“Being of Sound Body and Mind”: Disability, Slavery, and the Law in 18th-Century Southern New England

Throughout the eighteenth century, town councilmen in Rhode Island and Connecticut assessed the bodies of enslaved African and Indigenous individuals in order to determine their eligibility for emancipation. Acting as the gatekeepers of freedom, town selectmen screened the bodies of enslaved persons whose enslavers wished to free them. Their objective was to detect any visible physical or psychological disabilities–defects that town administrators believed would render the formerly enslaved incapable of labor, and thus, unable to support themselves in freedom. In these moments, matters of the flesh were made matters of public discussion and scrutiny.

This paper examines the social and legal histories of slavery, disability, and the law in southern New England during the long eighteenth-century (circa 1700 to 1810). Though the history of slavery and disability in the plantation south and Afro-Caribbean have received scholarly attention in recent years, the centrality of disability to the governance of racial slavery in New England has escaped the attention of historians. Utilizing a range of archival documents including civil lawsuits from Rhode Island and Connecticut regarding the soundness of bondspeople, town council and overseer of the poor records, manumission deeds, and legislative documents, this paper seeks to provide a comprehensive overview of the laws of slavery and manumission in early New England.