This panel brings together work on slavery, freedom, and disability during the long eighteenth century in North America. Focusing on the contested notion of “soundness,” or the qualities of body and mind that would enable “productive” and self-sustaining labor, the panel maps the laws regarding enslavement, manumission, and taxation as well as related arguments made by jurists, medical practitioners, governing officials, townsfolk, slaveowners, and, significantly, the enslaved themselves. Such debates, which determined the basic material conditions of the lives of the enslaved, were not only engrained in daily affairs, but also had implications for broad conversations about the nature and meaning of citizenship in the newly developing republic.