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

The chapter opens with Adeline, who is auctioned with her 10-week-old son.

Child-bearing women were placed on the market as both “real and potential mothers” (11). Partus Sequitur Ventrem is the 1662 Virginia legislation that defined slavery as matrilineal and thus “inherited.” The law sanctioned the valuing of women’s bodies based on their ability to reproduce. Enslaved women of child-bearing age are often (but not always) valued for their reproductive capacity; their children are born into commodification and commodified before even being born. It is not just the legal sanctioning of this commodification, however, but enslaved women’s memories and thoughts about being sold with which Berry is interested.

Most scholars have analyzed the pricing of enslaved people through studying male agricultural workers at their most productive. U. B. Phillips was the first scholar to diligently analyze this process. Working in the early 20th century, he argued that women’s value was not dependent on their reproductive capacity. In addition, he thought that the profit that would come from children was offset by the labor lost during pregnancy and nursing and by the frequent death of mother and/or child in childbirth.

Berry complicates Phillips’s analysis. Specifically, the late 1700s approached enslaved women’s reproduction differently than in the immediate antebellum era. While reproduction was seen as a valuable resource by some enslavers in the 1700s, many enslavers of this period did not want to own childbearing women or their potential children. Nonetheless, women’s reproductive capacity was always a factor in valuation, along with their labor skills and their physical appearance. In addition, ethnicity (American or African born) and location (urban or rural) mattered. A value, whether positive or negative, was always placed on future children a woman might have.

With the 1793 invention of the cotton gin and the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, enslavers moved west, with cities on the east coast such as Richmond now functioning as sources of enslaved people then trafficked to New Orleans, which became the biggest slave-trading city of the 19th century in the Deep South. In 1808 the trans-Atlantic trading of enslaved people was abolished in the United States, making women’s reproduction essential to the maintenance of American slavery.

Determining women’s thoughts about this commodification is much more difficult than determining imposed monetary values. Eighteenth-century accounts almost never contain women’s direct voices, so much of the record of women’s experiences and thoughts comes by way of their male relatives and, most often, enslavers.

Berry turns to the story of Tamar, as told by Moses Grandy of North Carolina, a woman who seemed to have a greater attachment to her husband than to her children. Born around 1780, Tamar was repeatedly auctioned because her owner thought she was having children too fast, and she repeatedly returned to a patch of woods and her mother’s home, where she sometimes lived under the floor and sometimes spent nights with her husband in the woods. She had three children in these same woods. Berry refers to research that points to gendered differences in self liberation, with women tending to choose “truancy” over a complete separation and flight from families, as men more often did. Yet Berry points out that, like Tamar, women often fled in search of their partners, too, and attention to ties with partners have often been discounted in favor of maternal ties.

Berry also points out different historical uses of the terms “breeding wench” and “breeder.” In the late 18th and early 19th centuries the terms had “broader, perhaps less offensive meanings” than in the antebellum period (19), with “breeding” a descriptor for women as reproductive beings and also raisers of children. In the mid- and late 19th century, when reproduction was more profitable, the terms signified the commodification of reproduction itself. To be a “breeder” was to be approached as a nonhuman animal, whose reproduction continues to be legally codified as exploitable and profitable.

Berry outlines three categories of enslaved women in the antebellum period: breeders, fancies (high-priced women considered beautiful), and skilled laborers. Skilled labor fell under the categories of house servants, field hands, cooks, laundresses, and seamstresses. Family separation was particularly common during the late-antebellum period. Health also determined the value of child-bearing-aged women, including acquired immunity to viruses such as smallpox, cholera, and yellow fever.

Chapter 2 considers the valuation of infants and children (up to 10 years old). It opens with a Northern white man, Nehemiah Adams, and his description of an infant, Rachel, being sold in 1854. Rachel is handed to an enslaved man, who is instructed to deliver her to the auction block. Adams first encounters this man sitting on the courthouse steps waiting for the auction to begin at noon. Berry asks various questions about this man’s state of mind.

Adams himself did not stay to see the auction, but he later learned that Rachel had sold for $140. The owner had sold Rachel’s mother before she gave birth and thus had claimed rights to the child, if born.

Berry also asks questions about the experiences and thinking of children and what it meant to them to be sold. These are difficult questions to begin to answer. There is almost no first-hand evidence from children themselves; most of the accounts of the experience of being sold as a child come from adults’ memories. Nonetheless, many early childhood memories are associated with trauma, with vivid memories often grounded in the most difficult experiences.

There are various forms of valuation of enslaved people, no matter what age. Appraisals were valuations done for estate inventories, wills, insurance records, and broadsides used to advertise upcoming auctions. These appraisals are generally lower than the market value that occurs at the moment of sale, whether that be through a public auction or private sale. When they recall their valuation, they are almost always referring to the price they heard at auction. Most enslaved people were not aware of their appraised value, as these determinations were not usually made in their presence, although some appraisals and the majority of auctions involved a physical exam.

Generally, by the age of 10 most enslaved children were aware of their commodification, even if they were not aware of their appraised or market value. Many narratives of enslaved people trace the first decade of life as one that moves from an often-joyful childhood to the painful awareness of enslavement and the full shift into forced labor by the age of 10. White children, too, learn their role in enslavement and are taught slavery through books such as The Child’s Book on Slavery; or, Slavery Made Plain. Wilma King’s Stolen Childhood is the guiding scholarly work on childhood in slavery.

Gender was irrelevant in the valuation of children up to age 10. Scholars have generally argued that children were not usually separated from their parents before the age of 10. In Alabama, for example, section 2056 of the “Master and Slave” statute states that enslaved children must be kept with their mothers unless a sale is levied against the owner’s debt. In Louisiana it was illegal to sell enslaved children under the age of 14. This prohibition is linked to the illegality of separating husbands and wives if owned by the same person, with the additional statement that children should not be separated from their parents (before the age of 14). It is unclear, however, how often this was enforced, though there is much evidence of enslaved families being brought to auction to be sold as a family unit. There is little evidence indicating whether families remained intact during auctioning itself, however. Children born to enslaved and imprisoned women were often considered property of the state.

Berry examines the valuation records at Cane Brake Plantation in Adams County, Mississippi, and finds that young children had “relatively stable lives” (50). There is a pattern to the meticulous record keeping done by James Green Carson, the owner of Cane Brake and an enslaver and physician who valued the people he enslaved on his plantation twice a year. In looking at these records, Berry finds that from 1856 to 1858 each child under the age of one was valued at $25, and upon turning one year old valuation rose to $75. Each subsequent year up to the age of 10 value increased by $25 increments. By the age of 10, then, both girls and boys were valued at $350.

Most of the scholarship on physician enslavers focuses on the medical care these physicians did or did not provide and not on their enslavement itself. It is uncertain whether physician enslavers provided better medical care or not. The relation between medicine, the sciences, and slavery is a mutually supporting one that Berry examines in more detail later in the book.

On one South Carolina plantation there is a record of an enslaved man being paid by his owner to exhume a two-year-old’s body to be sold to physicians in Philadelphia for medical research. Professors at the University of Virginia regularly paid $20 to $30 for these child “subjects.” Alternatively, some enslaved children were buried in cemeteries, such as Laurel Grove in Savannah, Georgia.

The Southern Mutual Life Insurance Company (SMLIC) established policies on enslaved people before and during the Civil War. More than 1,000 enslavers took out these policies and maintained them through the Civil War. In looking at these records, Berry found 43 children aged 0 to 10 covered under SMLIC policies between 1856 and 1863.