The American Slave Coast Quotes

“It is in no small part to Henry’s resistance that the Constitution owes the Second Amendment in particular—the one that promises “the right to keep and bear arms” in order to have “a wellregulated militia”—and it too was, in part, about slavery, because in the South, the militia was understood to be identical with the slave patrols that were constantly on guard.”
― Ned Sublette, The American Slave Coast: A History of the Slave-Breeding Industry

“That the War of Independence resulted in the strengthening, not the termination, of slavery was not an unexpected outcome for Southerners: protecting slavery had been the point of the war for them. It was the principal Southern political goal at every moment until slavery was destroyed.”
― Ned Sublette, The American Slave Coast: A History of the Slave-Breeding Industry

“Twenty-two-year-old Ona Judge, who was Martha Washington’s personal servant, escaped from the President and First Lady of the United States in Philadelphia in 1796 after learning she was to be given away as a wedding gift. She married a free black man in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and managed to avoid falling prey to the attempts at recapture that George Washington attempted against her until he died in 1799.”
― Ned Sublette, The American Slave Coast: A History of the Slave-Breeding Industry

“In particular, three slaveowning politicians loom large in our narrative as principal enablers of the territorial expansion of slavery and, consequently, of the slave-breeding industry: Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, and James K. Polk—a Virginian and two Tennesseans. All three were slaveholders, and like all slaveholders, their wealth was primarily stored in the form of captive human beings, so their entire financial base—personal, familial, social, and political—depended on”
― Ned Sublette, The American Slave Coast: A History of the Slave-Breeding Industry

“Much like a house mortgaged to a bank today, mortgaged slaves were security for those who put up the money for the mortgage, to whom the slaves were “conveyed.” A mortgage financier might be a merchant, a church with an investment portfolio, a college, a bank, or, commonly, a wealthy individual with a large slavehold. A slave put up for sale had to be warranted not only of “good character” (not criminal-minded or rebellious) but “free of all incumbrance” (not already mortgaged).14 Slaveowners had physical possession of, and legal title to, the enslaved, but to speak only of the slaveowners is to underestimate how broad was the stakeholding.”
― Ned Sublette, The American Slave Coast: A History of the Slave-Breeding Industry

“Nor did enslaved women have legal protection against sexual abuse from enslaved men. In the 1859 case of George v. the State of Mississippi, in which an enslaved man was accused of raping an enslaved female child, the Mississippi supreme court noted that “a slave can only commit rape upon a white woman” and held that “the regulations of law, as to the white race, on the subject of sexual intercourse, do not and cannot, for obvious reasons, apply to slaves; their intercourse is promiscuous, and the violation of a female slave by a male slave would be a mere assault and battery.”38 There was, then, legally no such thing as the rape of an enslaved woman.”
― Ned Sublette, The American Slave Coast: A History of the Slave-Breeding Industry

“Women with babies in hand were in a particularly cruel situation. Babies weren’t worth much money, and they slowed down coffles. William Wells Brown, hired out to a slave trader named Walker, recalled seeing a baby given away on the road: Soon after we left St. Charles, the young child grew very cross, and kept up a noise during the greater part of the day. Mr. Walker complained of its crying several times, and told the mother to stop the child’s d——d noise, or he would. The woman tried to keep the child from crying, but could not. We put”
― Ned Sublette, The American Slave Coast: A History of the Slave-Breeding Industry

“But revenue from slave labor was only part of the profitability of slavery. Selling slaves was part of the commerce at every little Southern junction. Most farmers who had slaves bought or sold them at one time or another. “In slavery, niggers and mules was white folk’s living,” recalled an unnamed formerly enslaved woman in Tennessee, who said that her former master “would sell his own children by slave women just like he would any others. Just since he was making money…. My mother sold for $1,000.”
― Ned Sublette, The American Slave Coast: A History of the Slave-Breeding Industry

“To own a slave was to have a license for libertine behavior, because sexual violation was intrinsic to slavery. The slaveowner had the full legal right to do with his property as he saw fit,”
― Ned Sublette, The American Slave Coast: A History of the Slave-Breeding Industry

“Slaves, whose legal status was comparable to that of livestock, were expected to provide a farm owner with marketable children.”
― Ned Sublette, The American Slave Coast: A History of the Slave-Breeding Industry

“Fannie Moore, interviewed in North Carolina in 1937, recalled that (as transcribed): “De ‘breed woman’ always bring mo’ money den de res’, [even the] men. When dey put her on de block dey put all her chillun aroun her to show folks how fas she can hab chillun.”12 Mary L. Swearingen of Bastrop, Louisiana, paraphrasing her enslaved grandmother, said, “Whenever a woman was an extraordinary breeder, she was mated by the master to his own accord.”
― Ned Sublette, The American Slave Coast: A History of the Slave-Breeding Industry

“For this reason, 1808 is also an essential date for understanding the making of African American culture. Kidnapped Africans had been arriving for almost two hundred years, repeatedly re-Africanizing American culture. No longer.”
― Ned Sublette, The American Slave Coast: A History of the Slave-Breeding Industry

“Perhaps 80 percent of enslaved children were born to two-parent families—though the mother and father might live on different plantations—but in extant slave-traders’ records of those sold, according to Michael Tadman’s analysis, “complete nuclear families were almost totally absent.” About a quarter of those trafficked southward were children between eight and fifteen, purchased away from their families. The majority of coffle prisoners were male: boys who would never again see their mothers, men who would never again see wives and children. But there were women and girls in the coffles, too—exposed, as were enslaved women everywhere, to the possibility of sexual violation from their captors. The only age bracket in which females outnumbered males in the trade was twelve to fifteen, when they were as able as the boys to do field labor, and could also bear children.”
― Ned Sublette, The American Slave Coast: A History of the Slave-Breeding Industry

“Beginning with maternal, fetal, and infant malnutrition, it’s hardly surprising that the enslaved were more susceptible than free people to most infirmities, including crib death, infant mortality of all kinds (including infanticide), death in childbirth, and injuries and deterioration to the mother from repeated childbirth, along with typhoid, cholera, smallpox, tetanus, worms, pellagra, scurvy, beriberi, kwashiorkor, rickets, diphtheria, pneumonia, tuberculosis, dental-related ailments, dysentery, bloody flux, and other bowel complaints. The health conditions of the enslaved were aggravated by overwork, accidents, and work-related illnesses such as “green tobacco sickness,” today known as nicotine poisoning, which plagued tobacco workers.22 The heavy work regimes they endured wore down their bodies and aged them prematurely, with childbirth-related fatalities limiting women’s life spans even more than the men’s.”
― Ned Sublette, The American Slave Coast: A History of the Slave-Breeding Industry

“That constitutionally stipulated deadline of January 1, 1808, is, from our perspective, one of the most important dates in American history, signaling as it does the transformation of the United States slavery industry. For this reason, 1808 is also an essential date for understanding the making of African American culture. Kidnapped Africans had been arriving for almost two hundred years, repeatedly re-Africanizing American culture. No longer. The child was separated from the ancestors.”
― Ned Sublette, The American Slave Coast: A History of the Slave-Breeding Industry

“Maria had died in childbirth-related complications sixteen years before, in 1804, as her mother Martha (or Patty) Wayles Jefferson had died from childbirth before her, and as her grandmother had died after giving birth to her mother.”
― Ned Sublette, The American Slave Coast: A History of the Slave-Breeding Industry

“The next five decades would each show a growth of the enslaved population of never less than 24 percent—”
― Ned Sublette, The American Slave Coast: A History of the Slave-Breeding Industry

“With Notes of the State of Virginia, Jefferson definitively established himself as a founding theorist of white supremacy in America, laying out in condensed form key points of racialized thought that pro-slavery writers would consistently reaffirm and that would echo in the cant of modern day white supremacists.”
― Ned Sublette, The American Slave Coast: A History of the Slave-Breeding Industry

“FROM THE BEGINNING OF newspapers in America, the forced-servitude business was a steady part of their revenue stream.”
― Ned Sublette, The American Slave Coast: A History of the Slave-Breeding Industry

“mojo (moyo, a Kikongo word meaning something like “soul force”).”
― Ned Sublette, The American Slave Coast: A History of the Slave-Breeding Industry

“When we speak of “branding” today, we should remember that it was at one time literal: with a hot iron pressed against human flesh.”
― Ned Sublette, The American Slave Coast: A History of the Slave-Breeding Industry

“When a “founding father’s” remarks about “liberty” don’t seem to make sense, substitute the word “property” and they do.”
― Ned Sublette, The American Slave Coast: A History of the Slave-Breeding Industry

“According to the detailed US census of 1860, which enumerated slaves and slaveholders in its “Agriculture” supplement, the 347,525 owners of one or more slaves constituted only 4.3 percent of the 8,039,000 “whites” in the fifteen slaveholding states (eleven of which would shortly secede) and 2.86 percent of the population of those states as a whole.”
― Ned Sublette, The American Slave Coast: A History of the Slave-Breeding Industry

“That now-archaic word “likely,” ubiquitous in slave sale advertisements, had a cluster of converging meanings: vigorous, strong, capable, good-looking, attractive, promising—in other words, likely to reproduce”
― Ned Sublette, The American Slave Coast: A History of the Slave-Breeding Industry

“Following the precedent set by the Europeans, who referred to the coastal regions of Africa by their exports—the Ivory Coast, the Gold Coast, the Slave Coast—some writers have referred to the Chesapeake region as the Tobacco Coast. But it would also be appropriate to call it the American Slave Coast.”
― Ned Sublette, The American Slave Coast: A History of the Slave-Breeding Industry

“Slave-raiding, which was typically conducted by Africans, was notoriously wasteful of life, since only the young were taken and often the rest were killed. If one died for every one taken captive in slave raids—a speculative and possibly conservative number—that would mean the transatlantic slave trade killed or enslaved some twenty-five million Africans.”
― Ned Sublette, The American Slave Coast: A History of the Slave-Breeding Industry

“The South’s 1860 population of 3,953,742 enslaved people comprised or made viable an estimated four billion dollars’ worth of private property...
...Four billion dollars was more than double the $1.92 billion value of farmland in the eleven states that seceded.* Without labor Southern land lost what value it had, but even with labor Southern land in 1860 still was worth much less than land in the free states”
― Ned Sublette, The American Slave Coast: A History of the Slave-Breeding Industry

“Perhaps one-half of 1 percent of the population of the slaveholding states owned a hundred slaves or more, and a few owned a thousand or more. It has been suggested that the 1860 census numbers might have underreported large slaveowners, but it’s unlikely that large slaveholders—again, almost the entire political class of the South—amounted to even 1 percent of the population of their states.”
― Ned Sublette, The American Slave Coast: A History of the Slave-Breeding Industry

“The idea that the South fought a war so that it could be left in peace to have slavery merely within its settled boundaries is sometimes voiced as a cherished myth today, but it does not fit the facts on the ground, nor did anyone think so at the time. Quite the contrary: the war was fought over the expansion of slavery. Southern rulers feared being restricted to the boundaries they then occupied. The dysfunctional-from-the-beginning Confederate States of America was set to have an aggressively annexationist foreign policy.”
― Ned Sublette, The American Slave Coast: A History of the Slave-Breeding Industry