African American Slavery and Disability

Bodies, Property and Power in the Antebellum South, 1800-1860

Dea Boster

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136275319
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Slavery
• Index: Social Sciences

Disability is often mentioned in discussions of slave health, mistreatment and abuse, but constructs of how "able" and "disabled" bodies influenced the institution of slavery has gone largely overlooked. This volume uncovers a history of disability in African American slavery from the primary record, analyzing how concepts of race, disability, and power converged in the United States in the first half of the nineteenth century.

Slaves with physical and mental impairments often faced unique limitations and conditions in their diagnosis, treatment, and evaluation as property. Slaves with disabilities proved a significant challenge to white authority figures, torn between the desire to categorize them as different or defective and the practical need to incorporate their "disorderly" bodies into daily life. Being physically "unfit" could sometimes allow slaves to escape the limitations of bondage and oppression, and establish a measure of self-control. Furthermore, ideas about and reactions to disability—appearing as social construction, legal definition, medical phenomenon, metaphor, or masquerade—highlighted deep struggles over bodies in bondage in antebellum America.

1 Introduction

“Here Are the Marks Yet”

Early in 1858, Tom Wilson arrived in Liverpool after stowing away from New Orleans in the hold of the cotton cargo ship Metropolis. After several weeks in England, Wilson's “own plain, unvarnished tale, taken down as the narrative fell from his lips,” was printed in the Liverpool Albion. Wilson, then aged 45, had been a cotton worker in Mississippi with a wife and three children before he was sold to New Orleans, away from his family. At his new plantation, Wilson was subject to repeated floggings with a leather strap, as well as having his right bicep cut to decrease his strength and ability to resist punishment. After less than two years in New Orleans, Wilson attempted his first escape from the plantation by running into the alligator-infested Baddenrush swamp, where he was caught by a pack of bloodhounds. The dogs attacked Wilson, enabling Burke, Wilson's overseer, to ride up and shoot Wilson in the hip. As Wilson described this occurrence to his interviewer, he noted “here are the marks yet,” and pulled up his trouser, showing “formidable seams” of scars on his calf and knee from the dogs’ teeth; Wilson also noted that the fourteen pieces of buckshot in his hip “can be seen and examined at any time.”¹

This “unvarnished” interview of “a poor fugitive slave”² was part of a significant trend in antebellum abolitionist propaganda on both sides of the Atlantic. In the 1840s and 1850s, many antislavery audiences were fascinated with the experiences of disabled slave bodies, and detailed accounts of slaves who sustained terrible, debilitating injuries during their bondage were abundant in abolitionist speeches and publications. Antislavery activists were certainly aware that visual images had the power to stir the emotions of their audience, hiring former slaves and fugitives to present their own accounts of slavery and display their bodies on abolitionist lecture circuits throughout the North.³ On many occasions, the ex-slaves would remain largely silent, appearing before the audience only to agree with the main presenters about the facts of their cases or to present their injuries. It was not uncommon for featured slaves to pull up their skirts or trousers to display scars on their legs, or to expose disfiguring whip marks on their backs. This exhibition of African American bodies was, in many ways, similar to the presentation of slaves at Southern markets and auctions. On the Northern abolitionist lecture circuit, the disfigured and disabled bodies of African American slaves were spectacular texts, and antislavery activists invited their audiences to “read” those bodies in a way not dissimilar to the way slaves’ bodies were read at slave markets in the South.⁴ Even though the readers of the Albion could not actually see Wilson, through his interview and the descriptions of his disabling injuries, they encountered his body as a part of his story and were invited to read his visible disfigurement as a major part of his tale of bondage.

Like the scars on Tom Wilson's leg, evidence of slave disability abounds in primary documents but remains invisible to those who choose not to see it. As historian Douglas Baynton has pointed out, “disability is everywhere in history, once you begin looking for it, but conspicuously absent in the histories we write.”⁵ Historians have mentioned disability in discussions of slave health or the effects of brutal treatment at the hands of masters, and a few have described famous slaves with disabilities—including Underground Railroad worker Harriet Tubman, abolitionist and women's rights activist Sojourner Truth, insurrectionist Denmark Vesey, Barnum's “Celebrated African Twins” Millie-Christine McCoy, and musical prodigy “Blind Tom” Bethune—but few have examined constructions of disability in antebellum slave society. Marks of slave disability in the historical record are certainly there to be found; the meanings of those marks, however, are far more complex than they appear on the surface. Analyzing disability and slavery involves finding intersections and layers of meaning in two social constructs that were more fluid and contested than many contemporaries would have admitted. Many scholars since the mid-twentieth century have identified constructions and deconstructions of the troublesome category “enslaved” (including race, gender, education, and social status); the popular image of blackness as backward, primitive, and savage; and the intertwined categories of black and white in antebellum American society. However, until recently, historians have been less likely to adopt disability as its own category of analysis or even as a cultural construct.⁶ We cannot take for granted simplistic definitions of disability as an individual's deviation from an imagined functional norm or physical ideal any more than we could assume slavery and race were simply inherent individual traits. Instead, it is more useful to approach a study of disability in African American bondspeople from the perspective that disability, like race and slavery, is defined by interactions between bodies and their physical, social, cultural, and aesthetic environments. This relational view of disability rejects the notion that those who are disabled have always been defined in contrast to a central, unproblematic, able-bodied norm and seeks ways to examine how both disability and able-bodiedness were culturally constructed, performed, racialized, commodified, and negotiated. In this sense, the contrast between able-bodied and disabled, slave and master, or black and white cannot be expressed as a simple, fixed binary; as scholars like Daniel Wickberg and Kenneth Greenberg have observed, we must instead seek out the language (both verbal and visual), contexts, and interactions that created and recreated those categories in history.⁷

In this book I analyze the complicated relationship between African American bondage and disability in the antebellum United States. Concepts of race and disability were mutually constituted in nineteenth-century discourses, and race as well as social status was often a signifying marker in definitions of normal and abnormal bodies. Slaves with physical and mental impairments often faced unique limitations and conditions in their diagnosis, treatment, and evaluation as property. Expectations for slave able-bodiedness, or soundness, often were linked with ideas about manageability and influenced how masters applied labels of disability to their human chattel as well as what measures they used to control their bondspeople. Slaves with disabilities could be a significant challenge to white authorities, who were often torn between the desire to categorize them as different or defective and the practical need to incorporate their disorderly bodies into daily life, labor schemes, and the strictures of the slave market. However, ideas about and responses to slave disability went deeper than economic and disciplinary concerns. Slaveholders and other white authorities (including overseers, traders, and physicians) assessed and valued enslaved bodies in idiosyncratic ways, often relying on emotional or aesthetic reactions to disabling characteristics. In essence, slaves with disabilities threatened the delicate illusion of control and stability that white authority figures had constructed but also forced them to confront their own deeply-held assumptions about race, deviance, and defect. Such complex reactions to disability were not limited to white and/or slaveholding observers. Although the majority of voices in the surviving primary record belonged to free, mostly white witnesses, slaves (and their bodies) actively participated in disability meaning-making projects. Furthermore, slaves with disabilities felt pain, loss, and despair but also experienced hope and recognized opportunities to use their defective bodies and minds to negotiate the terms of their bondage; in some cases, being physically unfit allowed slaves to establish a measure of self-control. In these respects, ideas about and reactions to disability—appearing as social construction, legal definition, medical phenomenon, or metaphor—highlighted deep struggles over bodies in bondage in antebellum America.

The project of this book is to reclaim a history of disability in African American slavery from the primary record and to analyze how concepts of race, disability, and power confluenced in the United States in the first half of the nineteenth century. Interpreting disability as a social construct rather than as an individual physical or psychological condition allows us to examine how social, political, cultural environmental, and aesthetic dialogues and relationships created boundaries between normal and defective bodies and minds in the nineteenth century. The culture of the emerging American republic often viewed disability as weakness and dependence, with negative associations to immorality, dishonor, and the grotesque; although there is evidence that slaves themselves did not conceptualize their bodies in bondage the same way whites did, it is apparent that many African Americans shared negative assumptions about individuals with disabilities. Race and disability were mutually intertwined concepts in discourse on bodies, normality, and the creation of “Others” in American culture, and African American bodies in bondage often bore a dual stigma of blackness and physical or mental inferiority. Disability was also used as a metaphor on both sides of the slavery debate in the North and South—proslavery advocates claimed that African Americans were inherently disabled from participating in a free society and required enslavement to thrive, whereas abolitionists argued that bondage itself was crippling to African Americans—and featured prominently in many different issues of slaveholding society. A variety of primary sources—including plantation records, masters’ correspondence, estate records, auction advertisements, judicial opinions, medical literature, and narratives written by slaves themselves—illuminate a complicated interaction of factors that contributed to how the slaveholding class assessed disability in human chattel and reacted to disabled bondspeople as bodies, property, and challenges to power. The contradictory classification of slaves with disabilities as “useless” on plantations, although many of them performed necessary and occasionally difficult duties, illuminated tensions between production, profit, and control in masters’ assessment and treatment of disabled bondspeople. Similarly, the codified language of slave soundness at market, which encompassed descriptions, physical signs, comparisons, and slave performances on the auction block as well as monetary price, reflected complex expectations and assumptions that slaveholders had for their bondspeople. Southern professionals, such as doctors and judges, played an important role in discourse on slave disability and the regulation of slavery itself, but they ultimately had to contend with the motives and desires of slaveholders, which could limit their authority. Slaves themselves, however, were not mere bystanders in discourse about unsoundness; they were active participants in the construction of meaning around disability and recognized that prevalent assumptions about disability could be advantageous in bondage. In all of these situations, concepts of disability and unsound bondspeople were significant elements of the uneasy power balance of American slavery and mastery. Each chapter begins with a brief glimpse into an individual experience with disability that highlights layered meanings of normal and abnormal enslaved bodies. These accounts, like Tom Wilson's scars, may be read to illuminate complex, intertwined constructions of disability and slavery in the antebellum United States.

Issues of slave disability, particularly assumptions about the inherent mental inferiority of African Americans, were prevalent in early-twentieth-century studies influenced by Ulrich Bonnell Phillips. In his 1918 monograph American Negro Slavery, Phillips promoted an image of slaves as childlike, superstitious, and needing proper discipline to control themselves; according to this view of the Old South's “plantation régime,” most masters assumed a benevolent teacher role, and most slaves were content with their kindly treatment.⁸ The Phillips school, a significant departure from earlier studies by scholars like James Ford Rhodes and W.E.B. Du Bois, dominated views of slavery until the 1940s and 1950s, when new objectivity scholars like Herbert Aptheker, Richard Hofstadter, and Kenneth M. Stampp challenged the conclusion that slavery had been a largely kind and cooperative institution. In 1959, Stanley Elkins presented his controversial thesis that the closed system of power in United States slavery caused significant psychological degradation, resulting in the infantilization of plantation slaves. Relying on much of the same plantation data that Phillips had utilized, Elkins argued that the trauma of capture, shock, and existence under a system of absolute control created the “Sambo” stereotype that, in his view, characterized the degraded mental state of slaves.⁹ Elkins's totalizing view of the victimized Sambo figure, as well as his comparison of concentration camp inmates during the Holocaust to African American slaves, inspired a number of important critiques; for example, Eugene Genovese claimed that the Sambo stereotype was far more subversive and complex than Elkins theorized, and scholars like Earl E. Thorpe and Sterling Stuckey argued that the Sambo figure was a myth created by slaveholders to justify slavery, not a reality created by the institution.¹⁰ As a result of the backlash against both the Phillips school of slavery history and the Elkins thesis, scholars more recently have emphasized slave agency and resistance over trauma and have largely avoided any in-depth discussion of slave disability.

Since the 1970s, there have been many important studies of slave communities and cultures that briefly mention disability in relation to the cruelty of the institution, slaves’ agency in protecting themselves and their families from abuse, or the use of malingering strategies as a method of negotiation. Ira Berlin's argument that slaves are not “outside history” and should be considered as central historical actors in their own right provided an avenue for examining slave perspectives on labor, health, punishment, and other issues related to disability.¹¹ Other studies of nineteenth-century society and culture hint at the importance of slave disability in more specific settings, such as the family, courtrooms, slave markets, popular culture, and the abolitionist movement.¹² However, although issues of disability are present in the literature on slavery, most authors mention them only in passing and have largely overlooked how constructs of “able” and “disabled” bodies influenced the institution of slavery. Furthermore, the experiences of slaves with physical or mental disabilities have received little scholarly attention. As Stephanie Camp and Edward Baptist have noted, “slavery studies that emphasized resistance and the capabilities (rather than the troubles) of slave communities were erasing everything that made the plantation evil,” including physical suffering that resulted from exploitation.¹³ In The Slave Community, John Blassingame—a vocal critic of Stanley Elkins—briefly examines the impact of brutality on the psychological health of slaves, noting in particular a mentally disabled “slave personality type” that resulted from repeated physical punishments.¹⁴ More recently, Nell Painter has argued for a more individualized, psychological approach to the study of brutality against slaves, because “denying slaves psychological personhood impoverishes the study of everyone in slaveholding society.”¹⁵ Whereas brutality against slaves certainly is an issue that deserves more scholarly attention, Blassingame's and Painter's method of applying modern psychometric standards to slave psychology is problematic, particularly given the paucity of primary sources from slaves themselves, and it sheds little light on how constructs of able-bodiedness and disability operated in slave society as a whole.

Studies of nineteenth-century health that emphasize the social framing of disease and medical practices provide a glimpse of how ideas about illness, debility, and physical defects were constructed and how histories of the health and medical treatment of African Americans both before and after Emancipation have placed slightly more emphasis on disability.¹⁶ Felice Swados and Richard Shryock were among the first scholars to question the romanticized myth that the Old South was a healthy environment for slaves; as Swados claimed, “the popular conception of the slaves as a sleek, robust, hearty group, enjoying a high degree of welfare on the old plantations, is false.”¹⁷ Relying mainly on research in Southern medical journals and plantation records, many late-twentieth-century historians of slavery have emphasized this point but, like most of their primary documents, focus rather narrowly on slave mortality—particularly on information about epidemic diseases and survival rates—rather than on morbidity, as well as on white healing practices and perspectives on slave diseases.¹⁸ Todd L. Savitt's Medicine and Slavery examines a wider perspective as well as a wider variety of health issues—including endemic and epidemic diseases, living and work conditions, injuries, and the combined use of “white” and “black” medical therapies—for slaves in antebellum Virginia.¹⁹ Although he highlights issues of disability, Savitt takes a biomedical approach to issues of health and slaves’ bodies that largely discusses disabilities (from poor living conditions, injuries, old age, reproductive issues, or insanity) only as medical pathologies and focuses almost exclusively on available treatments, or the lack thereof, for disabling conditions.²⁰

Two more recent studies in particular have touched on the cultural construction of disability in slaves and provide very useful models for further research. Sharla M. Fett's Working Cures: Healing, Health, and Power on Southern Slave Plantations (2002) is a medical history of slavery that builds on Savitt's work but focuses more on power dynamics and cultural communications about health and disease between slaves and their masters. Focusing primarily on Virginia and the Carolinas, Fett argues that slaves were not passive recipients of abusive white medical traditions; slave healing involved a variety of struggles over authority and practice. Slave communities developed a rich healing culture “that worked to counter the onslaught of daily medical abuse and racist scientific theories.”²¹ In other words, slaves created a collective countervision of health and healing to oppose the “white” medical view that “translated slave health into slaveholder wealth.”²² Although slave healing traditions were necessarily intertwined with issues of plantation control (such as labor and perceived insurrection threats), the existence of a strong healing culture provided a powerful identity for African American slaves and served as a means of resistance and negotiat...