production at will.[2] It has been said by various anti-slavery spokesmen that many slaveowners systematically bred slaves for the market.  They have adduced no shred of supporting evidence however; and although the present writer has long been alert for such data he has found but a single concrete item in the premises.  This one came, curiously enough, from colonial Massachusetts, where John Josslyn recorded in 1636:  “Mr. Maverick’s negro woman came to my chamber window and in her own country language and tune sang very loud and shril.  Going out to her, she used a great deal of respect towards me, and willingly would have expressed her grief in English.  But I apprehended it by her countenance and deportment, whereupon I repaired to my host to learn of him the cause, for that I understood before that she had been a queen in her own countrey, and observed a very humble and dutiful garb used towards her by another negro who was her maid.  Mr. Maverick was desirous to have a breed of negroes, and therefore seeing she would not yield to perswasions to company with a negro young man he had in his house, he commanded him, will’d she nill’d she to go to bed to her—­which was no sooner done than she kickt him out again.  This she took in high disdain beyond her slavery, and this was the cause of her grief."[3]

[Footnote 2:  This is at variance with Gibson’s thesis which, professedly dealing always in pure hypothesis, assumes a state of “perfect” slavery in which breeding is controlled on precisely the same basis as in the case of cattle.]

[Footnote 3:  John Josslyn, “Account of two Voyages to New England,” in the Massachusetts Historical Society Collections, XXIII, 231.]

As for the ante-bellum South, the available plantation instructions, journals and correspondence contain no hint of such a practice.  Jesse Burton Harrison, a Virginian in touch with planters’ conversation and himself hostile to slavery,[4] went so far as to write, “It may be that there is a small section of Virginia (perhaps we could indicate it) where the theory of population is studied with reference to the yearly income from the sale of slaves,” but he went no further; and this, be it noted, is not clearly to hint anything further than that the owners of multiplying slaves reckoned their own gains from the unstimulated increase.  If pressure were commonly applied James H. Hammond would not merely have inserted the characteristic provision in his schedule of rewards:  “For every infant thirteen months old and in sound health that has been properly attended to, the mother shall receive a muslin or calico frock."[5] A planter here and there may have exerted a control of matings in the interest of industrial and commercial eugenics, but it is extremely doubtful that any appreciable number of masters attempted any direct hastening of slave increase.  The whole tone of the community was hostile to such a practice.  Masters were in fact glad enough to leave the slaves to their own