American Negro Slavery by Ulrich Bonnell Phillips

U >> Ulrich Bonnell Phillips >> American Negro Slavery

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 | 32 | 33 | 34 | 35 | 36 | 37 | 38 | 39 | 40 | 41 | 42 | 43 | 44 | 45 | 46

[Footnote 10: Robert Collins, "Essay on the Management of Slaves,"
reprinted in _DeBow's Review_, XVII, 421-426, and partly reprinted in F.L.
Olmsted, _Seaboard Slave States_, pp. 692-697.]

Advice very similar to the foregoing examples was also printed in the
form of manuals at the front of blank books for the keeping of plantation
records;[11] and various planters described their own methods in operation
as based on the same principles. One of these living at Chunnennuggee,
Alabama, signing himself "N.B.P.," wrote in 1852 an account of the problems
he had met and the solutions he had applied. Owning some 150 slaves, he had
lived away from his plantation until about a decade prior to this writing;
but in spite of careful selection he could never get an overseer combining
the qualities necessary in a good manager. "They were generally on
extremes; those celebrated for making large crops were often too severe,
and did everything by coercion. Hence turmoil and strife ensued. The
negroes were ill treated and ran away. On the other hand, when he employed
a good-natured man there was a want of proper discipline; the negroes
became unmanageable and, as a natural result, the farm was brought into
debt," The owner then entered residence himself and applied methods which
resulted in contentment, health and prolific increase among the slaves, and
in consistently good crops. The men were supplied with wives at home so far
as was practicable; each family had a dry and airy house to itself, with a
poultry house and a vegetable garden behind; the rations issued weekly were
three and a half pounds of bacon to each hand over ten years old, together
with a peck of meal, or more if required; the children in the day nursery
were fed from the master's kitchen with soup, milk, bacon, vegetables and
bread; the hands had three suits of working clothes a year; the women were
given time off for washing, and did their mending in bad weather; all hands
had to dress up and go to church on Sunday when preaching was near; and
a clean outfit of working clothes was required every Monday. The chief
distinction of this plantation, however, lay in its device for profit
sharing. To each slave was assigned a half-acre plot with the promise that
if he worked with diligence in the master's crop the whole gang would in
turn be set to work his crop. This was useful in preventing night and
Sunday work by the negroes. The proceeds of their crops, ranging from ten
to fifty dollars, were expended by the master at their direction for Sunday
clothing and other supplies.[12] On a sugar plantation visited by Olmsted
a sum of as many dollars as there were hogsheads in the year's crop was
distributed among the slaves every Christmas.[13]

[Footnote 11: Pleasant Suit, _Farmer's Accountant and Instructions for
Overseers_ (Richmond, Va., 1828); _Affleck's Cotton Plantation Record and
Account Book_, reprinted in _DeBow's Review_, XVIII, 339-345, and in Thomas
W. Knox, _Campfire and Cotton Field_ (New York, 1865), pp. 358-364. _See
also_ for varied and interesting data as to rules, experience and advice;
Thomas S. Clay (of Bryan County, Georgia), _Detail of a Plan for the Moral
Improvement of Negroes on Plantations_ (1833); and _DeBow's Review_, XII,
291, 292; XIX, 358-363; XXI, 147-149, 277-279; XXIV, 321-326; XXV, 463;
XXVI, 579, 580; XXIX, 112-115, 357-368.]

[Footnote 12: _Southern Quarterly Review_, XXI, 215, 216.]

[Footnote 13: Olmsted, _Seaboard Slave States_, p. 660.]

Of overseers in general, the great variety in their functions, their
scales of operation and their personal qualities make sweeping assertions
hazardous. Some were at just one remove from the authority of a great
planter, as is suggested by the following advertisement: "Wanted, a manager
to superintend several rice plantations on the Santee River. As the
business is extensive, a proportionate salary will be made, and one or two
young men of his own selection employed under him.[14] A healthful summer
residence on the seashore is provided for himself and family." Others
were hardly more removed from the status of common field hands. Lawrence
Tompkins, for example, signed with his mark in 1779 a contract to oversee
the four slaves of William Allason, near Alexandria, and to work steadily
with them. He was to receive three barrels of corn and three hundred pounds
of pork as his food allowance, and a fifth share of the tobacco, hemp and
flax crops and a sixth of the corn; but if he neglected his work he might
be dismissed without pay of any sort.[15] Some overseers were former
planters who had lost their property, some were planters' sons working for
a start in life, some were English and German farmers who had brought their
talents to what they hoped might prove the world's best market, but most of
them were of the native yeomanry which abounded in virtually all parts
of the South. Some owned a few slaves whom they put on hire into their
employers' gangs, thereby hastening their own attainment of the means to
become planters on their own score.[16]

[Footnote 14: _Southern Patriot_ (Charleston, S. C), Jan. 9, 1821.]

[Footnote 15: MS. Letter book, 1770-1787, among the Allason papers in the
New York Public Library.]

[Footnote 16: D.D. Wallace, _Life of Henry Laurens_, pp. 21, 135.]

If the master lived on the plantation, as was most commonly the case, the
overseer's responsibilities were usually confined to the daily execution of
orders in supervising the slaves in the fields and the quarters. But when
the master was an absentee the opportunity for abuses and misunderstandings
increased. Jurisdiction over slaves and the manner of its exercise were the
grounds of most frequent complaint. On the score of authority, for example,
a Virginia overseer in the employ of Robert Carter wrote him in 1787 in
despair at the conduct of a woman named Suckey: "I sent for hir to Come in
the morning to help Secoure the foder, but She Sent me word that She would
not come to worke that Day, and that you had ordered her to wash hir
Cloaiths and goo to Any meeting She pleased any time in the weke without my
leafe, and on monday when I Come to Reken with hir about it She Said it was
your orders and She would do it in Defiance of me.... I hope if Suckey is
aloud that privilige more than the Rest, that she will bee moved to some
other place, and one Come in her Room."[17] On the score of abuses, Stancil
Barwick, an overseer in southwestern Georgia, wrote in 1855 to John B.
Lamar: "I received your letter on yesterday ev'ng. Was vary sorry to hear
that you had heard that I was treating your negroes so cruely. Now, sir, I
do say to you in truth that the report is false. Thear is no truth in it.
No man nor set of men has ever seen me mistreat one of the negroes on the
place." After declaring that miscarriages by two of the women had been due
to no requirement of work, he continued: "The reports that have been sent
must have been carried from this place by negroes. The fact is I have made
the negro men work, an made them go strait. That is what is the matter, an
is the reason why my place is talk of the settlement. I have found among
the negro men two or three hard cases an I have had to deal rite ruff, but
not cruly at all. Among them Abram has been as triflin as any man on the
place. Now, sir, what I have wrote you is truth, and it cant be disputed by
no man on earth,"[18]

[Footnote 17: _Plantation and Frontier_, I, 325.]

[Footnote 18: _Ibid_., I, 312, 313.]

To diminish the inducement for overdriving, the method of paying the
overseers by crop shares, which commonly prevailed in the colonial period,
was generally replaced in the nineteenth century by that of fixed salaries.
As a surer preventive of embezzlement, a trusty slave was in some cases
given the store-house keys in preference to the overseer; and sometimes
even when the master was an absentee an overseer was wholly dispensed with
and a slave foreman was given full charge. This practice would have been
still more common had not the laws discouraged it.[19] Some planters
refused to leave their slaves in the full charge of deputies of any kind,
even for short periods. For example, Francis Corbin in 1819 explained
to James Madison that he must postpone an intended visit because of the
absence of his son. "Until he arrives," Corbin wrote, "I dare not, in
common prudence, leave my affairs to the sole management of overseers, who
in these days are little respected by our intelligent negroes, many of whom
are far superior in mind, morals and manners to those who are placed in
authority over them."[20]

[Footnote 19: Olmsted, _Seaboard States_, p. 206.]

[Footnote 20: Massachusetts Historical Society _Proceedings_, XLIII, 261.]

Various phases of the problem of management are illustrated in a letter of
A.H. Pemberton of the South Carolina midlands to James H. Hammond at the
end of 1846. The writer described himself as unwilling to sacrifice his
agricultural reading in order to superintend his slaves in person, but as
having too small a force to afford the employment of an overseer pure and
simple. For the preceding year he had had one charged with the double
function of working in person and supervising the slaves' work also; but
this man's excess of manual zeal had impaired his managerial usefulness.
What he himself did was well done, said Pemberton, "and he would do _all_
and leave the negroes to do virtually nothing; and as they would of course
take advantage of this, what he did was more than counterbalanced by what
they did not." Furthermore, this employee, "who worked harder than any man
I ever saw," used little judgment or foresight. "Withal, he has always been
accustomed to the careless Southern practice generally of doing things
temporarily and in a hurry, just to last for the present, and allowing the
negroes to leave plows and tools of all kinds just where they use them,
no matter where, so that they have to be hunted all over the place when
wanted. And as to stock, he had no idea of any more attention to them than
is common in the ordinarily cruel and neglectful habits of the South."
Pemberton then turned to lamentation at having let slip a recent
opportunity to buy at auction "a remarkably fine looking negro as to size
and strength, very black, about thirty-five or forty, and so intelligent
and trustworthy that he had charge of a separate plantation and eight or
ten hands some ten or twelve miles from home." The procuring of such a
foreman would precisely have solved Pemberton's problem; the failure to
do so left him in his far from hopeful search for a paragon manager and
workman combined.[21]

[Footnote 21: MS. among the Hammond papers in the Library of Congress.]

On the whole, the planters were disposed to berate the overseers as a class
for dishonesty, inattention and self indulgence. The demand for new
and better ones was constant. For example, the editor of the _American
Agriculturist_, whose office was at New York, announced in 1846: "We are
almost daily beset with applications for properly educated managers
for farms and plantations--we mean for such persons as are up to the
improvements of the age, and have the capacity to carry them into
effect."[22] Youths occasionally offered themselves as apprentices. One of
them, in Louisiana, published the following notice in 1822: "A young man
wishing to acquire knowledge of cotton planting would engage for twelve
months as overseer and keep the accounts of a plantation.... Unquestionable
reference as to character will be given."[23] And a South Carolinian in
1829 proposed that the practice be systematized by the appointment of local
committees to bring intelligent lads into touch with planters willing to
take them as indentured apprentices.[24] The lack of system persisted,
however, both in agricultural education and in the procuring of managers.
In the opinion of Basil Hall and various others the overseers were commonly
better than the reputation of their class,[25] but this is not to say that
they were conspicuous either for expertness or assiduity. On the whole
they had about as much human nature, with its merits and failings, as the
planters or the slaves or anybody else.

[Footnote 22: _American Agriculturist_, V, 24.]

[Footnote 23: _Louisiana Herald_ (Alexandria, La.), Jan. 12, 1822,
advertisement.]

[Footnote 24: _Southern Agriculturist_, II, 271.]

[Footnote 25: Basil Hall, _Travels in North America_, III, 193.]

It is notable that George Washington was one of the least tolerant
employers and masters who put themselves upon record.[26] This was
doubtless due to his own punctiliousness and thorough devotion to system as
well as to his often baffled wish to diversify his crops and upbuild his
fields. When in 1793 he engaged William Pearce as a new steward for the
group of plantations comprising the Mount Vernon estate, he enjoined strict
supervision of his overseers "to keep them from running about and to oblige
them to remain constantly with their people, and moreover to see at what
time they turn out in the morning--for," said he, "I have strong suspicions
that this with some of them is at a late hour, the consequences of which
to the negroes is not difficult to foretell." "To treat them civilly,"
Washington continued, "is no more than what all men are entitled to; but my
advice to you is, keep them at a proper distance, for they will grow upon
familiarity in proportion as you will sink in authority if you do not. Pass
by no faults or neglects, particularly at first, for overlooking one only
serves to generate another, and it is more than probable that some of
them, one in particular, will try at first what lengths he may go."
Particularizing as to the members of his staff, Washington described their
several characteristics: Stuart was intelligent and apparently honest and
attentive, but vain and talkative, and usually backward in his schedule;
Crow would be efficient if kept strictly at his duty, but seemed prone to
visiting and receiving visits. "This of course leaves his people too much
to themselves, which produces idleness or slight work on the one side and
flogging on the other, the last of which, besides the dissatisfaction
which it creates, has in one or two instances been productive of serious
consequences." McKay was a "sickly, slothful and stupid sort of fellow,"
too much disposed to brutality in the treatment of the slaves in his
charge; Butler seemed to have "no more authority over the negroes ... than
an old woman would have"; and Green, the overseer of the carpenters, was
too much on a level with the slaves for the exertion of control. Davy, the
negro foreman at Muddy Hole, was rated in his master's esteem higher than
some of his white colleagues, though Washington had suspicions concerning
the fate of certain lambs which had vanished while in his care. Indeed the
overseers all and several were suspected from time to time of drunkenness,
waste, theft and miscellaneous rascality. In the last of these categories
Washington seems to have included their efforts to secure higher wages.

[Footnote 26: Voluminous plantation data are preserved in the Washington
MSS. in the Library of Congress. Those here used are drawn from the letters
of Washington published in the Long Island Historical Society _Memoirs_,
vol. IV; entitled _George Washington and Mount Vernon_. A map of the Mount
Vernon estate is printed in Washington's _Writings_ (W.C. Ford ed.), XII,
358.]

The slaves in their turn were suspected of ruining horses by riding them at
night, and of embezzling grain issued for planting, as well as of lying and
malingering in general. The carpenters, Washington said, were notorious
piddlers; and not a slave about the mansion house was worthy of trust.
Pretences of illness as excuses for idleness were especially annoying.
"Is there anything particular in the cases of Ruth, Hannah and Pegg,"
he enquired, "that they have been returned as sick for several weeks
together?... If they are not made to do what their age and strength will
enable them, it will be a very bad example to others, none of whom would
work if by pretexts they can avoid it." And again: "By the reports I
perceive that for every day Betty Davis works she is laid up two. If she
is indulged in this idleness she will grow worse and worse, for she has a
disposition to be one of the most idle creatures on earth, and is besides
one of the most deceitful." Pearce seems to have replied that he was at a
loss to tell the false from the true. Washington rejoined: "I never found
so much difficulty as you seem to apprehend in distinguishing between real
and feigned sickness, or when a person is much afflicted with pain. Nobody
can be very sick without having a fever, or any other disorder continue
long upon anyone without reducing them.... But my people, many of them,
will lay up a month, at the end of which no visible change in their
countenance nor the loss of an ounce of flesh is discoverable; and their
allowance of provision is going on as if nothing ailed them." Runaways were
occasional. Of one of them Washington directed: "Let Abram get his deserts
when taken, by way of example; but do not trust Crow to give it to him, for
I have reason to believe he is swayed more by passion than by judgment in
all his corrections." Of another, whom he had previously described as an
idler beyond hope of correction: "Nor is it worth while, except for the
sake of example, ... to be at much trouble, or any expence over a trifle,
to hunt him up." Of a third, who was thought to have escaped in company
with a neighbor's slave: "If Mr. Dulany is disposed to pursue any measure
for the purpose of recovering his man, I will join him in the expence so
far as it may respect Paul; but I would not have my name appear in any
advertisement, or other measure, leading to it." Again, when asking that a
woman of his who had fled to New Hampshire be seized and sent back if it
could be done without exciting a mob: "However well disposed I might be to
gradual abolition, or even to an entire emancipation of that description of
people (if the latter was in itself practicable), at this moment it would
neither be politic nor just to reward unfaithfulness with a premature
preference, and thereby discontent beforehand the minds of all her fellow
serv'ts who, by their steady attachment, are far more deserving than
herself of favor."[27] Finally: "The running off of my cook has been a most
inconvenient thing to this family, and what rendered it more disagreeable
is that I had resolved never to become the master of another slave by
purchase. But this resolution I fear I must break. I have endeavored to
hire, black or white, but am not yet supplied." As to provisions, the
slaves were given fish from Washington's Potomac fishery while the supply
lasted, "meat, fat and other things ... now and then," and of meal "as
much as they can eat without waste, and no more." The housing and clothing
appear to have been adequate. The "father of his country" displayed little
tenderness for his slaves. He was doubtless just, so far as a business-like
absentee master could be; but his only generosity to them seems to have
been the provision in his will for their manumission after the death of his
wife.

[Footnote 27: Marion G. McDougall, _Fugitive Slaves_( Boston, 1891), p.
36.]

Lesser men felt the same stresses in plantation management. An owner of
ninety-six slaves told Olmsted that such was the trouble and annoyance
his negroes caused him, in spite of his having an overseer, and such the
loneliness of his isolated life, that he was torn between a desire to sell
out at once and a temptation to hold on for a while in the expectation of
higher prices. At the home of another Virginian, Olmsted wrote: "During
three hours or more in which I was in company with the proprietor I do
not think there were ten consecutive minutes uninterrupted by some of the
slaves requiring his personal direction or assistance. He was even obliged
three times to leave the dinner table. 'You see,' said he smiling, as he
came in the last time, 'a farmer's life in this country is no sinecure,'" A
third Virginian, endorsing Olmsted's observations, wrote that a planter's
cares and troubles were endless; the slaves, men, women and children,
infirm and aged, had wants innumerable; some were indolent, some obstinate,
some fractious, and each class required different treatment. With the daily
wants of food, clothing and the like, "the poor man's time and thoughts,
indeed every faculty of mind, must be exercised on behalf of those who have
no minds of their own."[28]

[Footnote 28: F.L. Olmsted, _Seaboard Slave States_, pp. 44, 58, 718.]

Harriet Martineau wrote on her tour of the South: "Nothing struck me
more than the patience of slave-owners ... with their slaves ... When I
considered how they love to be called 'fiery Southerners,' I could not but
marvel at their mild forbearance under the hourly provocations to which
they are liable in their homes. Persons from New England, France or
England, becoming slaveholders, are found to be the most severe masters
and mistresses, however good their tempers may always have appeared
previously. They cannot, like the native proprietor, sit waiting half an
hour for the second course, or see everything done in the worst possible
manner, their rooms dirty, their property wasted, their plans frustrated,
their infants slighted,--themselves deluded by artifices--they cannot, like
the native proprietor, endure all this unruffled."[29] It is clear from
every sort of evidence, if evidence were needed, that life among negro
slaves and the successful management of them promoted, and wellnigh
necessitated, a blending of foresight and firmness with kindliness and
patience. The lack of the former qualities was likely to bring financial
ruin; the lack of the latter would make life not worth living; the
possession of all meant a toleration of slackness in every concern not
vital to routine. A plantation was a bed of roses only if the thorns were
turned aside. Charles Eliot Norton, who like Olmsted, Hall, Miss Martineau
and most other travelers, was hostile to slavery, wrote after a journey to
Charleston in 1855: "The change to a Northerner in coming South is always
a great one when he steps over the boundary of the free states; and the
farther you go towards the South the more absolutely do shiftlessness and
careless indifference take the place of energy and active precaution and
skilful management.... The outside first aspect of slavery has nothing
horrible and repulsive about it. The slaves do not go about looking
unhappy, and are with difficulty, I fancy, persuaded to feel so. Whips and
chains, oaths and brutality, are as common, for all that one sees, in the
free as the slave states. We have come thus far, and might have gone ten
times as far, I dare say, without seeing the first sign of negro misery
or white tyranny."[30] If, indeed, the neatness of aspect be the test of
success, most plantations were failures; if the test of failure be the lack
of harmony and good will, it appears from the available evidence that most
plantations were successful.

[Footnote 29: Harriet Martineau, _Society in America_ (London, 1837), II
315, 316.]

[Footnote 30: Charles Eliot Norton, _Letters_ (Boston, 1913), I, 121.]

The concerns and the character of a high-grade planter may be gathered from
the correspondence of John B. Lamar, who with headquarters in the town of
Macon administered half a dozen plantations belonging to himself and his
kinsmen scattered through central and southwestern Georgia and northern
Florida.[31] The scale of his operations at the middle of the nineteenth
century may be seen from one of his orders for summer cloth, presumably
at the rate of about five yards per slave. This was to be shipped from
Savannah to the several plantations as follows: to Hurricane, the property
of Howell Cobb, Lamar's brother-in-law, 760 yards; to Letohatchee, a trust
estate in Florida belonging to the Lamar family, 500 yards; and to Lamar's
own plantations the following: Swift Creek, 486; Harris Place, 360; Domine,
340; and Spring Branch, 229. Of his course of life Lamar wrote: "I am one
half the year rattling over rough roads with Dr. Physic and Henry, stopping
at farm houses in the country, scolding overseers in half a dozen counties
and two states, Florida and Georgia, and the other half in the largest
cities of the Union, or those of Europe, living on dainties and riding on
rail-cars and steamboats. When I first emerge from Swift Creek into the
hotels and shops on Broadway of a summer, I am the most economical body
that you can imagine. The fine clothes and expensive habits of the people
strike me forcibly.... In a week I become used to everything, and in a
month I forget my humble concern on Swift Creek and feel as much a nabob as
any of them.... At home where everything is plain and comfortable we look
on anything beyond that point as extravagant. When abroad where things are
on a greater scale, our ideas keep pace with them. I always find such to be
my case; and if I live to a hundred I reckon it will always be so."