The Value of Life and Death PDF

# The Value of Life and Death ## Introduction **APPRAISAL PRICE RANGE:** \$0-\$5,771 [\$169,504 IN 2014] **SALE PRICE RANGE:** \$0.14-\$3,228 [\$4-\$94,822 IN 2014] - *We are a race of beings who have long labored under the abuse and censure of the world, that we have long been looked upon with a...

# The Value of Life and Death ## Introduction **APPRAISAL PRICE RANGE:** \$0-\$5,771 [\$169,504 IN 2014] **SALE PRICE RANGE:** \$0.14-\$3,228 [\$4-\$94,822 IN 2014] - *We are a race of beings who have long labored under the abuse and censure of the world, that we have long been looked upon with an eye of contempt and that we have long been considered rather as brutish than human and scarcely capable of mental endowments.* - Benjamin Banneker to Thomas Jefferson, August 19, 1791² - *Just think of a people that hold four millions of their fellow-creatures in chains - four millions of human beings in chains! and sell them by the pound.* - The Christian Recorder³ > "Many a man, fifty years old, had not seen and felt what I had before my twentieth year." These are the words of Jourden H. Banks, who was born into slavery, sold three times, escaped twice, and ultimately reached freedom. His early years were pleasant compared to those as he matured into adulthood. In his narrative, published in 1861, we learn many things about the value of the enslaved and the ways enslavers, traders, and medical doctors trafficked human chattel from birth to death and beyond. > Banks lived on a Virginia plantation with his parents and sixteen siblings. His mother served as the cook, his father was the headman; the family was intact. As a young child, he played with his enslaver's son, Alexander, who was just a year older. By age five, Banks realized that he and Alex were different when his playmate began beating him. Banks fought back, because his father warned him that he had to respond or suffer continued beatings. Embracing this spirit, Banks kept track of how many whippings he owed Alex and returned them, blow for blow. Even in childhood, Banks's actions showed a nascent understanding of his soul value, ## Separate from his enslaver - *Organized around the stages of life, each chapter represents a window into enslaved people's awareness of their monetary value and places them in conversation with enslavers' accounting of their bodies from birth to death. Rather than follow a chronological structure, the book is organized around the life cycle of an enslaved person's body. Many studies address the fiscal value of enslaved people's work; this book does that, yet it differs by examining the spiritual and financial value of human commodities before and at birth, and even after death. That they were treated as disposable property before they were born and after they died forces us to reconsider the life cycle of human property. What did it mean to have a projected or real price from preconception to postmortem? Even the unborn children of expectant mothers were marked with a monetary value. And, when an enslaved person died, who would receive money for his or her body? For a period of time, the financial value of the bodies of the enslaved was sometimes contested in court, depending on the cause of death. During this time, death became a monetized value that accrued interest until the case was settled. Some dead bodies were cultivated as cadavers, trafficked and sold to medical schools for human anatomy courses at major institutions throughout the North and South. Untangling what I call the domestic cadaver trade, I also address some aspects of enslaved people's ideas about the afterlife and their preferences for specific burial rituals, even when doctors wanted to harvest their bodies for dissection.* ## Summary This book explores the ways enslaved people recalled and responded to their monetary value during the course of their lives. It examines the value of enslaved and free blacks and the individuals who had a vested interest in their fiscal vitality throughout their lives, upon their deaths, and even after death. This book explores the commodification of enslaved people and how it affected their lives, births, and afterlives. It examines the intimate relationship between enslavers, physicians, and human property, and shows how commodification touched every facet of enslaved people's lives. This book is also an intellectual history of enslaved people's thoughts, expressions, feelings, and reactions to their own commodification.