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

External value is the monetary value imposed on enslaved people. This value shifts throughout life and generally reaches its peak in early to middle adulthood. External value is determined by age, aesthetics, skills, region, historical period, and ethnicity (American or African born). This external value was periodically determined, most often through appraisals that were done for the purposes of enslaver records, insurance, wills, and broadsides advertising upcoming auctions. External values were often determined before conception in the valuing of women of child-bearing age in anticipation of children they might have. Once born, value generally increased incrementally until the age of ten, when almost all enslaved children were forced to work. Monetary value generally increased until the late twenties or thirties, when it then began to decrease. However, skilled enslaved people generally kept or even had an increase in their external value as they moved into middle and old age.

This external value was generally determined either through appraisal or at the moment of sale (market value). Appraisal value was usually slightly lower than market value; many appraisals were conducted through a physical exam, and almost all auctions included a physical exam, often a spectacle. These exams were often facilitated by physicians, who thus directly participated in the commodification of enslaved people while alive and again while dead, in the cadaver trade.

Ghost value is Berry’s term for the postmortem, external valuation of the dead. While this monetary value is generally much lower in death than in life—unless the enslaved person was very old and unable to labor in any kind of way—it is also not correlated to the external value in life. In fact, conditions that would lower external value in life might raise external value in death, such as disease and lactation, which enable unique dissection opportunities to observe specific bodily or disease processes.

Partus sequitur ventrem is Latin for “that which is born follows the womb.” Passed in 1662 in colonial Virginia, it was a legal doctrine that established that slavery would be inherited through the maternal line. Thus, any child born to an enslaved woman was born into the status of slave, which was permanent. This meant that while the child’s legal status was always determined by the mother, legal possession of the child resided with the enslaver. The doctrine also meant that any children born to white women, even if the father was enslaved, were born free.

This legal doctrine can be traced back to ancient Rome’s doctrines regarding slavery.

Resurrectionist, broadly speaking, is someone who resurrects or brings someone back to life. In the case of the 19th-century cadaver trade in the United States, a resurrectionist refers to grave robbers, people who would break into coffins to take recently buried corpses so that they could be dissected in medical schools or for researchers.

The term “resurrectionist” captures the scientific use of these bodies, in which enslaved corpses are wanted precisely because they are recognized as human and thus instructive for the teaching of human anatomy and medicine. This recognition of humanity arguably confers a status on enslaved people in death that did not exist in life. While a resurrectionist literally pulls a corpse up out of the ground, a resurrectionist also pulls a corpse into recognition as human, “resurrecting” the humanity that had been denied. At the same time, this scientific recognition of biological humanity is only achieved through the disrespect of the moral and spiritual lives of enslaved humans, so that their biological humanity is used against them.

The intellectual lives of resurrectionists—and how they thought about their work—is yet another subject that demands scholarly attention.

Soul value is Berry’s term for the internalized value of the self that an enslaved person both intrinsically feels and cultivates. This internal value exists in resistance to the external value that is imposed on enslaved people through their commodification or external, monetary valuation.