Wartime compensation petitions itemized enslaved people like livestock

Evidence

Margaret Barber’s petition was one of the most precise—“Where other owners measured their people in inches, she did so in quarter-inches.” She described those she enslaved, ranging in age from four months to sixty-five years, in detached detail and included information such as their name, sex, color, and height along with their “work” experience. — Dorothy A. Brown, Getting to Reparations, 79

Categorization

• XREF: This exemplifies Brown’s hidden-history architecture - the three-part argument for reparations as accounting - by showing enslaved people recorded in quarter-inch measurements as property inventory. — connects to: Polarised traits like cleanliness are imposed to mark slaves as nearer to animals — Val Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, 206