David Stefan Doddington's "Old Age and American Slavery"

David Stefan Doddington is Senior Lecturer in American History at Cardiff University. He is the author of Contesting Slave Masculinity in the American South.

Doddington applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Old Age and American Slavery, and reported the following:

If readers (please may there be some…) opened page 99 of Old Age and American Slavery, they would get a clear sense of the broader arguments in part one of the book. In these opening chapters I emphasize the rapacious character of American slavery, and the calculated abuse of enslavers, by showing how Black elders were exploited as much as possible, or neglected, sold, and abandoned where not. Page 99 offers one of the most well-known examples of such behavior, highlighting the famed Black activist and fugitive author Frederick Douglass’s recollections of the treatment of his grandmother, Betsey, by her enslaver:

“Finding that she was of but little value; that her frame was already racked with the pains of old age and that complete helplessness was fast stealing over her once active limbs – [her enslaver] took her to the woods, built her a little hut with a mud chimney and then gave her the bounteous pleasure of there supporting herself in utter loneliness; thus virtually turning her out to die.”

This section of Douglass’s narrative is well-known. However, the book complicates and extends the discussion by noting how in later versions of his life-story Douglass notes that Betsey was saved from this fate by Captain Auld, his own former slaver. As Douglass puts it: “The fact is, that, after writing my narrative describing the condition of my grandmother, Capt. Auld’s attention being thus called to it, he rescued her from her destitution.”

Douglass condemned the individuals who exploited his grandmother for as long as they could, and then cynically abandoned her, and he insisted that such treatment was the logical conclusion in a society built on exploitation. Readers who opened page 99 would thus get a stark indicator of the broader arguments in my book about the violence and tragedies of American slavery; they would have a clear sense of the significance of age to slavers, and to enslaved people, and how aging factored into the broader dynamics of slavery at an institutional and individual level. Notwithstanding her “rescue,” the treatment of Betsey reveals the systemic violence of enslavers who sought profit from the bodies and labor of enslaved people. Douglass could not save every elder.

Learn more about Old Age and American Slavery at the Cambridge University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue