Black Milk: White Women, Enslaved Wet Nurses, and Maternal Violence in the Antebellum Slave Market

Many historians who study motherhood in the antebellum South frame white slaveholding women’s decisions to use enslaved wet nurses as matters of necessity. In their view, white mothers used enslaved wet nurses as a last resort, not because they were readily available. Yet white women’s decisions to procure the services of enslaved wet nurses had economic implications and destructive consequences for enslaved women’s relationships with their children. Drawing upon slave narratives, slaveholders’ correspondence, and nineteenth-century southern newspapers, I examine the market that white slaveholding mothers created for enslaved wet nurses. I argue that white women’s decisions to borrow, hire, or buy enslaved wet nurses separated enslaved women from their children, caused familial trauma within enslaved communities, and constituted acts of maternal violence. I also contend that maternal violence was more than the brutal acts mothers committed against their own children; it also included the acts women committed against other mothers and children.

As productive laborers with the capacity to reproduce and sustain future workers, enslaved females commanded a significant price in southern slave markets.  Historians typically describe slave marketplaces as the disorderly domains of white men. They also suggest that slaveholding men concerned themselves with enslaved women’s reproduction because enslaved children augmented the wealth of white patriarchs. Notwithstanding, white mothers shaped the demand for an invisible, yet highly productive kind of skilled labor that only enslaved women’s childbearing and lactating bodies could perform; and sometimes they entered the slave market to find it. White women not only commodified the nutritive and maternal care enslaved mothers provided to white children; they enhanced enslaved women’s value in southern slave markets. By examining the market that white slaveholding women created for enslaved mothers’ intimate labor, my paper offers an alternative understanding of the relationship between race, motherhood, and violence in the antebellum South.