55 pages 1 hour read

The Price for Their Pound of Flesh: The Value of the Enslaved, from Womb to Grave, in the Building of a Nation

Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2017

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Themes

External Valuation (Commodification) and Internal Valuation (Soul Value) Within Slavery

Content Warning: This section discusses the system of race-based slavery in the United States, the commodification of enslaved people, execution, sexual assault, rape, and trafficking in human corpses.

Berry considers the systemic exploitation of slavery in its most obvious and most quantifiable form: commodification. Her research pays attention to the ways, then, that the economic infrastructure of slavery determines the monetary value of enslaved people. There were standards by which they were appraised, for example, and they were often the main source of enslavers’ wealth. An enslaved person was, moreover, economically “liquid,” easily converted to cash if the enslaver preferred money over labor.

There were standards for appraising the external value of enslaved people, including the “soundness” or “unsoundness” that was determined by physicians, who facilitated the process of appraisal and even advised insurance companies on the determination of value for enslaver compensation. Berry also examines the relation between individual enslavers and the enslaved people on their property by way of plantation ledgers in which enslavers kept records of these valuations but also included notes next to the names of enslaved people, sometimes regarding their individual personalities.

The determination of external value, whether at appraisal or through a determination of market value at auction or private sale, when value was generally higher than at appraisal, was violently imposed. While Berry is interested in how this external value was determined and thus spends time examining, for example, how women’s reproductive capacity was valued differently across historical periods and geographical regions, her passion lies with the ways enslaved people determined their own internal value, which she calls soul value. “Soul value” and its various manifestations include but are not limited to organization and participation in rebellions, flight from slavery, and learning to read and write.

Crucially, this internal valuation is formed in relation to the external valuation. While most enslaved people would not have been aware of their specific appraisal value and would only know their market value if they had been auctioned and heard the final bid or were told what they were sold for at a private selling, they were generally aware of the fact of their commodification by the age of 10. The relation between the two values—external and internal—changes throughout the life stages and is specific to each individual.

Some enslaved people were destroyed by the system of slavery and their commodification and were unable to compete with this external value through the cultivation of internal soul value, and they suffered what Berry describes as a social death. Others attempted to navigate their external value, even attempting to change that value. Others refused the external value and insisted on liberation, even if it meant death.

Working with those enslaved people who did not write their own first-person accounts, Berry asks challenging questions regarding, for example, whether hearing a high external value on the auction block could have potentially been a source of pride for an enslaved person, despite the direct experience of commodification.

As enslaved people aged, their external value usually dropped unless they had a particular skill that was not affected by age, as manual labor was. Once enslaved people lost their external value, their internal value—if high—was often able to “overcome” the external value, and some were able to finally secure their freedom.

The Relation Between Medicine and Slavery

The 18th- and 19th-century domestic cadaver trade placed an external value on enslaved people, even after death, procuring these bodies either through sale or through the robbing of graves to be used for dissection in medical schools. Enslaved people had their own ideas about what happened after death, and the cadaver trade dismissed these ideas and desires, obtaining these corpses without their or their families’ consent, treating them in death as they had been treated in life—as something to use.

The study of medicine was professionalizing during the late 18th and through the 19th centuries, and this professionalization occurred, in part, through the domestic cadaver trade. Cadavers were deemed necessary for anatomy instruction and research. While these bodies may have helped students to learn anatomy, the exploitation that enabled this “hands-on” teaching maintained violent ideologies of prejudice, most obviously systemic racism but also classism and ableism, as the poor, criminalized, and disabled were also trafficked.

The bodies of certain populations were thus deemed appropriate and forever available for scientific penetration and exploitation while other populations remained secure from scientific exploitation. Many members of the medical community, wanting to avoid any kind of “payback” after their own death, went to great lengths to avoid their own corpses becoming specimens, which helped to catalyze the cremation industry.

Students therefore learned, in their anatomy classes, which populations could be exploited for science and which populations were to be served by science. Dissection depended on prejudice and taught prejudice.

When considered within the broader context of the “the global history of anatomical education, the cadaver trade functioned along familiar routes” (157). Berry is sympathetic toward physicians who were “doing as their mentors had trained them” (157), yet at the same time she insists that the “the disrespect” of Black, poor, and disadvantaged lives must be foregrounded.

The exploitation of the most vulnerable humans by science has a long history, both in the vulnerable populations it chooses to exploit and in the privileged populations for whom its research is often inequitably and narrowly designed. The propensity of science to harm the most vulnerable in the name of “the greater good” continues to, ironically, undermine public health, as medical professionals are often rightfully not trusted. The abuses of the cadaver trade are part of the larger enduring problem of scientific hubris and exploitation, including not only humans but also animals.

Foregrounding the Manifestation of Soul Value and Enslaved Intellectual Life

Berry is a historian not only of slavery but also of enslaved people. In investigating the ways that commodification “touched every facet of enslaved people’s births, lives, and afterlives” (2), she also seeks to present an “intellectual history of enslaved people’s thoughts, expressions, feelings, and reactions to their commodification” (2).

Berry repeatedly stresses the difference between a consideration of enslaved people’s experiences and their thinking, emphasizing that historians have tended to pay much more attention to the former, with few historians asking, “What did the enslaved think?” (4).

Berry’s emphasis on enslaved intellectual lives occurs by way of her consideration of “soul value,” or the cultivation of self-worth in relation to the external commodification imposed by chattel slavery. The intellectual history she provides revolves around those she determines to have cultivated and manifested a deep soul value, and she therefore pays sustained attention to those who most dramatically resisted not just commodification but the very institution of slavery itself. The only developed “case histories,” for example, are those of participants in the rebellions of Nat Turner and John Brown, which are similar in their direct, explicit, and dramatic resistance and manifestation of deep soul value.

Despite Berry’s interest in gender and women’s history, there is little development of the intellectual lives of enslaved women, in part because, as she explains, there are fewer first-person texts written by enslaved women. Also important to consider is that there are fewer secondary sources documenting the thinking of enslaved women. While Berry carefully considers the vicissitudes of the commodification of women of child-bearing age, for example, the manifestations of soul value and the intellectual (as opposed to embodied) lives of women of any age remain obscure.

The gendered dynamics of the different ways soul value manifests are critical to consider, too. The most dramatic manifestations of soul value and intellectual life—as seen in the rebellions of enslaved people that Berry lingers over—are generally specific to men. As a result of their public and political nature, these acts of resistance received attention that other less dramatic manifestations of soul value perhaps did not and thus generated textual accounts and other historical sources, which in turn make them easier to study. On a related note, Berry does not consider the intellectual lives of those who struggled to cultivate and manifest soul value and to resist slavery (and who suffered, in varying degrees, a “social death”), and this is an area that continues to require more scholarly attention.

Nonetheless, Berry’s insistence on attempting this difficult work opens opportunities for other scholars to think through the ways that an intellectual history and consideration of soul value can be expanded through the frameworks she provides.

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