Bob — English common law mandated children’s status on that of their father.
However, in 1662, colonial governments adopted the legal doctrine of partus sequitur ventrem, making children born in the colonies take the status of their mothers; therefore, children of enslaved mothers were born into slavery as chattel, regardless of the status of their fathers. This ruling increased the value of female slaves, who could work and produce slaves at the same time.
In 1860, the price of labor was 10-cents an hour — $6.oo a week, or $300.oo a year. Now do the math. Every four years a female slave could provide her owner 12,480 hours of free labour — PLUS… and I quote…
“Child-bearing started around the age of thirteen, and by twenty the women slaves would be expected to have four or five children. To encourage child-bearing some population owners promised women slaves their freedom after they had produced fifteen children.
Charles Ball, a slave from Maryland, commented on a slave market that sold pregnant slaves. “The stranger, who was a thin, weather-beaten, sunburned figure, then said, he wanted a couple of breeding wenches, and would give as much for them as they would bring in Georgia. He then walked along our line, as we stood chained together, and looked at the whole of us — then turning to the women; asked the prices of the two pregnant ones. Our master replied, that these were two of the best breeding-wenches in all Maryland — that one was twenty-two, and the other only nineteen — that the first was already the mother of seven children, and the other of four — that he had himself seen the children at the time he bought their mothers — and that such wenches would be cheap at a thousand dollars each; but as they were not able to keep up with the gang, he would take twelve hundred dollars for the two.”
“Young women were often advertised for sale as “good breeding stock”.
“One slave trader from Virginia boasted that his successful breeding policies enabled him to sell 6,000 slave children a year.”
To put that in perspective, 6,000 slave children at $500.00 each is $67.5-Million in today’s dollars.
So no, white men were not buying sex. White men were selling children — and very often, they were selling their own children.
