Slave breeding in the United States

Slave breeding in the United States includes any practice of slave ownership that aimed to systematically influence the reproduction of slaves in order to increase the wealth of slaveholders. Slave breeding included coerced sexual relations between male and female slaves, promoting pregnancies of slaves, and favoring female slaves who could produce a relatively large number of children. The purpose of slave breeding was to acquire new slaves without incurring the cost of purchase, and to fill labor shortages caused by the termination of the Atlantic slave trade.

Selective breeding between slaves with the aim of developing particular physical traits was extremely rare however, as most slaves were unrestricted in their choice of sexual partners.

The laws that ultimately ended the Atlantic Slave Trade came about as a result of the efforts of abolitionist Christian groups such as the Society of Friends, known as Quakers, and Evangelicals led by William Wilberforce, whose efforts through the Committee for the Abolition of the Slave Trade led to the passage of the Slave Trade Act by the British Parliament in 1807. This led to increased calls for the same ban in America, supported by members of the U.S. Congress from both the North and the South as well as President Thomas Jefferson.

At the same time that the importation of slaves from Africa was being restricted or eliminated, the United States was undergoing a rapid expansion of cotton, sugar cane and rice production in the Deep South and the West. Invention of the cotton gin enabled the profitable cultivation of short-staple cotton, which could be produced more widely than other types; this led to King Cotton throughout the Deep South. Slaves were treated as a commodity by owners and traders alike, and were regarded as the crucial labor for the production of lucrative cash crops that fed the triangle trade.

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