The Mark of Slavery

Jenifer Barclay's The Mark of Slavery: Disability, Race, and Gender in Antebellum America stakes an important claim in the growing field of disability history and provides a simultaneously concise and complex analysis of the intersectionality of disability with social categories like race, gender, and class. In addition to reiterating earlier scholarship on the widespread existence of slave disability, and how blackness and disability constructs developed in tandem with one another, the author also shines direct light on “the symbiosis between racism and ableism” (p. 8), emphasizing the reflexivity of both racial and disability constructs. As Barclay argues, “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” (p. 9). At the same time, however, the author identifies racism and ableism in various political discourses and describes how both pro- and antislavery advocates relied on common assumptions about race and disability to make their arguments. Indeed, “across the political spectrum, antebellum Americans persistently wrapped the pliable, emotive rhetoric of disability around race, often invoking dominant ideas about masculinity and femininity in the process” (p. 2).The book traces the complex origins of these ideas in Enlightenment philosophy, West African cultural norms and enslaved communities, nineteenth-century medical science and disease classification, medicolegal developments, political developments, and popular culture during the industrial revolution (p. 7). Chapters 1 and 2 focus mainly on incidence and experiences of slave disability, then the book expands its view in Chapter 3 to argue that constructs of disability played a key role in the rise of southern medical and legal exceptionalism in the antebellum era. At no point in that period did a “fixed” body of law or medicine apply to the institution across the entire South, but Barclay identifies compelling examples of the “circular logic [that] presumed deficiency and defectiveness based on race” (p. 67) informing southern legal discourse, including slave codes, property rights, and manumission laws. Disability and able-bodiedness also became key elements in political debates over slavery. As Barclay argues in Chapter 4, proslavery advocates “failed to develop a cohesive, convincing racial ideology around notions of disability,” yet “far more successfully wielded disability as a rhetorical weapon in their scathing attacks on abolitionists” (p. 105). Chapter 5 is relatively brief but includes notable examples of disability and racial constructs developing in tandem on antebellum American stages. What emerges is a well-researched and poignant discussion of how ideas about disability, bondage, and blackness have influenced American medicine, politics, law, and entertainment as well as individual, family, and community experiences with disability.Barclay's work pays close attention to emotion and interpersonal relations, identifying disability as both a social force and individual lived experience that humanizes her research subjects and emphasizes their agency, making “a broad analysis of how disability informed power dynamics at the individual and structural levels” (p. 12). As the author points out, “ignoring the presence of [disabling] conditions in enslaved people's lives casts all historical actors as nondisabled and imagines the ‘universal’ slave experience as one that unfolded in an unchanging, fully functional body” (p. 16). Chapter 2 makes a particularly strong intervention for the unique roles of slaves with disabilities as “figures of continuity” in communities constantly threated with disruption (p. 38). Barclay utilizes fascinating case studies from antebellum plantation records to discuss how disabled slaves occupied fluid categories and used their liminal status to their advantage, such as the “chargeable” female spinners and weavers on a plantation in Mount Airy, Virginia (pp. 44–45). At times, the author faces frustrating limitations in the primary record of slave experiences and must rely on speculations about what historical actors “likely” or “probably” experienced (pp. 21, 60, 61). Nonetheless, the discussion is wonderfully nuanced, identifying both positive and negative reactions to perceived disability in a variety of primary documents written from perspectives of slavers and the enslaved. Furthermore, Barclay pinpoints how slave disability clashed with “long-standing American traditions that treasured individualism, hard work, and progress” (p. 99), which took on new meanings in the nascent industrial period. In the early nineteenth century, the rise of industrial labor and immigration influenced significant changes in American social class structure and, as recent scholars like Sarah Rose have argued, those changes went hand-in-hand with ableist constructs.1 This places Barclay's work in dialogue with a broader, interdisciplinary scope of current disability history and labor history in the United States.The Mark of Slavery also seeks to illuminate a close link between southern law and the development of “states’ rights medicine” in the nineteenth-century South, although this claim is somewhat less developed and relies heavily on the writings of Samuel Cartwright and Josiah Nott (pp. 86–93). While both men certainly were prolific authors, scholarly debates over southern medical distinctiveness have questioned their influence on southern medical practice.2 Barclay's claim that “a healthy ‘dose of law’ fueled southern medicine, which further drew on the authority of science” (p. 94) lacks the wonderful nuance and complexity of the book's discussion of lived realities. Furthermore, gender seems to be less of a through-line in the book than the title suggests, although the book contains many fascinating examples that highlight the relationships between gender roles and disability constructs, including discussions of disabled women's roles as caregivers (pp. 41–43) and the blind slave Henry Parker's description of his responsibility for female relatives (pp. 121–23). Some intriguing cases are given relatively little discussion, particularly the case of little person Thomas Dilward, whom Barclay describes in the book's introduction as “one of only two Black men to perform in blackface before the Civil War . . . as a cross-dressing, gender-bending fiddler” (p. 12) but appears only in a few pages at the end of Chapter 5. Notwithstanding these critiques, this book is an engaging, useful, and accessible addition to the growing canon of disability history, and the history of race and power dynamics more generally, in the United States

Ableism · Disability studies · Masculinity · Political science · Politics · Racism · Rhetoric · Scholarship · Sociology · Gender Studies · Historical Psychiatry and Medical Practices · Law

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