San Domingo masters deliberately worked slaves to death rather than breed them
Evidence
Haiti’s slave population, however, was not self-reproducing. And even so severe a “Negrophobe” as Lothrop Stoddard had to admit to the reason why. Sandwiched between his evocation of the official rationalizations for the persistent destruction of the Black population—explanations that ranged from the truths of improper food, the exploitation of pregnant women, high infant morality, and venereal disease, to the absurdities of proposing the “nervous strain” on savages suddenly introduced to continuous labor, and the supposition of an analogy to the impact of captivity on the reproductive capacities of wild animals—Stoddard was compelled to acknowledge: “The general opinion seems to have been that the negroes were worked too hard, and… that this was often deliberately done, as many masters considered it cheaper to buy slaves than to breed them.” As a consequence, the colony was forced to import Africans at a rate, which, by the time of the revolution, had grown to at least 40,000 each year. In turn, Stoddard recognized, “One of the most important considerations for the history of the Revolution in San Domingo is the fact that a majority of the negro population was African-born.” — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 728
Categorization
Category: Factual Claims
- XREF: The African-born majority among Haitian slaves directly connects to Robinson’s core thesis that the Black radical tradition was carried by African-born populations, not creoles.
- CANDY: The admission that masters found it cheaper to buy than breed slaves is grim but striking conversation material.