> Slave owners often bred their slaves to produce more workers. The function of such breeding farms was to produce as many slaves as possible for the sale and distribution throughout the South, in order to meet its needs.
That's not selective breeding for subservience. That's (non-selective) breeding for numbers.
We know those white male slave owners raped their female slaves and had children by them. Quoting "Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself" by Harriet A. Jacobs, 1861 at https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/11030 :
> Southern women often marry a man knowing that he is the father of many little slaves. They do not trouble themselves about it. They regard such children as property, as marketable as the pigs on the plantation; and it is seldom that they do not make them aware of this by passing them into the slave-trader’s hands as soon as possible, and thus getting them out of their sight.
> Large positive values for these variables indicate that skin color was important in determining slave price. Kotlikoff had estimated that the light-skin premium was 5.3% for females and 2.3% for males. My estimates are larger: especially when using the Matched Models Method: 11.1% and 9.7% for females and males respectively. ... the slavocracy’s penchant for light skin really did conflict with their pursuit of agricultural profit.
This isn't selective breeding for subservience.
How would that breeding program even work? When does selection occur? A subservient child might be quite different at 20 years old. An owner might get, what, 3 generations of breeding done in a life-time? And that requires a large population of slaves to draw from. So it needs to be a multi-generational project.
While at the same time there's all the other slave owners just breeding for numbers, making effective multi-generational selective breeding just about impossible.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slave_breeding_in_the_United_S...
> Slave owners often bred their slaves to produce more workers. The function of such breeding farms was to produce as many slaves as possible for the sale and distribution throughout the South, in order to meet its needs.
That's not selective breeding for subservience. That's (non-selective) breeding for numbers.
We know those white male slave owners raped their female slaves and had children by them. Quoting "Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself" by Harriet A. Jacobs, 1861 at https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/11030 :
> Southern women often marry a man knowing that he is the father of many little slaves. They do not trouble themselves about it. They regard such children as property, as marketable as the pigs on the plantation; and it is seldom that they do not make them aware of this by passing them into the slave-trader’s hands as soon as possible, and thus getting them out of their sight.
That's not selective breeding for subservience.
Further, lighter-skinned slaves were sold at a premium over darker-skinned slaves. https://swer.wtamu.edu//sites/default/files/Data/161-178-61-...
> Large positive values for these variables indicate that skin color was important in determining slave price. Kotlikoff had estimated that the light-skin premium was 5.3% for females and 2.3% for males. My estimates are larger: especially when using the Matched Models Method: 11.1% and 9.7% for females and males respectively. ... the slavocracy’s penchant for light skin really did conflict with their pursuit of agricultural profit.
This isn't selective breeding for subservience.
How would that breeding program even work? When does selection occur? A subservient child might be quite different at 20 years old. An owner might get, what, 3 generations of breeding done in a life-time? And that requires a large population of slaves to draw from. So it needs to be a multi-generational project.
While at the same time there's all the other slave owners just breeding for numbers, making effective multi-generational selective breeding just about impossible.