Draft posting of episodes from the Plantation Letters

[John Lee]

Post here drafts of essays on historical episodes emerging from inquiries using the Plantation Letters. These essays will be submitted to the History Engine at http://historyengine.richmond.edu

[Robert Coven]

The Good Slave
ECI-525--Robert Coven


Slavery is anathema, but it was not always so. It was quite possible for well-meaning and rational people to practice and defend the “peculiar institution.” Certainly this was the case in the Antebellum South. The thousands engaged in the capture, transport, trade, possession, and control of millions of Africans could not have reconciled themselves to the economic, political, intellectual, cultural, and social structures that supported and maintained slavery without a compelling rationale. Slaveholders sustained themselves with the firm conviction that they were doing right by the poor, benighted souls in their charge. In this way, masters could claim they were compassionate angels of mercy--providing discipline, moral instruction, sustenance, shelter, and all the benefits of civilization to a forsaken and savage race. This benevolence toward their inferiors would earn them a choice seat in heaven and the loyalty and hard work of their chattel, here on earth.

The Cameron family, in its management of large plantation holdings in Alabama and North Carolina, were among the more benevolent masters. Their humanity is expressed in the body of correspondence among the family and its paid employees. We can gain a relatively clear impression of the view of slavery from the top. However, It is difficult to hear the voices of the enslaved when examining this pernicious system. There are few materials, extant, which discuss slavery from the vantage of an oppressed, almost universally illiterate, unfree population. So, we must be satisfied with the inferences we can draw from the evidence provided by those in power in this paternalistic system.

The Cameron family’s paternalistic benevolence can be seen in their concern for the well being of their charges. “One of the inherent tragedies of slavery was that a humane master’s impulse to be kind to his slaves was severely circumscribed by the inescapable problem of control.” The fact that a sick slave is an unproductive asset could lead to a more cynical interpretation of this concern—a mercenary attitude that was extant; but so critical a view risks tainting the study with ahistorical presentism. Most owners followed the advice provided by Thomas Jefferson in 1814, “we should endeavor, with those whom fortune has thrown on our hands, to feed & clothe them well, protect them from ill usage, require such reasonable labor only as is performed voluntarily by freemen, and be led by no repugnancies to abdicate them, and our duties to them.”

Great attention was paid to the material well being of plantation hands. There are references in the Cameron letters to provisions made by master for the sustenance of slave. The unfree are sheltered in “plain but substantial and commodious” quarters. The slaves are fed and even feted. To earn such benevolence, slaves “had to give up all claims to respects as responsible adults, all pretension of independence.”

Almost every excerpt under study contains some reference to the health of the slaves--or, in more obviously paternalistic language: “our family of negroes.” The sheer volume and repetition of these accounts of disease and death tends to make the accounts sound like a morbid, but impersonal accounting of the condition of an inventory--not unlike diseased crops and broken fences.

There are some deaths, however, that receive more impassioned and sympathetic treatment. This was usually the case with a long-term household servant—an intimate of the family—not with the larger group of common field hands. In note of this, Paul Cameron gives his father this account:

The morning about 1/2 after 2 o’clock our faithful old friend Aunt Easter [Esther?] breathed her last. Through out her illness she has exhibited surprising submission and patience. We shall miss her much. For 10 years we have given her the key of the house in our absence and never found the first article out of place: was watchful over our little ones to keep them out of harms way. Such a good guard over every thing about the [unintelligible]. With but little mind she has acted well her part.

These few sentences are a good summary of the paternalistic attitude inherent to slavery. Cameron describes the dearly departed as deficient in intellect, but well suited to her subordinate role--a loyal and faithful servant, caring toward the master’s children, and honest. Aunt Esther submitted to death as willingly as she had to her role as a slave.

Paternalism, benevolent or not, was not the exclusive property of southern slave masters. Rather, this relationship is the product of the power differential that arises out of inequality. Paternalism defined the feudal system of the Antebellum South as much as it did the capitalist North. Northern factory owners treated their underclass, mostly unskilled immigrant laborers, with the same share of inhuman indifference and condescension as their southern brethren. With northern victory in the Civil War, the nation was firmly remade in the image of the Union. After Reconstruction, African-Americans remained burdened by a system of segregation and sharecropping almost as onerous as slavery. Meanwhile, the country, as a whole, has seen the perpetuation of corporate and government paternalism.
 
Kolchin, Peter. Unfree Labor: American Slavery and Russian Serfdom. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1987.

Stampp, Kenneth M. The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South. Vintage Books, New York, 1956.

Plantation Letters Collection. Letters from Paul Cameron to Duncan Cameron, 1845-46. Quotation is taken from page 2 of 10/28/1846 letter.