“FOR RENT: An eighteen year old girl, wet nurse, healthy and with much good milk for the last two months. She is for rent because her child has died. Inquire at 18A Candelaria Street.”

-Brazilian Newspaper Ad, 1845 [1]

“The black girl, richly and splendidly dressed, approaching with her head held high, a superb smile on her lips, as majestic as an ancient goddess, will obviously establish with her fine attire and the embroidered garment of the child she carries, the immense wealth of her masters.”

-1862, traveler’s description from Rio de Janeiro [1]

When James Annesley was born to his otherwise cruel and neglectful father in 1715, the wastrel baron did see to the nursing of his son. The landed English gentry of enslaved and pillaged Ireland were little better than modern thugs and drug dealers, stealing dogs as youths, robbing and raping as young men, and once ascending to their estates and titles, ordering extortions, murder and kidnapping, selling their human property off into the lethal slavery of America, and referring to women predominantly—even their wives—as “bitches” and fathering huge scattered broods of uncared for and unloved bastards. The only thing that was sacred to these thugs—who one uncle of two noble cousins referred to as “a rogue and a beast,”—was the continuance of their paternal family line. Family is a purely ancillary term in this savage context. For these men neglected, “drubbed,” and castoff their legal wives in favor of whores regularly and rarely knew their sons at all, putting them in the hands of servants and strangers as—once again, like modern, black American gangsters—they gambled and drank until dawn while their sons fathered themselves, perpetuating the cycle.

These men of privilege, who—like modern, black American thugs—never worked, living instead on the backs of working people, did have one crucial moral characteristic that defined them, the desire to bequeath their hereditary privilege to a male heir. And, like the Brazilian lords of a century later, they required wet nurses to accomplish this. The health of upper class English women was frail to begin with. Then, once “drubbings” and other abuses were factored in, miscarriages were common, so they needed to be kept pregnant as much as possible to insure “an heir and a spare.” Large breasts were also considered ugly by the denatured upper class, so a wet nurse would be employed, often meaning, even as the lady of the family was kept pregnant too often for her own health, that the necessary preexisting infant of the wet nurse was nutritionally neglected—all to keep social privilege on its linear trajectory toward ultimate and absolute moral decay. [2]

Juggy Landy was a famously endowed kitchen servant who had a bastard boy by a sailor and lived with her parents. When the Lady Altham, mother of James Annelsey, interviewed wet nurses she found one unwilling to be employed by a man of such “bad character” as her husband, another sick, and a third having “bitter milk.” One wonders who did the tasting of the milk. In any case, Juggy was forbidden to eat greens, roots or potatoes and was delivered regular parcels of jelly and jam to sweeten her milk. Her term of service was one year, after which James was taken back to his mother to be raised until she was “castoff” by her husband, who took on a whore, who forbade James to live at home, with the result that the boy spent much of his childhood as a homeless waif until finally sold into slavery by his uncle, who was even more cruel than his father and who had likewise threatened his servants with being “transported” into American “slavery” if they permitted the estranged Lady to send her love by word of mouth to her son.

As with every trip into early American servitude we discover that the “racist” social institutions such as wet nursing that were thought to be unique afflictions upon African American women alone, where inherited by them from their white predecessors in slavery. Postmodern America, obsessed with past white privilege and oriented toward current and future black privilege, with almost every twisted soul of the body politic obsessed with the human body, its material comforts and the money with which these things are acquired above all else, was clearly a long time festering before it took its current form.

1. Both quotes taken from Born in Blood and Fire: A Concise History of Latin America, by John Charles Chasteen, a superb general history

2. If one wishes to read of the awful roots of the modern tax farming system in which hundreds of thousands of poor whites perished in the most miserable conditions, read Birthright: the True Story that Inspired Kidnapped by A. Roger Ekirch