Draft for coursework, 2019
Dr. Daina Ramey Berry’s prizewinning The Price for Their Pound of Flesh: The Value of the Enslaved, from Womb to Grave, in the Building of a Nation (2017) relentlessly pursues the human story so commonly absent from an economic history of slavery. Distinguished historian of women and slavery at the University of Texas at Austin, Dr. Berry sits among contemporaries such as Edward Baptist, Sven Beckert, and Stanley Engerman, the latter whose deeply problematic and highly controversial Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery (1974) in many ways lays to rest. A beneficiary of Engerman and Fogel’s collected data, Berry developed her own extensive database of price indexes and also pioneered the discovery and of thousands of records of Southern Mutual Insurance (now Southern Mutual Life Insurance Company). This, however, does not begin to scratch the surface of the primary sources Dr. Berry consults, including “plantation records, diaries, trading company records, bills of sale, receipts, auction report, insurance companies, titles, deeds, gifts, court records,” and according to Berry, any record that “included name, age, sex, monetary value, and year data” across the over twenty archives and ten years of research she spent in pursuit of this history. (208). While the The Price for Their Pound of Flesh primarily situates itself in the 19th century, it is not a chronological history.
Dr. Berry instead organizes the book based on the life cycle of an enslaved person, which not only includes an accounting of their lives before the womb, but long after in the form of will contestations, cadaver sales, and insurance claims. From this vantage point, she produces an intellectual history with enslaved people interpreting their own value, in their own words when she can find them. Her work is thus distinguished from historical works that pursue commodification through the value of enslaved labor, but the value of the enslaved body. This unique, whole-life cycle approach allows her to look at different types of internal and external values, four of which she categorizes beginning with “soul value,” which she defines as how enslaved people interpreted their own value as human beings, separate from the imposition of slave owners. “Appraisal value” is that value ascribed by traders and buyers who anticipated how much output enslaved people would bring. Market value is the price for which they were paid, and finally “ghost value” describes the ways in which enslaved people were valued even after their death.
As the chapters progress, the reader is confronted with a subheading of average 19th century appraised values and sale prices for females and males and their corresponding 2014 dollar amount. Overall, the value of each child doubled during their survival and ascent into adolescence, peaked in midlife and older adulthood, and depreciated during old age. While all of the chapters stand on their own merit, chapters 1, 3, and 6 flesh out Berry’s meanings for appraisal value, soul value, and ghost value. Detached from a chronological perspective, the chapters are free to interweave examples from time and place as they feel appropriate. Chapter 1 discusses ways in which northern and southern slave owners ascribed value to childbearing women, with the former often seeing pregnant women as liabilities, and southern traders looking to capitalize on future workers given the ability to hire out enslaved labor, the global context being a reduction in enslaved people imported while enslaved women and men bore the costs in labor of keeping their children alive before they were of working age. In chapter 3, Berry deftly reads sources against the grain to explore how parents instilled “soul value” within their children, providing them with the ability to endure. Chapter 6 on ghost values illustrates how owners anticipated enslaved people’s deaths by taking out insurance policies, arguing over inheritances, which often involved family separation, and the cadaver trade also widely explored by other scholars.
The Price for Their Pound of Flesh deserves its many accolades and is unimpeachable in its novel and humanizing approach. There are, however, areas where shared knowledge is assumed and Berry’s intentional dramatizations need more solid grounding, such as her claim that “[y]oung men, on the other hand, experienced complications such as shame or lack of arousal resulting from being forced to have sex on demand. As a result, they were physically assaulted by enslavers and spent much of their early teens and twenties on the auction block. Sometimes they took the stand with their parents, and on other occasions, their parents tried to purchase them” (63). In the next paragraph, she produces a well-documented vignette about an enslaved father and son on the auction block, but there is no apparent reference to the literature on forced breeding nor any primary source. From her statement, one could presume that a young enslaved man might also not be aroused for a number of additional reasons besides timing, including not being able to choose his partner, having to perform under duress, his or feelings of compassion toward his forced partner. Without any source cited, the reader is left to speculate.
Despite complaints so common to trade publications, Berry’s inspiring approach encourages other ways of looking at how enslaved people assessed their own value. As much has been written on how enslaved people worked to emancipate themselves through self-purchase or flight, it might be interesting to look at ways these two approaches might intersect. In sum, The Price for Their Pound of Flesh succeeds where many fail as it interrogates unyielding sources for ways in which enslaved people assessed their own value as people and as commodities amidst a bevy of external evaluations of their productive potential and market price. With such an excellent undergirding of quantitative data and a powerful narrative quality, this book will leave undergraduate students with a perspective on slavery without the trappings and baggage of approaches that have so consistently reified the dehumanizing gaze.