The horrors of slavery, represented viscerally in the punishment scenes in Steve McQueen’s Oscar-winning film adaptation of Solomon Northup’s autobiography Twelve Years a Slave, wrought a heavy physical toll on the bodies of nineteenth-century African Americans. Punishments such as whipping, branding, ear cropping and teeth being knocked out could be disabling, yet, as Dea H. Boster demonstrates in this powerful and richly researched book, these were not the only sources of impairment on the slave plantations of the Antebellum South. The exertions of labour damaged slave bodies, while dietary deficiencies gave many a ‘bandy-legged’ appearance. Slaves might lose fingers and toes to frostbite, contract eye infections that might lead to blindness, or suffer from mental afflictions. Female slaves experienced fertility problems and miscarriage, often as a consequence of abuse. For slave owners, such impairments were viewed not so much in terms of their human consequences, but through an economic model that gauged the effects of disability on a slave’s value as property.
Evaluating the ‘soundness’ of slaves was a crucial aspect of the slave economy as many historians have noted, but constructions of the ‘unsound’ body and the experiences of slaves with disabilities have received much less attention. Boster’s book makes a significant contribution to our understanding of disability as a ubiquitous, yet often overlooked, aspect of the history of slavery. Drawing on a variety of sources including slave narratives, medical writing and the unpublished papers of plantation owners, Boster presents a nuanced analysis that will be of interest to historians of disability and slavery alike.
African American Slavery and Disability is divided into three parts. The first, ‘Bodies’, examines the intersection of discourses of disability and race in Antebellum America and analyses the causes of impairment among slaves. Antebellum writing about African American able-bodiedness and disability brought together ideas about racial inferiority and the natural ‘defectiveness’ that accompanied black skin. Indeed, disability played an important role in justifying slavery by those who supported it, arguing that African Americans were physically better suited to work on the slave plantations in the south and that they were disabled from living freely in the north. Pro-slavery writers often suggested greater incidence of intellectual disabilities, blindness and deafness among the free blacks of the northern states as a means of showing how independence from bondage only led to the greater dependence of disability. Anti-slavery writers conversely pointed to the ‘crippling’ effects of slavery on the bodies of African Americans, and emancipation narratives sometimes depicted freedom in terms of a rising up ‘cured’ of afflictions.
The second section, ‘Property’, examines the working lives of slaves with disabilities and their value in the marketplace. Plantation journals indicate that slaves with physical or sensory impairments were expected to work as long as they were able. In some cases, becoming disabled from work could lead to removal from the community of slaves, with elderly or disabled slaves being sent to live alone in the woods and fend for themselves. Boster provides some powerful evidence to suggest also that some African American slaves with disabilities were sold or hired out for medical research. Slaves with disabilities might be difficult to sell as workers, and Boster shows how on the auction block slaves were expected to give bodily performances that might conceal impairments to prospective buyers. Nevertheless, slaves were not simply passive in this process. Despite the degrading inspections to which slaves were subjected, there were opportunities for slaves to present their bodies in particular ways, sometimes emphasising impairment as a means of avoiding sale to undesirable masters or being separated from their families. This theme is developed further in the final section of the book, ‘Power’, which examines the ways in which anxieties about malingering were dealt with in slave plantations. While some slave owners treated sick or disabled slaves well and provided medical care, many were suspicious of their slaves’ claims of weakness or impairment and instructed physicians to detect malingering. That some slaves went as far as sabotaging their own bodies to prevent sale agreements serves as a testimony not just to the appalling circumstances of bondage, but also to the ways in which slave disability might serve as a tool of resistance.
This is a fascinating book that brings a new dimension to our understanding of Antebellum slavery by exploring it from a disability perspective. African American Slavery and Disability demonstrates the complexities, contradictions and double standards in the treatment of slave disability, showing that its meanings went ‘far beyond individual physical or mental condition’ and shedding light on the ‘complex social construction of disability in nineteenth-century American society’ (124). The book might have examined further the language of impairment in its sources and explored more critically the question of whether modern concepts of ‘disability’ map easily onto nineteenth-century languages of ‘unsoundness’. But on the whole this is an excellent study that opens up further possibilities for comparative work on other slave-holding societies, raising prospects of new transatlantic histories of race and disability.
Department of History and Classics, Swansea University, Swansea, UK
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© 2014, David M. Turner
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09687599.2014.931652