Mothering Enslaved Children

All over the Americas, male slave owners fathered children with enslaved women who were their property. They also fathered children with bondswomen with whom they had informal unions or with enslaved women owned by other individuals.

In some cases, enslaved mothers may have considered engaging in sexual relations with their owners and giving birth to their enslaved children as a possible path to emancipation. For example, despite its small numbers, in the British colony of Jamaica, some slave owners used their wills to manumit the offspring they produced with bondswomen, opening the path of social mobility to these freed children.⁹ Similarly in Latin America, where Catholicism shaped slavery systems, it was not uncommon for slave owners to use their wills to free the children they had fathered with enslaved women. Take the example of the slave ship captain Jacinto Gomes, who owned the enslaved woman Antonia, with whom he also cohabitated. Together the couple had two male children, Domingos and Manoel. In his will of 1752, Gomes declared that he had already freed Antonia and his two sons. Although born into slavery, because these two men and their mother were emancipated by their white owner and father, they ended up having access to considerable social mobility in eighteenth-century Bahia.¹⁰

The nineteenth century offers other similar examples. Consider the case of Luzia Jeje, an enslaved woman likely transported from the Bight of Benin to Brazil, who was sold into slavery in Salvador, Bahia, during the second half of the eighteenth century.

Likewise, Pedro Corrêa e Castro, known as Baron of Tinguá, was a rich owner of coffee plantations and enslaved people in Vassouras, a town in the Paraíba Valley in today’s state of Rio de Janeiro. Corrêa e Castro remained a bachelor all his life, but he had six children with his African-born enslaved woman Laura Congo. Corrêa e Castro freed upon baptism his first four enslaved daughters, but like many Brazilian slave owners, Corrêa e Castro failed to publicly recognize the girls as his offspring while he was alive. Still in 1849, he freed Laura Congo as well, therefore her younger daughter and son were born when she was already a freedwoman. In 1865, when Corrêa e Castro wrote his will, four of his daughters were adult and married. In his will, opened after his death, he freed twenty-six of his enslaved people, donated money to his bondspeople, recognized being the father of Laura’s six children, made them his heirs, and bequeathed to Laura and her children a significant amount of money and several enslaved persons.¹³ Although Laura was never legally married to her owner, eventually her children not only were recognized but also inherited property. In Córdoba (in present-day Argentina) and other parts of Latin America, men of European descent as well as Black men who married enslaved women owned by other people sought to purchase the freedom of their children, who had inherited their mother’s slave legal status. Some enslaved women even sought to pay for their offspring’s manumission before their birth.¹⁴

Mothering enslaved children may have been less difficult when bondswomen were engaged in more stable unions with free and enslaved men, and when they performed less strenuous tasks in domestic environments of urban areas.

Although it remains hard to determine whether these visual images portray enslaved, freed, or free women, they show us women street vendors transporting food on the tops of their heads, while also transporting their babies in slings. Regardless of the environment, bondswomen had very few hours of rest and sleep. In eighteenth-century urban Brazil, some enslaved women were left with no other choice than anonymously abandoning their babies to charity institutions, which also rented the services of enslaved wet nurses to breastfeed abandoned children.¹⁵ Giving away a newborn allowed these women to get rid of the burden of motherhood under slavery. It was also a possible path to freeing a child whose legal status was often unknown to the religious institutions that received the abandoned babies.¹⁶

Motherhood was even more challenging where women labored in the fields of large plantations. Take the example of Jamaica. Enslaved women performed field labor while carrying their babies in a sling for several hours under the hot sun in humid weather. When these little ones began to walk, they accompanied their mothers to the field, therefore dividing their attention between childcare and the daily, often heavy tasks of the fields. Starting in the second half of the eighteenth century, plantation managers assigned older enslaved women whose poor health made them less suitable to work in the fields as child caregivers. This innovation not only increased the productivity of enslaved mothers but also introduced the older children to the field work they would perform in the future.¹⁷ Because the abolitionist movement denounced the negative impact of field work on enslaved women’s fertility, some planters started exempting enslaved mothers of six or more children from laboring in the fields in the early nineteenth century.¹⁸ But these were not humanitarian gestures. During a new era when planters had to increasingly rely on bondswomen to produce new slaves, these initiatives were rather intended to preserve the lives of future enslaved children.¹⁹ Indeed, on some plantations, slave owners even provided financial and material rewards to pregnant enslaved women.²⁰