Undoing Slavery: Bodies, Race, and Rights in the Age of Abolition by Kathleen M. Brown (review)

Reviewed by: Undoing Slavery: Bodies, Race, and Rights in the Age of Abolition by Kathleen M. Brown Bronwen Everill (bio) Keywords Slavery, Abolition, Body Undoing Slavery: Bodies, Race, and Rights in the Age of Abolition. By Kathleen M. Brown. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2023. Pp. 456. Cloth, 39. 95. ) The violence and coercion that made up the daily experience of enslavement in early America render the body an obvious site for understanding the system of slavery. Scholars' turn to bodily understandings of the experience has transformed the history of enslavement into a much more visceral field—the physicality of labor, the gendering of Black men and women's bodies, and the legal regimes of blood and birth. While these End Page 140 topics are covered in Undoing Slavery, Kathleen Brown brings into new focus the ways that the disparate movements against enslavement also used the body to make sense of their arguments. Brown retells the story of the long struggle of abolitionism in America through the lens of changing ideas about the body from the seventeenth through the nineteenth century. Brown's focus on the body and on the discourses of legal rights, medical treatises, and religious texts that circulated on bodily topics in the seventeenth and early eighteenth century allows her to explore early antislavery sentiments that don't fit neatly into the trajectory of later abolition writings. In this way, the book subtly pushes back on the argument that slavery was morally acceptable and normative. Petitions from enslaved people, their poems and legal cases, as well as Quaker writings, seemingly unrelated English legal texts, and medical experiments all show that enslavement was not accepted as a natural state, but was something worked for, argued about, and justified by people invested in the success of slavery. The variety of sources used to explore how ideas of the body intersected with ideas about slavery and its necessary end lend themselves well to an interdisciplinary approach to the body. Combining gender theory, history of science, history of ideas, legal history, and the growing historiography—at which Brown has been the vanguard—of the body itself, Undoing Slavery peels back the layers of overlapping narrative in these disparate historiographies to tell a messier story about race, identity, and the claim to rights. How did "rights" become the measure of bodily autonomy? How did race move from culture and nation to being sited in the body itself? The book explores how abolitionists created a "vision of an unfettered, un-colonized body" by connecting "the libertarian protests of seventeenth-century English prisoners with those of nineteenth-century African-descended slaves, " all of which contributed to "shifts in legal and medical thinking" (336). Envisioning what freedom could mean for Black people in America meant drawing on a diverse range of theories and practices that, in turn, reshaped the fields that they were drawing on. The book tackles these questions chronologically. The ideas of natural-born liberties, of rights endowed by blood, and of the gendered aspects of both of these concepts, fill the first three chapters. Readers interested in the history of abolition will find familiar characters here—Phillis Wheat-ley, Olaudah Equiano—but also lesser-known actors. Chapter 3's focus End Page 141 on one family's legal wranglings over birthright introduces Robert Pleasants as a new figure in the story of antislavery. Pleasants, who inherited his father's Virginia estate, turned his back on the family's traditional support of the institution of slavery. He wrote to fellow abolitionists and encouraged fellow Virginians George Washington and Thomas Jefferson to emancipate their enslaved people. He fought his family in seeking to manumit the people they considered their property by birthright. And his rationale was derived from an argument that mirrored the biblical monogenesis argument: "that he was of 'one blood' with enslaved people" (122). This chapter is a tour de force of social history, grounding in a deeply researched case study the flow of intellectual history discussed in the first two chapters. The book then moves through the antebellum history of the antislavery movement, considering the arguments for Black belonging in the new United States based on the contribution of blood, sweat. . .