Stephanie Donegan is a Republican candidate for the District 21 State Senate seat in a suburb North of Atlanta, GA. Donegan is running in a crowded special election against six other Republicans and a single Democrat. She recently shared a post on social media disavowing the Transatlantic Slave Trade. That post, as of August 19, 2025, has received over 82,000 likes and almost 14,000 comments.
Donegan believes that 12.5 million slaves couldn't have been transported across the Atlantic in the timeframe of the slave trade. Her math says that over 350 years, slavers would have had to average 37,500 enslaved people annually, she stated the average load was between 250 to 350 captives each trip. She estimated it would take one slave ship leaving Africa every three days without fail, for 350 years.
Donegan calculated the number of boats required, captains, and crew, and considered factors such as disease, pirates, rebellions, shipwrecks, and other risks that would make that many trips without significant losses impossible. She also believes that most slaves in America were either Portuguese or Native American. I’m willing to accept that there were Native American slaves, but not that they made up the majority.
Her math was impressive, and if you accepted that her numbers were accurate, one might have a hard time accepting that 12.5 million Black people crossed the Atlantic. Her number of 12.5 million Africans leaving Africa is correct, but most of those people went to the Caribbean and South America. Only 388,000 were shipped directly to North America. What Stephanie should have been wondering about is how that 388,000 grew to a peak population of approximately 4,000,000 enslaved people and 500,000 free Black people just before the Civil War. I have an answer, but I’m not sure Donegan is going to like it.
The Black population in America grew faster than any other ethnic population, far exceeding the growth among white people. Historians have long noticed the trend, even giving it a name, natural increase. There was nothing natural about the process, unless you consider the part where a man inseminates a woman. That was a planned process, where the biggest and strongest Black people were bred like livestock to produce strong children. Some enslaved women were raped by their masters to produce house negroes and fancies to work in brothels. As masters (their kin and friends of the family) slept with slaves for generations, the end result was mulattoes, quadroons, octaroons, and so on. Sally Hemings was a quadroon. Her children by Thomas Jefferson were octaroons.
If you question, as Stephanie Donegan is certain to, that the natural increase was the product of forced breeding and rape, I refer you to a letter written by Thomas Jefferson to George Washington. Jefferson advised that Washington’s profits would rise 4% annually if his female slaves produced a child every two years.
“I allow nothing for losses by death, but, on the contrary, shall presently take credit four percent. Per annum, for their increase over and above keeping up their numbers.” — Thomas Jefferson
In all likelihood, Donegan will lose her Republican primary and fade away into obscurity. But this is America, and it’s been proven that you can hold idiotic views and become President one day. I can only hope she learns how to use a calculator.
This post originally appeared on Medium and is edited and republished with author's permission. Read more of William Spivey's work on Medium. And if you dig his words, buy the man a coffee.