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Furthermore, the proponents of the breeding thesis have been misled by their failure to recognize the difference between human beings and animals. What increases fertility among animals actually reduces fertility among men. Promiscuity increases venereal disease and reduces fertility. Emotional factors are of considerable significance in successful human conception. To imply that these factors would not be present in black people is inherently racist.

Clearly, had there been widespread sexual misconduct, the effects on slave morale would have been disastrous. Distraught and disgruntled slaves did not make good field hands. Consequently, most planters shunned direct interference in the sexual practices of slaves, and attempted to influence fertility patterns through a system of positive economic incentives — incentives that are akin to those practiced by various governments today.

Instructions from slave owners to their overseers frequently contain caveats against "undue familiarity" which might undermine slave morale and discipline. No set of instructions to overseers has been uncovered which explicitly or implicitly encouraged selective breeding or promiscuity.

Sexual Exploitation?

Didn't sexual exploitation undermine and destroy the black family? Critics of the South have consistently answered in the affirmative. They accuse slave owners and overseers of turning plantations into personal harems. Again, unfortunately for the thesis, the evidence on which these assumptions and conclusions are based is extremely limited.

Such arguments overlook the real and potentially large costs that confronted masters and overseers who sought sexual pleasures in the slave quarters.32 It would have been much easier, and less risky, for owners of large plantations to keep a mistress in town than to risk the possibility of the destruction of his own family by taking up with a slave woman. For the overseer, the cost of sexual episodes in the slave quarters, once discovered, was often his job. Nor would he find it easy to obtain employment elsewhere as an overseer, since not many masters would be willing to employ as their manager a man who was known to lack selfcontrol on so vital an issue.

Further, to imply that black men would be indifferent to the sexual abuse of their women is to imply that they were somehow less manly than other men who would be indignant over such abuse. This common assumption about slave men is not only unrealistic and unsubstantiated but an insult to their humanity and patently racist.

The Strength of the Slave Family

Apart from the motive supplied by Christianity, slave owners had strong economic incentives to promote high standards of morality among their slaves. Planters encouraged strong families not only for the well-being of the slaves, but also for the well-being of the plantation. Strong families promote happiness and contentment. Happy, contented workers are good workers. Thus, even if a slave owner was not a Christian, there were important reasons to discourage immorality. Marriage was encouraged. Adultery was punished and divorce was discouraged by the whip.