The Mark of Slavery

Reviewed by: The Mark of Slavery: Disability, Race, and Gender in Antebellum America by Jenifer L. Barclay Jonathan S. Jones (bio) The Mark of Slavery: Disability, Race, and Gender in Antebellum America. By Jenifer L. Barclay. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2021. Pp. 242. Paper, $28.00.) In The Mark of Slavery, Jenifer L. Barclay makes a powerful and well-supported case for the importance of disability as an analytical lens for [End Page 558] the study of slavery. This book is a significant one for scholars interested in the intertwined histories of disability, slavery, and medicine during the Civil War era. Specifically, Barclay argues that Blackness and disability became overlapping, mutually dependent social, medical, and intellectual constructs in antebellum America. Moreover, antebellum cultural, medical, and legal discourse “tethered blackness to disability, defectiveness, and dependency” (1). Barclay’s key intervention in the historiography is her assertion that previous scholarship on antebellum slavery has overlooked or medicalized disability. Likewise, most scholarship on disability history largely neglects slavery. Instead, Barclay calls for disability to be taken seriously in historians’ analysis of slavery alongside race and gender. The Mark of Slavery thus enhances foundational work on slavery and health by Todd Savitt, Sharla Fett, and Deirdre Cooper Owens in which the experiences and meanings of disability among enslaved people are referenced but not the main focus.1 Barclay’s work also fits squarely into the “new” disability history, which takes a social and cultural history approach to a subject often read exclusively through medical history. Starting from this foundation, Barclay marshals a wide range of sources—including legal texts, medical journals, plantation and tax records, abolitionist and proslavery literature, and WPA ex-slave narratives—to show how ideas about disability and its embodied experience profoundly shaped enslaved people’s lives and the institution of slavery. A broadly focused regional approach bolsters Barclay’s analysis. Barclay has managed to draw from sources spanning the South, including examples from the Upper South locales of Virginia, Maryland, Kentucky, and North Carolina, along with some from such Lower South states as South Carolina, Georgia, Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, and Texas. Considering how much the conditions of slavery varied by place and time in the antebellum South, I would have welcomed more explicit comparisons between these regions. But overall, the broad regional scope of the book is a strength, since it allows Barclay to incorporate more of the hard-to-find evidence about disability among enslaved people that she has unearthed. A narrower focus might have seen this valuable material left on the cutting room floor. The first and second chapters are the heart of the book. Barclay observes that some 9 percent of enslaved people in the antebellum South were classified as “unsound,” enslavers’ preferred term for the disabled. Many enslaved people’s bodies were damaged by the brutal and unsafe working and living conditions of slavery, while other enslaved people were born with congenital conditions perceived as disabilities. In either case disabled [End Page 559] enslaved people were often “devalued and dismissed by slaveholders who deemed them worthless” (10). For this reason, enslavers and doctors subjected disabled enslaved people to various medical procedures, tantamount to torture, with the goal of restoring bodies to “soundness” and salability. Jarringly, slaveholders—whose behavior was in many cases the cause of enslaved peoples’ disabilities—often “charged,” or claimed, care for disabled slaves as a tax write-off, while pointing to their supposed benevolence to buttress claims of paternalism. Yet precisely because they were devalued in economic terms, “slaves with disabilities occupied a marginalized but uniquely empowered social space.” For example, Barclay shows how supposedly “worthless” disabled enslaved people escaped sale and thus “represented stability and continuity” for families that were so often split apart by the domestic slave trade (10). Moreover, unlike white slaveholding communities, enslaved southern communities often lionized disability and imbued the disabled with special spiritual roles. These opposite conceptions of disability serve as powerful illustrations of the socially constructed nature of disability and ability. Barclay’s prodigious research has also allowed her to recover the often hidden, but nonetheless moving and important, bonds and communities that disabled enslaved people formed among themselves. In the three remaining chapters, Barclay

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