The Price for Their Pound of Flesh: The Value of the Enslaved, from Womb to Grave, in the Building of a Nation by Daina Ramey Berry (review)

Daina Ramey Berry’s latest work is a history of the value of enslaved people in early America through every stage of life. She incorporates elements of the new economic history of American slavery with a methodology all her own. Rather than placing “the market” at the core of her argument, Berry centers her work on the thoughts, emotions, and ideas of enslaved people. In addition to being an economic history, then, The Price for Their Pound of Flesh is also “an intellectual history of enslaved people’s thoughts, expressions, feelings, and reactions to their own commodification” (2).

The book is organized around the human life cycle, with chapters on preconception, infancy and childhood, adolescence and young adulthood, midlife, superannuation, and the afterlife of the body. In addition to looking at the effects of age, Berry analyzes how differences in historical period and region could dramatically alter the values assigned to enslaved people at different life stages. For instance, she notes the different meanings of “breeding” in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as opposed to the mid- to late nineteenth century. Earlier references to breeding, particularly before the ban on the Atlantic slave trade, “defined pregnant or nursing women,” whom Berry finds were not always highly valued by northerners with “little need for surplus laborers.” By the mid-nineteenth century, however, “breeding” signified “reproduction for profit” (21). As this example shows, Berry pays careful attention to the ways in which ideas about gender, sexuality, and reproduction influenced the value placed on an enslaved woman or man.

To facilitate her argument, Berry introduces new terminology that other scholars can profitably adopt. She begins by considering the multiple definitions and functions of the word “value” and then outlines the multiple ways she employs the term. Berry describes “spirit or soul value” as an internal quality “that often defied monetization yet spoke to the spirit and soul of who [enslaved people] were as human beings” (6). While soul value was internal and self-actualized, appraisal value was the external value enslavers assigned enslaved people for their potential labors. Market value was a second external value, representing the going sale price “for [enslaved people’s] human flesh, negotiated in a competitive market” (7). By using these three different values simultaneously, Berry reminds readers to look beyond numbers and data and consider, as she writes, “What did the enslaved think?” (4), rather than focusing only on what enslaved people experienced or what their market or fiscal values meant to enslavers.

Berry has one final definition of “value,” which she calls “ghost value,” defined as “the price tag affixed to deceased enslaved bodies in postmortem legal contestations or as they circulated through the domestic cadaver trade” (7). Another innovation of Berry’s is her analysis of this “domestic cadaver trade,” or the circulation of the dead bodies of enslaved people for use as cadavers in medical schools across the United States. The final chapter of the book, “Postmortem: Death and Ghost Values,” is a poignant reminder of the ways in which “commodification . . . touched every facet of enslaved people’s births, lives, and afterlives” (2). In addition to tracing the branches of the domestic cadaver trade, Berry conducts microhistories of the afterlives of Nat Turner, Dangerfield Newby, Shields Green, and Joice Heth. Berry’s work on the domestic cadaver trade could be a stand-alone book; at the very least, it should spark additional research on the subject.

Berry has made innovative use of sources, drawing on frequently cited archives in new ways as well as discovering and making archives of her own. In addition to medical and plantation records, she turned to cemeteries, published and unpublished slave narratives, and insurance company archives. In 2004, Berry discovered “an archival goldmine” of over four thousand insurance...