Petition descriptions reveal slavery’s physical toll and enslavers’ indifference to safety.

Evidence

What’s more, her petition provides unequivocal proof of the physical toll of chattel slavery. John Thomas, age forty-one, “had three fingers on his left hand injured by a corn sheller and has lost two joints of his little finger, one joint of his first finger, and his second finger is stiff. But he can drive the carriage and work as well as before.” She valued John at 1,200 and was awarded 350.40. That he could work as well as before, even with a mangled hand, provided little incentive for enslavers like Margaret to create safe working conditions. — Dorothy A. Brown, Getting to Reparations, 80

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘could work as well as before’ reasoning shows how enslavers’ own records document the inducement to unsafe conditions — direct evidence of saturated-system harm that the reparations argument needs.