Undoing Slavery: Bodies, Race, and Rights in the Age of Abolition

Early American Studies

by Kathleen M. Brown

Undoing Slavery excavates cultural, political, medical, and legal history to understand the abolitionist focus on the body on its own terms. Motivated by their conviction that the physical form of the human body was universal and faced with the growing racism of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century science, abolitionists in North America and Britain focused on undoing slavery’s harm to the bodies of the enslaved. Their pragmatic focus on restoring the bodily integrity and wellbeing of enslaved people threw up many unexpected challenges. This book explores those challenges.

Slavery exploited the bodies of men and women differently: enslaved women needed to be acknowledged as mothers rather than as reproducers of slave property, and enslaved men needed to claim full adult personhood without triggering white fears about their access to male privilege. Slavery’s undoing became more fraught by the 1850s, moreover, as federal Fugitive Slave Law and racist medicine converged. The reach of the federal government across the borders of free states and theories about innate racial difference collapsed the distinctions between enslaved and emancipated people of African descent, making militant action necessary.

Escaping to so-called “free” jurisdictions, refugees from slavery demonstrated that a person could leave the life of slavery behind. But leaving behind the enslaved body, the fleshy archive of trauma and injury, proved impossible. Bodies damaged by slavery needed urgent physical care as well as access to medical knowledge untainted by racist science. As the campaign to end slavery revealed, legal rights alone, while necessary, were not sufficient either to protect or heal the bodies of African-descended people from the consequences of slavery and racism.

Genres: History

456 pages, Hardcover

Published February 1, 2023

Reviews

[Wisconsin Alumni]

Kathleen Brown MA’85, PhD’90
Author

From the author:
Undoing Slavery excavates medical and legal history to understand the abolitionist focus on the body on its own terms. Facing many challenges to their goal of restoring embodied self-sovereignty to the enslaved, abolitionists learned that legal rights alone, while necessary, were not sufficient either to protect or heal the bodies of African-descended people from the consequences of slavery and racism.
Forthcoming February 2023.

[Eva · Rating 5 out of 5]

With the recent release of the Will Smith film 'Emancipation' about Gordon, or more popularly known as "Whipped Peter," whose image millions of people worldwide have seen for years of an enslaved Black man with a scars and lacerations so severe on his back from lashings and other mutilations, 'Undoing Slavery' comes at a time when more critical examinations of bodies in the context of transatlantic slavery are needed.

There really was a time not too long ago when people (mostly white and non-Black people) believed that people of African descent bled black blood whereas white Europeans bled red blood.... Enlightenment 'race scientists' were some of the most unenlightened imbeciles in history, which we know now, but the historical context is important of what allowed their ridiculous and baseless theories to proliferate beyond just white supremacist ideologies.

"The long attempts to use a biological notion of race to justify slavery and white supremacy has rightly made scholars of both slavery and diasporic Africa wary of a focus on the body." In her introduction, Brown focuses on the notions of bodies in the context of slavery and abolition. She brings up the Reverend Easton who pointed out that whether suffering from the lash herself or witnessing another's suffering, an enslaved mother transmitted the injury to her unborn child. "Even when emancipation lifted the formal constraints of slavery, former slaves could not shed bodies that had been beaten, disabled, malnourished, diseased, sexually abused, and traumatized by the loss of family connection."

Historical experiences did and do leave the body's plasticity to physically imprinting.

There's a brief discussion of inheritance of bodily status, as with Roman principles like jus sanguinis (law of blood or ancestry), which was used as the basis for 'partus sequitur ventrem,' stipulating that if a child was born to a mother of African descent whose status was enslaved and owned as property, this child would inherit that unto themselves and also be considered enslaved. The French also integrated this into their Code Noir (1685), "a digest of colonial practices that reflected the Crown's effort to regulate and rationalize the exploitability of slaves but conceptualized race as akin to lineage." The discussion also goes into notions of birthright, racist medicine and science, and more.

The author also goes into the criticisms lobbed at [white] abolitionists, rightly criticizing them for shortcomings "ranging from creating self-aggrandizing taxonomies of feeling, displacing Black subjects with white empathy, analogizing slavery to other abuses of power, and relying problematically on universal claims." Further to this, the author adds discussions of white voyeurism that obstructed the 'empathic road' to meaningful political action, which were 'painfully obvious' to Black abolitionists.

The discussion of Black abolitionists and a small number of their white allies turning to militant responses as resistance, including escape, is particularly salient and crucial.

Extremely comprehensive and granular in its scope, 'Undoing Slavery' is a crucial academic text that traces the issues discussed from European migrations to North America and prevailing attitudes of several Western European groups, Britain's loss of North American colonies, the East India Company, Thomas Jefferson and his trips to Paris while serving as US minister to France, to William Penn's arrival in Pennsylvania, the British and French and their relations with Native American groups, Quakers and their religious beliefs, abolition movements, and so, so much more.

There's also a fair amount of medical history in the volume, particularly as it concerns beliefs about blood, transfusions, coagulation, and other experiments. The 'one blood' principle gets considerable attention as do several wars and battles.

As well, the remarkable and gifted Black poet Phyllis Wheatley Peter, known more commonly as Phyllis Wheatley, gets highlighted including her arrival in Boston in 1761 after being stolen from her family in Senegambia.

[Ian Gere · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Even when emancipation lifted the formal constraints of slavery, former slaves could not shed bodies that had been beaten, disabled, malnourished, diseased, sexually abused, and traumatized by the loss of family connection.” (pg. 5)

I’ve previously read a book on British abolitionism, but I found Brown’s book does an excellent job at arguing that American abolitionists highlighted how the care of enslaved peoples’ body was a necessary factor for achieving freedom. She does an excellent job at putting readers on the ground of the abolitionist landscape, primarily by outlining the medical knowledge that informed how abolitionists used the enslaved body as a political entity. This is also the last book for my grad class, so yay!