Family separation in American slavery

Family separation in American slavery was extremely common. According to one historian of the slave trade in the United States, "The magnitude of the trade, in terms of the lives it affected and families it destroyed, is without a doubt greater than any Civil War battlefield." One survivor of American slavery told the WPA Slave Narratives project, "If you want to know what unhappiness means, just stand on the slave block and hear the auctioneer's voice selling you away from the folks you love." There is widespread evidence of the pervasive nature of family separation: "A central feature of virtually every slave autobiography and of many of the slave interviews, for example, is the trauma caused slaves by forced family separation."

Historian Calvin Schermerhorn wrote of Franklin & Armfield, entrepreneurs of the 1820s and 1830s, "As it innovated in finance and transportation, Franklin and Armfield became an engine of family wreckage and social disruption. What one contemporary critic called 'the Slave-Factory of Franklin & Armfield' produced captives by disarticulating families." The motivation for this family separation was market forces; Theophilus Freeman wrote to other traders in his network in 1839: "I want you to buy nothing but No. 1 [prime-age] negroes, as you will find plenty of them for sale before you can get money. Don't pay out a dollar for an old negro, unless you can get it very low, nor don't buy families, as there is not a single man here to buy such." In 1979, economist Laurence Kotlikoff analyzed a set of New Orleans slave sale prices from the period 1804 to 1862 and concluded "There is no evidence that slave owners valued the integrity of the entire slave family, although some evidence that they valued particular relationships within the family."

The death from cholera of Harriet Beecher Stowe's toddler in 1849 was one of the reasons she began writing about slavery; her grief at his death connected her to enslaved mothers who were irrevocably separated from their children by slave traders.