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.

• Acknowledgements; Introduction: Old Age and American Slavery; Part I. The Enslaved: 1. 'As to those more advanced in life': Old Age in Slavery; 2. 'Old and broken now; no tongue can tell how much I suffer': Sale, Abandonment, and Neglect; 3. 'Young people think that old people are fools but old people know that young people are fools': Intergenerational Conflict among the Enslaved; 4. 'Don't kill such an old creature as I': Old Age and Community Tension; 5. 'You won't notice me now but you'll wish you had': Conjure, Community, and Intergenerational Conflict; 6. 'The summer of my life was passing away': Resistance, Old Age, and Surviving Slavery; Part II. Enslavers: 7. 'Old God damn son-of-a-bitch, she gone on down to hell': Elderly Enslavers and Enslaved Resistance; 8. 'They are getting too old and weak': Aged Mastery and White Conflict; 9. 'Something must be done with the old man': Dominion after Death; 10. 'Let our women and old men… be disabused of the false and unfounded notion that slavery is sinful': Emancipation Contested; Conclusion; Bibliography; Index.

'This book offers compelling evidence that the rhetoric and realities of old age decline shaped enslaved people's self-understandings, relations with each other, and resistance to slavery as well as conflicts among enslavers. David Doddington demonstrates that no understanding of slavery can be complete without attention to old age.' Corinne Field, author of Equal Adulthood: Gender, Race, Age, and the Fight for Citizenship in Antebellum America