Content area
Full text
(ProQuest: ... denotes formulae and/or non-US-ASCII text omitted; see image)
Articles
The amount and explanation of catch-up growth in the heights of teenage slaves are outstanding questions in the history of American slavery. In 1986 Richard Steckel analyzed shipping manifests and reported that slaves were among the smallest children ever measured but as adults were nearly as tall or taller than many European nobility (Steckel 1986).1This upward movement through the percentiles was equivalent to catch-up (or compensatory) growth of approximately four inches relative to modern height standards. This remarkable catch-up is not unprecedented but is very unusual relative to current and historical patterns of physical growth.
Interpreting the extensive catch-up growth as evidence for selective feeding on the part of owners by age of the slave, Steckel's finding has enormous implications for how economists view plantation management and the treatment of slaves, particularly children. Simply put, the height evidence shows that slave children bore the appalling nutritional brunt of slavery. Ongoing research indicates that growth depression in children and catch-up by teenagers was profitable for slave owners. Even in the face of higher child mortality associated with poor nutrition, it was lucrative to delay improved diets until slaves began working around age 10. More broadly, this interpretation sheds light on the post-emancipation experience of African Americans. Poor early childhood nutrition is now widely understood to impose long-term cognitive deficits (Currie 2009; Grantham-McGregor, Fernald, and Sethuraman 2000; Behrman et al. 2014). The effects, then, of selective feeding may have gone beyond the hunger of young children but also imposed limitations on the post-emancipation economic potential of African Americans born under slavery.
Before attributing catch-up growth to selective feeding, however, a number of other hypotheses and questions must be addressed. First, was the source of the data, the shipping manifests themselves, representative of the slave population as a whole? Second, was catch-up growth simply a figment of cross-section data, or being unable to observe the same person over time? Perhaps short children from one region were mixed with tall adults from another region, or selective mortality removed the short and unhealthy over time. Finally, even if these alternative hypotheses could be eliminated, is four inches of catch-up even biologically possible in the first place?...