Since the 1830s, antislavery publications in the United States had featured stories of abuse and suffering among enslaved people in an effort to galvanize white Northerners to take a stand against slavery. Mothers proved to be an especially sympathetic subject: the paradoxical legal parameters of slavery meant that children inherited their unfree status from their mothers, enslaved women were prized for their reproductive potential, and enslaved parents had no legal claim to or authority over their own children. Enslaved women were vulnerable to sexual assault by their masters, who could then claim ownership of any child born due to rape. Families were in constant danger of being sold and separated.
The plight of enslaved mothers also contrasted sharply with the idealized version of white maternity that was increasingly celebrated in popular print in antebellum America. Magazines, newspapers, and advice manuals were full of highly sentimentalized depictions of middle-class mothers who were newly responsible for directing the moral and religious development of their young children within the home. As one publication summed it up, “Though her station is subordinate, yet in a great measure, a mother carries in her heart, and holds in her hand the destinies of the world.”
Not so, of course, for enslaved Black women, whose subordination was far more extreme, and whose unfree status effectively made idealized motherhood – and even the ability to remain with their own children – unattainable. Antislavery publishers seized upon this disjunction. A single 1835 issue of the monthly publication The Anti-Slavery Record, for example, featured five reports of mothers bereft by the sale of their children. There were “two women with infants at the breast” whose children were sold away from them so that they would not “depreciate the value of the mothers,” and a mother whose “anguish was so great, that she sickened and died” when separated from her five-year-old child. One woman was made gravely ill from “breasts having risen, inflamed, and bursted” after being sold away from her three-month-old infant. And there was a slave driver who, unhappy with the pace kept by a mother slowed down by her child, “snatched it from her arms, and handing it over to a person who stood by, made him a present of it.” Other texts drew upon the contrasting circumstances of white women and Black women explicitly. In one, titled “To Mothers in the Free States,” white women were asked to imagine that their own children were enslaved and to look upon the enslaved mother as if it was her own child who was abused or sold.