by Taylor, Alan
Overseers
The wealthier planters sought to increase their profits by enhancing the productivity of their land and labor. Careful record keepers and close supervisors, these agricultural reformers regarded time as money. In return for better food and clothing for the slaves, the improvers demanded faster labor over longer hours. They needed more work to realize their ambitious plans to dig ditches and drain swamps, erect new fences, shops, barns, and houses, and clear new fields to raise fodder for more cattle (in part to provide the manure needed to enrich the soil). Serving six days a week, with Sunday for rest, the slaves labored from dawn to dusk, with two brief breaks for meals. And they toiled in all weather conditions, save for a few of the coldest days in winter. Many masters lengthened the workday beyond dusk by requiring slaves to husk and shell maize or to sort and tie harvested tobacco deep into the night. The new work regime also stretched through the winter, previously a relatively slack time for slaves. The improvers kept their slaves busy and tired, from a conviction that idle hands made more trouble. The leading improver, Colonel John Taylor, advised selling trouble-makers “to some distant place” as “an object of terror” to the rest. He concluded, “Slaves are docile, useful and happy, if they are well managed.”16
To enforce the more stringent work discipline, planters hired common white men to serve as overseers on the plantations. In addition to an annual salary of $200 to $300, the overseer received a share of the harvested crop: at least a tenth and up to a fourth. Obliged to work long hours, closely supervising often restive slaves, the overseer had to be strong, resolute, and handy with a club and cowhide whip.17
An Overseer Doing His Duty, Sketched from Life near Fredericksburg, 1798. In this watercolor, Benjamin Henry Latrobe wryly contrasts the hard-working enslaved women supervised by a cigar-smoking overseer on a stump. (Courtesy of the Maryland Historical Society).
A leading improver, John Hartwell Cocke, owned Bremo, a 3,100-acre plantation in Fluvanna County (in the Piedmont). Although Cocke professed antislavery principles, he ran a very strict plantation, codifying his management principles in his “Standing Rules for the Government of Slaves on a Virginia Plantation.” Cocke instructed his overseers: “It is the duty of a faithful, active & industrious agent to be the first on the ground in the morning & the last to leave it at night. . . . You are bound not only to give orders, but personally to see that they are well & faithfully executed.” Cocke concluded, “Set the first example of strict attention to your duties & you may with the more justice & propriety inflict punishment upon others for the neglect of theirs.”18
Cocke allowed extra meat and a few hours of free time on Saturday night “to such as had been the most faithful during the week.” If deemed unworthy however, slaves lost their meat ration for the week and had to labor longer on Saturday night. Cocke also insisted that his overseers flog slaves who defied or slacked: “If you punish only according to justice & reason with uniformity, you can never be too severe & will be the more respected for it.”19
Improving planters demanded a daunting consistency, restraint, rationality, and attention to detail. Cocke instructed his overseers, “Arrangement & regularity form the great secret of doing things well. . . . Have everything done according to a fixed rule.” Inevitably, Cocke felt bitterly disappointed: “Overseers are too worthless generally & too prone to become good for nothing.” Cocke fantasized about establishing an observatory “on one of my River hills from whence every body knew I could see every foot of my low grounds by turning my head, [then] the Corn & Tobacco wou’d grow a great [deal] better and thousands [of] things wou’d go on much better than they do now.” He meant to employ a speaking trumpet to issue orders to all his workers, slave and free, from his hilltop observatory. Only a slave had to work harder to please Cocke than did an overseer.20
An overseer often felt caught between a demanding and meddling master and the resisting slaves. The master wanted the overseer to produce larger crops and make greater improvements while keeping the slaves reasonably content. Jefferson noted, “My first wish is that labourers may be well treated,” but his second was that they work long and hard hours: “The man who can effect both objects is rarely to be found.” Early and often, genteel planters derided their overseers as prone to steal, lounge, sleep with the slave girls, and whip too much. In a typical comment, Joseph C. Cabell described his overseer as “conceited & inclined to extort wages higher than he deserves. He is quite ignorant of farming.”21
After a long absence, John Randolph returned to his plantation to find “everything in bad order.” Noting “two negro girls, each with a mulatto child in her arms,” Randolph concluded that the overseer, Mr. Pentecost, was the father. Pointing out the new mothers to some neighbors, Randolph demanded, “Look at these girls; they are my crop hands. See how their heads are combed; how oily their hair. Do they look like they had stood blasts of Winter or Summer’s sun? No, Sirs; they have been in his harem.” Randolph expected his field hands to show the wear and tear of the weather. After informing Pentecost’s wife “of the infidelity of her husband,” Randolph fired the straying overseer.22
Slaves balked at the speedup demanded by masters and overseers. The enslaved envied the leisure of white gentlemen, who so conspicuously ate, drank, and lounged to flaunt their status. No slave could miss the equation of freedom with leisure in Virginia, so they sought to be as free as they could by working as little as possible. An immigrant from England who became a Virginia planter, Richard Parkinson, denounced his slaves: “They are so lazy by nature, that they would do little or nothing, but take pleasure in fine weather, cook victuals, and play on music and dance all winter, if they had no master. I think them as unfit to conduct themselves as a child—thoughtless in the extreme and therefore requiring a severe master.” When pushed too hard, slaves slowed down even further, although the overseer had the power of the whip, the slaves had the advantage of numbers and persistence, for overseers came and went. In 1803 a frustrated overseer complained that the slaves “Get much more Dissatisfied Every year & troublesome, for they say they ought all to be at there liberty & they think that I am the Cause that they are not.” He concluded that the slaves “gives me all the trouble that they can which keeps me one half of my time in hot blood.”23
Nonetheless, masters preferred slaves for plantation work because common whites took their republican equality so seriously. Despite belittling blacks as lazy, Parkinson deemed them “the best servants in America, since the establishment of independency” because “liberty and equality” had rendered white men “very saucy,” relatively expensive, and often drunk. The difference lay in the power to whip work out of the enslaved. Parkinson explained, “The slave is your own, like your horse, and you may whip him as you please; but you have no command over a white man.”24
Punishment
Masters and overseers inflicted pain to discipline and punish the enslaved. Charles Ball recalled the overseers’ armament as “a twisted cow-hide, sometimes a kind of horse-whip, and very often a simple hickory switch or gad, cut in the adjoining woods.” For an especially serious offence, such as stealing a pig, the overseer had the culprit stripped, tied by the hands, and suspended from a beam to receive at least a dozen bloodying blows to the bare back. The other slaves had to demonstrate their submission by helping to subdue, hoist, and whip the victim. Ball felt lucky to escape his first major flogging until age fifteen, for he described the “back of the unhappy Maryland slave” as commonly “seamed with scars from his neck to his hips.”25
Most masters sought to avoid maiming or killing a valuable slave, but renters showed less restraint. In 1811, Thomas Chrystie of Hanover County hired out his slave named Bob to Philip Croxton. On May 18, Bob staggered back to Chrystie, who reported, “He has been beaten about the Head, Arms, & Hands with Sticks or billets of Wood so as to render his arms entirely useless for the present. In addition he has been whipt with a keen Cow Hide so as to leave upwards of one Hundred cuts on his back
& Belly, which has brought on Fever & much Inflamation.” Seeking “damages for the improper beating,” Chrystie threatened Croxton with a lawsuit. As the renter of Bob’s labor, Croxton could punish only so long as he did not cripple the slave, ruining his value.26
Masters or overseers handled most crime and punishment on their plantations without involving the legal authorities. The county court came into play when a culprit seemed too hardened to “plantation justice” or had committed too serious a crime for the neighborhood to ignore. Striking or murdering (or sexually assaulting) a white person demanded a trial. In these trials, the justices dispensed with a jury, but they appointed an attorney to defend the slave, and the law required unanimity by at least five judges to convict. The court could order a whipping, generally of thirty-nine stripes, supplemented by branding a hand. If subsequently convicted of another felony, the branded slave faced almost certain execution. When the court did sentence a slave to death, the state compensated the owner with the appraised value of his dead property.27
Local public opinion often proved surprisingly divided over the punishment of convicted slaves. Some rigid masters favored frequent executions as essential to cowing the slaves. But many other whites believed that an apparent justice and occasional clemency would best defend slavery by reconciling slaves to their fate. If previously deemed diligent, tractable, and honest, the accused could expect more sympathy. Public opinion also urged some mercy when the white victim had an especially vicious reputation for feeding his slaves too little or whipping them too much. And many white folk had religious scruples against executing blacks for theft: a crime where whites instead reaped only fines or imprisonment. Ultimately, the prevailing mood in a county carried great weight. When masters felt relatively secure, they petitioned the governor to reduce the sentence (usually to sale and transportation beyond the state), but when they felt threatened by a rumored slave revolt, most of the white folk wanted executions.28
Despite their bloodthirsty reputation as “the internal enemy,” the enslaved bore their blows with remarkable restraint, rarely killing their tormentors. Between 1785 and 1831, the Virginia county courts convicted only 148 slaves of killing a white person: about three per year in a state with a white population in excess of 500,000. Far more often, slaves faced trial for arson or theft.29
Sometimes slaves did kill an overseer guilty of excessive brutality. In 1809, Miles King of Mathews County engaged John Mathews as an overseer. Apparently a vicious reputation preceded Mathews, for the pious King later discovered that the slaves had agreed “to kill him the moment they understood I had engaged him—Amen.” On May 31, “in the Gum Swamp field in the noon of the day,” Frank, Jack, James, and Edmund seized Mathews and crushed his skull and knocked out his teeth with blows from their iron hoes. They hid the corpse in a ditch but returned at night to retrieve “his mangled Body & carried it thro’ the oat patch to a Canoe in the Creek where they tyed a Bushel Basket to his ankles with his feet in it & Loaded it with . . . some Rock Stones & carried him (aided by my Foreman Joe & ploughman Peter) into East river in the deepest water off Cully’s point & there sunk him as they vainly thought forever!”30
On the night of June 9, the corpse bobbed to the surface and became entangled in the oar of a rowing white man, who drew the remains ashore. Alerted to the grim discovery, King had his “men and women, arrested and their arms tied fast and marched them to the spot where the body lay where they displayed Surprize & Horror! at again beholding the victim of their Cruel & Savage Rage.” King made them all touch the body, from a folk belief that it would bleed anew when touched by a murderer: “’tis not possible to describe the fear manifested & one of them, old Billy, told me if I would forbear to make him feel it, he would tell the whole truth & out it came for all the field Negroes being present at the murder & Several corroborated Billy’s tale in evidence at the Bar.” King turned over six slaves for confinement and trial by the Mathews County Court, which sentenced the four killers to hang and the two accessories (Joe and Peter) to receive brands on the hand and thirty-nine lashes each. The heads of the executed were “stuck upon a Pole at the Court house as a warning to others.”31
King predicted that the exemplary punishment would “most likely deter all the Negroes from a commission of the like crime for some years to come.” But the murder had demonstrated careful planning and cast an ominous light on the nocturnal movement of slaves intimately familiar with the local lands and waters in a county along Chesapeake Bay, where the British warships had once dominated and might return to in a future war.32
Caves
Masters sought to feed their slaves the minimum necessary to keep them healthy and working. George Washington explained, “It is not my wish or desire that my Negros should have an ounce of meal more, nor less, than is sufficient to feed them plentifully.” But no planter would consider it “plentiful” to live on the diet of his slaves. Charles Ball saw widespread hunger in the faces of his fellow slaves in Virginia: “A half-starved negro . . . his skin becomes dry, and appears to be sprinkled over with whitish husks, or scales; the glossiness of his face vanishes, his hair loses its colour, [and] becomes dry.”33
The customary weekly ration for an adult slave was a peck of corn and a pound of salt meat (usually pork) or fish. The meat component was, at best, a fourth of what most white men consumed in Virginia. The fish tended to be herrings, and the meat usually came from parts disdained by whites: heads and feet. Rarely did masters provide any drink other than water. This monotonous diet ranked high in starch and painfully low in the protein needed by hard-working people. Only in the flush times of harvest did slaves get a little more meat and some alcohol to inspire extra exertions. Many masters encouraged slaves to supplement their diet by keeping poultry and raising vegetables, potatoes, and melons; but the slaves could tend these only at night and on Sundays. During their limited spare time, slaves also fished and hunted for small game, especially raccoons and possum.34
The slaves watched with envy as their masters consumed heaping helpings of eggs, chicken, pork, and beef, washed down with alcohol, tea, and coffee. No people more delighted in eating and drinking than Virginians. Watching with envy, the enslaved longed for more food, especially the prime cuts of meat, including ham and bacon. At night they roamed in search of orchards to plunder and a pig or sheep to kill. William Grimes recalled, “We used to steal meat whenever we could get a chance; and such was my craving for it, that if the punishment had been death, I could not have resisted the temptation.” It required great ingenuity to pull off a surreptitious kill and hide the carcass from prying patrollers and overseers. “Is not cunning always the natural consequence of tyranny?” asked Francis Fedric, a former slave. As a young man in Maryland, Josiah Henson belonged to a planter named Riley, who stinted his slaves of food. Henson recalled “driving a pig or a sheep a mile or two into the woods to slaughter for the good of those whom Riley was starving. I felt good, moral, heroic.” The clever young man who killed, hid, and shared a hog became the hero of his slave quarters.35
Slaves justified their thefts with a labor theory of value: they took a small part of what they had earned by work extorted by lazy masters. Richard Parkinson reported, “As I have travelled on the road, I have made it my business to converse with them, and they say, ‘Massa, as we work and raise all, we ought to consume all.’ . . . They say, ‘Massa does not work; therefore he has not [an] equal right; overseer does not work; he has no right to eat as we do.’” Or they reasoned, in Austin Steward’s words, that the stolen animals “belongs to massa, and so do we, and [so] we only use one part of his property to benefit another.”36
By day, the slaves suffered from the master’s power, but at night they became almost free. After dark, the master and overseer retreated to their families and homes. While the master slept, the slaves, particularly boys and young men, could roam and play. Parkinson noted, “Though you have them [as] slaves all the day, they are not so in the night. I compare them to ca
ts. . . . All the black men I employed used to be out all night and return in the morning.” They rambled to hunt and fish, attend dances, steal meat, or gather to worship Jesus. Above all, men sought their girlfriends or wives. Old Dick recalled, “A negur never tire when he go to see his sweetheart.” Whites referred to the night as “Nigger day-time,” and one master complained that slaves took “uncurbed liberty at night, [for] night is their day.” George Tucker agreed: “The day was their masters; but the night is their own.” By acting as if free by night, they avoided a full submission to the slavery of their days.37
Slaves found most of their pleasure at night or during the brief Christmas break. Henson recalled his youth in Virginia: “Slavery did its best to make me wretched, but, along with memories of miry cabins, frosted feet, weary toil under the blazing sun, curses and blows, there flock in others, of jolly Christmas times, dancing before old massa’s door for the first drink of egg-nog, extra meat at holiday times, midnight-visits to apple-orchards, broiling stray chickens, and first-rate tricks to dodge work.” At night and during Christmas, slaves felt a measure of hope. William Grimes declared, “If it were not for our hopes, our hearts would break; we poor slaves always cherish hopes of better times.” In a perverse synergy, the release offered by nights, Sundays, and Christmas helped slaves to endure and so helped slavery to persist. A former Maryland slave, Frederick Douglass, noted that holidays served as “safety-valves, to carry off the explosive elements. . . . But for these [interludes], the rigors of bondage would have become too severe for endurance.”38