Infanticide

Enslaved mothers often employed extraordinary measures to protect their children from enduring a life of slavery. Most scholars have contended that female slaves frequently endured physical brutality and sexual exploitation. These variables somewhat explain enslaved women's severe reactions to the slavery institution. Resistance was commonplace among slave women. Unfortunately, for some, the callousness of slavery fostered aberrant and shocking behavior.

Infanticide was a practice that some enslaved women engaged in, frequently with the purpose of protecting their children from a life of perpetual bondage, or to hide a pregnancy from their owners. On occasion, however, the exercise was merely a woman's unexplained resolution to destroy her child's life. Some enslaved women induced miscarriages, whereas others used violence to put an existing child to death. According to historian Deborah Gray White, "Some southern whites were certain that slave women knew how to avoid pregnancy as well as how to deliberately abort a pregnancy" (1985, p. 84). Herbs, vigorous exercise, and "external and internal manipulations" may have all been used to induce miscarriage. Whereas many miscarriages were deliberate, some were incidental and brought about by the strenuous labor required of bondsmen and women.

The purposeful killing of slave children by their mothers has been most frequently portrayed as a heroic attempt to rescue their offspring from the horrors of slavery. White relays the example of a woman who killed her child to counteract her mistress abusing the infant, while another woman killed her newborn to prevent it from being sold. An observer recollected the latter incident and stated:

When her fourth baby was born and was about two months old, she just studied all the time about how she would have to give it up, and one day she said, "I just decided I'm not going to let Old Master sell this baby; he just ain't going to do it." She got up and give it something out of a bottle, and pretty soon it was dead. (1985, p. 88)

Slavery studies have frequently highlighted the notion that the corrosiveness of the slavery institution often drew out the most desperate and unusual facets of human behavior. Although enslaved blacks were seen as subhuman by some, the act of killing a child was universally perceived as morally wrong. Infanticide frequently stimulated public criticism, as evidenced in the 1856 Margaret Garner (d. 1858) case. According to scholar Steven Weisenburger, "Margaret Garner's child-murder electrified the United States…. In its epoch the Garner case became the most significant and controversial of all the antebellum fugitive stories" (1998, pp. 5-8). In 1856 Garner fled from a Kentucky plantation with her four children, husband, and his parents, Simon and Mary. She successfully escaped to Cincinnati, but was tracked down by her owner. Frightened, Garner grasped a butcher knife and practically beheaded her youngest daughter, Mary. The incident made headlines in northern newspapers. A reporter for the Daily Cleveland Herald recorded the following on January 30, 1856: "… the mother of the four children who were captured made a desperate effort to take their lives, rather than that they should be returned to servitude."

While one cannot deny the deliberate and violent nature of some infanticide cases, scholars have recently reexamined the phenomenon and have concluded that an overwhelming number of these occurrences were indeed accidental. Historian Michael Johnson concluded that most smothering cases were unintentional. Although most white southerners assumed that enslaved mothers carelessly smothered their children, recent evidence has revealed that these deaths were largely accidental. Johnson determined that slave infants were rarely the victims of smothering, but that most suffocation deaths were attributed to Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS) (1981, p. 496). Scholar Todd Savitt (1978) made a similar conclusion in his earlier study, and suggested that SIDS was a prevalent medical condition and the principal cause of slave infant deaths in the South.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

"Arrest of Fugitive Slaves: A Slave Mother Murders Her Child Rather than See It Return to Slavery," The Daily Cleveland Herald (Cleveland, OH), January 30, 1856.

Johnson, Michael P. "Smothered Slave Infants: Were Slave Mothers at Fault?" The Journal of Southern History 47, no. 4 (November 1981): 493-520.

Savitt, Todd. Medicine and Slavery: The Diseases and Health Care of Blacks in Antebellum Virginia. Urbana: University Press of Illinois, 1978.

Weisenburger, Steven. Modern Medea: A Family Story of Slavery and Child Murder from the Old South. New York: Hill and Wang, 1998.

White, Deborah Gray. Ar'n't I a Woman: Female Slaves in the Plantation South. New York: Norton, 1985.

                                   Talitha L. LeFlouria