Old Age and American Slavery

Explores how age shaped the institution of slavery and how the aging process affected the enslaved and enslaver alike.

David Stefan Doddington (Author)

9781009123082, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 16 November 2023

424 pages
23.6 x 16.1 x 2.6 cm, 0.71 kg

'A learned, well-written book that incorporates or critiques a wide range of academic literature on age, disability, gender, masculinity, and slavery studies; theories of identity and intersectionality; southern history; legal history; and other fields. Doddington's primary sources include WPA slave narratives, fugitive slave autobiographies, civil and criminal court records, and plantation diaries. The author's reliance on twentieth-century testimony of former slaves may seem counterintuitive, but he makes effective use of those sources to reveal the exploitative nature of slavery and the inter- and intraracial conflicts that came along with old age … a sobering assessment of the intersection of age and power in the antebellum South.' Frederick Knight, The Journal of the Civil War Era

Old Age and American Slavery explores how antebellum southerners, Black and white, adapted to, resisted, or failed to overcome changes associated with old age, both real and imagined. Slavery was a system of economic exploitation and a contested site of personal domination, both of which were affected by concerns with age. In examining how individuals, families, and communities felt about the aging process and dealt with elders, David Stefan Doddington emphasizes the complex social relations that developed in a slave society. In connecting old age to the arguments of Black activists, abolitionists, enslavers, and their propagandists, the book reveals how representations of old age, and experiences of aging, spoke to wider struggles relating to mastery, paternalism, resistance, and survival in slavery. The book asks us to rethink long-standing narratives relating to networks of solidarity in the American South and it illuminates the violent and exploitative nature of American slavery.

Acknowledgements
Introduction: Old Age and American Slavery
Part I. The Enslaved: 1. 'As to those more advanced in life': Old Age in Slavery
2. 'Old and broken now
no tongue can tell how much I suffer': Sale, Abandonment, and Neglect
3. 'Young people think that old people are fools but old people know that young people are fools': Intergenerational Conflict among the Enslaved
4. 'Don't kill such an old creature as I': Old Age and Community Tension
5. 'You won't notice me now but you'll wish you had': Conjure, Community, and Intergenerational Conflict
6. 'The summer of my life was passing away': Resistance, Old Age, and Surviving Slavery
Part II. Enslavers: 7. 'Old God damn son-of-a-bitch, she gone on down to hell': Elderly Enslavers and Enslaved Resistance
8. 'They are getting too old and weak': Aged Mastery and White Conflict
9. 'Something must be done with the old man': Dominion after Death
10. 'Let our women and old men… be disabused of the false and unfounded notion that slavery is sinful': Emancipation Contested
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index.

Subject Areas: History of the Americas [HBJK]