What Owners Really Did…

These violations didn’t just destroy the moment they occurred, they shattered entire lives. Young girls had their innocence stolen before they even understood what was being taken from them. They lived in perpetual terror, never knowing when the next assault would come. And if they became pregnant from these rapes, which happened constantly, they were forced to raise children who served as living, breathing reminders of their trauma.

Every day, looking at those children, remembering this is why survivors described it as worse than death. Death would have been final. But this torture continued every single day with no end in sight.

Forced breeding wombs as property. After the United States banned the international slave trade in 1807, enslavers faced a problem.

How to maintain and expand their enslaved labor force without importing people from Africa. Their solution was as calculated as it was cruel. They would force young enslaved women to breed new generations of slaves, treating these women’s bodies as production facilities for human property. Let me be very clear about what this meant.

Young women, often girls barely into their teens, were deliberately paired with men chosen by their enslavers for the explicit purpose of producing children. Owners forced these young women into breeding to replenish their labor supply, treating them like livestock. This wasn’t romance. It wasn’t courtship. It wasn’t even prostitution.

It was industrial scale forced reproduction. The mindset behind this practice was openly stated by those who benefited from it. In 1832, Virginia delegate James H. Goolson publicly likened enslaved women to brood mares, stating that owners bore gestation costs for profitable increase.

He said this in the state legislature as official government business without shame or hesitation. To these men, enslaved women weren’t people with feelings, hopes, or bodily autonomy. They were breeding stock, and the children born from forced reproduction were simply a return on investment. The mechanics of this forced breeding were brutal and degrading.

Narratives describe pairings that took place in barns or lodges with resistance met by severe whippings. Imagine being told you must have sexual relations with a person you might not know, might not want, might actively fear. And knowing that refusal means being tied to a post and beaten until you comply or until your spirit breaks entirely.

Rose Williams, who was enslaved in Texas, left behind testimony about her own experience with forced breeding. She recounted being forced to partner with a man named Rufus with her enslaver telling her,

“If you doesn’t want whipping it to stake, just do what I want.”

The choice was no choice at all. Submit to rape or be tortured.

And this wasn’t presented as punishment for some crime. This was simply the exercise of property rights over her body. Some women endured this horror repeatedly across decades. There was a woman known as Long Peggy who gave birth to 25 children and was finally freed only after her reproductive utility had ended.

25 children. Each pregnancy risking her life. Each birth tearing her body. Each child likely sold away eventually. Each one a piece of her heart walked away in shackles. She spent her entire reproductive life as a human breeding machine valued only for her ability to produce more property for her enslaver.

And the abuse didn’t stop during pregnancy. If anything, it intensified in its calculated cruelty. Pregnant women were flogged in special positions designed to protect the fetus while still inflicting maximum pain on the mother with salt rubbed into the wounds to amplify the agony.

Think about the psychology of this. They hurt her enough to break her spirit, but not enough to damage the valuable product she was carrying. The fetus had more legal protection than the woman carrying it because the fetus represented future profit. This added another layer of psychological torment. Every time a pregnant woman was whipped, she had to live with the guilt and fear of potentially harming her unborn child through no fault of her own.

The enslavers weaponized the natural maternal instinct to protect one’s child, turning it into another tool of control and another source of suffering. The assault on these women’s bodies even extended into the realm of medical experimentation. Enslaved women were subjected to gynecological experiments, often without any anatomy whatsoever, procedures that sometimes led to death or permanent disability.