MARYLAND   SLAVE  POPULATION	41

county region before 1710 is probably not simply a reflection of the age
distribution of immigrants. It reflects as well the failure of Africans to
reproduce themselves fully in the New World.

The small number of children may have been a consequence of an
extreme alienation among black women. Craven has recently noted that
"many comments have been made upon the morbidity, at times expressed
in suicide, of the African after reaching America, and the unwillingness
of some women to bring a child into the condition of enslavement."30 Un-
fortunately, the persuasiveness of this proposition depends almost entirely
on the scholar's inclination, for the evidence that could subject it to a
test—a survey of the attitudes of imigrant slave women—is unavailable.31

Attitudes other than morbidity may have depressed the birth rate. Most
West African tribes—the principal home of immigrant slaves in the
British colonies—practised polygynous marriage, usually an effective means
of birth control. While it seems unlikely that polygyny could withstand
the pressures generated by black sex ratios in the Chesapeake, some of
the associated attitudes toward child rearing and sexual intercourse may
have survived.32 In particular, West African women usually nursed their
children for two or three years and abstained from sexual intercourse
until the infant was weaned. Such practice produces an interval between
live births of three to four years, much longer than that usually found
among European women in the colonies. If widely followed, this
practice would severely depress the birth rate among African-born slave
women.38

pretation advanced later in this essay is correct, the rise in the proportion of children
in the 16905 reflects an increase in the child/woman ratio among native slaves born
in the wake of the first wave of black immigration in the middle and late 16705.

30 Craven, White, Red, and Elac\, 101.

31 See Bla&singame, Slave Community (esp. Samuel Hall's comment on his
mother's reaction to enslavement, quoted p. 22), and Patterson, Sociology of Slavery,
io6ff.

32 In the West Indies, where the sex ratio was approximately equal, blacks
occasionally practiced polygynous marriage. Dunn, Sugar and Slaves, 251; Pat-
terson, Sociology of Slavery, 106, According to Edward Kimber, slaves on the
Eastern Shore of Maryland practiced polygyny in the mid-i74os. "Eighteenth
Century Maryland as Portrayed in the 'Itinerant Observations' of Edward Kimber,"
Md. Hist. Mag., LI (1956), 327.

33 Melville J. Herskovits, Dahomey: An Ancient West African Kingdom, I
(New York, 1938), 239-353; George P. Murdock, Africa: Its Peoples and Their
Cultural History (New York, 1959); Paul Bohannan, Africa and Africans (Garden
City, N. Y., 1964), 158-173; Patterson, Sociology of Slavery, no. For birth intervals
among European women in the colonies see Robert V. Wells, "Quaker Marriage
Patterns in a Colonial Perspective," WMQ, 3d Ser., XXIX (1972), 440.