#the mark of slavery: disability race and gender in antebellum america

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Southern physicians regularily connected white women's childlessness to their "delicate" nature and pitied them as " victims of their own frail bodies" but framed enslaved women as promiscuous and thus more susceptible to venereal diseases that caused infertility. This "preoccupation with race- based explanations for infertility underscores that in addition to enslaved women's procreation and southern whites' reliance on it for profit and the perpetuation of slavery, their childlessness also played a key role in the construction of racial hierarchies and gender discourses.

A similar racialized logic undergirded southern physicians' explanations of congenital disabilities among enslaved women's children. A small number subscribed to the idea of "uterine sympathy" to explain newborns' congenital disabilities. This theory held that a woman's experience of emotional or physical trauma during pregnancy transferred to the fetus in utero and produced a disabling or disfiguring effect. Typically. however, physicians "linked [this] condition to white women alone. They attributed the disabilities of enslaved newborns, in contrast, to their mother's immorality and lack of sexual purity.

-- The Mark of Slavery: Disability, Race, and Gender in Antebellum America

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" in the genteel pages of new york literary world, an anonymous author claimed in 1849 that the entertainment craze of blackface minstrelsy was a fad, thankfully nearing its end."

in 1849? that is some serious optimism my guy.

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In I863, Union troops blockaded the Atlantic coastline during the Civil War, making food and supplies scarce in the Confederate South. One Virginia slaveholder offered his scarce in the advice about how to survive the trying times and, at the same time, showcase his support and loyalty to the Confederacy.

He suggested that his brother "put [his] wife and mother on the smallest amount of food, [ and] kill dogs and old negroes if necessary to keep our army alive. " The sheer brutality of these remarks underscores the callousness with which some slaveholders viewed elderly slaves, who they perceived as costly and disposable.

-- The Mark of Slavery: Disability, Race, and Gender in Antebellum America

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While the full depth and breadth of West African beliefs about embodiment is far beyond the scope of this work, a brief survey of attitudes and practices among Yoruba, Igbo, Mendi, Akan, Ga, and other West African people in the age of transatlantic slavery reveal that people with disabilities were empowered, integral members of their communities.

Yoruba cosmology and culture offer compelling evidence about these different perspectives. The Yoruba associated blindness, albinism, and people with "twisted limbs, hunched backs and other deformities" with Obatala, the "artist god" who created the form of living things by sculpting them from clay. Physically marked by the deity, people with these characteristics took on a sacred status and served as priests and priestesses in Obatala's shrine. Similarly, the Mende, Akan, and other ethnic groups along the Gold Coast considered Little People especially powerful. The Yoruba even referred to them as en orisa, the possessions of the gods. Seventeenth-century European traveler narratives reveal that they played key roles in royal courts, especially as servants to nobility. The Yoruba, in particular, saw Little People as "uncanny in some rather undefined way, having a form similar to certain potent spirits who carry out the will of the gods." The Akan likewise believed in the spiritual power of Little People, whom they called Mmoetia. Herbalists and healers of the body, mind and spirit, the Mmoetia were associated with various deities and could cause mischief or punish individuals for their transgressions.

Among the Ga, individuals understood in contemporary times as developmentally disabled- especially those who were "incapable of speech" and "of grotesque appearance" were "treated with the greatest kindness, gentleness and patience." Community members regularly fed and provided care for them, not based on pity but, rather, out of "a deep respect for their spiritual status" as "the reincarnation of a deity. For the Yoruba and Igbo, "children born with certain physical marks who developed seizures or forms of madness in which they heard voices were thought of as abiku or ogbánge children. " Similarly viewed as being connected to particular deities, these "spirit children" were drawn to the spirit world unless a diviner or healer intervened to interrupt the cycle of birth, death, and rebirth that trapped them. Because of their perceived spiritual power and as a way to cajole them into not dying and returning to the spirit world once again, abiku or ogbánge children received special treatment in their communities. If they died, their corpses were marked to make them more readily identifiable as abiku or ogbánge when they were reborn. As these brief examples demonstrate, bodies and minds that Europeans and Americans characterized as defective, pitiable, and inferior instead signified power and inspired awe and respect in many West African societies. Along with a range of other cultural beliefs and practices, enslaved Africans forced into the Americas also carried ideas about the body with them. The remnants of these beliefs influenced their descendants' views of disabled family and community members.

--- The Mark of Slavery: Disability, Race, and Gender in Antebellum America

interesting stuff in this book.

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GODDAMN CALHOUN.

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Of all the socially disabling aspects of slave law, antiliteracy laws were some of the most deeply resented among enslaved people. Not only did these laws demand subservience and deference by denying slaves access to knowledge, they also framed enslaved people as "idiots" or "feeble minded."

As Frederick Douglass explained, "I have found that, to make a contented slave, it is necessary to make a thoughtless one. It is necessary to darken his moral and mental vision, and, as far as possible, to annihilate the power of reason."

By the time of the Revolution, many Americans viewed those labeled idiotic as able-bodied but ignorant as well as innocent with a childlike nature, yet prone to criminality. Idiots were the brunt of mean-spirited jokes and the objects of pity and charity. After the Panic of 1819-a financial panic triggered by the abrupt halt of vibrant trade after the War of 1812 that plunged the nation into an economic depression and necessitated the development of almshouses for the nation's unemployed and poor--views of idiocy grew even more conflicted.

By the mid-1850s, Americans reconstructed idiocy as a "failure of the will."so Many of these understandings of idiocy paralleled racist stereotypes of enslaved men as "Sambos" -an imagined figure seen as "docile but irresponsible, loyal but lazy, humble but chronically given to lying and stealing. .. full of infantile silliness... and childish exaggeration.

The long history of antiliteracy laws that targeted enslaved people illuminates pervasive attempts to associate enslaved people with idiocy and codify slaveholders' desire for all blacks to act in a Sambo-like fashion into law.

--- The Mark of Slavery: Disability, Race, and Gender in Antebellum America

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Assumptions about deafness intersected with stereotypes of enslaved blacks as intrinsically "simple" or lacking intelligence, a combination of ideas that reduced this young man's value from a labor standpoint. His mother's visible concern for him further heightened the perception that he could not care for himself, let alone productively labor for another. A confluence of beliefs about enslaved blacks, disabilities in general, and deafness in particular ultimately allowed this young man to remain with his mother. His experience stands in sharp contrast to the fate of his sister whose youth and able-bodiedness (advertisements for the auction described her as "new") made her a valuable investment and led to her painful removal from loved ones, friends, and familiar places.

Sudden disablement could also dramatically alter an enslaved person's perceived capacity to labor, influence the outcome of a looming sale, and enable families to stay intact. This reality was not lost on enslaved people; for some, self-sabotage became a viable tactic to escape sale and separation from loved ones. One enslaved woman took control of her future by "maiming" herself to avoid sale. When a slave trader bought her and was about to take her from her husband and children, she "went into the court-yard, took an axe, and with her right hand chopped off her left."

Acutely aware of the importance attached to sound bodies, she understood that "a one-handed slave" was of little value to a trader and escaped sale by disabling herself." Robert Falls remembered that his mother had "fits" after her owner sold her and was quickly returned. Though their family avoided separation, Falls's mother continued to struggle with this trauma and lived with these fits long after she came back.

--- The Mark of Slavery: Disability, Race, and Gender in Antebellum America

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An ardent supporter of slavery and advocate for separate educational institutions for southern medical students, physician Samuel A. Cartwright drew on ethnography, phrenology, and comparative anatomy to imagine a series of physical and psychological defects unique to enslaved blacks.

[...]

Black defectiveness, according to Cartwright, included both physical and mental traits. He drew on Morton and other ethnologists' claims that blacks possessed smaller brains, but went further and argued that, in comparison to whites, they also had malformed spines, "legs (that) curved outwards and bowed," flat feet with ankles awkwardly located more in the "center" of the foot, a "hopper-hipped" gait, and smaller, denser muscles. Cartwright also addressed internal differences, maintaing that in comparison to whites, blacks possessed small defective lungs that caused "improper atmospherization of the blood," deprived the brain of necessary oxygen, and decreased intelligence.

He analogized this condition to "newborns of the white race," implying that it rendered adult blacks dependent, childlike, underdeveloped, and ultimately the same as people with disabilities (regardless of race) who were likewise infantilized. These particular examples of supposed racial difference deviated from the "normal" bodies of nondisabled whites and involved a lack of some quality or another.

--- The Mark of Slavery: Disability, Race, and Gender in Antebellum America

eugenics isnt a thing just yet in this time period but i am starting to see why it took off so strongly

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In addition to congenital vision and physical impairments, more rare conditions sometimes occurred among enslaved infants like conjoined twins. Long met with wonder and astonishment and frequently described as "monstrosities," many twins fused together in utero died at birth, but some occasionally survived. Millie and Christine McKoy, the children of Monemia and Jacob born on Jabez McKay's North Carolina plantation in July 1851, were one such exceptional case. Joined near the pelvis, Millie and Christine survived infancy, lived to be sixty-one years of age (dying only hours apart), and experienced a highly unusual life compared to most enslaved people.

--- The Mark of Slavery: Disability, Race, and Gender in Antebellum America

Hey guys read the article

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In the rhetoric they used to condemn the institution of slavery and its willing apologists, abolitionists displayed their more derisive, loathsome understandings of disability. Slavery, they argued, was a dreadful, disabling institution that kept enslaved people mute, blind, crippled, idiotic, and dependent on the paternalistic charity of slaveholders. It robbed enslaved people "of themselves . .. their very hands and feet, all their muscles, and limbs, and senses, their bodies and minds. " By unjustly stealing the fruits of their labor, it denied bondpeople a key avenue to independence and forced them into a dependent position equated with women and people with disabilities. To accomplish this, it was necessary for slavery to "shut out all light from the mind of the slave and surround him with a thick, impenetrable darkness, in the midst of which he must live and die; and from which his eye can never open. " As Frederick Douglass elaborated, "to make a contented slave, it is necessary to make a thoughtless one . .. to darken his moral and mental vision and . .. annihilate the power of reason." In comparing the experiences of enslaved people to the plight of the Irish, Douglass also emphasized that "there comes no voice from the slave"-in other words, unlike the oppressed Irish, American slaves were entirely mute. Presaging a disturbing claim more familiar by the end of the nineteenth century the sentiment that death was preferable to disability one abolitionist decried the horror of slavery's disabling aspects by rhetorically asking " would you not rather prefer to be met by a highwayman and shot dead... than have your life worn out on a slave plantation?"

Sometimes aboltionists reversed this logic to emphasize that, in spite of slavery's disabling nature, enslaved people were far from disabled. This strategy honed in on an essential weakness in proslavery thoughed. The inherently contradictory claims that blackness signifed innate the sity, abnormality, inferiority, and dependeney. Yet somehow black deople were still the best candidates for lives of endless toil. To counter this, abolitionists sometimes depicted enslaved blacks as independent, competent, able-bodied, and sound minded even as they endured crippling oppression. In literature like Harriet Beecher Stowe's best-selling novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), characters like Uncle Tom and Aunt Chloe were exceptionally industrious, effective, and efficient. Trustworthy, ever steady Uncle Tom, for instance, skillfully and single handedly managed Arthur Shelby's entire plantation while his wife, Chloe, expertly handled her family, home, and kitchen." These depictions recast enslaved people as able, sound, rational, disciplined, and industrious in spite of their oppression.

--- The Mark of Slavery: Disability, Race, and Gender in Antebellum America

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Not coincidentally, the years before the Civil War were precisely when "normal" took on new meaning and variations of it like "normality," "norm," and "normalcy" entered the English language (in 1840, 1849, 1855, and 1857, respectively). Disability's power to stigmatize derived from its relationship to abnormality and its ability to rationalize inequality based on one's real or imagined proximity to it. As disability intertwined with the broader metalanguage of race, it minimized or amplified specific qualities imagined as innate to whiteness or blackness, racializing and delimiting "normal" bodies. Disparaging views of both blackness and disability structured definitions of national identity and freedom, demarcating who could legitimately possess citizenship just as abolitionists and women's rights advocates pressed for its expansion. The tumultuous antebellum years stand out as the era in which these deeply intertwined links first congealed in apparent and easily observable ways as shorthand for the "mark" of slavery. Thus, it is the most logical place to begin exposing and destabilizing this discursive relationship.

--- Jenifer L. Barclay, The Mark of Slavery: Disability. Race, and Gender in Antebellum America

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-- the mark of slavery: disability, race, and gender in antebellum america

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well i mean i guess you guys tried?

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god damn john c calhoun.

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oh wait this is hm.

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Enslaved people with disabilities were also a paradox, in life and in histories about the institution of slavery. They were simultaneously invisible and hypervisible, present and absent, ubiquitous in the historical record but erased, ignored, and obliquely referenced in historical scholarship for decades. The deeply engrained ideology of ableism, as well as the medical and charitable models of disabilitythat objectify, pitty, or seek to "improve" disabled people contributed to this paradox. In the past, the economics of slavery further exacerbated this dynamic by devaluing disabled people in quotidian ways that, at once, rendered them invisible and unimportant but also dramatic and heartbreaking. The contradictions that produce this paradoxical effect also involve larger issues of representation and power. Whose stories are recordedc or remembered? How? Why? By whom? Because enslaved people with disabilities simultaneously occupied at least two ( if not more ) marginalized social identities, the complexities of their experiences only become legible within an intersextional frame work that accounts for this multiplicity. As the historical context changed around them so, too, did their legibility and visibility. During and immediately after the Civil War, the experienceds of people with disabilities on the cusp of freedom, or newly free, grew more obscure. At the same time, the use of disability as a discursive marker for inferiority resurfaced and expanded in potent new ways to legitimize, once again, white dominance in southern slavery.

— The Mark of Slavery, Jenifer L. Barclay