Contested Bodies. Sasha Turner

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СКАЧАТЬ young enslaved women linked abolitionist goals for ending slavery and promoting reform and the civilization of blacks.

      Despite revised strategies, the second generation of abolitionists did not avoid entanglements. The ideological struggles between activists, government officials, the slaving interests, and the enslaved were many and varied. Activists, like William Wilberforce and James Ramsay, conflicted with one another because they had different ideas about how to control women’s reproductive labor. Collectively, reformers clashed with the imperial government, which was concerned about financially ruining the colonies or interfering with rights of governance. Abolitionist visions further contradicted the beliefs of the proslavery vanguard. Slave owners rejected the notion that as an inferior people, Africans and their descendants could ever be fit for freedom or could share the rights and privileges of Englishmen. Plantation owners and agents were also not confident that black people could be productive without the coercion of slavery. Finally, the bodily and moral reforms abolitionist had in mind for enslaved women and their children reflected British cultural values. Such ideals were at odds with what people of African descent living in the West Indies practiced and envisioned for their lives once they obtained freedom. The contests over abolition and reform hinged on competing ideas about how to control reproductive labor and who benefited from women’s reproductive potential.

      The Biological Reproduction Argument for Abolition

      Several abolitionists emphasized how slavery and the slave trade undermined the reproductive potential of captive women, and how best to harness it as a resource for colonial improvement and a path to freedom. By offering proposals for gradual reform, spearheaded by slave owners rather than Parliament, James Ramsay and William Wilberforce gained significant influence as abolitionists. The still fresh wounds of Parliament’s infringement 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 СКАЧАТЬ