Carolina Lowcountry and the Atlantic World

The Plantation Overseers of Eighteenth-Century Virginia, South Carolina, and Georgia

Tristan Stubbs

• Publisher: University of South Carolina Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781611178852
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Slavery
• Index: Social Sciences

From trusted to tainted, an examination of the shifting perceived reputation of overseers of enslaved people during the eighteenth century. In the antebellum southern United States, major landowners typically hired overseers to manage their plantations. In addition to cultivating crops, managing slaves, and dispensing punishment, overseers were expected to maximize profits through increased productivity—often achieved through violence and cruelty. In Masters of Violence, Tristan Stubbs offers the first book-length examination of the overseers—from recruitment and dismissal to their relationships with landowners and enslaved people, as well as their changing reputations, which devolved from reliable to untrustworthy and incompetent. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, slave owners regarded overseers as reliable enforcers of authority; by the end of the century, particularly after the American Revolution, plantation owners viewed them as incompetent and morally degenerate, as well as a threat to their power. Through a careful reading of plantation records, diaries, contemporary newspaper articles, and many other sources, Stubbs uncovers the ideological shift responsible for tarnishing overseers' reputations. In this book, Stubbs argues that this shift in opinion grew out of far-reaching ideological and structural transformations to slave societies in Virginia, South Carolina, and Georgia throughout the Revolutionary era. Seeking to portray slavery as positive and yet simultaneously distance themselves from it, plantation owners blamed overseers as incompetent managers and vilified them as violent brutalizers of enslaved people. "A solid work of scholarship, and even specialists in the field of colonial slavery will derive considerable benefit from reading it." — Journal of Southern History "A major achievement, restoring the issue of class to societies riven by racial conflict." —Trevor Burnard, University of Melbourne "Based on a detailed reading of overseers' letters and diaries, plantation journals, employer's letters, and newspapers, Tristan Stubbs has traced the evolution of the position of the overseer from the colonial planter's partner to his most despised employee. This deeply researched volume helps to reframe our understanding of class in the colonial and antebellum South." —Tim Lockley, University of Warwick

— Chapter One —

A “continual exercise of our Patience and Economy”

The Structure of Oversight, Patriarchism, and Dependence in Pre-Revolutionary Virginia, South Carolina, and Georgia

Besides the advantage of a pure Air, we abound in all kinds of Provisions without expence (I mean we who have Plantations). I have a large Family of my own, and my Doors are open to Every Body, yet I have no Bills to pay, and a half-a-crown will rest undisturbed in my Pocket for many Moons together. Like one of the Patriarchs, I have my Flocks and my Herds, my Bond-men and Bond-women, and every Soart of Trade amongst my own Servants, so that I live in a kind of Independence on everyone but Providence. However this Soart of Life is without expence, yet it is attended with a great deal of trouble. I must take care to keep all my people to their Duty, to set all the Springs in motion and make every one draw his equal Share to carry the Machine forward. But then “tis an amusement in this silent Country and a continual exercise of our Patience and Economy.”¹

William Byrd II’s panegyric to the glory of patriarchism likened the plantation hierarchy to a well-constituted machine.² At its head, naturally, sat Byrd, who took “care to keep all [his] people to their Duty, to set all the Springs in motion and make every one draw his equal Share to carry the Machine forward.” Two hundred and thirty years later, Kenneth Stampp’s description of the overseer as “an indispensable cog in the plantation machinery” drew an equivalent comparison.³ Yet there is little evidence that Byrd would have agreed with this analysis. As a “Patriarch,” he viewed himself customarily as the only valid source of plantation authority; he had, moreover, little faith in the abilities of overseers. Nor would he have admitted a second observation. Dreamily depicting himself at the center of a pastoral idyll, a watchful master of his “Flocks” and “Herds,” Byrd imagined plantation agriculture to be an exercise in disinterested benevolence. His explicit calling was to rule dependents, not manage assets.⁴

But like all machines, eighteenth-century Chesapeake and lowcountry plantations were designed for a specific task—in this case to turn a healthy profit from capital investment. The thin fabric of Byrd’s bucolic sketch now and again reveals this problematic truth. He had “Bond-men and Bond-women, and every Soart of Trade amongst [his] own Servants,” so that he could “live in a kind of Independence on everyone but Providence”; indeed, although he had “a large Family of [his] own, and [his] Doors [were] open to Every Body, yet [he had] no Bills to pay, and a half-a-crown [would] rest undisturbed in [his] Pocket for many Moons together.” For all his ostentatious exasperation at the “great deal of trouble” inherent in patriarchal “Duty,” and for all his claims that plantation management represented an “amusement,” Byrd’s freedom from economic worries derived ultimately from his exploitation of dependent and enslaved labor.

The eighteenth-century South was a “remarkably underinstitutionalized world.”⁵ Long before diffuse political power was subsumed into the modern centralized state, throughout the Anglophone world much political authority and legitimacy derived from the idealized figure of the household patriarch.⁶ Societal maturation led to the domination by elite whites of the primary means of production in plantation society—the enslaved workforce.⁷ William Byrd II had spent much of his early life studying and working in London, but in his ambition to define himself as a patriarch he was typical of the rich colonists of his age.⁸ His fellow elites developed patriarchal control over their households (which included white employees as well as black people) and kinship circles and were able to maintain oligarchic rule of the government of North American colonies.⁹ Putting to work ever-greater numbers of enslaved and indentured dependents over the course of the century further aggrandized plantation owners’ conception of the power and extent of their dominions.

Reflecting the importance of such ideas for the growth of prejudices against overseers, the first five chapters of this book look at overseeing in the patriarchal era (defined here in broad terms as the seven decades before the Revolution—though a few examples appear from beyond 1775). The views of planters were so central to the popular understanding of oversight that negative opinions of the profession are impossible to understand without reference to this discourse, while patriarchism represented the dominant model of political economy, at the center of which overseers found themselves. So although it is often extraordinarily difficult to discern overseers’ voices above the noise of planter prejudice, understanding exactly why slave owners cleaved so tightly to the stereotype reveals much about the society that overseers helped to create. Linking these chapters is a more prosaic theme. For all the late-century rhetoric that suggested otherwise, the impetus to turn a good yield from their plantations remained paramount in slaveholders’ minds. Throughout the pages below, overseers’ involvement in realizing a profit is discussed concurrently with slaveholder ideology; it was the dichotomy between the two that informed much anti-overseer sentiment.

As a means of rationalizing planter rule, patriarchism first developed in the earliest slave colony, Virginia. Owing to the relatively small size of the Chesapeake plantation, in the early years of the colony’s history there was regular contact between patriarchs and subordinates.¹⁰ The nature of tobacco production, which involved small groups of laborers working under supervisors, meant that there was a “patriarchal, intimate quality about its work.”¹¹ From its beginnings the ideology was defined by a Lockean code of material reciprocity. As sovereign of his household, the patriarch provided for its members.¹² In return he expected loyalty and their dedicated labor.

Elite men invoked the language of the biblical ancients and their Roman successors when describing their unique positions. They put themselves at the head of a tribe, like “the Patriarchs of old,” or gave themselves the Latin title paterfamilias.¹³ In so doing they aped a tendency that was current among other Anglophone men of high status. Just as household relationships within Britain’s empire were conceptualized in familial terms, so the head of the empire, the king, named himself paterfamilias of all subject territories and peoples. Because the personal was so political, other political relationships were also described in the same terms as household relationships. To the metropolis, and in the regretful eyes of many of the colonists, Virginia, South Carolina, and Georgia were as much dependents as the indentured servants who first peopled them.¹⁴

Elite whites in North America constructed a formulation that rationalized the unbreakable linkages between varying strata in the social and political hierarchy, a formulation that bound the lowliest enslaved person to God Himself.¹⁵ The “Chain of Being,” while describing a simple hierarchical ordering of power from top to bottom, also contained within it diverse definitions: there were as many different types of patriarchy and dependence as there were of patriarchs and dependents. And since everyone (with the exception of the divine) was dependent on someone else, southerners developed an acute sense of the expected rights and privileges, and duties and responsibilities, associated with their specific social positions. The patriarchal cultural ethos positioned enslaved people at the bottom of this network of relationships.

Long before southerners saw a need to justify slavery, they explained social distinctions with reference to a seemingly natural ordering that ranked people according to intelligence.¹⁶ Patresfamilias not only adopted the titles of the ancients; they claimed to have the wisdom of the ancients, too. As in Greece and Rome, mature, elite white men alone possessed sufficient mental faculties to contend with the burden of responsibility that the management of dependents placed on them, because mature, elite white men alone possessed sufficient reason for the task. Patriarchal southern societies contained hierarchies of rational capacity to match their hierarchies of power. Reason itself provided the rationale for the societal and economic inequalities that pervaded Virginia, South Carolina, and Georgia during the first seventy years of the eighteenth century.

In essence a rationalization of unequal labor relations, patriarchism rationalized additional inequalities of wealth and status by calling on unsympathetic character assumptions. Elites believed dependents to be dissolute and untrustworthy, led more by their passions than by reason. The Virginian Huguenot minister Peter Fontaine explained how, unless “ye Impetuosity of ye Passions” was quelled, “they should run Into Riot, if Left unsubdued, and unemploy’d.”¹⁷ Such prejudices claimed a long heritage in the Anglophone Atlantic world. They traced their earliest roots to seventeenth-century civic humanism and the liberalism of John Locke (who had penned the 1669 Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina) and were fortified by a contemporary discourse on personal morality known in North America through the writings of David Hume and Adam Smith.¹⁸ Both William Cabell and his fellow Virginian planter George Washington read Francis Hutcheson, Smith’s onetime tutor and a contemporary progenitor of the revived language of passions.¹⁹

If mastery and dependence were deemed integral facets of the natural order of things, confirmation was provided by America’s idiosyncratic labor practices. The sparsely populated seaboard colonies contained a higher proportion of legal dependents than early modern Britain and western Europe. Enslaved people were seen to possess the lowest level of reason of any eighteenth-century southerners. But along with bondpeople, indentured servants and women and children generally were supposed to be irrevocably incapable of their own self-rule; they therefore “deserved to be subjected to power.”²⁰ Because women were widely believed to be in hock to their passions, they were not permitted the responsibility of exercising political rights. More than this, dependence among males was itself feminized, while independence was bound up with ideals of masculine self-worth.²¹ A Virginian book of aphorisms from the 1760s counseled that “if thou goest about any Thing in a Passion, thou takest on thee to do a manly Act, when thou art not a Man.”²²

Dependency also encompassed other sizeable groups of southerners—the poor, those who were not heads of households, and, by extension, those who worked for others. Their lack of material wealth meant that such people were motivated by baser instincts than disinterested patriarchs, and likely to be dominated by more powerful individuals. A sympathetic commentator described just before the Revolution the bind that this network of prejudices created: “an humble man is generally accounted base, if otherwise, he is esteemed proud; a bold look is looked upon as impudence; if modest, then … he must be hypocritical.”²³

The English understanding of liberty, from medieval jurist Henry de Bracton’s De legibus angliae onward, sprang from the idea that subjects were free as far as they yielded to no power other than the law.²⁴ For John Locke liberty meant personal autonomy: freedom from another man’s command.²⁵ Depending on anyone else’s will, as overseers depended on the will of their employers, meant “forfeit[ing] [their] liberty.”²⁶ The first edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, printed in 1771, defined “LIBERTY” as “a state of freedom, in contradistinction to slavery. According to Cicero, liberty is the power of living as a man please, or without being controlled by another,” while “FREE … is used in opposition to whatever is constrained or necessitated. When applied to things endowed with understanding, it more peculiarly related to the liberty of the will.”²⁷ “SLAVE,” on the other hand, was “a person in the absolute power of a master.”²⁸ The Virginian planter Joseph Ball, who evinced a strong patriarchal attitude in all areas of plantation management, read Cicero as well as the influential English theorists of dependence and patriarchy Hobbes and Coke.²⁹

Such strength of feeling arose because as slavery became more widespread, and “servile work and dependence” came to be identified with slaves, all men ideally should have owned land, the “hallmark of independence.”^30...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• A Note on Terminology
• Introduction: To “treat them … inhumanly”—Overseeing in the Eighteenth Century
• – Chapter One – A “continual exercise of our Patience and Economy”: The Structure of Oversight, Patriarchism, and Dependence in Pre-Revolutionary Virginia, South Carolina, and Georgia
• – Chapter Two – ”Douptfull of my Diligence”: Overseer Recruitment and Character Requirements
• – Chapter Three – “Nothing pleases me better than to see them in good order”: Contractual Relationships between Overseers and Planters
• – Chapter Four – “Under the shadow of my own Vine & my own Fig-tree”: Relations between Overseers and Slave Owners
• – Chapter Five – “At their uttermost perils”: Relations among Overseers, Bondpeople, and Servants
• – Chapter Six – “Insurgents … disappointed in their villainous Stratagems”: Plantation Overseeing during the American Revolutionary War
• Epilogue: “Little better … than human brutes”—The Consolidation of Anti-overseer Stereotypes
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index