The Slave Plantation in Retrospect

THE race question in the South is at last beginning to be approached in a temper fairly free from partisan bias. But the institution which bequeathed us the race question still awaits dispassionate historical appraisal. Despite the lapse of almost half a century, the embers of the great conflict in which slavery perished are still hot, if one but deeply stir the ashes. It is therefore to be accounted a rare piece of good fortune that the first two volumes of the Documentary History of American Industrial Society¹ delineate the ‘peculiar institution’ wholly from the economic point of view. Professor Phillips has ranged far in his quest of illuminating excerpts, but has discerningly garnered only what is untouched by political rancor. The diary of the planter, the journal of the traveler, the account-book of the merchant, the private report of the overseer, the correspondence of friends, the advertisement, news item, and editorial, the personal testimonial, the confession of the convict, the public petition, the criminal records of parish and county, the private contract, and the occasional local ordinance, — all have contributed to the deftly arranged mosaic set before us in Plantation and Frontier. The illustrative material has been organized around various topics of cardinal importance, such as Plantation Routine, Plantation Vicissitudes, Slave Labor, Negro Qualities, ‘Poor Whites,’ Migration, Frontier Society, so that each assemblage of documents bears a common character.

It is due perhaps to a too sedulous avoidance of the political aspect of slavery that the statute-book has been drawn on so sparingly to produce this composite picture. And it is, of course, true that the politics of slavery is a domain quite by itself. The earliest colonial statutes against slave importations,— most, if not all, of them frustrated by the Crown, — the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, the Constitution’s delimitation of the life of the foreign slave trade, the Missouri Compromise, the Kansas-Nebraska Bill, the Fugitive Slave Law, the Emancipation Proclamation, and the Thirteenth Amendment, — all these are only some of the greater landmarks, extinct volcanoes as it were, in the seismic tract of national politics. They would have been quite out of place in a treatise like this.

But there is another kind of fundamental legal monument at whose absence among so much that is pertinent we must somewhat wonder. An instance in point is the assimilation of the offspring of mixed unions to the servile status of the mother. Almost the entire institution of slavery was profoundly affected by this single juridical custom. It reflected an attitude of the white toward the subject race that is certainly deserving of notice. Moreover the varying legal status of the colored race as regards rights both personal and real, such as the slave’s peculium, seems so essential a part of the true inwardness of slavery that its omission is at least remarkable. Nor is the rejoinder quite adequate that the two volumes are designed to portray the plantation rather than slavery, for the economics of the plantation were the economics of slavery, and as Professor Phillips rightly contends at the outset, industrial history is concerned ‘in the main with men and manners. It is a phase of social history’; and social history has no mirror comparable to the statute-book.

Regrettable as is the omission of statute and adjudication, their absence carries a very real compensation. The portraiture of the economic life of the South by means of less technical documents gains thereby in immediate intelligibility. An enactment or a leading legal decision may be of most profound social significance, but it commonly speaks an alien tongue. It requires too often an interpreter, while the intimacy of everyday intercourse speaks for itself. Matter of fact arrests a thousand auditors where the abstractions of the forum engage but few. The integration of the various cycles of illustrative material moreover is skillfully effected by Professor Phillips’s prefatory essay. This introduction serves admirably both to outline the general character of the plantation system, and to knit into a congruous fabric the diverse strands of evidence contained in the various sections of the two volumes. It is as though a scholarly lecturer first traversed with an intelligent audience the essential historical movements of a period, before throwing upon the screen the concrete pictures to exemplify the living reality.

‘When Virginia was founded, the word plantation had the meaning of the modern word colony. The Jamestown settlement was the plantation of the London Company in the sense that the Company had founded it and exercised jurisdiction over it.’ But before long ‘plantation’ came to signify, not the planting of colonists, but the planting of staples. Essential to the plantation, as Professor Phillips insists, was a labor force of considerable size, generally in bondage, subdivided into groups working each under supervision, and producing a commodity intended, not for consumption at home, but for sale in the market.

The farm was differentiated from the plantation not so much by the farm’s smaller area as by its self-directing labor, and by its affording the cultivator his immediate subsistence. The duel between the farm and the plantation epitomizes the greater part of the antebellum industrial history of the South. The struggle moreover was an oftrenewed fight, and not a single pitched battle. In the same territory, as, for example, in seaboard Virginia, the early supremacy of the plantation yielded later, when the soil’s pristine fertility had been exhausted, to the farm. And in general, while the superior efficiency of the plantation for the raising of staples vanquished the farm system in the short run, Providence for once fought against the ‘big battalions ’ and was bent on according the final victory to the smaller contestant.

Not the least merit of Professor Phillips’s illuminating introduction is his demonstration that a purely chronological method will not suffice for the history of the plantation régime. The same cycle of alternate triumphs and reverses as between the two industrial claimants for the soil of the South was rehearsed in different regions at very different periods. The pell-mell rush into the uplands of the interior when Whitney’s gin had made the shortstaple cotton commercially profitable, carried the struggle ever onward to the Mississippi. Frontiering was only the onward lip of the migratory wave which in the Southwest coveted the exploitation of virgin soil by the labor of the slave-gang. The essential service of these two volumes is the picture they afford of the vie intime of the plantation, and the emphasis they throw on the frontiersman as the advance guard of the slave planter.

What then was the typical character of the slave plantation of the South? Was it essentially a mild patriarchal form of industrial organization, in which the master safeguarded the real interests of his slave dependents, themselves incapable of self-government or self-support? Or was it in the main a tyrannous exploitation of the African for the profit of his owner?

The questions just suggested deserve an answer less than they deserve analysis and criticism. They are keyed up to a note of hectic moral expectancy, and betray an anticipation of sweeping approval or condemnation which the judicial, many-sided study of history must invariably disappoint. The slave plantation bore a character impressed upon it by the industrial conditions of its day and age. As these varied, the plantation varied; and while the character of the individual owner often notably shaped for his lifetime the general tone and character of his own estate, the manifold influences of the economic environment controlled in the long run.

‘The plantation system was evolved to answer the specific need of meeting the world’s demand for certain staple crops in the absence of a supply of free labor.’ The primary impulse was undeniably commercial, in a day when humanitarian or social considerations sat lightly upon the master class. The lot of the white redemptioner upon the early tobacco plantation was, to say the least, not enviable; while the African, removed but a span from savagery, lacked all claim to any customary rights which sheltered the Englishborn subject from abject degradation. And yet there were mitigations, if not compensations, to the slave, in the situation; in the rude plenty that unbounded land of unimpaired fertility at first afforded; in the self-interest of the far-sighted planter, alive to the fact that his continued profit depended on the physical well-being of his bondsmen; and in the Englishman’s ingrained habit of feeling no inconsiderable measure of personal responsibility for the essential comfort of man or beast subject to his domination.

This preliminary characterization of the plantation system requires almost indefinite qualification and amendment. ‘The plantation system,’ Professor Phillips tells us, ‘had independent origins in the Spanish West Indies and in English Virginia.’ The West Indian type radiated outward from Charleston, South Carolina. Thither the Barbadian English had migrated in 1670. By 1694 they had begun the cultivation of rice by slave labor. It is difficult to escape the conviction that the Virginia type of plantation was immensely more humane than the Carolina type. In part this was due to the larger size of the slave-gangs worked on the Carolina rice-swamps. Some appreciable taint of Spanish inhumanity, it may be conjectured, had infected the morale of the system. Moreover the frequent absenteeism of the Carolina plantation owner, caused by the miasmic character of the region, completed the opportunity for the more than fitful emergence of oppression on the part of overseer and driver.

Perhaps no contrast is more marked in the documents cited by Professor Phillips than the exacting solicitude shown by the more humane plantation owners for their slaves as over against the uniform incompetence of the hired overseers, who seem as a class to have been both incapable and unfeeling. The instructions issued by the owners to their agents and managers often expressly prohibit cruel or excessive punishment; allow a direct appeal by the slave from the overseer to the master; guard against excessive tasking; provide for proper medical attendance and nursing; authorize kitchen gardens and minor opportunities for the slaves to earn money; and establish regular religious instruction. On the other hand, Olmsted is quoted as to the character of the overseer: —

’I asked why he did not employ an overseer.’

‘Because I do not think it right to trust to such men as we have to use, if we use any, for overseers.’

‘ Is the general character of overseers bad ? ’

‘They are the curse of the country, sir; the worst men in the community.’ ²

And yet the unfortunate overseer must not be condemned without due allowance. He had to contend against the mean status among his own race that his employment too frequently involved. He had to cope with fire and flood; with drought and crop failure; with the frequent ravages of fatal epidemics, especially cholera, among his hands. More vexatious than all else, and more trying to nerves and temper, was the task of exacting unwilling labor from the blacks. Their incorrigible tendency to eye-service, to laziness, lying, petty thieving, quarrelsomeness, and malingering, would have taxed the patience of far better men than overseers for the most part were. Besides, a salary of four to five hundred dollars a year was not likely to command the combined virtues of a Moses and a Numa. And so we catch in the records the constantly recurring complaint of the overseer concerning his tantalizing and vexatious lot. Thus in 1771 one of these taskmasters from the Custis estate writes to Washington about a runaway: '. . .he went away for no provocation in the world bot So lazey he will not worke and a greater Roge is not to be foun.' Another instance may be found in the letter to Miss Telfair when the overseer of her Georgia plantation writes despairingly in 1836:‘ . . . so soon as I am absent from either [gang] they are subject to quarrel and fight, or to idle time, or beat or abuse the mules, and when called to account, each Negro present . . .will deny all about the same.’

Perhaps the least inadequate answer to the question broached above as to the essential character of the plantation is to say that the moral level of its community life depended on the presence or absence of certain welldefined factors. If the plantation owner felt his responsibility, — and very generally, I think, this was the case, — if he avoided absenteeism, and made his authority felt by his personal presence; if the social ties of an old established neighborhood had created its crust of beneficent custom; if the fieldhands on the plantation were neither too few nor too numerous; if the character of the work, such as the raising of cotton or tobacco, excluded insanitary conditions of work and life (such as frequently prevailed on the rice and sugar plantation); if neither financial misfortune, nor the death of the owner, nor the partition of his property, led to the dispersal of his slaves; and, above all, if the absence of greed for quick and exorbitant profits shut out frequent accessions to the slave hands and prevented the reduction of the whole gang to a mere profit-getting machine, as on the frontier, — the plantation régime may be regarded in relation to its time as an efficient and fairly merciful industrial system, which sheltered a backward people, and ‘ incidentally trained a savage race to a certain degree of fitness for life in the AngloSaxon community.’

On the other hand, every qualification which limits the conditional verdict just rendered, denotes a door of potential abuse and perversion. The unfeeling, the immoral, the mercurial, and the rapacious master and overseer — and such there were — distorted the homely virtues of the régime. Its moral level was perhaps at its highest when its heyday of economic profitableness was past, or at least when the quest of immediate profit was tempered by higher and more humane considerations.

At best, the régime was doomed to be but temporary, for its existence came to depend on unexhausted, virgin soil, and the geographical confines of plantationdom had been all but reached by 1860. Given some system of soil-renewal, sugar and cotton might have been raised for some years longer by slave labor, for in both cases large gangs could be worked at routine tasks every month in the year. Tobacco culture required labor for but a portion of the twelvemonth, and the slave’s cost in days of comparative idleness became prohibitive economically. The growing of cereals required hired help for only a fraction of the year, and was clearly beyond the competitive capabilities of the slave plantation. Moreover the self-directing labor of the factory system confirmed the monopoly of manufactures to free soil.

The seamy side of slavery was obvious and dramatic; its beneficent aspect was largely hidden and silent. The slave trade and the slave mart focused the cruelty of slavery, although the renting out of slaves to alien taskmasters, and the legal disabilities imposed upon ‘ free persons of color,’ were almost equally poignant in their pathos. The horrors of blood and torture in which the infrequent slave conspiracies were extinguished were unspeakable, although, it must be confessed, the holocaust seems the product of race antagonism with its implacable cruelty rather than of slavery proper. The attitude of the master to his ’people,’as he termed his slaves, was in general one of patriarchal control where their well-being was a constant care conscientiously borne.

But despite the detestation which the South showed for inhumanity toward the Negro, the two volumes illustrate to the life the inevitable way in which slavery was bound to occasion the deepest misery to the best of the subject race. For example, an anonymous pamphlet of about 1808, entitled A Tour in Virginia, relates how ‘two blanched and meagre-looking wretches were lolling in their one-horse chair, protected from the excessive heat of the noonday sun by a huge umbrella, and driving before them four beings of the African race, fastened to each other by iron chains fixed round the neck and arms, and attended by a black woman, a reliance on whose conjugal or sisterly affection prevented the application of hand-cuffs or neck-collars’; while ’the people on the road loaded the inhuman drivers with curses and execrations.’

A counterpart to the foregoing is the petition of a free Negress, Lucinda, who refused to remove from Richmond, Virginia, to Tennessee, ‘as in Richmond she had a husband . . . from whom the benefits and privileges to be derived from freedom, dear and flattering as they are, could not induce her to be separated.' She was threatened with the forfeiture of her freedom because, against the law, she had remained over a year after her emancipation in Virginia, and feared compulsory sale and separation from her husband. ’To guard against such a heart-rending circumstance, she would prefer, and hereby declares her consent, to become a slave to the owner of her husband.’

The intimate and vital flashes which these two volumes frequently turn upon slavery and its economic shell, the plantation, are paralleled by the judiciously chosen vignettes of frontier life in the South. To be sure, it savors something of special pleading in validation of the title Plantation and Frontier, to claim that the ‘full type of the frontier’ was not found north of Mason and Dixon’s line, ‘in that the United States Army policed the Indians, and the popular government was administered directly under the Federal authority.’ The northwestern frontiersman had begun to penetrate the wilderness before the United States Army existed; and if local government in that vast region was ‘administered directly under the Federal authority,’ we have been sadly misled by many competent historians. The various types of migration in the South, however, are well exemplified in the round hundred pages devoted to the topic. The early redemptioner whose service had expired on the seaboard plantation, the small cultivator of tobacco in the same region who had been worsted by the competition of the large planter, the artisan who found the black laboring population of riparian Virginia little to his liking, were all lured to the ‘back country.’ By 1740 the tongue of migration had extended to within fifty miles of the Blue Ridge Mountains. After 1798 a second impetus was given the westward movement by the eager quest for cotton lands, and the upland regions of the South were rapidly invaded. The earlier pioneers, often displaced by the oncoming of the planter, sold their lands, and pushed deeper into the wilderness.

In this motley throng of migrants were to be found various well-defined types. At the one extreme there was the restless adventurer like Gideon Lincecum, who in 1818 ‘had been reared to a belief and faith in the pleasure of frequent change of country’; who looked upon the long journey to Alabama of ‘about five hundred miles, all wilderness, with ‘much pleasure,’ and who felt ‘as if I was on a big camp hunt.' The sting of pioneering was in the blood, and like others of the breed ‘he hoped to realize a profit from it, as soon as people should move into the country.’

At the other end of the series was to be found the gentleman-farmer type, like Colonel Leonard Covington, whose tobacco lands were unprofitable, and who in 1808 looked cautiously toward betaking himself with his family and slaves to Mississippi, there to retrieve his fortunes. He writes to his brother for various particulars, and adds, ‘I have a thousand more questions in my head, but, pushed for time just now, must hope you will say everything that I could ask, not forgetting politicks, the state of religion, if there be much amongst you. As to dealings generally, are the folks pretty punctual, or is there much use for lawyers?’

It is possible that the cautious inquiry about ‘the state of religion, if there be much amongst you ’ may have been elicited by the news of the desperado, the ‘ bad man,’ and the affrays in which every frontier is prolific; characters like Colonel Bishop, and that ’pinck of purity and truth, George W. Wacaser,’ who on election day ‘attacked two gentlemen riding in a carriage and with the butts of their muskets, in a most shocking manner, bruised and mangled their heads and bodies.’

If the imagination be allowed to range over the facts disclosed by the history of slavery in the new world, the dramatic magnitude of the great episode becomes almost oppressive. Weston, in the Progress of Slavery (1857), called attention to the fact that instead of America’s being settled by the European races, ‘the truth really is, that America, including its islands, has been settled chiefly from Africa, and by Negroes’; and that prior ‘to the commencement of the present century, the number of Negroes brought hither had probably exceeded the whole number of Europeans of all nationalities, who had emigrated hither, twenty-fold, or even more.’ The Encyclopœdia Americana (1851) computed the Negroes taken for transportation to the new world during the last three centuries at ‘above forty millions, of whom fifteen or twenty per cent die on the passage.’

This age-long panorama of millions of Africans, wrenched from their original habitat and forced by the rigorous tutelage of slavery to subdue an untamed continent, has a gloomy grandeur to it which at once enforces the fatefulness of human history and the cruel masterfulness of the dominant race.

At the bar of history, justice for this agelong agony of unconjectured tears can hardly be required at the hands of less than the whole Caucasian family. So far as amends are concerned, it matters now comparatively little that the mere legal bond of servitude has been destroyed. It boots not that our own forbears may have escaped the immediate contact with the slave, or even that our own kindred vicariously for us may have paid by their blood for some infinitesimal part of a cosmic sin. Behind it all there stands an atavic transgression which the individual can never expiate; a racial iniquity beyond private atonement; a corporate cruelty whose blood is upon us and our children. The recognition of the abject status of a wronged race must furnish at the same time the indispensable basis for the white man’s responsibility for the Negro, and the base of departure for the steep and arduous ascent which the African himself must make.