UC Davis

This dissertation analyzes the lives and work patterns of blind enslaved people in the antebellum South. It asks three main questions: How did the stereotype that the blind were weak and helpless affect how owners thought of and employed them? Conversely, how did blind bondspeople who were capable of physical labor adapt and shape their daily tasks to compensate for their blindness? Finally, how did emancipation affect blind black people’s chances to support themselves through meaningful employment? The study draws on a wide range of primary sources, including slave narratives, plantation journals, court cases, newspaper articles, letters, and Census data. It employs an interdisciplinary approach that combines disability and slavery studies. Blindness was a random but regular occurrence in bondspeople. Although old age was the leading cause of blindness, infections, accidents, and genetics also took the sight of younger bondspeople. In everyday discourse and legal proceedings, slaveholders classified blind slaves as useless and unsound. These descriptions drew from wider stereotypes that the blind were weak, immobile, and helpless. Despite slaveholders’ declarations, the chattel principle caused them to contradict themselves and incorporate blind slaves into their workforces. Blind bondspeople most often labored on the support side of plantations: the operations that maintained the property, served the personal needs of residents, and facilitated faster work by bondspeople engaged in producing cash crops. They performed a variety of skilled and unskilled touch-based tasks, performing roles such as cook, washer, boatman, and cooper. While enslaved, blind black people lived, ate, and worked like other bondspeople. After emancipation, however, stigmas forced them to live and work like the blind white population, who mainly subsisted on charity.