Unfit for Bondage: Disability and African American Slavery in the United States, 1800-1860.

Abstract

Concepts of race and disability were mutually constituted in nineteenth-century American culture. Antebellum observers described racial differences in terms of physical or mental disability, particularly in the context of the slavery debate. African American bodies in bondage 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 free society and required enslavement to thrive, whereas abolitionists argued that bondage itself was crippling to African Americans.

Disability featured prominently in many different aspects of slaveholding society. Assumptions about slave able-bodiedness or “soundness” were linked with ideas about manageability. Thus, behavioral expectations influenced how masters applied labels of disability to their human chattel, as well as what measures they used to control their bondspeople. However, slaveholders and other white authorities (including overseers, traders, prospective buyers, judges, and physicians) assessed and valued enslaved bodies in complicated ways, drawing on emotional or aesthetic reactions to “disabling” characteristics as well as more utilitarian considerations. Slaves also actively participated in disability “meaning making” projects at different sites in slave society, including plantations, auctions, courtrooms, and abolitionist propaganda. Many slaves strategically displayed, hid, exaggerated, or feigned disabilities to negotiate the terms of their bondage by avoiding labor, preventing undesirable sales, or attempting escape.