Contested Bodies. Sasha Turner

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СКАЧАТЬ proposal seems even more arbitrary when one considers emergent ideas in late eighteenth-century Britain that encouraged breastfeeding for at least twelve months. British medical opinion had begun to shift away from supporting wet nursing and toward encouraging mothers nursing their own children because doctors deemed it better for infant growth and development.³⁰ Reformers also advocated lactation because, in the words of one medical writer, it stimulated “maternal affection” and it gave the child “a greater sense of security and confidence about the world and increases its attachment to its mother.” The burgeoning British obstetrics community not only urged mothers to nurse their children but also sanctioned their doing so for at least the full first year of their babies’ lives. Ramsay’s proposal for enslaved mothers was half the time advised for British women.³¹ Briefer lactation periods expedited enslaved women’s return to the sugarcane fields. In this regard, Ramsay’s pronatal plan not only offered masters a way to balance their productive goals with reproductive ones, it also reaffirmed the authority masters claimed over slave women’s bodies and maternal customs. Under the plan, male abolitionists and planters would determine the length of breastfeeding, not the mothers themselves. Such affirmation of mastery conflicted with the autonomy women carved out for themselves in the preabolitionist years when masters neglected childbirth and childrearing.

      But beyond creating a way for enslavers to balance the dual labor demands they placed on enslaved women, there was another, more fundamental effect of Ramsay’s not simply borrowing lactation recommendations for British mothers and applying them to enslaved mothers. His policies inscribed differences between black and white women. The reproductive ability of both sets of women were appropriated in service of the British nation, which needed people to work, sail ships, and defend the empire. English women were not just reproducers, they also were mothers, whose civic duty it was to bear children and raise them to become good, loyal citizens. Conversely, enslaved women were vessels that bore future workers, viewed with only a dim possibility of sharing the same political rights and privileges as whites. As adults corrupted by slavery, captive Africans were not fit to prepare their children for freedom. Ramsay therefore advocated two sets of reforms. One focused on improving the material conditions of slavery that would facilitate and encourage conception and reduce maternal and infant mortality. The second set of reforms centered on preparing children for freedom. Enslaved mothers were to have only a limited role in preparing their children to become free people.

      Ramsay believed that moral institutions like the church best secured the social conditioning of young people. In his 1784 essay that the Abolition Society reprinted and distributed widely, he argued, “Religion brings conscience in to the aid of social regulations, and fits the man for acting his part in his proper station.” Ramsay believed that soon after weaning, enslaved children should learn Christian teachings that emphasized humility and long suffering. “Begin by drawing their attention particularly to the sufferings and crucifixion of our savior,” he wrote. “When this is found to have an impression on their minds, and filled their hearts of grateful sentiments, make them connect with repentance and a good life, submission to their masters and full obedience to their commands, even to working on the plantations when so ordered.” They should learn these lessons when “their minds are tender” before the “impositions of slavery corrupted them.”³²

      Ramsay’s writings reflected the principle of the “conditioned child,” which stressed creating desirable habits in young people for them to become “natural in them” in their adult life. A child was like a “blank slate” upon which adults could write the social actor they desired.³³ With the new generation of enslaved people, Ramsay proposed abandoning the system of punishment upon which slavery had been built, and replacing it with Christianity. Christian-based obedience, gratitude, and morality would prove more “powerful incentives to the mind [that would] incline them to the right.”³⁴ Successful emancipation depended on indoctrinating enslaved children from their infancy in the “knowledge of their duty” as obedient, moral subjects.³⁵

      Because of the centrality of retaining the purity of enslaved children’s minds, Ramsay did not expect enslaved mothers to socialize their children. British missionaries would have such responsibilities.³⁶ Recalling the challenges one minister faced in proselytizing grown-ups, Ramsay doubted whether enslaved adults could be rescripted sufficiently into new ways of thinking and being in order to train children properly. Imported adults, he insisted, generally resisted change and sulked when persuaded to abandon their old prejudices. Enslaved parents could not be trusted to discard fully their old habits. Ramsay firmly believed that adults were products of their childhood, and as such, enslaved mothers who had converted in their adult years were constantly at risk for relapsing into the habits of their youth. It is for this reason he advocated that enslaved mothers play limited roles in caring for and socializing young people. Early weaning reflected such limitations. As Ramsay promoted lead roles for missionaries in raising enslaved children, parents stood to lose what little rights and liberties they fought to preserve in socializing their sons and daughters before the 1780s era of pronatalist abolitionism.³⁷ For the few children born during slavery, mothers competed with masters for influence and control over them. Ramsay’s proposal magnified the already fraught relationships between enslaver and enslaved over the control and raising of enslaved children.

      Amelioration and the Future of Slavery

      Despite the contrasting views Ramsay and Wilberforce held on the roles enslaved mothers should play in raising their children, they agreed that successful emancipation was contingent upon women’s ability to reproduce and the acculturation of enslaved children to British values. Ramsay and Wilberforce were not the first to appropriate women’s reproductive ability in the service of abolition and reform, however. They echoed the writings of other imperial policymakers, especially those of Maurice Morgan, a colonial bureaucrat who, in 1772, had anticipated the end of the slave trade and designed a plan for how the British government could safely liberate the enslaved. Promoting biological reproduction and the resocialization of enslaved children and establishing a date for an embargo on slave trading were the hallmarks of Morgan’s plan. It would be impracticable to “liberate the present race of slaves,” Morgan argued, not because they were “incapable of receiving freedom [but because] their ignorance and their habits effectually forbids it.” He therefore proposed that the British government allow the slave trade to continue for fifteen years (he offered no precise date) during which time plantation owners would buy “a certain number of male and female children annually.” These new young recruits, he explained, would be sent to Britain, where they would attend English “Charity schools” until they turned age fourteen. At the end of their formal education (Morgan was never clear on what the curriculum should include) trainees would receive further practical instruction in the areas of gardening, agriculture, and manufacture.³⁸

      Having received the requisite schooling, colonial protégés should be married at the age of sixteen and then sent to an experimental settlement, which Morgan proposed would be a “district near Pensacola,” a new British settlement in west Florida. Early marriage, he asserted, was important in order to capitalize on black female fecundity. “The black women are mothers at fourteen, and often sooner,” Morgan wrote, and “they continue to breed till six and twenty.” By this calculation, he estimated that these specially trained youths would increase the number of settlers, quickly peopling the “deserts of Florida with freemen.” The British government should grant them land and the same support as had been given to migrants in the seventeenth-century founding of the North American and West Indian colonies. Morgan intended his scheme for the new west Florida settlement, but he urged, “this plan will admit of being greatly varied.” Pensacola could serve as a positive example that people of African descent were capable of improvement and could successfully plant the colonies as free workers.³⁹

      Morgan proposed a slight alternative to his Pensacola plan for the West Indies. He suggested a period of ten years instead of fifteen for the importation of children, who should be no older than six years old. Like the children for Pensacola, those purchased for the West Indies would attend school in СКАЧАТЬ