Written By Lexx Thornton
What if I told you that Black women’s wombs were once seen as tools to grow the slaverybusiness? I’m not talking just as human beings, but as machines to produce more slaves! Let’sdive into one of the biggest cycles that ran America. You hear of the men who built America such as Cornelius Vanderbilt, John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, J.P. Morgan, and HenryFord. But we fail to hear about what ran America, until now.
During slavery in America, something terrifying was made legal without any hesitation. A child born by an enslaved black woman would automatically become a slave, no matter who the father was even if he was white, even if he was the master.Sound familiar? The law was called:”Partus Sequitur Ventrem”. This meant that which was born follows the womb. This single sentence legally made African women’s bodies tools to multiply slaves.
White slaveowners knew this and approved of this. While some had in mind dollar signs thatwould come as a result of this law, some knew that their children (due to affairs) and theirchildren, would never be free. So instead of buying more Africans, they forced enslaved women to have children again and again and again which is why it was called common back then to have 16 children. Their bodies became factors of pain.
They were raped repeatedly, even by their masters. The more children they had, the more profitthe slaveowners made. It wasn’t just cruelty, it wasbusiness. By 1860, the total value of enslaved people in the United States was estimated at $3.5 billion—which was more than the combined value of all U.S. railroads and factories at the time.
If adjusted for inflation, that would be tens of trillions of dollars today. A healthy enslaved child might be sold for $500 to $1,000 in 1850s dollars—$15,000 to $35,000 today. Over are productive lifetime, a woman might bear 5–10 children, generating enormous wealth for the master. Plantations grew in value not just from cotton profits, but from the increase in the number of people they enslaved. The forced reproduction of enslaved Black women generated billions of dollars in wealth for American slaveowners and formed a core part of the U.S.economy in the 19th century.