BookTalk: They Were Her Property, Chapters 5 and 6…Wet Nurses and Selling Slaves

*All book quotes are taken from Chapter 5: “Wet Nurse for Sale or Hire” and Chapter 6: “That ‘Oman Took Delight in Selling Slaves” of They Were Her Property.¹

It’s been a loooooong time since I’ve summarized a chapter in this book, but let’s get back into it! In Chapter 5 of They Were Her Property, Jones-Rogers calls attention to the commercialization of breast milk in the slavery industry and the impact it might have had on enslaved women and their children. In Chapter 6, she revisits previous themes, delving into the specific roles white women played in the slave market and the actions they took to be successful.

Recall that the principal theme of this book is that white women (not only white men, as supposed by many historians) were instrumental and active agents in the institution of slavery in America. Using travelers’ observations, diary entries, account ledgers, slave narratives, and other records to elucidate her points, Jones-Rogers explains in these chapters that these women were not just waiting in the wings while the males in their lives navigated their escapades into the slave market. Contrary to traditional thought, white women would have been well-acquainted with the inner workings of the slave trade, whether through informal conversations, referrals, and agreements made between friends; when they initiated their own purchases and sales; or while they operated as buying agents, private investors, business partners, mortgagees, and plaintiffs in slave-related lawsuits. In many cases, there were white females who operated businesses near the slave houses, pens, yards, depots, jails and auction houses that were interspersed among banks, churches, newspaper buildings, and other edifices in commercial areas. These proprietors likely contributed to the system by providing services that helped keep professional slave traders in business, including those that facilitated and perpetuated violence against enslaved women (e.g., the sexual violence occurring in brothels).

Another form of “violence, loss, and separation” occurred when white slave-owning women contracted enslaved women to oversee the breastfeeding of white infants, a practice referred to as wet nursing (p. 108). When I first encountered this topic in the book, I thought of Salma Hayek made headlines for nursing an infant while on a humanitarian trip in Sierra Leone. She breastfed the hungry boy, presumably with the mother’s permission and, in doing so, called attention to the country’s cultural and medical issues related to the stigma associated with breastfeeding. I breastfed my children, but I couldn’t imagine sharing such an intimate exchange with someone else’s baby. According to ABC News, Salma explained that “the idea of helping a child in this way had a long tradition in her family. She related a story about her great-grandmother many years ago in Mexico saving the starving baby of a stranger by breastfeeding the child.” There was a tradition of wet-nursing in America, too, particularly during the late 18th and 19th centuries. Although white immigrants initially were used to provide this service, the trend quickly spread to the slavery industry. Others had a choice to provide much-needed nutrition to other people’s babies, but many enslaved women did not have this luxury.

There is so much packed into this chapter of the book that I can’t do it justice. Jones-Rogers explains some of the reasons white slaveowners sought enslaved women to fulfill this duty, including postpartum illness, fear of complications; desire to maintain their physique and/or social routines, insufficient milk supply/latching difficulties, and a general unwillingness to do so. Interestingly there arose an existential dilemma for white slave-owning parents resulting from a belief in “the association between breast milk and moral and physiological contagion” arising from prejudice against immigrant wet-nurses: “if breast milk carried the racial and moral essence of the lactating mother, and African Americans were morally and biologically inferior beings, what would be the fate of the white children who sucked at the breasts of the enslaved?” (p. 104). Slaveowners ultimately decided that none of that really mattered.

Once they committed to hiring or renting/selling a wet-nurse, they set out to acquire their slaves. In keeping with women’s tradition of

“bartering and exchanging home-produced goods and foodstuffs with other women in their communities…white women routinely borrowed enslaved people from and lent them to one another…bartering and exchanging enslaved wet nurses as living goods….without diminishing their value in the formal slave market” (p. 110).

However, in addition to the typical word-of-mouth and in-vivo methods of advertisement, newspapers were a heavily and successfully used vehicle for soliciting and selling slaves for the purpose of nursing. Desirable qualities included “good health, upstanding character, plentiful milk, and milk that was fresh [i.e., the mother was nursing a young infant]” as well as previous experience nursing their own and/or white children, intelligence, separation from their own infants (either by death or sale); and ability to perform a variety of other household skills (p. 109, 112-117).

Wetnursing had a profound impact on the enslaved mother and her family. According to Jones-Rogers, “enslaved mothers were generally deprived of adequate food and nutrients to support and sustain their own health, much less that of two or three babies;” this may have been a more prominent experience for those women who served both this role and worked in the fields (p. 106). In these cases, a slave (or even multiple slaves for one slaveowner’s family) was compelled to focus more on providing care to the owner’s child than on her own progeny, which, of course, could result in psychological, emotional, and/or physical neglect. Slave children sometimes ended up being raised by extended or fictive family and were fed sub-par substitutes for their mother’s milk. In breastfeeding their infant slaveowners, wet-nurses likely recalled the trauma of losing their own children, but they could not express their grief and despondency (or resentment and rage), without being pathologized. Jones-Rogers noted,

“when confronted with enslaved women’s emotional responses to losing or being separated from their children, white southerners construed their grief as ‘the sulks,’ or even a form of madness – ‘vices,’ flaws, or pathological conditions – that made such women less valuable and less desirable non the slave market” (p. 121).

In conclusion, Jones-Rogers posits that wet-nurses

“were crucial to the further commodification of enslaved women’s reproductive bodies, through the appropriation of their breast milk and the nutritive and maternal care they provided to white children, [with] the demand among slave-owning women for enslaved wet nurses transform[ing] the ability to suckle into a skilled form of labor…and creat[ing] a largely invisible niche sector of the slave market that catered exclusively to white women” (p. 102).

I finished reading these chapters very curious about wet-nursing practices in St. Landry Parish, Louisiana (my maternal family’s stomping grounds). I wondered how slaveowners of color participated in this “niche sector of the slave market” and if any of my ancestors served as wet-nurses. I did a cursory scan of a newspaper database to look for relevant advertisements, but I didn’t find any obvious or preponderant evidence of the same discoveries Jones-Rogers made and definitely not any involving free people of color (fpoc). I will keep looking, though! Regarding my own ancestors, the purchase of one of my matriarch’s occurred at the same time she was breastfeeding her 6 month-old infant and only months before her new owner gave birth. She possibly could have been acquired to be a wet-nurse. Very interesting indeed!

References

¹ Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers, They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 2019).

² “Slaves Waiting for Sale, Virginia,” photograph, Library of Congress (https://www.loc.gov/item/89711937/ : accessed 25 July 2023), Virginia, 1856.

³ “Slave Nursing White Baby, Envelope 2,” image, Library Company of Philadelphia (https://digital.librarycompany.org/islandora/object/digitool:37172 : accessed 25 July 2023), from the John A. McAllister (1822-1896) Collection: Civil War Envelopes, Philadelphia, 1861-1865.