Disability in American slavery

Last updated November 08, 2023

It is estimated that about 9 percent of American slaves were disabled on the eve of the Emancipation Proclamation due to some type of physical, sensory, psychological, neurological, or developmental condition.^[1] This means that roughly 360,000 to 540,000 American slaves had a disability.^[1] In the antebellum age, slaves were described as disabled if their injury or condition prevented them from performing labor, such as blindness, deafness, loss of limbs, and even infertility. Since disabled slaves could not fend for themselves or perform the normal types of slave labor, they usually depended on their masters and mothers to take care of them. In terms of labor, disabled slaves usually found themselves working in the kitchen or in nurseries. Since they could not work as fast as able slaves, disabled slaves were often subject to harsh treatment that included weapons. Often, slave owners would sell off their disabled slaves to doctors who would then perform medical experiments on them. After slavery ended, disabled slaves mostly remained on plantations until the government was able to set up hospitals and asylums to house them.

Definition of disability in slaves

In the antebellum South, the term "disabled" did not just apply to African American slaves who had been born with a mental or physical disability. Rather, slaveholders usually referred to slaves who had been subject to lack of food, harsh penalties, harmful work conditions, or abuse as mentally or physically disabled.^[2] Slaveholders developed the idea of soundness; a slave's soundness depended upon their ability to perform manual labor, their value as a commodity, and lastly their actual health.^[2] Because of this, the term disability described many enslaved African Americans because of the multitude of injuries that left them unable to perform manual labor.^[2] These "injuries" included diseases, such as rickets, pellagra, and scurvy, which caused sight impairment and stunted growth.^[2] Injuries such as fractures, burns, loss of limbs, or head trauma left slaves unable to perform their manual labor which thus labelled them disabled.^[2] One of the most common forms of disability was blindness which could have been caused by birth defects, grueling days in the field, or severe beatings or whippings where the eyes were harmed.^[2] Infertility, or inability to reproduce, categorized women as disabled as they were unable to perform their most important duty.^[2] Along with these disabilities, psychological impairments, neurological problems like epilepsy, old age, and injuries from abuses such as whippings led to slaves being labelled as disabled.^[2]

Life and labor

During childhood, disabled slaves challenged not only slave owners but also their own mothers. Doctors and mothers spent more time providing medical care or attending to their disabled children. Children were often sent away to doctors who performed surgeries to correct their disabilities; owners hoped that the disabled slaves would be restored to working capability. Many disabled children were subject to surgeries that attempted to fix conditions such as "clubbed feet" and blindness. When owners did not pay medical attention to child slaves with disabilities, the role of caretaker fell to their mothers. Along with taking care of disabled children, mothers had to take care of their other children, deal with their declining health caused by age and living conditions, as well as perform their work duties on the plantation. Mothers advocated for their children and often put their disabled child's needs ahead of their duties on the plantation which often resulted in punishment. Despite the struggles that went along with raising a disabled child on a plantation, mothers did not have as much fear of their child being sold or taken away. Sometimes, slaveholding families would even buy disabled children along with their enslaved mothers because they felt pity for the disabled children.^[3]

Slaves with disabilities were subjected to most of the same labor and punishments as other slaves. In terms of labor, slaves with disabilities were involved with cooking, sewing, gardening, and taking care of the children and livestock. Although their tasks were generally limited, it did not mean that their jobs were easier. When it came to cooking, disabled slaves did not avoid hard work as they were expected to wake up before their master and other slaves to cook meals; cooking meals often included the strenuous tasks of grinding meat and gathering wood for fires. Similarly, disabled slaves who worked in the nursery had to deal with little children throughout the day; this was usually too much for old, disabled slaves who were given that job. Despite these more common jobs and tasks, disabled slaves were sometimes given very odd tasks. For example, a blind slave was in charge of driving the breakfast cart out to the fields to feed the other slaves. Some slave owners sold their disabled slaves off to be tradesmen such as tailors or shoemakers. Most slaves regarded tradesmen's lifestyles to be safer than the average plantation slave's lifestyle.^[2]

Treatment

Often, disabled African American slaves were subject to punishments due to their inability to perform tasks. Usually hindered by physical or mental limitations, disabled slaves were incapable of working as fast as other slaves and struggled with the heavy workloads that accompanied slaves that worked in the fields.^[2] Not surprisingly, disabled slaves were subject to corporal punishment such as whippings.^[2] More commonly, slaves with disabilities were neglected rather than punished. Slave owners dealt with older disabled slaves in multiple ways. Slave owners would make sure that older disabled slaves would receive reduced rations.^[2] Sometimes, slave owners would just sell the disabled slaves.^[2] When disabled slaves became "too old", slave owners would often force the slaves to move to cabins or rooms out in the middle of the woods and forced them to fend for themselves.^[2]

Slave owners often sold away slaves with disabilities to doctors who were performing medical research.^[2] Doctors attempted new techniques as well as therapeutic interventions on these disabled slaves; the hope was that these doctors would be able to "fix" the slaves' disabilities which would allow them to help white people with similar disabilities.^[2] Along with general medical research, slaves with disabilities were used as subjects of surgical demonstrations. For example, Georgia physician Crawford Long discovered that sulfuric ether could be used as anesthesia by performing surgeries on disabled African American slaves that included the amputations of their fingers and toes.^[2] Similar to medical research, Long, and other doctors who experimented with disabled slaves, believed that their findings could be used to help white people with the same ailments.^[2] White doctors also studied African American slaves born with congenital birth defects.^[2]

An example of disabled slaves who were subjected to harsh treatment were Christine-Millie McKoy, twins that were born conjoined at the hip.^[4] Before they were two years old, they were sold to a Joseph P. Smith who showcased the girls in carnivals and other events while also allowing them to be evaluated by doctors.^[4] Medical officials were obsessed with the twins' reproductive organs and anuses which led to their "digital rape."^[2]^[4] Throughout their life, the McKoy twins would be showcased all across the United States as well as Europe, kidnapped multiple times, and medically mishandled by medical professionals.^[4]

Civil War and aftermath

During the Civil War, African American slaves, when hearing about Union advancement, abandoned their homes on the plantation to join the Union Army.^[5] However, the Union army sought out able-bodied slaves who could help dig ditches, launder uniforms, and cook meals.^[5] Therefore, disabled slaves who were unable to flee from their plantations were forced to stay enslaved.^[5] Even after the Civil War ended, disabled freed slaves who were unable to enter the workforce were forced to stay on their plantations and work for their masters.^[5] The government decided to focus some of their relief efforts towards those with disabilities which can be seen through Secretary of War E.M. Stanton's comments: "Under any circumstances, and in all large societies, even during a normal and peaceful condition of things, there will be found a certain amount of vagrancy and a certain number of indigent poor, disabled, or improvident, to whom it is a custom and a duty to extend relief."^[5] In March 1865, the US government established the Freedmen's Bureau to help freed African Americans, including disabled former slaves, adjust to freedom and what it entailed.^[5] The Freedmen's Bureau helped the government in terms of disabled persons in two ways: counting the number of disabled people in the South to estimate the amount of fiscal relief needed and setting up asylums and hospitals for disabled former slaves to reside in.^[5] In terms of their first responsibility, from "September 1, 1866 to September 1, 1867, the offices of the Bureau reported 1400 'blind' freed men, 414 'deaf and dumb',1,134 'idiotic or imbecile', 552 'insane', and 251 'club footed.'"^[5] However, these numbers represent the amount of former disabled slaves the Bureau actually saw when in reality, many more disabled slaves were still hung up in their plantations where the Freedmen's Bureau could never have found them.^[5] Secondly, due to the South's refusal to allow African American disabled people into the same asylums as white people, the Freedmen's Bureau set up asylums across the South.^[5] However, many times these asylums did not have enough funding so the Bureau was forced to have disabled African Americans perform tasks to help ends meet.^[5] For example, the Bureau had disabled African Americans work in vegetable gardens, clean laundry, and even join in the construction of facilities.^[5]

Related Research Articles

Samuel Gridley Howe was an American physician, abolitionist, and advocate of education for the blind. He organized and was the first director of the Perkins Institution. In 1824 he had gone to Greece to serve in the revolution as a surgeon; he also commanded troops. He arranged for support for refugees and brought many Greek children back to Boston with him for their education.

Child slavery is the slavery of children. The enslavement of children can be traced back through history. Even after the abolition of slavery, children continue to be enslaved and trafficked in modern times, which is a particular problem in developing countries.

Peon usually refers to a person subject to peonage: any form of wage labor, financial exploitation, coercive economic practice, or policy in which the victim or a laborer (peon) has little control over employment or economic conditions. Peon and peonage can refer to both the colonial period and post-colonial period of Latin America, as well as the period after the end of slavery in the United States, when "Black Codes" were passed to retain African-American freedmen as labor through other means.

Forty acres and a mule was part of Special Field Orders No. 15, a wartime order proclaimed by Union General William Tecumseh Sherman on January 16, 1865, during the American Civil War, to allot land to some freed families, in plots of land no larger than 40 acres (16 ha). Sherman later ordered the army to lend mules for the agrarian reform effort. The field orders followed a series of conversations between Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton and Radical Republican abolitionists Charles Sumner and Thaddeus Stevens following disruptions to the institution of slavery provoked by the American Civil War. Many freed people believed, after being told by various political figures, that they had a right to own the land they had been forced to work as slaves and were eager to control their own property. Freed people widely expected to legally claim 40 acres of land. However, Abraham Lincoln's successor as president, Andrew Johnson, tried to reverse the intent of Sherman's wartime Order No. 15 and similar provisions included in the second Freedmen's Bureau bills.

The Black Codes, sometimes called the Black Laws, were laws which governed the conduct of African Americans. In 1832, James Kent wrote that "in most of the United States, there is a distinction in respect to political privileges, between free white persons and free colored persons of African blood; and in no part of the country do the latter, in point of fact, participate equally with the whites, in the exercise of civil and political rights." Although Black Codes existed before the Civil War and although many Northern states had them, the Southern U.S. states codified such laws in everyday practice. The best known of these laws were passed by Southern states in 1865 and 1866, after the Civil War, in order to restrict African Americans' freedom, and in order to compel them to work for either low or no wages.

During the historical timeline of the Southern United States, the Antebellum Period extended from the conclusion of the War of 1812 to the start of the American Civil War in 1861. This era in the South's history was marked by the prevalent practice of slavery and the associated societal norms it cultivated. Over the course of this period, Southern leaders underwent a transformation in their perspective on slavery. Initially regarded as an awkward and temporary institution, it gradually evolved into a defended concept, with proponents arguing for its positive merits, while simultaneously vehemently opposing the burgeoning abolitionist movement.

Laura Smith Haviland was an American abolitionist, suffragette, and social reformer. She was a Quaker and an important figure in the history of the Underground Railroad.

The health of slaves on American plantations was a matter of concern to both slaves and their owners. Slavery had associated with it the health problems commonly associated with poverty. It was to the economic advantage of owners to keep their working slaves healthy, and those of reproductive age reproducing. Those who could not work or reproduce because of illness or age were sometimes abandoned by their owners, expelled from plantations, and left to fend for themselves.

The institution of slavery in North America existed from the earliest years of the colonial history of the United States until 1865 when the Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery throughout the United States except as punishment for a crime. It was also abolished among the sovereign Indian tribes in Indian Territory by new peace treaties which the US required after the Civil War.

A freedman or freedwoman is a formerly enslaved person who has been released from slavery, usually by legal means. Historically, slaves were freed by manumission, emancipation, or self-purchase. A fugitive slave is a person who escaped enslavement by fleeing.

Seasoning, or the Seasoning, was the period of adjustment that slave traders and slaveholders subjected African slaves to following their arrival in the Americas. While modern scholarship has occasionally applied this term to the brief period of acclimatization undergone by European immigrants to the Americas, it most frequently and formally referred to the process undergone by enslaved people. Slave traders used the term "seasoning" to refer to the process of adjusting the enslaved Africans to the new climate, diet, geography, and ecology of the Americas. The term applied to both the physical acclimatization of the enslaved person to the environment, as well as that person's adjustment to a new social environment, labor regimen, and language. Slave traders and owners believed that if slaves survived this critical period of environmental seasoning, they were less likely to die and the psychological element would make them more easily controlled. This process took place immediately after the arrival of enslaved people during which their mortality rates were particularly high. These "new" or "saltwater" slaves were described as "outlandish" on arrival. Those who survived this process became "seasoned", and typically commanded a higher price in the market. For example, in eighteenth century Brazil, the price differential between "new" and "seasoned" slaves was about fifteen percent.

Slave breeding was the practice in slave states of the United States of slave owners to systematically force the reproduction of slaves to increase their profits. It included coerced sexual relations between male slaves and women or girls, forced pregnancies of female slaves, and favoring women or young girls who could produce a relatively large number of children. The objective was to increase the number of slaves without incurring the cost of purchase, and to fill labor shortages caused by the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">History of slavery in West Virginia</span>

The western part of Virginia which became West Virginia was settled in two directions, north to south from Pennsylvania, Maryland and New Jersey and from east to west from eastern Virginia and North Carolina. The earliest arrival of enslaved people was in the counties of the Shenandoah Valley, where prominent Virginia families built houses and plantations. The earliest recorded slave presence was about 1748 in Hampshire County on the estate of Thomas Fairfax, 6th Lord Fairfax of Cameron, which included 150 enslaved people. By the early 19th century, slavery had spread to the Ohio River up to the northern panhandle.

The 1842 Slave Revolt in the Cherokee Nation was the largest escape of a group of slaves to occur in the Cherokee Nation, in what was then Indian Territory. The slave revolt started on November 15, 1842, when a group of 20 African-Americans enslaved by the Cherokee escaped and tried to reach Mexico, where slavery had been abolished in 1829. Along their way south, they were joined by 15 slaves escaping from the Creek Nation in Indian Territory.

Slavery in Virginia began with the capture and enslavement of Native Americans during the early days of the English Colony of Virginia and through the late eighteenth century. They primarily worked in tobacco fields. Africans were first brought to colonial Virginia in 1619, when 20 Africans from present-day Angola arrived in Virginia aboard the ship The White Lion.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Slavery during the American Civil War</span>

Slavery played the central role during the American Civil War. The primary catalyst for secession was slavery, especially Southern political leaders' resistance to attempts by Northern antislavery political forces to block the expansion of slavery into the western territories. Slave life went through great changes, as the South saw Union Armies take control of broad areas of land. During and before the war, enslaved people played an active role in their own emancipation, and thousands of enslaved people escaped from bondage during the war.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Plantation complexes in the Southern United States</span> History of plantations in the American South

Plantation complexes were common on agricultural plantations in the Southern United States from the 17th into the 20th century. The complex included everything from the main residence down to the pens for livestock. Until the abolition of slavery, such plantations were generally self-sufficient settlements that relied on the forced labor of enslaved people.

The treatment of slaves in the United States often included sexual abuse and rape, the denial of education, and punishments like whippings. Families were often split up by the sale of one or more members, usually never to see or hear of each other again.

Slavery in Cuba was a portion of the larger Atlantic Slave Trade that primarily supported Spanish plantation owners engaged in the sugarcane trade. It was practised on the island of Cuba from the 16th century until it was abolished by Spanish royal decree on October 7, 1886.

Marriage of enslaved people in the United States was generally not legal before the American Civil War (1861–1865). Enslaved African Americans were considered chattel legally, and they were denied human or civil rights until the United States abolished slavery with the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. Both state and federal laws denied, or rarely defined, rights for enslaved people.

References

1 2 Barclay, J. L. (2021). The Mark of Slavery: Disability, Race, and Gender in Antebellum America. University of Illinois Press.
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 Boster, Dea Hadley (2013). African American Slavery and Disability: Bodies, Property and Power in the Antebellum South, 1800-1860. Studies in African American History and Culture. Taylor & Francis. ISBN 978-0415537247.
↑ Barclay, Jenifer L. (2014). "Mothering the 'Useless': Black Motherhood, Disability, and Slavery". Women, Gender, and Families of Color. 2 (2): 115–140. doi:10.5406/womgenfamcol.2.2.0115. S2CID 145722769. Project MUSE 557696.
1 2 3 4 Berry, Daina Ramey; Gross, Kali Nicole (2020). A Black Women's History of the United States. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. ISBN 978-0-8070-0199-8.
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 Downs, James T. (31 July 2008). "The Continuation of Slavery: The Experience of Disabled Slaves during Emancipation". Disability Studies Quarterly. 28 (3). doi: 10.18061/dsq.v28i3.112 .

This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.

[:4-1] 1 2 Barclay, J. L. (2021). The Mark of Slavery: Disability, Race, and Gender in Antebellum America. University of Illinois Press.

[:1-2] 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 Boster, Dea Hadley (2013). African American Slavery and Disability: Bodies, Property and Power in the Antebellum South, 1800-1860. Studies in African American History and Culture. Taylor & Francis. ISBN 978-0415537247.

[:3-3] Barclay, Jenifer L. (2014). "Mothering the 'Useless': Black Motherhood, Disability, and Slavery". Women, Gender, and Families of Color. 2 (2): 115–140. doi:10.5406/womgenfamcol.2.2.0115. S2CID 145722769. Project MUSE 557696.

[:2-4] 1 2 3 4 Berry, Daina Ramey; Gross, Kali Nicole (2020). A Black Women's History of the United States. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. ISBN 978-0-8070-0199-8.

[:0-5] 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 Downs, James T. (31 July 2008). "The Continuation of Slavery: The Experience of Disabled Slaves during Emancipation". Disability Studies Quarterly. 28 (3). doi: 10.18061/dsq.v28i3.112 .

[1]

[2]

[3]

[4]

[5]