This seemed to be a common trend throughout most of history, not just US history. For slave traders, wouldn’t it have been far more profitable for the children of slaves to be born free, forcing slave owners to have to buy more slaves?
I get why slaves reproducing is good for the owner, because they have an infinite labor source, but it feels bad for everyone else involved in the trade?
In a more US centric focused bonus question, with the 1790 Naturalization Act, why wouldn’t slaves born on US soil be considered citizens and be free? Technically they weren’t bought so they wouldn’t be property according to slave owners so why was it considered the owner’s right to own child slaves born on US soil?
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Because the law said that if a baby’s mother was a slave, the baby was a slave. It’s not a matter of interpretation, it was an explicit law.
**Partus sequitur ventrem** (Latin for “That which is born follows the womb”; usually shortened to partus) was a legal doctrine passed in colonial Virginia in 1662 and other English crown colonies in America which defined the legal status of all children to be the legal status of their mothers.
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