“Among North American slaves, births greatly exceeded deaths, so that the slave population expanded rapidly…Indeed, the North American pattern was probably, with a few local and sometimes short-term exceptions, unique in the history of slavery.” As historian C. Vann Woodward wrote: “So far as history reveals, no other slave society, whether of antiquity or modern times, has so much as sustained, much less greatly multiplied, its slave population by relying on natural increase.”
