CHAPTER 4
Slaveholders’ very title for North American slavery raised still more questions about whether the color line could segregate the democratic from the despotic. Democratic despots called their form of enslavement both the Peculiar Institution and the Domestic Institution. The despotism was allegedly peculiar because domestic. Unlike all-powerful authoritarians elsewhere, these autocrats supposedly governed all dependents as family folk.
That color-blind formula dissolved color lines. White and black dependents lived in the same domicile under the same patriarch. Slavery was right rule because patriarchs treated impersonal black property as personal white intimates.
Historians, dismissing slaveholders’ claim that white families and black slaves were ruled in comparable ways, have proposed just about every other comparison to explain the Peculiar Institution. North American slavery has been measured against Latin American bondage, Russian serfdom, Nazi concentration camps, medieval manors, and American prisons.1 Southern slaveholders would have protested that all those supposedly comparable dictatorial institutions have nothing faintly domestic about them. To understand our peculiar regime, they would have insisted, one must take the domestic nature of our Peculiar Institution seriously.
The strength of that insistence tells us much about this regime. With dictators throughout history available to them as models, these titans were drawn to their own homes as exemplar of proper dictatorial sway. Yet their homes were precisely the realm where the nineteenth century’s more romantic, more permissive, more egalitarian sensibilities worked to soften coercive imperiousness and summon consenting obedience.
Could coerced slaves be even remotely likened to assenting dependents in the Age of Romanticism’s newly permissive home? These patriarchs’ favorite domestic charade was meant to demonstrate an affirmative answer. Paternalists sought to make their own performance as benevolent fathers, their wives’ performance as moral matriarchs, and their slaves’ performance as consenting children achieve the total verisimilitude that is possible only when actors are one with their act.
Parallels in ways of controlling white homes and black slaves turned out to be close enough so that charade as reality was sometimes possible. Because control over white family members and black slaves was also so different, the cast’s performance more often violated the script. The largest reason why this charade about the benevolent father, the moral matriarch, and the consenting black “boys” swung erratically between credibility and absurdity was that the paternalist swerved between nurturing and coercive versions of paternalistic control.
1
Masters’ softer paternalism was exemplified in that ubiquitous Massa-slave charade. The charade, more omnipresent here than in any other Western Hemisphere slavery system, was performed with particular insistence when strangers visited a plantation. The charade was also often staged, significantly, when visitors were not present, when only Massa clapped for the cast.
According to the script, Massa was no jailer or guard or brutalizing tyrant. He was a paternalist—a nineteenth-century American paternalist. Familial control in the American Age of Romanticism meant an emphasis on education, on affection, on maintaining order through a minimum of punishment and a maximum of persuasion. The patriarch, whether with slaves or children, would not haul out the lash at every transgression. He preferred to teach wards to obey next time.
Blacks were scripted as consenting children. Serviles could occasionally be so silly or stupid or slovenly as to require a cuffing. But because slaves understood that the order imposed from above was benevolent and caring, cowering before violence was not necessary to secure domestic tranquility.
The charade was like a long-run play. As years passed, performances improved, for the star of the show increasingly rejoiced in the plot. As the South moved towards the Civil War, benevolent patriarchy became a partially self-fulfilling prophecy. The more romantic egalitarianism took over in the Big House, the easier slavery was to defend as an extension of domestic consent. The more proslavery theory was raised into self-conscious awareness, the more a planter’s self-esteem depended on treating his people like family members. With slave prices soaring and the African market forbidden, only fools risked their slaves’ life and health. With plantations rather isolated and slaves living in Massa’s house, only masochists would provoke slaves’ revengeful fury. Seldom have men had so many reasons to transform grinding tyranny into genial control.
The Man’s stake in transforming coerced slaves into consenting dependents helps explain why in the American South black population increased far faster than occurred under slavery elsewhere.2 Masters and mistresses lavished hours nursing sick slaves, cultivating black friendships, plotting nice holidays, buying pretty trifles. Overseers received instructions never to whip in a passion, always to serve nourishing meals, ever to tend to slave health, never to violate black women. When planters returned from vacation, they relished slaves’ homecoming celebrations. When blacks dropped postures of loving “boys” after emancipation, patriarchs were genuinely shocked.3 Their incredulity measured the depth of their long-standing wish that caring paternalists and grateful servants were more genuine than actors in a phony charade.
2
But the difficulty of attaining slaves’ consent had always been obvious in masters’ contrasting heavy-handed punishments. Their brutality subjected slaves to waves of horror never laid on white children. Their racially selective violence was neither peculiar tyranny nor a recognizably domestic deterrent, not at least according to their own conception of nineteenth-century domesticity.
Manuals of instructions, published and unpublished, on southern plantation management constantly prescribed relentless punishment to secure black servility.4 Masters were instructed to separate the innocent from the guilty scrupulously. They were then instructed to punish the guilty automatically. Patriarchs were told to issue a word, then a blow. When orders were evaded, punishment must follow. When disobedience persisted, punishment must escalate. When contrariness continued, the contrary must be sold. Systematic whippings and chainings and selling bad actors down river were not acts of cruelty but of kindness. Blacks, realizing the slightest misstep automatically yielded brutality, would willingly obey.
Concentrated authority, continued coercive instructions, was as crucial as systematized punishment. Only Massa’s will must sway will-less slaves. Dependents must know no other morality or commandments. Slaves must never leave plantations. Blacks must never learn to read or write. Serviles must never hear black preachers. Easily confused slaves must learn only one man’s unconfusing commandments.
White communities, continued the tyrannical scenario, must keep slaves’ world closed and bondsmen’s eyes focused on Massa. Runaways must be hunted down, then whipped into awareness that Massa was inescapable. Nightly patrols must jail slaves who were strolling the countryside or buying from Yankee peddlers. Discussion of antislavery must never occur in the hearing of slaves. Guns and books must never reach slave hands. The community must tar and feather anyone doubting slaveholders’ legitimacy.
This coercive model, unlike the domestic model, invites comparisons with totalitarian regimes in every place and century. Tyrants know that if power from above appears limited, those below will test the system. By emphasizing a closed regime, relentless punishment, an all-powerful coercer, the theory of plantation management became a little Bible on tyrannical social control.
The southern theory of systematic coercion, even when practiced unsystematically—especially when carried out uncertainly—meant that slaves intimately experienced terror. Slaveholders’ domestic analogy must never hide that simplest truth about the so-called Domestic Institution. Slavery, to the slave, partly meant DON’T!, lest one suffer beyond endurance.
Slaves could resist violent deterrence, assuming the risks looked tolerable. They could run away, should they wish to chance snarling dogs and racist rednecks anxious to reduce them to “nigger.” They could drink with Yankee peddlers, if they wished to brave the drunken rage of nonslaveholding patrols. They could praise the Lord, black style, should they wish to risk whites busting in, determined to teach “niggers” that no “nigger” God existed. They could break tools and burn barns and slit throats, if thoughts of retaliation were endurable.
Slaves contemplating defiance, for example, had to rise above fear of confinement in ball and chain. They had to overcome images of squeezing iron causing flesh to swell, while preventing skin from stretching. Expanding fluids could only press against nerves that were already screaming. A day in irons, in solitary confinement, no food, water, or companion to offer solace—that image did often deter slaves from saying No! to Massa.
Images of beatings, more than memories of irons, deterred blacks from provoking that frightful will. Being whipped, compared with being ironed, might be less horrid because more quickly over. But beatings were more frequent and more instantly agonizing.
A white’s slashing blow seldom relied on unaided muscle. Paddles supplied the most dreaded leverage. These long rough wooden clubs, with screws stabbing out one end, cut many times with each administration. Equally notorious were “cow hides.” These leather straps were hammer-thick at the striking end, elastic-thin at the swinging end. The thinness whipsawed the thickness into a stinging sledgehammer.
Most often employed was some version of the lash. When most stinging, the lash was a cat-o’-nine-tails: a small handle attached to “a large rope of many strands—the strands unraveled, and a knot tied to the extremity of each.” One blow from this “cat” ripped open nine wounds. More merciful and mercifully more common were ropes with fewer strands, all woven together to concentrate leverage on the hard knot at the end.
Whatever the whip, offending slaves were stretched on the ground or up on toes. The lash then sliced open naked skin pulled taut. A customary dose was 39 strikes, “well laid on,” crisscrossing the back and snarling at the face with a hiss accentuating the blow.
As Frederick Law Olmsted described “the severest corporeal punishment I witnessed at the South,” a slave girl named Sail was ordered to pull up her clothes and lie on her back, private parts exposed. The overseer flogged her “with the rawhide, across her naked loins and thighs.” Sail “shrunk away from him, not rising, but writhing, groveling, and screaming, ‘Oh don’t sir! Oh please stop, master! please sir! please sir! oh, that’s enough master! oh Lord! oh master, master, of God, master, do stop! oh God, master, oh God, master!’”
After “strokes had ceased” and “choking, sobbing, spasmodic groans only were heard,” Olmsted asked if it was “‘necessary to punish her so severely.’… ‘O yes sir,’ answered the lasher, laughing at the Yankee’s innocence. Northerners ‘have no idea how lazy these niggers are … They’d never do any work at all if they were not afraid of being whipped.’”5
Sail escaped easily, compared with a perennially disobedient slave. The most dreaded deterrent was neither squeezing irons nor slitting lashes but sundered marriages. Systematic coercion demanded that the systematically disobedient be systematically sold away. My gang, bragged a disciplinarian, has “the reputation of being very orderly,” for “I always make it a rule to sell every runaway—and they are fully aware of this.”6
The threat of selling blacks to the nouveau Southwest was slaveholders’ new nineteenth-century weapon. Here as in so many ways, an institution growing “better” because less physically horrid was growing worse because more psychologically brutal. Earlier, when already settled Atlantic Coast regions comprised almost the whole South, eighteenth-century masters quite regularly strung up, decapitated, or otherwise mutilated disobedient slaves. That unfamilial deterrence not only seemed unfamily-like but unnecessary in the nineteenth century, when threats of sales to brutal lashers half a continent away could terrify blacks.7 The threat of being sold down river meant the prospect of separation from wives, offspring, friends—from cherished personal ties that made a slave’s lot more endurable. Rumors that frontier slavemasters were the most unendurable brutes increased the deterrent’s horror.
Fear, so critical to smashing black resistance, had little to do with how often the frightful was deployed. Slicing open backs with 39 lashes occurred “only” two or three times per plantation per week. Ball and chains were “merely” employed two or three times a month. Selling blacks down river, away from relatives and friends in the quarters, was “seldom” used more than two times a year per plantation. Creditable horror, however, does not require incessant repetitions.8 The brutalized Sail must be frozen at the center of historical consciousness because every slave every week witnessed a compatriot’s lacerations. Slaves performed primarily because terror was an unending image. Their world was in part a dismal dungeon.
3
But The Man no less than his “boys” shuddered at slavery as a form of jail. Revulsion against despotic violence, instinctive to despots who were egalitarian republicans too, mitigated against constantly terrorizing the willful into will-lessness. A Nazi concentration camp guard visiting a plantation would have been outraged that his sort of tyranny lacked his sort of tyrant.
His scorn would have delighted paternalists, whose version of domesticity did not invite members of caring homes to lock doors and windows against each other or to beat each other into wimpering zombies or to sell each other from each other. Because slaveholder violence gave way often enough to inconsistent permissiveness, observers could almost—almost—believe they were watching a version of mid-nineteenth-century parental control.9
Thus, instead of the expected patrol out every night, a puzzled visitor usually found none. A South Carolina patrolman who complained that “for two years past” he had never been called up “for an hour’s duty” had performed the usual service.10 Normally, patrols combed forests and plains only during insurrection panics. Once hysteria subsided, patrolmen retired and let blacks roam.
Slaveholders often winked at widespread roaming. Instead of forcing blacks to marry on the plantation, Massas often allowed blacks to travel many miles to see mates living in other Massas’ quarters. Some slaves married free blacks. A few free blacks owned slaves.
Slaves were no more sealed off from northern free whites than from southern free blacks. Instead of barring slave rendezvous with Yankee peddlers, masters customarily paid scant attention to such meetings. In fact, by allowing slaves to sell backyard crops and by failing to monitor the cash flow, masters helped provide slaves with some heady ideas. Freedom-loving Yankees, glad to sell cheap whiskey, and free blacks, glad to expand black connections, provided opportunities for a clandestinely open experience no properly closed system could tolerate.
A more common open experience involved black religious meetings. Most slaves had some contact, and many slaves had massive contact, with supposedly outlawed black congregations. Blacks often could celebrate their gospel with their leader preaching their version of the Word. Nat Turner, for one, freely preached his insurrectionary version of Christianity.
Many blacks had access to Turner’s other weapons. Bondsmen who spent evenings cleaning guns for hunting with Massa in the morning were not unusual. More unusual was the scene in Austin, Texas, in the summer of 1854, where blacks strolled streets at all hours, “without license from their masters, and sometimes carrying … loaded firearms.” Strollers were even seen “in daytime, near our corporate limits, with their pistols testing their skill—at targets.” “At this moment,” warned Franklin Elmore of Charleston, South Carolina, on May 30, 1849, the U.S. Arsenal, with its “cannon muskets, rifles, swords & ammunition is here, in this City, without a Sergeants guard, in reach of our negroes.”11
Charleston’s careless approach typified a sloppy regime. Masters and mistresses left doors unlocked, windows open, guns unguarded. Discussions of abolitionism continued in slaves’ presence. Everyone pretended not to notice blacks, who pretended not to notice the conversation. Newspapers containing antislavery were strewn around the house. Everyone pretended that domestics could not read a syllable. Whites also usually pretended not to know that literate slaves presided over black religious meetings at night.
The greatest deviance from a closed system occurred not in the occasional freedom whites permitted blacks at night but in the inconsistent discipline masters imposed by day. Planters no more punished blacks after every transgression than patrols imposed curfews every night. If a black planted cotton crookedly, he might be whipped. Then again, he might be warned to try harder. If a black claimed not to hear orders, he might be cuffed. Then again, orders might be repeated. If a worker slowed down, he might be kicked. Then again, he might be given a rest. If a black filched cotton or briefly vacationed or broke hoes, he might be sold down river. Then again, he might be scolded. It all vaguely resembled permissive white parents, clamping down on offspring one moment, letting up the next.
“I had quite an explosion yesterday with my negroes,” Linton Stephens wrote to his brother when describing a typical plantation scenario. One favorite slave accused another “of cutting and hauling off my wood for sale.” The accused confessed and accused another, who also confessed. What do you suppose I did? Linton asked. “I felt very much like knocking the whole deceitful set in the head.” According to his instructions, he should have lashed. Instead, he scolded. After all, culprits were family servants, and “they all pretend great regard for me.”12
Linton Stephens’s most cherished slave, like most slaveholders’ pet bondsmen, lived in the Big House and daily ministered to personal whims. The loss of such a servant was like a death in the family. “My house servant Mary is about to die,” Linton wrote his brother in 1861. “Never, never did the death of so humble and lowly a personage affect me so profoundly.” Mary, “one of the very few truly grateful people,” was always “humble and lowly.” She paid “kindly and careful attention to all the wants and comforts of me and my children.” Her “gentle, sorrowing, sympathizing pity” for me revealed a “refinement … you would scarcely think a negro capable of.… I feel her loss,” Stephens concluded, “all the more on account of the very humility of her nature and the lowliness of her station.”13
A paternalist such as Stephens was not going to beat family servants every time wood was filched. With blacks as with whites inside the familial Big House, he preferred to scold and nurture and teach. He would mold grateful dependents with a minimum of terror and a maximum of guidance.
That governing wish for a social control akin to a parent’s created a cruel kindness. Slaveholders demanding obedience but uneasy about systematic terrorizing deployed a psychological tyranny perhaps more terrible than physical brutality. They taught black “boys” that black was ugly. The dominant cultural orthodoxy, that inferior blacks forever needed white masters, was not reserved for white classrooms. Racism was also employed to make blacks grovel before whites.
A powerless slave cannot escape a degree of self-contempt. Whites ever sought to increase black self-revulsion by claiming that “niggers” were “black-assed,” as the revealing phrase went. The “black-assed” were stupid and slovenly, innately needing parental guidance.
White churches taught the same unholy lesson. In the mid-nineteenth-century years, masters erected ever more chapels for their slaves and hired ever more local clerics to give special sermons. Resulting clerical performances often emphasized that Christ commanded the ruled to obey.
Much of the way masters deployed secular power, like the way they deployed religious power, was aimed at securing “boys’” willing consent. Ceremonies at patriarchal homecomings, where planters returned home bearing gifts for all “childish” dependents, black and white, in exchange for cheers and protestations of how sorely “father” had been missed, were calculated to be seen as a vote of confidence in familial government. Ceremonies at Christmas time, where gifts were ostentatiously given and thanks for being such generous masters ostentatiously received, could easily be viewed as annual paternalistic reelections. Granting of small garden plots and wandering privileges were little bribes by masters aimed, in part, at gaining recognition as good “fathers.” Permissiveness when “darkies” misbehaved, or firings of unpopular overseers, or sympathy for ailing slaves, or willingness to suspend incredulity when slaves might be pretending to be too sick to work—such benevolent conduct pleased the democrat in the dictator.14
Insofar as consent rather than coercion could secure tolerable work and loyalty, permissive paternalism amounted to brilliant slave management. But black “boys,” like white lads, needed a tap now and then. “If Cuffee won’t work,” ran the standard line, “you must make him work…. Of course we are to treat the slave as a human being, thoughtfully, wisely, humanely, even tenderly, but that very treatment implies an occasional flogging.”15
“Cuffee,” the name here given the recipient of “occasional flogging,” was another revealing southern code word. Like “master,” “the people,” “boy,” “black-assed,” and “Domestic Institution,” “Cuffee” pointed to the psychology behind the language. “Sambo,” posterity’s conventional name for master’s most desired domestic, was a term less commonly employed in the Old South. “Cuffee” better conveyed the desired meaning. Cuffings, as opposed to whippings or beatings or lashings or smashings, bore connotations of “softer” physical reminders. One had to cuff naughty Cuffee now and then. But social control was more genial when Cuffee could be educated into needing no more cuffings.
With that giveaway word Cuffee, Southerners again broadcast distaste for social control through violent deterrence. At the same time, with their sometime deployment of violence beyond cuffing, these patriarchs broadcast their inability to live up to the preferred domestic system. The essence of their “parenting” could only be inconsistency: disobedience only sometimes met with brutal lashing, patrols only sometimes sent out, a paternalism, in short, based on erratic employment of coerciveness.
4
Even if control over white children and black slaves had been as similar as pretended, up-to-date paternalists would have had to be inconsistent disciplinarians. Modern parents know that permissive child-raising does not produce docile dependents. Test, test, test is the central theme in an inconsistent parent/child relationship. When children are not sure what punishment will ensue, they experiment. A quasi-permissive domestic authority responds with erratic swings between indulging cute misbehavior and smacking bratty bottoms. Slaveholders who were hauling out balls and chains one moment and enduring feigned illnesses the next were, in part, akin to modern parents.
But slavery could no more precisely resemble nineteenth-century familial control than could domestic servitude be comparable to despotic prisons or Nazi concentration camps or medieval manors. The racist base of slavery itself undercut a color-blind domestic analogy. Patriarchs could not, did not, love members of a despised race remotely in the way they adored their own white children. Democratic parents’ ability to teach consent rests in large part on mixing love with persuasion. But men treated like inferior souls will not consent as voluntarily as children treated like prized treasures.
That matter of color led to a second difference between child-raising and slave-managing. Young Massa was raised to be a mature adult. Cuffee was trained to be an eternal child. The reward of growing up to be masters gave sons incentive to consent, eventually, to norms of indulgent masters. The horror of never growing up gave slaves only the disincentive of succumbing to eternal hard labor.
Still another difference between fathering and mastering was the matter of numbers. An intimacy akin to paternal rule requires tiny numbers of dependents. A teacher sometimes gains intimacy with a class of five. A lecturer has a nodding acquaintance with an audience of hundreds. So, too, slaveowners could be intimate with omnipresent house servants. But planters could hardly love as their children seldom-seen field hands. Samuel Hairston of Virginia controlled over a dozen plantations and almost 3000 slaves. Stephen Duncan of Natchez possessed eight plantations and over 1000 slaves. Wade Hampton of South Carolina owned six plantations in several states and over 900 slaves.16
Such masters often personally mastered nary a slave. The most important taskmaster in many a house servant’s life was not his owner, who added up accounts in the background, but the planter’s wife, who administered the household cuffs. The most important boss in many a field hand’s life was not his master, whom he rarely saw, but his driver, a fellow slave. The most important superior in many a driver’s life was not Massa, who was often off vacationing at the Springs, but a hired white overseer, who made no claim to benevolent ownership. Such impersonal bureaucracy mocked pretenses of familial intimacy.
The plantation bureaucracy operated unlike a family in that the “boys” helped dictate their own disciplinarian. When selecting drivers, masters had to select natural black leaders. A slavish drone without his peers’ respect could not make The Man’s orders inescapable. Once selected, drivers wielded power natural to natural leaders but unnatural to innate dependents. Some planters allowed drivers to run entire plantations. No white, patriarchs thought, could manage so well. But they also supposedly thought that no black “boy” could manage anything. Some planters put drivers in charge of intricate sugar and rice machinery. No white, they thought, understood the sophisticated apparatus. Yet they also claimed to think that no black could understand anything sophisticated. Some planters gave blacks license to transport crops miles down river to commercial depots. No whites, they thought, were such efficient and trustworthy agents. But they also allegedly believed that blacks were inefficient and untrustworthy. All those thoughts added up to uncomfortable realizations that independent patriarchs depended on their “boys” to shuck dependency and assume power.17
The case of William Pettigrew illustrates how much father-power could slip to mastered “boys.” When Pettigrew was absent on frequent holidays, two black drivers, Moses and Henry, controlled his two North Carolina plantations. “What a blessing it is to have two such men [not boys!],” Massa exclaimed. Their “chief desire I think is to relieve me of as much burden as possible,” and “to add to their own character as men of honesty, industry, faithfulness, & success.”18
Although handing to Moses and Henry father’s power to direct, William Pettigrew retained father’s power to approve. “Remember me very kindly to the people,” he wrote his drivers. “Their good conduct will be very gratifying to me.” Those who misbehaved would “be disgraced in my estimation.” They would betray “the good name of their home.”19
When betrayal came, Pettigrew responded not by seizing the power he had abdicated but by slipping in permissive advice. At Christmas time in 1857, Pettigrew was bedeviled by Jack and Frank and Venus and Patience, who allegedly helped themselves to Massa’s money and molasses. The thieving, Pettigrew believed, came partly because slaves frolicked at neighboring plantations. During his absence, he wrote to Moses and Henry, “it is my wish [not his command] that the people go from home as little as possible. If I were they,” scolded the disappointed patriarch, “I would be ashamed.” He was loath to “give a positive order [!], but… I wish yourself & the people at Dr. Hardison’s & Mr. Murphy’s to keep apart.” With mixing and mingling, “there must ever be trouble. My idea [but not his order] is, stay at home.” Two years later, Pettigrew was still handing a driver written “permission to allow such person or persons, as he may think proper, to go” anywhere from the plantation.20
Pettigrew’s abdications might appear to be a textbook example of how not to master. Still, his bureaucratic system succeeded. It succeeded because it violated the South’s textbook distinction between the “natural” superiority of white men and the “natural” inferiority of black “boys.” White supremacists could cling to the “natural” by hiring white overseers to drive black drivers. But overseers, when a rung from the top of the plantation bureaucracy, undercut domesticity from another direction. They made paternalism dependent on the very sort of wage slave that domestic patriarchy had allegedly obliterated.
The South claimed superiority over the North in part because those who owned laborers supervised more familially than did directors interested only in payoff. Overseers sought the highest payoff. They usually owned nary a laborer. They were paid wages for a season. Cuffee was hardly their “boy.” Serviles would be cuffed paternalistically only if Massa could make adoptive parents paternal.
Massa revealingly tried. Upon being hired, overseers were charged with mixing force and affection in the manner of the new paternalism. “Be firm, and at the same time gentle,” instructed the South’s patriarchal Thomas Afflecks. On the “firm” side, remember that “the only way to keep a negro honest is not to trust him.” Punish every dishonest disobedience “without listening to a word of excuse.” On the “gentle” side, remember that “occasional rewards have a better effect than frequent punishments.” Recall the desirability of dispensing with lashes entirely. Find exquisite balances between the times lashes are necessary and the times indulgence is preferable.21
Having tried to transmit their teetering sense of balance, owners had to depend on hirelings to keep teetering to a minimum. Just as William Pettigrew could not withhold power and still give drivers command, so patriarchs had to give paternalistic instructions and hope hirelings would patronize accordingly. Intricacies of overseers’ everyday management—discovering whether a complaining slave was really ill, ascertaining who, if anyone, had stolen master’s chickens, discerning whether the cowhide or a tongue lashing best fit the latest slave carelessness—all these decisions were difficult. Overseers, judges on the spot, could make master’s benevolent instructions deceitful rhetoric or living truth.22
Or more accurately, overseers could not altogether master shamming blacks. Slaves, experts at tricking whites who supposedly knew them intimately, mystified supervisors who knew them not at all. Each overseer mystified by a “disobedience”—or was it a “childishness”?—had to decide whether to “be firm” or “gentle.”
To make the domesticity analogy more doubtful still, the overseer as substitute parent had to satisfy not only “father” but also the head “boy.” Overseers always had theoretical power to compel drivers. But drivers often had actual capacity to oversee overseers. Permanent drivers knew their gangs better than did transitory overseers; and masters cherished long-term head blacks more than short-term white supervisors. So long as drivers balanced the tightrope between loyalty to the Big House and sensitivity to the quarters, these “boys” could maintain more credibility with The Man than could a wage-earning overseer charged with making slavery unlike wage slavery.
Common field hands could also summon masters’ power against overseers’ power. Just as slaves indirectly helped choose black drivers, so they indirectly helped fire white managers. If slaves considered an overseer brutal or a previous overseer preferable, they could escalate pretended illnesses, intentional accidents, calculated carelessness. If the overseer merely begged and cajoled, crop production declined, and he was in trouble. If the wage slave whipped and whipped, slaves, led by drivers, sometimes complained to Massa.23
Some masters demanded that the people speed complaints to the Big House. An Alabama planter instructed his overseer that “each and every slave shall communicate to the master … his punishment, the quantity and cause thereof, the existence of any known immorality and the parties engaged in it.” Big Daddy was not going to let outsiders abuse his “boys.”24
When abuse occurred, patriarchs had a dismal choice. They could buy more lashes in the interests of more obedience. Or the owner might emulate James P. Tarry of Alabama in telling his overseer during the long hot summer of 1854 “to withhold your rushing whipping & lashing—for I will not stand it any longer.”25 Whichever side master backed momentarily, he could not tolerate crossfire constantly. To work another season, overseers had to be master psychologists, superb disciplinarians, superior agriculturalists.
Overseers were more often considered ordinary. Chattel slavery, while requiring wage-earning directors, damned wage slaves as degraded. The best men owned bondsmen. The best Southerners scorned a lifetime of being a hireling.
So the best overseers moved up to their own Big Houses, the ordinary plodded from job to job, and planters wailed: Overseers whipped too much. They whipped too little. They were too intimate in the quarters. They took too few pains to be likable. “Of all ‘the curses of slavery,’” said South Carolina’s James Hammond, “incomparably the greatest is the infernal necessity of having agents.” His “stupid, perverse, heedless and thoughtless … prime ministers” were “lineal descendants I doubt not of Adam’s first overseer—Cain.” Black “scamps,” added Linton Stephens, “will poach upon you if you allow them one inch of a chance—and then to crown it all they are eternally begging me for little favors and gifts … and all for the want of somebody to govern them.”26
Massa governed too little. Overseers were as capable as the bureaucratic system allowed. Overseers’ cursed presence illuminated the impossibility of huge plantations becoming intimate families. Their unending problems personified difficulties inherent in coercing adult “boys” into permanent childhood. Those paid wages to oversee a system supposedly antithetical to wage slavery were perfect scapegoats for a bureaucracy grown uncomfortably unlike a family.
5
Even if an impersonal bureaucracy could have been like a personal family, sales of “family friends” would have mocked the domestic analogy. “The people” were property as well as folks. Sometimes folks had to be marketed. Sometimes higher prices for individual slaves were so enticing that husband was sold away from wife, wife away from children, brother away from sister. Slave dealers were even better scapegoats than overseers for a partially anti-domestic Domestic Institution.
The Peculiar Institution was assuredly peculiar in that its property owners usually loathed those who transferred property. Agents, such as merchants and stockbrokers who help buy and sell prized property, are usually themselves prized. A handful of Old South slavedealers, such as Thomas Gadsden and Nathaniel Bedford Forrest, were cherished. But most slavetraders were loathed.27
Nothing was cheaper than contempt for agents who rewarded hypocrisies. No one was more hypocritical than a “father” selling his “boy.” Nothing could be more anti-familial than breaking up slave marriages. Nothing could be more understandable than heaping blame on merchants who coldheartedly offered top dollar for separated people.28
Top dollar aside, domestic discipline sometimes mandated broken homes. By threatening to sell enslaved mates away from each other, masters meant to create such a fearful deterrent that slaves would obey and domestic relations would be genial. A single smashed slave family, while unfortunate, might create beneficent harmony on the rest of the plantation.29
But destroying families for financial reasons was not true-blue patriarchy. Planters, like most investors, often borrowed. Borrowers, when pressed, had to sell property at least disadvantage. Selling one prime fellow or “wench” was often more advantageous than marketing a group of mixed value. Furthermore, slaveholders, like most American heads of families, wished offspring to inherit the family fortune equally. Equal white division sometimes required dividing black families.30
Only a system with powerful personal codes could have so often overcome such powerful impersonal propulsions. Masters went to heroic pains (and they did think, significantly, their pains heroic) to avoid destruction of slave families. Many an heir accepted less so that an estate could be divided without dividing families. Louisiana barred the separation of small children from mothers. Late antebellum Alabama somewhat limited the iniquity. No abolitionist would have believed the number of times, in these two states and elsewhere, slaveholders avoided this ultimate monstrosity.31
Still, the monstrous did happen. No self-respecting culprit could avoid squirming over it. Documents illustrating slaveholders’ discomfiture were strewn around the South. Whenever such letters are found, the finder becomes almost an unholy voyeur, intruding on a black victim’s anguish that is almost unbearable. But undeserved empathy for the white victimizer is a prerequisite for understanding this regime. When black families were split, more than at any moment, the Old South’s “domestic” form of slavery revealed its arrogance and hypocrisy.
Witness, for example, South Carolina’s Thomas Chaplin in 1845. Chaplin, thrown heavily in debt by high living, saw that he must sell “ten prime negroes…. Nothing can be more mortifying and grieving to a man, than to select out some of his negroes to be sold—You know not to whom, or how they will be treated by their new owners, and negroes that you find no fault with—to separate families, mothers & daughters—brothers & sisters—All to pay for your own extravagances.”
Two days later, Chaplin was “glad” to be finished with this “most unpleasant thing I have ever had to do…. The Negroes at home are quite disconsolate, but this will soon blow over. They may see their children again in time.” For the next few months Chaplin spent many hours threatening to duel those who questioned his honor. The acutest questioning came from within. The wider torment was the South’s.32
The most excruciating expression of that torment, and one of the most priceless of the southern documents this wanderer has stumbled upon, was written far from slave-obsessed South Carolina, up in half-enslaved Maryland.33 T. D. Jones of Princess Anne County, having sold his slave woman, Eliza, away from her daughter, Jenny, received from the mother a request for the child. The mother’s request, with its implicit moral indictment, struck the patriarch as insufferably presumptuous. “I profess to be a christian,” Massa Jones wrote back to Eliza, “& have the happy and comforting assurance that I am, by the grace of God, what I profess to be.” Still, he would not indulge in arrogant refusal to answer impertinence. “Christian principle” requires one “to have mercy, deal justly, and walk humbly.” Mercy mandates “a listening ear to your request.” Justice prompts “me to do what is right, and humility constrains me to condescend to answer.”
As he condescended to consider his possible inhumanity, the patriarch seemed momentarily to judge himself beneath contempt. “I knew how to estimate the claims of a Mother and to appreciate the affection of a Mother for her child,” he winced. “I greatly regret the occasion that resulted in the separation of you from your child.”
Then he found a way to regain patriarchal hauteur. The child, he reported, loves Massa more than Momma. Jenny “says she does not want to go away from her master.” With amused “annoyance,” he reported his inability “to keep her off my heels in the street.” With bemused condescension, he wrote that she is as “petted” and as “watchful” a “little spy as you used to be.” With affectionate patronization, he recounted his inability to “spurn” his “little orphan’s” “caresses.” Jenny is so “very fond of me, and I should miss her so very much,” concluded the domestic arbiter, that “I have not yet come to a decision” about competing patriarchal and matriarchal claims.
The confused judge at last located the culprit. “If you had conducted yourself faithfully,” he wrote to Eliza, “no offer could have tempted me.” Your letter, he charged, continued “your ingratitude and faithlessness.” Only “indignation or malice” could explain your insufferable failure “to inquire after my welfare.”
Father forgave the snub with patriarchal majesty. He implored Eliza “as one who takes an interest in your wellbeing in this world, and still greater interest for the wellbeing in the eternal world, & above [all] as the one who stood sponsor to you in baptism, to repent of your misdeeds—to cease to do evil & learn to do well,” and to pray daily “to God, thro’ Jesus Christ … to help your infirmities.” Choosing climactic words posterity must try to read without a smirk, he closed “with unfeigned benevolence & charity.” (Emphasis throughout these two paragraphs mine.)
“Benevolent charity”? Incredibly, just possibly. All Massa Jones’s self-serving presumption must not hide the terrible although remote possibility that the child caught between two sorts of “parenting” was not feigning preference to stay with Big Daddy up river. Terror about what lay with Momma down river could have sadly afflicted the child. So too, the patriarch just might have honestly presumed that his love exceeded an “erring” mother’s. But Massa Jones’s letter indicates also guilt behind confidence and doubt behind bluster. In its vacillations, its squirming, its totterings, this marvelous, horrid document tells the tale of the lordly arrogance, the outrageous sincerity, and the painful awareness of falseness in this “peculiar” “domestic” regime.
6
Even if slaveholders’ impersonal bureaucracy could have personified loving fathers, and even if slave property could have been sold without devastating families, slavery’s domestic balances would have been precarious. The way the scales tipped, like most things southern, was geographically predictable. Where slavery was relatively weak and growing relatively weaker, especially northwards in the South, masters feared that too permissive an approach made mastery a little precarious. Where slavery was relatively strong and growing relatively stronger, especially southwards in the South, masters feared that arbitrary violence made mastery more than a little anti-paternal.
Benevolent tyranny depends on benevolent tyrants. While southern family norms beckoned masters towards benevolence, norms alone never bar sadism. Southern slaveholding neighborhoods, particularly in newer and lower parts of the South, tended to have their own horror stories—whispered tales of blacks murdered or crippled or raped or mangled.
Thomas Chaplin again provides an unforgettable example. One day in 1849, Chaplin served on a jury of inquest at James Sandiford’s neighboring lowcountry South Carolina plantation. Roger, one of Sandiford’s slaves, “a complete cripple, being hardly able to walk,” had just been found “in the most shocking situation.” Roger had returned from an oyster catch, allegedly late, allegedly bearing insufficient baskets of oysters. After “30 cuts” with the cowhide, Roger was allegedly sassy. “For these crimes,” Massa Sandiford, a “demon in human shape, … had this poor cripple Negro placed in an open outhouse, the wind blowing through a hundred cracks, his clothes wet to the waist, without a single blanket & in freezing weather, with shackles on his wrist, & chained to a bolt in the floor and a chain around his neck.” At daylight, Roger was found “choked, strangled, frozen to death.” The jury ruled that Roger accidently “slipped from the position in which he was placed.” Chaplin’s “individual verdict” was “murdered by his master.”34
Roger’s murder was hardly the rule. The Linton Stephenses massively outnumbered the James Sandifords. Some murderers of slaves were jailed. More were ostracized. Still no Southerner could escape the question raised by his own knowledge of a Roger. Could a peculiarly domestic system give men leeway to be anti-familial demons?
That question was most relevant in the nouveau Southwest. Everything about the rawest cotton and sugar belts—relatively uncivilized conditions, owners with relatively new and huge slave gangs, a relatively reckless materialistic spirit—mitigated against that semi-permissive paternalism found most often on smaller or older estates. Not infrequently on a crude frontier, overseers whipped more, permitted less, and won more rewards for hard driving. Much more often in a raw and virgin land, no charade of familial affection existed. Precisely for these reasons, that nineteenth-century threat of selling slaves down river was a terrible new deterrent in this supposedly less terrible era.35
Witness James A. Hamilton, a Louisiana sugar planter, who regarded house servants not as pets to pamper but as niggers “turned out to annoy us. I have whipped them until there is no place to whip, and yet they seem to do as usual.” He regarded field hands not as erring children but as “awful lazy” devils. They had “to be licked like blazes.”36
Hamilton possessed no “hope” of making hands “honest and obedient.” He had accordingly “punished all the negroes very severely.” If they all ran away, which “would not surprise me,… I will take it as a godsend—for I am nearly worried to death with them.—If I had a jail—I should lock them up every night.”
When the beaten absconded, the would-be jailer took it as no “godsend.” “Last night,” Hamilton related with savage humor, “my negroes gave a supper party at my place above. Just about the time they were to set down to tea, I waked them up with the contents of my Gun. Such scampering you never did see … I saved only one of the flock.” The survivor was “very badly wounded and may in all probability be disabled for life. This same boy has been shot twice this year, and once before by me.”37
Hamilton viewed such warfare not with a sadist’s contentment but with the brawler’s exhaustion. “Next year I must hire someone to whip my negroes,” he wrote. Harried nerves and a skipping heart left him feeling “almost dead. One little excitement uses me up, and to fight negroes nearly kills me—damn their hides, I wish they were all in Africa.”38
Benevolent paternalism? No wonder abolitionists laughed. No wonder patriarchal paternalists regarded even a few John Hamiltons as contemptible betrayers. A master class mocked in its highest aspirations by so dismal, even if uncharacteristic, an example could hardly feel comfortable about a Domestic Institution. The South’s paternalistic leaders were rather left to feel that theirs was a ruling class with domestic pretenses as yet uncomfortably underachieved.39
7
While the harsher southwestern disciplinarians mocked the domestic charade, the Upper South’s more permissive regime came closer to following the script. Residents of areas further from the tropics, less sure slavery was permanent, more often tipped the balance of coercion and consent towards leniency. The tip left foreign travelers feeling that, compared with black Louisianians, black Marylanders were “less civil, less obliging,” less “servile, … less cringing,” in short “far more independent than” blacks further south.40
Border slaves had greater chance to observe and practice freer conditions. The nonslaveholding North was closer. Border cities, with unusually large free black populations and expanded opportunities for slaves to earn wages, were much more open than cities further south. Even in the more rural northern South, free blacks were much more prevalent than in the more southern South.
This larger atmosphere of freedom often led tyrants not to clamp down more viciously but to allow slaves more liberties. In its more extreme form, the expansion of permissiveness allowed bondsmen to contract their own jobs, pay their own way, and move about as they pleased provided their master was paid a fee. This “hiring out” system, especially prevalent in border cities, came naturally to a world where free blacks demonstrated skills as good as free whites’ and where black “wage slaves” demonstrated that race control hardly required chattel slavery.
The “hiring out” system was only the most notorious example of border slavery’s tendency to expand freedom within slavery. Another startling example, particularly prevalent in Maryland and Delaware, was to bribe slaves to be good servants by promising freedom in the master’s last will and testament. In the late 1850s, when Marylanders debated saving slavery by re-enslaving free blacks, opponents of re-enslavement urged that, without prospects of freedom, border slaves would not work.41 The novel notion scuttled slaveholders’ commonplace belief that Cuffee needed to be cuffed into being an eternal “boy.”
Again, some border masters, particularly near free states, forgot instructions that Cuffee must stay home. Some permissive masters gave slaves unrestricted license to wander, hoping to avoid the ultimate wandering. Others, particularly in cities, let slaves marry free blacks, sire free children, worship at free black churches. Others let slaves have money and buy freedom. More taught slaves to read and write. Always the object was the same. Adjust to the northern South’s exposed openness by making slavery less provoking for slaves.42
Deep South proslavery perpetualists called it all madness—an invitation to razor-slashed jugulars. Twentieth-century social theorists, with their conventional wisdom that a sip of freedom provokes thirst for more, say amen. Which only goes to show that in both centuries theorists have missed tyranny’s complexities. Border slaves always sipped freedom. They usually did not run away. They rarely slit master’s throat. They almost never revolted. Slaveholders’ nonclosed society was a theoretical mess.
It was also working. Masters aware of theoretical danger made theory fail. The border slave establishment handed out privileges with one hand, threatened reprisals with the other, and convinced slaves that a tinge of freedom was preferable to testing out whose throat would be slit. Even in its most lenient forms, the system obeyed the true iron law of tyranny’s survival: Always make sure that the balance of privilege and force keeps a subject believing that rebellion would violate his interest.
Border slavery, while obeying that law, balanced coercion and consent at an uneasy level in an uncomfortable spot. Border masters feared that a little outside pressure could upset the balance. Let antislavery Northerners mass too close and too hard and runaways could escalate, white heresy grow, nervous masters sell blacks down river faster. Then a despotic system infused with some democratic modes of social control would come to its ultimate test.
8
The Domestic Institution would be most tested in the northern South precisely because the domestic analogy was there most apt. Peculiarly in the Border South, the notion that patriarchs could control blacks while going light on brutality and heavy on persuasiveness faintly resembled control over white children. But further southward, slavery could less easily seem truly domestic. Down river, the multiple troubles with the domestic analogy: the contempt for dependents with black skin, the expectation that black but not white “boys” would be eternal children, the impersonal bureaucracy governing many blacks but nary a white dependent, the merchandising of black but not white folk, the brutalizing of slaves alone—all of these factors made governing slaves too dissimilar to governing families. The resulting swings between brutality and permissiveness raised the largest question about Cuffee’s constancy. Could so strained a domestic analogy—and so inconstant a terrorizing—sufficiently control that implausible fellow, the grown-up will-less “boy”?