ABSTRACT

Because the vital registration system evolved slowly in the United States, and was not complete in the South until the second quarter of the twentieth century, historical evidence on the health of blacks is meager. This chapter incorporates skeletal indicators of health and compares results with traditional sources. Free blacks were remarkably healthy in early-nineteenth-century Philadelphia, despite obstacles to their social and economic mobility. The number of slave skeletons studied here is small, but they contain many lesions indicating biological stress and considerable physical exertion. If this was true more generally, then intense physical labor, rather than organizational efficiency, could have been an important source of the greater output per worker on slave as opposed to free farms.

Controversy over the health and mortality of slaves and free blacks can be traced to the abolitionist era when critics of slavery included charges of poor living conditions and poor nutrition as part of their attack (Weld, 1839). Although these claims were secondary issues in the attack against the institution in the United States, they nevertheless defined an agenda for later research by historians, economists, and other social scientists. Virtually all comprehensive twentieth-century works on slavery address the issues of health and nutrition against a backdrop of whites or of free blacks.

Despite remarkable efforts by historians and economists to understand slavery and to interpret and analyze some of the features of the experience of African slaves of the nineteenth century through numerous sources, several points or issues of controversy remain over health. As part of the overall research objective of this project, our goal is to bring bioarchaeological evidence into the debate and to compare results with other historical skeletal samples.