The Price for Their Pound of Flesh: The Value of the Enslaved, from Womb to Grave, in the Building of a Nation

Content Warning: This section discusses the system of race-based slavery in the United States, the commodification of enslaved people, execution, sexual assault, rape, and trafficking in human corpses.

Berry considers the systemic exploitation of slavery in its most obvious and most quantifiable form: commodification. Her research pays attention to the ways, then, that the economic infrastructure of slavery determines the monetary value of enslaved people. There were standards by which they were appraised, for example, and they were often the main source of enslavers’ wealth. An enslaved person was, moreover, economically “liquid,” easily converted to cash if the enslaver preferred money over labor.

There were standards for appraising the external value of enslaved people, including the “soundness” or “unsoundness” that was determined by physicians, who facilitated the process of appraisal and even advised insurance companies on the determination of value for enslaver compensation. Berry also examines the relation between individual enslavers and the enslaved people on their property by way of plantation ledgers in which enslavers kept records of these valuations but also included notes next to the names of enslaved people, sometimes regarding their individual personalities.

The determination of external value, whether at appraisal or through a determination of market value at auction or private sale, when value was generally higher than at appraisal, was violently imposed.