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

“Unite, and you shall form one of the most splendid empires on which the sun ever shone, of the most homogeneous population, all of the same blood and lineage.28”
― Ned Sublette, The American Slave Coast: A History of the Slave-Breeding Industry

“Saint-Domingue, where some fifty thousand French soldiers had perished.”
― Ned Sublette, The American Slave Coast: A History of the Slave-Breeding Industry

“Dessalines gave an order that he is remembered for: koupe tèt, boule kay—cut off heads, burn houses.”
― Ned Sublette, The American Slave Coast: A History of the Slave-Breeding Industry

“Such a disaster must have tended directly to injure the interest of Mr. Jefferson, and to promote the slender possibility of a second election of Mr. Adams. I do not, for my part, believe that any white person whatever was concerned in the business. But if the country contains one man capable of conceiving such a project, it corresponds, in preference to the character of any other person, with that of Alexander Hamilton, the theoretical incendiary of Pittsburg,* and the grand Patriarch of American calamities.”
― Ned Sublette, The American Slave Coast: A History of the Slave-Breeding Industry

“Gabriel attempted no defense at his trial but requested that his execution be postponed so that he could be hanged together with the others who would also be convicted. The request was granted, and Gabriel was hanged on October 10 together with George Smith, Gilbert, Tom, William, and Sam Graham.34 By October 24, twenty-six people had been executed.35”
― Ned Sublette, The American Slave Coast: A History of the Slave-Breeding Industry

“The pro-British Federalists began what has been remembered as “black cockade fever,” wearing long trailing black ribbons from the back of their hats. As Republicans countered with red—or red, white, and blue—ribbons, Philadelphia divided into two color-coded camps.”
― Ned Sublette, The American Slave Coast: A History of the Slave-Breeding Industry

“No Person held to Service or Labour in one State, under the Laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in Consequence of any Law or Regulation therein, be discharged from such Service or Labour, but shall be delivered up on Claim of the Party to whom such Service or Labour may be due.”
― Ned Sublette, The American Slave Coast: A History of the Slave-Breeding Industry

“The three-fifths clause did not mean, as some have complained, that the enslaved were considered only three-fifths human. Politically, the enslaved were zero-fifths human. The three-fifths clause was a politically acceptable accounting gimmick for figuring out how much to rig the national vote on behalf of slaveholders, and it distorted political realities in the United States for as long as slavery lasted.”
― Ned Sublette, The American Slave Coast: A History of the Slave-Breeding Industry

“The paradox of liberty versus slavery at the nation’s birth is no paradox at all. Liberty was the right to property. Slaves were property. Liberty for slaveowners meant slavery for slaves.”
― Ned Sublette, The American Slave Coast: A History of the Slave-Breeding Industry

“Called by various names in different territories of Africa and the New World, a portable spirit bundle—though not containing ancestors’ remains as in the motherland—was known in the southern United States as a mojo (moyo, a Kikongo word meaning something like “soul force”).”
― Ned Sublette, The American Slave Coast: A History of the Slave-Breeding Industry

“To further bedevil the Carolinians, a free black garrison town, called Gracia Real de Santa Teresa de Mose, was established in 1738 about two miles north of San Agustín, providing a first line of defense for the Spanish.* Its governor was Francisco Menéndez, the leader of Florida’s black militia. A Mandinga who was born a Muslim, Menéndez had been kidnapped to Barbados as a boy and then taken to South Carolina. He defected to the Yamasee Indians at the time of the Yamasee War in 1715 and ultimately escaped to Florida, where he accepted Catholicism and was baptized with his Spanish name.11 There was a price on his head in South Carolina, but no matter: he was fighting for the Spanish, and he had weapons.”
― Ned Sublette, The American Slave Coast: A History of the Slave-Breeding Industry

“the feeble Spanish king Carlos II. The last Hapsburg king of Spain, he was believed to be bewitched but was actually the product of generations of royal inbreeding; his decisions, presumably including this one, were largely made by his regent mother, the Austrian queen Mariana.”
― Ned Sublette, The American Slave Coast: A History of the Slave-Breeding Industry

“Henrietta Maria’s retinue was smaller than the Bourbons were accustomed to in France, but it was large enough that her household staff included a “keeper of the parrots” and two dwarves, Jeffrey and Sarah, both of whom had servants.2”
― Ned Sublette, The American Slave Coast: A History of the Slave-Breeding Industry

“Dr. Samuel A. Cartwright described at a professional conference a medical condition he had discovered called drapetomania, in a paper reprinted in DeBow’s Review in 1851. Drapetomania’s victims were “Negroes,” and its chief symptom was an irresistible urge to run away. When milder therapy failed, Dr. Cartwright prescribed “whipping the devil out of them.” He also described another purported disease, dysæsthesia æthiopica, or “hebetude of mind,” whose symptom was commonly described by overseers as “rascality,” and which was “much more prevalent among free negroes living in clusters by themselves, than among slaves on our plantations, and attacks only such slaves as live like free negroes in regard to diet, drinks, exercise, etc.”26”
― Ned Sublette, The American Slave Coast: A History of the Slave-Breeding Industry

“The great rice plantations of the Lowcountry could never have been built and staffed with free labor. No one would have done that work voluntarily. Attacked by clouds of stinging insects in rattlesnake-ridden swamps, the rice slaves built dams, dug miles of ditches, burned the ground cover in spectacular nocturnal conflagrations, pulverized the earth, spent their days standing barefoot and waist-high in foul-smelling stagnant water, hoed endless rows of rice, regulated how much of the heavier salt water versus how much of the lighter fresh water to allow into the sluice gates they had designed and built, chased away the thick flocks of migrating bobolinks that could devastate a crop, winnowed the rice in baskets they had woven according to African practice, pounded the husks off with African-style tall pestles in mortars, and cut and hauled wood to build the barrels with, while also raising or catching much of the food they ate.”
― Ned Sublette, The American Slave Coast: A History of the Slave-Breeding Industry