Open Yale Courses: HIST 119: The Civil War and Reconstruction Era, 1845-1877. Lecture 3 – A Southern World View: The Old South and Proslavery Ideology says,
" Ads in newspapers, like this one in Charleston, would read, "Negroes wanted. I am paying the highest cash prices for young and likely Negroes, those having good front teeth and being otherwise sound." It’s all about market forces and the health and the condition of your product. Probably the best book written on this, particularly on the language of the domestic slave trade, is Walter Johnson’s book called Soul by Soul, a book — I highly recommend you read it sometime in your reading lives.
But it’s amazing to read the letters and the language of slave traders when they write to each other, the complacency, the mixture of just pure racism on the one hand and just business language on the other. "I refused a girl 20-years-old at $700.00 yesterday," one trader wrote to another in 1853. "If you think best to take her at 700, I can still get her. She is very badly whipped but has good teeth."
America's story: The Largest Slave Auction
March 3,1859 says,
The slaves were humiliated when the buyers pulled open their mouths to see their teeth and they pinched their arms and legs to check for muscle strength.
What is it about "good teeth" or "good front teeth" (even stranger) that would make a slave more valuable to a slave dealer? Slaves worked with their hands, not with their teeth, surely? I don't think doctors nowadays look at a patient's teeth to estimate the health.