Disability in American slavery

It is estimated that about 9 percent of American slaves were disabled on the eve of the Emancipation Proclamation due to some type of physical, sensory, psychological, neurological, or developmental condition. This means that roughly 360,000 to 540,000 American slaves had a disability. In the antebellum age, slaves were described as disabled if their injury or condition prevented them from performing labor, such as blindness, deafness, loss of limbs, and even infertility. Since disabled slaves could not fend for themselves or perform the normal types of slave labor, they usually depended on their masters and mothers to take care of them. In terms of labor, disabled slaves usually found themselves working in the kitchen or in nurseries. Since they could not work as fast as non-disabled slaves, disabled slaves were often subject to harsh treatment that included weapons. Often, slave owners would sell off their disabled slaves to doctors who would then perform medical experiments on them. After slavery ended, disabled slaves mostly remained on plantations until the government was able to set up hospitals and asylums to house them.

Definition of disability in slaves

In the antebellum South, the term "disabled" did not just apply to African American slaves who had been born with a mental or physical disability. Rather, slaveholders usually referred to slaves who had been subject to lack of food, harsh penalties, harmful work conditions, or abuse as mentally or physically disabled.