"a dictate of both interest and mercy"? Slave Hospitals in the Antebellum South

Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences

Volumn 65, Issue 1, 2010, Pages 1-47

  Kenny, Stephen C ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF LIVERPOOL   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

Domestic slave trade; Enslaved bodies; Hotel Dieu; New Orleans; Slave hospitals; Touro Infirmary

Indexed keywords

AFRICAN AMERICAN; ARTICLE; CAUCASIAN; HISTORY; HOSPITAL; HOSPITAL DESIGN; HUMAN; HUMAN EXPERIMENT; PHYSICIAN; SOCIAL PROBLEM; SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY; SPECIALIZATION; UNITED STATES; UNIVERSITY HOSPITAL; WAR;

AFRICAN AMERICANS; AMERICAN CIVIL WAR; EUROPEAN CONTINENTAL ANCESTRY GROUP; HISTORY, 19TH CENTURY; HOSPITAL DESIGN AND CONSTRUCTION; HOSPITALS, SPECIAL; HOSPITALS, UNIVERSITY; HUMAN EXPERIMENTATION; HUMANS; PHYSICIANS; PREJUDICE; RACE RELATIONS; SOCIAL PROBLEMS; SOUTHEASTERN UNITED STATES; SPECIALIZATION;

EID: 72749117636     PISSN: 00225045     EISSN: 14684373     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1093/jhmas/jrp019     Document Type: Article

References (175)

1. Racial terms are slippery concepts, subject to change over time, and different usages in various contexts. However, in the American South during the antebellum period and when applied to hospitals, the terms "Negro" and "slave" appear to be synonymous. Similarly, I can detect no meaningful difference in the use of the terms "hospital" and "infirmary" in this context.
2. Katherine Bankole first drew attention to the significance of the Admission Book of Touro Infirmary in New Orleans for the subject of slavery and health care in the antebellum South. Katherine K. Bankole, Enslavement and Medical Practices in Antebellum Louisiana (New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1998), especially 81-97.
3. Dr. A. P. Merrill, "Plantation Hygiene," Southern Agriculturist, 1853, 1
4. Advice among Masters: The Ideal in Slave Management in the Old South, ed. James O. Breeden (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1980), 178-189
5. See also A. P. Merrill, "On Some of the Distinctive Peculiarities of the Negro Race," Memphis Med. Recorder, 1855, 4:1, 1-17
6. and Merrill's editorial emphasis on diseases "peculiar to the negro race" in Memphis Med. Recorder, 1856, 5:1, 383.
7. Cartwright's writings on "Negro" medicine were reproduced in a number of ante bellum Southern periodicals, such as De Bow's Review. For the clearest expression of Cartwright's racialized medical thought, see the "Report on the Diseases and Physical Peculiarities of the Negro Race," New Orleans Med. Surg. J., 1851, 7, 691-715.
8. For an earlier appearance of this same sentiment, see Samuel A. Cartwright, "Address, Delivered before the Medical Convention in the City of Jackson, Jan 13, 1846," New Orleans Med. Surg. J., 1846, 2:6, 724-733
9. Merrill, "Plantation Hygiene," in Advice, ed. Breeden, 183.
10. James Breeden suggests that achieving an "ideal in slave management" was a common theme of writers and reformers contributing to antebellum Southern agricultural journals. See Advice, ed. Breeden, ed., xvii-xii.
11. William Dosite Postell, The Health of Slaves on Southern Plantations (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1951), 129-141
12. The Health of Slaves on Southern Plantations, Ibid., 132.
13. Eugene D. Genovese, "The Medical and Insurance Costs of Slaveholding in the Cotton Belt," J. Negro Hist., 1960, 45:3, 147.
14. Eugene D. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll; The World The Slaves Made (New York: Random House, 1974), 62.
15. William Kauffman Scarborough, Masters of the Big House: Elite Slaveholders of the Mid-Nineteenth-Century South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2003), 181.
16. Masters of the Big House: Elite Slaveholders of the Mid-Nineteenth- Century South, Ibid., 182.
17. For examples of large plantation hospitals in the antebellum South, see the descriptions of the infirmary at Hopeton, Georgia, and the slave hospital at Retreat plantation in Georgia, in John Michael Vlach, Back of the Big House: The Architecture of Plantation Slavery (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), 144-151
18. Frances Anne Kemble, Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation in 1838-1839 (1863; New York: Meridian, 1975), 69-70.
19. For similar observations, see testimony of the Reverend Dr. Channing of Boston recalling his residence in Virginia and a visit to a very rudimentary plantation hospital, in Timothy Dwight Weld, American Slavery as It Is: Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses (1839; New York: Arno Press reprint, 1969), 44.
20. Postell, Health of Slaves, 138-41
21. Todd L. Savitt, Medicine and Slavery: The Diseases and Health Care of Blacks in Antebellum Virginia (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1981), 192-94
22. and Sharla Fett, Working Cures: Healing, Health, and Power on Southern Slave Plantations (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002).
23. Todd L. Savitt, "The Use of Blacks for Medical Experimentation and Demonstration in the Old South," J. Southern Hist., 1982, 48, 331.
24. Savitt, Medicine and Slavery, 307.
25. Fett, Working Cures, 142-168
26. The pest-house on Sullivan's Island, South Carolina is discussed in George C. Rogers, Jr., Charleston in the Age of the Pinckneys (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1980), 27.
27. Philip D. Morgan, Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 323
28. Joseph I. Waring, A History of Medicine in South Carolina, 1670-1825 (Columbia, SC: R.L. Bryan Company, 1964), 113.
29. Joseph I. Waring, A History of Medicine in South Carolina, 1825-1919 (Columbia, SC: R.L. Bryan Company, 1967), 17.
30. Morgan, Slave Counterpoint, 323.
31. As slaveholding units in many upper-south states were smaller, there appear to be fewer nonplantation slave infirmaries in these locations. This seems to be the case for North Carolina, which also lacked a medical college in the antebellum era.
32. Charleston Mercury, 27 September 1856.
33. The Mississippian, 17 December 1858. 21.
34. These hospitals admitting slave patients were identified in the following sources: Augusta Daily Chronicle and Sentinel, 3 January 1855
35. Charleston Daily Courier, 9 January 1852 and 5 June 1861
36. Charleston Mercury, October 1838, 12 January 1856, 3 and 27 September 1856; 12 November 1859
37. Columbia Telescope, 4 July 1828, 15 March 1834, 30 August 1834; 11 October 1834
38. Daily South Carolinian, 2 March 1853
39. Fayetteville Observer, 26 July 1858
40. Greenville Mountaineer, 8 August 1845 and 4 October 1850
41. Mississippi Free Trader and Natchez Gazette, 6 January 1846, 21 July 1852, 26 August 1856
42. The Mississippian, 8 and 17 December 1857 and 2 February 1858
43. Montgomery Weekly Advertiser, 1 January 1852
44. Montgomery Tri-Weekly Flag and Advertiser, 12 January 1847
45. Nashville Union, 23 June 1851
46. The Weekly Nashville Union, 23 April 1845
47. The Semi-Weekly Natchez Courier, 7 May 1847
48. Natchez Weekly Courier, 12 January 1859
49. New Orleans City Directory, 1839, 1841, and 1859
50. New Orleans Commercial Bulletin, 29 April 1836, 27 September 1856, 12 November 1859
51. Savannah Morning News, 31 October 1857
52. Savannah Daily Morning News, 12 September 1854 and 8 December 1857
53. Hotel Dieu Patient Register; Touro Infirmary Admission Book; Evelyn Ward Gay, The Medical Profession in Georgia, 1733-1983 (Atlanta: Auxiliary to the Medical Association of Georgia, 1983)
54. Reginald Horsman, Josiah Nott of Mobile: Southerner, Physician, and Racial Theorist (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987);
55. Savitt, Medicine and Slavery.
56. For an overview of the role of the hospital in American medicine before the Civil War, see Charles E. Rosenberg, The Care of Strangers: The Rise of America's Hospital System (New York: Basic Books, 1987), 3-11.
57. Columbia Telescope, 4 July 1828.
58. Columbia Telescope, Ibid. 28.
59. See Stephen C. Kenny, "'I Can Do the Child No Good': Dr. Sims and the Enslaved Infants of Montgomery, Alabama," Soc. Hist. Med., 2007, 20: 2, 223-241
60. See R. L. Blakely and J. M. Harrington, eds., Bones in the Basement: Postmortem Racism in Nineteenth-Century Medical Training (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997)
61. Savitt, "The Use of Blacks for Medical Experimentation in the Old South," 331-48
62. and Kenny "Anatomy, Autopsy, and Dissection of Enslaved Bodies in the Old South" (forthcoming in The Slave Body in the World of Southern Medicine, 2010).
63. The Medical College of South Carolina and the Medical College of the State of South Carolina. For background on the rivalry between the two schools, see Joseph I. Waring, A History of Medicine in South Carolina, 1825-1919 (Charleston, SC: R. L. Bryan Company, 1967), 76-80.
64. Columbia Telescope, 15 March 1834.
65. See Cartwright, "Report on the Diseases." 32.
66. Columbia Telescope, 15 March 1834.
67. Savitt, Medicine and Slavery, 193-194
68. Greenville Mountaineer, 8 August 1845. 32.
69. James Marion Sims, The Story of My Life (1884; New York: De Capo Press, 1968), 230.
70. For a social history of James Marion Sims and a discussion of his significance to American medical history, see Deborah K. McGregor, From Midwives to Medicine: The Birth of American Gynecology (New Brunswick, NJ and London: Rutgers University Press, 1998).
71. From Midwives to Medicine: The Birth of American Gynecology, Ibid., 209, 241.
72. James Marion Sims, "Osteo-Sarcoma of the Lower Jaw-Resection of the Body of the Bone. Cure," Am. J. Med. Sci., 1846, 7:21, 128-32
73. "Removal of the Superior Maxilla for a Tumour of the Antrum; Apparent Cure. Return of the Disease. Second Operation. Sequel," Am. J. Med. Sci., 1847, 13:26, 310-315 The term "heroic" generally refers to major operations undertaken in the era before anaesthesia or antisepsis.
74. Sims, Life, 209, 210
75. W. O. Baldwin, "Tribute to the Late James Marion Sims, M.D., LL.D.," Appendix III, in Sims, Life, 428
76. Seale Harris, Woman's Surgeon: The Life Story of J. Marion Sims (New York: Macmillan, 1950), 74.
77. Sims, "Osteo-Sarcoma," 128, 129.
78. Osteo-Sarcoma, Ibid., 130.
79. Evidence of extreme methods of controlling slave patient bodies are indeed rare, but see also M. Marsh, M.D., "Cancer of the Mammary Gland," New Orleans Med. News Hosp. Gaz., 1860, 7:3, 173-178 With consent from her mistress, cotton planter Mrs. N, Dr. Marsh performed an operation to remove a cancerous breast from a forty-four-year-old enslaved woman, Delphy. This operation took place in Dr. Warren Stone's Infirmary in New Orleans, with the patient both etherized and fastened to a chair with towels around her hips and waist.
80. For Sims's account of his anatomical training, see Sims, Life, 119.
81. Sims, "Osteo-Sarcoma," 130.
82. Sims, "Osteo-Sarcoma," 130., Ibid.
83. Osteo-Sarcoma, Ibid., 131.
84. Osteo-Sarcoma, Ibid. 43.
85. Osteo-Sarcoma, Ibid. 43., Ibid.
86. On the "Sambo" stereotype in Southern culture and the debate over slave personality, see Stanley Elkins, "Slavery and Personality," in Elkins, Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life, 2nd ed. (1959; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), 81-139
87. Eugene D. Genovese, "Rebelliousness and Docility in the Negro Slave: A Critique of the Elkins Thesis," Civil War Hist., 1967, XII, 293-314
88. Gilbert Osofsky, ed., Puttin on Ole Massa: The Slave Narratives of Henry Bibb, William Wells Brown, and Solomon Northup (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1969), 9-48
89. Kenneth Stampp, "Rebels and Sambos: The Search for the Negro's Personality in Slavery," J. Southern Hist., 1971, 37, 367-392
90. Sims, "Osteo-Sarcoma," 131
91. Seale Harris, Woman's Surgeon, 80.
92. Fett, Working Cures, 145.
93. Sims, "Osteo-Sarcoma," 131.
94. See Kenny, "'I Can Do the Child No Good.'".
95. "DR. GIBBES is preparing an INFIRMARY in the rear of the Museum, where surgical and other cases will be received. Planters are informed that negroes sent to this Infirmary will be carefully attended." Columbia Telescope, 30 August 1834.
96. On the effort to reform orthodox American medicine and to promote European, especially Parisian, clinical medical thought, see John Harley Warner, Against the Spirit of System: The French Impulse in Nineteenth-Century American Medicine (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998).
97. These included the following authors and, wherever identifiable, the hospitals they used to treat slave patients: Robert S. Bailey, John Bellinger (Medical College of the State of South Carolina)
98. E. S. Bennett, John Julian Chisolm (Charleston Preparatory Medical School, Medical College of South Carolina, and his own Negro Infirmary), E. B. Flagg (Charleston Preparatory Medical School), Eli Geddings (Medical College of South Carolina), Robert W. Gibbes (his own Negro Infirmary), J. McF. Gaston (Columbia Preparatory Medical School), Thomas Ogier (Southern School of Practical Medicine), Francis Peyre Porcher (Charleston Preparatory Medical School and his own Negro Infirmary), A. N. Talley (Columbia Preparatory Medical School), and William T. Wragg (Southern School of Practical Medicine).
99. R. W. Gibbes, "Compound Dislocations of the Ankle Joint: Recovery after Reduction, without Anchylosis," Charleston Med. J. Rev., 1860, 15:6, 741-749
100. E. Geddings, "Case of Total Inversion of the Uterus, in which Extirpation of the Entire Organ was Successfully Practised," Charleston Med. J. Rev., 1854, 9:5, 613-615
101. See, for example, J. J. Chisolm, "A Few Interesting Cases," Charleston Med. J. Rev., 1857, 12:5, 614-621
102. Duffy, Rudolph Matas, 233.
103. Charles Gardener comp., Gardener's New Orleans Directory for 1861 (New Orleans: Charles Gardener, 1861), 16.
104. Gardener's New Orleans Directory for 1861 (New Orleans: Charles Gardener, 1861), 16., Ibid.
105. Hotel Dieu Hospital Patient Register, Louisiana Division and City Archives, New Orleans Public Library, New Orleans, LA (hereafter HDHPR).
106. The date at which the registrar of the Hotel Dieu last used the category "slave" in the record of admissions.
107. In this simple pre-printed and handwritten register, ruled columns log nine fields of data: patients' names, age, place of birth, reference (usually to the client or patron), date admitted, date discharged, date of death, hour of death, and diagnosis.
108. HDHPR.
109. Walter Mucklow Burnett, Touro Infirmary (New Orleans: Touro Infirmary, 1979), 1-2
110. John Duffy, ed., The Rudolph Matas History of Medicine in Louisiana, Vol.II (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1962), 231-233
111. This should be taken as a minimum figure, as there were significant variations in the way an individual patient's details were entered into the Admission Book. Touro Infirmary Admission Book, 1855-1860, Touro Infirmary Archives, New Orleans, LA (hereafter TIAB).
112. Plan of Property late the Residence of Cornelius Paulding, drawn by C. A. Hedin, Plan Book 20A, Folio 25, New Orleans Notarial Archives, New Orleans, LA.
113. W.H. Rainey, comp., Mygatt and Co's Directory 1857 (New Orleans: n.p. 1857), Louisiana Division and City Archives, New Orleans Public Library, New Orleans, LA.
114. Cohen's New Orleans Directory for 1855 (New Orleans: n.p., 1855). Louisiana Division and City Archives, New Orleans Public Library, New Orleans, LA.
115. See Thomas C. Buchanan, Black Life on the Mississippi: Slaves, Free Blacks, and the Western Steamboat World (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 26-31
116. Ari Kelman, A River and Its City: The Nature of Landscape in New Orleans (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 50-86
117. Robert C. Reinders, End of an Era: New Orleans, 1850-1860 (Gretna, LA: Pelican Publishing Co., 1998), 33-50.
118. Cohen's New Orleans Directory. . . for 1853 (New Orleans: n.p., 1853).
119. See also the following later advertisements for further examples of racial segregation of medical facilities in antebellum New Orleans: Dr. Warren Stone's Maison de Sante in Cohen's New Orleans Directory for 1855 (New Orleans: n.p., 1855)
120. Drs. Mercier and Chaille, Circus Street Infirmary in Charles Gardener, Gardner's New Orleans Directory for 1858 (New Orleans: Charles Gardener, 1858), Louisiana Division and City Archives, New Orleans Public Library, New Orleans, LA.
121. Roger A. Fischer, "Racial Segregation in Ante Bellum New Orleans," Am. Hist. Rev., 1969, 74, 932-933
122. Probably mindful of the recent (1853) yellow fever outbreak in the city, another segregation policy advertised by Touro was the exclusion of patients with "contagious diseases." (See also New Orleans Times Picayune, Friday 8 December 1854). However, this was a largely futile exercise in manufacturing public confidence in a sanitary hospital environment, as the huge number of fever and measles cases recorded in the Admissions Book makes plain.
123. Frederic Bancroft, Slave Trading in the Old South (1939; Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1996)
124. Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul: Life inside the Antebellum Slave Market (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999)
125. Michael Tadman, Speculators and Slaves: Masters, Traders, and Slaves in the Old South (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996).
126. Other recent monograph studies on the domestic slave trade in the U.S. include: Robert Gudmestad's A Troublesome Commerce: The Transformation of the Interstate Slave Trade (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2004)
127. and Steven Deyle's Carry Me Back: The Domestic Slave Trade in American Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). Tadman's study is largely responsible for reawakening current academic interest in the subject, pioneering new ways of working with a wide range of sources to arrive at an accurate estimate of the size of the antebellum slave trade. Johnson's Soul by Soul focuses on New Orleans and uses slave narratives and court records to examine the experience of the city's slave-pens and auction-blocks from the perspective of trader, buyer, and slave; while Gudmestad's work concludes by asking us to consider the legacies of the "troublesome commerce"-seen most dismally in the transformation of slave trader Isaac Franklin's "favorite plantation, Angola" into the Louisiana State Penitentiary of today. Deyle's focus is on the importance of local sales in slaves in the antebellum South, emphasizing that slave trading was "a regular part of everyday life" and was "performed in full public view."
128. For a history of Kendig reconstructed from court and notarial records, see Richard Tansey, "Bernard Kendig and the New Orleans Slave Trade," Louisiana Hist., 1982, 23, 159-78
129. see also, Judith Kelleher Schafer, Slavery, the Civil Law, and the Supreme Court of Louisiana (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1994), 140-142
130. Jim Barnett and H. Clark Burkett, "The Forks of the Road Slave Market Site at Natchez," J. Mississippi Hist., 2003, 63, 168-87
131. Bancroft, Slave Trading in the Old South, 316-317
132. TIAB.
133. See, for example, Cohen's New Orleans City Directory, 1855.
134. Tansey, "Bernard Kendig," 168.
135. In the Foster group of patients, there are just two patients who were recorded as having resided for any length of time in New Orleans. Allen, a thirty-four-year-old married male originally from North Carolina, who was listed as having lived in the city for twenty-five years; and Mary, a twenty-year-old born in Kentucky and a resident of New Orleans for six years. This indicates that Foster traded slaves locally as well from out of state. TIAB.
136. HDHPR.
137. F. M. Boney, ed., Slave Life in Georgia: A Narrative of the Life, Sufferings, and Escape of John Brown, a Fugitive Slave (Savannah, GA: The Beehive Press, 1972)
138. Solomon Northup, Twelve Years a Slave, ed. Sue Eakin and Joseph Logsdon (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1975)
139. Charles Ball, Slavery in the United States, rpt. in I Was Born a Slave: An Anthology of Classic Slave Narratives, ed. Yuval Taylor, vol.1, 1772-1849 (Edinburgh, UK: Payback Press, 1999).
140. See Johnson, Soul by Soul, 223. John Brown's description of Freeman's slave yard accommodating up to 500 souls might seem an overestimate based on the traumatic experience of close confinement. However, as Richard Tansey notes in his article on Kendig, in 1853 the New Orleans slave trading firm of Thomas and Lucio Foster claimed to be able to house up to "300 negroes" in a single yard.
141. Boney, Slave Life in Georgia, 95;
142. Tansey, "Bernard Kendig," 168.
143. Stephen Williams quoted in Charles Orson Cook and James M. Poteet, "'Dem Was Black Times, Sure Nough': The Slave Narratives of Lydia Jefferson and Stephen Williams," Louisiana Hist., 1979, 20, 290.
144. Boney, Slave Life in Georgia, 95.
145. Johnson, Soul by Soul, 118.
146. Northup, Twelve Years a Slave, 54.
147. Mortality rates for Charity Hospital were over 20 percent during the antebellum period. See Duffy, Rudolph Matas, 198-214.
148. For a graphic description of the conditions Africans endured on a slave ship making the Middle Passage journey, see The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African. Written by Himself, ed. Angelo Costanzo (originally published, 1789, Broadview Literary Texts, 2001).
149. See also Hugh Thomas, The Slave Trade: The History of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1440-1870 (London: Picador, 1997), 407-28
150. and Stephanie E. Smallwood, Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007).
151. TIAB.
152. Tansey, "Bernard Kendig," 162.
153. The Kendig patient group was made up of twenty-four individuals: eight identified as female and sixteen as male. The average age of both men and women alike was twenty-three years. Six of the patients came from Kentucky, four from Mississippi, two each from Virginia and Georgia, and a single patient in each case from Alabama, Florida, Arkansas, Texas, Tennessee, and South Carolina.
154. TIAB.
155. Ibid. 91.
156. Tansey, "Bernard Kendig," 171.
157. TIAB.
158. TIAB.
159. TIAB.
160. TIAB.
161. See Marie Jenkins Schwartz, Birthing a Slave: Motherhood and Medicine in the Antebellum South (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 83-87.
162. Richard Follett, The Sugar Masters: Planters and Slaves in Louisiana's Cane World, 1820-1860 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005), 48.
163. The Sugar Masters: Planters and Slaves in Louisiana's Cane World, 1820-1860, Ibid. 91.
164. One example is that of Dr. Truman Stillman, proprietor of the Louisiana Lock Hospital Institution, advertising in Michel's New Orleans Annual and Commercial Register in 1846.
165. Fett, Working Cures, 15-35.
166. Johnson, Soul by Soul, 120.
167. Sarah Ann Allen v. W. L. Campbell, No.1849, 5 La. Ann. 754, New Orleans, December 1850.
168. Schafer, Slavery, the Civil Law, 127-148
169. Slavery, the Civil Law, Ibid., 131-132
170. Allen v. Campbell.
171. Schafer, Slavery, the Civil Law, 127-48.
172. Indeed, in the document, "Brief for the Plaintiff," accompanying this case, Allen's attorney E. L. Goold refers to Bensadon as Walter Campbell's M.D. Despite Bensadon's testimony, this case was decided in favor of the plaintiff Sarah Allen.
173. Schafer, Slavery, the Civil Law, 103.
174. The advertisement urges those requiring further particulars to "apply at the Infirmary, or at the U.S. Life Insurance Annuity and Trust Company, 48 Camp Street."
175. A recent study of slavery and life insurance in the Upper South argues that slaveowners were among the first and most enthusiastic southerners to embrace this new commercial safeguard. Sharon Ann Murphy, "Securing Human Property: Slavery, Life Insurance, and Industrialization in the Upper South," J. Early Rep., 2005, 25, 615-52, 618.