Slinging Babies: The Perils of Motherhood for Enslaved Africans and Native Americans

Accounts of slave babies suffering from a distinctly violent death are indicative of how vulnerable the babies and young children of slave mothers were in a time when violence against Native Americans and Africans in America was unmitigated by law or custom. This paper argues that throughout the history of slavery, African and Native American women experienced significant trauma over the loss of their infant children due to violence. Indeed, the killing of slave babies by white slave owners remained an indelible, horrifying fact in the minds of those enslaved in the South. The enslaved also accused slave traders, black and white, of killing slave babies. The foundation for this sort of race based violence in America emanated from a type of warfare used for centuries by Europeans and Africans. What we today call total warfare, which military historian John Grenier calls “unlimited war” or “petite guerre,” is a strategy where one side attempts to destroy its enemies’ will to fight by “killing and intimidating enemy noncombatant’s populations,” namely women, children, and old people. Scholars identified this type of warfare in the nineteenth century, but Americans, white and black, historically used the term “extermination” to describe the total warfare that they envisioned. White anxiety about Native American and African American revenge and servile insurrections created a “them or us” mentality, and those people believed to be racially different, killed in what European Americans called just wars, were seen as mere collateral damage. In most cases, however, the killing of the babies and children of enslaved mothers had little to do with any confrontations with white power. Thus, this paper traces how the phenomenon of brutally killing babies aligns with the idea of potential racial extermination, to discern what affect it had upon aboriginal and African American communities.