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

Written by Daina Ramey Berry

Narrated by Pippa Vos

Groundbreaking look at slaves as commodities through every phase of life, from birth to death and beyond, in early America

In life and in death, slaves were commodities, their monetary value assigned based on their age, gender, health, and the demands of the market. The Price for Their Pound of Flesh is the first book to explore the economic value of enslaved people through every phase of their lives—including preconception, infancy, childhood, adolescence, adulthood, the senior years, and death—in the early American domestic slave trade. Covering the full “life cycle,” historian Daina Ramey Berry shows the lengths to which enslavers would go to maximize profits and protect their investments. Illuminating “ghost values” or the prices placed on dead enslaved people, Berry explores the little-known domestic cadaver trade and traces the illicit sales of dead bodies to medical schools.

This book is the culmination of more than ten years of Berry’s exhaustive research on enslaved values, drawing on data unearthed from sources such as slave-trading records, insurance policies, cemetery records, and life insurance policies. Writing with sensitivity and depth, she resurrects the voices of the enslaved and provides a rare window into enslaved peoples’ experiences and thoughts, revealing how enslaved people recalled and responded to being appraised, bartered, and sold throughout the course of their lives. Reaching out from these pages, they compel the reader to bear witness to their stories, to see them as human beings, not merely commodities.

A profoundly humane look at an inhumane institution, The Price for Their Pound of Flesh will have a major impact how we think about slavery, reparations, capitalism, nineteenth-century medical education, and the value of life and death.

Winner of the 2018 Hamilton Book Award – from the University Coop (Austin, TX)

Winner of the 2018 Society for Historians of the Early American Republic Book Prize (SHEAR)

Winner of the 2018 Phillis Wheatley Literary Award, from the Sons and Daughters of the US Middle Passage

Finalist for the 2018 Frederick Douglass Book Prize from Yale University’s Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition

• Language: English
• Publisher: Beacon Press Audio
• Release date: Aug 1, 2024
• ISBN: 9780807017593

Daina Ramey Berry

DAINA RAMEY BERRY is the Oliver H. Radkey Professor of History and African and African Diaspora Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the author of The Price for their Pound of Flesh: The Value of the Enslaved, from Womb to Grave, in the Building of a Nation and Swing the Sickle for the Harvest Is Ripe: Gender and Slavery in Antebellum Georgia.

Reviews for The Price for Their Pound of Flesh

[waitingtoderail · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

It took me some time to make it through this book, a remarkable work of scholarship, because I had to wrestle with many of the things I was learning. You see, it had never occurred to me,a white man with a master's degree in history, that of COURSE the slaves knew their economic worth. Now, I read Fogel & Engerman in grad school, but of course they didn't give two whits about the slaves' experiences. Dr. Berry's work should supplant or even replace theirs. Simply stunning work.

[jim_sipe-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

As a genealogist and historian, I found the topic of this work very intriguing. While the title did not really give an idea of the subject the subtitle was the net which caught my attention, The Value of the enslaved, from Womb to Grave, in the Building of a Nation. The perspective taken by Berry is quite different from anything I have read in the past. My knowledge of Southern history is not as strong as other locals, nor do I have a special interest due to personal family research. This is part of why I gravitate to books such as this one.
The research undertaken, appears to be exhaustive. If you are a genealogist or historian the records used to obtain information for this publication may be new to you and well worth your time to discover, so you can apply, obtain and use the sources for your own research.
Describing the life of a slave based on their value was very interesting. To put this in a timeline comparing how that value changes from birth to death was incredible. I would highly recommend his informative work to all historians, even going so far as to say it should be read by anyone with ties to the South. Whether you family was enslaved or the owner of slaves there is a lot of data to be gleaned from this work. Not to leave out the non-slave owning population, others reading this book will gain insight into the community, culture and general life people from the South.
One of the most noteworthy sections dealt with postmortem, cemeteries and the medical schools. Slaves would raid cemeteries for bodies (not legally and probably without their owner knowing) and deliver them to some of the greatest medical schools in the U.S. A little known, fact that much of our early medical information gleaned from cadavers was based on the African population and not on a European population.
Wonderful book and I am grateful to have had the introduction and then the ability to read this work thanks to Librarything.

[maowangvater · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This is a fascinating and disquieting account of the commodification of human life and human bodies. Although it would be naïve to expect a book about slavery to be anything but disquieting, Dr. Berry’s years of research into and study of the subject and her pairing of the voices of the enslaved juxtaposed with their assessed economic value and their, on average, higher sale price from gestation and into the grave and beyond made this privileged old white male reader quite squeamish—and deservedly so.

The economic value of the slave is given as a capital value, as a piece of farm machinery or an item of livestock would be assessed for property insurance. The arrangement of the book follows the life cycle of slaves from before birth, as the value of a “breeding Wench,” might be higher for a plantation owner wanting to expand his “stock,” and less for a slave owner wanting a domestic worker, where the enslaved woman’s child care duties would be an interruption of her household duties. This fluctuating valuation continues even after death when the mortal remain of the slave would be sold by the owner, or stolen by grave robbers for dissection, a growing trade in the 18th century and a well-established extralegal practice in the 19th. Berry coins the term “ghost value” for this postmortem trade for which medical colleges would pay up to $30 for a cadaver, or $881 in 2014 dollars. She uses another neologism for the value, or self-worth that the enslaved person put on him- or herself, their “soul value.” This was an unquantifiable value.

[hotwolfie · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I was hoping to win an Early Review Copy of this book, so I was pretty happy when I actually did! If you're a fan of nonfiction, historical books I'd definitely recommend this. I thought the premise of the book was interesting and original, and it was very well researched. It is a difficult book to read due to the heartbreaking history, but it's a worthwhile examination. The writing style is also not dry at all, and author Daina Ramey Berry really grabs your attention.

[garyleejones · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

The Price for Their Pound of Flesh, by D. R. Berry, is a thoughtful, detailed, and perceptive account of the commodification of human beings in 19th century America. Organized by the chronological age of an enslaved person, it traces the monetary value placed on the enslaved from birth to early childhood, then from early to middle childhood, middle childhood to young adulthood, etc all the to and past the value at death. The author carefully avoids calling the people "slaves," consistently calling them "enslaved," to refer to conditions imposed on them rather than to fundamental identity. The variety of insights into what the buyers and sellers valued is impressive and thought-provoking. This is a book to read, consider, re-read, and value.

[liz1564 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This concise book about slavery does more to expose the horrors of the institution than most much longer studies. Ms. Berry, associate professor at the University of Texas and a Distinguished Lecturer for the Organization of American Historians, literally reveals the value of an enslaved person from infancy to beyond the grave. She analyzes an impressive amount of data again and again to illustrate her points.

“Examining a sample of 17,652 enslaved values from nine Southern states between 1771 and 1865, we learn that the average appraised values for women and men age twenty-tree to thirty-nine were respectively $528 and $747.” p. 96

The book is divided into six sections: preconception; infancy and childhood; young adults; midlife; elderly; and post mortem. Each section is fascinating in a horrific sense. In the first section, enslaved women were breeders, fancies, or laborers. After the end of the African slave trade, slavery in the United States was solely dependent on the “wombs of the women” already in the country This phrase, “wombs of the women” brought me up short. I always knew this, but I never concentrated on it so specifically. By having babies, enslaved females alone were keeping the institution viable. Yet not all owners of enslaved women wanted breeders. She could die in childbirth; at best, she was limited in her work while heavily pregnant or nursing. And babies just were not profitable. Children were worth about $25 until they reached the age of ten and could begin their lives as laborers. Before ten, they had to be cared for with no return on the owner’s investment.

As Berry proceeds through the life stages of the enslaved, she again uses meticulous research to show the value of a young or a midlife adult. Besides auction and private sale records, insurance records proved valuable data. Enslavers took out policies on their property should anything unnatural cause their death. Nat Turner’s rebels who were hanged reaped their owners’ full value. By the time an enslaved man or woman reached rare old age there was little value for their flesh and many were just turned out to survive any way they could.

Finally, in the final chapter, the discussion is the value of the slave’s body after death. Departing from the pattern of the book, Berry analyzes the significant trade in cadavers to medical schools, mainly in the North. She uses as examples not just the enslaved, but also freed and free men, plus poor whites. This buying of bodies continued well into the 1880’s. Before Emancipation the enslaver had the right to sell his dead property; after the Civil War grave robbers filled the roll with eager students paying the money for a fresh corpse.

Along with the value of the man, woman, or child to his owner, Berry balances it with what she calls “soul value”, the value the enslaved placed on himself or herself. Knowing they were worth more than their pound of flesh, even if this would only be realized in a heaven where all are free and families are reunited, helped these men and women endure the daily brutalities they had to face.

This is this most powerful book I have read on slavery in the United States. The hackneyed phrase about enslaved men and women being treated “like cattle” becomes terribly real when one sees the cold statistics which show how they were, indeed, treated like cattle…..bred, worked, put out to pasture if they lived long enough, and finally, cut up after they died.

I cannot recommend this enough. I wish everyone in this country would read it. If I could give it ten stars, I would.

[ghr4 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Daina Ramey Berry's enlightening The Price for Their Pound of Flesh: The Value of the Enslaved, from Womb to Grave, in the Building of a Nation is a fine work of research and scholarship. The author vividly details the horrific manner in which the valuation of slave was akin to the pricing and sale of livestock - an innate element of the slave trade whose harrowing details, until now, have largely escaped our collective consciousness.

The book, however, goes well beyond the monetary facts and figures, deftly presenting poignant and heartbreaking accounts of the frequent separation of children from their mother as the result of auction block sales. And beyond the dollar valuations at each stage of life and postmortem, Berry also considers the important concept of "soul value," the slaves' self-assessed value of their inner spirit, their own self-worth as a means of maintaining their human dignity. Through this deeply spiritual internal outlet they centered their thoughts and feelings on the true value of their soul, rather than the commodified "flesh and blood" value dictated by the slave market.

In order to relate the historical facts honestly and thoroughly, the author necessarily includes some rather gruesome details, particulary regarding the desecration and dismemberment of bodies after death, and the clandestine cadaver trade with its associated grave-robbing practices.

Berry has provided a noteworthy addition to the canon of quality works exploring this tragic chapter in American history.

[stevesmits · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This exhaustively-researched and intriguingly-structured book is valuable in how it jars one's sensibilities about the moral degradation of slavery. It is easy to abhor slavery in the abstract, the conceptions of most people guided by their ethical repugnance of the "institution" whose presence in history of the continent lasted longer than the years since its abandonment. Moreover, depictions in books, movies and the theater of the overt physical cruelty inflicted on the enslaved, while shocking, diverts attention from the depth and scope of slavery's degradation and inhumanity.

Professor Berry approaches this subject from the interesting perspective of the economics of the slave trade; she focuses on the business aspects of buying and selling human beings. In her book, she categorizes the enslaved according to their passage in life, from prenatal to death (and beyond, i.e. the disposition of their bodies). She describes the "attributes" of people within each age group that contributed to their value at sale. One example is that of the purported "fecundity" of women that would make them good "breeders of issue" that would have future economic value to their enslavers. There are many examples of the assessment of the worth of the enslaved, so similar to how the market value livestock is determined.

Professor Berry describes the understanding of the enslaved themselves of their condition and external value (like, for instance, when children come to understand that they are the property of another) and the presence of a self-awareness of internal value, an individual realization of their intrinsic worth that she labels "soul value". From their stories and their actions to resist or escape enslavement, we know this to be so.

In addition to the business aspect of trading in humans, Berry has included many scenes of the anguish and desperation of people put on the auction block -- the utter depravity of the process and the unimaginable grief at the separation of families. These human stories are heart-rending, but, in a sense, what is as deeply chilling is the understanding that this was "business" with all its prosaic, mundane aspects, so widely accepted as having a legitimate economic purpose and no moral implications.