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Full resolution (TIFF) - On this page / på denna sida - II. Race - 5. Race and Ancestry - 3. Changes in Physical Appearance
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Chapter 5. Race and Ancestry 12 i
physical appearance which have no relation to genetic changes. About the
effects of most of these causes of change, our knowledge is conjectural.
The slave trade itself could be assumed to follow a selective pattern. It
has been part of the system of popular beliefs of white people in America
to assume that the captured slaves were predominantly of low class origin,
of a docile nature and with less intelligence and courage than the average
in their homeland. Modern research tends to rectify the idea of the extreme
submissiveness shown by the American Negro in slavery—a belief which
became of particularly great importance as part of the Southern ideological
armor before and immediately after the Civil War—and also to render
probable that the slaves were a cross-section of the population from which
they were drawn.^® Several instances of African royalty and nobility are
recorded among the slaves. The means by which Africans were made slaves
cannot be used to argue for any unfavorable selection. Persons who had been
captured in war, who had committed crimes, or who had failed to pay
their debts, were sold to traders. Other slaves were those who were simply
kidnapped by the white traders or by their black assistants. Warfare and
kidnapping were nonselective. Punishment for crimes or debt was certainly
socially selective, but there is no.evidence that it was biologically selective.
In any case, this source of slaves was of rather small importance.
Another source of selectivity—this one in the positive direction—might
have been the rigors of the voyage from Africa to America. Available
evidence is contradictory as to the extent of mortality during the period
from the seizure of slaves in Africa to their ultimate sale in America. The
old standard evidence pointed to a death rate as high as five-sixths of all
Negroes captured. Some recent sources of information, however, mention a
mortality as low as 13 per cent.^^ Even if the evidence were not contra-
dictory as to the extent of mortality, the biologically selective nature of this
mortality would not be definitely known—although it seems reasonable to
suppose that the weakest died first. More definitely selective than the death
rate was the unwillingness of the slavers to ship sick, disabled or wcrik
persons. They were looking for the able-bodied to be sent as slaves.
Slavery as an institution must, in various ways, have had selective effects
upon the genetic composition of the American Negro population. Planta •
tion owners, particularly in the slave-breeding states in the Upper South
during the first half of the nineteenth century, took measures of positive
eugenics in controlling mating.^^ The slave breeders can generally be
assumed to have favored the reproduction of docile and physically strong
specimens of the slave population. The historical sources give frequent
references to such practices. Other practices—such as the killing of slaves
who attempted to escape and the selling of ^^bad niggers” down the river
to the Deep South where life expectancy was shorter—may also have
had some genetic effect.
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