My response to
@Noonthirtyjoe was partially satire but my defense of his stance not being racist is sound.
Seriously speaking on slave breeding with no jokes inserted,
it was real and largely unproductive in sustain population growth among slaves.
It was not predominant until after the cotton gin was invented shortly before 1808, then Kentucky became the first (and really only significant) state with a breeding market since the imports were lower all around due to the gin machines operating better at turning a profit.
Frazier in his book
The Negro Family, stated that "there were masters who, without any regard for the preferences of their slaves, mated their human chattel as they did their stock."
Ex-slave Maggie Stenhouse remarked, "Durin' slavery there were stockmen. They was weighed and tested. A man would rent the stockman and put him in a room with some young women he wanted to raise children from."
In the book ,
The American Slave Coast, the author states that the reproductive worth of "breeding women" was essential to the young country's expansion not just for labor but as merchandise and collateral stemming from a shortage of
silver,
gold, or sound
paper tender. He concludes that slaves and their descendants were used as human savings accounts with newborns serving as interest that functioned as the basis of money and credit in a market premised on the continual expansion of slavery.
Others reject the idea that
systematic slave breeding was a major economic concern. They argue that there is very meager evidence for the systematic breeding of slaves for sale in the market in the Upper South during the 19th century.
BUT as always definitions:
They distinguish systematic breeding—the interference in normal sexual patterns by masters with an aim to increase fertility or encourage desirable characteristics—
from pro-natalist policies, the generalized encouragement of large families through a combination of rewards, improved living and working conditions for fertile women and their children, and other policy changes by masters. They point out that the demographic evidence is subject to a number of interpretations.
Their takeaway was that when planters intervened in the private lives of slaves it actually had a negative impact on population growth.
That's what happens when government regulates, am I right? (Ok that was a joke, but only here in the last line)