stopping frequently to try to digest what I had just read. The scholarship and footnotes are nearly overwhelming. They knew that they would be attacked for their conclusions, so they made certain to have every comment footnoted to contemporary sources or to the Slave Narratives of the Federal Writers Project.

Below is my brief summary of part of those first few pages, dealing with slave breeding and the treating of slaves as another type of agricultural livestock. I can envision heads exploding in the South as the book is being read.

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A new book by Ned and Constance Sublette, The American Slave Coast: A History of the Slave-Breeding Industry (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 2016) provides a very detailed examination of a major American industry during the first half of the 19th century. In 754 pages, with 20 pages of footnotes and 33 pages of bibliography, they examine the breeding and sale of slaves from Virginia and Maryland to the new agricultural regions of the American South.

Monoculture agriculture had depleted the soils of the northern slave states, but once the importation of new slaves into the United States was prohibited in 1808, a second crop became viable. In addition to growing tobacco for sale, farmers could raise slaves for the market. Tens of thousands of slaves were sold south, the majority of them males between the ages of 12 and 30. More females were kept behind for breeding purposes. While there have long been rumors of plantations where the main (or only) crop was slaves, the Sublettes could find little evidence that such was widespread. They did find a few examples for their book: a farm with only two male slaves, but 22 women and 27 children; another with 28 men, 38 women, and 120 children being readied for sale (p.28).

They found, and list, a great many examples of the careful mating of prime slaves to produce the optimum offspring for manual labor. Large, strong males being paired with multiple females. That slaves were treated as a form of livestock, not much different from cattle or pigs was discussed using the testimony of a former slave who was interviewed by the Federal Writers Project during the Depression:

The formerly enslaved Cornelia Andrews, interviewed in North Carolina at the age of eighty-seven, recalled a castration policy for eugenic purposes: "Yo' knows dey ain't let no little runty nigger have no chilluns. Naw sir, dey ain't, dey operate on dem lak dey does de male hog so's dat dey can't have no little runty chilluns."*

* Federal Writers Project Slave Narratives, Library of Congress American Memory, North Carolina narratives, 11:1,31.

http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/snhtml

Mr. Sanchez, an old great grandfather - born in East L.A. who remembers the

Pachuco (police) Riots when his best friend was killed

for just walking on the side walk at the wrong time.

Mr. Sanchez says, "If he was Black in America, he would thank his lucky stars his

ancestors were taken to America. On the West Coast of Africa they would

have probably been killed off and never left their genetic mark on the 21st Century.".

That's what Mr. Sanchez says.

Moi

Recovered Liberal

If any Liberal can truly be termed, "recovered".

I've seen a couple of reviews of Ned and Constance Sublette's book and the reviews are more scathing on the way slaves were treated.

IMO what the fable of the Grand Southern Society and the pre-revolution gentlemanly and sophisticated plantations is a hoax. Worse than that, the southern idealization and rewriting of that period of history was simply meant to minimize slavery. The sad fact is that the South bred slaves and shipped them to other parts of the country and the world. Cotton, tobacco and other crops might have been the major exports and money makers in the South but the slave trade was there as an asset. That isn't a kind opinion but I think it is more truth than the history that the South wants to believe.

There is a great desire to in somewhat paint that era of slave trade in rosy terms -- as being beneficial to the Africans. I never believed that.

That's my venting.

I left out other parts of my beliefs because what is pertinent to the EA is that smaller and less sturdy slaves (muscular? healthy?) or in any way considered not a hard worker or not strong enough to produce more slaves, were most likely castrated so they could reproduce their own kind.

I had also once read that red hair (which is an international and inter-racial world wide phenomena) had also been bred out in order to distinguish between "whites" and "coloreds" so that you almost never see anyone with red hair in the States as compared to the Caribbean or Africa itself.