When the United States Congress voted to abolish the transatlantic slave trade in 1808, many hoped it would signal a decline in the horrors of slavery. But instead of ending human bondage, this legal milestone gave rise to one of the most wicked adaptations of slavery on American soil: slave breeding, a practice that commodified Black women’s fertility and turned the human womb into a marketplace.
For centuries, the Atlantic slave trade had enabled American planters to purchase enslaved Africans from Europe and West Africa. But with growing abolitionist sentiment in Britain and the U.S., the trade was banned in 1807 (effective in 1808), making it illegal to import enslaved Africans into the U.S.
But slavery itself was not abolished, plantations, especially in the Deep South, still required massive labor forces to produce cash crops like cotton, sugar, and tobacco. Deprived of fresh supplies from Africa, slaveholders in the Upper South, particularly in Virginia, Maryland, and North Carolina, found a new way to profit: they began breeding enslaved Africans for sale.
With the external trade closed, an internal trade system emerged in full force. Between 1810 and 1865 (the year slavery was abolished), over one million enslaved Africans were forcibly relocated from the Upper South to the Deep South in what historians now call the Second Middle Passage. But unlike the original Middle Passage across the Atlantic, this migration was made up of American-born Black people, many of them the children of forced breeding programs.
Even pregnancies and childbirth were manipulated to suit economic schedules. Some slaveholders practiced what scholars have termed “breeding season”, strategic timing of sexual exploitation to produce babies in cycles.
One of the most tragic figures to emerge from the era of slave breeding was Luke Blackshear, an enslaved African who was forced by his American master to father 56 children. While most slave breeding accounts focus on the exploitation of women, Luke’s story reveals how enslaved men were also reduced to tools of reproduction. His master used him as a “stockman”, a term for enslaved men selected for their physical traits and compelled to reproduce with multiple women, often under direct supervision. These pairings were not consensual; they were orchestrated with the same cold calculations used in livestock breeding.
Slaveholders kept records of these forced unions, believing they could engineer stronger, more profitable laborers through selective breeding. Luke was described as tall and physically fit, traits that made him valuable in the eyes of his owner. Over the years, he was forced into repeated sexual encounters with women who had no say in the matter. Neither he nor the women were treated as human beings with emotions or family bonds; they were simply parts of a breeding system designed for profit.
The children Luke fathered were rarely raised together and most were sold off while still young. Though he sired 56 children, he was never allowed to be a parent to any of them.
Popular Slave Breeders in the US
Several names stand out in the history of slave breeding in America, people who were not just passive participants but active architects of the system:
John Armfield, a partner in the infamous firm Franklin & Armfield, was one of the most powerful figures in the domestic slave trade. Operating out of Alexandria, Virginia, the firm purchased enslaved people, many of whom were bred in the Upper South, and transported them to markets in Natchez, Mississippi, and New Orleans. Franklin & Armfield industrialized the trade, turning slave breeding into a supply chain operation that fed the labor-hungry plantations of the Deep South.
Robert Lumpkin, owner of the notorious Lumpkin’s Jail in Richmond, Virginia, operated a prison-like slave jail where enslaved Africans were imprisoned, abused, and bred before being sold further south. His jail was infamous for acts of rape and violence. Lumpkin forced an enslaved woman named Mary to bear several of his children, exemplifying how enslaved women’s reproductive capacity was exploited for personal and financial gain.
While some breeders focused on producing laborers, others, like Lewis C. Robards of Kentucky, specialized in the sexual exploitation of enslaved girls. Robards carved out a niche in the mid-1800s by selling light-skinned, often very young, mixed-race girls to wealthy Southern men, not for work, but for sex. These girls, known as “fancy girls,” were frequently the children of rape, their lighter skin making them more “desirable” in Robards’ private auctions and brothels in cities like New Orleans and St. Louis. He openly advertised their appearance, manners, and skin tone, transforming sexual trauma and biracial identity into profitable merchandise. His market helped fuel the systematic rape of enslaved women.
Another disturbing figure was Calvin Smith, a Georgia slaveholder who ran a closed-door slave breeding operation. Unlike large-scale traders, Smith kept dozens of enslaved women whose sole purpose was to produce biracial children for sale. Though not widely known, Smith was part of a network of private breeders who rarely appeared in public auctions but supplied enslaved children to larger plantations.
These men and others treated the Black body not just as labor but as renewable capital. Enslaved children were no longer just born into slavery; they were manufactured into it.
The economic motive behind slave breeding was cold and calculated. Between 1800 and 1860, the price of an enslaved African more than tripled. A teenage girl, if deemed a good breeder, could fetch a higher price than a man. Children born of breeding could be sold for $200–$500 each, and by their teens, they were worth much more.
Some estates increased their wealth not through planting or production but purely through reproduction, a twisted form of biological capitalism.
Though the Civil War and the Thirteenth Amendment eventually ended slavery, the trauma of slave breeding has echoed through generations. Family trees were broken, bloodlines obscured, and histories erased. The focus on reproduction in slavery laid the groundwork for later forms of racialized control, forced sterilizations, eugenics, and other forms of reproductive violence aimed at Black women in the 20th century.
Today, the story of slave breeding is still rarely taught in schools or mentioned in textbooks. It is an uncomfortable truth that reveals not just the brutality of slavery, but the depth of moral decay it inflicted on American society.
You might find these articles interesting.
Pata Seca: The Enslaved African Breeder Who Produced Over 200 Children for His Master
How Enslaved Black Women Resisted Slave Breeding By Using Cotton Roots as Contraceptives
Slave Breeding in the US: How Enslaved Africans were Bred Like Livestock in the 19th Century
Lumpkin’s Jail: The 19th-Century American Slave Breeding Facility for Enslaved Africans
