Historyomath is my term, like ethnobotany, of combining two disciplines to answer a question. It likely exists, possibly in sociology as demographics or in economics as econometrics. Were I still a professor, I could toddle over to the history department and ask my questions until my annoyance sent me off with a list of books and a search to the library. Likely today, it would be articles to check in the databases of knowledge. However, I am not at the academy; I am in my van, at five a.m.

One museum I visited diagrammed the transatlantic slave trade and made three observations. First, about 12 million Africans were transported in the slave trade, and, as the placard contextualized, “the largest forced migration the world has seen.” Second, of that number, the majority, in the millions, went, via Portuguese trading, to South America, followed with the sugar plantation masses to the Caribbean, also in the millions. Third, a mere 400,000 (and I don’t mean to diminish those numbers or the associated crime) were landed in the United States. A date is not given, but the assumption is that they arrived before 1808, when the United States suspended the importation of slaves (not, note, the slave trade). The enslaved population then numbered about 1 million. This means in approximately 128 years since the first slaves arrived, those landed and native-born had more than doubled. However, by the time the Civil War broke out, there were some 4 million slaves in the United States. The enslaved population had increased fourfold in about fifty years. These people were now mostly third, fourth, or fifth-generation Americans. 

The following may seem unduly harsh, unfeeling, or just cruel. However, it provides another dimension to measure chattel slavery. 

Sweetwater Farm in Tennessee raises milking cows and was one of the first farms to install robotic milking machines. The cows live out their lives in barns, eat a specialized feed, and walk themselves to a milking station where the robotic arm cleans the udder, attaches the milkers to the teats, and siphons off the milk to holding tanks. The cows most commonly have six lactations, as a result of six pregnancies, which gives them a productive life of about six years. Over this productive lifetime, it is not unusual for a cow to achieve 100,000-pound milk production status. Some cows remain productive through a longer cycle, of up to 15 or so lactations and consequently larger yields. The global record, set by a Danish cow, is close to 500,000 pounds of milk. 

A throwaway line by a writer not really sympathetic to the African Americans during the internal trade leading up to the Civil War, noted, among the travails of long marches, family separation, and desperate living conditions, “forced breeding.” With the population increases in slavery without further importation of slaves, breeding, as with livestock, must have been a component of the slave system. With high infant mortality, short life expectancies, and extreme work conditions, for the enslaved population numbers to have increased as much as they did, deliberate breeding had to have been essential to the slave trader and the plantation owner. For a population to quadruple in 50 years requires a growth rate of over 2.8% annually. A casual calculation means each woman would have had to have had over four children. If infant mortality and childhood loss are considered, only four children might not be enough. And there are gender ratios, with transported men outnumbering women by almost two to one. However, reports from slave-selling states indicate there were as many as a third more women than men. The slave-holding class during the debates about war had clearly known that slavery could be, at minimum, self-sustaining. It had, in fact, shown that it could be expansive. 

The Civil War was about slavery — the totalizing system of American chattel slavery holding Black Americans in generational bondage and exploiting a natural increase in their numbers.