Liberty's Daughters - The Female Slave/Slave Life

In many history classes I've taken over the course of my secondary and post-secondary academic career, when focusing the fate of slaves and their lifestyle in early America, the stories are typically heart-wrenching. If not for the absolutely intolerable and unfortunate circumstances they were subjected to unfairly by the white population at the time, than for all the terribly sad stories of families being ripped apart by being sold to different plantations, or members being worked to death, escaping to the north, or worse, being killed. Now I recognize that the situations that Mary Beth Norton discusses should be read as the rarities that they were, but the perspective she introduces was rather interesting nonetheless. Plantation owners like our rather revered Thomas Jefferson were rather ahead of their time, in a sense, in allowing if not encouraging marriage amongst slaves, as well as doing anything they could to ensure the successful childbirth for the wife. After the birth Jefferson also made sure that the families would ultimately stay within the same plantation or system of plantations, even if it meant moving them about his own property, or selling slaves that he hadn't intended to part with when selling ones that he did. This allowed slave families, as the book stated, "at least from the standpoint of their female members...more [geographic stability] than those of free white people." This really interested me because, irrespective of the rarity of the situation, this is quite possibly the first time I had ever heard of the life of the slave being possibly more stable in any regard to that of the white populous at the time. However, I suppose the adage of something being "too good to be true" rears its ugly head here, as despite how benevolent his actions may have seemed, Jefferson recognized the business benefits of his actions--keeping a family together meant the greater possibility of more children, and that meant more slaves. "I consider a woman who brings a child every two years as more profitable than the best man of the farm," Norton quotes Jefferson as saying, "what she produces is an addition to the capital, while his labors disappear in mere consumption."