Children of the plantation

In the context of slavery in the colonial United States, the expression "Children of the plantation" was a euphemism used in the 13 Colonies to identify the offspring of black female plantation slaves by white men, usually their owner or one of his sons or the estate's overseer.

Such children, who were born into slavery (Partus sequitur ventrem, were seldom acknowledged by their white fathers. These children were classified as mulatto, a historic term for a multiracial person. The one drop rule meant that they could never be part of white society.

One famous example is the decades-long relationship between President Thomas Jefferson and his slave (and possible half-sister of his wife) Sally Hemings. The Jefferson–Hemings controversy, now resolved by DNA testing, shows that all her children were his. In the antebellum period, hers would have been called a "shadow family".

Alex Haley's Queen: The Story of an American Family (1993) is a historical novel, later a movie, that brought knowledge of the "children of the plantation" to public attention.

See also

• Slave breeding in the United States
• Plaçage
• Sexual slavery
• Partus sequitur ventrem