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.

• African American Slavery and Disability Bodies, Property, and Power in the Antebellum South, 1800–1860 7
• Copyright 8
• Contents 11
• List of Figures 13
• Acknowledgments 15
• 1 Introduction: “Here Are the Marks Yet” 17
• Part I: Bodies 31
  • 2 The Dual Stigma of Race and Disability in Antebellum America 33
  • 3 Sources of “Unsoundness” in African American Slaves 50
• Part II: Property 69
  • 4 Labor and Expectation in the Lives of Slaves with Disabilities 71
  • 5 Disability, Value, and the Language of Slave Sales 90
• Part III: Power 109
  • 6 Disability, Mastery, and Power Dynamics in the Antebellum South 111
  • 7 Epilogue and Conclusion: Seeing “Moses” 135