American Negro Slavery Part 22

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 cla.s.s 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 cla.s.s,[25] but this is not to say that they were conspicuous either for expertness or a.s.siduity. 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, advertis.e.m.e.nt.]

[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 ent.i.tled 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. Pa.s.s 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 p.r.o.ne 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; ent.i.tled _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. n.o.body 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 pa.s.sion 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 advertis.e.m.e.nt, 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 emanc.i.p.ation 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 a.s.sistance. 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 cla.s.s 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."

[Footnote 31: Lamar's MSS. are in the possession of Mrs. A.S. Erwin, Athens, Ga. Selections from them are printed in _Plantation and Frontier_, I, 167-183, 309-312, II, 38, 41.]

Lamar could command strong words, as when a physician demanded five hundred dollars for services at Hurricane in 1844, or when overseers were detected in drunkenness or cruelty; but his most characteristic complaints were of his own short-comings as a manager and of the crotchets of his relatives.

His letters were always cheery, and his repeated disappointments in overseers never damped his optimism concerning each new inc.u.mbent. His old lands contented him until he found new and more fertile ones to buy, whereupon his jubilation was great. When cotton was low he called himself a toad under the harrow; but rising markets would set him to counting bales before the seed had more than sprouted and to building new plantations in the air. In actual practice his log-cabin slave quarters gave place to frame houses; his mules were kept in full force; his production of corn and bacon was nearly always ample for the needs of each place; his slaves were permitted to raise nankeen cotton on their private accounts; and his own frequent journeys of inspection and stimulus, as he said, kept up an _esprit du corps_. When an overseer reported that his slaves were down with fever by the dozen and his cotton wasting in the fields, Lamar would hasten thither with a physician and a squad of slaves impressed from another plantation, to care for the sick and the crop respectively. He redistributed slaves among his plantations with a view to a better balancing of land and labor, but was deterred from carrying this policy as far as he thought might be profitable by his unwillingness to separate the families. His absence gave occasion sometimes for discontent among his slaves; yet when the owners of others who were for sale authorized them to find their own purchasers his well known justice, liberality and good nature made "Mas John" a favorite recourse.

As to crops and management, Lamar indicated his methods in criticizing those of a relative: "Uncle Jesse still builds air castles and blinds himself to his affairs. Last year he tinkered away on tobacco and sugar cane, things he knew nothing about.... He interferes with the arrangements of his overseers, and has no judgment of his own.... If he would employ a competent overseer and move off the plantation with his family he could make good crops, as he has a good force of hands and good lands.... I have found that it is unprofitable to undertake anything on a plantation out of the regular routine. If I had a little place off to itself, and my business would admit of it, I should delight in agricultural experiments." In his reliance upon staple routine, as in every other characteristic, Lamar rings true to the planter type.

CHAPTER XV

PLANTATION LABOR

WHILE produced only in America, the plantation slave was a product of old-world forces. His nature was an African's profoundly modified but hardly transformed by the requirements of European civilization. The wrench from Africa and the subjection to the new discipline while uprooting his ancient language and customs had little more effect upon his temperament than upon his complexion. Ceasing to be Foulah, Coromantee, Ebo or Angola, he became instead the American negro. The Caucasian was also changed by the contact in a far from negligible degree; but the negro's conversion was much the more thorough, partly because the process in his case was coercive, partly because his genius was imitative.

The planters had a saying, always of course with an implicit reservation as to limits, that a negro was what a white man made him. The molding, however, was accomplished more by groups than by individuals. The purposes and policies of the masters were fairly uniform, and in consequence the negroes, though with many variants, became largely standardized into the predominant plantation type. The traits which prevailed were an eagerness for society, music and merriment, a fondness for display whether of person, dress, vocabulary or emotion, a not flagrant sensuality, a receptiveness toward any religion whose exercises were exhilarating, a p.r.o.neness to superst.i.tion, a courteous acceptance of subordination, an avidity for praise, a readiness for loyalty of a feudal sort, and last but not least, a healthy human repugnance toward overwork. "It don't do no good to hurry,"

was a negro saying, "'caze you're liable to run by mo'n you overtake."

Likewise painstaking was reckoned painful; and tomorrow was always waiting for today's work, while today was ready for tomorrow's share of play. On the other hand it was a satisfaction to work st.u.r.dily for a hard boss, and so be able to say in an interchange of amenities: "Go long, half-priced n.i.g.g.e.r! You wouldn't fotch fifty dollars, an' I'm wuth a thousand!"[1]

[Footnote 1: _Daily Tropic_ (New Orleans), May 18, 1846.]

Contrasts were abundant. John B. Lamar, on the one hand, wrote: "My man Ned the carpenter is idle or nearly so at the plantation. He is fixing gates and, like the idle groom in Pickwick, trying to fool himself into the belief that he is doing something.... He is an eye servant. If I was with him I could have the work done soon and cheap; but I am afraid to trust him off where there is no one he fears."[2] On the other hand, M.W. Philips inscribed a page of his plantation diary as follows:[3]

[Footnote 2: _Plantation and Frontier_, II, 38.]

[Footnote 3: Mississippi Historical Society _Publications_, X, 444.]

Sunday July 10, 1853 Peyton is no more Aged 42 Though he was a bad man in many respects yet he was a most excellent field hand, always at his post.

On this place for 21 years.

Except the measles and its sequence, the injury rec'd by the mule last Nov'r and its sequence, he has not lost 15 days' work, I verily believe, in the remaining 19 years. I wish we could hope for his eternal state.

Should anyone in the twentieth century wish to see the old-fashioned prime negro at his best, let him take a Mississippi steamboat and watch the roustabouts at work--those chaffing and chattering, singing and swinging, l.u.s.ty and willing freight handlers, whom a river captain plying out of New Orleans has called the n.o.blest black men that G.o.d ever made.[4] Ready at every touching of the sh.o.r.e day and night, resting and sleeping only between landings, they carry their loads almost at running speed, and when returning for fresh burdens they "c.o.o.njine" by flinging their feet in semi-circles at every step, or cutting other capers in rhythm to show their fellows and the gallery that the strain of the cotton bales, the grain sacks, the oil barrels and the timbers merely loosen their muscles and lighten their spirits.

[Footnote 4: Captain L.V. Cooley, _Address Before the Tulane Society of Economics, New Orleans, April 11th, 1911, on River Transportation and Its Relation to New Orleans, Past, Present and Future_. [New Orleans, 1911.]]

Such an exhibit would have been the despair of the average ante-bellum planter, for instead of choosing among hundreds of applicants and rejecting or discharging those who fell short of a high standard, he had to make shift with such laborers as the slave traders chanced to bring or as his women chanced to rear. His common problem was to get such income and comfort as he might from a parcel of the general run; and the creation of roustabout energy among them would require such vigor and such iron resolution on his own part as was forthcoming in extremely few cases.

Theoretically the master might be expected perhaps to expend the minimum possible to keep his slaves in strength, to discard the weaklings and the aged, to drive his gang early and late, to scourge the laggards hourly, to secure the whole with fetters by day and with bolts by night, and to keep them in perpetual terror of his wrath. But Olmsted, who seems to have gone South with the thought of finding some such theory in application, wrote: "I saw much more of what I had not antic.i.p.ated and less of what I had in the slave states than, with a somewhat extended travelling experience, in any other country I ever visited";[5] and Nehemiah Adams, who went from Boston to Georgia prepared to weep with the slaves who wept, found himself laughing with the laughing ones instead.[6]

[Footnote 5: Olmsted, _Seaboard Slave States_, p. 179.]

[Footnote 6: Nehemiah Adams. _A Southside View of Slavery, or Three Months in the South in 1854_ (Boston, 1854), chap. 2.]

The theory of rigid coercion and complete exploitation was as strange to the bulk of the planters as the doctrine and practice of moderation was to those who viewed the regime from afar and with the mind's eye. A planter in explaining his mildness might well have said it was due to his being neither a knave nor a fool He refrained from the use of fetters not so much because they would have hampered the slaves in their work as because the general use of them never crossed his mind. And since chains and bolts were out of the question, the whole system of control must be moderate; slaves must be impelled as little as possible by fear, and as much as might be by loyalty, pride and the prospect of reward.

Here and there a planter applied this policy in an exceptional degree. A certain Z. Kingsley followed it with marked success even when his whole force was of fresh Africans. In a pamphlet of the late eighteen-twenties he told of his method as follows: "About twenty-five years ago I settled a plantation on St. John's River in Florida with about fifty new negroes, many of whom I brought from the Coast myself. They were mostly fine young men and women, and nearly in equal numbers. I never interfered in their connubial concerns nor domestic affairs, but let them regulate these after their own manner. I taught them nothing but what was useful, and what I thought would add to their physical and moral happiness. I encouraged as much as possible dancing, merriment and dress, for which Sat.u.r.day afternoon and night and Sunday morning were dedicated. [Part of their leisure] was usually employed in hoeing their corn and getting a supply of fish for the week. Both men and women were very industrious. Many of them made twenty bushels of corn to sell, and they vied with each other in dress and dancing.... They were perfectly honest and obedient, and appeared perfectly happy, having no fear but that of offending me; and I hardly ever had to apply other correction than shaming them. If I exceeded this, the punishment was quite light, for they hardly ever failed in doing their work well. My object was to excite their ambition and attachment by kindness, not to depress their spirits by fear and punishment.... Perfect confidence, friendship and good understanding reigned between us." During the War of 1812 most of these negroes were killed or carried off in a Seminole raid.

When peace returned and Kingsley attempted to restore his Eden with a mixture of African and American negroes, a serpent entered in the guise of a negro preacher who taught the sinfulness of dancing, fishing on Sunday and eating the catfish which had no scales. In consequence the slaves "became poor, ragged, hungry and disconsolate. To steal from me was only to do justice--to take what belonged to them, because I kept them in unjust bondage." They came to believe "that all pastime or pleasure in this iniquitous world was sinful; that this was only a place of sorrow and repentance, and the sooner they were out of it the better; that they would then go to a good country where they would experience no want of anything, and have no work nor cruel taskmaster, for that G.o.d was merciful and would pardon any sin they committed; only it was necessary to pray and ask forgiveness, and have prayer meetings and contribute what they could to the church, etc.... Finally myself and the overseer became completely divested of all authority over the negroes.... Severity had no effect; it only made it worse."[7]

[Footnote 7: [Z. Kingsley] _A Treatise on the Patriarchal System of Society as It exists ... under the Name of Slavery_. By an inhabitant of Florida.

Fourth edition (1834), pp. 21, 22. (Copy in the Library of Congress.)]

This experience left Kingsley undaunted in his belief that liberalism and profit-sharing were the soundest basis for the plantation regime.

To support this contention further he cited an experiment by a South Carolinian who established four or five plantations in a group on Broad River, with a slave foreman on each and a single overseer with very limited functions over the whole. The cotton crop was the master's, while the hogs, corn and other produce belonged to the slaves for their sustenance and the sale of any surplus. The output proved large, "and the owner had no further trouble nor expense than furnishing the ordinary clothing and paying the overseer's wages, so that he could fairly be called free, seeing that he could realize his annual income wherever he chose to reside, without paying the customary homage to servitude of personal attendance on the operation of his slaves." In Kingsley's opinion the system "answered extremely well, and offers to us a strong case in favor of exciting ambition by cultivating utility, local attachment and moral improvement among the slaves."[8]

[Footnote 8: [Z. Kingsley] _Treatise_, p. 22.]