>> From the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. ^M00:00:04 ^M00:00:22 >> Edward Widmer: Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for coming to LJ-119 in the Library of Congress and the John W. Kluge Center. It's a great pleasure to welcome our speaker today. Before we start the program I want to ask you to take a moment to silence your devices. We'll also be filming this program, so think about a good question before you ask it. Our lecture today is sponsored by the Kluge Center at the Library of Congress. We bring together scholars and researchers from around the world to distill wisdom from the Library's rich holdings and to interact with Congress and the public. And we find our talented writers and scholars from around the world in a myriad of ways. We have many scholars in place. But in today's instance it was a really nice act of serendipity. Our speaker was speaking in Atlanta at a meeting of the American Library Association. And our new librarian, Dr. Carla Hayden, was in the audience and was so riveted by our speaker that she said, "I've got a place for you to give a talk." And that was the Kluge Center a few months later. I believe it was a Martin Luther King Day speech. So we're so happy to have our speaker. Our speaker is Dr. Daina Berry, who an associate professor of history and African and diaspora studies and the Oliver H. Radkey fellow in American history at the University of Texas at Austin. She's a prolific author. She's the author of ^ITSwing the Sickle for the Harvest is Ripe: Gender and Slavery in Antebellum Georgia^NO. She's an award-winning editor of ^ITEnslaved Women in America: An Encyclopedia^NO and ^ITSlavery and Freedom in Savannah^NO. She has recently published a book she will be talking about today. And I want to note it was published in one of my favorite presses in the United States, the Beacon Press, which is true to its name, a beacon of liberal -- it used to be liberal Protestant writing and now I think we can just call it liberalism. But it's a wonderful press in Boston. And the book is ^ITThe Price for their Pound of Flesh: The Value of the Enslaved from the Womb to the Grave in the Building of a Nation^NO. Please join me in welcoming Dr. Daina Berry. Thank you. ^M00:02:49 [ Applause ] ^M00:02:53 >> Daina Ramey Berry: Thank you so much for your introduction, and I want to thank you and your staff for allowing me to come and speak about my work here. It's an honor to be here, and I was very happy when Dr. Hayden extended the invitation. What I'd like to do is to talk a little bit about this project that I've been working on for ten years, and to talk a little bit about some of the motivations behind the research, and then share a little bit of reading from parts of it. And I also want to give time for Q&A because oftentimes when I've presented since January, I've had a lot of really interesting and very lively discussions about the subject matter. Because this is the history of the enslaved. And I said that during the writing process that I really learned more about myself than I did about the people that I was writing about and that I was more a scholar of the enslaved than I am a scholar of slavery. And that's something that I've learned: The slavery is the institution that houses the people that I'm interested in writing about. And so I wanted to begin with just a quick overview about the book and about the project, and then I'm going to talk about a couple sections from there. The book is structured around six different chapters. And it came out of -- it grew out of my first book. It was supposed to be chapter six of ^ITSwing the Sickle^NO, and the editors thought that this discussion of slave prices and slave people's values just didn't fit with the rest of what was in the manuscript. And they said, "You know, that would be a great separate study." And when I had written that particular chapter -- so I've been working on this stuff a little bit longer than the ten years because this was part of that first book project that I did -- I found evidence of enslaved values, monetary values on their bodies. And I found that women were priced higher during their child-bearing years. And I wanted to know why I had not seen that in historical literature, why I had not seen that outside of some conversations women were sort of put as secondary but outside the conversations that were in the slave price literature as well. And so I wanted to know if this was a national trend. I wanted to know, you know, for all these years between the ages of let's say 15 to 30 were women priced higher? And that's sort of what started me off on this. And I was basically collecting a database of enslaved people's values -- the name, their age, their sex, their prices, and so forth. And some of these values come in the form of appraisals, which are the annual appraisals that were done every year to figure out the projections of how much they would be over the course of a year or over the course of their lifetime. And some of them also came in the form of market sales. And market sales represent the highest value that a person has. It's the price that they command in the auction block. So this one little chapter that I had written for a different book became its own study when I started doing the research and learned that women were not priced higher than men and that there was just that group of plantations that I was looking at were actually the anomaly. They were the outlier. And that for across the board -- and I'll show you a slide in a few minutes of the numbers -- men were priced higher than women across the board. And so you'll see a little bit of this. And I'll show you my influences where some of you may know Stanley Engerman, he's an economic historian, co-author of ^ITTime on the Cross^NO with Robert Fogel. He saw me give a talk at Duke when I was doing the research for this, when I was still thinking that women were priced higher. And he came up to me afterwards and said, "You know, I think I have something that might be useful to you. Do you have time to come to Rochester?" I said, "Sure, why not?" And I went up there with a graduate student and my family and literally left with eight boxes -- or seven boxes of archival data that they had collected from ^ITTime on the Cross^NO. So this was, like, one of the most generous academic donations somebody could ever had. And it totally catapulted my study in terms of the number of data points that I had. But one of the things that I've wanted to do with this book was to not just make people dots on graphs and lines on charts, positive and negative signs, I wanted to show their humanity and I wanted to focus on their humanity. And I wanted to find a way to tell their story as a commodity but as a commodity that's also a person and a human being, similar to what Walter Johnson did in ^ITSoul by Soul^NO. And one of the ways I did this was to center the voices of the enslaved and to allow them to tell these stories about how they understood themselves as human beings and as products. And I'll talk a little bit about that in a few minutes. So just the data, this is what a lot of people are interested in. I only really have it at the tops of each chapter. I ended up with about 80,000 individual slave values, as I mentioned, appraisal and market sales. Some of this came from insurance records were people were ensuring their enslaved people from as young as age nine to as old as age 89 or 90, life insurance policies so that if the enslaved person passed, they could then purchase another laborer with the money that they had given in with the premium and so forth. So that's the dataset. I think by the time I cleaned up everything and made sure there was not any overlap between the Fogel and Engerman data and my own data, I think I ended up with about 55,000 or 56,000 cases that are used throughout the book. And each chapter uses about 10,000 to 12,000 to make up the averages. And this is what I came up with. This is what I found. This is a slide -- I realize when I've been talking about my book, I've been sharing the stories of the enslaved, which is the most important part for me personally, but I realized that a lot of people wanted to know, well, what were the numbers? So what you have here is this is based on each chapter. And I show you the age ranges. They're not just typical ten-year age increments. The first number with the dollar sign in the column is the value at that time, it's converted into 1860 dollars. And then the number in parentheses is what it is in 2014 money, okay? And I used the lowest income value translators. So these numbers are actually a lot larger depending on which chart you want to use through -- Economic History Net is where I went and got those figures. So but the average enslaved person was about $10,000 to $15,000 in today's money. If you think about that, you think about it in terms of, you know, the number of enslaved people folks owned, that's a lot of money. And a lot of these people had large plantations, 300 people. They sometimes had more money in human bodies and human chattel than they did the land. So that's something to keep in mind. I can come back to this slide later during the Q&A if you like. This is just an example of a bill of sale, just one sample of the types of records that I used to characterize and find this information. But one of the things as I mentioned, this here is from the eve of the Civil War. So it's probably, you know, in Confederate dollars. This is an inflated price. This is probably not -- this particular value has not been inverted. And the advertisement here talks about a 32-year-old male, but they refer to him as a boy. They have in this particular ad his height, his complexion, and they mention stuff about his skill, that he was a brick mason. So just this little slip of paper. I don't even know how many characters it is. It's probably the same as a contemporary tweet or a little bit longer -- has a lot of information about an enslaved person. And those are the people to whom which I wrote this book for and about. ^M00:10:21 So switching to the structure, I wanted to read a little bit from how I looked at how enslaved people understood and learned to understand that they were treated as commodities and how they responded to that. Because my other question that was driving this study was: What did the enslaved people think; what did they feel; how did they respond; how did they react; what did they know about their values; did they care; were they happy to have high values or low values? And I will read briefly. In 1854 Rachel, an infant girl, was placed on the auction block. Although she was wrapped in a coverlet and she was asleep, her face was exposed. An enslaved man had delivered her to the auction on the instructions of his enslaver. Rachel was about a year old and she was for sale. As the enslaved man sat on the courthouse steps with Rachel, waiting for the noon hour, the time and place of many public auctions, one wonders how he felt. Was it excruciating for him to carry out his enslaver's demand and bring little Rachel to the market? Or was he unmoved? What kind of exchange had he had with her parents? Did he feel partially responsible for what was about to take place? Imagine trying to keep the baby calm after she was separated from her mother and then handing her over to the sheriff at the start of the auction. While the enslaved man sat holding Rachel in his arms, the Reverend Nehemiah Adams, a visitor from Boston on a three-month tour of the South, approached him to ask a few questions. Adams was startled to see an enslaved man holding an infant. "Is the child sick?" Adams asked. Responding with deference, the man replied, "No, Master. She is going to be sold." Puzzled, Adams inquired about the child's mother, to which the man answered that she was quote, "At home." The minister's mind was filled with questions, but most importantly, he worried about Rachel's mother. How did she feel? How much did she miss her child? Was the infant taken openly or in private? Who did this? By now Rachel was weeping and refusing to be comforted. This was too much for Adams, who chose not to stay and witness the sale. Later he learned that Rachel had been sold for $140. Imagine her confusion as she looked at the group of potential buyers gazing at her, evaluating her earning potential. How did Rachel even begin to process what occurred? Her inconsolable crying is one clue, but she was too young to express her feelings in any other way. So I open with infancy because when I was doing this research, I've said this before, I had columns in my dataset of years old. And I had to create a column for months old when I found an 8-month-old baby for sale. And then I had to create a column when I found a 6-week-old baby in the market with no parent for sale. And then when I found a 3-day-old baby, I actually had to take a break from the research for about a week because it moved me in a way I wasn't expecting. I wasn't expecting to see it. And I didn't even know how to process it at the time. I thought -- I can't imagine and I can't even imagine it from this particular child's perspective. But I wanted to think about ways for teaching my students and for teaching the general public to whom this book is also written of how do we understand how enslaved people were commodified? How do we understand they were treated as a person with a price, as Walter Johnson refers to it? And how did they make sense of this? So moving ahead, there's a time period where enslaved children start to transition into understanding what's happening. Not only are they learned and raised to know that they're also commodities because their parents teach them that or the people that are caring for them do, so they're living in a dual world. Sort of like W.E.B. Du Bois talks about in the double consciousness. So they're already being raised in that space. But this often happens around five or six, that they recognize there's something different about themselves and about the white children that they're around. "Many a man 50 years old had not seen what I had before my 20th year." These are the words of Jordan 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 which was 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 16 siblings, which is pretty unusual. His mother served as a cook, his father was the head man, and the family was intact. As a young child, he played with his enslaver's son, Alexander, who was just about a year older. But by age five Banks began to realize that he and Alex were different when his playmate began beating him. Banks fought back because his father warned him that had he not responded, he would suffer continued beatings. Embracing this spirit, Banks kept track of how many whippings he owed Alex and he returned them blow for blow. Even in childhood, Banks' actions showed a nascent understanding of what I call his soul value, which was separate from his enslaver. As he processed the distinctions between himself and his nemesis, Banks experienced another epiphany. Alex attended school while he was sent to quote, "Scare crows in the fields." In his words, the dreary days of boyhood began in the fields. Now, this moment during enslaved childhood served as a turning point in Banks' life and the understanding of the reality of their condition. Historian Wilma King calls this the quantum leap into the world of work. And as they aged, enslaved youth and young adults learned and intimately understood their place in the world. Banks' maturation solidified his understanding of enslavement, especially during three pivotal events of his youth and early adulthood. The first was the sale of his two sisters, the second was the nearly-fatal beating of his mother, and the third was the slow death of his enslaver. Of the latter, Banks remarked, "I saw him in life. I saw him in death. But he left me in chains." So to me this just is a way to understand how enslaved people are starting to recognize what it means to be a commodity, to recognize that there's something different about themselves than their white playmates to whom they had been playing with for most of their lives. And they also start paying attention to their values. There was a slave, a young woman named Merlida [assumed spelling] who talks about how she was put on the auction block, and she remembers that they put her up for $600. And her mistress came and said, "No, you can't sell her," and she was crying because she didn't want her owner to sell her. And they took her down off the block. And she says, "Although I wasn't sold that day, I remember my price." And this interview was taken 80 years later, but she remembers on that day exactly how much she was worth and that her owner didn't think that that was the right time or value to sell Merlida. And so this even, regardless of what other kind of memories they have, there are vivid memories of pricing. And they talk about this throughout their work. And one of the things that I found difficult was that I felt like scholars spent most of their time focusing on male prices, particularly inflated males in their prime years and very few people looked at how women were valued. But I also felt that they were missing how enslaved people survived. And there's a lot of people that have written about resistance and so forth, but I kept thinking to myself, "How did 4 million people end up in 1865 to have survived this institution? You know, what did they turn to?" They weren't all socially dead, they weren't all in a melancholy state. They might have experienced depression -- what we're calling depression today. They might have experienced grief and sadness, but how did they survive? And there had to be something. And one of the things I came up with was that they had a notion of a value that could not be commodified. And I'll share what that is. The pubescent years were terrifying. Not only were their bodies changing, but this was also a time when enslaved children experienced a separation that they had feared all of their lives. Daughters and sons were taken from their parents as the external value of their bodies increased. Market scenes from childhood now made sense and haunted them for the rest of their lives. At this stage in their maturation they knew full well that others claimed ownership of them and that sexual assault came at any age. However, their parents, if present, as well as other kin reminded them of a value that enslavers and traders could not commodify: The spiritual value of their immortal souls. Soul values is my term for such valuation. And it often escapes calculation and developed during these years. Soul values are enriched through an inner spiritual centering that facilitated survival and they were reinforced by loved ones. Sometimes this internal value appeared as a spirit, a voice, a vision, a whisper, a premonition, a sermon, a ancestor, a god. It came in public and private settings and occasionally described as a personal message from a higher being or a heaviness in the core of their bodies. ^M00:20:03 "My soul began singing," one enslaved person recalled, "and I was told that I was one of the elected children." This telling, this uplifting, this singing of a fearful thrill of things unknown but longed for still made the enslaved feel free during captivity. Freedom of the soul matured in puberty. And so it's really at this stage when they're in their teen years and going into puberty when girls are going through their cycles and now their values are increasing because they can give birth to additional laborers where planters don't have to then purchase them because their value of the enslaved, the status of the slave is defined by the mother. So if your mother was enslaved and you gave birth, those children were also enslaved as well. So this is why during those eight plantations that I found in ^ITSwing the Sickel^NO that I found women were priced higher, I thought, "Well, this has got to be the case across the whole country, right, in terms of other enslaved communities?" And the only thing I can say for that -- because I've been trying to figure out why that was the case -- is that most of those plantations were on one island community, St. Simon's Island, Georgia. They were, like, 12 plantations there total, but eight of them where the female plantation mistress was serving as a manager because either their husbands were deceased, they had gone off to war, they had gone on political leave, and so forth. So some of these plantations were managed by women and perhaps that's why their values were there. I don't know. But that's one of the things that I think about and one of the solutions that I think would make sense. So now shifting to how enslaved people responded and what do they know about their values, we know that they were given a rating system where they were either a full hand, three-quarters hand, half hand, one-quarter hand. A full hand was A1 prime, which was someone between the ages of 18 and 30 years of age who could do certain amount of work in a given day. And most other enslaved laborers were sort of judged based on that person but on a decreasing scale. And that value, that rate was often correlated with their prices. So if they kept rates. Not all plantation owners kept track of the rating system, but when they did, we're finding direct connections with the values. And so one of the things that you hear when you look at the auction records and you hear bid callers and you read the text from bid callers and they'll say, "This is a first-rate person, there's a first-rate bargain, he's A1 prime, he's strong; or she's got -- look at her arms, look at her healthy babies," when they're trying to bid them off. And here's what enslaved people say about first rate. Bid caller and criers shouted out the values of enslaved people as prime, first-rate, and A1. But from freedom in Canada, Benjamin Miller explained what he thought first-rate meant. Before his escape in North Carolina, his North Carolinian enslaver had trusted him to travel to and from the market, running errands and to do favors. Sometimes his enslaver gave him small amounts of money. He says quote, "But I was still a slave." On one occasion, Miller said he was trying to purchase himself for $450 and neighbors told his enslaver that that was too low of a value and that he needed to increase it. So his enslaver said, "You can purchase yourself if you give me $800." All right? And at this point, he felt like that was too much and he didn't have the money, obviously. So when he heard that he had raised the price, Miller was unwilling to pay for it. Instead, he fled without paying and made his way to Canada. Reflecting on this pivotal event, Miller discussed what it meant to be first-rate. "I have done first-rate here," he says from Canada, "I will tell you what I call first-rate. I say first-rate from the fact that we have to row against wind and tide when we get here. And being brought up illiterate, I consider that if we live and keep our families well-fed and clad, we have done first-rate." So this is, like, the first time where we're thinking about, you know, what did enslaved people think, what did they know about their values, how do we make sense of this? And shifting just a little bit further to two other slaves I'll just tell you about quickly, and then I wanted to end with an aspect of this research that took me on a three-year detour. And it's really where I think I had to just decide I was going to stop. And it's where I hope to pick up from here forward. But Mingo was an enslaved man who I write about, and I found a poem of his that was written on the beam of a prison wall. And he had ran away when his family and he were separated from one other. And he didn't want to live without his wife and his children. And apparently he had been writing poems all his life. And he wrote this poem and he's thinking about this is his last life on earth and he probably won't see his family again. And he wanted to leave something for them to think about if they ever knew. But this was just his way of sort of addressing his enslavement. I'm not going to read the whole poem, but I'll just read what he would say to his wife. "Dear wife, they cannot sell the rose of love that in my bosom glows. Remember as your tears may start, they cannot sell thy immortal part." And so for me, Mingo recognized that there was a place in him, in his wife, and in their bodies and their souls and their spirits that could not be commodified, that could not be sold. And I feel like he's trying to leave that message for her. Isaac is another enslaved man that I think out of everybody in the whole book -- he's in chapter five -- really exemplifies soul value. He was caught for planning an insurrection. It was a conspiracy because somebody found out about it. And they captured him, put him in jail, and they were trying to find out who else was involved in this. And they kept asking him questions, you know, like -- and he said, "I'm the one. Take me. I'm the one. There's nobody else." And they said, "Well, there's got to be other people that were doing this." He's like, "No, take me. I'm the one. I'm the man. I'll live with the consequences." And so that night his minister, who he was very close to, came to visit him in jail. And they had a four-hour conversation. And they talked, they laughed, they cried, they prayed together. And we have this evidence from a newspaper writer who was there at the jail. This is how I know the story about Isaac. And the minister was that tears because the minister felt like he was the guilty one. He said, "I feel like I'm the guilty one. I feel like I'm the hypocrite." And he said this is a noble man. You know? And when he asked him, he said, "Well, don't you love us? Why would you plan this rebellion, Isaac? I don't understand." And Isaac says, "I love you and I love master. I love my master, I love my mistress," he said, "But I will kill you, too, first if I have to," he said, "Because I want to be free. And I believe that God is a god of the black and the white," this is the language he uses, "and that I'm not supposed to be captive. I'm not supposed to be held captive." And so the next day after they finished praying and crying, it was the day of his execution. He was there and he was getting ready to be hung. And he was there and there were other men there. There were four or five other men present. And one of them was his brother, Isaac's brother. And they said, "Do you have any final words?" A rope is around his neck, he's standing at the gallows. They're about to put the latch to let the floor underneath him and he says, "I have no other words, except for if you just let me die, you know, I will die a noble death." And he said -- and he looked at the other men, he said, "Comrades, be men and die like men." He jumped before they could pull the latch, lifted up his feet, and hung himself. And although it's like from our perspective it might seem like suicide, it's his way of expressing his own power in deciding when he's going to die, in deciding when his life is going to end. For so long his life was controlled by other people. He did not tell whoever else was involved. And as soon as that happened, the other four or five men that were there did the exact same thing. And so they all took their lives without letting somebody else pull the latch from under their feet. And I think that is one of the strongest evidence of soul value for me out of all the cases that I tell in this story. And so I thought that I would end the book and when I was writing it thought that the book would end with them reflecting on life and life after death or life at death. Because some of them, death meant freedom. Elizabeth Keckley says -- thinking about death she says, "At the grave at least we should be permitted to lay our burdens down, that a new world, a world of brightness may open to us. The light that is denied us here should grow into a flood of effulgence beyond the dark, mysterious shadows of death." So they're looking towards death as a place, a respite place, right? And one of the descendants of Nat Turner, Lucy Turner also speaks of death, and she says, "Sometimes there is a victory in the grave, which leads to a bright eternal heaven where faith, hope, charity, love, and justice shall last forever without ceasing." And this is where I was thinking that I was going to end the book. And I then discovered that once their bodies -- once they died, there was an illegal traffic and trade in their cadavers were planters were then selling their bodies to medical schools for anatomical research. And so that the commodification extended beyond the grave, beyond their natural lives. And I just want to show you a few slides of that. This is what I call the domestic cadaver trade where enslaved people were put sometimes -- and I should say this, it's not just enslaved people. Any unclaimed bodies, white, black, any nationality, whether they were unclaimed, whether they were from an alms house, a jail, a hospital. There was a certain period that if the body wasn't claimed, then they could be turned over to medical schools for research. All right? Now, I was interested in those that were of the formerly enslaved, and I was trying to find, you know, where are these bodies? I don't know whether or not all of them were, but I did find a number and numbers of black bodies on dissection room tables and in the records of these medical schools. And this is the three-year detour I took. So one of the things that they did, they had these resurrect men, grave robbers exhume bodies out of graves and they would put them in bags like this. Or they would put them -- I thought I had the whiskey one there, next -- this is an outdoor dissection that took place at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. It's a disturbing image. And you'll see the black gentleman in the front sitting on the pail is the janitor or probably the resurrection man. This picture was taken after slavery. But one of the things I found was most of the medical schools had African-American janitors, and the janitor's role was to procure bodies for dissection. ^M00:30:39 So there were African-American men that were owned by universities -- we're learning a lot about slavery in universities now; there will be a watershed of studies in the next few years coming -- but they were owned by the university, and the university paid them to go get bodies and get fresh subjects for dissection is the language they used. These men were resurrection men. At the top of the screen you'll see the very top of the picture -- I don't know if you can see -- the very top here is an African-American man whose name is Grandison Harris, he worked for the Medical College of Georgia. And he worked there for a number of years. Seven faculty members owned one-seventh of his body. So they actually used his body as -- you know, if you left the college, you could then sell your one-seventh share of Grandison. But he was property of the university. And these are the whiskey casks that was the other -- they were taking them long distances. If they were traveling over state lines, they would hide them. They would sometimes ship them. After 1842, they'd put them on the railroad industry as well after railroads were built. And I found that a lot of the routes for the domestic cadaver trade were the same routes as the domestic slave trade, which I think is really ironic. So even on ships, in the bellies of these ships, or even steamboats where enslaved were kept, there were also deceased enslaved people in casks being sent to medical schools for anatomical research. This is a picture of Chris Baker at the Medical College of Virginia, which is VCU today. He was one of the major resurrection men who was born there. His father was in the business before that. So we know that this was going on as early as the 1820's, 1830's. And it wasn't until the 1880's in most states that they had anatomical acts where they could then try to regulate this traffic. This is another picture from 1896. This is from ^ITMurder in Virginia^NO, a book by Suzanne Lebsock. And she talks about Chris Baker here because there was a murder case. And there was a dispute about who was going to have the body; was the family going to have the body to bury or was the medical school going to have the body? So there was this fight over the body. And you see Chris Baker even after slavery in 1896 is still the go-to person for transporting bodies. And after I finished the book, I found a notice about Chris' funeral. And one of the things that I'm working on now is a new book called ^ITBlood Ties^NO. And the it's history of these resurrection men and their offspring because a lot of them were two or three generations deep working at these institutions. And I'm trying to understand what their lives were like and how they grew up to learn this business. But they had elaborate funerals for them because they were well-liked and they were well-respected among the medical community. But a lot of the people whose bodies that they traded never had a proper burial. And so I thought that was a really interesting contrast. And they paid to go to these anatomy lectures. So there was money generated out of the lectures. There was money for the bodies. There was money to pay the faculty members. These are just some anatomy admission lecture tickets. And in 1882, these were all from a scrapbook from the medical college in Philadelphia, College of Physicians. This is just them writing out the story of body snatching. I had to start in the 1890's and move my way back to find this history. And I knew it would be like a needle in a haystack. Michael Sappol from the National Library of Medicine talked about it in ^ITA Traffic of Dead Bodies^NO. Margaret Washington talked about this particular trade briefly in ^ITMedical Apartheid^NO. And Todd Savitt also did write about this in ^ITMedicine and Slavery^NO. And so I wanted to look for that needle in a haystack and spent three years in medical libraries, medical schools looking at their admissions books, looking at their account records and lecture notes and found a number of quote unquote "Negro subjects" for dissection there. Stephen Kinney out of Liverpool is also doing work on this as well. He's looking at medical museums. So there's going to be more work coming out in this area. And this is just a draft of the Pennsylvania Anatomy Act, which then says, you know, there's regulation on who gets to have these bodies and how they're equally distributed amongst the medical colleges. This is just some more documents on that. The post-Anatomy Act, they have the list. This is before it becomes more institutionalized, and then it becomes records of an anatomical review board. And Dr. [inaudible] at UVA, who's here, is doing work on this from the 20th century forward, late 19th century through, like, 1930's. And so she's looking at these particular records as well. So you'll see more work in this area. And I wanted to just close with this fact that the bodies that were found from the Medical College of Georgia where Grandison Harris was for several years serving as the chief body snatcher or janitor, they were finally laid to rest in 1998. So this history's a lot closer to us than people realize. People always want to say, "Oh, slavery was so far away." But these bodies were just buried not too long ago. The Medical College of Virginia or VCU has also uncovered a number of bodies that were in a well that we believe were the bodies that Chris Baker had helped exhume. And they're in debates now about what kind of ceremony they want to have to honor those that were dishonored in a previous lifetime. And they were buried here in unmarked grave. Their remains were there. They put in a 2,500-pound vault so that no one would tamper them. And the last sentence here says, "May they rest in external peace." Thank you very much. ^M00:36:22 [ Applause ] ^M00:36:29 So I have this here because I did a piece in the ^ITTimes^NO last year about this body trade. And I started getting emails like this where people were sending me facts that there are catalog entries for skulls today. Nat Turner's skull was recently turned over to the family. They're doing forensic testing on it right now to find out, and the family wants to do a particular burial for him. So this is not a history that's old. It's still here. This is a newspaper ad about the bones and the remains from Virginia Commonwealth University that I mentioned. So we are still dealing with this history, and I would love to have conversation about anything I've talked about, including the contemporary ramifications of this history as well. And there's a microphone circulating for Q&A. Over here, yeah. >> Thank you so much for this. I actually was very curious to know more about the cadaver trade and maybe the kind of anthropological element of it in terms of I know that up until probably only the last five decades or so there was a lot of kind of hair-splitting between the idea of people of different races being different species. So as these cadavers are being brought in and being tested and being examined, are they kind of feeding some of those very racist ideas, species-ist ideas or are they looked at as, "Well, hey, we have body that we can finally look at. Let's make the" --^* >> Daina Ramey Berry: Great question. Yeah, great question. So I'll respond to that based on the records that I covered. Because I was studying the medical records, I was looking at doctors and even students that were training that were working on their medical degrees in the 19th century. And one of the students wrote in his journal that he was happy because it was time for the dissections and there's a time of the year where they do the dissections in the winter and the spring. And he said, "I was happy to do this and we had our first negro cadaver." And he said, "And I was so surprised when we cut it open that the inside looked the same." The inside looked the same as the white cadavers, you know? So this is on the eve of racial science. You know? A lot of what I'm writing about happens before the American Medical Association was founded. So it's before the regulation, it's before cremation, it's before formaldehyde and some of the preservation chemicals that were being used. Some of these physicians that were training the students, one of them had nightmares about his body being tampered. And he was one of the first cases of cremation in US history. So he made sure that his body was cremated because he didn't want that. But then there's others, there are a few physicians at Harvard who wanted their bodies and their skeletons to be fully articulated and on display so students could study them. So it's a tough balance because this is also advancing American medicine, you know? And there's that. But then there's also the exploitive part of it that we can't really ignore. So those are some of the things. They also measured Morton -- Samuel Morton was part of a larger trade in skulls in particular. And Favin [assumed spelling] wrote about this in The Skull Trade. And they would measure the brains because they were trying to decide, like, were black brains smaller or larger, what's the cranial capacity? So there was a lot of that and there was conversation about that. But often I would find in these records they would say whether the cadaver was negro or not. It would often say -- it would use the word negro or negro skeleton. There was one where they were talking about a skeleton, they said, oh, this skeleton when it was fully macerated, when they cleaned off all the skin and the ligament and tendons, they got it all fully articulated on the stand, they said the bones washed up so white. And this was a negro skeleton. And they said when he was alive he stood six feet five. I remember when I saw that, that's all I had on this particular case. But I was thinking did they know that because they measured him when he was laying down or is this something they actually knew? Like, I have no idea. But I was, like, they talked about how stood six foot five, was it just because it was the height or not? And they talked about how they were surprised that the bones could wash up that white coming from a negro cadaver. So those are the only examples that I can think of off the top of my head. Other questions? >> Thank you so much, Dr. Berry for this riveting lecture. I also am intrigued and disturbed by your discussion of the cadaver trade. And I'm curious whether either the resurrection men or the kin of the dead commented at all, given your earlier discussion about soul value and the stress that the enslaved and freed black men and women placed on the immortality of the soul regardless of what happened to the body, whether the resurrection men or the kin of the dead commented on perhaps the immateriality in some sense of what was done to the cadavers, given the life of the souls. >> Daina Ramey Berry: Right. Good question. So in terms of the actual -- like, Chris Baker, Grandison Harris, the actual resurrection men that I write about, that's what I'm working on now, is to try to find what they -- you know, their own testimonies. I've just found them -- I found them in records books, but I haven't found stuff written and produced by them. I found a few quotes from newspaper articles. Like, one of the schools, there was a school play. They did a Christmas ceremony. And they talked to Chris on stage. So I have some, like, voice from him. They said that he was very comfortable with bodies. And I think that for him -- and I don't know this; I'll hopefully learn this as I'm working on the next book -- that there's a separation. I'm hoping or I think that he might believe that there's a separation from the spirit, the soul leaves the body when it departs this world. And I think there were some people that believed that so that they could stomach this if they knew about it. I mean, there was one slave narrative that I found by Charlie Grant who was told to go exhume the body of a two-year-old infant and bring it to his enslaver. And his enslaver was then -- as Charlie says, "He's going to send it to Virginia to a doctor and they're going to cut it up." So there's an understanding from some enslaved people, you know, even in the 20th century that are talking about that. There's also newspaper advertisements of stories where they talk about people being afraid to see Chris Baker on the street. You know, watch out, he might snatch you. So there was this sort of lore among the free black community to watch out for him. But I don't have a sense yet of what he felt or what he thought. I don't know about his spiritual belief system, but people say that he and Grandison Harris were really good. Like, there was a newspaper article that talked about Harris and he could break open a casket and get the body out within a few minutes. And they just said he was good at his craft. You know, it's kind of a creepy craft, but they said he was very good at what he did. And there were other body snatchers that were Irish out in the Baltimore area. They were Irish, they were not all African-American. Sometimes -- and they worked as part of a trading system where they had, like, middlemen just like we see with the slave trades. And so it's a very elaborate system that we're still trying to find out more about. Thank you. >> Thank you for this talk. Your idea about a soul value is really provocative. And I think it's something we'll talk about as historians for, you know, the next few decades to come. But it seems like having an individual recognition of one's own soul value is a resistive act in and of itself as your powerful example with the suicide showed. And so I'm wondering how this sort of played out day-to-day and what were the consequences of an individual recognizing his or her own soul value or spiritual value? Because it seems like, you know, if a slave holder notices this, there are very real tangible consequences. What measures did enslaved people have to take to conceal this recognition? >> Daina Ramey Berry: Right. I think it's great. I'm actually -- I've been working on an article on soul value just to tease it out more than what I do in the book, and I've been doing the research for a couple months now. And just tracing, like, just Frederick Douglass is one example. You're not going to see them call soul value, you know, I'm not seeing that there. But he's talking about what I would describe it, there was times where he felt like he couldn't take anymore and he was going to give up. And he describes this feeling in the core of his soul. He says it's like a flame that's going to go out. It's almost done. He said than something came over him and it rose again, he was able to stand up and move through that painful experience whether it was a beating, a whipping, a sale, or what have you. And so I'm trying now to look at how people went in and out of this. Because I do think that some of them struggled and some of them went through periods where they were very low and they may not valued themselves much. They may have felt like they wanted to give up. And then there was something else that kind of kept them going. And Douglass describes it as a flame. And I think that's a really great analogy and a way to think about it. It's something that almost -- for me it's got a dual purpose because a flame burns, you know? So you think about the heat and the power of that, of fire, and you also think of the fact that a wind can either take it out or make it stronger. And so that's one place. So I think it also is expressed through day-to-day resistance, but then also having to measure when to scale back so that your owner or your enslaver doesn't see that you have this will that's different. And I think a lot of enslavers recognized enslaved people that had strong wills, and they would try to do all kinds of things to combat that. So slavery is a system, I always say, of negotiation, you know? And sometimes literacy, writing yourself a pass, you know, getting away, finding a way to escape slavery might have been that one person's way of expressing soul value. And I don't know that I'm committed to saying that soul value is all based on, like, a Christian belief system, you know? I think that there's some that are African belief systems that would fall along this, and it may even be people that don't believe in a higher power, but they believe in something about will and survival. And so I do see that, but that's something that I'm sort of trying to tease out a little bit. I hope that answers your question. Okay, good. >> Thank you for your talk. This was amazing. And you kind of just touched on a little bit what my question was, was this idea of soul or spiritual value, did you see it more fleshed out in the enslaved who were Christian? I mean, you talked about Isaac met with his minister and how -- you know, if they both believed in the same god. So I'm just curious, did that come up? How did that develop? And I liked the fact that you mentioned that those who didn't believe in a higher power still believed in themselves and also the culture they came from, from Africa. >> Daina Ramey Berry: Yeah, it's easier to see it with those that were Christian because they'll talk about it because they believe that there's something above them that governs, like a higher being, a god. But even people with African religious belief systems believe in ancestor gods and other people that have influence on their lives, even people that came before them that they may have never met. And so there's that influence there. But I think for me, I saw a lot of soul value in those that ran away and I always say to people it doesn't mean that most enslaved people escaped -- successfully escaped -- it just that the records that survived because abolitionists wrote them, wrote about these stories in newspapers or I've used William Still's Underground Railroad and found evidence of soul value there. Even in the published narratives from 1825 all the way through 1870's, the published primary narratives, there's evidence of soul value woven all throughout. Some of them recognize god as a Christian being and recognize their soul and their spirit as something that lives beyond this here and now in this space that they're in. And there's others that did not necessarily say that or mention a Christian god but still believed in something about themselves, that there's got to be a better place. And for some, a better place was Africa or parts of Africa. For some a better place was to be on the other side of the here and now, whatever that is for them. And so I'm sort of working through how I want to describe that. But here I use evidence of where they're talking about these pulls inside them to know that they're not the commodity or that value, that dollar value that's on their bodies, to know that that's not who they are and that there's something beyond that, that there's someone that encompasses much more than that. Thank you. >> We have time for one more question. >> Daina Ramey Berry: Okay. >> What wonderful talk, thank you. One of the most complicated families in American history's is Thomas Jefferson's, patron of this library and buildings named after him. And his slaves in many cases are his children. He's also a math guy and he knows values of object -- have you looked into his papers and does he go into this? >> Daina Ramey Berry: Yes, I have. And actually, I want to read you a quote that I use here. I looked at his work for a while and I was trying to decide how deep I wanted to go. I have some of the values of his enslaved people in the book, but they're part of the dataset. But what I did with Jefferson here, just at the beginning of the introduction I have a quote from Benjamin Banneker who writes to Thomas Jefferson in August 19th of 1791. He says, "We are a race of beings who have long labored under the abuse and censor of the world. We have long been looked upon with an eye of contempt and that we have long been considered rather brutish than human and scarcely capable of mental endowments." so he's trying to look at him and say let's not just make us a number. We're human beings, we've helped build this country. So I didn't go into too much detail about him there in the book, but I do have the figures in there. There was something else I was trying to think of I wanted to say about Jefferson. It's escaped me. Yeah, sorry. But thank you. Thank you very much. Appreciate it. ^M00:50:45 [ Applause ] ^M00:50:48 >> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress. Visit us at loc.gov.