Contested Bodies. Sasha Turner
on the constitutional rights of North American colonists made abolitionists cautious of arousing the disapproval of government ministers who wished to avoid a similar debacle. Although unsuccessful, gradualism with the promise of increased returns seemed best to avoid conflicts and opposition from Parliament, colonial governments, and planters. Ramsay also derived prestige because previously he resided in the West Indies as a vicar, doctor, and slave owner. His rendering of the “facts” he witnessed firsthand in a pamphlet, An Enquiry into the Effects of Putting a Stop to the African Slave Trade (1784), and book, An Essay on the Treatment and Conversion of African Slaves in the British Colonies (1784), received mass support. Subsidizing their reprinting and distribution, the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade, formed in 1787, distributed these writings across Britain.5
Wilberforce also garnered national attention because his position as member of Parliament uniquely placed him to present petitions and legislation to Parliament. His sheer persistence enhanced his notoriety. In 1790 alone, for instance, Wilberforce submitted at least eight bills to Parliament. Moreover, Wilberforce adjusted his arguments for abolition along the lines of what he thought would gain support from detractors in the government. Rejection by parliamentarians who believed it their duty to defend “traditional imperial interest” forced him, for example, to expand his arguments beyond moral and religious reasons. By 1806, Wilberforce appealed to previously rejected arguments that colonial slavery was a backward, inefficient system.6 He suggested prohibiting the slave trade as a necessary first step to persuade West Indian stakeholders to initiate reforms that would enhance reproduction among enslaved women. As Wilberforce argued, reproducing laborers locally would best allow colonial authorities to nurture the desired habits of the subject population.
Abolitionists aligned abolition and colonial reform with the reproductive capacities of female slaves in several ways. However, the most fundamental link they made was through shutting down the slave trade. From an abolitionist perspective, the slave trade encouraged various habits of cruelty, which once removed would secure new generations of laborers. James Ramsay firmly believed that as long as the slave market remained open slaveholders would continue to depend on it as they viewed it as a more expedient measure to maintain productivity. “From their eagerness to push on the cultures of the estates,” he wrote, they would continue to make their demands for the trade. Under such circumstances, the “question concerning the buying or breeding of slaves” would always yield a preference for buying.7
From his experience as a West Indian resident, Ramsay witnessed how brutally plantation managers and overseers treated enslaved women during pregnancy. Planters believed that pregnancies and young children undermined labor productivity. They therefore did little to alleviate the conditions of pregnant women and mothers, or to ensure the survival of enslaved youths. Moreover, Ramsay explained, plantation managers aimed to secure maximum and immediate profits, and generally, they were unconcerned about the future or morality of the colonies. Unless the slave trade ended and the estate owners and agents developed a sense that their long-term interests relied on women reproducing, Ramsay insisted, no improvement could be guaranteed, and more importantly, their dependence on enslaving Africans would only deepen.8
In order to capitalize on enslaved women’s reproductive potential as a resource for producing potentially free people, abolitionists thought it necessary to ban the slave trade. A slave trade embargo would awaken the inborn, mothering instinct “naturally” found in females. The various stages of the slave trade, from capture in Africa and captivity on the coast to transportation and subsequent sale in the Americas, disrupted communities and separated captives from their families. As buyers and sellers traded Africans like cattle, Wilberforce protested before Parliament, “husbands [were] torn from their wives, wives from their husbands, and parents from their children.”9 Despite captive women’s efforts to retain family ties, traders remained unmoved by scenes of heartbreak as they quickly summoned whips and chains to break apart mothers clinging to their children and wives cleaving to their husbands. Abolitionist and statistical analyst Thomas Cooper, who calculated the mortality of the slave trade as roughly one fifth of the world’s population, stressed, “If these instances of separation should happen, if relations, when they find themselves about to be parted, cling together, if filial, conjugal, or parental affection should detain them a moment longer in each other’s arms, than their second receivers should think fit, the lash instantly severed them.”10 Thus, Cooper concluded, although “Negresses have the maternal character as strongly impressed on them as any [English] woman” the tyrannical experiences they endured extinguished their mothering desires. They became “callous to every natural feeling,” and preferred to “destroy their fruit” than allow it to live.11 Ultimately, captive African women failed and refused to reproduce because of the traumatic experiences and memories of their capture and sale.
While these arguments accurately portrayed the disruption of families caused by the slave trade and possible reasons women had for restricting their fertility, they presumed a “natural” desire among women to become mothers. Reformers failed to consider the possibility that enslaved women rejected motherhood not only because of slavery but simply because they had no wish to become mothers. Enslaved women’s desire to bear children seemed irrelevant to activists like Wilberforce, who argued that “Negroes were … by nature peculiarly prolific,” and closing the portal of Africa would restore their reproductive ability.12 The difficulties planters encountered with enslaved women, as subsequent chapters show, reflect an ideological conflict between enslaved women and male planters and abolitionists. Male reformers naturalized motherhood, while women understood motherhood as a matter of choice. Both despite and because of the impoverished conditions of bondage, enslaved women persisted in choosing for themselves.
The positive comparisons Cooper made between “Negresses” and English women reflect the representational conflicts between abolitionists and proslavery supporters. Abolitionists distanced themselves from proslavery literature that, in defense of slavery, assigned a natural, inferior status to Africans. From the formation of Atlantic world slave societies in the seventeenth century, Europeans distinguished African-descended people as inferior and used biological markers, including skin color, facial features, and hair texture, to mark Africans as uncivilized and naturally suitable for slavery.13 Abolitionists aimed to prove that captive Africans lacked civilization and diverged from so-called higher moral standards because of slavery and the slave trade, and not biology.14 Claiming the possibility of colonial reform as a likely consequence of biological reproduction hinged on abolitionists proving that the conditions of slavery caused certain undesirable qualities in the “Negress.” Activists had to prove that captive Africans would not reproduce negative traits generationally because their brutishness was environmentally induced. Tensions emerged between pro-slavery and antislavery activists because the former aimed to prove that people of African descent were inherently inferior, incapable of reform, and ultimately unsuitable for freedom and subject-citizenship.
Abolitionists solidified the links between reproduction, abolition, and reform by highlighting the particular ways in which the material conditions of slavery undermined the reproductive potential of women. Abuse, overwork, inadequate diets, and neglect combined to depress women’s fertility. “How can population be favoured where there is a want of food, clothes, and every convenience necessary for its encouragement? Can they rear [children] for him, who demands bricks without straw, that they may be oppressed at his caprice?” Ramsay asked. Masters ignored the proper gendered division of labor by forcing enslaved women to work the same tasks as men, even while pregnant. Writing from personal experience in the colonies, Ramsay recalled that expectant mothers continued in their exhausting labor routines as long as their strengths prevailed, which was usually until their pregnancies terminated by miscarriage or birth, often prematurely.15
While granting expectant mothers time off from work promised to soften some of the harsher elements of slavery, it conflicted with beliefs planters held that the plantations could only remain productive through coercion and strict labor discipline. Relaxed labor routines, antiabolitionists argued, made slaves idle and insubordinate. These conflicting beliefs were at the heart of the struggles between the slaving interests and abolitionists. Even after abolitionists secured a parliamentary ban on slave trading in 1807, they pushed for additional