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 wer