The American Slave Coast: A History Of The Slave-Breeding Industry, by Ned and Constance Sublette

There seems to be a mistaken assumption among many writers about slavery that the historically minded contemporary person looks with horror at the thought that slaveowners, particularly those in areas where soil had been declining, engaged in slave-breeding. Considering, though, that the United States had a mild enough slavery regime–especially in its tobacco states to the north of the slave states–where slaves were able to enjoy natural increase, something that was nearly unheard of in the rest of the New World, it is little surprise that masters would find that increase to be a worthwhile asset to exploit and to deliberately cultivate like any other one. Given that the entire United States imported as much slaves, roughly, as the tiny island of Barbados, where else were those slaves going to come from except from being bred from the local stock, as it were, given how slaves were viewed as chattel by their owners. As abhorrent as that appears to the authors and perhaps to many contemporary audiences, the result flows naturally from the logic of the situation. Given that human civilizations have always exploited some underclass that it was in their interest to ensure could at least maintain its population for maximum exploitation, why should it be considered a negative aspect of America’s slavery system that slaves did increase both through their voluntary actions as well as through coerced efforts at breeding as would be familiar to anyone from a farming family who has tried to breed goats or cattle or anything else of that nature? We know that slavery is bad, but at the same time, is it not better that slaves lived well enough to increase in the United States in ways that were not possible in the sugar islands of the rest of the New World, whose importations caused so much more violence because they had to repeated over and over again for centuries?

Indeed, the authors have a deeply confused view in the history that they seek to present. The logic of the slaveowners is merely the logic of the ideological allies of the authors in the BLM, and even their behavior is the same in seeking to memorialize what they view as being critical aspects of their history, and in denying historical memory to those they view as enemies. Southern slaveowners did not think that there was any right that blacks had that whites were bound to respect, and contemporary BLM figures do not believe that there is anything that could be done against whites that would be wrong in their eyes. Their morals and practices are the same, equally reprehensible to those not blinded by the seduction of identity politics. The authors seem not to understand how the conduct of Southerners with regards to blacks makes perfect sense when you accept their premises–I don’t happen to accept their premises personally, nor does anyone else in the present day except contemporary radicals whose premises are exactly the same, only in reverse. Much of this book (which is immense, coming in at more than 670 pages of core content) is rather repetitive in seeking to paint Southerners and their Northern enablers as some sort of horrible monsters. Yet the violence and anti-white hostility that the authors celebrate and cheer on was and is the justification for a great deal of the violence against blacks that the authors bemoan and view as being so unacceptable. People, including even whites, have a right to self-defense, and those who threaten their lives and well-being deserve beatings and judgments, so long as that property is properly defined and limited.

In reading this book, therefore, I did not share the sense of horror that the authors had. People in positions of authority will always abuse that authority based on their own selfish lusts, and white Southerners as discussed here certainly had plenty of selfish lusts and desires for domination that they exhibited for hundreds of years on those unfortunate enough to be viewed by law and custom as their chattels. Many people, like Thomas Jefferson, wrote eloquently on their own feelings of being wrong in depending on slaves for their wealth and of the shameful deeds that were sometimes necessary to pay their debts, and about the vengeance they feared for. This book revels in that vengeance when it comes to slave revolts, Haiti’s revolution (which has not exactly been a boon for its nation’s citizens over the past two centuries, or for its natural environment), and in the inevitable arming of free blacks and fugitive slaves whenever someone was at war with the American South as a force multiplier against a vulnerable plantation society. Yet it is precisely that vulnerability that the American South had that has made its rhetoric and its legal codes so harsh. Less insecurity would have led to less harshness, and yet the authors lack the moral sense to feel some compassion for people who felt, and continue to feel, with good reason, under seige.

In terms of its contents, this book is divided chronologically into six parts. The first part of the book looks at the economic worth of the capitalized womb of the slave woman, looking at the law and economics of slavery with 1808 as a key turning point in ending the importation of slaves to any great degree except for small amounts of smuggling, forcing the United States to rely on its own natural increase (I). The second part of the book then goes back to the origins of American slavery in the Chesapeake colonies and the Deep South, examining the importance of Barbados as a source of the sort of slavery found in South Carolina and the Deep South, and the societies that developed along the Chesapeake and Atlantic coast during colonial days (II). The third part of the book then looks at the silent profit of slavery during the period of Independence through the French Revolution as it was experienced in the United States (III). After that the author examines the development of the American internal slave trade in the aftermath of 1808, and its role in the War of 1812 (IV). The penultimate part of the book examines the growth of slavery in the Deep South and the rise of the slave power as well as the spread of American power and influence Westward to the Pacific (V). The sixth and final part of the book then looks at the state of slavery and of the South before and then during the Civil War as slavery in the United States came to a definitive and sudden end (VI). A coda gives the author’s views on contemporary racial politics, after which there are acknowledgements, picture credits, notes, references, and an index.