5 - To Claim One’s Own: Death and the Body in the Daily Politics of Antebellum Slavery

Summary

This essay explores the vast range of treatments that black corpses received in the antebellum South, arguing that death and the dead bodies of the enslaved were important sites for expressing and challenging social claims in others. The treatment of the dead in the slave South reflected, in magnified terms, how planters and bondspeople thought of themselves and each other. Death and the dead body are important sites for historians' analyses, precisely because Southerners used them to stake claims of kinship and respectability. The bodies of enslaved people were valuable to slaveholders in two distinct ways: as sources of labor and as sources of ideological power. For masters seeking to control their slaves through violence and terror, the black corpse was disposable. The dead body of a slave could no longer produce material wealth, but the ideological profit was still there for the stealing.