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---------- Forwarded message --------- From: H-Net Staff via H-REVIEW <h-rev...@lists.h-net.org> Date: Thu, Aug 22, 2019 at 8:25 AM Subject: H-Net Review [H-War]: Iverson on Stubbs, 'Masters of Violence: The Plantation Overseers of Eighteenth-Century Virginia, South Carolina, and Georgia' To: <h-rev...@lists.h-net.org> Cc: H-Net Staff <revh...@mail.h-net.org> Tristan Stubbs. Masters of Violence: The Plantation Overseers of Eighteenth-Century Virginia, South Carolina, and Georgia. Columbia University of South Carolina Press, 2019. 248 pp. $44.99 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-61117-884-5. Reviewed by Justin Iverson (Northern Illinois University) Published on H-War (August, 2019) Commissioned by Margaret Sankey Despite the breadth of literature on chattel slavery in early America, much less is known about plantation overseers or managers who were charged with making sure the chattel system was profitable for wealthy patriarchs at the top of the social ladder. Tristan Stubbs shows in _Masters of Violence_ that on a daily basis overseers supervised enslaved people while they worked, purchased food and clothing, distributed supplies, and administered violence to maintain the system. Why we know so little about them is, as Stubbs notes, in part because of their absence in the historical record. Thus, by analyzing the limited written records that overseers produced, and by reading against the grain of text in colonial newspapers and planter letters and diaries, Stubbs offers the first book-length project on overseers in early America. However, as the title _Masters of Violence_ implies, this is not just a social history of overseers per se, but also an intellectual history assessing how overseers influenced the development of enlightened patriarchal ideas in the eighteenth century. Stubbs argues that stereotypes that planters developed toward overseers are crucial for understanding the development of republican masculinity in the South. Stubbs tracks a shift in how planters viewed overseers over the course of the eighteenth century in Virginia, South Carolina, and Georgia. As wage workers for wealthy patriarchs, they held a dependent status that wealthy Anglo-Saxon colonists abhorred. But in the early eighteenth century, overseeing was not immutably linked to dependent status, and Stubbs notes that planters often held positive feelings toward their managers. Over time negative stereotypes toward overseers increased, and there were three general denunciations of overseers during the century. Planters thought that overseers were bad agriculturalists, that they had little chance of acquiring enough land to become independent patriarchs, and that they were dishonest thieves. So why then "by the late eighteenth century, were overseers stigmatized by figures such as Jefferson as much for their membership in a dependent 'class,' or 'race' of overseers as for belonging to a broader class of dependents" (p. 6)? Stubbs first establishes how overseers managed plantations differently in each of the three colonies he compares. More bondpeople were subjected to each overseer in South Carolina and Georgia than in Virginia, a characteristic he argues occurred primarily for three reasons. The task system connected to rice and indigo cultivation in the Deep South required less direct supervision than the gang system that managers used to cultivate tobacco in Virginia. Tobacco production was also more labor intensive than rice production, and excessive costs to drain and ditch fields for rice inhibited smaller landholders from acquiring land in South Carolina and Georgia. As a group, overseers were mostly young white men from lower classes. Stubbs has found only one example of a woman overseer although planters hired married overseers for the additional labor that their spouses produced. They were typically hired during the peak autumn-winter season, and planters expected them to have basic literacy and numeracy skills. In addition, they had to be balanced and sober so that they could rationally manage enslaved people and not waste plantation resources, which might cut potential profits. Planters typically hired them for one- or two-year contracts and they could be fined if they were negligent. Aside from wages, planters also compensated them with food, crop shares, provisions, and housing. Importantly, the recruiting process and contract terms were ways for planters to demonstrate their patriarchal mastery of their plantations and reinforce their authority. These forms of compensation reiterated overseers' dependent status, while short contracts inhibited their ability to challenge a planter's patriarchal authority. Overseers' relationships with planters and enslaved people also informed developing ideas of enlightened patriarchy in the eighteenth century. Even absentee owners never fully absolved themselves of plantation management, and they regularly checked in with managers to ensure production ran smoothly. Letters and plantation visits were ways for planters to communicate with managers, but also ways for planters to reinforce their authority. Overseers could give feedback to planters and offer recommendations, but planters had the final say on production operations. But planters also feared overseers as thieves who would take advantage of them at every opportunity. Overseers were also threats to the plantation hierarchy when planters were gone and could not closely monitor them. Thus, Stubbs argues, planters created an overseer class and made overseers "others." Importantly, the otherization of managers as a stigmatized group of dependents, Stubbs claims, "qualifies" Edmund Morgan's influential _American Slavery American Freedom_ (1975) thesis that whites built racial solidarity to bridge class divides in colonial Virginia (p. 96). Overseers were clear exceptions to this practice. Enslaved people also used what leverage they had to drive a wedge between planters and overseers. By talebearing, bondpeople could influence how plantations were managed and how planters and managers would treat them. Talebearing also further reinforced the process of making overseers others. Although enslaved people challenged overseer power, Stubbs views the infrequency of overt and violent resistance by enslaved people in the South as indicative of a relatively nonviolent relationship between bondpeople and managers. However, relations between overseers and enslaved people were more strained from 1775 to 1782 than at any other time in the century. The chaos that the Revolutionary War produced diminished overseer authority and forced them to resort to more violent strategies to maintain plantation order. The heightened level of violence probably discouraged some enslaved people from fleeing or disobeying during the period, but it also reinforced negative stereotypes toward managers as brutal and inhumane. Moreover, when overseers failed to maintain order, their inadequacies reiterated their negligence and fed developing critiques of overseers during the period. Ultimately, Stubbs concludes that the Revolutionary War brought "the defamed status of overseers to the fore" (p. 159). Since they worked for an independent patriarch, and since they raised the level of violence against enslaved people, plantation managers represented the "antithesis" of revolutionary ideas of order, balance, and liberty. Since they filled the distance between planters and their slaves, they became scapegoats for planters to reduce their cognitive dissonance about chattel slavery and the violence it took to preserve it. Thus, overseers were central for the development of enlightened patriarchal ideas that portended antebellum paternalism. Overall, _Masters of Violence_ adds nuance and depth to the understanding of slavery, masculinity, class, and humanitarianism in early America, and thus it would serve well in upper-division undergraduate and graduate courses focusing on those themes. Citation: Justin Iverson. Review of Stubbs, Tristan, _Masters of Violence: The Plantation Overseers of Eighteenth-Century Virginia, South Carolina, and Georgia_. H-War, H-Net Reviews. August, 2019. URL: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=53966 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. -- Best regards, Andrew Stewart _________________________________________________________ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: https://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
