1 - Valuable Bodies
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 December 2014
Summary
A darkey’s worth a hundred dollars as soon as he kin holler – dat’s what de white folks say bout here.
Virginia slave to James Redpath, 1854Recalling his life as a slave before the Civil War, William Henry Singleton closed his short autobiography (published in 1922) by expressing infinite gratitude to Abraham Lincoln for emancipating “me and all the rest of my race.” The former bondsman considered all of the privileges and responsibilities that came with freedom a blessing, but above all else he was clearly most grateful for the acknowledgment by the United States government of his humanity – in his words, for the right “not to be bought and sold any more…not to be treated as things without souls any more, but as human beings.” Having been deported from his North Carolina home to Georgia as a young boy, Singleton knew firsthand what it was like to be bought and sold like a “thing” without a soul. That his definition of freedom entailed first and foremost the right not to be traded like an inanimate object is hardly surprising – for millions of African Americans, the commodification of slave bodies symbolized the atrocities of antebellum slavery.
Such dehumanization was, of course, nothing new in the nineteenth-century South: the selling of bondspeople domestically from one slaveholder to another had existed in the colonial period, and the immediate and (potentially) permanent reallocation of individual slaves’ labor across space underpinned the very institution of chattel slavery in the first place. What did set the antebellum period apart, however, was the sheer magnitude of domestic forced removal. The frequency with which enslaved people were relocated increased dramatically in the early nineteenth century, and by the outbreak of the Civil War, the scale of forced migration in the southern states had truly skyrocketed. For a variety of reasons, more American-born slaves from the so-called “migration generations” – those who lived between the Revolutionary War and the Civil War – found themselves uprooted and removed from their homes than ever before. Few African Americans emerged unscathed when emancipation finally came; those who had not been forcibly removed themselves usually had family members or friends who had been.
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- Slavery and Forced Migration in the Antebellum South , pp. 17 - 55Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2014
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