WHO WAS BETTER OFF?
A COMPARISON OF AMERICAN SLAVES AND ENGLISH
AGRICULTURAL WORKERS, 1750-1875
BY
ERIC V. SNOW
TABLE OF CONTENTS
1. WHY COMPARE
ENGLISH LABORERS AND AMERICAN SLAVES TO BEGIN WITH? . . 10
The
Standard Comparison of Factory Workers with Slaves 10
Why
Do Such a Comparison? 10
What
Exactly Is Compared Out of Each Diverse Group 12
Five
Broad Areas for Comparison Purposes 12
2. A
HISTORICAL PERENNIAL: THE STANDARD OF
LIVING DEBATE 14
Some
Theoretical Problems in Comparing Slaves and Laborers'
Standard of Living 14 ...
Diet
and the Standard of Living for Slaves 17
Fogel
and Engerman's Optimistic Reconstructions of the Slave
Diet 18
The
Slave Diet as Crude, Coarse, and Boring 21
Differing
Diets for Slaves with Different Positions 23
The
Slaves' Role in Providing Themselves with Food on Their
Own 25
Variations
in What Food Different Slaveowners Provided Their
Own
Slaves With 26
The
Diet of English Farmworkers: Regional
Variations 28
The
Southern English Agricultural Workers' Diet Was Poor,
Often Meatless 30
Grains,
Especially Wheat, Dominate the Agricultural Workers'
Diet 32
The
Role of Potatoes in the Laborers' Diet, Despite
Prejudices Against Them 33
Did
Farmworkers Prefer Coarse or Fine Food? 34
The
Monotony of the Farmworkers' Diet in the South of England 36
The
Superior Conditions of the Northern English Farmworkers 37
Meat
as a Near Luxury for Many Farmworkers 39
The
Effects of Enclosure and Allotments on Hodge's Diet 40
Comparing
Food Received by English Paupers, Slaves, and Their
Nation's Army 42
Better
Bread Versus Little Meat? The Slave
Versus Farmworker
Diet 43
Clothing
for Slaves 44
Bad
Clothing Conditions for Slaves 45
Differences
in Clothing Provided for Slaves with Different
Position 46
The
Factory Versus Homespun: The Master's
Decision 48
Slaves
and Shoe Shortages 49
Fogel
and Engerman's Optimistic Take on Slaves' Clothing
Rations 51
Clothing
and English Agricultural Workers 51
The
Low Standards for Farmworkers, Especially in Southern
England 52
Homespun
More Common in America than England by C. 1830 53
Special
Measures Needed to Buy Their Own Clothes 54
Housing
For Slaves: Variations around a Low
Average Standard 55
Cases
of Good Slave Houses 58
Was
Poor White Housing Little Better than the Slaves'? 59
Fogel
and Engerman's Optimistic View of Slave Housing 59
Genovese's
Overly Optimistic Take on Slave Housing 60
The
Moral Hazards of Crowded, One-Room Slave Houses 62
Slave
Housing--Sanitation and Cleanliness 63
English
Farmworkers' Housing--Quality/Size 64
Poor
Housing Leads to Sexual Immorality 66
How
the Artist's Eye Can Be Self-Deceiving When Evaluating
Cottages' Quality 68
How
Rentals and the Poor and Settlement Laws Made for Poor
Quality Housing 69
The
Problem of Cottages Being Distant from Work 70
The
Aristocracy's Paternalism in Providing Housing, and Its
Limits 71
Little
Difference for Slaves and Farmworkers in the Quality of
Their Housing 73
Agricultural
Workers--Sanitation/Cleanliness 74
Slaves--Furniture
and Personal Effects 76
English
Agricultural Workers: Home Furnishings,
Utensils,
etc. 78
Fuel--Sambo's
Supply Versus Hodge's 79
Sambo's
Medical Care 82
The
General Backwardness of Antebellum Medical Care 83
Masters
Sought Ways to Reduce Medical Expenses 84
Masters
and Overseers as Amateur Healers for Slaves 84
Black
Medical Self-Help: Conjurors and
Midwives 86
Medical
Care for English Agricultural Workers 87
Whose
Medical Care Was Better? Hodge's? Or Sambo's? 91
The
Overall Material Standard of Living:
Was Hodge or Sambo
Better Off? 92
Trickle-Down
Economics with a Vengeance: How the
Slaves
Benefited 93
3. THE QUALITY
OF LIFE: SLAVES VERSUS AGRICULTURAL
WORKERS.. 95
The
Quality of Life as Opposed to the (Material) Standard of
Living. 95
Literacy
and Education for African-American Slaves
96
Why
Slaveholders Sought to Keep Slaves Illiterate
98
English
Farmworkers, Literacy and Education 102
A
Brief Sketch of the Development of English Public Education 104
What
Age Did Child Labor Begin and Schooling End? 105
Ignorance
Versus Skewed Knowledge: Different
Models for
Controlling a Subordinate Class 106
Slaves--The
Treatment of Elderly "Aunts" and "Uncles" 109
Altruism
and Self-Interest Did Not Necessarily Conveniently
Coincide to Protect Elderly Slaves'
Lives 110
Did
Slavery Provide More Security Against Starvation than
Laissez-Faire? 110
Odd
Jobs for Elderly Slaves 112
The
Senior Hodge: Cared for, or Fends for
Himself? 113
The
Effects of the New Poor Law on the Elderly, Non-Working
Poor 115
How
the Local Authorities Profited from the Workhouse Test 117
Whose
Elderly Were Better Off? The
Farmworkers' or the
Slaves'? 118
The
Slave Childhood: Full of Fun or Full of
Fear? 119
Pastimes
for Slave Children 120
Plantation
Day Care: How Slave Childhood Was
Different 123
Is All
Work Bad for Children? 124
The
Slave Childhood: Good, Bad, or
Indifferent? 125
Hodge's
Childhood: More Work, But More
Worthwhile? 126
Just
How Common Was Child Labor, Especially in the
Countryside 128
The
Parental Push for Child Labor 130
Day
Care Not a Common Experience 131
Young
Hodge at Play 132
The
Relative Quality of Life for the Children of Slaves and
Laborers 133
Religion--A
Site for Enlightenment, Social Unity, and Social
Conflict 134
Slave
Religion--The Slaveholders' Options on Christianizing
the Slaves 135
The
Earlier Practice of Not Evangelizing the Slaves 137
The
Gospel of Obedience Distorts the Christianity Given to
the
Slaves 137
The
Slaves Add to the Religion Given Them by Their Masters
and
Mistresses 139
No
Surprise: The Slaves' Lack of Religious
Freedom 141
The
Slaves Unbend a Bent Christianity 142
Slave
Preachers: Their Role and Power 144
Did
Slaveholders Achieve Religious and Ideological Hegemony
Over the Slaves? 145
English
Agricultural Workers and Christianity 149
Reasons
for the Established Church's Unpopularity with the
Laborers 149
How
the Local Elite Can Use Charity to Control the Poor 151
The
Laborers’ Turn to Nonconformity and Its Mixed Results 153
Christianity: An Instigator of Laborers' Resistance? 154
Similarities
in Southern White and English Lower Class
Religion 155
Somehow
Seeking Participation in and Control of One's
Destiny: The Consolations of Faith? 156
The
Slave Family: How Well Did It Survive
Slavery? 157
The
Family Bonds of Slaves Made Conditional Upon the
Stability of the Slaveholders 159
The
Routine Destruction of Family Relationships under Slavery 161
Fogel
and Engerman's Mistakenly Low Figures on Marriage
Breakup 164
How
the Slaves' Fears about Family Breakup Could Make For
Continual Anxiety 165
The
Process of Being Bought and Sold as Itself Dehumanizing 166
How
Slavery Undermined the Families of Slaves 166
How
Slavery Weakened the Father's Role 167
Factors
Which Encouraged Slaves to Treat Marriage Bonds
Casually 170
How
Slavery Encouraged a Casual Approach to Family
Relationships 171
The
Ways Slavery Destroyed Family Relationships 173
How
the Master Could Routinely Interfere in Slave Family
Relationships 174
Master-Arranged
Marriages 175
Just
How Common Was Miscegenation? 176
Despite
the Pressures, Slaves Still Maintained Some Form of
Family Life 178
The
Key Issues Involved in Examining the Quality of Farm-
worker Family Life 179
The
"Weber/Gillis" Thesis Summarized:
Was Brutish Family
Life
the Norm? 180
The
Limits to Snell's Rebuttal Against Seeing Lower Class
Family Life as Harsh 182
How
Not Being Independent and Self-Sufficient Could Improve
Family Life 184
The
Limits to Applying the Gillis-Weber Thesis to the
English Case 186
Some
Evidence Bearing on the Quality of Farmworkers' Family
Life 187
Why
the Slave Family was Fundamentally Worse Off than the
Laborer Family 189
Why
the Laborers Had a Higher Overall Quality of Life than
the
Slaves 190
The
Problems of Comparing the Slaves' and Laborers' Quality
of
Religious Experience 190
How
Elderly Slaves Could Have Been Better Off Than the
Elderly Farmworkers 192
How
the Slaves' More Carefree Childhood Was Not Necessarily
a
Better One 192
The
Hazards of Historical Analysis that Uses the Values of
Those in the Past 194
4. THE SEXUAL
DIVISION OF LABOR: A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS 196
The
Sexual Division of Labor:
African-American Slaves 196
Kemble
on a Stricter Sexual Division of Labor's Advantages 197
Jobs
Female Slaves Had 198
Qualifications
about the Generally Weak Sexual Division of
Labor among Slaves 201
Plantation
Day Care Revisited 202
The
Sexual Division of Labor: English
Agricultural Workers 203
Women's
Work in Arable Areas at Harvest Time Increased
Later in the Century 204
The
Female Dominance of Dairy Work Declines 205
How
the Separate Spheres' View on Sex Roles Influenced the
1867-68 Report 206
Why
Did Laboring Women Increasingly Fall Out of the Field
Labor Force? 207
Allotments
Partially Restore the Family Economy 209
Quality
of Life Issues and the Sexual Division of Labor 209
The
Division of Labor: Blessing or Curse? 211
Who
Was Better Off Depends on the Values One Has 213
5. CONTROLLING
SUBORDINATE CLASSES--HOW IT WAS DONE 213
The
Central Reality of Work and the Elite's Needs for
Controlling Its Workers 213
Dawn
to Dusk--Work Hours for Slaves 215
Using
Force to Get Slaves into the Fields in the Morning 215
Finishing
Work for the Day--Some Variations 217
Hours
of Work--Agricultural Workers 218
Were
Workdays Shorter for the Farmworkers than the Slaves? 219
The
Length of the Workweek and Days off--Slaves 221
Slaves
Normally Did Not Work on Sundays 221
Holidays
the Slaves Did Not Work On 223
Unplanned
Days Off Due to Weather or the State of Crops 224
The
Days of Work for Agricultural Workers 225
Those
Laborers Who Had to Work Sundays, and Those Who Did Not 226
Seasonal
and Other Changes in the Workweek, and Their Effects
on
Unemployment 228
How
"Voluntarily" Did Slaves Work?
The Necessity of Coercion
and
Supervision 230
Why
the Whip Had to Be Used to Impose Work Discipline on the
Slaves 231
How
Commonly Were the Slaves Whipped? The Time
on the Cross
Controversy 233
The
Deterrence Value of Occasional Killings 235
The
Danger of Corporal Punishment Backfiring, Requiring
"Massive Retaliation" 236
How
Even Good Masters Could Suddenly Kill a Slave in the
Heat of Passion 237
Miscellaneous
Punishments that Masters Inflicted on Slaves 238
Examples
of Corporal Punishment Backfiring 239
Did
Slaveowners Successfully Implant a Protestant Work Ethic
in
the Slaves? 240
The
Slaves' Sense of Work Discipline Like that of Other
Pre-Industrial
People 242
Genovese's
Paternalism: How Successful Were
Planters in
Imposing Hegemony? 244
Scott
Versus Hegemony 244
Were
the Slaveholders Really Believers in Paternalism?: The
Implications of Jacksonian Democracy
and Commercial
Capitalism in the American South 247
Counter-Attacks
Against Portraying Slaveholders as Bourgeois
Individualists 249
Ignorance
as a Control Device Revisited 252
How
Masters Would Manipulate the Slaves' Family Ties in Order
to
Control Them 253
Positive
Incentives Only a Supplementary Method for
Controlling the Bondsmen 255
The
Brutal Overseer as a Historical Reality 258
The
Task Versus Gang Systems: Different
Approaches to Work
Discipline 260
The
Infrapolitics of Task (Quota) Setting 261
The
Gang System's Advantages 262
The
Patrol/Pass System 264
The
Slaveowners Who Liberally Granted Passes or Dispensed with
Them
Altogether 266
How
the Divisions Among White Slaveholders Benefited the
Enslaved 267
How
Mistresses and other Family Members Often Restrained Ill-
Treatment 268
The
Central Reality of Violence as the Main Tool to Control
the
Slaves 269
The
High Levels of Violence Between the Slaves and Masters
Compared to England 271
Both
Sides committed Far Less Violence During the Swing Riots
in
England 272
The
Lower Goals and Greater Divisions among Local Elites in
the
English Case 273
The
Routine Police State Measures in the South 275
Coercion,
Not Incentives or Ideology, as the Basic Means of
Enforcing Slavery 276
Basic
Differences Between the American and English Elites'
Methods of Control 276
The
Freedom of Action Local Government Officials Had in
England 277
The
Basic Strategy to Better Control the Farmworkers 278
Enclosure
as a Method of Social Control and "Class Robbery" 279
Enclosure: Direct Access to the Means of Production and
Some Food Both Lost 280
Open
and Close Parishes: One Dumps Laborers
onto the Other 282
The
Decline of Service 284
Why
Service Declined 285
How
Poor Relief Itself Promoted Population Growth 287
Assorted
Methods that Deterred Applicants for Relief 288
Why
"Make-Work" Jobs Failed to Deter Applicants and
Undermined Work Discipline 289
The
New Poor Law: Deterring Applicants for
Relief by
Using the Workhouse Test 290
Falling
Productivity: One More Consequence of
the Old Poor
Law 292
The
Workhouse Test as a Tool for Increasing Labor
Productivity 293
The
Workhouse Test Was a Tool for Lowering Wages Also 294
Allotments
Help Reduce Increases in Rates Caused by Enclosure 296
Why
the Rural Elite Still Sometimes Opposed Allotments 297
Miscellaneous
Ways Allotments Were Used to Benefit the Rural
Elite 298
Another
Positive Mode of Creating Work Discipline:
Piecework 300
The
Legal System and Its Influence on the Laborers 303
The
Justice of the Peace/County Court System Necessarily
Expressed Class Bias 303
The
Biases of the Courts Against the Laborers Should Not Be
Exaggerated 304
Ignorance
of the Law as a Control Device 305
Examples
of How the Contents of the Law Could be Against the
Laborers 306
The
Important Differences Between Controlling the Laborers
and
Slaves at Work 307
Ideological
Hegemony, Paternalism, Class Consciousness, and
Farmworkers 309
Did
Some in the Elite Begin to Repudiate Paternalistic,
Communal Values? 309
How
the Rural Elite Tried to Have Paternalism and Capitalism
Simultaneously 310
Paternalism
Vs. Capitalism: The Trade-Offs between
Freedom
and
Security 311
How
the Waning of Paternalism Made the Laborers' Class
Consciousness Possible 313
The
Power of Gifts to Control, and When They Do Not 313
The
Failure of Paternalism as an Ideological Control Device
from
C. 1795 314
The
Laborers' Growing Class Consciousness, C. 1834 to 1850 315
When
the Laborers as a Class in Itself Began to Act for
Itself 317
A
Comparison of Respective Elite Control Strategies: Slave-
owners and Squires 318
How
Much Success Did These Two Elites Have at Hegemony? 322
6. ON
RESISTANCE BY A SUBORDINATE CLASS 325
The
Infrapolitics of Daily Life 325
Analytical
Problems with "Day-to-Day Resistance"
(Infrapolitics) 325
The
Continuum of Resistance from Infrapolitics to Organized
Insurrection 326
The
Need for a Subordinate Class to Wear a Mask to Conceal
Their Knowledge 328
Early
Training in Mask Wearing 329
The
Costs of Being Open and the Mask Falling Off 330
The
Subordinate Class's Compulsions to Lie 330
Why
the Rituals of Deference Still Had Meaning 332
Elkins's
"Sambo" Hypothesis and Its Problems 333
An
Act of Routine Resistance: Stealing 338
Various
Motives for Theft 338
The
Intrinsic Costs of Double-Standards in Morality 339
Evading
Work by Claiming Sickness 341
Work: Slowdowns and Carelessness 342
The
Strategy of Playing the White Folks Off Against Each
Other 343
Manipulating
White Authority for the Slaves' Own Purposes 343
How
Pleadings and Petitions Could Restrain Masters and
Mistresses 343
The
General Problem of Slaves Running Away 344
Temporary
and Local Flight 346
"Negotiating"
a Return 347
How
Runaways Could Resist Capture 348
Maroons: Settlements of Escaped Slaves 349
The
Most Successful Runaways 350
"Strikes"
Conducted by Groups of Slaves Running Away 352
Small
Scale Open Confrontations and Violence 353
"Nats"
or "Sambos"?--Selective Perception by the Master Class 355
The
Rarity of Slave Revolts in the United States Compared
to
Elsewhere 356
The
Factors Militating Against Slave Revolts in the United
States 357
Many
Slaves Knew How Much the Deck Was Stacked Against
Successful Revolt 359
Why
then, If Revolts Were So Rare, Were the Whites So
Paranoid? 360
Resistance
to Slavery in the United States Is Dominated by
Infrapolitics 362
Resident
Slaveholders Supervising Small Units of Production
Smother Resistance 363
Resisting
Enslavement Is Not the Same as Resisting Slavery
as
a Social System 364
Hodge: The Predominance of Daily Infrapolitics Over
Outright
Riots 366
Social
Crime--The Infrapolitics of Poaching 367
The
Laborers' Counter-Ideology Against the Elite's Game Laws 368
The
Role of Theft, More Generally Defined, in English
Rural Infrapolitics 369
The
Correlation between Poverty and Theft 370
Hodge's
Thinner Mask 370
How
Farmworkers Could "Run Away"--Resistance Through Migra-
tion 372
The
Reluctance of Laborers to Move and Other Obstacles to
Migration 373
The
Tamer Confrontations between Hodge and His Masters 375
Food
Riots as a Method of Resistance 376
The
Swing Riots Generally Considered 378
How
the Laborers Did Benefit Some from the Swing Riots 379
The
Relative Weakness of the Farmworkers' Unions Compared
to
Others in England 380
The
Organization of the Agricultural Labours' Union in 1872 381
Comparing
Two Subordinate Classes' Methods of Resistance 383
7.
CONCLUSIONS: THE BALANCE BETWEEN
"RESISTANCE" AND "DAMAGE"? 386
Resistance
and the Subordinate Class's Quality of Life 386
Slavery
Is on a Continuum of Social Systems of Subordination 388
Selected
Bibliography 390
1. WHY COMPARE
ENGLISH LABORERS AND AMERICAN SLAVES TO BEGIN WITH?
The Standard Yet Problematic Comparison of Factory
Workers with Slaves
Mississippi slaveowner and politician John A. Quitman "professed
little respect for the northern free-labor system, where 'factory wretches'
worked eleven-hour days in 'fetid' conditions while their intellects were
destroyed 'watching the interminable whirling of the
spinning-jenny.' . . .
The Quitman plantations functioned satisfactorily, and his bondsmen were
appreciative of their condition. He
described his slaves as 'faithful, obedient, and affectionate.'" Quitman's comparison is still made today
when debates break out over the standard of living about who was better
off: slaves versus [Northern] factory
workers, not farm servants.
Similarly, while examining general European conditions for workers,
Jurgen Kuczynski states: "It is precisely
these bad conditions which justify the arguments of the slaveowners of the
South, that the slaves are materially better off than the workers in the
north. This would in many cases have
been true." Despite its frequency,
this comparison is actually problematic:
It discounts the additional effects of urbanization, crowding, and doing
industrial/shop work inside. In the
countryside, with its low population density and work in the fields outside,
people experience a different way and quality of life. The conditions of urban factory life simply
are not tied to the legal status of being free or slave. This common comparison actually contrasts
two very different ways of life, urban versus rural, factory versus farm, to
which widely varying value judgments can be attached. As E. P. Thompson observes:
"In comparing a Suffolk [farm] labourer with his grand-daughter in
a cotton-mill we are comparing--not two standards [of living]--but two ways of
life."1 By likening
some other agricultural labor force to the slaves of the American South before
the Civil War, many of the apples/oranges comparison problems are
eliminated. This work shows the largely
landless English agricultural workers during the general period of the
industrial revolution (c. 1750-1875) had a superior quality of life of compared
to the black slaves in the American South (c. 1750-1865), but that the latter
at times had a material standard of living equal to or greater than the
former's, at least in southern England.
Why Do Such a Comparison?
A
historical comparison brings into focus features of both subjects under study
that might otherwise go unnoticed. New
insights may be gained, which might be missed when highly specialized
historians devoted to a particular field analyze historical phenomena stay
strictly within their area of expertise.
Suddenly, through historical comparison and contrast, the pedestrian can
become exceptional, and what was deemed unusual becomes part of a pattern. For example, both the agricultural workers
and the slaves found ways to resist the powerful in their respective societies,
but their forms of resistance differed since their legal statuses
differed. In the preface of his study
of American slavery and Russian serfdom, Kolchin observes some of the
advantages of doing such a comparison.
It reduces parochialism in given fields, allows features to be seen as
significant that otherwise might be overlooked, makes for the formulation and
testing of hypotheses, and helps to distinguish which variables and causal
factors had more weight.2
A comparative topic is justified, even when it deals with phenomena long
since analyzed by historians, if it wrings new insights out of the same old
sources. It may expose assumptions
about events or processes experts take for granted or overlook in the fields
being compared. One suspects sometimes
labor historians and African-American slavery historians may be letting their
respective historiographical work pass each other like ships in the night, not
knowing the valuable insights one group may have for the study of the other's
field.3
Comparing
and contrasting English agricultural workers during the industrial revolution
and American slaves before and during the Civil War allows for the exploration
of (perhaps unexpected) similarities and differences in their experiences in
the same general time frame. Placing
side by side for inspection two agricultural work forces who lived at the same
basic time who spoke the same language seems "a natural," but
specialists in both fields have largely overlooked this identification. The history of black slavery is
"labor history." On a daily
basis slaveholders got people to labor for them, tried to motivate them by fear
and the stick, or, less commonly but ideally, by love and the carrot. Of course, fundamental differences remained
between the two work forces. The blacks
were not really seen as part of the surrounding society for racial reasons,
while the English agricultural workers still had some real rights, despite
their evident subordination. Excepting
for children, farmworkers were never subjected to the supreme indignity of
being flogged while on the job, but the whip was virtually the emblem of the
slaveowner's authority over his or her property. Exploring the similarities and differences between these two work
forces is the burden of this work.
What Exactly Is Compared Out of Each Diverse Group
This
work compares from these groups those who lived in rural areas and did farm
work as their main or exclusive occupation.
Neither urban slavery in the American South nor slavery in the North
before its demise are analyzed here.
However, some source documents used below involve slaves who either may
have lived in a small town or in both city and country. Artisans who lived in rural areas, such as
blacksmiths and carpenters, receive some attention in the American case but
almost none in the English. Servants
are included, whether American slave or English free, whether doing domestic
chores, learning husbandry, or a combination of the two, but slave domestics receive
much more attention than English ones.
Slaves working in industry or factories are omitted, as well as their
English counterparts, since this work is about agricultural/rural workers. Workers in English domestic industry are
also passed over. But cases in which
substantial machinery and mills functioned on plantations, such as for rice and
sugar refining, are covered since they functioned amidst a rural setting. Unless otherwise mentioned, it should be
assumed, as "Southern slaves" are compared with English agricultural
workers, that the former live in rural areas or perhaps small towns, and that
they are either field hands or servants, not urban and/or industrial
workers. Since about ninety percent of
the slaves did not live in cities, the vast bulk of them lived in rural areas.4 Blacks without masters--"free
Negroes"--are not covered here.
The focus shall be on ENGLISH farm workers, not Scottish, Welsh, Irish,
or "British." Exclusions and
limits are necessary for what is compared here within these two large, diverse
groups, since more could always be added.
Five Broad Areas for Comparison Purposes
In
five broad categories English farmworkers and African-American slaves are
compared. The first concerns the
material standard of living, such as in diet, clothing, housing, and medical
care. The second concerns the less
quantitative but essential "quality of life" issues, such as in
family relationships, education, religious activities, and having an informed
outlook on life. Although through sheer
ignorance and good treatment perhaps some slaves were relatively content with
their lot, their satisfaction does not make their situation to be actually
good. It is better to be Socrates
dissatisfied than a pig satisfied, a dictum which a few quantitative economic
historians seem tempted to forget. Only
those slaves with a "live for today" philosophy, who made themselves
totally oblivious to the future, could possibly forget what masters selling
their family members would do to them.
Sales due to death or bankruptcy were always remained a sword of
Damocles hanging over the bondsmen. Third,
the sexual division of labor between men and women is compared for the English
farm workers and African-American slaves.
These two groups had glaring differences in this area which, perhaps
ironically, declined sharply after freedom for the slaves came. Fourth, work conditions, labor discipline,
and the ways the masters attempted to control their respective subordinate
classes are compared, including by and through the state. Abuses at work are dealt with, such as
whipping, hours of work, holidays/days off, and the incentives used by "management,"
broadly considered. The reality of
paternalism and the quality of work relationships are examined. Fifth, the means by which the subordinate
classes resisted the will of the dominant class is analyzed. How the oppressed classes wore a
"mask" is considered here.
Both of these groups carefully concealed, by lies, feigned ignorance, or
the simple non-volunteering of information, what they REALLY thought from their
"betters" to avoid punishment or exploitation. The infrequent, but spectacular, cases of
revolts and mass actions are covered, as well as union activities among the
agricultural workers. Using the broad
categories of the material standard of living, the quality of life, the sexual
division of labor, work conditions and controls, and resistance against those
in authority and their controls, the most important similarities and contrasts
between these two work forces are focused upon.
This
comparison uses the general time period of 1750-1875. Making for the drawing of sharper parallels, these dates allow two
largely contemporary work forces to be compared who both lived in
industrializing nations and spoke the same language. The nineteenth century is emphasized, partly due to greater
documentation, but also because then the factors creating these two work
forces' conditions peaked. The
proletarianization of the farmworkers reached a height in the first half of the
nineteenth century, before allotments spread more widely, mechanization became
common, and out-migration had partially emptied the English countryside. Similarly, after generally experiencing a
boom in the preceding thirty years, the Cotton Kingdom clearly reached an
economic high point in 1860. This work
emphasizes portraying the respective climaxes of the two work forces'
conditions as determined by events and processes that began in the seventeenth
and early eighteenth centuries, such as the initial arrival of slaves in the
English colonies and the second general wave (i.e., post-Tudor) enclosure
acts. Changes from earlier conditions
(pre-1750) are treated largely in passing, which makes the conditions of the
slaves look better, due to the improvements in their treatment from the early
colonial period, while these make the agricultural workers apppear worse off,
because of the negative effects enclosure and the French Wars had on their
standard of living compared to (say) 1725.
Both
work forces lived in industrializing countries. The South's industrial sector before the Civil War that could
employ the slaves paled before what was available to rural English
workers. Nevertheless, they still
resided in the nation that was, by the eve of the Civil War, the world's second
greatest industrial power. The North's
industrial sector clearly affected them.
Often Northern factories made the clothes and shoes they wore, and the
tools and machines they worked with.
Corresponding with the period of England's industrialization, the
enclosure acts affected the laborers largely negatively. They greatly reduced the independence and
social mobility the farmworkers had had.
If they were willing to migrate, industry gave them an outlet from bad
rural conditions. It even provided some
competition for their labor that raised their wages when they stayed put, at
least in northern England. Importantly,
a major chronological difference separates the two groups: Freedom abruptly came to the slaves in 1865,
but the improvements and changes in the farmworkers' conditions were gradual,
without any radical discontinuity.
Perhaps the farmworkers' gaining the vote in 1884 was the one event that
changed their lives the most, for although the Swing Riots of 1830-31 badly
shook the British establishment, their effects on their lives were a pittance
before the effects of emancipation on American blacks.5 The mechanization of English agriculture was
a long, slow process, undoubtedly hindered early in the nineteenth century by
the massive labor surplus that prevailed in much of the English countryside,
and even by "Captain Swing" himself.
Hence, some sources about post-1875 conditions are cited for the English
case, since their conditions changed more slowly, but post-1865 conditions are
mostly ignored for the freedmen, although racial subordination continued by
means other than bondage.
2. A
HISTORICAL PERENNIAL: THE STANDARD OF
LIVING DEBATE
Some Theoretical Problems in Comparing Slaves and
Laborers' Standard of Living
The debate over standard of living during
industrialization, and the role of capitalism in lowering or raising the
masses' consumption and use of various material goods, is one of
historiography's greatest footballs. The
Long Debate on Poverty6 has an aptly chosen title! Unfortunately, for both Southern slaves and
English farmworkers, no solid nationwide statistical economic data exists that
could decisively settle the issue. The
English (and Welsh) had no fully inclusive census until 1801, no occupational
census until 1841, and no official registration for deaths and births until
1839.7 American census data begins with 1790, but a
mere count of people, crops grown in a given year, and their occupations is not
enough to calculate per capita income.8 Furthermore, what the average slave received
hardly equaled what the American did!
To run such calculations, it is necessary to know what the slaves alone
got. The available historical evidence,
such as it is, can give clues and indications of what the actual standard of
living was. But, at this late date,
nothing with full rational certainty capable of convincing all the disputants
involved is likely to turn up.
Anecdotal evidence is valuable, because it can descriptively expose the
relationships within an society that an overemphasis on quantitative data can
obscure. But it cannot totally settle
this debate, since conflicting stories appear to support both sides, such as
how kindly or harshly the "typical" master treated the "average"
slave. This point leads to the next big
problem in the standard of living controversy . . .
Just
what exactly IS the "average" slave or the "typical"
agricultural worker? These abstractions
represent groups that experienced a great variety of working conditions,
climates, lifestyles, occupations, family statuses, and masters
supervising. What is
"average" for slaves when comparing the relatively mild bondage of
the Border States, such as Virginia and Kentucky, with the harshness of the
frontier Deep South, such as Texas and Arkansas? What is "average" for agricultural workers between
Northumberland, where one observer said the wages and the standard of living
surpassed America's for farmworkers, as opposed to the utter misery of
notoriously low-waged Wiltshire in southern England?9 Theoretically, after warming up the
computers armed with spreadsheet programs, adding the two together and dividing,
the issue would be settled, if accurate, broad-based, quantitative statistics
did exist (but they do not).
Number-crunching can obscure the essential reality of an unequal or
extreme situations within the working class or bondsmen as a whole. The economist who warned against wading a
river with an average depth of four feet drew attention to a serious
theoretical problem that pervades quantitative analysis when applied to the
standard of living debate. Although the
"average" bondsman or the "mean" farmworker are handy
abstractions, they remain generalizations.
It is mistaken to allow them to obscure the underlying realities of
(especially) regional diversity for the farmworkers, or the widely varying
treatment meted out by various masters and mistresses to their bondsmen.
Diet and the Standard of Living for Slaves
The
essence of the standard of living debate seems to be diet, and how far the
masses lived above bare subsistence.10 Related issues include:
How much and what kinds of "luxuries," such as sugar, coffee,
and tea, did the groups in question enjoy?
How much and what kinds of meat did they have? Did they eat wheat, the most expensive grain, or barley, rye,
oats, etc.? How coarse was the food
they ate? For the American slaves, as
for American Southerners generally, the main grain was corn (maize), and the
main meat, pork.11
The absolutely archetypal rations slaves received consisted of so many
pecks of corn and pounds of pork or bacon per week. Anything adding to or replacing these items as basic foodstuffs
was at least mildly unusual. As escaped
slave Christopher Nichols testified to Drew:
"My master used to allow us one piece of meat a day, and a peck and
a half of corn meal a week." After
being sold for $1,200 in Natchez, Eli Johnson was "put on a cotton farm,
and allowed a peck of corn a week and three pounds meat." Traveler Frederick Law Olmsted inquired of
one white Southerner: "'What do
they generally give the niggers on the plantations here?' 'A peck of meal and three pound of bacon is
what they call 'lowance, in general, I believe. It takes a heap o' meat on a big plantation.'" Aged ex-slave Andy Anderson painfully
recalled that the new overseer, Delbridge, cut rations as the Civil War
began: "He weighs out the meat,
three pound for the week, and he measure a peck of meal." The "meat" in question was
normally from the flesh of hogs, although exceptions appeared. Once a slave in eastern Maryland, Frederick
Douglass mentioned how the standard monthly rations included fish
sometimes: "The men and women
slaves received, as their monthly allowance of food, eight pounds of pork, or
its equivalent in fish, and one bushel of corn meal." Charles Ball similarly described Calvert
County, Maryland, where
the practice amongst slave-holders, was to allow each
slave one peck of corn weekly, which was measured out every Monday morning; at
the same time each one receiving seven salt herrings. This formed the week's provision, and the master who did not give
it, was called a hard master, whilst those who allowed their people any
thing more, were deemed kind and indulgent.12
Hence, the normal bondsman and woman expected a diet
that included several pounds of pork or bacon and, even more certainly, corn.13
Were
the standard rations enough? Sometimes
they were not, at least for some adult men.
As Blassingame notes:
"Equally serious was his [the slave's] dependence on the 'average'
amount of food and clothing his master decided was sufficient for all
slaves." What was sufficient for
one man or woman may be insufficient for others!14 Ex-slave Anderson added, after describing
his plantation's new standard rations:
"And 'twa'n't enough. He
half-starve us niggers, and he want more work." Runaway slave Williamson Pease ironically commented to Drew about
the draught animals' superior treatment:
"Horses and mules have food by them all the time, but the slaves
had four pounds of fat bacon a week, and a peck of corn meal,--not enough to
last some men three days." Francis
Henderson similarly commented:
"Our allowance was given weekly--a peck of sifted corn meal, a
dozen and a half herrings, two and a half pounds of pork. Some of the boys would eat this up in three
days."15
Underfeeding almost inevitably caused theft, as Pease and Henderson also
observed. Harriet Brent Jacobs, alias
Linda Brent, described well how miserly the rations could be doled out. Her mistress would
spit in all the kettles and pans that had been used
for cooking. She did this to prevent
the cook and her children from eking out their meager fare with the remains of
gravy and other scrapings. The slaves
could get nothing to eat except what she chose to give them. Provisions were weighed out by the pound and
ounce, three times a day. I can assure
you she gave them no chance to eat wheat bread from her flour barrel. She knew how many biscuits a quart of flour
would make, and exactly what size they ought to be.16
So according to the slaves' own testimony, the nearly
universal "standard rations" were inadequate for many of them, at
least by themselves without what they could raise, hunt, or steal on their own,
or what more indulgent masters might issue.17
Fogel and Engerman's Optimistic Reconstructions of the
Slave Diet
Fogel
and Engerman in Time on the Cross argue that slaves were well fed:
The average daily diet of slaves was quite
substantial. The energy value of their
diet exceeding that of free men in 1879 by more than 10 percent. There was no deficiency in the amount of
meat allotted to slaves. On average,
they consumed six ounces of meat per day, just an ounce lower than the average
quantity consumed by the free population.18
Although such data as average heights and rapid
population growth indicate American slaves were not seriously underfed, this
result was not entirely due to their masters and mistresses' efforts.19 The slaves struggled to get food on their
own, such as by hunting and trapping (both relatively productive in a sparsely
populated/frontier region), gardening small patches of land, purchasing food
using money they earned from extra work, not to mention stealing. The testimony cited above casts some doubt
on the "standard rations" of pork and corn alone always being enough
to satisfy at least adult male bondsmen.
Fogel
and Engerman clearly make many dubious assumptions and casual mistakes while
reconstructing the slave diet, as shown by Richard Sutch's searching and
intensive critique of their data. Their
disappearance method uses data from only 44 generally backwoods counties out of
Parker and Gallman's sample of 413 counties' farm and plantation food
production. They assume the slaves must
have eaten most of the food produced on the plantations in their subsample
because (they reason) these were too far from significant urban markets. Their subsample of this sample excluded
farms and small plantations with fewer than fifty-one slaves, thus discounting
the possibility of local sales of produce by the big plantations to neighboring
farms and small plantations. Indeed,
their subsample comes down to just seventy-seven plantations, including less
than 10 percent of the total population and 1.5 percent of the total productive
landholdings in the Parker-Gallman sample.
With such a narrow sample focused on the largest plantations, a bias
similar to U.B. Phillips's American Negro Slavery, distortions
inevitably appear. Since plantations
were commercial and non-subsistent by nature, they sold produce for cash. Using a subsample of them in backwoods areas
more than fifty wagon miles from urban areas would not eliminate the
distortions caused by local sales of produce or the driving of animals on the
hoof to market. The latter point
undermines Fogel and Engerman's evidence for the slaves having a high beef
consumption based on their subsample since 15 percent of all the cattle in it
were on four Texas farms in two counties which fell outside the fifty-mile
radius. But since Texas was notorious
for long distance cattle drives to market, it is implausible to think these
ranches' slaves ate most of the steer raised on them! They underestimate the resident white population's consumption in
these areas, such as by using conversion ratios (such as dressed to live
weight) which lower how much pork the slaves ate and raise how much the whites
ate in the subsampled areas. Between
all the mistakes and questionable assumptions Sutch identifies, many of them
omitted here, nobody should place much stock in Fogel and Engerman's arguments
for a varied and nutritious slave diet.20
Much
of the debate on the slave diet between Fogel and Engerman and their critics
like Sutch surrounds mineral and vitamin deficiencies. For example, was the phenomenon of dirt/clay
eating, which still survives among Southern rural blacks in the United States
today, due to malnutrition? A thiamine
deficiency could easily explain some plantations' outbreaks of sudden
dirt-eating frenzies.21
Being high in pork and maize, the classic slave diet clearly was
tailor-made for producing pellagra, just as it did among poor whites. Due to its chemically bound form, corn lacks
niacin that the human body can easily use.
Its high content of the amino acid leucine partially even interferes
with the body's digestion of whatever niacin that is consumed. Although the body can convert the amino acid
tryptophan into niacin from crude protein, the low quality fat pork slaves
normally ate unfortunately was a poor source of it. Even nowadays, let alone in antebellum times, physicians had
difficulty diagnosing pellagra because its symptoms seem to be like other
afflictions; it also manifests itself in the early stages in disparate ways in
different individuals. It normally does
not develop along standard, classical lines.
Nineteenth-century American doctors simply did not know about this
disease, so they would think the bondsmen under their care had other diseases. The description of the "negro
disease" called black tongue by Southern physicians, however, fits nearly
perfectly pellagra in its earlier stages.
Employing such arguments, Kiple and Kiple suggest that pellagra's
symptoms manifested themselves during hard times when planters cut back on
their rations. It also became operative
in many bondsmen in an early, endemic form that emerged during winter and early
spring, only to disappear again due to seasonal fresh fruits or vegetables
entering their diet. Sutch observes
that the standard ration falls way short of supplying enough niacin. It even lacks the extra protein with which
the body could convert tryptophan into niacin.
The unsupplemented standard ration had other vitamin and mineral
deficiencies, such as in thiamine, riboflavin, and calcium. It was short even in vitamin A, since the
corn and sweet potatoes of the antebellum South were evidently normally white,
not yellow, in color.22
Since the bondsmen likely suffered from dietary deficiencies, at least
during winter and early spring when forced to survive on the easily stored
items of the standard ration and/or under harsher masters and mistresses' more
restrictive diets, this casts doubt upon Fogel and Engerman's rosy
reconstruction.
The Slave Diet as Crude, Coarse, and Boring
Besides
being likely vitamin deficient, the slave diet was obviously crude, coarse, and
boring. As Frederick Douglass commented: "Not to give a slave enough to eat, is
regarded as the most aggravated development of meanness even among
slaveholders. The rule is, no matter
how coarse the food, only let there be enough of it." Victoria McMullen remembered her slave
grandmother described the average slave's diet this way: "But the other slaves didn't git
nothing but fat meat and corn bread and molasses. And they got tired of that same old thing. They wanted something else
sometimes." Mary Reynolds recalled
during slavery days what she was fed:
"Mostly we ate pickled pork and corn bread and peas and beans and
'taters. They never was as much as we
needed." Although monotonous, this
diet showed her master at least gave more than just the stereotypical "hog
and hoecake" diet. As Olmsted
observed: "The food is everywhere,
however, coarse, crude, and wanting in variety; much more so than that of
our [Northern] prison convicts."
The restricted food types they received, the crude cooking equipment
they used, and the sharp time limits imposed by both sexes working a
"sunup to sundown" work day all combined to produce a dreary
diet. As actress turned reluctant
mistress Fanny Kemble observed at her husband's rice plantation:
They got to the fields at daybreak, carrying with them
their allowance of food for the day, which toward noon, and not till then,
they eat, cooking it over a fire, which they kindle as best they can, where
they are working. Their second meal in
the day is at night, after their labor is over, having worked, at the very
least, six hours without intermission of rest or refreshment since their
noonday meal.
Since the adults of both sexes worked such long hours
of hard labor in the fields, the cooking equipment consisting generally of
fireplaces or open fires, and relatively few or no metal pots, forks, knives,
and spoons being available, crudely prepared meals inevitably followed. Solomon Northrup, a free man sold into
slavery, said slaves often lacked the motivation to hunt after work because
"after a long and hard day's work, the weary slave feels little like going
to the swamp for his supper, and half the time prefers throwing himself on the
cabin floor without it." Little
time remained for the slave woman, if one applies unrealistically the
contemporary Victorian middle class' ideology of the separate spheres to this
situation, to spend long hours bringing supper's food up to some elevated level
of gustatory delight. John Brown, once
a young slave in southern Virginia, described how simply slaves often prepared
their food: "We used to make our
corn into hominy, hoe and Johnny-cake, and sometimes parch it, and eat it
without any other preparation."23 If issued unground, just grinding/pounding the corn into something
cookable took enough effort and time itself.
Nevertheless, the slave diet's fundamental problem was the lack of
variety in what slaveowners issued their human chattels to begin with, not the
lack of time originating in long days of field work by both sexes that reduced
the number of domestic chores, including cooking, that could be done.24
Setting
up communal facilities army-style was one partial solution to slaves without
enough time to cook. Kemble mentioned
that one old woman in a shed boiled and distributed the daily allotment of rice
and grits on her husband's Georgia rice-island plantation. Francis Henderson, who escaped from the
Washington D.C. area, said slaves cooked food on their own, but often lacked
the time to do so: "In regard to
cooking, sometimes many have to cook at one fire, and before all could get to
the fire to bake hoe cakes, the overseer's horn would sound; then they must go
at any rate." Frequently he had to
eat on the run and could not sit down to eat due time constraints. During harvest, this problem was solved by
cooking everything at the big house "as the hands are wanted more in the
field. This was more like people, and
we liked it, for we sat down then at meals."25 But the cost of removing this burden this
way was still greater regimentation and further weakening of the slave family's
role by reducing their freedom as part of individual households to make
decisions about consumption, i.e., how dinner was cooked.
Differing Diets for Slaves with Different Positions
Since
masters and mistresses were "respecters of men," they treated
different slaves--or groups of slaves--differently.26 In particular, the household servants and
drivers and their families were apt to receive better material conditions, in
exchange for (inevitably) the tighter controls and supervision due to being in
the white owner's presence more. (This
is the classic trade-off of a sincerely practiced paternalism). The bleak picture of field hands subsisting
on "hog and hominy" diets did not apply to all their neighbors
dwelling in the quarters. Not having
just to subsist on the standard rations, servants benefited from the leftovers
of their master and mistress' table, as Kemble observed. Mary Boykin Chesnut's servants mobbed her
while visiting near her husband's father's plantation, wanting her to come
home. Her cook said, when asked if she
lacked anything: "Lacking
anything? I lack everything. What is cornmeal and bacon, milk and molasses? Would that be all you wanted? Ain't I bin living and eating exactly as you
does all these years? When I cook fer
you didn't I have some of all? Dere
now!" Her complaint was, in part,
"Please come home, so we could eat better again!" Freedman Edward Jenkins of Mount Pleasant,
South Carolina, told Armstrong how house servants gained from their owner's
meals: "What de white folk had ter
eat, de servan's had also, when de white folks done eat dey fill." Although his parents were field hands, aged
freedman Tony Washington remembered his mistress made him "the
waiter-and-pantry" boy. This job
allowed him to get extra food, including leftover alcohol, as he nostalgically
remembered:
Dey [the visiting white gentlemen] set down ergain,
an' Massa say: 'Sonny, bring de
glasses!' I'd bring de glasses, an' de
brandy from de sidebo'ahd. Dey know how
ter treat dey liquor in de old days an' nobody git drunk. Co'se, I got er little dizzy once when I
drink all dat de gen'lemans lef' in dey glasses--heh heh!--but Missus say she
gwine tell Massa ter whip me if'n I do dat ergain!
Sam Jackson benefited from having relatives in the
right places in "the big house."
He enjoyed reminiscing about his boyhood job's perks:
I was de waitin'-boy fo' de table. Don' you know, in dem conditions, I had a
sof' bed ter lie in? Yaw
. . . did I git plenty ter eat?
Jus' guess I did. De waiter-boy
allays got plenty, an' when his Maw was house-woman, an' his Auntie de cook,
guess he goin' go hungry? Ho!27
By having family members close to the master or the
mistress, this slave child avoided the customary lack of good treatment
("investment") most received from their owners because they were too
young to work in the fields.
Further
evidence of tiers within slave society in the quarters, as reflected by
differences in diet, comes from archeological investigation. At Thomas Jefferson's Monticello estate,
investigators found bones deposited from different animals, domesticated and
wild, in different parts of his estate. Although the differences in bones
buried between Building 'o' and the storehouse, both areas mainly for slaves,
could be explained by some other mechanism, apparently higher quality cuts of
meat were eaten at the former but not at the latter. As Crader notes:
"Meaty elements such as lumbar vertebrae, the pelvis, and the front
and hind limbs also are present, elements that virtually are absent from the
Storehouse assemblage."28 Differences between the secondary butchery marks, caused by
removing the meat at the cooking stage, appeared between Building 'o' and the
storehouse's artifacts. (Primary butchery
involves taking the animal apart at the joints after its slaughter). The bone marks found at the site of Building
'o' are like those that would be produced by the way the whites at the mansion
ate, but are completely absent from the Storehouse's assemblage of bones. The master, as well as his evidently
better-off slaves, ate their meat as roasts, while the worse-off slaves stewed
their meat in pots, with the bones chopped up much more.29 The evidence Crader literally unearthed may
indicate that Jefferson's domestic servants consumed the big house's leftovers
at their homes in the quarters, which gave them a somewhat better diet than the
field hands.30
The Slaves' Role in Procuring Their Own Food
Slaves
could seek additional food, if they were able and willing to put time into it
after a long day working for their masters and mistresses, by hunting,
trapping, fishing, and tending their own plots of crops. Some masters banned these activities, but
the slaves might still go secretly hunting (at least) anyway. As freedwoman Jenny Proctor of Alabama
recollected: "Our master, he
wouldn't 'low us to go fishing--he say that too easy on a nigger and wouldn't
'low us to hunt none either--but sometime we slips off at night and catch
possums." A strong majority still
permitted their slaves extra ways to get food, showing a strongly different
spirit from the English rural elite's about almost anyone else hunting besides
themselves. Northrup stated why: "No objections are made to hunting,
inasmuch as it dispenses with drafts upon the smoke-house, and because every
marauding coon that is killed is so much saved from the standing
corn." After nearly tripping over
a huge pile of oyster shells on her husband's cotton-island plantation, Kemble
later commented: "This is a horrid
nuisance, which results from an indulgence which the people here have and value
highly; the waters round the island are prolific in shell-fish, oysters, and
the most magnificent prawns I ever saw.
The former are a considerable article of the people's diet, and the
shells are allowed to accumulate."
The slaves also set out somewhat ineffective traps for birds at the
upstream rice-island estate. A
neighboring master shot and killed an old man of Douglass' master in Maryland
while "fishing for oysters" for the trivial offense of trespassing on
his land. In this way they "made
up the deficiency of their scanty allowance." Hunting could be of critical importance to the bondsmen's
diets. Archeological evidence from the
Hampton St. Simons island plantation had 17.6 percent of the bones gathered
from wild animals, while one at Cannon's Point had an amazing 89.8 percent by
number of bones (44.5 percent by estimated meat weight) from such fauna. These percentages sharply contrast with the
2 percent or less figures from Monticello, the Hermitage, and the plantation at
Kingsmill.31 Hence, depending
the environment and slaveowners' provisions (or presumed lack thereof),
hunting, fishing, etc. could be just a minor way to supplement the slaves'
diet, or a mainstay perhaps required for survival.
Many
slaveowners allowed their bondsmen to cultivate small patches of land, similar
to the allotments that English agricultural workers tended. The slaves often benefited little from them,
because this extra food was eventually obtainable only by working on their
gardens after having put in a full day's work for someone else, thus increasing
their real workweek. As aged ex-slave
Mary Reynolds of Louisiana recalled:
Sometimes Massa let niggers have a little patch. They'd raise 'taters or goobers. They liked to have them to help fill out on
the victuals. . . . The
niggers had to work the patches at night and dig the 'taters and goobers at
night. Then if they wanted to sell any
in town, they'd have to git a pass to go.
Some masters stopped their slaves from having gardens,
as ex-slave Jenny Proctor remembered.
Although this practice was common, Olmsted noted, various planters
prohibited it "because it tempts them to reserve for and to expend in the
night-work the strength they want employed in their service during the day, and
also because the produce thus obtained is made to cover much plundering of
their master's crops, and of his live stock." Planter Bennet Barrow allowed his slaves to have gardens, but
stopped them from selling anything grown on their plots because it
created a "spirit of trafficing" which required of them "means
and time" they had no right to possess.
Further, he added:
A negro would not be content to sell only What he
raises or makes or either corn (should he be permitted) or poultry, or the
like, but he would sell a part of his allowance allso, and would be tempted to
commit robberies to obtain things to sell.
Besides, he would never go through his work carefully, particularly When
other engagements more interesting and pleasing are constantly passing through
his mind, but would be apt to slight his work.
But by allowing animals such as pigs and chickens to
be raised by their bondsmen, other slaveowners were more generous. Fanny Kemble noted that the blacks of her
husband's rice-plantation could raise as many domestic birds as they wished,
but no longer had permission to raise their own pigs. Some slaves were free to grow even cash crops on their
"allotments." Overseer John
Mairs wrote to Mrs. Sarah Polk about how much cotton her hands had raised for
themselves, which was marketed with the rest of the plantation's output: "Youre servents crope of coten in 1849
was about 8400 lbs of sead coten."32 Hence, the practice of giving plots of land to slaves to raise
some of their own food or crops was common in the South, but slaveowners many
times placed major restrictions on it.
Variations in What Food Different Slaveowners Provided
to Their Slaves
Much
variation arose in what food and how much of it slaves had from master to
master and plantation to plantation. On
the one hand, enough disturbing cases of slaves who rarely or never got any
meat appear to cast some doubt on the utter universality of the "standard
rations." After all, would
Louisiana have a law requiring slaves to be fed (Olmsted believed) four pounds
of meat a week if slaveowners were already doing it? He added also:
"(This law is a dead letter, many planters in the State making no
regular provision of meat for their force)." Frederick Douglass noted Master Thomas Auld in Maryland allowed
him and three fellow slaves in his kitchen less than half a bushel of cornmeal
a week, "and very little else, either in the shape of meat or vegetables. It was not enough for us to subsist
upon." Thomas Hedgebeth, born free
in North Carolina, worked on some farms there.
As he recounted to Drew:
I have known that the slaves had not a bite of meat
given them. They had a pint of corn
meal unsifted, for a meal,--three pints a day. . . This is no hearsay--I've seen it through the
spring, and on until crop time: Three
pints of meal a day and the bran and nothing else.
After being beset by a minor mob of children begging
her for meat, Kemble later wrote that at the rice plantation her husband
owned: "Animal food is only
allowed to certain of the harder working men, hedgers and ditchers, and to them
only occasionally, and in very moderate rations." A neighboring plantation owner told her
somewhat offhandedly that a meatless diet was a good social control
device: "He says that he considers
the extremely low diet of the negroes one reason for the absence of crimes of a
savage nature among them; most of them do not touch meat the year
around." John Brown remembered as
a slave child in Virginia that:
"We never had meat of any kind, and our usual drink was
water."33
Contrary to what some may think, this evidence indicates that the corn
in the standard rations was more "standard" than the pork!
Other
slaves enjoyed a more luxurious, or at least varied, diet. For example, Thomas Jefferson's slaves had
at least a diversity of meats in their diet.
They received .5 to 1.5 pounds of beef, 4 to 8 fish, and 4 to 4.5 pounds
of pork per month per man or woman.
Judging from archeological remains at Andrew Jackson's Hermitage,
Jefferson's Monticello, and the Hampton Plantation in Georgia, beef may have
been more significant in the slave diet than commonly believed. Aged freedwoman Harriet McFarlin Payne
recalled in the quarters: "Late of
an evening as you'd go by the doors you could smell meat a-frying, coffee-making,
and good things cooking. We were fed
good." Although admittedly this
coffee may have been ersatz, McFarlin's account still shows these slaves were
far removed from the basically corn and water diet Brown described above. Although now seen as a proven public health
menace, the giving of tobacco to slaves by planter Bennet Barrow demonstrates
they received more than the bare necessities.
In Louisiana Olmsted encountered a plantation that to a minute degree
made up for the almost inhuman hours of grinding season: It issued extra rations of flour and allowed
the sugar refinery's hands to drink as much coffee and eat as much molasses as
they wished. Tobacco rations were
regularly dispensed year around, and molasses during winter and early summer. Cato of Alabama remembered as a slave his
mistress on Sunday gave out chickens and flour. He also had vegetables and dried beef for eating later. Plowden C. J. Weston, a South Carolina rice
planter with several plantations, prepared a standard contract for his
overseers which included standard rations (some weekly, some monthly, some in
only certain seasons or conditional upon good behavior) of rice, potatoes,
grits, salt, flour, fish or molasses, peas, meat, and tobacco. Some masters also issued (appropriately)
buttermilk to the often lactose-intolerant slaves. Many slaves got their hands on alcohol through their own earnings
or by selling property stolen from their masters.34 So although Fogel and Engerman's rosy
perceptions of the slave diet have some support, the weight of the literary
sources available fails to sustain their case overall, thus implying the
existence of flaws in their quantitative sampling methodology. The slaves usually "enjoyed" a
spartan diet--although their poor white neighbors perhaps often were only
somewhat better off--but a number had more than the standard rations through
having more progressive and/or indulgent masters and mistresses and/or unusual
opportunities or abilities to get food on their own.
The Diet of English Farmworkers: Regional Variations
Turning
to the English agricultural workers' diet, strong regional variations must be
remembered. In the same way the Border
States usually treated their slaves better than the Deep South partially
because of their ability to more easily escape to the North, the English
farmworkers living in areas north of the Midlands lived better than their
brethren to the south, where the most desperate rural poverty prevailed. Additionally, the grain-growing arable
districts in the southeast, due to greater seasonal variations in employment,
normally had worse conditions for their generally more numerous inhabitants
than the pastoral, shepherding, dairying districts in the southwest. Sir James Caird's dividing line, drawn from
the Wash (north of East Anglia) across England through the middle of Shropshire,
quite accurately divides the high-wage north from the low-wage south. In the north, because farmers as employers
faced the competition of mine operators and factory owners for labor, they had
to pay higher wages. Otherwise, low
wages would provoke farmworkers to "vote with their feet," causing
them to migrate to nearby booming urban areas benefiting from the economic
expansion produced by the industrial revolution. Even the likes of E.P. Thompson admits that the real wages of
laborers in such areas probably "had been rising in the decades before
1790, especially in areas contiguous to manufacturing or mining districts. 'There wants a war to reduce wages,' was the
cry of some northern gentry in the 1790s." By contrast, in the south, outside of London, a city of trades
dominated by skilled artisans which also contained relatively little factory
employment, few nearby urban areas possessed employers competing for
unskilled labor. The increasingly
overpopulated southern English countryside during this period (c. 1750-1860),
and the very understandable reluctance of rural laborers to relocate long
distances, enabled the gentry and farmers to successfully rachet down wages to
levels often barely above subsistence, especially for married men with large
families. According to Brinley, in
1850-51 southern England's average weekly agricultural wages were eight
shillings, five pence, about 26 percent lower than northern England's. By James Caird's calculations, the
difference was 37 percent.35
Under the old poor law (pre-1834), parish relief increasingly became a
way of life for many of the rural poor, especially during winter months in
arable counties due to their strongly seasonal swings in agricultural employment. The subsidizing of wages directly out of
parish relief funds raised by local property taxes ("the poor rates")
put mere bandages over the deep wounds ultimately inflicted by the decline of
service, the enclosure acts, and population growth. Unfortunately, such "solutions" as the Speenhamland
system, which gave supplemental allowances from parish relief funds to members
of families commensurate with the rise and fall of bread prices, only served to
depress wages further. The grim picture
of southern farmworkers' families depending year around mostly on the
(frequently irregularly employed) father's wages of ten shillings a week or
less and little else besides parish relief sharply contrasts with the northern
agricultural workers' much higher wages, the greater availability of work for
wives and/or children, and the frequent survival of service (the hiring of
(unmarried) farm servants under one year contracts).
The agricultural workers south of
Caird's wage line often endured truly desperate material conditions. A majority of them probably had a lower
standard of living than the moderately better-off slaves. In particular, meat had largely fallen out
of the diets of southern English farmworkers.
Remembering as a child how scarce meat was in Warwickshire, Agricultural
Labourers' Union organizer and leader Joseph Arch (b. 1826) commented:
Meat was rarely, if ever, to be seen on the labourer's
table; the price was too high for his pocket,--a big pocket it was, but with
very little in it . . .
In many a household even a morsel of bacon was considered a luxury. Flour was so dear that the cottage loaf was
mostly of barley.
He then discusses how scarce potatoes were in
"country districts"--or at least in 1830s Warwickshire. (For the growing dependency of the English
on potatoes, see pp. 33-35). Locally
only one farmer, a hoarder in 1835, had grown them. Similarly, a "Rector and Conservative" described the
status of "bacon, [which] when they can get it, is the staff of the
laborers' dinner." A careful
rationing exercise accompanied its appearance, which befit male privilege, or
female self-sacrifice, depending on one's perspective: "The frugal housewife provides a large
lot of potatoes, and while she indulges herself with her younger ones only with
salt, cuts off the small rasher and toasts it over the plates of the father and
elder sons, as being the breadwinners; and this is all they want."36
The Southern English Agricultural Workers' Diet Was
Poor, Often Meatless
William
Cobbett, the great Tory-turned-radical journalist and gadfly, saw up close the
poor, largely meatless diet of southern farm laborers. While travelling in Hampshire, he noted the
"poor creatures" who "are doomed to lead a life of constant
labour and of half-starvation."
After mentioning the snack of a pound of bread and a quarter pound of
cheese he and his young son ate came to five pence, or almost three shillings,
if they had it daily, he wondered:
How, then, Gracious God! is a labouring man, his wife,
and, perhaps, four or five small children, to exist upon 8s. or 9s. a
week! Aye, and to find house-rent,
clothing, bedding and fuel out of it?
Richard and I ate here, at this snap, more, and much more, than the
average of labourers, their wives and children, have to eat in a whole day, and
that the labourer has to work on too!
When facing such tight budgets, laborers spent little
on meat, but concentrated on cereal foodstuffs or (perhaps) potatoes, which
Cobbett hated to see. Later in the same
county, he indignantly observed:
These poor creatures, that I behold, here pass
their lives amidst flocks of sheep; but, never does a morsel of mutton
enter their lips. A labouring man told
me, at Binley, that he had not tasted meat since harvest; [this was written
Nov. 7th] and his looks vouched for the statement.37
Cobbett's
polemics constitute only a small part of the evidence describing how poor the
laborers' diet was in southern England.
Caleb Bawcombe, a shepherd, recalled for Hudson how the sight of deer
tempted his father Isaac into poaching while living in Wiltshire (c. 1820):
For many many days he had eaten his barley bread, and
on some days barley-flour dumplings, and had been content with this poor fare;
but now the sight of these animals [deer] made him crave for meat with an
intolerable craving, and he determined to do something to satisfy it.
Somerville encountered one man, who was better fed in
prison (he had participated in the Swing Riots of 1830) than when freed to live
in Hampshire. In prison he ate four
times a week 14 ounces of meat.
"No working man like me as can get it [good meat]. I wish I had as much meat now as I had in
the hulk; and I wishes the same to every poor hard-working man in
Hampshire." While visiting England,
Olmsted learned of this pathetic vignette from a farmer. Illustrating how scarce fresh meat was in
the laborers' diets, they gorged themselves the few times they could afford
it:
They [the laborers] will hardly taste it [fresh
meat] all their lives, except, it may be, once a year, at a fair, when they'll
go to the cook-shops and stuff themselves with all they'll hold of it; and if
you could see them, you'd say they did not know what it was or what was to be
done with it--cutting it into great mouthfuls and gobbling it down without any
chewing, like as a fowl does barleycorns, till it chokes him.
Edward Butt, a Sussex relieving officer and farmer,
recalled for the Committee on the New Poor Law that when he was younger (before
1794) the laborers had some meat everyday with their bread when they came to
eat in his father's farmhouse. But by
1837, they mainly ate bread and vegetables, especially potatoes. Unable to get milk in his area, the
farmworkers also ate little meat.
Somerville found one Wiltshire laborer, although saddened by his young
son's death, not fully regretting it either:
"We ben't sorry he be gone.
I hopes he be happy in heaven.
He ate a smart deal; and many a time, like all on us, went with a hungry
belly." Ironically, while serving
a sentence in Bermuda for poaching:
"We had terrible good living . . . by as I ever had for
working in England. Fresh beef three
times a-week, pork and peas four times a-week." When imprisoned laborers ate better free ones, Wiltshire's dire
conditions can only be imagined.
Similarly, one laborer in Hampshire told Somerville: "They say meat be wonderful cheap in
Reading, but what of it being cheap to we who can't buy it at no
price?" Speaking more generally,
Deane and Cole note an increase in England's grain growing acreage took place
"at the expense of the nation's meat supply" during the French
Wars. As shown by meat having
disappeared from their dinner tables, many agricultural workers in southern England
were beaten down to the edge of subsistence.38
Grains, especially Wheat, Dominate the Agricultural
Workers' Diet
Perhaps
best illustrating the importance of grain in Hodge's diet, consider the case of
one Hampshire laborer and his family.
They normally only ate bread, with some vegetables. Somerville learned the father had for
breakfast just dry bread, if anything at all, before mid-day. Especially in hard times, the laborers's
budgets might be 80 percent or more committed to buying bread and/or
flour. Looming large in the diet of
southern English agricultural workers, wheat was the dominant grain, at least
in good times. Barley, rye, or oats
also put their appearances, with the last being the north's dominant
grain. These grains had the advantage
of avoiding some of the nutritional pitfalls of corn (maize). For all his travails, Hodge in southern
England did not suffer from pellagra, as many black slaves in the American
South likely did for some part of the year.
Since reliance on grains other than wheat in southern England was deemed
a sign of poverty, laborers often resented eating bread made out of anything
else. Showing barley did not always
make for palatable fare, and pointing to exceptional poverty for the southern
English, consider this story Hudson learned about conditions in Wiltshire (c.
1830) for those on the parish make-work detail during the winter months. Some of his most elderly informants told of
how the laborers played with their food in the fields:
The men would take their dinners with them, consisting
of a few barley balls or cakes, in their coat pockets, and at noon they would
gather at one spot to enjoy their meal, and seat themselves on the ground in a
very wide circle, the men about ten yards apart, then each one would produce
his bannocks, and start throwing, aiming at some other man's face; there were
hits and misses and great excitement and hilarity for twenty or thirty minutes,
after which the earth and gravel adhering to the balls would be wiped off, and
they would set themselves to the hard task of masticating and swallowing the
heavy stuff.
Admittedly, food fights during lunch with barley balls
were exceptional. For the southern
English, wheat was their mainstay, with 94 percent of the population in
southern and eastern England subsisting on wheat in 1801. In contrast, the northern English, despite higher
incomes, had less of a taste for wheat.
According to Thomas, just some 25 percent of them lived upon it, while
50 percent consumed oats, 18 percent barley, and 6 percent rye. During the 1760s, Charles Smith judged,
assuming a population of around six million in England and Wales, that
3,750,000 ate wheat, 888,000 rye, 623,000 oats, and 739,000 barley. Evidently, wheat bread grew in market share
until the 1790s, when over two-thirds of the population relied upon wheat. The southern English desire to cling to the
wheaten loaf and to resist shifting to potatoes or other grains despite their
low wages and the effects of enclosure combined, Thomas infers, to cause them
possibly to eat less wheat than formerly and perhaps even less food
overall. The northern English
preference for oats (similar to the Scots') was made largely possible by the
availability of inexpensive milk to the poor.
Due to enclosures taking away most of their cows, laborers in the south
could not easily do likewise, as the Hammonds saw.39 By opposing having coarser grains the
mainstay of their diet, the southern English may well kept the finer
"luxury grain" (wheat) in their diet only by eating less of it.
The Role of Potatoes in the Laborers' Diet, Despite
Prejudices Against Them
Potatoes
played an important role in the laborers' diet, especially as the nineteenth
century drew on, and desperation broke down resistance against substituting
them for grain. Exemplifying this
contempt for potatoes, Cobbett saw them as a sign of the English sliding down
to the Irish level:
I see [in Sussex] very few of "Ireland's lazy
root;" and never, in this country, will the people be base enough to
lie down and expire from starvation under the operation of the extreme
unction! Nothing but a potatoe-eater
will ever do that.
Further, rather than see the English working people
reduced into living on potatoes,
he would see them all hanged, and be hanged with them,
and would be satisfied to have written upon his grave, 'Here lie the remains of
William Cobbett, who was hanged because he would not hold his tongue without
complaining while his labouring countrymen were reduced to live upon potatoes.'40
Despite Cobbett's opposition, a man full of the
prejudices of the southern farmworker which in spirit he remained, potatoes
became important in Hodge's diet.
Demonstrating the decay of farm laborers' anti-potato sentiments, one
Dorsetshire landowner in Dorset successfully got laborers to reclaim wasteland
for him in return for planting potatoes, despite they knew next year the
process would be repeated with another piece of land. In Somerset in 1845 during the Irish potato famine the blight
wiped out all the potatoes. Due to the
laborers' extreme dependence on them, this was a disaster because their wages
averaged a mere seven shillings and six pence a week year around: "For years past their daily diet is
potatoes for breakfast, dinner, and supper, and potatoes only. This year they are not living on potatoes,
because they have none." In
Sussex, Somerville found a laborer's wife complaining about "how it hurts
the constitution of a man to work hard on potatoes, and nothing else but a bit
of dry bread." This family ate
four days a week normally only potatoes and dry bread. Somerville even exaggerated how important
potatoes were in the diet of English laborers.
When commenting on how the potato blight had wiped out the crop in the
south and west of England, he said this event had gotten far less attention
than the Irish disaster: "Surely
the English potatoes are not to be overlooked, nor the English labourers, whose
chief article of diet potatoes are. . . .
How much greater must be the suffering be when to dearness of bread
there is the companionship of scarcity of potatoes!" Now although potatoes loomed increasingly
large in the laborers' diet, and 1845-46 was a bad year for both England and
Ireland, grains still remained their staff of life generally, unlike for the
Irish. Still, Cobbett's anti-potato
campaign must be ranked an ultimate failure:
Near the town of Farnham where Cobbett was born and buried, Somerville
found "the finest specimens of this year's crop which I have seen in any
part of England," having seen some excellent patches of potatoes between
that place and the location of Cobbett's farm at Normandy.41
Did Farmworkers Prefer Coarse or Fine Food?
Against
the view that the farmworkers (or slaves, by implication) prefer finer and less
coarse foods, Jeffries once commented on Hodge's desires and the problems with
changing what Mrs. Hodge winds up cooking:
The difficulty arises from the rough, coarse tastes of
the labourer, and the fact, which it is useless to ignore, that he must have
something solid, and indeed, bulky. . . . Give him the finest soup; give him pates,
or even more meaty entrees, and his remark will be that it is very nice,
but he wants 'summat to eat'. His teeth
are large, his jaws strong, his digestive powers such as would astonish a city
man; he likes solid food, bacon, butcher's meat, cheese, or something that
gives him a sense of fullness, like a mass of vegetables. This is the natural result of his training
to work in the fields. . . .
Let anyone go and labour daily in the field, and they will come quickly
to the same opinion.
Although his rather condescending views were on target
concerning food preparation, they ignore the farmworkers' desires for a less
coarse grain since it may compose 80 percent or more of their diets. Certainly, some class bias is definitely
coloring Jeffries' views of Hodge's real desires. Consider the implications of bread remaining the staff of life
for the laborers and making up most of their daily calories. To switch from wheat to barley, or to
oatmeal without milk, would tax anyone's digestive system used to the first
grain when it is most of what he or she eats, not just an incidental as
(wheat) bread is in many contemporary Americans' diets. Anyway, Jeffries was not discussing grain
substitution at all. Unlike most aristocrats,
the laborers engaged in heavy physical work needed serious bulk in their diet
in order to have sufficient calories to sustain their efforts, but their food
need not be unusually hard to digest or unpalatably coarse after its
preparation to fulfill their needs.
Indeed, according to Young, food that was too bulky might slow down the
laborers eating it. As E.P. Thompson
confirms: "There is a suggestion
that labourers accustomed to wheaten bread actually could not work--suffered
from weakness, indigestion, or nausea--if forced to change to rougher
mixtures."42
Although these complaints were likely partially psychosomatic, they
still show the laborers preferred less-coarse grain in their diet.
Admittedly,
the southern farmworkers' partiality for the white wheaten loaf was rather
unwise from a modern dietician's viewpoint, as Olmsted observed: "No doubt a coarser bread would be more
wholesome, but it is one of the strongest prejudices of the English peasant,
that brown bread is not fit for human beings." This comment raises the issue of taking into account the
laborers' definitions of "good conditions" before judging these by
purely modern criteria. Snell discusses
this issue at length. If Hodge placed a
strong priority on eating fine white wheat bread, outsiders are presumptuous to
rearrange his life for him, saying he should like what they judge to be
"good for him," even though objective reasons justify the would-be
imposition, i.e., the health advantages of increasing the amount of bran in the
daily diet. The threat to the status of
English laborers posed by coarser or non-wheaten bread in times of dearth was
rather irrational, but it still was probably more sensible than a contemporary
preference among the young for designer brand jeans or sneakers over store
brands of similar quality. The
"Brown Bread Act's" attempts to force laborers to consume bread made
of wholemeal flour provoked riots even during the terrible 1800-1801
agricultural year. In Surrey and Sussex
in southern England, the resistance to this law was especially strong;
unsurpisingly, it lasted less than two months.43
The
Monotony of the Farmworkers' Diet in the South of England
The
southern English agricultural workers' diet was monotonous, like the slaves'. In the Salisbury area (1850) Caird found it
largely consisted of water, bread, some potatoes, flour with a little butter,
and possibly a little bacon. He reports
what sounds like a prisoner's meal:
"The supper very commonly consists of bread and water." In 1840s Wiltshire, Somerville found two
laborers who could not afford bacon and vegetables with every dinner on eight
shillings a week. Following a recent
wage reduction, "they did not know how they would with seven
[shillings]." In Wooburn parish,
even in an apple orchard area most laborers did not earn enough to make apple
pies! Years later (c. 1875), in this
same general area, Jefferies still commented while noting improvement: "A basketful of apples even from the
farmer's orchard [as a gift] is a treat to the children, for, though better fed
than formerly, their diet is necessarily monotonous, and such fruit as may be
grown in the cottage garden is, of course, sold." Near Monmouth, Olmsted ran into a laborer
who, although he also had a pig and a small potato patch, "oft-times
. . . could get nothing more than dry bread for his family to
eat."44 Thomas Smart, a
Bedfordshire laborer, and his family subsisted upon garden-grown potatoes,
bread, and cheese, with a little bacon occasionally, supplemented by tea and a
little sugar. At times he went without
meat for a month. Milk was difficult to
buy from the local farmers.45
The hot dinner laborers had around noon on Sunday Jeffries
described as their "the great event" for the day. Of course, beer certainly emerged in Hodge's
diet around harvest time, and often not just then. The alcoholic part of the laborers' diets provoked the rural
middle and upper classes into nearly endless moralizing, at least about its
abuses that caused the father's wages to be wasted in beerhouses and a lack of
labor discipline. Due to the near
absence of meat, this diet was arguably less satisfying than slaves', except
that its bread often was purchased baker's bread. This bread, or even what the laborer's wife made at home, was a
much more carefully prepared and refined product than the cornmeal the slaves
often had to pound into a crude hoecake or johnnycake (cornbread). As Olmsted (c. 1851) observed while in
southern England:
The main stay of the laborer's stomach is fine, white
wheaten bread, of the best possible quality, such as it would be a luxury to
get any where else in the world, and such as many a New England farmer never
tasted, and, even if his wife were able to make it, would think an extravagance
to be ordinarily upon his table.46
Admittedly, white wheat bread likely was the only
luxury Hodge and his family in the south of England enjoyed. Despite this particular boon, a lack of meat
still characterized the southern English agricultural laborer's diet,
although not the northerner's. All in
all, the slaves' "standard rations" arguably, minus the problems of eating
crude corn bread and the risk of pellagra without further supplements, likely
surpassed in overall satisfaction what the majority of the free agricultural
laborers of England depended on because meat (and milk) fell out of their diet
as enclosure advanced, making it difficult or impossible for them to keep their
own cows or pigs (see pp. 40-41 below), and they often did not consume enough
even of starches (potatoes and bread) in hard times.
The Superior Conditions of the Northern English
Farmworkers
The
northern English agricultural laborer clearly enjoyed superior conditions to
his southern brother (or sister) during the general period of
industrialization. Joseph Arch recalled
why the union failed in organizing the northern farmworkers:
We could not do much in the north; about Newcastle and
those northern districts the men were much better paid, and they said, 'The
Union is a good thing, but we are well off and can get along without it.' The Union was strongest, and kept so, in the
Midland, Eastern, and Western counties.
In northern England near Scotland, in Northumberland
and Durham, the 1867-68 Commissioners found the wages were high and that the
labor market favored the laborers. The
institution of service still persisted in northern Northumberland in the mid to
late 1860s. They were often paid in
kind and received fifteen to eighteen shillings a week. Day laborers--those not under a contract for
their service--received two and a half to three shillings a day. Since the laborers' cottages were dispersed,
they avoided the pitfalls of the gang system since they lived on or near their
employer's premises, thus eliminating long walks to work. Wages were high enough so their children
rarely went to work before age fourteen except during summers, when
eleven-twelve year olds took to the fields during agriculture's seasonal peak
in labor requirements. In southern
Northumberland, none under ten worked.
Higher wages allowed northern laborers' children to receive more
education than their southern counterparts, where the much smaller margin above
subsistence correspondingly increased the need for them to earn their keep as
soon as possible. As another sign of
the North's tight labor market, routinely single women living in their
parents' home often were in farm service--"bound" in
"bondage"--and did all types of heavy farm work.47 Excepting perhaps for housing (see p. 69),
this area's agricultural workers were about as well-off as non-skilled manual
laborers then could expect.
Away
from these areas near Scotland, wages gradually decline until the
Lincoln\Leicester area is reached, where a rather abrupt transition to southern
English conditions occurs. Lincoln and
Nottingham had wages of fifteen to seventeen shillings a week, but Leicester
just eleven. Their diets reflected
these wage differences, since in Lincoln laborers' families had meat two or
three times a day, while in Leicester only the father had it, and then just
once a day. Similarly, for Oxfordshire
and nearby, Somerville described many laborers as "always under-fed, even
if always employed." By contrast,
Yorkshire's higher wages of fourteen shillings per week encouraged parents to
keep their children in school longer.
There farm service still remained, with foremen receiving thirty pounds
a year and board, a wagoner, sixteen to twenty pounds, and plowboys, ten to
fourteen. Tom Mullins of Stafford
remembered at age seventeen (c. 1880) he earned sixteen pounds per year and his
keep. In Stafford, where during his
life he moved from the southern to the northern part. (Incidently, Caird's wage line falls at this county's southern
border). Oatmeal, frequently turned
into thin sour cakes shaped like disks, along with dairy products, formed the
mainstay of the diet before c. 1890.
"Though wages were low people managed on them and also saved a
bit. Ten shillings went a lot further
then than now. Bread was 3d. the
quartern loaf, milk 3d. a quart, tobacco 3d. an ounce . . . beer was 2d., the
best was 3d." Since service
persisted in his area, an annual hiring fair took place about October tenth
each year. "But I never need to
hire myself out, as I always had more jobs offered than I could undertake. Pity I couldn't have spread myself a
bit!"48 As these
descriptions illustrate, the diet of the farm laborers north of Caird's line
was quite good, showing unquestionably that they were better off on average
than most slaves in the United States even before considering any quality of
life factors.49
Meat as a Luxury For Many Farmworkers
Unlike
most slaves, the meat English farm laborers ate often came from what animals
they personally owned and slaughtered themselves, assuming they were not sold
to meet rent, clothing, or other expenses.
In Wiltshire, near Cranbourne, Somerville found "all of them [the
laborers] kept a pig or two; but they had to sell them to pay their
rents." A Sussex farmer/relieving
officer told Parliamentary Commissioners that "every labourer at that time
[pre-1794] had a pig." Farmworkers
in that area then got pork from feeding their own animal, not directly from the
farmers they worked for. Showing a
serious decline in living standards had set in, Somerville found in 1840s
Dorset that often laborers were not allowed to keep a pig: "The dictum of the father of Sir John
Tyrrell, in Essex, is understood and acted on in Dorset--'No labourer can be honest
and feed a pig!'" Betraying a
materialistic bent, Cobbett summarized well how important owning pigs was to
the laborers: "The working people
[near Worcester] all seem to have good large gardens, and pigs in their
styes; and this last, say the feelosofers what they will about her 'antallectal
enjoyments,' is the only security for happiness in a labourer's
family." Of course, as part of
their duties for their masters, slaves raised pigs and other animals for
slaughter. But they did not own them
personally, except where their masters and mistresses allowed them to, such as
the task-system-dominated area of lowland Georgia and South Carolina. In England, butcher's meat (i.e., the meat
of animals killed and already cut up for the buyer) was regarded as a
luxury. Consequently, classes above the
laborers were its main consumers.50 Jefferies heaped scorn on maidservants, born of fathers still at
the plow, who when at "home ha[d] been glad of bread and bacon," but
after having worked for wealthy tenant farmers, "now cannot possibly
survive without hot butcher's meat every day, and game and fish in their
seasons."51
The meat laborers ate was often what they had raised themselves, whether
it was on the commons before enclosure, on allotments, or in their own
gardens. Depending on the commercial
market for meat was not a way to economize.
Scarce until after around 1830, allotments helped laborers raise their
own pigs (when so allowed). Indeed, in
some areas with allotments many or most did keep pigs, in part because these
produced some of the needed manure to keep their (say) fourth or half acre
fertile.52 But as the
enclosure movement gained strength after 1760, stripping farmworkers of grazing
land, they largely lost their ability to raise their own animals until
allotments slowly, partially, and haphazardly restored this ability after c.
1830.
The
Effects of Enclosure and Allotments on Hodge's Diet
Although
a more general discussion enclosure and alllotments' social effects appears
below (pp. 279-282, 296-299), the effects of both on the diet of the farmworkers
are considered here. Enclosure affected
cottagers and others who mixed wage earning and subsistence agriculture using
the commons by cutting out the latter, throwing them fully upon what their
wages could purchase. As E.P. Thompson
observes: "In village after
village, enclosure destroyed the scratch-as-scratch-can subsistence economy of
the poor--the cow or geese--fuel from the common, gleanings, and all the
rest." Ironically, as the
Parliamentary Commissioners observed in 1867-68, allotments undid this
consequence of enclosure, although they came later and affected significantly
fewer laborers, especially before the late nineteenth century. They allowed the laborers to grow
vegetables, especially potatoes, on a quarter or half acre of land specially
rented out to them. Despite his
notoriety as an advocate of enclosure, agricultural improvement writer Arthur
Young learned that enclosure usually oppressed the poor:
In twenty-nine cases out of thirty-one noted [by
ministers making additional comments on a survey checking the effects of
enclosure on grain production], the poor, in the opinion of the ministers, were
sufferers by losing their cows, and other stock. . . . [In some
cases] allotments were assigned them; but as they were unable to be at the
expense of the enclosure, it forced them not only to sell their cows, but their
houses also. This is a very hard
case, though a legal one; and as instances are not wanting of a much more
humane conduct, it is to be lamented that the same motives did not operate in
all.
These Anglican clerics (members of a group known to be
generally unfriendly to the laborers' best interests, as Cobbett and Arch made
clear) made comments that indicate enclosure's role in worsening the diet of
the poor in various areas following the loss of cows and other animals. One for the parish of Souldrop, Bedford
observed: "The condition of the
labouring poor [is] much worse now than before the enclosure, owing to the
impossibility of procuring any milk for their young families." Another added, for Tingewick,
Buckingham: "Milk [was] to be had
at 1d. per quarter before; not to be had now at any rate." Repeatedly they saw many had to sell off or
otherwise lose their cows (sixteen of the thirty-one mentioned this
specifically). For Passenham,
Northampton, one commented: "[The
poor were] deprived of their cows, and great suffers by loss of their
hogs." A man of the cloth for
Cranage, Chester remarked: "Poor
men's cows and sheep have no place, or any being." Such deprivations helped to breed resentment
one laborer expressed against almost anyone richer than himself. While attacking farmers, lords, and parsons,
he additionally brought Somerville into his line of fire: "I see you ha' got a good coat on your
back, and a face that don't look like an empty belly; there be no hunger
looking out atween your ribs I'll swear."53 Clearly, enclosure robbed meat and milk from
the mouths of many farm laborers and their families, and was a major cause for
eliminating animal foods from their diets as the enclosure movement gained
steam after 1760 in areas with a labor surplus, such as southern rural England.
Allotments
returned some of what enclosure had taken.
These small pieces of land gave underemployed and unemployed farmworkers
something to fall back upon financially.
Because of the Swing riots of 1830-31 and the rising burden of poor
rates caused by laborers applying for relief when their wages were insufficient
to support them, the movement to rent out fourth- or half-acre pieces of land
picked up speed as the nineteenth century passed. Intensively cultivated, small amounts of land could produce
impressive amounts of food, as the 1843 Committee reported. One rood of land--usually one-fourth of an
acre--could grow six months' worth of vegetables! Perhaps one-half would be planted in potatoes, with the rest
being beans, peas, and other vegetables.
One-eighth of an acre could grow five pounds' worth of crops--equal to
ten weeks or more of wages for many laborers in southern England. In at least once case, such a tiny parcel
produced eighty bushels of carrots, fourteen-fifteen bushels of other
vegetables, which was double or triple what the typical farmer would have
raised on the same land. A rood's worth
of land could also yield a hundred bushels of potatoes. Young even published calculations suggesting
that if 682,394 laborer's families each grew a half acre's worth of potatoes,
then England would have required no grain imports in the disastrous 1800-1801
agricultural year. Because of the
laborers' enormous desires for parcels to grow potatoes on--Cobbett's hated
root--some landlords unscrupulously charged rents up to eight pounds per acre
per year, which greatly exceeded what a tenant farmer would pay. Allotments could allow the farmworkers to
keep animals such as pigs, as noted above (pp. 39-40), potentially enabling
them to eat meat more regularly. One
M.P. for Lincoln helped tenants by renting out small allotments to keep animals
on. The 1867-68 Commission reported
that in Yorkshire some laborers benefited from having "cow gates" to
pasture cows in lanes nearby.54 Allotments often made a major difference in the diets of English
agricultural laborers fortunate enough to have them. These were unquestionably more important in their lives than the
patches of land slaveowners allowed many American slaves to cultivate. Unlike for the farmworkers, masters and
mistresses automatically gave to the slaves the standard rations, which was
most of what they ate, excepting some in task system areas, unlike in England
unless the worker was a live-in farm servant.
Comparing the Diets of English Paupers, Slaves, and
Their Government's Army
Indicating
that many southern English agricultural workers arguably had a diet worse than
that of many slaves, consider this comparison between the food they received
and what their respective governments gave to lowly privates in their
armies. The laborers per family on
parish relief received less than what one soldier in the Royal Army did, but at
least some slaves received rations that compared favorably to the American
army's. As Cobbett vehemently
protested:
The base wretches know well, that the common
foot-soldier now receives more pay per week (7s. 7d.) exclusive
of clothing, firing, candle, and lodging; . . . [and]
more to go down his own single throat, than the overseers and
magistrates allow [in parish relief] to a working man, his wife and three
children.55
As a growing population raised unemployment rates and
enclosure eliminated agriculture's subsistence economy, many laborers, probably
a solid majority in the south, were on parish relief for extended periods
during their lives, especially during the winter.56 Since arable agriculture was a highly
seasonal business, many more laborers were out of work in winter than in
summer, causing many to depend on parish relief or at various parish make-work
jobs such as stonebreaking on the highways or flint gathering in the
fields. The disproportion between at
least some slaves and the U.S. Army's rations for privates appears smaller than
the ratio between farm laborers on parish relief and average English
soldiers. Olmsted cited an
advertisement in the Richmond Enquirer which listed one and a quarter
pounds of beef and one and three-sixteenths pounds of bread--presumably
hardtack--as the daily ration, with an additional eight quarts of beans, two
quarts of salt, four pounds of coffee, and eight pounds of sugar distributed
out over each hundred days. In
contrast, the Daily Georgian noted the rations for slaves being hired
for a year to work on a canal. Each was
to receive "three and a half pounds of pork or bacon, and ten quarts of
gourd seed corn per week." At
least some masters would beat this ration of pork: Planter Barrow Bennet gave "weakly" "4 pound &
5 pound of meat to evry thing that goes in the field--2 pound over 4 years 1 1/2 between 15 months and 4 years
old--Clear good meat."57
Evidently, the disproportion was greater between what the British
government gave its privates and its laborers in parish relief (admittedly,
those not working) and what the American government gave its soldiers and a
number of slaveowners gave their slaves.
Better
Bread Versus Little Meat?: The Slave
Versus Farmworker Diet
Many
bondsmen in America had arguably better diets than many farmworkers in England,
at least when living south of Caird's wage line. Three pounds of pork or bacon routinely appeared in the diet of
most adult slaves, while many southern English agricultural workers, once both
population growth and enclosures took off, had meat generally eliminated from
their diets during the period c. 1780-1840.
On the other hand, the grain the slaves ate often was coarser, and (perhaps)
more nutritionally suspect. Wheat
bread, often made by a baker, which most southern farm workers mainly subsisted
upon, was clearly a more refined and tasty product than maize crudely pounded
and cooked in the forms of hoecake and johnnycake. Reflecting how the laborers had lost meat, but had a much finer
grain product compared to the slaves, J. Boucher, vicar of Epsom, observed in
late 1800: "Our Poor live not only
on the finest wheaten bread, but almost on bread alone."58 It remains unclear who ate more
vegetables. In this regard, those
laborers fortunate enough to have allotments--a serious possibility only
towards the end of the period being surveyed here--probably were better off
than a majority of the slaves, many of whom lived almost exclusively on the
"standard rations" of corn and pork.
Most farmworkers were not this lucky, and the stories of privation noted
above (pp. 30-32) suggest what
vegetables they had were limited to potatoes.
Regional variations within England complicate this picture: The minority of farmworkers fortunate enough
to live in the north near where competition for labor by industry and mining
pushed up their wages were certainly better off materially than most American
slaves, even before considering any more ethereal quality of life
criteria. As for American regional
variations, the Border States such as Virginia or Kentucky may have treated
their slaves better. But the difference
may have been been more in the form of less brutal treatment than in better
food, since Frederick Douglass, John Brown, and Charles Ball in Maryland and
Virginia describe rations similar to the evidence encountered from elsewhere in
the South. (Regional variations in the
food given to slaves, however, need much more research). The differences between America, a sparsely
populated, newly settled country, and England, a relatively densely populated
and intensively farmed land suffering from the Malthusian effects of rapid
population growth during its period of industrialization (and the mismanagement
of enclosure), helps explain this supreme irony: The free farm laborers of southern England arguably had a diet
worse than that of American bondsmen in Mississippi or Georgia. If those kept in slavery--the worst American
human rights abuse, all things considered--may have eaten better than English
rural laborers, that is deeply to the shame of England's elite--"old
corruption."59
Clothing for Slaves
The
amount of clothing slaves received is relatively well-documented, because it was
a significant item of expense often bought off-plantation and then shipped and
issued to the slaves instead of being made right on it. This generalization does not deny how
prevalent homespun clothing was in the South, but shows planters and other
masters often chose not to run truly self-sufficient plantations or farms in
matters of clothing. Because low
quality purchases were made, not many months passed before the slaves'
"new" clothes became loose-fitting half-rags. Bennet Barrow dispensed a not-atypical
clothing ration per year, at least for larger planters. In his "Rules of Highland
Plantation" he stated: "I
give them cloths twice a year, two--one pair shoues for winter evry third year a blanket--'single
negro--two.'" His relatively
frequent issue of blankets was perhaps unusual. He dutifully noted their issuance sometimes in his diary. Escaped slave Francis Henderson, from
"Washington City, D. C.," recalled that his master dealt with
blankets less generously--he received only one before running away at age
nineteen. "In the summer we had
one pair of linen trousers given us--nothing else; every fall, one pair of
woolen pantaloons, one woollen jacket, and two cotton shirts." In Virginia, Olmsted learned that:
As to the clothing of the slaves on the plantations,
they are said to be usually furnished by their owners or masters, every year,
each with a coat and trousers, of a coarse woollen or woollen and cotton stuff
(mostly made, especially for this purpose, in Providence, R. I.) for winter,
trousers of cotton osnaburghs for summer, sometimes with a jacket also of the
same; two pairs of strong shoes, or one pair of strong boots and one of lighter
shoes for harvest; three shirts, one blanket, and one felt hat.
This optimistic description probably pertained to the
more ideal masters and what slaveowners by reputation were supposed
to do, or reflected the better treatment of slaves the Border States such as
Virginia were known for. Later, in a
conversation with an old free black man, he observed: "Well, I've been thinking, myself, the niggars did not look
so well as they did in North Carolina and Virginia; they are not so well
clothed, and they don't appear so bright as they do there." Additionally, Christmas gifts of certain
finery could supplement the basic yearly ration of two summer suits and one
winter suit, as he noted about four large adjacent plantations "situated
on a tributary of the Mississippi" owned by one normally absentee
planter. Slaves also could purchase
clothes with earnings from working on Sundays, holidays, or late at night.60 Hence, the slaves normally were issued a
certain amount of clothing yearly, but was it enough?
Bad Clothing Conditions for Slaves
Evidence
repeatedly points to the everyday work clothes of enslaved blacks being near
rags. The semi-tropical weather of the
Deep South no doubt contributed to slaveowners' complacency with ill-dressed
slaves. Perhaps the reason why Olmsted
had observed better dressed slaves in Virginia and North Carolina was because
planters and other slaveholders knew these states had harsher climates compared
to the Deep South, which encouraged them to distribute more and/or better
clothes. Even so, ragged slaves were
common throughout the South. Born free
in North Carolina, Thomas Hedgebeth had worked for various slaveholders. He saw how badly dressed the slaves were at
one place. They had no hats while
having to work in the fields in summer.
As he described:
They were a bad looking set--some twenty of
them--starved and without clothing enough for decency. It ought to have been a disgrace to their
master, to see them about his house. If
a man were to go through Canada [where he was living at the time] so, they'd
stop him to know what he meant by it--whether it was poverty or if he was
crazy,--and they'd put a suit of clothes on him.
The slaves Olmsted saw while passing by on a train in
Virginian fields were "very ragged."
At one farm in Virginia, "the field-hands wore very coarse and
ragged garments." A different problem
appeared on the rice-island estate Kemble stayed at. The slaves issued a fair amount of thick cloth to turn into
clothes. But in coastal lowland
Georgia's hot climate the resulting garments were virtually intolerable during
summer, even to the blacks accustomed to the climate.61 Simply put, their clothes were so bad
because their owners basically determined how much would be spent on them, not
the slaves themselves. Their masters'
self-interest naturally led to them to minimize "unnecessary clothing
expenditures."
Slave
children suffered most from inadequate clothing rations. Often they ended up with just a long shirt,
although nakedness was not unknown. Aged
freedwoman Mary Reynolds of Louisiana recalled what she wore when she was
young: "In them days I weared
shirts, like all the young-uns. They
had collars and come below the knees and was split up the sides. That's all we weared in hot
weather." Frederick Douglass
recalled his want of clothing when he was a child:
I suffered much from hunger, but much more from
cold. In hottest summer and coldest
winter, I was kept almost naked--no shoes, no stockings, no jacket, no
trousers, nothing on but a coarse tow linen shirt, reaching only to my knees.
He found the thought of owning a pair of trousers at
the age of seven or eight--offered because he was being sent to Baltimore to
work as a servant--"great indeed!"
Aged freedman Cicero Finch of Georgia remembered how both slave boys and
girls wore the same basic piece of clothing:
An' de chillun?
When dey big 'nough ter put on anything, it's a shirt. Boys an' girls de same. Run roun' in dat shirt-tail. Some de gals tie belt roun' de middle, an'
dat's de only diffrunts.
In an upbeat recollection presumably blurred by
nostalgia, old ex-slave Kike Epps of South Carolina described a still lower
standard that prevailed for children's clothing on his master's
plantation: "Dis hy'ar [banyan]
shu't . . . wuh made jus' lak a sack. Got hole in top fo' de haid, an' holes fo' de arms. Pull it over yo' haid, push yo' arms t'rough
de side holes, an' dar yo' is!"
They would wear this bag with holes "till dey mos' growed
up!" Due to South Carolina's warm
climate even in winter, he wore this outfit without complaint, making for a
decidedly different memory from Frederick Douglass's bitter experience in
Maryland's much harsher winters.
Although this pattern had exceptions, generally little was spent on
children's clothes because they did no field labor when young, causing the less
forward-looking "entrepreneurial" slaveowners to "invest"
less in their "human capital" at this point in their lives, to use
desiccated cliometric terminology.62
Differences in Clothing Provided for Slaves with
Different Positions
Just
as for food, different groups of slaves received different kinds and/or amounts
of clothing. Most obviously, the larger
planters issued better clothes to servants than to field hands, since they had
to look presentable to the big house's visitors.63 They also received the cast-offs of the
master's family, in the same way they enjoyed the scrapings and leftovers of
the master's table. After being made a
servant as a child, old freedman Henry Coleman remembered his mother told his
father about one of his new needs:
"That black little nigger over there, he got to git hisself some
pants 'cause I's gwine to put him up over the white folks's table." His job was to swish away flies from a swing
with a brush of peacock feathers over his owner's table. To wear only a shirt from that elevated
position just might prove to be too revealing!
Slaves with managerial duties also acquired better attire. Olmsted described the
"watchman"--the top slave who served virtually as a steward and
storekeeper for a large South Carolina rice planter--as being as well-dressed
and as well-mannered as any (white) gentleman.
One ex-slave said his father, a driver, was "de only slave dat was
give de honor to wear boots."64 So at the cost of living under a master's or mistress's closer
supervision, drivers and domestic servants enjoyed greater material benefits
such as having better food and clothing.
Many
slaves saved their best clothing for going to church on Sundays or special
occasions, but reserved the worst for work.
Gus Feaster, a South Carolinian freedman, remembered:
Us wore the best clothes that us had [at
church]. . . . Us kept
them cleaned and ironed just like the master and the young masters done
theirn. Then us wore a string tie, that
the white folks done let us have, to church.
That 'bout the onliest time that a darky was seed with a tie.
Solomon Northrup, held in bondage in Louisiana,
recalled that on Christmas slaves dressed up the best they could:
Then, too, 'of all i' the year,' they array themselves
in their best attire. The cotton coat
has been washed clean, the stump of a tallow candle has been applied to the
shoes, . . . [and, perhaps] a rimless or crownless hat
. . . [was] placed jauntily upon the head.
Many women wore red ribbons in the hair or
handkerchiefs over their heads then as well.
Kemble saw a similar phenomenon, comparing it to poor Irish immigrants
who spent (judging from her middle class standpoint) too much on clothes after
coming to America:
I drove to church to-day in the wood-wagon, with Jack
and Aleck, Hector being our charioteer, in a gilt guard-chain and pair of
slippers to match as the Sabbatic part of his attire. . . . The [male] Negroes certainly show the same
strong predilection for finery with their womenkind.
Most strikingly, a free black man from North Carolina
peddling tobacco in South Carolina told Olmsted how differently the slaves
dressed while on the job compared to church:
Well, master, Sundays dey is mighty well clothed, dis
country; 'pears like dere an't nobody looks better Sundays dan dey do. But Lord!
workin' days, seems like dey haden no close dey could keep on 'um at
all, master. Dey is a'mos' naked, wen
deys at work, some on 'em.65
Of course, since they normally worked six days out of
seven, bondsmen could not wear good clothes every work day without ruining all
they had. Most lacked the necessary
changes of shirts and pants to do that.
Dressing badly at work compared to church or other special occasions
also may have reflected their different attitudes towards the two
situations. On the day they are free
from work and "own their own time," they dressed to express
themselves. But when they are in the
fields, six days out of seven, and their time is the master's time, they
avoided dressing above average or trying to impress their companions in
bondage, unlike at church on Sundays.
Doing so might well bring the unwanted attentions of the overseer or
master against some "uppity" black.66 Bondsmen and women indulged in what Kemble
called "the passion for dress" not everyday, but only on days where
the immediate coercion associated with work ceased.
The Factory Versus Homespun: The Master's Decision
Masters
acquired clothing for their slaves in two different ways. First, they could place orders with
factories in the North or in England.
Second, they could make homespun right on the farm or plantation
itself. Olmsted time and time again
refers to the ubiquity of homespun as worn by whites in the South,
including the smaller planters, which he rarely witnessed in the North. When summarizing the economic backwardness
of the South, he pointed out: "How
is it that while in Ohio the spinning-wheel and hand-loom are curiosities, and
homespun would be a conspicuous and noticeable material of clothing, half the
white population of Mississippi still dress in homespun, and at every second
house the wheel and loom are found in operation?"67 One of Bennet Barrow's most common diary
notations describing his slaves' daily work concerned slave women spinning on
rainy days which kept them (at least) busy.
Slaves and others recalled the making of homespun clothing.68 Here the white population's standard of
living constitutes a ceiling on the black/slave population's conditions. Slaves are exceedingly unlikely to have
anything routinely better than their white neighbors, outside of exceptional
individuals such as the aforementioned "watchman" on one South
Carolina rice plantation. Homespun was
coarser cloth and required much time to produce, but had the advantage of
reducing cash outlays for subsistence farmers.
They gained more independence from the market, but at the cost of many
extra hours of labor. Submitting to the
division of labor, which small farmers accessed through the market, always
presents trade-offs: They could stay
independent, and either go without or put more hours of their lives into
producing at home what could be bought instead, or pay for it, using cash
earned from cash crops sold on an open market, knowing that a sustained price
drop could ruin them.
Unfortunately
for the slaves, when their masters chose to rely on the market, the clothing
often specially manufactured for them was of a cheap, low-grade quality. Clothes made of "Negro cloth" were
durable but rough on the skin. Even
clothes made of this material may not last that long, since they often had only
one or two sets of clothes to wear, besides any finery they might luckily
possess. Having so few clothes made it
hard to wash and clean their clothes more than once a week.69 Since they often did not have another full
set of clothes to change into, the daily wear and tear on what they did own was
nearly ceaseless during the work week.
Clearly, since the slaveowners normally chose what and how much the
market produced, it was hardly a savior in providing better clothes for the
slaves.
Slaves and Shoe Shortages
Slaves
also suffered from not having enough pairs of shoes or boots. The South's warm climate fortunately
mitigated this shortage's negative effects, especially in the Deep South. Old freedwoman Nicey Kinney recalled that
the freedmen after emancipation when going to church were "in their Sunday
clothes, and they walked barefoots with their shoes acrost their shoulders to
keep 'em from gitting dirty. Just 'fore
they got to the church they stopped and put on their
shoes . . ." This
obviously implies that many slaves preferred to go barefoot at times, at
least in summer. Still, Barrow knew the
dog days of August could torment even his blacks' feet: "ground here verry hot to the negros
feet." But when cold weather
closed in, lacking adequate protection for the feet suddenly became
dangerous. Once the jealous mistress of
Harriet Brent Jacobs ordered her to take off her creaking new shoes. Later she was sent on a long errand during
which she had to walk in the snow barefoot.
After returning and going to bed, she thought might end up sick, even
dead. "What was my grief on waking
to find myself quite well!" As a
slave child, Frederick Douglass recalled what going barefoot did to his
feet in Maryland's winter: "My
feet have been so cracked with the frost, that the pen with which I am writing
might be laid in the gashes."
Freedwoman Mary Reynolds had to wear shoes with brass studs in the toes
and sides which hurt her ankles because they were too small. Despite rubbing tallow into these shoes and
putting rags in them, they still left her with life-long scars. Similar to their clothing situation, slave
children were even more neglected about being given proper shoes--many received
none at all. One Virginia slaveowner
ruefully regretted the deadly result of failing to shod one slave, telling
Olmsted that: "He lost a valuable
negro, once, from having neglected to provide him with shoes."70 Judging from how masters and mistresses
tended to neglect supplying their bondsmen with sufficient clothing, deeming it
rather optional, especially in the Deep South, the slaves were even more apt to
be ill-supplied with shoes, especially since they themselves did not always
wish to wear them. Slaves certainly
were unlikely to have more shoes than they needed!
Just as for clothing, masters and
mistresses could get their bondsmen shoes from two different basic
sources. One standard approach,
commonly used by the larger planters, was to order them from some company in
the North or England. Brogans, basic,
hard, and heavy work shoes, were not purchased while meditating on the tenderness
of the slaves' feet. They were often
ordered a size large, since the certainty of the fit was questionable when
ordering from a distance. Barrow
repeatedly recorded giving shoes to his slaves, always in October when
noted. He said they were issued for winter
yearly, which has its implications about the rest of the year. Alternatively, shoes could be made locally
and individually by a shoemaker, perhaps by a slave craftsman owned by the
planter himself.71
Either way, the ration of shoes given out each year was unlikely to last
until the next year's new allowance arrived while suffering under the strain of
heavy field work. The bondsmen's
pre-teen children were fortunate to get any shoes at all, since they rarely
worked with the crops.
Fogel and Engerman's Optimistic Take on Slaves'
Clothing Rations
Pressing
forth an optimistic line on slave clothing allowances, Fogel and Engerman
claim:
These [records from large plantations] indicate that a
fairly standard annual issue for adult males was four shirts (of cotton), four
pairs of pants (two of cotton and two of wool), and one or two pairs of
shoes. Adult women were issued four
dresses per year, or the material needed to make four dresses. Hats were also typically issued annually
(women received headkerchiefs).
Blankets were issued once every two or three years.
They add that sometimes slaveowners issued socks,
underclothes, petticoats, jackets, and coats, the latter for winter
months. Likely only the most
paternalistic masters indulged in such a high yearly issue. Two or three sets of clothes seem a more
likely average annual ration, as Sutch argues.
Barrow issued blankets every three years, but Francis Henderson's master
was apparently far less generous. The
exemplary planters Fogel and Engerman cite must be offset against the very
neglectful ones. Ball gave his editor a
horror story about his fellow slaves' lack of clothing on a large cotton
plantation in South Carolina. In the
work gang, none had a full set of clothes, with "not one of the others
[besides himself] had on even the remains of two pieces of apparel," and
many of the teenage slaves were naked.
Although an abolitionist editor's bias may have distorted this story,
undeniably most slaves looked on workdays terribly ragged by Northern free
white standards.72
Clothing and English Agricultural Workers
Turning
to the English case, documenting conditions becomes significantly harder. Since the farmworkers normally bought
clothing on their own, sources similar to that of the planters' records of
clothing bought for their slaves do not exist.
Furthermore, the kind of clothing the lower classes wore in England was
often differed little in general appearance from the middle class's. Unlike other European societies, England had
no required "peasant costume" that automatically marked off those working
the land from the rest of society. But
similar to many French peasants, many agricultural workers did wear
smocks. Somerville once saw a crowd, of
at least one thousand men, women, and children, who gathered to hear anti-corn
law speeches. The men, composing
two-thirds of it, mostly wore "smock-frocks or fustian coats, just as they
had come from their work." This
outfit's prevalence gradually declined as the nineteenth century progressed. As a youth in Warwick (c. 1840), Joseph Arch
was given a smock of the coarsest cloth to wear, like other plowboys in his
village. Since the sons of the local
artisans sported cloth-coats (albeit made of shoddy material), they felt
superior to the farmworkers' sons. The
difference resulted in "regular pitched battles of smock-frock against
cloth-coat." In Sussex, Cobbett
saw a boy wearing a faded, patched blue smock, which made him reflect that he
had worn the same when he was young himself (c. 1775). This boy also had on nailed shoes and a worn
but clean shirt.73
Conspicuously, by comparison, African-American slaves, the lowest of the
low in their society, wore no smocks while in the fields, nor did the white
farmers either.
The Low Standards for Farmworkers, especially in
Southern England
Clothing
standards for agricultural workers, at least in southern England, approached
the bottom of the heap even for the working class. While attacking the upper class's hypocrisy on this score,
Cobbett quoted Sir John Pollen, an M.P. for Andover. Attempting to justify the corn laws as a means of helping the
agricultural laborers, Pollen said the "poor devils" had
"hardly a rag to cover them!"
Somerville knew of one child who lent his shoes to another without any
while they played together. Many of the
budgets that researchers collected on the farmworkers normally had nothing
devoted to purchasing clothing. After
constructing a fairly reasonable, non-luxurious budget, Cobbett found that
maintaining a family of five on five pounds of bread, one pound of mutton, and
two of pork a day cost (c. 1825) over sixty-two pounds a year. This figure, for just food alone,
was more than double what their average annual wages likely totaled, based on a
nine to ten shillings a week average.
Those on parish relief received still less (just seven shillings six
pence per week, by Cobbett's reckoning).
Of course, they ate far less meat than this in reality, ensuring their
budgets came closer to balancing. With
the extra harvest earnings, clothing (perhaps) could be bought for a brief
period annually, since these put the agricultural workers somewhat above
subsistence in much of southern England.
Otherwise, they had to get them by charity or even begging. The Hampshire girls Cobbett saw in their
Sunday best had received from charity a camlet gown, a white apron, and a plaid
cloak each. But the upper class's
generosity was unreliable, especially when by promoting enclosure and high
excise taxes it had taken forcibly from the laborers much more than it ever
gave back. As a result, many
agricultural laborers could only afford to own one change of clothes
altogether, putting them right at or below the level of many slave field hands
in America.74
This conclusion is hardly surprising, because of the high cost of food
for large families where the father was the main or sole support, especially
when his family was scraping bottom during the family life cycle. With the parents struggling to raise a large
number of children, household duties heavily burdening the mother, and only one
child (perhaps) able to start earning a little at age eight or nine, a
virtually guaranteed family financial crisis lasting some years struck working
class families until their children became teenagers and could earn their keep. Under these conditions, clothing expenses
were necessarily cut to the bare bone.
Although
necessary for life, clothing was often an easily postponable purchase, since
the laborer's wife (almost inevitably) could somehow patch and mend what
near-rags the family had for another year or more when a major crisis for the
family or region struck. Encountering a
laborer in northern Hampshire along the road, Somerville found he had four
children and a wife to support on a mere eight shillings per week. Hovering near the bottom of the family
life-cycle, having a wife unable to leave home everyday, and having one
twelve-year-old earning two shillings a week, they could not think of buying
new clothes: "Clothes, bless you! we never have no clothes, not new--not to
speak of as clothes. We thought to have
something new as bread was getting cheaper, but wages came down, and we ben't
better nor afore; it take all we earn to get a bit of
bread . . ."
Although many laborers locally raised pigs, they saw little of them as
food--they sold them to pay the rent, and maybe buy some clothing. As the trade of Poole, Dorset scraped bottom
in 1843, and the surrounding countryside held in the grip of economic distress,
the local people avoided coming into town to buy clothes. Similarly, when the potato blight wiped out
the potatoes of southern and western England in 1845, and high bread prices
came with little or no increases in wages, Somerville heard that: "The village shopkeepers and tradesmen
feel it [the potato famine], and complain that the labourers are neither paying
what they owe for clothes and groceries, nor are they making new
purchases."75
So whenever a family or general distress hit, laborers put off buying
new clothes, since bread or potatoes were more immediately vital to life.
Homespun More Common in America than England c. 1830
A
major difference between the America of 1860 and the America of a generation or
two earlier Cobbett lived in (1792-1800, 1817-1819) was how commonly Northern
farm families made their own homespun clothing. One time he observed "about three thousand farmers, or
rather country people, at a horse-race in Long Island, and my opinion was, that
there were not five hundred who were not dressed in home-spun coats." By the eve of the Civil War, this state of
affairs had plainly changed. Having a
farm on Staten Island, Olmsted certainly had a reasonable idea of conditions on
Long Island. He commented how rare
homespun was in the North, even in a more recently settled state such as Ohio
(see pp. 48-49 above). Cobbett saw the
decline of the home manufacture of clothing as a real privation for farm
families. Correspondingly, he condemned
concentrating its manufacture in the factories of the "Lords of the
Loom." Noting its bad effects
on keeping women employed at home, he points to the downside of the regional
division of labor:
The women and children, who ought to provide a great
part of the raiment, have nothing to do.
The fields must have men and boys; but, where there are men and
boys there will be women and girls; and, as the Lords of the Loom
have now a set of real slaves, by the means of whom they take away a
great part of the employment of the country-women and girls,
these must be kept by poor-rates in whatever degree they lose employment
through the Lords of the Loom.
Clearly, regional specialization and the division of
labor had its costs in economic displacement.
Since the industrial belt in the Midlands made most of England's cloth,
and the tailors of London stitched much of it together, both undermined the
economic independence of agricultural workers and farmers by making much of
England's clothes. In this case,
strongly counter-balancing the advantages of raising the quality and lowering
time spent on making clothes for rural families, the laborers' womenfolk had
much less to do, causing a kind of generalized and semi-hidden underemployment. As general population growth raised the
unemployment rate and the regional and sexual division of labor intensified,
women were pushed out of fieldwork as the eighteenth century drew to a close
and the nineteenth century opened, further impoverishing southern English agricultural
workers. One farmer/relieving officer
in Sussex remembered that the poor once made their own clothing (c. 1794), but
that had changed by 1837.76
By contrast, since America boasted a nearly empty wilderness crying out
for settlement, far more work was available for everyone. Under these conditions, women need not
suffer such want, in part because male wages or work brought in much more
income. Hence, differing national
conditions led to a paradoxical result:
Olmsted saw the American South's heavy dependence on homespun clothing
as a sign of its poverty/economic backwardness, but Cobbett saw its absence in
England as evidence of the rural working class's increased impoverishment.
Special Measures Used to Buy Clothes
Illustrating
the rather desperate clothing situations southern English agricultural workers
endured, consider the implications of one typical self-help used to help solve
it: benefit clubs. In Dorset, Caird knew of a clothing club
that operated in the area around Blandford.
Similar to medical clubs and friendly societies in concept, this
particular one helped meet the clothing needs of rural workers and their
families. The workers contributed one
penny for themselves and per child per week, the employer one penny also, in
equal proportion. At the end of the
year, club members received clothing equal in value to their accounts' totals. Despite only applying a mere bandaid over
the gaping wound of low wages, this approach still encouraged laborers to
exercise more self-discipline. They
already had to operate carefully within low incomes to meet their most
immediate needs outside food and shelter (rent). One anonymous resident rector had the program of selling
"blankets, shoes, and various articles of clothing, at two-thirds of the
prime cost" to laborers. After
having sold them to all in his parish, he later limited sales to the sober,
reliable, and church-going. In a
pamphlet published during the Swing riots stating the laborer's case against
the farmer and landlord's, an anonymous Christian paternalist calculated the
cost for laborers of a "reasonable" set of men's clothes and shoes
per year at £3 14s. 6d. and women's (much of it in cloth, not ready-to-wear) at
£2 18s. 2d. Since the list for men
consisted of three shirts, one pair of "trowsers," one jacket, one
waistcoat, two pairs of socks, and one pair of shoes, it indicates prevailing
clothing standards must have been still lower than this for southern
rural districts in England. Also
including other basic items such as soap and candles, these expenses "must
be raised by the extra work of the labourer, by his profits in the hay
and corn harvest, by the produce of his garden, by the leasings of his family,
and by the earnings, if any, of his wife and children."77 Simply put, the regular weekly earnings of
Hodge south of Caird's wage line usually failed cover anything beyond food and
perhaps rent if he was the sole support for a large family. Ironically, the anonymous Christian
paternalist's clothing budget's list of items being fewer than what many larger
American planters issued their slaves annually. Special measures such as a "clothing club" or the use
of harvest earnings for a vital necessity at a low-level of purchases help
demonstrate the constant struggle the southern English agricultural workers had
against ending up with mere rags to wear.
Slave Housing:
Variations around a Low Average Standard
Since
their homes often were crude log cabins with dirt floors, the housing
conditions of slaves were hardly ideal even for their day and age. The impulse to heap indignation against
these conditions, however, must be stiffled, at least to the extent the slaves
lived on the frontier, where their master and mistress' "big house"
often surpassed what their chattels endured by only a few steps. The housing slaves had in (say) South
Carolina or Virginia in the 1800s illustrated how long settled areas treated
them, but it cannot be safely extrapolated to what blacks endured when moving
westward with their white owners into Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi,
Louisiana, and especially Texas.
Correspondingly, the slaves suffered with very crude housing when they
were first taken to America en masse in the early 1700s, as slavery
became widespread. But as the decades
passed, at least some more paternalistic masters upgraded their slaves'
dwellings, even if they remained beneath those most Northern free workers
had. Hence, some antebellum defenses of
slavery focused on the conditions of slaves on large plantations in
long-settled regions such as lowland Georgia or South Carolina and Tidewater
Virginia, where some authentic paternalism and mutual outgoing concern may have
developed because (by the mid-1800s) the same white families had owned several
generations of slave families. Having
played with the children of slaves when young, the planter's white sons and
daughters, as they became older and the master or mistress of the plantation
themselves, would have long-standing personal relationships with at least some
bondsmen.78 These
relationships simply could not exist when the earlier colonialists had imported
freshly enslaved Africans directly from West Africa. Nor did this situation arise among non-hereditary slaveowners on
the make on the frontier, where housing conditions were inevitably worse
anyway. Hence, variations in slave
housing partially correspond to how long a given area of the South had been
settled, how paternalistically inclined the slaveowners were, and how long they
and their ancestors had lived in one area with the same slave families over the
generations.
As
overwhelming evidence indicates, the slave quarters normally consisted of
"houses" little better than the barns and sheds that sheltered many
animals during the winter in the North or in England. One room was all many, perhaps most, slaves had, with perhaps a
loft for the children to sleep in, such as where former slave Charley Williams
lived in Louisiana. As freedwoman
Harriet Payne commented:
"Everything happened in that one room--birth, sickness, death and
everything."79
Slaves often lived in log cabins which allowed them to see through the
chinks between the logs. Dirt floors
were a standard feature.80
Escaping from slavery near Washington, D.C., Henderson described
wretched housing conditions: "Our
houses were but log huts--the tops partly open--ground floor,--rain would come
through. . . . in rains I have seen her [his old aunt] moving
about from one part of the house to the other, and rolling her bedclothes about
to try to keep dry,--every thing would be dirty and muddy." Booker T. Washington said that as a child he
was born and had lived in "a typical log cabin, about fourteen by sixteen
feet square." It had no glass
windows, a dirt floor, a door that barely clung to its hinges, and numerous
notable holes in the walls. Since his
mother was the cook, the plantation's cooking was done in this
unsanitary cabin, for both whites and blacks!
Olmsted in South Carolina's high country found conditions worse than
what animals in the North suffered:
The negro-cabins, here, were the smallest I had
seen--I thought not more than twelve feet square, inside. . . .
They were built of logs, with no windows--no opening at all, except the
doorway, with a chimney of stick and mud; with no trees about the, no porches,
or shades, of any kind. Except for the
chimney . . . . I should have conjectured that it had been built
for a powder-house, or perhaps an ice-house--never for an animal to sleep in.
Providing scant comfort to the slaves, the local poor
whites' homes were "mere square pens of logs" of little better
quality.81
While
in Virginia, Olmsted passed larger plantations that had "perhaps, a dozen
rude-looking little log-cabins scattered around them [the planters' homes], for
the slaves." In Louisiana he saw a
creole-owned plantation where "the cabins of the negroes upon which were
wretched hovels--small, without windows, and dilapidated." In the frontier conditions of Texas, he
described one planter's slave quarters as being
of the worst description, though as good as local
custom requires. They are but a rough
inclosure of logs, ten feet square, without windows, covered by slabs of hewn
wood four feet long. The great chinks
are stopped with whatever has comes to hand--a wad of cotton here, and a
corn-shuck there.
They gave little protection against the cold. Kemble thought she had found the
worst slave accommodations by far at the Hampton estate on St. Annie's in
Georgia, but later discovered far worse ones nearby: "The negro huts on several of the plantations that we passed
through were the most miserable habitations I ever beheld. . . .
[They were] dirty, desolate, dilapidated dog-kennels." One master "provided" the worst
housing of all for his slaves--none! After getting into trouble with the law in Georgia, he had moved
himself and his slaves to Texas, as aged freedman Ben Simpson remembered: "We never had no quarters. When nighttime come, he locks the chain
around our necks and then locks it round a tree. Boss, our bed were the ground."82 These examples illustrate the general
crudeness of slave housing, since it fell below what most whites in the
contemporaneous North would have found tolerable, even for many living in more
recently settled states such as Illinois or Wisconsin.
Cases of Good Slave Housing
Sometimes
a higher standard of slave housing prevailed on some plantations. One particularly impressive case, pointed
out as such earlier by Olmsted, was a certain rice plantation not too far from
Savannah, Georgia:
Each cabin was a framed building, the walls boarded
and whitewashed on the outside, lathed and plastered within, the roof shingled;
forty-two feet long, twenty-one feet wide, divided into two family tenements,
each twenty-one by twenty-one; each tenement divided into three rooms.
The cabins all had doors that could be locked and
lofts for the children to sleep in.
Each room had a window with a wooden shutter to close it. Overcrowding was avoided, since only five
people on average lived in each of these homes. To use English terminology, each had an "allotment" of
a half-acre garden and an area that served as a combination chicken coop and
sty for pregnant sows. An interviewer
seeking nostalgic reminiscences from freedmen, Orland Armstrong drew attention
to the good housing conditions some slaves enjoyed when visiting a plantation's
ruins: "Some of the old cabins are
only heaps of debris, while others are better preserved. They were built of brick, in the substantial
manner of many of the fine old South Carolina plantation servant [slave]
houses." A good, but somewhat
lower standard than these Olmsted found on a farm in Virginia, which had
well-made and comfortable log cabins, about thirty
feet long by twenty wide, and eight feet tall, with a high loft and shingle
roof. Each divided in the middle, and
having a brick chimney outside the wall at either end, was intended to be
occupied by two families.
They even had windows with glass in the center, an
unlikely sight on the frontier for anyone's dwelling, but not surprising in a
long-settled country. Housing that
reflected frontier conditions--"log huts" many of the slaves lived
in--began to be replaced by "neat boarded cottages," reflecting a
more settled life, on four large adjacent plantations by a "tributary of
the Mississippi." For whites, the
frontier offered a means of getting ahead financially in exchange for the
privations of living in the wilderness.
But for the slaves, pioneer life merely meant having to endure more work
and less comfort, especially in housing, without gaining anything more than
they initially had if they stayed back east toiling on some large planter's
estate. Consequently, for this reason
and others, slaves much more commonly lived in a house where they could count
the stars through the cracks, as Marion Johnson did, "the usual
comfortless log-huts" (Olmsted), not a three-room wood frame duplex.83 Although some slaves enjoyed such
exceptional housing conditions, these were hardly representative for most
living in the South's interior, away from the lowland coastal areas of
Virginia, Georgia, and South Carolina, where (as Kemble's descriptions show)
conditions often were hardly ideal as well.
How Much Better Was the Poor Whites' Housing than the
Slaves'?
The
crude housing many southern whites had perhaps best serves to indicate
that slave housing was not all its apologists might have claimed. Even the master's home might be
unimpressive, especially when he was a small slaveholder and/or lived on the
frontier. After visiting a neighboring
mistress's home on a sea island of Georgia, Kemble said typical farmhouses in
the North were certainly better:
"To be sure, I will say, in excuse for their old mistress, her own
habitation was but a very few degrees less ruinous and disgusting [than her
slaves' homes]. What would one of your
Yankee farmers say to such abodes?"
Similarly, although noting the homes may have signs of a former splendor
or elegance, she observed, using her Englishwoman's eyes to make a comparison
while calling on a mistress's home in a nearby village in Georgia: "As for the residence of this princess,
it was like all the planters' residences that I have seen, and such as a
well-to-do English farmer would certainly not inhabit." Considering she was living in a long-settled
region of the South, this condemnation is particularly noteworthy. Olmsted stayed overnight in one old
settler's home in Texas. It was a room fourteen feet square, which "was
open to the rafters." The sky
could be seen between its shingles. He
actually spent the night in a lean-to between two doors, keeping on all his
clothes in the winter weather. While in
Mississippi, he deliberately decided to spend a night in a poor white family's
cabin seen as typical judging from all the other ones he had passed that
day. Since this family had a horse and
wagon, a fair amount of cotton planted, but no slaves, they likely beat the
poor white average some. Measuring
twenty-eight by twenty-five feet, their log house was open to the roof. It had a door on each of its four sides, a
large fireplace on one side, but no windows.
In northern Alabama, an area where more whites than blacks lived, most
of the houses he passed were "rude log huts, of only one room, and that
unwholesomely crowded. I saw in and
about one of them, not more than fifteen feet square, five grown persons, and
as many children." The conditions
whites in the South experienced have major implications for how the slaves
lived. The poor whites' standard of
housing indicates the basic ceiling on what the enslaved blacks could normally
expect at best. Bad housing conditions
(admittedly, in part a function of a frontier environment) for many whites
indicate most bondsmen likely had nothing better, and normally had something
noticeably worse.84
Fogel and Engerman's Optimistic View of Slave Housing
Fogel
and Engerman describe optimistically the average slave house. Measuring eighteen by twenty feet and being
made of logs or wood, it had one or two rooms.
It likely had a loft for children to sleep in. The floors were "usually planked and raised off the
ground." But is this description
justified? They considerably exaggerate
the size of the slaves' homes, since the free white rural population often
lived in a home of comparable size. The
travelers' accounts that mention the specific size of slave cabins rarely name
a figure this high. After scrounging
through various travelers' accounts, secondary sources, etc., Sutch properly
maintains fifteen by fifteen feet was typical, with sixteen by eighteen
"an occasionally achieved ideal size." The housing Kemble encountered at her husband's rice island
estate was the best of the housing conditions on his two estates. It surpassed other places she visited or
knew of locally. Nevertheless, while
naming a specific size, she described appalling conditions of crowding:
These cabins consist of one room, about twelve feet by
fifteen, with a couple of closets smaller and closer than the state-rooms of a
ship, divided off from the main room and each other by rough wooden partitions,
in which the inhabitants sleep. . . . Two families (sometimes
eight and ten in number) reside in one of these huts, which are mere wooden
frames pinned, as it were, to the earth by a [huge] brick chimney outside.
On the new Polk estate in Mississippi, some eighteen
men, ten women, seven children, and two evidently half-grown boys, thirty-seven
in all, crowded into four rough-hewn houses, built in a mere eighteen
days. As Bassett describes: "The trivial character of the buildings
on the plantation is shown in the fact that a few years later, 1840, all these
buildings were abandoned and others built in what was considered a more healthy
location." As cited above (p. 57),
Olmsted saw slave houses measuring twelve by twelve in South Carolina and ten
by ten in Texas. Genovese maintains,
based on his sources, contrary to Fogel and Engerman's claims above, that
slaveholders even into the 1850s usually did not "provide plank floors or
raised homes . . . although more and more were doing so." According to Blassingame, most slave
autobiographers said they lived in crude one-room cabins which had dirt floors
and lots of cracks in the walls that allowed the winter weather to enter. Although admitting the existence of some
with higher standards, Stampp still maintains:
"The common run of slave cabins were cramped, crudely built,
scantily furnished, unpainted and dirty."
Those that fell beneath this "average" were
"plentiful" as well.85 Fogel and Engerman clearly overstate how good the slaves' housing
conditions usually were.
Genovese's Overly Optimistic Analysis of Slave Housing
Like
Fogel and Engerman, Genovese puts an overly optimistic spin on slave housing,
but here compared to the rest of the world's:
Their [the slaveholders'] satisfaction [with their
slaves' housing] rested on the thought that most of the world's peasants and
workers lived in dirty, dark, overcrowded dwellings and that, by comparison,
their slaves lived decently. . . .
During the nineteenth century such perceptive travelers as Basil Hall,
Harriet Martineau, James Stirling, and Sir Charles Lyell thought the slaves at
least as well housed as the English and Scottish poor, and Olmsted thought the
slaves on the large plantations as well situated as the workmen of New
England. . . . Even
Fanny Kemble thought conditions no worse than among the European
poor. . . . The laboring
poor of France, England, and even the urban Northeast of the United States . . .
lived in crowded hovels little better and often worse than the slave quarters.
Although his point has merit about the conditions of
the southern English farm laborers, or those of the Eurasian masses, peasants and
artisans, it ignores how most slaves were worse off materially than typical
American free laborers. If they had not
been enslaved or discriminated against, the conditions of blacks in the United
States would have been better than those in most of the world because America
was largely a vast wilderness full of raw natural resources awaiting
exploitation by (then) modern technology.
These conditions made for an intrinsically higher standard of living
compared to (say) England, which suffered from the Malthusian effects of rapid
population growth. Furthermore, as
Sutch's reply to Fogel and Engerman over the quality of housing in the North
generally demonstrates, including even New York's slums in the depression year
of 1893, Genovese is too pessimistic about Northeastern urban housing
standards.86
Genovese
also reads too much into his citations of Olmsted and Kemble. Olmsted was not making a general point about
all slaves living on big plantations having housing as good as that of
New England workers when he said this about a sugar plantation in
Louisiana: "The negro houses were
exactly like those I described on the Georgia rice plantation [quoted above, p.
58], except that they were provided with broad galleries in front. They were as neat and well-made externally
as the cottages usually provided by large manufacturing companies in New
England, to be rented to their workmen."
Such good conditions were hardly automatic even on large plantations, as
Kemble's already cited account shows.
On the page Genovese cites of Kemble, she was describing sanitary
conditions and rebutting the (racist) contention that the smell of blacks and
their quarters was intrinsic to their race rather than being due to their
poverty and ignorance of proper habits of cleanliness. She was not discussing so much the intrinsic
size or construction of the house in question, but how the peculiar institution
created "dirty houses, ragged clothes, and foul smells." After comparing between the smells of slaves
and a "low Irishman or woman" and maintaining both resulted from
"the same causes," she said:
The stench in an Irish, Scotch, Italian, or French
hovel are quite as intolerable as any I ever found in our negro houses, and the
filth and vermin which abound about the clothes and persons of the lower
peasantry of any of those countries as abominable as the same conditions in the
black population of the United States.
Although this description likely displays some class
or national bias, clearly she distinguished between the cleanliness and the
intrinsic quality of building construction by saying she was "exhorting
them to spend labor in cleaning and making [their homes] tidy, [yet admitting
she] can not promise them that they shall be repaired and made habitable for
them." She also felt that the
difference between the homes slave servants lived in and their master's house
was much greater than that between where free white servants lived and where
they worked: "In all
establishments whatever, of course some disparity exists between the
accommodation of the drawing-rooms and best bedrooms and the servants' kitchen
and attics; but on a plantation it is no longer a matter of degree." Focusing on their lack of furnishings in
particular, she said the slave servants
had neither table to feed at nor chair to sit down
upon themselves; the 'boys' lay all night on the hearth by the kitchen fire,
and the women upon the usual slave's bed--a frame of rough boards, strewed with
a little moss of trees, with the addition of a tattered and filthy blanket.87
After analyzing his citations of Kemble and Olmsted,
Genovese clearly reconstucts too optimistically how good slave housing was
relative to many free workers. As shown
below, this place is hardly alone where Genovese's work draws conclusions
startlingly similar to not just Fogel and Engerman's generally discredited
work, but the equally discounted Slavery by Stanley Elkins as well, yet Roll,
Jordan, Roll has avoided similar opprobrium and presently reigns as the
leading general work of the field.
The Moral Hazards of Crowded, One-Room Slave Houses
Often
living in one-room cabins or shacks, slave families had to undertake special
measures to help preserve their children's sexual morality. In language reminiscent of the 1867-68
Report on Employment in Agriculture in England that described the hazards of
promiscuously mixing the sexes of different ages together (see p. 67 below),
Olmsted cites similar Victorian reasoning on sexual matters about slaves by a
Presbyterian minister and professor of theology. Although rarely put so bluntly, the basic problem was figuring
out how to shield the children from the sights and sounds of parental
love-making and its resulting negative moral effects. Since slave families had such limited space available--one room
and (perhaps) a loft to place the children being typical--these concerns were
legitimate, but slaveowners usually ignored them in their general quest to
reduce housing expenses. But these
wretched conditions promoted the slave father and mother's inventiveness, so
they found their own solutions to this problem. Some hung up clothes or quilts to create privacy, while others
used scrap wood in order to subdivide a one-room home into something closer to
two. A few resourceful slave parents
even made special trundle beds to ensure at least some sexual privacy. According to Genovese, these measures had at
least some success.88
The poor housing masters and mistresses provided to their slaves clearly
failed to promote the Victorian ideals of sexual purity that they generally
professed.
Slave Housing--Sanitation and Cleanliness
Housing
quality can also be judged by its cleanliness and how much it lived up to the
principles of sanitation. A relatively
spacious or well-built home could still have terrible standards of cleanliness. Especially in rural areas, this aspect of
housing quality more clearly burdens the occupants, not the owners. In other words, the master has no duty to
enforce good housekeeping practices among his bondsmen besides setting up some
basic guidelines to help them keep themselves (i.e., his property) from getting
sick. In the quarters, the slaves
should be cleaning up after themselves, not the master or mistress. After seeing two old slave women living
without "every decency and every comfort," Kemble then visited the
home some of their younger relatives.
That home was "as tidy and comfortable as it could be
made." Since this difference arose
under the same master, it shows the slaves themselves had some level of
responsibility for cleanliness. But
admittedly, the intrinsic burdens of bondage, of working for their owners often
six full days a week, ensured the slaves could only wring limited amounts of
time during a typical work week for housecleaning anyway. Since the master class believed the ideology
of "separate spheres" was inapplicable to field hands, housekeeping
was inevitably neglected because both sexes were driven out into the fields to
work. The depressing scene Kemble
paints of the quarters on one of her husband's estates undoubtedly was found
throughout the antebellum South:
Instead of the order, neatness, and ingenuity which
might convert even these miserable hovels into tolerable residences, there was
the careless, reckless, filthy indolence which even the brutes do not exhibit
in their lairs and nests, and which seemed incapable of applying to the uses of
existence the few miserable means of comfort yet within their reach. Firewood and shavings lay littered about the
floors, while the half-naked children were cowering round two or three
smouldering cinders. The moss with
which the chinks and crannies of their ill-protecting dwellings might have been
stuffed was trailing in the dirt and dust about the ground, while the back door
of the huts . . . was left wide open for the fowls and ducks, which
they are allowed to raise, to travel in and out, increasing the filth of the
cabin by what they brought and left in every direction.
Kemble
herself knew sheer ignorance and lack of education produced these appalling
conditions, a cause which the master or mistress was more responsible for than
the slaves. Having been born and raised
in a deprived environment, the latter could not be expected to know
better. After mentioning how some
slaves were so dirty and smelly she disliked being attended by them at meals,
she denied that smelling bad was intrinsic to the black race, but blamed it on
"ignorance of the laws of health and the habits of decent
cleanliness."89
An archeological discovery at Monticello suggests (but fails to prove
fully) another pest slave housekeeping faced:
Rodents left gnaw marks on the bones found where slaves had lived in or
around, especially in the root cellar of one of their homes. True, some masters wished to improve
conditions. For example, planter Bennet
Barrow once inspected his slave quarters.
Although finding them "generally in good order," he reproved
some of his slaves as "the most careless negros I have." Another time he gave them an evening to
"scoure up their Houses" and "clean up the Quarter
&c." Some slaves themselves
kept their homes fairly clean, at least by their own standards (not the
higher ones a middle class observer such as Kemble judged by).90 Although Fogel and Engerman like to think
otherwise, deep concern by bondsmen or masters about cleanliness was not
typical.91 For good reasons
most slave dwellings were neither especially neat nor orderly places.92 Although the bondsmen shared the blame for
their homes' unsanitary conditions with their owners, factors mostly outside
the slaves' control loomed larger than their own untidiness in spreading
disease and dirt in the quarters, such as the failure of indifferent masters
and mistresses to instruct them on the habits of cleanliness, the long workweek
for both sexes that reduced the time available for housekeeping chores, and the
flaws in building construction that let the elements in.
English Farmworkers' Housing--Quality/Size
In
England, the economic dynamics of building housing for farmworkers differed
sharply from America's when constructing homes for slaves. The poor law, both old and new, gave
the (major) ratepayers of a parish a financial incentive to avoid erecting new
cottages in their parishes, and to pull down those already extant. By reducing how many were eligible for
relief, they lowered their taxes.93 Ideally, the "powers that be" in a given parish wanted
no more workers living in a parish than were employed year around, thus
consistently keeping them off the dole.
In "their" parish they strove to reduce how many could claim a
settlement.94
Since the poor (under the Elizabethan poor law) could have a settlement
in only one parish at a time, and could claim relief only from that one parish,
these laws encouraged the ratepayers to unload "their" poor onto other
parishes to be cared for. In order to
lower the rates, the parish elite could combine to keep out new migrants to
their parish. Ratepayers, normally the
gentry and (large) farmers who rented from the former, created "closed
parishes" when they were few enough in number that they, by coordinating
their efforts, set up a "cartel" that kept out all newcomers without
a settlement in their parish.95 When the ratepayers were too numerous and/or unequal in income to
conspire successfully to keep out the poor without settlements in their
community, an "open parish" resulted. Under the settlement laws, a new migrant to another parish could
be "deported" (removed) to the parish of his origin (where he did
have a settlement legally) when he became chargeable to his new parish.96 Consequently, the ratepayers of open
parishes, which included the better-off artisans, professionals, and tradesmen,
paid through the rates poor relief for the seasonally discharged/underemployed
laborers who worked in nearby closed parishes for at least part of the year
during the spring and/or summer months.97 Although the deeper intricacies of the local elite's machinations
to lower their taxes under the poor law (old and new) has to await
further explanation below (pp. 278-79, 281-85, 287-99), the impact of the poor
laws on the availability and quality of housing is considered here.
Undeniably,
the English farmworkers generally endured miserable conditions in housing. The conditions they suffered were less
excusable than what the slaves faced:
Unlike the harsh frontier conditions many slaves and their masters
suffered, England was hardly a newly settled land. Although recognizing how poor much of English rural housing was,
Rule nevertheless still says:
"Housing is as much a matter of existing stock as of
production." On the other hand,
much of England, especially in the southern arable counties, had a serious wood
shortage, which increased the poor's problems in finding wood for building or
even cooking. Arch contrasted his
father's fortunate situation, who actually owned the home his family
lived in, with conditions commonly found elsewhere in England:
In one English county after another I saw men living
with their families--if living it could be called--in cottages which, if
bigger, were hardly better than the sty they kept their pigs in, when they were
lucky enough to have a young porker fattening on the premises.
While the farmworkers' union grew, he described their
housing: "The cottage
accommodation was a disgrace to civilisation; and this, not only in
Somersetshire, but all over the country.
As many as thirteen people would sleep all huddled up together in one
small cottage bedroom." According
to Somerville, in most counties "the meanest hovels are rented as
high" as two pounds ten shillings per year, while in Dorset the landlords
charged three and four pounds a year without any garden ground for "the
worst of houses" that "the poorest of labourers" occupied. Emma Thompson in 1910 recalled how life was
in Bedfordshire some 80 years earlier:
"I well remember three families living in one house and two
families, and only one fire place. When
I was first married I had one room to live in." In a two-room house (which includes the loft), she had ten
children, seven surviving into adulthood.
In 1797 some cottages were noted as so bad they let in the elements--a
problem hardly unfamiliar to many American slaves. Examined by the Select Committee on the Poor Law Amendment Act
(1838), Mark Crabtree described one typical laborer's cottage as having a dirt
floor, half of a window's diamond squares of glass missing, and an outside wall
which had nearly fallen down. Although
observing specifically of his native area in southern Scotland, Somerville
still generalized to overall British conditions when he said some new cottages
were built of stone and plastered inside, "with a boarding over-head,
instead of the bare roof, which is so common."98 Clearly, England's farmworkers and American
slaves suffered from similar housing problems.
Poor Housing Leads to Sexual Immorality?
Because
housing space was so limited, Anglican clerics feared the poor would be
(literally) de-moralized in their sexual standards of conduct. Overcrowding mounted as, among other
factors, the decline of service lowering marriage ages and the tying of relief
payments to being married promoted increased population growth. The pulling down of cottages to reduce poor
law taxes as the first half of the nineteenth century passed added more
problems, as Rule notes. One vicar, for
Terrington in Norfolk, said most of his parish's cottages had two or three
rooms. Often in the latter case, a
lodger rented one of the three rooms, thus requiring the family to squeeze into
the two remaining rooms. Some homes had
only one room. The vicar focused on one
case in which a father, mother, three sons, and a grown-up daughter shared a
single room. He "fear[ed] that
much immorality, and certainly much want of a sense of decency among the
agricultural labouring classes, are owing to the nature of their homes, and the
want of proper room."99
In the general neighborhood of Farnham, Surrey and Maidstone, Kent,
where the hop harvesting season in September brought in hordes of temporary
migrant workers, Somerville found that bad housing conditions prevailed even before
the temporary workers arrived. The
migrants simply worsened pre-existing crowding still further. As a result, segregating the sexes then
rated as a low priority. "The
undivided state of the larger families acting upon the scantiness of house room
and general poverty, or high rents, often crowds them together in their
sleeping apartments, so as seriously to infringe on the decencies which guard
female morals." Hart, a
professional gentleman of Reigate, was appalled that brothers and sisters lived
in the same room until they moved out as teenagers or adults. But still worse overcrowding appeared
elsewhere: Commonly in Cuckfield,
Sussex, the children of both genders slept not merely in the same room, but the
same bed. Clergyman W. Sankie of
Farnham knew a case in which two sisters and a brother, all over fourteen,
routinely slept in the same bed together.
Since general housing situations approached this nadir, the
laboring classes understandably never acquired "that delicacy and purity
of mind which is the origin and the safeguard of chastity." Similarly, some certainly voiced similar
concerns about packing American slaves into crude one bedroom shacks. But since they were generally regarded as
inferior beings with stronger animalistic desires than whites, masters and
mistresses in the U.S. South more easily rationalized crowded housing
conditions than their English counterparts.
The latter often just simply ignored the poor conditions and the
agricultural workers' correspondingly degraded character. Olmsted encountered a "most intelligent
and distinguished Radical" who said about them: "We are not used to regard that class in forming a judgment
of national character."100 Two surveys, one in 1842 and another in 1864
of 224 cottages in Durham and Northumberland, found most had just one
room. Hence, while one part of the
elite and middle class (justifiably) moralizes about the effects of bad,
crowded housing, another determinedly ignores the need to improve such conditions
altogether to save money, or to find ways to keep the poor permanently
dependent on them.101
How the Artist's Eye Can Be Self-Deceiving When
Evaluating Cottages' Quality
The
physical appearance of farmworkers' cottages can be deceiving, as Rule noted,
because what may appear picturesque to the eye, especially an urban dweller's, could
still be unhealthy or unpleasant to live in.
Arch once said that laborers' cottages with "their outside
trimmings of ivy and climbing roses, were garnished without, but they were
undrained and unclean within."
After stopping to sketch a farmhouse he encountered near Chester,
Olmsted thought the cottages nearby were "very pretty to look
at." All the houses in the hamlet
he was visiting were like the house he chose to draw: timber, whitewashed walls, and thatch roofs. (I do not recall him saying he had sketched
any slave dwelling!) The farmer living
in this house described the cottages nearby
as exceedingly uncomfortable and unhealthy--the
floors, which were of clay, being generally lower than the road and the
surrounding land, and often wet, and always damp, while the roofs and walls
were old and leaky, and full of vermin.
The walls were made of layers of twigs and mud. Thatched roofs had the advantage of being
cheaper and more picturesque than slate or tiles, and of giving more protection
against the heat and cold. Their
disadvantages included breeding vermin and being more apt to catch fire (it was
feared). Olmsted maintained laborers'
cottages usually had walls made of stone, brick and timber, or of clay mixed
with straw, the last being very common.
This method could make for walls of high quality, since even villas and
parsonages used it.102
But since the homes of laborers often were ill-maintained, they became
much worse than the local elite's, even had the same quality of construction
had been put into their walls and roofs, which hardly seems likely.
Again,
Hodge in southern England was significantly worse off than his northern
counterpart, excepting evidently Northumberland. Arch described the former's cottages above. The commissioners on conditions in
agriculture in 1867-8 noted that cottages in Yorkshire were in much better
shape than those in the southern counties.
They were more comfortable, often had gardens attached to them or
allotments, and even "cow gates" for pasturing the family's female
bovine. Still, bad housing conditions
still appeared in the north. After
saying Dorset had the worst houses and the poorest laborers, Somerville
corrected himself some--in Northumberland "the houses were worse than ever
they have been in Dorsetshire"--which means they had to be truly
awful! In well-off Northumberland,
Caird found that some laborers still lived with their cows and other
animals. Both even went out the same
door! The cowhouse was "divided
only by a slight partition wall from the single apartment which serves for
kitchen, living and sleeping room, for all the inmates." Admittedly, he also discovered a newly-built
village where all cottages were of two or four rooms each, having attached
gardens and access to a cowhouse and pasture.103 So even in an area well-known for its
laborers enjoying good material conditions, the cottages were the most
neglected aspect of their material well-being.
How Rentals and the Poor and Settlements Laws Made for
Poor Quality Housing
Necessarily
"freeborn Englishmen" got housing differently than American
slaves. Slaveholders automatically
provided it to their bondsmen, although they likely built under their owners'
direction what they lived in. Except
for unmarried men and women living as farm servants in housing their
master (the farmer) provided them, the laborers had to rent it. (Few could hope to aspire to home ownership,
Arch's family being a rare exception).
As service declined, especially in the southern arable districts as the
eighteenth century waned and the nineteenth opened, more and more farmworkers
had to find and pay for their own housing.
Helping matters none, rents rose in the period from about c. 1790 to
1837, at least in the memory of one farmer/relief officer in Sussex. Although they had a freedom slaves almost
totally missed, to choose where they lived, practical factors besides financial
ones constrained the laborers' free choice in housing. Because a closed parish's larger farmers and
gentry had a vested self-interest in reducing how many could claim poor relief,
they intentionally neglected or even tore down laborers' cottages not
absolutely necessary for their operations.
One witness told he Parliamentary Commissioners for the 1867-68
Report: "He [the landlord] does
not care if they all tumble down."
The inability of laborers to pay the rents to begin with also promoted
intentional neglect, since this made renting cottages simply unprofitable. One owner of several cottages informed the
Rector of Petworth, who told the Parliamentary Committee the economic dynamics
involved: "If cottages brought no
rent, the owners of them would not repair them, and they would by degrees take
them away." Despite their likely
meager carpentry skills and inferior materials, the tenants discovered they
had to repair "their" dwelling, not their landlord. Other legal hurdles impeded attempts to
improve laborers' cottages. In comments
recorded by Somerville, Charles Baring Wall, M.P. for Guildford, Hampshire,
found out that landowners really had no power over cottages held on
life-holds. He had to wait until they
fell in to give him the "opportunity of 'doing what he like with his own,'
. . . to improve the cottages upon them."104 The poor laws encouraged ratepayers to
minimize the amount of poor relief paid, while the settlement laws encouraged
them to drive the poor out of "their" parish so that the legal claims
the poor's settlements created would burden financially some other
parish. As a result, the "freeborn
Englishman" often lacked the liberty to choose which parish he would
settle in, because the rich of many parishes would declare him potentially (or,
after 1795, when actually) chargeable to the parish, and so have him and his
family removed to their parish of origin.
Surprisingly, both American slaves and English agricultural workers
endured restrictions on freedom of movement, for although they were far more
stringent on the former, the latter also suffered more from them than is
commonly realized. Clearly, the laws of
England, because of those on the poor, settlements, and tenure, cost the
laborers much of their freedom and created major incentives for the owners of
laborers' cottages to neglect them.
The Problem of Cottages Being Distant from Work
Many
agricultural workers endured one problem most slaves did not: long walks to work. Because of the landlords and large tenant
farmers's desires to lower their taxes, many were driven out of closed parishes
into open parishes, making many rent homes located uncomfortably far from the
farms they worked at. The Duke of
Grafton in Suffolk owned one farm where two regularly employed laborers walked
four and a half miles one way from Thetford, making for, as Caird calculated,
nine miles a day, fifty-four a week. In
Lincolnshire, he found some farmers lent their men donkeys to ride on since
walking six or seven miles one way was too exhausting! The commissioners of the 1867-68 Report on
Employment in Agriculture found cottages were often built too far from where
the laborers worked, even in Yorkshire where better conditions normally
prevailed. These long distances laid
the foundations for the infamous gang system, which mainly operated in the
swampy clay soil fens districts of the Eastern Midlands and East Anglia. Under this system, a gang master gathered
together groups of workers, especially children, to work on some farm a
considerable distance from where they lived.
If these laborers had been farm servants, living with their masters (the
farmers) or in cottages on or near the farms where they worked, such measures never
would have been necessary. Living so
far from work was largely the fault of the poor and settlement laws creating
the open and closed parish system, which heavily burdened the laborers. As Caird observed:
It is the commonest thing possible to find
agricultural labourers lodged at such a distance from their regular place of
employment that they have to walk an hour out in the morning, and an hour home
in the evening,--from forty to fifty miles a week. . . . Two hours a day is a sixth part of a man's
daily labour, and this enormous tax he is compelled to pay in labour, which is
his only capital.105
So as the slaves had to endure long walks to visit
family members, including husbands and wives "living 'broad," the
English agricultural workers had to withstand lengthy walks to arrive at
work. The subordinate class in both
cases had to go a distance to do something their betters usually had close at hand.
The Aristocracy's Paternalism in Providing Housing,
and Its Limits
As
the nineteenth century passed its midpoint, a noticeable number of large
landowners began to improve cottages on their lands, even though bad conditions
still generally prevailed elsewhere.
For some English aristocrats, paternalism actually took on some
practical reality in this area. Surely knowing
a good return on investment through the rent the laborers paid was a pipe
dream, they still built new cottages anyway.
If the laborers' wages were nine shillings or fourteen per week, they
had serious trouble in being able to pay more than one shilling six pence to
two shillings a week in rent. Indeed,
the parish of Petworth in Sussex routinely paid at least some of its paupers'
rent until the New Poor Law was passed.
A semi-reasonable maximum rent was two shillings six pence to two
shillings nine pence a week, although in Surrey it ranged upwards of three
shillings and three shillings six pence.
Laborers often struggled mightily to pay even (say) one-seventh of their
income in rent. If they paid two
shillings a week, their annual rent would be five pounds four shillings. If a cottage cost roughly £100 to £140 to
build, depending on local building materials and supplies, the return on
investment (ROI) would hover around 4.5 percent annually when ignoring all
repair costs. Some let them at 2.5
percent a year, but this involves self-sacrifice. So long as farmworkers' wages were low, and what rent they could
pay was equally depressed, strict profitability considerations discouraged
building further cottages, over and above the poor law's own negative
incentives on the construction and maintenance of cottages.106
Despite
the incentives against building cottages, a number of aristocrats led the way
in improving rural housing conditions.
Many small tradesmen, artisans, and speculators acted differently. They built cottages in open parishes and
charged excessively high rents because closed parishes denied sufficient
housing for all the laborers they employed year around. As farmworkers were driven into these
tradesmen's areas, they drove up the demand for (and costs of) housing. In contrast, the self-sacrificing
aristocrats in this regard included the Duke of Wellington in Berkshire, who
rebuilt or improved his laborers' cottages, giving each one about a quarter
acre for a garden. He charged a mere
one shilling a week rent for both cottage and garden. Caird regarded the Duke of Bedford's cottages as "very
handsome," which had many conveniences as well as gardens attached, and
let out at fairly low rents. (Some complained, however, about their rooms'
small size). In 1830, according to the
Steward at Woburn, the laborers on the Duke of Bedford's estates there paid
just one shilling a week rent, while elsewhere others charged at least two
shillings a week for two rooms, "miserable places, [with] no
gardens." Lord Beverley rented one
and a half acres of excellent pasture land, one and a half acres of
"mowing-ground for winter food," and a house for just seven pounds
per year to his laborers in high-wage Yorkshire. The Duke of Northumberland spent freely to make improvements that
would help all the laborers on his huge estates. The 1867-68 Report said the Earl of Northumberland had improved
or built 931 cottages for his laborers.
Similarly, the village of Ford, built by the Marquis of Waterford,
included houses with two or four rooms, gardens, close-by outhouses, water
pipes, and use of a common cowhouse and pasture, let at just three or four
pounds a year, depending on size. The
Duke of Devonshire in Derbyshire built for his laborers the village of Edensor,
whose cottages had pasture access and rather elaborate architecture. George Culley discovered that the landlords
owned the best housing in Bedfordshire.
In all but three cases, it was near or at their seats of residence. Somerville found Lord Spencer in Northampton
was building impressive new dwellings for his laborers, although "the old
ones . . . were equal and rather superior to the ordinary class
of labourers' houses." Some
cottages stood in groups of three, with the smaller one having just two or
three "apartments" being placed between the larger ones. Some even had two rooms upstairs and two below. Potato gardens were placed in back, flower
gardens in front. Here even fancy
Gothic architecture greeted the passerby's eyes. A bakehouse and washing-house was provided for each four
houses. They also could rent allotments
at low rates.107
By building better and/or providing cheaper housing, the upper class
showed their rhetoric about noblesse oblige was not entirely empty.
Despite
the altruistic picture reported above, Lord Egremont of Sussex revealed some of
the aristocracy's other motives behind renting their cottages so cheaply yet
semi-contentedly. He told the rector of
Petworth, Thomas Sockett, that he got no rent for his cottages, and, to begin
with, did not rent any above three pounds per year even with a good
garden. He said this matter-of-factly,
without grievance. He, like other
landlords, did not mind getting little or nothing in rent because, under the
New Poor Law, "They save it in diminution of the
rate. . . . He stated, that the fact was that the poor men could
not now pay the rent." So what the
aristocracy may have lost from low (or zero!) rents, lower taxes more than made
up for, or they considered it a downwards adjustment for the low wages their
laborers earned. Furthermore, the
aristocracy tended to build improved cottages only near their seats, so as
(perhaps) to avoid literally looking at poverty in the face. These houses might have pretty, overly
ornate facades, but have little additional comfort inside. Although exaggerating some, Somerville said,
after having traveled extensively in England, that such high quality houses
"are found only in some pet village near a nobleman's park, or in the park
itself, and only there because they are ornamental to the rich man's
residence." Although the English
rural elite undeniably exploited the laborers, as the enclosure movement and
the low wages the laborers received demonstrate, still at least some
aristocrats sincerely made efforts at providing housing paternalistically. But their efforts must be seen in the
context of the low wages and/or reduced poor rates paid after the 1834 Poor Law
Amendment Act, which often meant they were handing back a slice of the loaf that
they had previously grabbed from the laborers.
These exertions by aristocrats at improving cottages failed to touch the
lives of most farmworkers since, "the majority of [England's] rural
inhabitants [still] liv[ed] in damp and squalor," as Rule correctly
observes.108
Little Difference for Slaves and Farmworkers in the
Quality of Their Housing
Probably
the overall quality of housing for the average slave or farmworker was about
the same. Although in both cases, large
landowners may have been somewhat altruistic, since they built nice houses or
cottages on some large plantations or estates, only a minority of the slaves or
laborers benefited from these efforts.
Dirt floors and non-glazed or broken glass windows were standard for
both groups. Walls often had holes or
were otherwise decripit in both cases.
Both slaves and farmworkers usually would have lacked a ceiling
overhead; a gaze upwards would bring into view the rafters and beams holding up
the roof. The bondsmen more likely
lived in a home made nearly exclusively of wood, with (perhaps) some mud daubed
in to fill the nooks and crannies or to help fireproof the chimney, compared to
their contemporaneous rural field laborers in England. In England, walls made of mud/clay mixed
with sticks or straw were common, thus nearly inverting the ratio of the two
materials compared to America, clearly corresponding to their differing relative
scarcity between the two countries.
Probably a thatched roof, being cooler in summer, warmer in winter, and
protecting better against the elements, was superior to what the slaves (or
many poor whites) normally had in America, where stories of being able to see
through the roof (or walls, for that matter) appear. In both cases, since the slaves and the laborers (normally) did
not own the place they lived, they suffered from what others were willing to
give them. Although the farmworkers
supposedly had to pay rent, and had the freedom to move, because of the effects
of the settlement laws and closed parishes, not to mention low wages and the
enclosure acts helping to breed wage dependence, they often had to accept what
was located near their jobs. Competition
in the housing market in England was rendered even more imperfect because the
governmental restrictions on labor mobility (already an instrinsically less
mobile commodity than others) made workers even less able to move. Clearly, the bulk of both the bondsmen and
laborers lived in rundown, decrepit housing of low quality and few amenities,
even if a few fortunate souls benefited from paternalistic planters and
aristocrats.
Agricultural Workers--Sanitation/Cleanliness
Sanitation
for the England's housing during the industrial revolution was notoriously
bad. How could a reader forget Engels'
portrait of Manchester's odious slums and filthy, meandering streets in The
Condition of the Working Class in England?
In Victorian England, the appalling death rates produced by poor
sanitation practices spawned a thriving public health movement among the middle
class which aimed at cleaning up the hazards resulting from the then brave new
world of modern urban industrial life.
It must be realized, even about such pits of despair as Liverpool's
cellar dwellings, that this problem was ultimately rooted in the concentration
of houses packed together in rapidly growing large cities without any changes
from practices that fit much better small villages or sparsely populated rural
areas. As Rule noted, the houses of the
cities and towns were built of better materials, such as brick or stone, but,
"It was not so much their individual deficiencies, but the collective
environmental horror which they presented which shocked
contemporaries." In previous
centuries, the death rates of medieval cities and towns in Europe were so high
they gradually devoured their inhabitants, which made their population's
natural rate of increase actually negative.
If people then build still larger agglomerations of buildings, but fail
to change the sewage and garbage disposal systems, only public health disaster
can possibly result. Although rural
areas' inhabitants enjoyed better health than city dwellers, that outcome did
not come from the former having superior sanitation practices. Rather, because the population density was
lower, the old, traditional methods took a notably lower toll in the
countryside than within England's industrial cities. Even the contrast between villages and outlying scattered houses
was jarring, as Jeffries saw:
The cottages in the open fields are comparatively
pleasant to visit, the sweet fresh air carries away effluvia. Those that are so curiously crowded together
in the village are sinks of foul smell, and may be of worse--places where, if
fever comes, it takes hold and quits not.
As Engels observed, relatively little damage might
come from making a dung heap in the country, since it is more exposed to the
open air. But when a similar pile
builds up in a city's alley or dead end, the very same practice is much more
dangerous to human health.109 So although the countryside was healthier
than the early industrial cities, the difference came from the concentration of
large amounts of housing with barely changed medieval sanitation measures in
the latter, such as open sewers along the sides of the streets, not superior
practices that systematically ensured cleanliness in the former.
Unlike
the towns by the 1870s and later, many villages in England had little or no
sanitary arrangements. As Joseph Arch
put it: "I must not name villages
[with bad sanitary arrangements]; any one who travels must observe the bad
sanitary condition of the rural districts." Although in an area of England where the laborers were relatively
well-paid and fed, Caird found miserable arrangements for sanitation in the
village of Wark, Northumberland:
Wretched houses piled here and there without
order--filth of every kind scattered about or heaped up against the walls--horses,
cows, and pigs lodged under the same roof with their owners, and entering by
the same door--in many cases a pig-sty beneath the only window of the dwelling.110
Unlike Olmsted's aforementioned experience (p. 68),
the laborers' cottages might not be even picturesque, let alone provide
sanitary conditions for their occupants.
The
housekeeping of Hodge's wife may have been perfectly fine, but the area around
her cottage could still stink badly.
(Unlike for the slaves, a strong sexual division of labor generally
prevailed among the farmworkers, except during harvest and in the north, as explained
below--pp. 200-210). Jeffries explains
why, by contrasting the stench emanating from the laborers' cottages to the
scent of the surrounding fields:
The odour which arises from the cottages is peculiarly
offensive. It is not that they are
dirty inside . . . it is from outside that all the noisome
exhalations taint the breeze. . . . The cleanest woman indoors thinks nothing disgusting out of
doors, and hardly goes a step from her threshold to cast away indescribable
filth.111
This mentality may explain why Caird found the
inhabitants of Wark tolerating the conditions that he saw. The cleanliness of the farmworkers' cottages
usually beat that of the slaves' shanties, because the laborers' wives, being
at home most of the day, could sink much more their labor into housekeeping or
other, associated tasks, such going to market.
Unlike the slave woman out in the fields all day, Mrs. Hodge rarely
could blame a time shortage for making the inside of her house dirty.
Slaves--Furniture and Personal Effects
What
housing a subordinate class' members have obviously differs from what items
they can put in it. Although good
housing and owning numerous personal possessions normally positively correlate
with one another, this is not guaranteed.
Although comparing the household items of American slaves and English
farmworkers is inevitably difficult because broad-based statistical data are
mostly unavailable, it is still worthwhile to examine generally what the
poorest classes of their respective societies owned as household items. Unlike food, household items form part of
their owners' enduring surroundings.
(Clothing has been separately considered above). Their sentimental value can
disproportionately outweigh their cash value, especially when parents or other ancestors
had passed them down to the current owners.
They also can contribute mightily to personal comfort, such as how a
chair allows someone to avoid having to sit or stand on a (sometimes wet) dirt
floor.
The
slaves normally could only count on having in their shacks some kind of
bed. These often were made with
stuffings or coverings of moss, hay, and/or corn shucks on top of a wooden
frame. As a child, Frederick Douglass
did not even have this. He used a
stolen bag that had contained corn to help keep himself warm. Turning to a more normal case, freedwoman
Millie Evans of North Carolina recalled that her family's smaller beds in
daytime could be easily slid underneath the largest bed. "Our beds was stuffed with hay and
straw and shucks, and, believe me, child, they sure slept good." Ex-slave Marion Johnson, once a slave in
Louisiana, also thought well of the basic bedding he enjoyed: "Mammy's beds was ticks stuffed with
dried grass and put on bunks built on the wall, but they did sleep so good. I can 'most smell that clean dry grass
now." Solomon Northrup, less
nostalgically and less comfortably, described the "bed" that his
master gave him:
The softest couches in the world are not to be found
in the log mansion of the slave. The
one whereon I reclined year after year, was a plank twelve inches wide and ten
feet long. My pillow was a stick of
wood. The bedding was a coarse blanket,
and not a rag or shred beside. Moss
might be used, were it not that it directly breeds a swarm of fleas.
In Georgia on the rice-island plantation, Kemble saw
slave women freely hazarding these risks from moss by placing it upon "a
rough board bedstead." Meanwhile,
some servant boys slept on the hearth by the kitchen fire. Such
rough accommodations--near Washington, D.C., escaped slave Francis
Henderson similarly had "enjoyed" a "board bed" like
Northrup's--could become comfortable, "being used to it." So even though Evans and Johnson recalled
better bedding conditions than Henderson or Northrup, nostalgia and acclimation
combined presumably caused them to overstate how well off they were. Olmsted's encounter with vermin in the bed
of a fairly typical white family's home indicates what many slaves
undoubtedly suffered when sleeping on anything softer than boards.112
Besides
beds, slave cabins normally were sparsely furnished or equipped. Kemble saw no chairs or tables in the cabins
of the servants--presumably the materially better-off slaves--who waited on her
at her husband's rice-island estate, where conditions were better than
the average of other nearby plantations.
The slaves also often owned various ceramic objects, such as pots, cups,
bowls, and plates. Their distribution
on plantations reflected the slaves' and overseers' positions in
Southern society as subordinate to the planters. Domestic servants predictably possessed better crockery than
field hands. In his area of Louisiana, Northrup
said slaves were "furnished with neither knife, nor fork, nor dish, nor
kettle, nor any other thing in the shape of crockery, or furniture of any
nature or description." Only by
working on Sunday, their day off, could slaves earn the money to buy the utensils
needed for food storage and civilized cooking.
Note one reason why Rose Williams of Texas found her master's quarters
pleasing: They were furnished with
tables, benches, and bunks for sleeping.
A mixed picture emerges, since some masters provided more than others,
and the slaves themselves found ways to get or even make furnishings, including
chairs, and utensils, depending on their individual initiative. For example, Mary Reynolds said the men
sometimes made chairs at night. Similar
to their split on slave housing, Genovese portrays the situation for furniture
and utensils more optimistically (but here accurately) than Stampp's dire
picture. Nevertheless, the better-off
slaves acquired basic cooking utensils, furniture, and kitchen crockery often through
their own efforts and resourcefulness, not necessarily because
supposedly paternalistic masters generously handed out these items.113
English Agricultural Workers: Home Furnishings, Utensils, and Crockery
The
farmworkers' cottages were unlikely to be better equiped with furniture,
utensils, or crockery than the bondsmen's quarters. While testifying before the parliamentary committee investigating
the operation of the New Poor Law, Mark Crabtree's description of what
furnishings the laborers had resembled reports about what slaves owned. He found one cottage, occupied by a laborer
who had worked twenty years for one farmer, to have one chair, a chest, three
stools, a table of two boards and a piece placed on four hedge-stakes, and two
straw beds without blankets for nine people.
The beds were attached to the wall on one side, and supported on two
posts on the other, similar to the beds of many slaves. The home of one unemployed man presented a
similar but perhaps more desperate situation because his family had pawned
possessions in order to buy food. It
had two chairs, a similar table built on hedge-stakes, four beds of straw with
one blanket for all of them, four coverlets, and two basins. Its kitchen utensils amounted to two broken
knives, one fork, one tea-kettle, two saucepans, three plates, and two broken
plates. Apparently, these pathetically
few possessions were all fourteen people had.
Somerville's semi-apocryphal "ploughman" living in Wilton,
Wiltshire, complained about having a "wretched home . . . .
without any comfort, almost without furniture."114 For him, this grinding poverty characterized
even a fairly normal year! The
furnishings and utensils of the agricultural laborers could not be plentiful
when so many of them already lived so close to subsistence, which their ordeal
in buying clothes when paid such low wages demonstrates.
In
times of crisis, such as high prices due to crop failure, the laborers emptied
their cottages in order to fill their stomachs. In Dorset, when the port of Poole lay nearly at a standstill in
1843, in the surrounding countryside many of the laborers' cottages were nearly
or literally empty. Evidently, at least
the pawnbrokers were doing brisk business.
Visiting the pawnbroker was also necessary to fulfill a condition for
going into the workhouse: A family or
elderly couple had to sell off their furnishings, because otherwise they were
too "rich" to get parish relief.
Knowing firsthand the severe financial stress of laborers under such
stress, Somerville commented:
It has always seemed to me a grievous error to deny
out-door relief to families in temporary distress, whereby they are compelled
to undergo the most cruel privations, or submit to break up their little homes,
sell off their furniture, . . . and become thorough, confirmed,
irredeemable paupers.
Similar dilemmas still face the clientele of today's
welfare state bureaucracies. The
English poor law was designed only to relieve the most desperate, including
those who sold off nearly everything besides the clothes on their back in order
to make themselves sufficiently "desperate."115 As a result, the homes of laborers may prove
to be nearly empty of household items because of high food prices or long
spells of unemployment. By contrast,
since the slaves did not have to fend for themselves, they never suffered the
calamity of selling off their furniture in the event of financial disaster, but
they were denied the advantages of independence and freedom in increasing their
self-respect.
Fuel--the Slaves' Supply Versus the Farmworkers'
The
bondsmen had undeniably better fuel supplies than the farmworkers. In the United States, the problem was having
too many trees, not too few.
Trees had to be chopped down and the stumps removed before cultivation
began. Here the slaves most clearly
benefited from living in sparsely populated frontier areas, as opposed to a
long-settled region where most of the trees were already cut down, such as in
southeast England. Even on Kemble's
husband's rice-island estate, where a priori one might think trees would
be scarce, a preserve of trees and other vegetation was allowed to remain so
that her husband's "people" could still easily get firewood. Perhaps best illustrating the attitude of
the owners of forested land in the frontier South, one master told Olmsted
while he paid (because it was the holidays) his slaves to turn wood into
charcoal, "that he had five hundred acres covered with wood, which he
would be very glad to have any one burn, or clear off in any way." Masters and mistresses normally just let
their slaves collect their own firewood from uncleared land on or near their
property, feeling no need to supply it to them. According to Olmsted, since the slaves uncommonly liked having
fires, they took extra opportunities to create them. On one Virginia plantation, the hands made "a fire--a big,
blazing fire at this season, for the supply of fuel is unlimited,"
which they used to cook their food also.116 Due to this natural resource's abundance, it
cost little or nothing to use, allowing the slaveholders to grant the slaves
this minor indulgence. Indeed, the
slaveholders could even benefit as it helped clear the land for crops. At least in this one case, the New World's
material abundance clearly benefited the slaves, since wood approached being a
free good like air in America's eastern forests.117
By
contrast, the agricultural workers of England often endured a truly desperate
fuel situation, especially in arable areas in the southeast after
enclosure. First of all, England had
been chopping down its forests excessively for centuries; real shortages of
wood had developed in many areas. One
inn-keeper Olmsted encountered, of a village near Chester in 1850, thought
America's "wood fires" were an unusual phenonemon. Indeed, growing wood shortages helped to
push the English to replace charcoal with coking coal in iron making, which
Abraham Darby in 1709 was the first to use successfully. A number of decades passed, however, before
English ironmakers used coke extensively for smelting iron, as Deane notes.118 Because of wood shortages, many agricultural
laborers burned other vegetation as fuel, such as furze, turf, or peat. Compared to coal or seasoned firewood, these
were inferior fuels.119
The hedges which fenced off one farm from another often provided fuel,
as Young knew. Farmer and former
relieving officer Edward Butt recalled for the 1837 Poor Law Report that in his
youth (c. 1790), laborers got fuel by paying a half guinea to get a thousand
turf from a nearby commons in the Petworth, Sussex area. At that time, the farmers charged nothing to
their laborers for transporting it to the latter's homes. Fuel cost much less then. In arable areas, the laborers were normally
worse off, for reasons Cobbett saw:
"No hedges, no ditches, no commons, no grassy lanes: a country divided into great farms; a few
trees surround the great farm-house.
All the rest is bare of trees; and the wretched laborer has not a stick
of wood." One plowboy of about
sixteen near Abington in southern England said he had hot food only once a
week, when his master let him and other boys working for him boil potatoes. Otherwise, he only ate bread and lard--cold. No fire warmed him in winter as he slept in
the loft of the farmer who employed him, excepting sometimes when he stayed
with local cottagers.120
Hence, fuel shortages hurt the poor by chilling them in winter and by
limiting how they prepared their food year around. It promoted the buying of more expensive ready-made food such as
baker's bread. Furthermore, money spent
on fuel was not money spent on food. In
southern England, the high cost of fuel helped to lower the quality of the
laborers' diets.121
Shortages of wood or other materials for fuel could extract the ultimate
cost: In southern Northumberland, where
the laborers had lots of fuel, their death rate rose less than that of others
in the harsh year of 1864.122
Shortages
of wood or other vegetation provoked major conflicts between laborers and local
landowners, especially after enclosure eliminated wastelands or commons that
the former had used to get fuel.
Landowners often imposed restrictions on gathering fuel in order to
protect their game's habitat. For
example, in 1825, the Earl of Pembroke ordered the villagers of Barford to take
no dead wood from his forest, Grovely Wood.
He had "discovered" they had no legal right to do so. Yet, as a customary right, they had taken
wood from this forest for centuries. In
retaliation, Grace Reed and four other women she led resisted the Earl. After defiantly gathering sticks from the
Woods, they returned home. They were
sentenced to jail after refusing to pay the fines imposed. But the next day, the women were freed, and
Pembroke quickly declared, following further investigation, that the people of
Barford had the right to remove dead wood from the forest after all. Clearly, their act of civil disobedience
saved them their customary right.
Elsewhere, the poor were less lucky.
In Wiltshire, those living in villages next to the Fonthill and Great
Ridge Woods were not allowed to gather dead wood for the same
reason--protection for game animals such as pheasants and rabbits. Because the rabbits multiplied after this
area was made off-limits, the forest's hazelnut trees soon died off after being
stripped of their bark. This forest
soon stopped supplying nuts to those who came even from long distances to
gather them. In this case, having no
recourse for decades afterwards, the poor lost out on both fuel and food.
Hudson saw (c. 1910) its dead wood lying around as if it were an undisturbed
primeval forest. The cases in which the
rich gave away or sold fuel to the poor non-profitably hardly compensated for
the losses inflicted by enclosure, game protection, and general
deforestation. Although in America the
slaves continually struggled with their masters for material advantages, an
overabundance of wood ensured conflicts over it were rare or non-existent. But in England, disputes over fuel supplies
were endemic. There, a child breaking a
bough from a tree for any reason could be sentenced to the House of Correction,
as the Hammonds noted.123
Since slaveholders felt little need to protect the wild animals in areas
only recently hewed from the wilderness, the slaves were usually free go
hunting. In contrast, the agricultural
workers constantly disobeyed their overlords' restrictions on hunting and its
spillover effects on obtaining fuel supplies (see below, pp. 367-69).
Slave Medical Care
Whether
done out of financial self-interest or paternalistic altruism, slaveholders
often had (white) physicians treat the slaves.
Masters and mistresses usually wanted no treatable diseases or injuries
to reduce or eliminate their human property's financial value. (But, as Kemble knew, their rationality
could not be assumed).124
Sometimes the master or overseer gave medicine or some treatment such as
bleeding to his slaves. The blacks also
had their own resources: many larger
plantations boasted homegrown "conjurors" using herbs or spells to
help cure fellow slaves of afflictions.
Since slave midwives assisted other women at birth, they did not
necessarily rely on doctors for deliveries.
Unfortunately for the slaves and just about everyone else in Southern
society excepting perhaps the physicians themselves, the crudeness and
backwardness of antebellum medical science ensured it delivered at least as
much harm as cure. For many sick
bondsmen, the plantation's resident witch doctor's rituals and herbs arguably
were more effective than the white physician's bag of tricks, which included
leeches for bleedings. Despite its
general ineffectiveness, even lethalness, large planters such as Barrow still
could pile up the doctor's bills. In a
day and age when doctors charged around $1 to $5 per house call, Barrow spent
(assuming accurately kept figures) just $69.18 for 1838-39, but $288.25 for
1839-40 and routinely $300 or more annually afterwards.125 The slaveholders' investment in their
bondsmen encouraged high expenditures on their medical care, even when
paternalism did not.
Masters
willingly had the same doctor treat both their families and their slaves on the
same visit, which shows some surprising impartiality in providing medical
help. Planter Bennet Barrow noted in
his diary: "Dr King practising on
two of my negros--& my family &c."126 This "race mixing" he took for
granted despite his rigid insistence on enforcing the color line other times.127 So long as they were the absolute rulers of
blacks, white slaveholders readily and necessarily accepted situations that
would have appalled diehard post-reconstruction segregationists. Correspondingly, Barrow (as well as the
doctor himself) lightly pass over a white physician treating blacks and whites
during the same visit living on the same land.
The General Backwardness of Antebellum Medical Care
Although
slaveholders paid doctors good money to treat their slaves, positive outcomes
from treatment were hardly guaranteed.
Between bad treatments (e.g., bleeding and questionable
"medicines") and professional incompetence, it was frequently safer not
to have a doctor in the house. Barrow
condemned one doctor who visited his place during a small epidemic: "number of sick ones, asked Dr Hail to
see Marcus and a more undecisive man I never saw. made great many attempts to
bleed him, but failed & large veins at that, Died at 11 ok." Other planters evidently placed less faith
in bleeding than Barrow, at least when the overseer did it. Plowden C. J. Weston, rice planter of South
Carolina, prepared a standard contract that his overseers signed which included
this statement: "Bleeding is
Under All Circumstances Strictly Prohibited, Except by Order of the Doctor." Counting a completed bleeding as an
accomplishment and a botched one a failure, as Barrow did, accepted the
premises of a backward medical "science" still practicing treatments
more suited to the Dark Ages than to the nineteenth century's spirit of
progress. Despite the general crudeness
of antebellum medical science, it still performed some recognizably modern
treatments. One day planter Barrow
noted in his diary: "Number of
cases of Chicken Pox, Vaccinated all my negros, Old & Young Most of them with good taking scars, but
have now the appearance genuine."
Regardless of what treatments the doctor gave, still patients died
sometimes. Overseer George W. Bratton
wrote to his employer, planter (and later U.S. President) James Polk, about the
fate of one of his slaves: "Losa
died the sixteenth of this month [November 1838] I had good atten[tion] paid to her I call in and other phisian to
Loosa she died with the brest
complaint."128
Good intentions sometimes still brought bad results!
Masters Sought Ways to Reduce Medical Expenses
Undoubtedly,
many masters and mistresses cut corners by calling in physicians only when
their slaves were really sick or injured. After describing the Old Miss as stingy with the food rations,
freedman Tines Kendricks of Georgia said she acted similarly about getting a
doctor to help Mose, a young slave boy:
Aunt Hannah, she try to doctor on him and git him
well, and she tell Old Miss that she think Mose bad off and ought to have the
doctor. Old Miss she wouldn't git the
doctor. She say Moses ain't sick much,
and, bless my soul, Aunt Hannah she right.
In a few days from then Mose is dead.
Jenny Proctor of Alabama remembered getting cheap
medicine and a doctor's visit being a last resort:
We didn't have much looking after when we git
sick. We had to take the worst stuff in
the world for medicine, just so it was cheap.
That old blue mass and bitter apple would keep us out all night. Sometimes he have the doctor when he thinks
we going to die, 'cause he say he ain't got anyone to lose, then that calomel
what that doctor would give us would pretty night kill us. Then they keeps all kinds of lead bullets
and asafetida balls round our necks.129
Apologists for slavery might have claimed that the
slaves automatically got medical care from their owners, unlike the North's
"wage slaves" from their employers.
But since slavery also gave the masters practically unlimited
freedom in determining how to control their bondsmen, no guarantees existed for
the provision of medical care regardless of any possible laws stating
otherwise. The slaveholders cannot be
given total freedom to make the slaves' will their will, yet easily stop those
neglecting to give what supposedly gave the slaves material security (here,
medical care) that replaced the uncertainties of freedom. The slaves really had neither security nor
freedom because the master had practically nearly 100 percent freedom to order
them about and to treat them as he wished, excepting the extreme cases where
white neighbors mobilized against his excessive cruelty by their (likely low)
standards.
Masters and Overseers as Amateur Healers for Slaves
On
his or her own a slaveholder might provide medicines or even an infirmary. By administering medicines himself or
herself, a slaveowner could avoid calling in a doctor to begin with, thus
possibly save a dollar or two.
Certainly they had financial motives for seeking medical information,
since it could save the lives of their human property while simultaneously
keeping the doctors away. Freedwoman
Mary Reynolds of Louisiana remembered the (rather dubious) medicines her owner
gave out: "Massa give sick niggers
ipecac and asafetida and oil and turpentine and black fever pills." As Stampp observes, often overseers or the
masters themselves diagnosed and treated sick slaves, using doctors only as a
last resort. Granted this, Fogel and
Engerman sensibly infer: "Planters
sought to be, and overseers were expected to be, knowledgeable about current
medical procedures and about drugs and their administration." Planter Weston had his overseers pledge to
refrain from using strong medicines, "such as calomel, or tartar
emetic: simple remedies such as
flax-seed tea, mint water, No. 6, magnesia, &c., are sufficient for
most cases, and do less harm. Strong
medicines should be left to the Doctor."
Because overseers' low educational levels usually corresponded with a
minimal knowledge of medical science, this master avoided entrusting too much
of his slaves' lives and health to their medical judgment. But Kendricks' mistress dispensed medicine
where he lived: "Old Miss, she
generally looked after the niggers when they sick and give them the
medicine. And, too, she would get the
doctor iffen she think they real bad off 'cause like I said, Old Miss, she
mighty stingy, and she never want to lose no nigger by them dying." This mistress knew being penny-wise may be pound-foolish. But she still hesitated to admit a slave may
be really sick because they frequently shammed sickness to avoid toiling by the
sweat of their faces: "Howsomever,
it was hard sometime to get her to believe you sick when you tell her that you
was, and she would think you just playing off from work. I have seen niggers what would be mighty
near dead before Old Miss would believe them sick at all." Kemble's husband's rice-island estate had a
six-room infirmary. Despite looking
good on paper, in reality it was filled with weakened bodies scattered amidst
an appalling spectacle of filth and rubbish, darkness and cold. This place was, supposedly, where its
"patients" went to recover from sickness! Some bondswomen attempted to receive a little warmth from a
feeble fire in its enormous chimney, while "these last poor wretches lay
prostrate on the floor, without bed, mattress, or pillow, buried in tattered
and filthy blankets, which, huddled round them as they lay strewed about, left
hardly space to move upon the floor."
The "hospital" on her husband's sea island cotton estate was
still worse.130
Hence, between the crude medicines and primitive buildings used for
medical treatment, the provision of health care by masters and mistresses for
their slaves did less good than what might be claimed.
Black Medical Self-Help: Conjurors and Midwives
By
having their own resources in the form of conjurers (i.e., shamans or witch
doctors) and midwives, the slaves did not entirely depend on their owners for
medical help. The black community did
not just passively wait for what "ole massa" might hand out, but also
looked to help themselves in health care and other needs. Like the slave preacher, the plantation
conjurer served as an independent source of authority (religious, not just
medical) to the slaves. Unlike drivers
and domestic servants holding more prestigious positions (at least to the
whites), the conjurer's activities did not fully fall under the white chain of
command. Sometimes white medical
science even adopted the "cures" slaves used on themselves in its own
practice. According to Kemble, one
physician told his white patient to bind the leaves of the poplar tree around
his rheumatic knee, "saying he had learned that remedy from the negroes in
Virginia, and found it a most effectual one." "Auntie Rachael," living in a cabin near Raleigh, North
Carolina, gave a long list of treatments for diseases based on black folk
wisdom. She had learned them from her
mother, who had been a "docterin' woman." Her "cures" included giving mare's milk for whooping
cough, smearing the marrow of a hog jowl on the skin lesions caused by the
mumps, putting on a mud plaster and wearing little bag around the neck with a
hickory nut to cure shingles, various buds and herbs for making tea to cure bad
colds, and tying a charm around a child's neck to ward off disease: "A bag o' asafetida is good [as a
charm]; er, de toe-nails of a chicken is mos' pow'ful!"131 Although these "cures" seem
positively naive and superstitious nowadays, they may have often followed
better the principle of medicine that states "First, do no harm" than
the white doctor's bag of tricks.
Slave
midwives were valuable to their owners, not just to their sisters in bondage. Kemble noted that the "midwife of the
[rice-island] estate--[was] rather an important personage both to master and
slave, [for] as to her unassisted skill and science the ushering of all the
young negroes into their existence of bondage is intrusted." Births attended by midwives enabled masters
to reduce both medical expenses and the number of doctor's visits. The slave women benefited from having
someone of their own race and sex serving them during such an intimate passage
of life. Slave midwives helped rebut
any contentions that black women could not assist or serve competently in some
crucial position in the slave community's life. Zack Bloxham of Florida recalled his mother was a field hand,
adding an evident exaggeration:
"She was a midwife, too, an' treated right special on 'count of
it. Dey didn' need no doctor wid Mammy
dar!" Despite her very ordinary
main position on the plantation, Bloxham's mother role as midwife greatly
raised how much respect others, both black and white evidently, gave her. "Aunt" Florida of Georgia said her
grandmother, the "sworn midwife" of the plantation, attended on both
blacks and whites in her locality of "Hurricane an' Briefiel'." By helping women of both races, she again
shows that whites under slavery often accepted "race mixing," but
only under a social system that theoretically ensured the whites' almost
complete control over most blacks.
Illustrating the importance midwives potentially had, overseer John
Garner blamed the death of a newborn baby slave on Matilda telling him only at
the last minute she was going to have a child, which kept him from getting a
midwife soon enough: "I cold not
get the old woman there in time, her lying up at the same time." Of course, the "help" some
midwives gave to women in labor could clearly be harmful. One "ignorant old negress" that
Kemble encountered would, in cases of greatly long and difficult labor,
"tie a cloth tight round the throats of the agonized women, and by drawing
it till she almost suffocated them she produced violent and spasmodic
struggles, which she assured me she thought materially assisted the progress of
the labor."132
Despite this caveat, slave midwives were usually vital members of the
plantation community who received respect from black and white alike.
Medical Care for English Agricultural Workers
English
farmworkers had one major advantage over the slaves in medical care, but also
one major disadvantage. On the one
hand, they were potentially free to go or not go to any doctor, and to accept
or reject any treatment offered.
However, financial limitations made a mockery of this freedom, since
their poverty normally forced to rely on parish-provided medical help. On the other, the employing farmers often
cared little about the fates of their (often overly plentiful) employees, since
their self-interest was less directly tied to the health of their laborers than
for planters owning slaves. People tend
to care more for what they OWN than for what they do NOT own, although the
self-interest of slaveowners only unreliably restrained their conduct, as
Kemble observed (see p. 82). Quite
literally, the agricultural workers were more on their own, for good or for
ill. Paternalism, whether that of
slaveowners or landed gentry, necessarily involves the subordinate class giving
up some degree of freedom in exchange for greater security. The slaves clearly were further along the
continuum that traded freedom for security than the farmworkers. Consequently, the slaves probably had more
guaranteed medical care but definitely less freedom than the farmworkers. The slaves received (white) medical care
whether they wanted it or not, while the agricultural workers got the freedom
to fend for themselves, unless the parish paid for a doctor to attend on them
when sick. If the parish did, excepting
for private acts of charity, no individual farmer or landowner provided
it.
In
Petworth Union, Sussex, standard practice was to pay for the medical care of
paupers under both the New and Old Poor Laws.133 The union hired two doctors to attend the
poor, both in the workhouse and without, at, respectively, ninety and one
hundred pounds a year each.134 Although the New Poor Law of 1834 prohibited
outdoor relief to the able-bodied non-elderly, and used the workhouse as a
"test" of destitution (i.e., desperation) to discourage applications
for relief, it still allowed medical aid to paupers not in the poorhouse. Initially, this union argued with William
Hawley, an Assistant Poor Law Commissioner, over whether the husband as head of
the family and as a pauper was the only one legally entitled to medical relief,
or whether his wife and children also were covered. The tradition of the union (including before Petworth parish
became part of a union in 1835) had been to relieve medically the poor even when
they failed to legally meet the definition of being a pauper. The clerk to the local board of guardians
even asserted that although this was his union's standard practice, he believed
it was not for other unions. The
doctor, Mr. Hall, aided anyone poor who asked him for help, although strictly
legally by contract he only had to help when requisitioned by the relieving
officer or workhouse master.135 In times of medical emergency, however,
Hawley said the doctor should attend to a poor patient immediately, deeming as
unnecessary the drawing up of a formal order for relief if the relieving
officer was not nearby. A letter by
Edwin Chadwick, the Secretary of the Poor Law Commission in London, dated
August 22, 1836, declared that relieving the whole family was to be standard
practice in England.136
The Petworth union's board of guardians evidently operated by a more
compassionate ethos than the New Poor Law required or even permitted. First, at least one of their doctors by
tradition aided any poor person asking for help, not just those strictly
meeting the legal definition of "pauper." Second, even before receiving Chadwick's letter, they had opted
for the broader legal interpretation of helping the whole family, not just the
father. Petworth Union's fairly liberal
administration guaranteed the laborers a reasonable amount of medical care, but
more restrictive unions elsewhere would have covered only those legally
declared to be paupers, which normally meant only the able-bodied in the
workhouse, and the non-able-bodied (including the elderly) without.
Extrapolating
from Petworth to all of England is an obviously hazardous act. More restrictive policies operated
elsewhere. Thomas Sockett, the rector
for Petworth parish, described a case involving a man named Holden, living in
Tillington, Midhurst parish. After
asking for relief, he found that the union withheld medical aid. Free medical aid was first denied because
only male heads of households were to receive it, not wives or children. Later, he heard that renting a house worth
eight pounds a year cost him all free medical help. Although he did pay that much rent nominally, this denial ignored
that half of the house was sublet to another man for three pounds eighteen
shillings per year. He ultimately got
no relief, except perhaps two weeks later.
Showing that English medical practice's backwardness rivaled the
antebellum South's, the laborer tried to help his wife like the physician had
done before. After getting some
leeches, he applied them as the doctor had, who "had blistered her head
and put on leeches."137 When medical help was this primitive and
errant, the conflict between intentions and results is obvious. Assuming medical treatment was routinely
this bad, the skinflint board of guardians governing Midhurst, by denying free
medical "aid," helped the poor more than the relatively compassionate
Petworth board!
Establishing
medical clubs were another way to help laborers and others who were poor pay
for medical care. Similar to the
clothing club described above (p. 54), and friendly societies in general, they
guaranteed benefits when the member was sick in return for paying some small
amount weekly or monthly. As Thompson
notes: "Small tradesmen, artisans,
labourers--all sought to insure themselves against sickness, unemployment, or
funeral expenses through memberships of 'box clubs' or friendly
societies." According to Huggett,
a typical laborer as a member might pay one shilling a month in return for
potential benefits of one shilling a day for six weeks and six pence a day for
another six weeks when sick and unable to work. Why were these clubs so scarce among laborers compared to the
artisans, at least before c. 1815?
Since class consciousness or political activism developed more slowly
among the laborers than the skilled tradesmen (see below pp. ), the former naturally lagged behind the
latter in organizational activities.
Clearly, compared to the skilled, the unskilled were less likely to be
politically concerned and more likely to possess fatalistic attitudes towards accepting
conditions as they were, as Mayhew experienced in London. But consider a more immediate, practical
issue: If a laborer and his family are
just barely above subsistence, spending an extra shilling or two a month may be
an impossible burden to bear. As Rector
Sockett commented: "I think it
quite a mockery to propose a medical club to a man that has not shoes to his
feet." Furthermore, the local
parish authorities might set their face against a club because it would make
the laborers too independent. Arch
remembered his local parish's parson refused to preach a sermon to help a club
raise funds, although it still was organized anyway. Since rural areas contained fewer people to control and a likely
even more concentrated elite possessing the great powers the central government
had delegated it and a possible near monopsony over the local labor market, the
rural elite has relatively more power to exert against any attempts at
organization by the laborers compared to their urban counterparts. Additional problems could come from
within: Members, usually having only
grade school educations at best, could commit fraud or mismanagement. The former ultimately destroyed the benefit
society that shepherd Caleb Bawcombe had been a member of (c. 1885) for three
decades. He sued its secretary for
refusing to pay him because of narrow, legalistic reasons for the six weeks he
had been laid up. Helped by others, he
won, but the judge ordered the club to be dissolved and its money to be
distributed to its members since its secretary was exposed as a cheater.138 Although friendly societies were hardly a
panacea because of the laborers' tight finances, they still represented a level
of freedom in open collective action that American slaves could only
dream about.
The
laborer's right to reject a medical treatment seems unimportant, but it
demonstrates the difference between a free man and a bondsman. At times it mattered, despite its
theoretical nature. Arch had a running
battle against the local authorities who wished to vaccinate his children over
his objections. Four times He went to
court, represented by just himself.
Four times he won and stopped them, something which no slave could boast
of. Admittedly, his reasons for
opposition were dubious. He disliked
the mass vaccinations at school, saying he was not going to have his
"children treated as if they were cattle." He told the bench that his children were healthy. He said no hereditary diseases can be traced
back for many generations in his family.
He feared that their blood could be tainted by the "filthy matter
. . . too often used for vaccination purposes." His reasoning was specious: The eighteenth-century's crude inoculations
were still a mighty contributor to the overall death rate's decline,
even before the introduction of Jenner's improved process of smallpox
vaccination (1796).139
Nevertheless, this situation shows the farmworkers and slaves occupied
sharply different legal categories, despite being as mistreated as a class by
enclosure and the multitude of petty tyrannies committed by the local gentry,
large farmers, and parsons. Slaves
simply could not testify in courts of law against whites at all. But if the laborers were well-informed
legally (which, admittedly, they usually were not), they could wrest favorable
decisions from even hostile magistrates, as Arch did. The laborers did not always have to accept what the local
authorities provided for them, in medical matters or other areas of life,
although the costs of insubordination could be high, while the slaves had less
choice concerning what they received from their masters and mistresses, against
whom disobedience usually brought much harsher, swifter punishments.
Workhouse
infirmaries imposed a regime of regimentation, but likely presented decidedly
more orderly and clean conditions than most infirmaries in the South that were
intended for slaves. Showing its high
level of control over the inmates, Petworth Union's workhouse for the elderly
at Kirdford, Sussex denied them the freedom to walk anywhere without permission
except for the garden/backyard area outside it.140 Jeffries described one place where an
elderly agricultural worker stayed that lacked the freedom and sentimental
value of his own cottage, but which provided better food and care: "In the infirmary the real benefit of
the workhouse reached him. The food,
the little luxuries, the attention were far superior to anything he could
possibly have had at home. But still it
was not home."141
Certainly the cleanliness of this particular workhouse beat hands down
the disorderly squalor and filth that Kemble encountered in an infirmary on a
plantation whose general treatment of the slaves was better than the
neighboring masters' average standards.
Although workhouse inmates were not treated much as individuals, their
conditions surely beat the dirt floor of some "infirmary" as a place
to regain health compared to staying at home.
Whose Medical Care Was Better?
Since
the late eighteenth to mid-nineteenth-century's health care was undeniably
crude and primitive, the medical care slaves or agricultural workers received
from their superiors remains for us today more a test of intentions than
results. The fewer slaves or
farmworkers that doctors bled, blistered, or gave useless patent medicines to,
the better off they were. The stingy
board of guardians or master who refused to pay for doctors may have helped
their charges more than the seemingly compassionate authorities who paid the
fees of physicians producing more pain and death than cure and life. Based on the sources above, parishes and
unions providing doctors for the paupers in their midst may have been given
more regular care than a majority of slaves received, if for no other reason
than England's higher population densities helped doctors serve more people in
a given day by reducing the amount of travel between patients. But those English workers not declared
official paupers at the time they fell ill likely received less help since they
would either have to pay for medical expenses out of pocket or lean on the
doctor's sense of altruism. Those
fortunate enough to live in a parish or union that provided medical help to
basically all laborers, not just the legal paupers, were probably better off
than a majority of slaves. As for the
bondsmen, the masters and mistresses owning them may have had more immediate
self-interest in helping them when sick, just as a farmer who owns a cow calls
a veterinarian when it has a disease.
But self-interest only unreliably "guaranteed" slaves
received medical help, since self-interest could also dictate its denial or
cutting corners on its provision, such as slaveowners or overseers trying to
administer medicines or treatments on their own and avoiding the calling in of
doctors until the last minute. Slaves
in areas where doctors were reasonably accessible may have on average received
more professional medical attention than those English farmworkers on their own
because they were not declared paupers legally.
Reflecting
their different cultures and legal statuses, the slaves and farmworkers had
different ways to get their own medical aid.
The slave conjurors, being warlocks or witches as well as healers,
became someone in their own community with a source of authority independent of
the white establishment's. Besides the
problems caused by the "magical" side of their healing arts, the conjurors'
treatments probably helped no less and hurt no more their brothers and sisters
in bondage than the white physicians did.
The slave midwives did more good on average for their community by
helping fellow slave women through the travail of birth, but they lacked the
same level of power if they were not conjurors also. As shown by their limited freedom to organize medical benefit
clubs, the English agricultural workers were able to engage in collective
action to help meet their medical needs.
But their tight family budgets were roadblocks against the sparing of a
shilling or two a month, which discouraged many from joining or organizing
these groups. Those engaged in
collective action also took on the risk that one or more persons involved may
let the whole group down by failing to do their jobs effectively, such as by
committing fraud or causing bankruptcy.
How these subordinate groups independently got medical care varied
because of the agricultural workers' greater freedom legally allowed them to
organize collectively, while the slave community, drawing on their African
cultural heritage, turned to the conjurer's treatments and his perceived
magical powers.
The Overall Standard of Living: Were the Slaves or Farmworkers Better Off?
Without
reliable, broad-based quantitative statistics, it is difficult to decisively
prove which group of two was better off materially or the same group in
different generations. Conditions that
vary regionally merely add further complications, such as the differences
between the Border States and Deep South for the slaves, or northern and
southern England for the farmworkers.
Diversity within the subordinate group cannot be dismissed, which could
be caused by individual ability, the character of the specific master(s) a slave
or farmworker has, and family relationships.
Finally, the material standard of living only partially covers the
quality of life. When making broad
group generalizations, such as comparing all Southern slaves to all English
agricultural workers to determine whose standard of living was higher,
dogmatism should be avoided and these caveats remembered. But although this realm allows one literary
source to be pitted against another, some generalizations are still
possible.
For
the southern English agricultural workers (who composed a solid majority of
their group) and typical rural slaves, there was likely little to choose
between the quality and quantity of clothing or housing. Perhaps the slaves of the Deep South of
smaller planters and farmers had worse clothes, but its hotter climate ensured
they had less need for them than the English did, which partially justified
their owners' complacency. Apparently
most in both groups probably owned only one or two changes of clothes,
excluding the nicer clothes some slave servants had, or the "Sunday best"
saved for church. Both often lived in
one-room houses with dirt floors and non-glazed windows, having perhaps a loft
for the children to sleep in. The
slaves might have been better off since wood was plentiful in the New World,
making construction and repairs cost less than in most of England. The English had to use other materials which
nonskilled people had more trouble building with than the logs thrown together
for many a frontier cabin. As for
medical care, the average slave may have had better access to a physician's
care than the average English farm laborer who was not legally a pauper,
assuming the South's lower population densities did not sharply reduce the
number of house calls made per day, and that smaller planters and farmers paid for
medical help as much as large planters.
Turning to diet, the slaves had much more meat and probably more food
overall, but the southern English agricultural workers ate white wheat bread
that was clearly less coarse than the crude corn bread many slaves ate. Ironically, the free southern rural
laborers of England approached bare subsistence closer than the
African-American bondsmen, thanks to enclosure, rapid population growth in a
long-settled realm, and the belt-tightening of the New Poor Law (1834). Northern English agricultural workers, who
composed perhaps one-third or one-fourth of all English farmworkers, were
usually significantly better off than the slaves.142 Their higher wages (and superior access to
allotments or other land) kept meat solidly in their diets, allowing them to
pay for more clothing and better cottages.
Similarly but less dramatically, the Border States' slaves enjoyed
better treatment and conditions than the Deep South's. Hazarding a broad-brushed judgment, it
appears the farmworker's material standard of living was no higher than slaves
on average, who often were marginally better off than the southern agricultural
workers considered alone, at least in diet.
Trickle-Down Economics with a Vengeance: How the Slaves Benefited
How
could a slave labor force arguably have a marginally higher standard of living
than (much of) a free one? Several
unusual factors produced this result.
First, even American slaves benefited some from living in a part of the
world where population density was low and natural resources were abundant,
especially wood and land. True, the
white slaveholders expropriated most of the benefits that the slaves would have
had if they had been free. This is
"trickle-down economics" with a vengeance! In the South, wood for homes, heating, and cooking was nearly a
free good. Masters knew slaves put to
work growing corn and raising hogs in addition to the cash crop could cover
most of their living expenses, leaving largely to themselves the surplus
generated by the cash crop. The
prudent, risk-averse planter or slaveowner made his or her slaves pursue
subsistence as a collective by raising corn and hogs. Benefiting from cheap land, this strategy made many slaveowners
rich, since the cash crop's receipts greatly exceeded the direct cash expenses,
at least in good years. By contrast,
since land was relatively scarce and expensive in England, the landlords and
gentry passionately clung to it; even most farmers had little or none, let
alone the farmworkers. As the
industrial revolution began, England's growing population ensured competition
for land ownership would intensify.
Southern England's general deforestation guaranteed fuel for cooking and
heating would be expensive. Hiking
fuel's costs still more, its scarcity often required it to be transported
considerable distances. Furthermore,
the landlords and farmers used access to land as a social control/labor
discipline device. They often hesitated
to lease even tiny parcels of land as allotments to the agricultural
workers. By making their labor force
totally dependent on wages and forcing it into the labor market to survive,
they wanted to keep them from pursuing a subsistence strategy in order to
control its actions better. By
contrast, under their masters' direction and control, the slaves normally had
to pursue subsistence, but their lack of freedom ensured they wouldn't become
too independent of their owners. By
owning the slaves and their produce, and keeping firm control of the
distribution of food (under the gang system), the slaveholders grasped the
throats of the slaves firmly even as they raised most of the food they
ate. But in England, since neither the
labor force nor the product of its labor was owned by the rural elite,
controlling the laborers was intrinsically more difficult. The landlords and their tenants alienated
the labor force from the means of production (the land through enclosures),
creating a more easily controlled, wage-dependent rural proletariat since
farmworkers were denied the ability to eke out a living from the local commons
all or part of the year. The American
slaveowner almost whimsically granted his slaves small patches of land to grow
vegetables thanks to the abundance of land on the frontier, but those trying to
persuade English landlords and farmers to provide allotments to farmworkers
often resembled dentists trying to pull teeth from balky patients. In short, since southern England had a higher
population density and lower resource base than the American South, this
difference helped to ensure farmworkers likely had a lower standard of living
than the slaves, particularly for food and fuel.
Theoretically,
since the slaveholders owned all slaves and anything their labor produced, but
the rural English elite owned neither the farmworkers nor their labor, it seems
the latter should automatically be better off materially. The counter-intuitive result arises because
the farmworkers had all the burdens of freedom without all of its advantages,
while the bondsmen's material security in having (theoretically) guaranteed
food, shelter, and clothing had some basis in fact. The landlord/farmer class in England devised a system under which
the rural laborers still had to fend for themselves (excepting the parish dole
and private charity), especially as service declined, but tilted the laws
against their labor force. The process
and outcome of enclosure demonstrated the reality of class-based legal bias
above all. When dividing up the land
into awards, the enclosure comissioners routinely ignored the customary rights
of non-landowners to the parish commons to raise animals or obtain fuel. If they actually legally owned
nothing, they received nothing. Even
the recipients of a patch of land often soon sold it because their share of the
expenses of building fences and the commissioners' legal costs exceeded what
cash they had.143
The game laws also were biased against the laborers, which not only
outlawed them from hunting for food, but even often restricted the farmers from
destroying the pests that damaged their crops, an issue returned to below (pp.
303-4, 367-69). By contrast, in
America, even slaves were usually free to hunt. The poor and settlement laws combined to impede migration,
helping tilt many local rural labor markets still further in the farmers and
landlords' favor by discouraging competition for Hodge's labor by
industry. Other ways that the law
favored the upper class's material interests is dealt with in the final section
dealing with methods of elite control (pp. 303-7). Clearly, the English landlord/farmer class had not set up a
class-neutral system of laissez-faire.
Instead, taking advantage of the laborers at almost every turn possible,
they systematically tilted the law to limit the laborers' freedom to sell their
labor to the highest bidder. The rural
elite imposed a laissez-faire regime on the laborers only to the extent it
favored their class interests, but inflicted anti-free market controls on the
rural lower class, such as the settlement laws, when excessive fidelity to the
principles of classical economics contradicted their own collective
self-interest. For now, fuller details
of how the English rural elites controlled the farmworkers have to wait until
the last section. Consequently, although
Hodge was no slave, his superiors definitely oppressed and exploited him, which
explains how his standard of living often arguably fell beneath that of the
real slaves of the American South.
3. THE QUALITY
OF LIFE: SLAVES VERSUS AGRICULTURAL
WORKERS
The Quality of Life and the (Material) Standard of
Living Compared
The people I saw around me [in Steventon, Berkshire]
were, many of them, among the poorest poor.
But when I visited them in their little thatched cottages, I felt that
the condition of even the meanest and most ignorant among them was vastly
superior to the conditions of the most favored slaves in America. They labored hard; but they were not ordered
out to toil while the stars were in the sky, and driven and slashed by an
overseer . . . Their homes
were very humble; but they were protected by law. No insolent patrols could come, in the dead of night, and flog
them at their pleasure. The father,
when he closed his cottage door, felt safe with his family around him. No master or overseer could come and take
from him his wife, or his daughter. . . . The parents knew where their children were
going, and could communicate with them by letters. The relations of husband and wife, parent and child, were too
sacred for the richest noble in the land to violate with impunity. Much was
being done to enlighten these poor people.
Schools were established among them, and benevolent societies were
active in efforts to ameliorate their condition. There was no law forbidding them to learn to read and write; and
if they helped each other in spelling out the Bible, they were in no danger of
thirty-nine lashes, as was the case with myself and poor, pious, old uncle
Fred. I repeat that the most ignorant
and the most destitute of these peasants [laborers, since they were employees,
and land] was a thousand fold better
off than the most pampered American slave.144
Above
Harriet Brent Jacobs, fugitive slave, working for her employer as a nanny while
in England, expertly, eloquently, and concisely states what some quantitative
historians seemingly overlook sometimes:
The quality of life and the standard of living are not
coextensive. The laborers undeniably
had a better quality of life than most slaves.
"Quality of life" captures all the aspects of life that
contribute to happiness and an informed worldview. Although food, clothing, housing, medical care and other material
aspects of life are captured under the heading "the quality of life,"
they are but a part of it. The quality
of relationships with other people, such as family, friends, bosses, and agents
of the state, weighs heavily in contributing towards personal happiness, as do
education and religious experience. The
most highly esteemed and influential slaves from the white viewpoint, such as
the head driver on a large plantation, lacked the basic legal rights and
protections that even the most oppressed and half-starved Wiltshire laborer
possessed. Consider Kemble's
description of headman Frank on her husband's rice-island estate. He had the authority to whip a fellow slave
three dozen times, could give permission for slaves to leave the island, had
the key to the stores, determined who would work where, and handed out the
rations. He had many positive personal
qualities. But he could only helplessly
endure, knowing full well the ultimate futility of violence, while the white
overseer took his wife as a mistress for a time and had a son by her. "Trustworthy, upright, intelligent, he
may be flogged to-morrow if [the overseer] or [Kemble's husband] so please it,
and sold the next day, like a cart-horse, at the will of the latter."145 Since so much contributes to personal
happiness besides the material basics, the standard of living cannot properly
serve as a true proxy for a society's overall social well-being. In this section, the quality of life,
including such aspects as education, family relationships, the position and
treatment of the elderly and children, and religious activities (as developing
part of an informed worldview and broader outlook on life under such highly
circumscribed conditions), of English farmworkers and African-American slaves
is compared, demonstrating how the former were unquestionably better off.146 Although the quality of life is more
ephemeral and less susceptible to quantification than the material standard of
living, it still is of first importance.
Unlike what some economic historians seem to think, man does not live by
bread alone.
Literacy and Education for African-American Slaves
The
amount of formal education that most American slaves received is summarizable
in one word: none. As freedwoman Rose Williams recalled: "Massa Hawkins . . . has no
books for larning. There am no
education for the niggers."
Masters and mistresses could easily justify this policy from their
viewpoint. They feared that if their
slave work force could read, 'rite, and do 'rithmatic, then it would become
restless, discontent with their condition, and possibly revolt. To prevent this from happening, the law in
most slave states threatened heavy penalties against anyone daring to teach
slaves how to read. Today, since the
leading forms of mass communication (TV, radio, and motion pictures) demand
little or nothing in the way of literacy from their audiences, and since most
people in the developed world are literate, which encourages them to take this
for granted, the contemporary world easily forgets how total was the ignorance
that darkened the minds of those unable to read in the pre-electronic media
age. Besides public meetings, the printed
word was nearly the only means to reach a mass of people at once in the
nineteenth century. By keeping the
slaves illiterate, masters and mistresses forced their bondsmen to depend
mainly on rumor and hearsay passed from one person to the next as what he or
she "knew." Illiteracy helped
keep slaves in line by making escapes to the North even more hazardous. Even Douglass, a literate slave, did
not know that Canada existed. If a
bondsman neither can read a map nor already knows the geographic area he or she
is planning to flee through, escape attempts become dangerous, even
foolhardy. He or she could easily get
lost and go in the wrong direction, especially when pausing to ask for
directions from anyone with a white face was risky. Beyond the practical advantages of literacy, there is also the
intrinsic excellence developed in the human mind by training it in reason,
logic, and knowledge, which (certainly in the nineteenth century) came from
analytical reading. Since the faculty
of reason is the highest human faculty, it is a crime against the victims'
humanity to have the deliberate policy of not just intentionally
neglecting it, nay, but prohibiting its development and full use. As Aristotle explains in the Nicomachean
Ethics:
That which is proper to each thing is by nature best
and more pleasant for each thing; for man, therefore, the life according to
reason is best and pleasantest, since reason more than anything else is
man. This life therefore is also the
happiest.
The slaveowning class, by pursuing an intentional
policy of stunting the minds of their slaves, weakened in them the faculty that
makes man different from the animals, thus undermining what made them human
instead of a mere "beast of burden."147 Despite the English upper class harbored
fears like their American counterparts', English conditions ultimately sharply
differed from America's, because as the nineteenth century progressed, the
government increased its efforts to educate the farmworkers.
Bondsmen
repeatedly said either that they did not know how to read as slaves, learning
only after they became free, or that they were the rare literate
exceptions. Reuben Saunders, born and
raised in Georgia, a slave set free by his master after living in Mississippi,
commented: "I was never caught
there with a book in my hand, or a pen.
I never saw but one slave in Georgia, who could read and write, and he
was brought in from another State."
Questioning one slave preacher's credentials, his master's oldest son
asked: "'Bird, you can't preach,
you can't read. How on earth can you
get a text out of the Bible when you can't even read? How'n hell can a man preach that don't know nothing?'" To defend his ministry, the slave replied
that "Lord had called him to preach and He'd put the things in his mouth
that he ought to say." After the
young master heard Bird preach "the hairraisingest sermon you ever
heard," he gave him a horse to preach anywhere nearby. Nevertheless, illiteracy was certainly no
aid to this slave's ministry. A more
unusual case of a slave who grew up illiterate was Williamson Pease of
Tennessee. His master and mistress
tried to teach him at home, but, "I would get out of the way when they
tried to teach me, being small and not knowing the good of learning." Far more commonly, many a slave who wanted
the ability to read was kept from gaining it.
W.E.B. Dubois once estimated that maybe 5% of the slaves were literate
by 1860, with a disproportionately higher percentage of them living in the
towns and cities than in the countryside, where controlling the slaves was
easier, and in some parts of the Upper South than in the Deep South, where laws
against teaching slaves to read were nonexistent or more weakly enforced.148
Why Slaveholders Wanted Illiterate Slaves
Simply
put, slaveholders wanted their bondsmen iliterate in order to control them
better. A simple, tactical objection to
literate slaves was that if they could read and write, they could forge passes
for leaving the plantation, as Douglass once did in a failed escape
attempt. But the broader, more
strategic problem was that literacy would create discontent among the slaves as
the veil of ignorance rose off their eyes.
They would realize and feel more acutely the lost opportunities and
great burdens of their servile condition.
Since knowledge is power, a literate slave's greatly increased access to
information also would help him or her plan escapes or revolts more
effectively. Douglass explained that
his mistress in Baltimore had been teaching him how to read. But suddenly, his master (Hugh Auld)
terminated the lessons, warning her:
If you give a nigger an inch, he will take an
ell. A nigger should know nothing but
to obey his master--to do as he is told to do.
Learning would spoil the best nigger in the world. Now . . . if you teach that nigger
[Douglass] how to read, there would be no keeping him. It would forever unfit him to be a
slave. He would at once become
unmanageable, and of no value to his master.
As to himself, it could do him no good, but a great deal of harm. It would make him discontent and unhappy.
Ironically, through a form of reverse psychology, his
master's broadside against his wife strongly motivated Douglass to learn how to
read, since he realized it would open his mind. Illiteracy denied knowledge to the slaves, helping create
"the white man's power to enslave the black man." Kemble found her husband's overseer had
similar views:
No; he had no special complaint to bring against the
lettered members of his subject community, but he spoke by anticipation. Every step they take toward intelligence and
enlightenment lessens the probability of their acquiescing in their
condition. Their condition is not to be
changed--ergo, they had better not learn to read.
Aptly illustrating the slaveholding class's
sensitivities about educating slaves into uncontrollability, a missionary once
received a petition that over 350 large planters and leading citizens in South
Carolina had signed. They opposed his
wishes to instruct slaves only orally in religious truths:
Verbal instruction will increase the desire of the
black population to learn. . . . Open the missionary sluice, and the current will swell in its
gradual onward advance. We thus expect a
progressive system of improvement will be introduced, or will follow from
the nature and force of circumstances, which, if not checked (though it may be
shrouded in sophistry and disguise), will ultimately revolutionize our civil
institutions.149
Fearing a slippery slope to emancipation or rebellion
began with slaves receiving any kind of (non-artisanal) education, they opposed
all formal instruction. For its own
purposes, the white ruling class' logic was impeccable: We must deny slaves education which
increases their discontent, makes them harder to control, and leads them to
revolt.150
Despite
all the roadblocks against bondsmen learning to read, some still found paths to
literacy. Undoubtedly, slaves learned
to read from members of the class most opposed to literate bondsmen: slaveholders. The slave-owning class was neither totally united nor consistent
in practice in keeping slaves illiterate.
Hence, a few favorites were taught how to read, such as house servants
(e.g., Douglass). In South Carolina,
the grand jurors of Sumter County, greatly concerned that some masters taught
their slaves how to read, warned of "consequences of the most serious and
alarming nature" if this practice did not end. As a girl, Harriet Brent Jacobs learned how to read from her
mistress: "While I was with her,
she taught me to read and spell; and for this privilege, which so rarely falls
to the lot of a slave, I bless her memory." Wanting all her slaves to be able to read, Mary Lee, the wife of
Confederate general Robert E. Lee, cast the gift of literacy widely on her
Virginia plantation. She delegated the
actual teaching job to two of her children.
In one rather unusual case which Olmsted records, a small Mississippi
planter with twenty slaves, did not teach any of his slaves to read, but let
one teach all the rest. He was
thoroughly convinced that "Niggers is mighty apt at larnin', a heap more
'n white folks is," citing the case of an apparent seventeen-year-old who
learned to read as well as any man he knew in a mere three months. Freedman Arnold Gragston, born and raised a
slave in Kentucky, said his master, who owned ten slaves, had one special slave
whose job was to teach the rest on his plantation, and others nearby, how to
read, write and figure. James Sumler of
Virginia got the younger white children (of his master evidently) to teach him
how to read while hiding in a hayloft on Sundays.151 Although such masters were not common, they
still illustrate that the Southern ruling class was not as monolithic in
keeping the slaves illiterate as its public declarations may indicate, since it
sometimes felt that at least a few "pet" slaves were worthy of the
gift of literacy.
More
problematic for the white power structure (since it was uncontrolled and often
not detected), some slaves taught other slaves to read. Benedict Duncan of Maryland learned from a
Sunday school teacher, as did Christopher Hamilton of Missouri, but the former
first learned his letters from his father.
Harriet Brent Jacobs taught one old man how to read, who badly wanted to
be able to read the Bible in order to serve God better. Under the cover of a Sunday school held in
the home of a free black man, Frederick Douglass was teaching up to forty
students how to read. Several of his
students became fully literate. Jenny
Proctor, freedwoman of Alabama, told what she and her fellow bondsmen did to
learn to read:
None of us was 'lowed to see a book or try to
learn. They say we git smarter than
they was if we learn anything, but we slips around and gits hold of that
Webster's old blue-back speller and we hides it till 'way in the night and then
we lights a little pine torch, and studies that spelling book. We learn it too.
Furthermore, some states, such as Tennessee and
Kentucky, had no laws against teaching slaves how to read. Henry Morehead, while still a slave in
Louisville, Kentucky, paid his own expenses for attending a night school to
learn how to read and spell. But even
in this more moderate Border State, his owners objected. They brought in policemen to close the
school.152
Self-help measures allowed some slaves to learn how to read in defiance
of the laws against it, by helping one another become literate, or finding
someone else who would teach them.
Despite
the slaves' own efforts at self-help and the cracks in the united facade the
white ruling class presented against educating slaves to read and write,
masters and mistresses usually sucessfully darkened the American slave's mind. Franklin is much too optimistic when he
claims:
It is remarkable how generally the laws against the
teaching of Negroes were disregarded.
Planters became excited over the distribution of abolition literature in
the South, but they gave little attention [?!] to preventing the training of
slaves to read, which would have rendered abolition literature ineffective to a
large extent.
Potentially draconian penalties threatened those
teaching slaves how to read. Even death was not reckoned too harsh a
penalty by the time Kemble published her journal. Earlier, heavy fines for the first two offenses, and imprisonment
for the third, were Georgian law in the 1830s.
Jacobs warned the old man she taught that "slaves were whipped and
imprisoned for teaching each other to read." The formal law's punishments were one thing to fear; the dangers
of the lynch mob's summary "law" quite another. Freedwoman Ellen Cragin's father asked an
old white man who taught him, "Ain't you 'fraid they'll kill you if they
see you?" He replied, "No, they
don't know what I'm doing, and don't you tell 'em. If you do, they will kill me." When their whips could do the same job more quickly, masters need
not wait on the legal system to deal with recalcitrant slaves reaching out to
enlighten their minds. Ellen Betts,
freedwoman of Louisiana, remembered how her master punished his slaves when
they strived for literacy: "If
Marse cotch a paper in you hand he sure whup you. He don't 'low no bright niggers round, he sell 'em quick. He always say, 'Book larning don't raise no
good sugar cane.'" Kemble found
the prior overseer of her husband's estates firmly discouraged slaves from
learning to read. Despite having a
literate father, Israel explained why he was not:
You know what de white man dat goberns de estate him
seem to like and favor, dat de people find out bery soon and do it; now Massa
K---- [the prior overseer], him neber favor our reading, him not like it;
likely as not he lick you if he find you reading; or, if you wish to teach your
children, him always say, 'Pooh!
teach'em to read--teach'em to work.'
According to dat, we neber paid much attention to it.
Master Edwin Epps asked Northrup, already literate
before he was kidnapped and sold south, whether he could read:
On being informed that I had received some instruction
in those branches of education, he assured me, with emphasis, if he ever caught
me with a book, or with pen and ink, he would give me a hundred lashes. . .
. [He said] he bought 'niggers' to work
and not to educate.
As a field hand, he found nearly impossible to get
even a single sheet of paper and ink to write with, let alone have a letter
mailed off plantation.153
So even when a slave was lucky enough to be able to read, his master
could, totally arbitrarily, effectively strip him of this ability by preventing
its exercise.
English Farmworkers, Literacy, and Education
Although
the literacy levels of the agricultural workers of England were hardly stellar,
they still greatly exceeded those of Southern rural slaves. Admittedly, a very minimal definition of
"literacy" is used here: the
ability to read and write one's signature.
Major improvement occurred as the eighteenth century ended and the
nineteenth progressed. For England (and
Wales) as a whole, lumping together both urban and rural averages, literacy has
been estimated to be about 25 percent even in 1600, rising to roughly 55
percent in 1750, reaching around 65 percent in 1800, and then remaining on a
slightly inclined plateau until about 1850.
During the 1850-1900 period, England made rapid progress, as it moved
towards a universal compulsory public school system, so literacy reached the 95
percent level around 1900. Since urban
areas had a higher level of literacy than rural areas, these statistics have to
be adjusted downwards to estimate the latter's rate alone. Even in 1867-68, the middle aged and elderly
in Cambridgeshire only rarely could read.
In 1911, Hudson encountered a 76-year-old woman in Wiltshire who said
when she was young poverty prevented her from getting any schooling. Newlyweds often could not sign the register
in church. An investigator for the
1867-68 Report on Employment in Agriculture found in Leicester that only
one-fourth could read and write well, one-fourth could only read, one-fourth
did both some, and one-fourth or more were illiterate. R.S. Schofield found that illiteracy for the
1754-1844 period ranged between 59 and 66 percent for male laborers and
servants, but a higher rate inevitably prevailed among females. His figures are based upon whether they
could sign their examination papers produced by investigations of their
settlement status when applying for (or potentially so) relief in a particular
parish. Overall illiteracy ranged from
30 percent (Dorset) to 60 percent (Bedfordshire) in 1838-39 in the counties
where the Swing riots of 1830-31 occurred, with the female average consistently
higher than the male average.154 Since farmworkers were the lowest group on
the occupational scale in the countryside, where average literacy levels were
low, their high illiteracy figures come as no surprise. Rural artisans and farmers both had higher
literacy rates than agricultural laborers.
The
statistically-based figures cited above of average literacy are based upon the
bare minimal ability of reading and writing one's signature. Reading a newspaper, magazine, or book with
comprehension is quite another matter.
As Hobsbawm and Rude note:
"The ability to scrawl one's own name [on the marriage register at
church] is no effective test of literacy." A low effective literacy rate cuts off farm laborers from
knowing the activities of others elsewhere, largely limiting their mental
horizons to only what they personally witnessed, which Somerville noted while
in Berkshire. The laborers opposed any
division of the commons, even when dividing it into petty farms would benefit
them, since they knew no better way by anything they had seen or experienced
personally: "In the first place,
all husbandry by plough or spade, which they are accustomed to see, or have
ever seen, (read of, they cannot, few of them can read,) is so different
in its results from what it might be, that they very naturally believe their
own eyes rather than the mere assertion of a stranger." A "few" sounds far less than 34 to
41 percent. One way to explain the
difference is that functional illiterates often can scrape by reading and
writing a bare little. Semi-literacy
remained a major roadblock against them learning of better ways to do things
from anything written. This problem was
surmountable if farmers or others more apt to be capable readers showed them
how to use some new technique or way to earn a living, as Cobbett's promotion
of straw-plaiting as a domestic industry shows.155 The literacy rates cited above should not be
taken to mean the ability to read (say) a newspaper editorial with 50%
comprehension, and then be able to mentally critique it effectively.
A Brief Sketch of the Development of English Public
Education
The
development of English public education was a slow, gradual process which is
only briefly summarized here. There had
been many schools, church- or chapel-related, but the government did not run
directly any overall system. The
typical quality of these schools was questionable. Arch said his mother was nearly as important in educating him as
the parson's village school that he attended for a bit less than three years
(ages six to eight). That school gave
him all the formal education that he received in 1830s Warwickshire. His mother read to him from the Bible and
Shakespeare. As he got older, she gave
him writing and arithmetic exercises to do after he finished work for the
day. Shepherd Isaac Bawcombe learned
how to read from a laboring lodger staying with his family who had fallen
evidently from a higher position in society.
Similar to Arch, Bawcombe benefited from home schooling, but unlike him,
he received no formal schooling:
"The village school was kept by an old woman, and though she taught
the children very little it had to be paid for, and she [Bawcbombe's mother]
could not afford it." Schools were
quite common in Leicestershire and Lincolnshire (c. 1867-68) because of the
clergy's influence and even the interest of the agricultural workers themselves
in educating their children. A grant of
£20,000 in 1833 for building schools was the first time the central government
of Britain appropriated money for schools.
But only with the Reform Bill of 1867 and the Education Act of 1870 did
England, as part of Britain, clearly move towards a system of universal and compulsory
public education. The latter act
allowed local school boards to be set up which could force students to attend
up to age thirteen. School boards only
needed to be created where local church-affiliated schools were inadequate.156 These laws affected the whole of Britain,
not just English rural laborers. But
what special challenges did public (government) schools and their students in
the English countryside face?
The
public schools for laborers and others living in rural England often bore the
burdens of indifferent support from parents and their employers, limited
facilities, and an early drop-out/school-leaving age. The investigators for the 1867-68 Report examined local
conditions of education carefully, particularly noting what ages children
tended to stop going to school and enter the work force full time. Two of the four questions they sought
answers to concerned restricting child labor by age limits and about school
attendance. They found a fundamental
conflict within the family economy about the role of children: Since farmworkers lived so close to subsistence,
their children's need to acquire an education clashed with their parents' need
for them to pull their own weight financially as soon as possible. The parents' earnings, especially for those
working irregularly because of rain or their own habits, were not high enough
to allow for the sacrifice of a child's earnings for the longer run benefits
stemming from education. Although this
did gradually change, rural laborers also often had apathetic attitudes about
sending their children to school. Stemming
from their superior economic conditions, parents who were laborers in Northumberland
and Durham cared more for educating their children. Unlike Hodge in the south, in the north he was much farther above
the level of subsistence, so he (and Mrs. Hodge) could more easily afford the
opportunity costs of sending children to school and foregoing their immediate
earnings. In Yorkshire, because the
parents had higher wages, they were more likely to leave their children in
school longer. Even in these high-wage
counties, the financial help from children working remained important, especially
when they were part of a large family with many young children.157
At What Age Did Child Labor Begin and Schooling End?
The ages at which the farmworkers'
children left school in the mid-nineteenth century to go to work seem
ridiculously low by contemporary standards, but these must be seen against the
backdrop of the typical laboring family's constant struggle to survive
financially. Because the farmworkers'
finances were so tight and because enclosure and the consolidation of small
farms into large ones had cost them so much of their ability to better their
conditions, even the commissioners of the 1867-68 Report conceded that it was
unfair to deny farmworker parents the ability to receive wages from their
children as early as possible so long as any resulting injury to the latter from
going to work was preventable.
Different conditions prevailed in different parts of England, since in
some places seven to ten year olds went to work, while in others they waited
until age thirteen. In northern
Northumberland, children rarely worked before age fourteen, except during
summers when eleven and twelve year olds were hired. In southern Northumberland, none under ten worked, except the
children of small farmers, whose nine year olds went to work on their own
farms. In Leicestershire, where lower
wages prevailed, the age of children leaving school actually was falling
because the increased cultivation of root crops was raising the demand for
child labor to harvest or weed them.
Children started work normally around eight years old, and even some six
year olds joined them. The average age
for quitting school had fallen from twelve or thirteen to ten. In low-wage Cambridge, some six year olds
went out to work, and many more aged seven and eight did likewise. Boys left school at age nine, "never to
return." But in higher-wage
Yorkshire, nine was the youngest normal age for children to leave school, but
so many left near that age that 74 percent attending school were under ten
years old. In Northamptonshire, boys
began to work at age eight, seven sometimes, and almost all were before
reaching their tenth birthday. After
age ten, if work was available, they often were employed all year around.158 In southern English counties, such as
Leicester, Northampton, and Cambridge, children routinely went to work and left
school earlier than those in northern English counties, such as Northumberland,
Durham, and (most of) Lincoln, which varied as a function of their parents'
wages: Those farther above subsistence
as they earned more could leave their children in school longer, while those
closer to absolute poverty sent them out to work as soon as it was practical.
"Going
to work" and "leaving school" were not necessarily simultaneous
events. Since agricultural work was
seasonal, children could be employed in the summer months, then put back into
school during fall and winter. In his
or her first years of work, a child sent into the fields during one part of the
year may be in the school house other times, during the winter and fall months
before spring planting time arrived.
Indeed, even into the 1890s, schools in Northampton made their schedules
fit the seasonal demands of agriculture, not vice versa. Morgan discovered school log books with
entries noting that attendance was lower than average when harvest was not yet
finished or had just begun. Hence, one
entry in a book kept for a school in Berkshire noted for July 22 and following
days in 1878: "Attendance smaller
than usual owing to the commencement of harvest operations." Like many others, it judiciously closed its
doors for several weeks during the late summer's harvest period. Mistakenly opening on September 6, 1875, it
immediately shuttered its doors again for another week: "School should have been reopened today
but there were so few in attendance that it was closed for another
week." In 1873 an entry simply
noted for July 21, 22, 23:
"Attendance on these days was limited on account of
Harvest." Establishing night
schools for laboring children was another way to fit school around the
work. One investigator for the 1867-68
Report suggested possibly that all children from five to ten years old should
be legally required to go to school, and night schools should be established
for ten to thirteen year olds.159 Eight of Woburn Union's 16 parishes had
evening schools, which had a total of 165 students out of a population of
11,682. In Bedfordshire overall, 29 of
its 50 parishes had evening schools with an average attendance of 546, and 952
names on their registers.160 But just because these schools existed,
meeting day or night, does not mean they necessarily supplied a reasonable
education. Arch saw night schools
at their best [as] mostly makeshift affairs. The boys would often attend them in the
slack winter months from November to March, or they would put in their day
schooling then, but the irregularity and the poor teaching did not give the
ordinary lad a fair chance of getting even a decent elementary education.161
Clearly, employers and laboring parents (as they
struggled near subsistence in southern England) saw the work of the latter's children
and the wages they earned during peak periods in the agricultural year as
outweighing in importance their children's potential long-run intellectual
development. As the government
attempted to make nearly a whole generation of laborers' children truly
literate for the first time, it had an uphill battle in persuading parents and
employers that education was valuable when these children often ended up doing
the same jobs as their parents, for whom literacy had mattered little, and when
parents, usually having little education themselves, only knew its value dimly,
if at all (unlike Douglass and many other literate slaves).
Ignorance Versus Skewed Knowledge: Different Models for Controlling
a Subordinate Class
The
education of masses, including the laborers, presented the English upper class
with a perplexing dilemma. The two
competing models of social control vis-a-vis education were both tempting. On the one hand, they could work to deny the
downtrodden literacy, keep them ignorant, narrow their mental horizons, and so
make them more contented in the work of drudgery that inevitably the vast
majority of human beings had to endure.
As Arch described this approach:
'Much knowledge of the right sort is a dangerous thing
for the poor,' might have been the motto put up over the door of the village
school in my day. The less
book-learning the labourer's lad got stuffed into him, the better for him and
the safer for those above him, was what those in authority believed and acted
up to. . . . These gentry
did not want him to know; they did not want him to think; they only wanted him
to work. To toil with the hand was what
he was born into the world for, and they took precious good care to see that he
did it from his youth upwards.
Members of the elite sometimes revealed that their
objectives were exactly what Arch said they were. Giddy, not only an M.P. but president of the Royal Society, rose
up to speak in 1807 against educating the poor extensively:
It would in effect be found to be prejudicial to their
morals and happiness; it would teach them to despise their lot in life, instead
of making them good servants in agriculture, and other laborious employments to
which their rank in society had destined
them; instead of teaching them subordination, it would render them
factious and refractory, as was evident in the manufacturing counties; it would
enable them to read seditious pamphlets, vicious books, and publications
against Christianity; it would render them insolent to their superiors; and in
a few years the result would be that the legislature would find it necessary to
direct the strong arm of power towards them.
During the reactionary 1790s in England, local
landowners even attacked the conservative Hannah More's schools in the 1790s,
which strongly preached patriotism to the children and avoided teaching them
how to write as they learned to read: "Of all the foolish inventions and
new fangled devices to ruin this country, that of teaching the poor to read is
the very worst." Obviously, American
slaveholders made this choice, using the ignorance of their slaves as a
control mechanism.162
On
the other hand, the powers-that-be could bring the lamp of learning to the
masses, but selectively control its light by placing in the curriculum concepts
or ideas conducive to continuing their control and leaving in darkness those
which did not. After encountering a
well-dressed little girl in Hampshire, Cobbett found Lady Baring had not only
given her the clothes, but had taught her to read and sing hymns. He commented, after spotting at least twelve
more girls dressed similarly:
"Society is in a queer state when the rich think, that they
must educate the poor in order to insure their own safety: for this, at bottom, is the great motive now
at work in pushing on the education scheme." Even Arch briefly alludes to this approach: "Of course he [the farmworker] might
learn his catechism; that, and things similar to it, was right, proper, and
suitable knowledge for such as he; he would be the more likely to stay
contentedly in his place to the end of his working days."163 Conspicuously, at least some American
slaveholders objected to similar education, even when done only verbally, in
the petition Olmsted quoted from. (See
above, p. 99). The English upper class
may have neglected educating the working class compared to the rest of
western Europe, but, unlike Southern slaveholders, it did not strive to halt
the dissemination of literacy among the masses to the extent the latter sought
it.164 Exceptions do
arise, such as the case where local farmers pushed their laborers to take their
children out of a school that had been built on someone's allotment, since they
feared it would teach the value of allotments.
Education was much more strongly discouraged by the practical needs of
employers for labor at seasonal peaks and parents to have children work to help
their families survive financially. By
giving laboring parents a powerful incentive to pull their children out of
school and put them into the fields as soon as possible, the rural elite's
efforts to screw down wage rates through enclosure, the New Poor Law, and the
settlement laws may have done more indirectly to discourage effective
literary among the laborers than any direct attempts at suppression. England simply did not have the laws against
teaching reading or writing to the lower class that, in the American South,
generally existed against teaching slaves.
This showed the English upper class was neither united nor adamant in
its objections to the laboring poor becoming literate. Presumably, the Protestant emphasis on
individuals reading the Bible helped to keep anti-literacy laws from being
passed, but this belief did not hinder the equally Protestant slaveholders in
America from passing and enforcing such laws in most of the South. As the nineteenth century drew on, the
English elite increasingly opted for the second option of social control
vis-a-vis education, of bending the curriculum to teach the masses to be
patriotic, industrious, obey the state and queen, etc. As the mechanization of English agriculture
gradually proceeded throughout the nineteenth century, the newly invented farm
machinery required increasingly literate laborers to learn its proper operation
and repair, giving the upper class a good practical reason to promote literacy.165 So although American slaveholders used
ignorance as a major way to subdue the slaves, the English upper class
increasingly opted to provide (skewed) knowledge to control refractory laborers
and artisans.
Slaves--The Treatment of Elderly "Aunts" and
"Uncles"
The
treatment of the elderly serves as a useful indicator for testing the realism of a culture's rhetoric about caring
for the weak. Although the tradition of
many cultures teaches the young to respect the old for their wisdom and
knowledge, these lessons are undermined by the practical problems of the old
becoming economic burdens as their health declines and fails. Filial piety towards the elderly by the
young, although upheld by references to the Fifth Commandment, was not always
forthcoming. Furthermore, at least in
England and other nations with a Anglo-Saxon-Celtic culture, the elderly in the
past, not just the present, normally did not live in the same household
as their children.166
They survived independently, whether by charity, odd jobs, relatives'
support, poor relief, accumulated savings, or avoiding retirement until death
or declining health. Hence, the aged's
quality of life usefully serves as one yardstick for judging an upper class's
claims of paternalism about those in the subordinate class unable to do
productive work anymore.
The
Southern slaveholders unhestitatedly spouted paternalistic rhetoric concerning
how they cared for their workers when they were old, sick, and worn-out,
but the capitalists of the north (by and large) did not.167 The reality is much more mixed. Often the older slaves received enough to
physically survive, but little more.
Kemble found miserable conditions for retired elderly slaves on her husbands'
estates, even though his plantations were reputed to treat their bondsmen above
average. Two very elderly black women,
having retired as actively working slaves for their master, lived in
"deplorably miserable hovels, which appeared to me to be occupied by the
most decrepid and infirm samples of humanity it was ever my melancholy lot to
behold." On her husband's
sea-island estate, she witnessed a truly pathetic old man in an infirmary die
before her very eyes: "Upon this
earthen floor, with nothing but its hard, damp surface beneath him [besides a
little straw], no covering but a tattered shirt and trowsers, and a few sticks
under this head for a pillow, lay an old man upward of seventy
dying." She compared slaves'
conditions when old to that of aged laborers confined to the workhouse as
paupers, and said the former were little better.168 This old man's case illustrates that the
slaveholders' altruistic rhetoric of paternalism obscured the reality of a
system whose harshness at least equaled laissez-faire's on the old.
Altruism and Self-Interest Did Not Necessarily
Conveniently Coincide to
Protect Elderly Slaves' Lives
Unfortunately
for slaveholders, in the case of caring for older slaves, self-interest was
not, by and large, conveniently allied to altruism. The slaveholder apologist's old canard that a master would seek
to protect his property from harm and treat it well out of self-interest
generally collapses when applied to elderly slaves doing little or no
productive work. The owner rationally
then should hope for the speedy deaths of his useless dependents to save on
food and clothing rations. As Kemble
noted: "It is sometimes clearly not
the interest of the owner to prolong the life of his slaves; as in the case of
inferior or superannuated laborers."
Hence, it is easy to document all sorts of perfectly economically
rational yet calloused behavior towards elderly slaves. Harriet Jacobs knew an old slave woman, made
nearly helpless by sickness and hard labor, whose owners lacked the
paternalistic sentiment to take her with them when they moved to Alabama: "The old black woman was left to be
sold to any body who would give twenty dollars for her." Attempting to sell an aged slave could
backfire: Walker knew one case where a
slave was whipped for overstaying Christmas vacation, and because he was too
old to be successfully sold in the slave markets of New Orleans and Mobile! In a case that distressed Barrow, he was
told to let go of an elderly escaped slave that his slaves had captured the day
before: "Uncle Bat. told my boy to
turn old Demps Loose & let him go.
been runaway some months, a verry Bad Example. he shall not stay in this neighbourhood."169 The master of Old Demps evidently felt it
cost less to let him fend for himself as a runaway than to care for him on the
plantation. Since elderly slaves were
net drains on their owners' account books, the latter had a self-interest in
hoping none of the former lived long enough to retire on their plantations.
Did Slavery Provide More Security Against Starvation
Than Laissez-Faire?
A
standard condemnation of the North's general system of laissez-faire lay in its
intrinsic lack of security for wage workers, including providing for
retirement. As soon as an employer
judged a worker as not contributing to his bottom line, such as due to
diseases, crippling accidents, senility, or a depression cutting sales, he
(unless of paternalistic minority) would lay off or fire one determined to be
worthless to his economic self-interest.
Enduring uncertainty was inevitable for members of the North's
proletariat, excepting those who could fall back on the family farm. Slavery, its apologists trumpeted, was
morally superior because it provided economic security for slaves in sickness
or old age under a system of altruistic paternalism that was attributable to
its reciprocal obligations between master and bondsman.170 However, this defense of the peculiar
institution always had a fundamental weakness:
Since the slaveholder received so much arbitrary authority over his
slaves legally, having still more de facto because of the weakness of
the criminal and civil justice system in the sparsely-populated, lynch
mob-prone South, promises of security were often hollow, and nearly
unenforcible against any master or mistress breaking them. Frederick Douglass described his
grandmother's fate when his master died, and the plantation's slaves fell into
the hands of heirs who did not know them:
My grandmother, who was now very old, having outlived
my old master and all his children . . . her present owners finding
she was of but little value, her frame already racked with the pains of old
age, and complete helplessness fast stealing over her once active limbs, they
took her to the woods, built her a little hut, put up a little mud-chimney, and
then made her welcome to the privilege of supporting herself there in perfect
loneliness; thus virtually turning her out to die!
Quoting from a Southern newspaper, Olmsted noted a
similar case of a nearly seventy-year-old slave, driven into the woods to die. The coroner's formal pronouncement on the
case was, "Death from starvation and exposure, through neglect of his
master."171
Although the elderly slaves who suffered the fate of neglect or
abandonment were only an unfortunate minority of those few fortunate enough
even to live to a ripe old age, still these cases illustrate how unenforcible
the paternalistic promises of care were, because the master had nearly
unlimited power legally to demand almost anything from his slaves short of
their lives. Since the Southern
slaveholder's absolute and arbitrary will replaced the Northern capitalist's
more constrained power over his work force's personal lives, slaves found a
"paid retirement" to be deniable upon the whim of their owners, thus
negating the promises of slavery as guaranteeing security.
Odd Jobs for Elderly Slaves
Often
older slaves continued to work at least some, for better or for worse. Some still worked in the fields. Charity was one of the oldest slaves on
Kemble's husband's sea-island cotton estate.
She not only had to do field work, but had to walk a roundtrip of nearly
four miles to and from her work area, a distance familiar to many English
agricultural laborers. Composing the
opposite extreme were "old and sick" slaves who persuaded their
masters to let them retire; some of them suddenly became amazingly productive
after Emancipation! Masters and
mistresses often put their bondsmen to work at various light duties when they
became too weak for regular field work.
For example, old men in one frontier area sometimes did guard duty
around the quarters to protect young slave children from wild animals, as
Armstrong heard.172
A stereotypical job for old bondswomen was to provide day care for the
children of the field hands and other parents not at home during the day.173 Charles Ball's grandfather, nearly eighty
years old, was excused from the heavy field labor of raising tobacco, but
received a half-acre patch near his cabin where he raised much of his own food.174 As aged slaves did these activities, they
remained useful to their owners--and perhaps felt more useful to themselves as
well--by continuing to do at least some work in the autumn years of
their lives.
Depending
on the master or mistress' whim, the treatment of the elderly slaves in America
varied enormously. Although some, perhaps
even a narrow majority of those lucky enough to live into old age may have
enjoyed their final years with old friends and family--assuming they had not
been sold off earlier!--in familiar surroundings, others were condemned to
death or neglect in a manner worthy of the most cutthroat, profit-seeking
factory owner. Furthermore, because of
sales, slaveholders moving to other areas with their slaves, estate divisions
due to inheritances, and slaves being given away as gifts, an elderly slave may
end up living far from many or most of his or her descendants and
relatives. After his father ran away,
Charles Ball found that his grandfather was his only relative still left
in Maryland that he knew of when he was still a boy. The converse of this--young Charles was the only relative his
grandfather had nearby, owned by another master--was evidently equally
true. Helping aged slaves tests the
slaveholders' altruism to the limit, since little self-interest would remain in
preserving the lives of slaves no longer capable of working enough to support
themselves. But as Genovese observes,
the younger slaves really supported their old kinfolk, not the masters
themselves.175
Because relatively few slaves lived long enough to enjoy retirement,
especially since infant mortality rates were high, slaveholders were less
burdened than they would be under contemporary life expectancies. Proportionately fewer blacks reached old age
than whites anyway (which is still holds true for contemporary American
society). The 1850 census reported that
the average ages at death were 21.4 for blacks and 25.5 for whites nationally,
and for 1860, 3.5 percent of the slaves, but 4.4 percent of the whites,
surpassed 60 years of age. The crude
death rates were 1.8 percent for slaves versus 1.2 percent for whites.176 Since some were self-sacrificing and others
were not, slaveholders compiled a distinctly mixed record, which extinguishes
any still-lingering stereotypes about all aged slaves being well taken care of.
The Senior Hodge:
Cared for, or Fends for Himself?
In
England, the parish normally cared for the elderly when they were not still
working. Like today, they generally
did not move in with their married children to be supported by them under the
same roof.177
Since England was a free society without slavery, relatively little
incentive existed for a farmworker to fake ill health in order to retire
early. After the New Poor Law (1834)
tightened rules on the granting of outside relief, especially by imposing the
workhouse test on the able-bodied, this incentive evaporated for the
self-respecting. Many elderly people in
England continued to work as long as possible.
Tommy Ierat, a shepherd in Somerset, reached the age of seventy-eight
before coming home one day to his wife, when he first announced his retirement
thus: "I've done work." A shepherd named John worked for some
sixty-five years, retiring at age eighty-five when his master did also. Caleb Bawcombe shepherded until he was
almost seventy, when he joined his wife's venture in starting a small business
some forty-five miles away.178 Admittedly, shepherds are not representative
agricultural laborers since their jobs are less physically taxing than those
cultivating the soil. Furthermore,
since shepherds were hired by the year, they enjoyed far greater job security
and stability than most other agricultural workers. But other elderly farmworkers still could do various light tasks,
thus leaving heavier tasks for the young men and women. The anonymous "Hodge" of Jeffries'
account, forced into the workhouse when he could work no longer, had continued
to work well past age seventy at various light tasks:
He still could and would hoe--a bowed back is not
impediment, but perhaps rather an advantage, at that occupation. He could use a prong in the haymaking; he
could reap a little, and do good service tying up the cut corn. There were many little jobs on the farm that
required experience, combined with the plodding patience of age, and these he
could do better than a stronger man.179
Due to financial necessity and the lack of formal
pensions for all but the most fortunate laborers, farmworkers generally worked
as long as they could to avoid relying on parish relief and, especially after
1834, the high chance of commitment to the workhouse as a pauper.
Once
they could no longer support themselves, the central earthly concern of most
elderly farmworkers was about how the parish and/or their children would care
for them. A very high percentage under
the Old Poor Law (pre-1834) received parish relief in old age, according to
Thomson: "It constituted
. . . a formalized institution of income distribution to which the
two-thirds to three-quarters of the population who were non-propertied could
look with near-certain expectation of regular and prolonged assistance in old
age."180
Since his destiny was almost unavoidable, he lost the incentive to save
and be self-disciplined as he grew older because, regardless of self-exertion,
his physical strength inevitably gave out.
He would have to ask for parish relief, likely resulting in committal to
the dreaded workhouse after 1834. As
Arch put it:
Why, even if he had managed, by the most strenuous
efforts, to keep himself afloat on life's stream, he was almost bound to see
his little raft of independence slowly, surely drifting on to the mudbanks of
pauperism at the close of his voyage. . . . What did he care then, if at the end of his
rollicking road the poorhouse door would be yawning wide to receive him? He couldn't help that, he had given up
trying. He drowned the thought in his
glass, and chalked up his score with a laugh, and went down a bit faster.181
However, depending on how great a fear a given laborer
had of commitment to the workhouse and/or his desire to maintain self-respect
by avoiding dependence on others, this scenario might not play out in his
life. He (or she) might strenuously
work all his might to put off the day of reckoning as long as possible. Now under the Old Poor Law, the elderly
received outside relief in the form of small pensions of roughly two shillings
six pence a week, sometimes more. Such
handouts allowed them to get by without having to move in with their children
or into the workhouse. Because of this
law, children over the generations grew accustomed to normally not
supporting their aged parents directly, but letting the parish do it.
A
fortunate few received private pensions from their employers or some other
charity. For example, John, a Wiltshire
shepherd who died about 1855, had worked for the same farm nearly sixty
years. When his master decided to retire,
he offered his aged shepherd twelve shillings a week and a rent-free cottage in
the village he was moving to. Despite
being a very generous offer for its day and age, John turned him down since he
wanted to stay in his native village.
But despite his refusal, his master still made for him a
"sufficient provision."
Shepherd Isaac Bawcombe benefited from a charity which "provided
for six of the most deserving old men of the parish of Bishop" because a
sportsman rewarded him for not allowing or committing any poaching on the land
where he tended his sheep. Ironically,
since he was just sixty years old and still in excellent health, he had no need
to retire. The charity gave him a
rent-free cottage, eight shillings per week, even some free clothes. James Foard, a guardian for Petworth union,
Sussex, said Petworth parish had "a good deal" of charities,
"principally for old people, who [receive] a room to live in, and a
certain sum yearly." Administered
totally independently of the poor laws, these charities helped those "unable
to work . . . of good character."182 But since charity only helped a small
minority of the aged, most laborers had to depend on the aid that the poor laws
dispensed to survive when old.
The Effects of the New Poor Law on the Elderly,
Non-Working Poor
With
the arrival of the New Poor Law, conditions changed. Many of the old had their pensions cut--often down to one
shilling six pence or one shilling nine pence a week--or were thrown into the
workhouse. Some even starved to death,
slowly or quickly, after their outdoor relief was reduced or denied when they
refused to live in the workhouse. As
Snell notes, the parish authorities also began to force the children of aged
parents to contribute towards their upkeep.
They punished the recalcitrant by throwing them into jail. Farm laborer Samuel Dawson, earning just
twelve shillings a week, landed in Bedford gaol for two months in 1875 because
he refused to pay one shilling a week to help support his parents. But as even Snell admits, not all the
aged, non-working laborers were forced to go into the workhouse under the New
Poor Law. Instead, the percentage
committed varied depending on whether the authorities tightened the screws
against outdoor relief (such as in the 1830s and 1870s) or loosened them (the
1850s). Some parishes practiced more
creative ways for supporting the elderly.
In one area, some old men were given two acres as allotments, which kept
them off the parish. But being useless
for the truly crippled, this program was hardly common also.183
Interestingly,
the 1837 Committee investigating the New Poor Law's effects (in its first
report) repeatedly found in its chosen area of study--Petworth Union,
Sussex--that the elderly did receive outdoor relief: "The aged and infirm are relieved,
whenever they prefer it, at their own homes, or at the houses of relations or
friends with whom they live; and by the general testimony of the witnesses
their condition has been improved by an increase of pay."184 Time and time again, witnesses called before
the committee, even critics of the 1834 Law, admitted that the condition of the
elderly was the same and/or had improved.
Instead, they said laborers with large families suffered the most since
they depended now only on wages, and had to make due without the old supplemental
allowances paid for each child they had.
As the rector of Petworth, Thomas Sockett, certainly a critic of aspects
of the New Poor Law, remarked:
It has been very injurious to the deserving labouring
man with a large family; but that with respect to the old people, it having
been, I must say, mercifully administered in Petworth, it has not been
injurious. I think the aged and infirm
are as well off as they were before the New Poor Law came into operation.185
Similarly, a member of the board of guardians at
Petworth and another hostile witness, James Foard stated that the New Poor Law
was "very injurious to men with large families, very oppressive," but
that other groups had remained unaffected by the law. "Very few" of the old lived in the union's workhouse,
and no more than had before.186 When a relative could help them, they could
voluntarily choose whether they went into or left the workhouse. Like what Jeffries saw, he said "they
are more contented and happy" when living outside the workhouse. This option also cost the parish less!187 Other witnesses made comparable comments to
the committee.188
Admittedly, Petworth parish/union was unusually compassionate in its
administrative practices. It apparently
was in some hot water for liberally interpreting a certain emergency provision
of the New Poor Law that allowed outdoor relief for the able-bodied, which may
have been why the committee even had interrogated its authorities to begin
with. But this case still shows that
the Poor Law Commission in London was not forcing the local authorities
to put the elderly poor into the workhouses, at least immediately after the
passage of the 1834 law. Consequently,
Snell may have underestimated the amount of continuity for the care of the
elderly poor before and after 1834 in areas outside of Norfolk and Suffolk.189
How the Local Authorities Profited from the Workhouse
Test
The
New Poor Law's main point was to deter applicants by banning outdoor relief to
the able-bodied and creating the workhouse test for destitution. The local powers-that-be of rural England
did not seek full workhouses, because it cost more to maintain someone
in them than at his or her own home on a pension. Because only the most desperate and needy would ask for relief
when it could only be had on very unpleasant terms, the workhouse test always
had some justification when applied to the able-bodied. However, except perhaps as a device for
detecting those faking ill-health or for encouraging the semi-able bodied to
struggle on as long as possible independently, the test was unjustifiable when
applied to the enfeebled elderly and others incapable of working steadily. Arch's own experience, when he cared for his
own father, illustrates these issues well.
Arch's wife, who had been making an important two shillings a week
cleaning laundry, had to give that up to serve as a nurse to her father-in-law,
which placed his family in a serious financial squeeze. The parish overseer thought Arch could get
some help from the parish to care for his father. As it was, the board of guardians denied him even one shilling
six pence per week, which only partially replaced his wife's earnings
anyway. They said they were
willing to take his father into the workhouse, and have him pay one
shilling a week towards his upkeep. On
the surface, their offer seems completely illogical economically because caring
for Arch's father in the workhouse would probably cost three to four shillings
a week. The parish quite possibly would
be one shilling six pence to two shillings six pence a week worse off
for committing his father to the workhouse than it would be for giving Arch a
mere one shilling six pence a week relief pension to care for him, even when
counting Arch's would-be one shilling a week contribution. But then, out of family pride and
self-respect, Arch made the choice the workhouse test was created to
encourage. He totally rejected the
parish's offer to take his father in, replying, "I'd sooner rot under a
hedge than he should go there!" By
rejecting parish relief, he did exactly what the framers of the New Poor Law's
workhouse test had counted on:
Applicants would refuse to take relief when the cost of accepting it in
dignity and freedom was too high.
Hence, the parish ended up saving one shilling six pence per
week, after having risked losing up to two shillings six pence per week had
Arch placed his father in the workhouse.
This case also illustrates how the New Poor Law intensified the ill-feeling
between the classes in rural England.
The guardians saved one shilling and six pence a week, but at the cost
of making Arch resentful and angry. The
ratepayers saved their quids but at the cost of sleeping less easily at
night. Because of the New Poor Law, low
wages, and enclosure, the rural elite knew the laborers hated them such that
they could without warning torch their grain stacks, burn their barns, smash
their threshing machines, and poach their game.190
Whose Elderly Were Better Off? The Farmworkers' or the Slaves'?
Before
hazarding a summary judgment about whether old slaves or elderly farmworkers
were better off in their twilight years, certain trade-offs and qualifications
must be considered first. If the
elderly farmworkers in question were workhouse inmates, who endured orderly but
spartan conditions, prison-like restrictions on movement, and isolation from
their children, grandchildren, and even spouses, many aged slaves were better
off by comparison. The elderly slaves
suffered similar restrictions on movement--the pass system--and their
plantation's conditions were hardly luxurious.
However, an elderly slave's chance of starving to death likely equaled a
farmworker's. Laborers risked
starvation after refusing to go into the workhouse and being denied a
sufficient relief pension when they had no relatives nearby to help them (or
other means of support), but then elderly slaves were really always in danger
because of their owners' nearly absolute and arbitrary whim, since their
support could suddenly vanish without warning.
But IF most or all of the elderly slaves' descendants, relatives, and
old friends had NOT been sold off or forced to move elsewhere when a master or
mistress died or relocated far away, the quality of their human relationships
when old would have been better than the agricultural laborers'. They would have died after by accompanied by
familiar faces in their declining years, unlike the elderly farmworkers in
workhouses, who were largely isolated from the surrounding society and who
generally only associated with other workhouse inmates, assuming they were not
further segregated by sex or other category.
But even after the passage of the New Poor Law (1834), a significant
number of elderly farmworkers still received outdoor relief because they were
not deemed able-bodied. Additionally,
in the period before 1834, back to 1750 and earlier, the elderly
agricultural laborers normally were better off than the slaves, if they had
received outdoor relief in the form of a small pension and stayed in the same
cottage with the same sentimental sights and sounds they may have known for
fifty years or more. The slave's level of
security against starvation in old age likely differed little from that of most
free workers in the United States, and fell beneath that of English farmworkers
under the low-tech welfare state created by the Old Poor Law of Elizabeth
(1601). The claim that the lot of
slaves was preferable to the fate of agricultural workers in old age only
largely rings true in the post-1834 period, and only to the extent that the
elderly laborers ended up in workhouses, and the elderly slaves were not
separated by sale or moving from most or all of their relatives.
A Slave's Childhood:
Full of Fun or Full of Fear?
What
quality of life did the children born into bondage have in their early
years? How much work did the children
of slaves do? Notoriously, the industrial
revolution in England featured a heavy dependence on the labor of children (and
women) in coal mines and textile mills, which because of the large numbers
employed and the high intensity of work involved became appalling. Since the masters and mistresses in the
American South industriously worked at exploiting the labor of adult slaves,
how did they treat slave children? Was
the slave childhood full of fun and play until the early teen years, as an
apologist for slavery might claim?
Certainly "Uncle" Jim, cited below (p. 121), nostalgically
recalled his youth. Or was it full of
fear--fear of separation by sale from a mother or brother, fear of the
overseer's lash landing on a father or sister, fear of a lack of food or
clothing? Douglass abruptly realized
his inferior status for the first time when he saw the fearful whipping that
one of his aunts endured, complete with awful screaming and pleading. He hid, being afraid he would be next.191 As noted above (pp. 96-102), the slaves'
education was normally not just merely benignly neglected but ferociously
attacked. The lives of slave children
were filled, not by school, but by either play or work, since the first possibility
was routinely overlooked when not totally forbidden.
Serious
field labor or domestic service normally began around age twelve, which was
later than what the children of many English agricultural laborers
experienced. Kemble complained that
"stout, hale, hearty girls and boys, of from age eight to twelve and
older, are allowed to lounge about, filthy and idle" at her husband's rice
island estate in Georgia. The only
"work" they had was watching the infants and toddlers of the men and
women in the fields. "Aunt"
Sue, once owned by a Virginia master, said she really began work as a
"missy-gal" (domestic servant) at age thirteen. Charles Lucas of Virginia told Drew he was
"kept mostly at the quarters until age twelve or thirteen," where
useful fieldwork was hardly possible.
Olmsted found that the labor of younger slaves was so discounted by one
planter/overseer in Virginia that they sometimes escaped his attention. He routinely failed to record them as
inventory during Christmas time until age twelve or thirteen! On a large, long-established plantation not
far from Savannah, Georgia, the paternalistic master did not commit slave
children to regular fieldwork until age twelve, excepting some light duties
such as bird scaring. In an extreme case,
one master in Georgia "didn't put his boys into the field until they were
15 or 16 years old." Since this
case arose in a lowland area dominated by the task system, however, the
children still did work, but with their parents full time as a family unit
growing crops on their own plots before reaching these ages. Illustrating the opposite extreme, although
it was a fairly common age for many English farmworkers' sons to go to work,
Henry Banks of Virginia told Drew he was put to work at age eight, at "ploughing,
hoeing corn, and doing farm work generally." Booker T. Washington, born a slave in 1856, fared worse:
no period in my life devoted to play. From the time that I can remember anything,
almost every day of my life has been occupied in some kind of
labour . . . During the
period that I spent in slavery I was not large enough to be of much service,
still I was occupied most of the time in cleaning the yards, carrying water to
the men in the fields, or going to the mill, to which I used to take the corn,
once a week, to be ground.
Pro-slavery apologist J.H. Hammond once boasted that
no slave worked before age ten, most did not work until age twelve, and they
did only light work for a few years after that. Genovese found Hammond to be reasonably accurate, maintaining
that on average most did not work until age twelve, with some falling a few
years to either side of this age.
Certainly, this generalization by Fogel lacks broad support: slave children began working as early as
three or four years old, nearly half worked by age seven, and almost all worked
by age twelve. Since age twelve really
appears to be a turning point in the lives of many slave children, Genovese's
judgment is solidly based. At this age,
they became a producer under labor discipline instead of a dependent largely
excused from it, so the system's brutality first fully struck them under the
watchful gaze of the overseer or master while working in the fields or
(perhaps) big house.192
Pastimes for Slave Children
What
did slave boys and girls do until around the age of twelve? Generally most played with abandon. In reminiscences tinged with nostalgia, aged
freedman "Uncle" Jim negatively compared the higher levels of
supervision children had when he was an old man to when he was young:
Dey let us play lak we want to in de ole days. We had a big yawd, an'a plantation so big we
didn' know whar it begin an' whar it ended at.
We run all over de place, an' jus' so we didn' break no laig, er
somepun, an' git hurt, we's all right.
Nobody hollerin' atter us all time.
Nowadays, de white folks won't let de chillun git out dey sight. An' de cullud folks won't, neither. All time makin' 'em keep clean, an' wear
good clo'es, an' stay in de house, an' not talk loud. . . . Pres'dent Lin'cum done sot de cullud folks
free, but de chillun ain't got no freedom no mo'!
Freedwoman Louise Dugas similarly recalled that she
and other slave children played around the sugar refinery on her master's sugar
plantation: "Us chillun eat dat
sugar 'twill our stummicks so sweet dey hurt!
Go off an' play while, 'twill de feelin' leave, den eat some mo'!" Frederick Douglass, clearly not someone
inclined towards nostalgic recollections of slavery, remembered his boyhood (up
to age seven or eight) favorably about how much time he had to play, if not for
food and clothing. "I was not old
enough to work in the field, and there being little else than field work to do,
I had a great deal of leisure time."
He only needed to do a few light tasks like driving up the cows in the
evening, cleaning the front yard, etc.
While visiting an old-time lowland plantation near Savannah, Olmsted
witnessed a surely common scene on large plantations throughout the South. Some
twenty-seven slave children, mostly babies and toddlers with some eight or ten
year olds tending the youngest ones, played on the steps or in the yard before
the veranda of the big house.
"Some of these, with two or three bigger ones, were singing and
dancing about a fire that the had made on the ground. They were not at all disturbed or interrupted in their amusement
by the presence of their owner and myself."193 The consciousness of being a bondsman, as
someone almost certainly doomed to a lifelong drudgery in the fields with small
chances for advancement or intellectual enlightenment, simply was not fully
grasped by young slaves. The traditional
defense mechanisms of a subordinate class in wearing a mask before one's
superiors, the guarding of every word spoken when "on stage" before
the master or some other superior white, had only partially penetrated the
consciousness of these young children playing before their owner in front of
“the big house.” A child develops these
mechanisms only over time as parents teaches them about them, an issue which is
returned to below (pp. 329-330). The
children abruptly had to become more calculating with their words after being
thrust into a productive role through fieldwork, domestic service, etc., round
about age twelve, in order to avoid whippings or other punishments.
Slave
children could play with the white master's children with little consciousness
of racial differences until about six years of age or older. Harriet Jacobs remembered a scene where a
white child played with her slave half-sister:
"When I saw them embracing each other, and heard their joyous
laughter, I turned sadly away from the lovely sight." She did so, knowing what was likely in store
for "her slave sister, the little playmate of her childhood" when
grown-up, which was due to her beauty.
Olmsted witnessed in Virginia on a train
[a] white girl, probably [the] daughter [of the white
woman seated behind her], and a bright and very pretty mulatto girl. They [including an older black maid] all
talked and laughed together; and the girls munched confectionary out of the
same paper, with a familiarity and closeness of intimacy that would have been
noticed with astonishment, if not with manifest displeasure, in almost any
chance company at the North.194
Slave children played various formal games with one
another and with the whites, such as marbles, hide-and-seek, hide-the-switch,
horseshoe pitching, jump rope, and different versions of handball and
stickball. They also played games
representing their condition of bondage, such as auctioning one another off and
whipping each other with switches.
"Uncle" Smith Moore of Alabama reminisced about playing with
the white boys when young, even riding colts and steer together. Kemble was greatly disturbed that Sally, her
still very young daughter, would learn the wrong lessons from romping with
slave playmates:
I was observing her to-day among her swarthy
worshipers, for they follow her as such, and saw, with dismay, the universal
eagerness with which they sprang to obey her little gestures of command. She said something about a swing, and in
less than five minutes head man Frank had erected it for her, and a dozen young
slaves were ready to swing little 'missis.' --, think of learning to rule
despotically your fellow-creatures before the first lesson of self-government
has been well spelt over!
Such deference, given to the master and mistress'
offspring, soon inculcated the habit of command--or lording it over
others--into their minds. A white child
had to be seven to eleven years old before this habit seriously sank in, which
is when the spark of reason ("concrete operations") first comes into
life. Correspondingly, as the young
slave passed age six, his parents taught him increasingly about the need to
guard his words, especially as he may see such scenes as the overseer or master
overruling his parents' authority, or even whipping them, thus making obvious
the need to protect them and his fellow slaves in general from the whites'
punishments.195
Plantation Day Care:
How Slave Childhood Was Different
The
central role of what amounted to institutionalized day care on the plantations
was perhaps the biggest difference between the childhood of a slave and his
white counterparts, in England or America.
Since masters drove both the mothers as well as fathers into the fields
to work, older brothers and sisters while under the eye of one or more old
women who had retired from field labor largely cared for the youngest children
left behind. For much of the day, since
older children (not necessarily of the same family) watched younger ones, the
children were left on their own. The
old women did not care for the young children so much as watch the older
children do so, as Genovese notes:
"By and large, the children raised each other." Kemble saw on all the plantations she
visited and lived on that children under the age of twelve cared for all babies
in arms. Eight or nine year olds got
the job of carrying nursing babies to their mothers in the field, and then back
to the quarters, watching them during the hours their mothers (and fathers) worked
elsewhere. As Kemble observed,
"The only supervision exercised over either babies or ‘baby-minders’ was
that of the old woman left in charge of the Infirmary, where she made her abode
all day long." Obviously, the
adults exercised little control over the children, except when they committed
some major offense, since this aged bondswoman probably had her hands full just
watching over the infirmary's patients.
Needless to say, since these children fundamentally needed adult
supervision themselves, having eight year olds watch over young babies (who
were not necessarily their siblings) made for day care of dubious quality. Freedwoman Ellen Betts of Louisiana
remembered caring for children when she was still a child herself:
Some them babies so fat and big I had to tote the feet
while 'nother gal tote the head. I was
such a little one, 'bout seven or eight year old. The big folks leave some toddy for colic and crying and such, and
I done drink the toddy and let the children have the milk. I don't know no better. Lawsy me, it a wonder I ain't the biggest
drunker in this here country, counting all the toddy I done put in my young
belly!196
This woman admitted she was not the best babysitter
when she herself was young. She surely
provided poorer care than the babies' mothers or fathers would have; she
certainly made for a worse role model for the babies under her supervision than
nearly any adult present on the plantation would have. Almost inevitably parents have more
self-interest and concern for their offspring than eight-year-old children who
frequently were not even relatives of the babies in question. Such crude day care, made up of children
watching babies under the loose supervision of one or more old women, resulted
in less disciplined, more ignorant children than would have been the case had
the slave women not been driven into the fields for a full workday, thus
demonstrating that largely dissolving the sexual division of labor weakened the
black family under slavery.
Is All Work Bad for Children?
Is
all work bad for children, slave and otherwise? Although child labor has gained much notoriety from the textile
industry in England during the industrial revolution because of the intensity
and length of the work day that the children endured, could not something more casual,
especially when part of the family economy under the parents' direct
supervision, be in fact valuable to children in building discipline and
training them for their future roles in society? Looking at the institution of
slavery through the eyes of a middle class Englishwoman, Kemble saw the
idleness of the children as a problem, not an asset, since it increased
the women's work load:
Every able-bodied woman is made the most of in being
driven afield as long as, under all and any circumstances, she is able to wield
a hoe; but on the other hand, stout, hale, hearty girls and boys, of from eight
to twelve and older, are allowed to lounge about, filthy and idle, with no
pretense of an occupation but what they call 'tend baby.'
This task actively took little of their day, since it
mainly involved carrying the babies needing to be nursed to their mothers in
the fields and back. Besides this, the
older children basically left them to kick, roll, and rest about in or near
their cabins, activities they often joined in themselves. If Kemble is believed, the slave children on
her husband's estates were less creative in their pastimes than others
elsewhere! If the lives of young slaves
were empty of education, work, or training for an occupation, filling them
instead with aimless leisure time was of "questionable benefit"--even
though the children enjoyed it!--when taking a broader view.197
Being
communally cared for, slave children were correspondingly fed communally as
well, in a remarkably crude, animal-like manner. Throughout the South adults on plantations fed them as if they
were pigs. Typically, one or more old
women, having charge of the slave children's day care, placed food in a trough,
and called the children to eat. After
scrambling to show up first, they quickly dug in. Equipped only with their bare hands or perhaps a piece of wood,
they gobbled down as much as they could grab in order to get the most. Frederick Douglass described the feedings he
experienced when young on his master's Maryland plantation:
We [children] were not regularly allowanced. Our food was coarse corn meal boiled. This was called mush. It was put into a large wooden tray or
trough, and set down upon the ground.
The children were then called, like so many pigs, and like so many pigs
they would comes and devour the mush; some with oyster-shells, others with
pieces of shingle, some with naked hands, and none with spoons. He that ate fastest got most; he that was
strongest secured the best place; and few left the trough satisfied.
"Uncle" Abner in Arkansas, in a memory
saturated with the nostalgia of a care-free childhood (or deference to the
white interviewer), remembered a similar procedure:
Granny put a big trough on de po'ch, an' pile de food
in. Lawsy! No food taste so good since!
Cawn bread an' yams, an' hunks o' meat.
Milk ter drink in de tin cups.
Eat yo' stummick full, fight wid de res' o' de chillun erwhile, an' roll
over on de flo' ter sleep!
It seems that, because of how he was raised, he still
did not realize even as an old man how degrading trough feedings were. The crude communal feeding of slave
children, to the extent it was done, obliterated the slave family's role in
providing for their children directly.
These feedings must have told slave children early in life that they
were different from whites because no white child was fed out of a trough, as
Genovese notes.198 The master and mistress, by feeding
slaves this way, often treated them like the cows, pigs, and horses in their
barns and sties, as their most valuable livestock, not as fellow human beings,
not withstanding any possible contrary propaganda.
The Slave Childhood:
Good, Bad, or Indifferent?
It is
rather rash to make a summary judgment of the quality of life for millions of
slave children. But generalizations,
with the attendant qualifications and exclusions, are necessary so the past can
be viewed more clearly than the jumbling confusion caused by listing a hundred
or a thousand concrete particulars which most people soon forget. The childhood of slaves featured little work
until the immediate pre-teen years, little or no education, and an abundance of
play time. The plantation system
minimized the role of parents in raising their children by obliterating the
sexual division of labor in fieldwork, leaving the children largely to their
own devices under the daily but loose supervision of one or more elderly
"grannies" for much of the day.
Communally feeding the children like animals was merely a product of the
crude day care system established on the plantation. This system left the children unusually ignorant even for an
uneducated class of people, since younger children had much less knowledge and
fewer lessons from experience to pass on, and simply couldn’t care as much or
as well as the babies’ mothers and fathers did. This childhood of idleness and ignorance made the transition to
regular fieldwork all the more jarring, as the masters and mistresses, who may
have earlier indulged their pickaninnies, thrust them out into the fields under
the threat of the lash. As Olmsted
observed: "The only whipping of
slaves I have seen in Virginia, has been of these wild, lazy children, as they
are being broke in to work. They cannot
be depended upon a minute, out of sight."199 The individual relationships a child has
with his or her parents is the main determinate of the quality of a person's
childhood. For the broader issue of the
negative effects slavery had on inter-family relationships because of the
master's or mistress' interfering in them for work discipline purposes, see
below (pp. 167-176). Nevertheless,
because of a lack of parental/adult supervision, the slave childhood may have
been often enjoyable, at least until the reality of low caste status came fully
crashing in mentally and emotionally somewhere between ages six and twelve (or
when regular work began), but it made for unusually ill-disciplined, ignorant
youngsters whose parents largely squeezed their civilizing function into
Sundays or between when they worked and slept.
Hodge's Childhood:
More Work, but More Worthwhile?
When
comparing the lives of children of English agricultural workers and
African-American slaves, two key differences stand out. First, the farmworkers’ children had lives
filled with more work, since their age of going to work was lower, as well as
more formal education, especially as the nineteenth century drew on, compared
to the slaves’ offspring. These two
activities inevitably cut back on the amount of playtime they had before around
the age of twelve. Second, the
farmworkers remained almost unaffected by the quality of life issues associated
with how slavery subverted the slaves’ parental authority and weakened family
life because the master or mistress imposed work discipline by manipulating the
family members’ loyalties to one another by threatening sales or by whippings.
Farmers could threaten to fire and blacklist their laborers, but since mostly
only men made up the work force, especially in the south and outside the peak
harvest and haymaking seasons, they simply lacked the power to interfere within
the laborers' families to the same degree.
Hodge's sons and daughters encountered far less fear and thus wore a thinner mask than the
stereotypical “Sambo’s” children. Due
to the sexual division of labor and, increasingly, mass education, the children
of farm laborers were also normally much better supervised during the day than
young slaves. The ill-effects of the
primitive day care, such as that found on Southern plantations, hardly existed
in rural England, because Mrs. Hodge normally was found at home, especially in
the south. As male unemployment rates
rose towards the end of the eighteenth century on into the early nineteenth,
women and children were pushed out of the agricultural labor market and into
the home.200
Although the children of farmworkers had less pleasure from playtime
compared to the young slaves, their childhood likely was more worthwhile to the
extent they received some formal education, some practical work experience (if
the hours were not excessive, etc.), and were around adults more, including
their parents, whose knowledge and experience in life made them much better role
models than the eight year olds "minding baby" in the American South.
As
demonstrated earlier in the section dealing with education (pp. 105-107), the
children of agricultural laborers went to work normally a number of years
before the children of slaves did, excepting in northern England where higher
parental wages prevailed than in the south. Boys commonly began work at eight
or nine years old in much of England.
Caleb Bawcombe regularly began to help his father with the flock at age
nine. But in relatively high-waged
areas, children often only began to work regularly at age twelve, thirteen, or
even fourteen. Since generally their
first years at work were highly irregular and especially tied to seasonal labor
demands, the age at which children first entered the labor force did not mean
full time, year-around work began for them then. In Northamptonshire, country boys eight to ten years old worked
for an estimated ten to twelve weeks a year at least for two shillings a week,
which is hardly full-time employment.
The authors of the 1867-68 Report found that work for children under age
ten was "precarious, occasional, and fluctuating," but soon
afterwards became increasingly regular, especially for boys. Working for the first time when he was nine,
Arch said he scared crows for twelve months straight for several farmers. So he either had an unusual experience or he
included the slack periods in between stints.
Bird scaring was common, if seasonally irregular, work in Northampton
for the youngest boys (seven or eight years old), giving them ten weeks of work
(spring), three (summer), and three more (winter). In northern Northumberland, children rarely worked before age
fourteen, except during summers, when eleven and twelve year olds did also. The
normal July-November seasonal peak for agriculture provided much more work for
children then than at other times. The
Fens stood out as an exception, since there children worked with the winter
turnip crop. This area was notorious for the gang system, which helped "to
force children into premature employment." Yorkshire, without this system, had seasonal work for boys
begin at age twelve.201
These ages for going to work (excepting Arch's) likely reflect some
tightening of the labor market in the late 1860s in agricultural areas, (a key
ingredient in the brief successes of Arch's National Agricultural Labourers'
Union in the early 1870s), which makes projecting them backwards more than two
or three decades hazardous.
Just How Common Was Child Labor, Especially in the
Countryside?
Earlier
on, from the early eighteenth century until the 1840s, many contemporaries
considered child unemployment and underemployment to be a problem, which
puts in context Kemble's complaints about idle young slaves lounging about on
her husbands' estates while the women were overworked.202 Agriculture presented further problems for
employing children, for unlike mining or cotton spinning, domestic industry or
factories, their small size and strength unambiguously worked against
them. H.H. Vaughn noted in 1843 that,
unlike climbing chimneys or running carts of coal in mines with low ceilings,
smallness was no advantage: "In
most out-door work weight and strength are an advantage." They could not easily be employed full
time. R.H. Greg, in a 1837 defense of
the factory system that saw industry as the savior of idle children, even
exaggeratedly claimed: "Boys are
of little use, girls of still less, in agricultural countries, before the age
of 18." Now this view plainly
overstates the case. The infamous
masters of the gang system found gathering children (and women) into groups to
weed or harvest root crops a perfectly workable solution to the Fens’s labor
shortage. This area's farmers found the
hiring of plowboys (ages eight to eleven), and children to weed (seven to
eleven for boys, seven to thirteen for girls) financially wise. In Leicester, due to more land and root
crops coming into cultivation, farmers employed children down to even six years
old. Vaughn's claim still has its germ
of truth, for children (like women) were in the "last hired, first
fired" category; farmers normally viewed them as "a cheap and
amenable labour force which could be used flexibly as the seasons dictated."203 But as many local labor markets tightened in
the 1860s into the early 1870s, they were increasingly hired even in the
long-depressed agricultural counties of the south of England. Somewhat earlier, the 1851 census found very
few five to nine year olds (2.0 percent of boys, 1.4 percent of girls) were
employed, and still many ten to fourteen were not employed (36.6 percent for
boys, 19.9 percent for girls). True, it
seems these figures may not accurately capture much of the part-time or
seasonal work children engaged in.204 Still, they warn against extrapolating back
the ages given for children going to work in the 1867-68 Report to periods of
higher adult male unemployment in agricultural areas in the south of England,
where industry generally was a weak competitor for labor.205
Traditionally,
one important transitional point in the lives of laborers' children was when
they were first hired into farm service under a yearly contract with a farmer
who boarded them at his expense at his house.
This career stage began generally around the age of fourteen; a later
shift in status to day laborers developed after they married. Women went into service, not just men,
especially in the more pastoral counties in the southwest as (especially)
dairymaids. Fundamentally, "farm
servant" was synonymous with being unmarried, and "day laborer"
with being married. Service's chief
benefit was to increase the young worker’s economic security. No threat of applying for parish relief in
the slack winter months hung over those so employed, especially in arable areas
with their greater the seasonal peaks and dips in the demand for labor compared
to pastoral areas. This practice
imposed greater stability on the young, encouraging them to save for a delayed
marriage, especially because the monetary wages normally were paid in one lump
sum near the end of the service period.
The farm servant also received a settlement in the parish he lived in,
allowing him to apply for parish relief there, after a year’s completed
service. The experience of service
followed by marriage and day labor gradually declined as the eighteenth century
closed and the nineteenth opened in much of southern England, especially the
southeastern grain-growing, arable region.
What caused this decline? As
population growth caused higher unemployment, farmers gained an incentive to
hire labor only by the month, week, or even day. The poor laws' settlement provisions, which discouraged the
yearly hirings that later gave farm servants
the right to apply for relief in the parish of hire, were another
factor. Then enclosure in combination
with the poor laws in the south promoted population growth: Both encouraged early marriages since single
people had trouble getting any relief, and discouraged saving, since the wages
earned by now exclusively wage-dependent laborers were enough only for a bare
subsistence. Farm service, as a key
transition point of childhood into adulthood in the world of work, gradually
became a relic of the past as the eighteenth century closed and the nineteenth
century opened, except for northern areas and in certain occupations such as
shepherd, where steady, year-around work was necessary. Increasingly, men and women (when employed
at all) spent their whole careers as day laborers, without the farm servant
stage in their work lives.206
The Parental Push for Child Labor
Parents
had a strong financial incentive to put their children to work as soon as
possible, excepting when schooling was a serious option. Some resisted this course, perhaps remembering
their own more-carefree childhood.207 Working class parents typically faced the
problem that during the family life cycle their income was at its lowest point
when the number of young mouths needing to be filled was at its highest then
when the children and their mother could do little work outside the home. When a family had (say) five children ages
one, three, five, seven, and ten, the mother (granted the traditional sexual
division of labor) had to watch the children and could not easily work at jobs
outside the home. Children at these
ages normally could not be put to work, except maybe the oldest. In agricultural districts without any
domestic industry, often finding work for young children and their mothers was
hard, even though their earnings were vitally necessary to put the family above
the barest of subsistence levels. The
New Poor Law fell hardest on families at this nadir point in their lives,
because it eliminated the Speenhamland system's per child allowances paid by
the parish. In areas of high
unemployment, the natural tendency in England's patriarchal society was to
minimize the unemployment rate for men at the cost of pushing women and
children largely out of the labor market, excepting the peak summer months,
which included harvest. Cobbett
lamented the concentration of weaving and spinning in the north, which
undermined the old domestic industries in the south, including weaving and
spinning cloth just for household use, thus leaving women and children,
especially girls, out of work (see above, pp. 53-54). As the sexual and regional divisions of labor increased in
intensity, they helped to accentuate the natural burdens of the family life
cycle for southern England's agricultural workers, excepting the few places
where some domestic industry persisted.
Because American slaves were guaranteed support in food and day care (at
least in theory), they rarely had to face independently the pressures of the
family life cycle, unlike English farmworkers.
But the bondsmen’s guaranteed support and security came at the cost of
independence and freedom, since the financial constraints on childbearing were
largely eliminated by necessarily being their masters’ property. Hence, while the children of Hodge had to
endure the tightening pressures of family life cycle when their parents had
many offspring, which the children of slaves avoided, the farmworkers had much
more independence and freedom of action, which slaves never enjoyed because of
their unfree status.
The investigators working for the 1867-68
Report were acutely aware that they should avoid recommending an age limit on
children working that would greatly burden the poor. They knew the parents’ earnings, especially when even many men
experienced irregular employment, were not enough for them to easily sacrifice
the earnings of their children for higher considerations such as
education. As Arch noted: "Children were employed till the law
compelled them to be sent to school, and when the father was able to earn so
little who can wonder at it? Boys, as
soon as they were big enough, would be sent out into the fields, just as I
was." In Cambridgeshire, low wages
encouraged parents to put their children to work as early as possible. If a husband earned twelve shillings per
week, ten shillings six pence went towards flour for bread, so children had to
work in order for the family to survive.
In Northampton, the loss of earnings by those aged eight to ten would
only constitute some twenty shillings a year to the parents, but these were
much higher elsewhere (four pounds seven shillings a year in Lincoln and
Nottingham). In the Thames valley area
(and surely elsewhere!), parents under high financial pressure naturally tended
to neglect their children's education.208 Ironically, the children of small
freeholders in the Humber/Fens area had less education than did the
hired laborers'. This curious result
stemmed from the small farmers putting their children to work on their farm as
soon as possible.209
Because so many families lived so close to bare subsistence, parents had
to make their children work early in life, thus prioritizing the immediate
earnings needed for financial survival over longterm improvement resulting from
their children’s education.
Day Care an Uncommon Experience
Due
to the high unemployment rates for men and especially women in many
agricultural areas, and the introduction of the scythe in arable districts,
which required great strength to use, laborers’ children rarely experienced any kind of day care. The sexual division of labor combined with
high unemployment in southern England ensured children received plenty of adult
supervision. Even when harvest came,
and virtually everyone was put to work (at least as the mid-nineteenth-century
mark is passed) in agricultural parishes, children might still directly assist
their parents in harvest. The family
often worked as a unit, with the husband using a bagging hook to cut down the
stalks of wheat, the wife following closely behind, gathering and tying them
together, with one or more children pulling and preparing the ties for their
mother to use. Many times, after
negotiating with the farmer for a given piece work rate, a number of families
entered a field at once, each working on its one or two allotted acres. A family of farmworkers also worked together
to raise food when given an allotment, since the children and mother would tend
the plot during the day while the father was away working for some farmer. The rest of the family could hoe, weed,
plant, and pick food from the plot themselves, giving them additional
(self)employment and badly-needed food.
Some children even used wheelbarrows to gather manure from the public
roads for their family’s plot! Then, in
the evenings or early mornings, or otherwise when not working for others, the
father would work on the family’s allotment also. In this situation, the productive unit was the family. Clearly, a child’s experience while working
for his or her father or mother typically differs sharply from the impersonal
supervision exercised by a farmer or one of his carters. It’s unlikely that farmers treated even
long-term farm servants or apprentices to husbandry nearly as well as their
fathers and mothers would. Normally,
day care made no appearance in the lives of laborers' children, at least when
both the parents were alive. But one
older child may end up watching younger brothers and sisters in areas where the
women also worked in the fields routinely, such as southern
Northumberland. Jeffries idyllically
describes how the parents would lock out of the cottage their older child, who
then watched her younger brother or sister play out in the beautiful spring
countryside. Day care--or paid baby-sitting--might
make its appearance in an area such as Yorkshire, where the women also did
field work regularly. Here, this
practice’s consequences produced various complaints: The women kept their cottages less tidily, they neglected their
families, they gave opiates to their children, and they paid "an old
woman" daily so much to care or them!210 (Talk about shades of nearby industrial
Manchester!) The English agricultural
workers’ family still was much more apt to be an active, productive economic
unit than the black slaves’ family (excepting some in lowland task system
areas) because the latter was much more subordinated to the productive process
than the former as masters mostly eliminated the sexual division of labor and
created a greater average division of the family unit spatially during the
workday by separating mothers and their children more commonly than the farmers
in England did with the laborers.
Young Hodge at Play
Although
the life of young Hodge was more filled with work and especially education than
a young slave’s, the former still had time to play. Getting themselves thoroughly dirty, younger pre-school children
might romp about outside their parents' cottage in the fields or perhaps in a
nearby farmyard carefully out of sight of the adults. Maybe the oldest sister would watch her younger siblings play
around the ditches and hedges, gathering flowers or even acorns which the
farmers would pay for. The habit of the
parents, if both were gone, was to lock their children outside. Less innocently, two boys in the village of
Ridgley that Somerville described were keen at raiding nests, following clearly
in their poaching fathers' footsteps.
Caleb Bawcombe managed to combine with play routinely while watching his
father's flock. He and his brother were
playing "on the turf with nine morris-men and the shepherd's puzzle,"
when their mother suddenly appeared one time.
While engaged in crow-scaring, Arch sometimes mischievously looked for
trouble by bird-nesting, trespassing, etc., in more idle moments. He favorably compared the outdoors
environment he enjoyed to what children in the mines endured: "And I had the trees to look at and
climb, hedgerow flowers to pluck, and streams to wade in." Although his mother's home schooling
competed against play, he did not mind this regime. As a teenager, working as a stable boy for what were good wages
for his age and county, he continued to study, seeing how limited the
opportunities for amusement in his village were:
The village lad had two kinds of recreation open to
him. He could take his choice between
lounging and boozing in the public house, or playing bowls in the bowling
alley. That was all. There were no cricket or football clubs, no
Forester's meetings.211
The first option led into the wasteful, profligate way
of life the middle classes, local farmers, and gentry routinely condemned,
which he did not find tempting.
Children, as always, will find some way to play, but on balance the
farmworkers’ offspring had more work, more schooling, and less playtime than
the slave’s children.
The Relative Quality of Life for the Children of
Slaves and Laborers
Excepting
how masters could subvert parental authority by whippings, sales, etc., and the
fear inspired by the same, slaves until about age twelve typically had a more
carefree childhood than agricultural workers.
Although young farmworkers worked rather irregularly before age twelve
or more, they still did more work at younger ages than most young slaves. Furthermore, especially as the nineteenth
century advanced, education increasingly became a reality for the offspring of
laborers, which meant the school often filled days without work, at least
outside agriculture's summer/harvest seasonal peaks. So while young slaves had more playtime, the children of laborers
were much more likely to gain some education, as limited or crude as it may
have been, and to receive what arguably was useful work experience. Unlike the contemporary United States, where
society is wealthy enough to guarantee thirteen years of school to its entire
population, the pressures of bare subsistence in the farmworkers’ world often
made child labor necessary for a family to survive independently as an economic
unit. Slave children also were much
more likely to experience day care, at least on the plantations, where the
"baby minders" were still young children themselves, often unrelated
to their young charges. By contrast,
young Hodge enjoyed–-a perhaps problematic term here--much more adult
supervision, since women had largely been driven out of the agricultural labor
force outside of seasonal peaks by the time the nineteenth century began,
limiting them to a more strictly defined homemaking role. The high adult male unemployment rates, at
least in southern England, indirectly ensured their children received more
supervision from their parents, whose greater experience in life made them
better role models. Day care was rare,
at least in the south, although an older sister (likely) may have watched
younger siblings. While school
increasingly did split up the laborers' family during the day, as in
contemporary society, they still had adult care and attention. At least at harvest, the laborers' family
also sometimes did function as a unit, instead of being separated during the
day, unlike for the bondsmen. So
outside of the kind of frightening experiences Douglass tells, the slave's
childhood likely was more enjoyable to about age twelve on average, but the
farmworker's youth likely was more worthwhile, benefiting from the advantages
of more education, more family and adult direction and care, and (arguably, if
not especially intense or long in hours) useful work experience.
Religion--A Source for Enlightenment, Social Unity,
and Social Conflict
To the skeptically inclined, the
juxtaposition of religion and the quality of life initially may appear
peculiar, but consider the reasons for relating the two. Religion, especially for those peoples who
are illiterate or semi-literate, is the main source of an integrated view of
existence, by bringing a man’s or woman’s mind above the routine material cares
of life. It attempts to explain the
unknown, since the (ostensible) purpose of revelation is to bring humanity
knowledge that is necessary to live the right kind of life in the here-and-now,
but which is unobtainable by reason, philosophy, or science, or cannot be with
the same degree of certainty. It is the
main source of morality and behavioral restraint above the level of fear of
authority or what the neighbors think.
As long as the Thrasymachuses of the world would define justice, and
morality in general, as "nothing else than the advantage of the
stronger," religion's specific precepts and commandments will serve as the
main restraining force on people's actions since philosophy is generally
perceived at having failed to provide a satisfactory natural law theory as the
foundation of right and wrong.212 Religion also supplies a purpose for an
individual’s decisions about values in this life through asserting they affect
his fate in the afterlife. It elevates
the concerns of believers above those which also preoccupy animals to eternal
verities which have to be reckoned with, granted the truth of the religion in
question.
Organized
religion, although first and foremost it concerns man's relationship with God
(or the gods), also brings people together in order to worship the divine,
through rituals, assemblies, pageants, processions, etc. Here religion becomes contested terrain
between a society’s elite and subordinate classes, since nominally all humans
have to be concerned about what the supernatural powers-that-be desire of them.
Both the rich and poor are destined for the same fate--the grave. Religion can serve instrumental purposes for
this present life as well, which the elite may twist to serve their own
purposes. When it comes to an upper
class imposing hegemony and a subordinate class resisting it, religion is often
a central battle ground. The
powerholding class in society can bend religion into a system of social control
to benefit itself even as the subordinate class may manipulate the same
religion to justify its resistance, despite a mutually shared faith may bring
the two sides together into the same social settings to serve the same God or
gods. Religion can serve simultaneously
as a site of social unity and as a setting for social conflict since it
provides people with a collective activity outside of work, as well as a means
of raising their minds above the purely material to take a broader, more
philosophical view of life. It reminds
its adherents that something other than self-interest should guide their
actions in life.213
Christianity,
being the religion shared by both the English farmworkers and converted
African-American slaves, contains elements of use to both sides in their power
struggle, even as it serves as a means of unifying each side in a common
concern about God's purpose for their lives.
Christianity emphasizes the need to obey authority, of obeying the
powers that be as ordained of God (Rom. 13:1-7), of rendering unto Caesar that
which is Caesar's (Matt. 22:21), and to keep the command of the king (Eccl.
8:2). It tells slaves to obey their
masters (Eph. 6:5-6; Col. 3:22), and not to steal from them (Titus
2:9-10). On the other hand, the state
is not the ultimate authority for Christians. It presented a theoretical threat
to the totalitarians of this past century who wanted the whole heart, mind, and
soul of all the citizens of whatever nation they ruled over. Thus, after the Sanhedrin told them to stop
preaching about Christ and the resurrection, Peter and the other apostles
defiantly replied (Acts 5:29): "We
must obey God rather than men."
Similarly, during the previous run-in with the Sanhedrin, Peter and John
proclaimed (Acts 4:19): "Whether it is right in the sight of God to give
heed to you rather than to God, you be the judge." Christianity, even as
it tells those of a subordinate class to obey their superiors in this world, it
humbles the elite philosophically by saying all persons are equal in His sight
(Gal. 3:28): "There is neither Jew
nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free man, there is neither male nor
female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus." "For he who was called in the Lord while a slave, is the
Lord's freedman; likewise he who was called while free, is Christ's slave” (I
Cor. 7:22). It condemns giving a rich
man precedence in the assembly of believers (James 2:1-4). It states the rich are not favored in God’s
sight, at least if they are covetous of their property or oppress the poor
(James 5:1-6; Matt. 19:21-26; Amos 4:1-3; Isa. 3:14-15; Eze. 18:12-13;
22:29). Furthermore, and perhaps most
ominiously for slaveholders, Jehovah is portrayed as the freer of the nation of
Israel from slavery in Egypt (Ex. 6:5-7, 20:2). Hence, the Bible presents material susceptible to manipulation by
an elite bent on exploiting a subordinate class and for a subordinate
class to condemn and--if it denies that Christianity teaches pacifism--resist
the powerful. Although it makes for
poor hermeneutics and bad systematic theology, each side is apt to use the
parts of the raw material of revelation that favors its cause, while
conveniently ignoring that which does not.
Slave Religion--The Slaveholders’ Options on
Christianizing the Slaves
Because
Christianity contains teachings that an elite may not always find to its
liking, it can become divided over whether inculcating Biblical precepts to a
subordinate class is in its material self-interest. Of course, the elite’s strongly religiously motivated members
will evangelize heedless of any negative consequences to their position in this
life,214 but normally altruistic idealism cannot be counted on to
predominate in the upper class. The
elite faces here the same problem it does with disseminating or denying
education to the masses. A society’s
rulers have to choose between two models of social control: skewed knowledge or ignorance (see above,
pp. 107-9). Christianity presents a
similar problem theoretically, for those, like Napoleon, who approach religion
as an insrument for controlling other people's behavior. On the one hand, after noting all the useful
statements about obedience not just to God, but to secular authorities in the
Bible, slaveholders could see converting their slaves as advancing their
self-interest, over and above any otherworldly benefits. A Machiavellian
analysis could conclude teaching them Christianity was valuable. Having been written in an ancient world full
of slaves, yet not condemning slavery as an institution, the Bible (usefully)
tells slaves to obey their masters.
After all, Rome was full of slaves, many ancient Christians were slaves,
and some Christians even had slaves (e.g., Philemon) Harriet Jacobs, although overstating the impetus of Turner's
rebellion in promoting evangelism among the slaves, expressed this option
forcefully: "After the alarm
caused by Nat Turner's insurrection had subsided, the slaveholders came to the
conclusion that it would be well to give the slaves enough of religious instruction
to keep them from murdering their masters."215 On the other hand, the Bible contains many
statements about the duties of the rich and powerful towards the poor and weak
which an oppressed class could forge into useful ideological weapons for
hammering their superiors with. The Old
Testament's description of God using Moses to free the childen of Israel from
slavery in Egypt surely resonated with American slaves. The New Testament's proclamations about
being free in Christ (re: II Cor. 3:17-18; Luke 4:17-21) or all being equal in
God’s sight (Col. 3:11) were potentially troublesome to slaveholders.216 Then, pragmatically speaking, large numbers
of slaves gathered together for religious assemblies may prove hard to control.
American
slaveholders' mainstream response eventually made a compromise between the two
models: They evangelized their slaves,
but presented a perverted Protestant Christianity which overbearingly
emphasized the need to obey while purposely neglecting those parts of the
Christian message that might be, well, ah, dangerous. Conveniently cast aside was the Reformation's message that each
man must be able to read and interpret the Bible himself as God's Spirit
directed him. Evangelization based on
selective exegesis was easily carried out, with whatever not serving the
slaveowners’ interests edited out, for since they kept their slave population
largely illiterate and bookless, the bondsmen were mostly incapable of checking
on their masters and mistresses’ teachings by opening and reading the Bible for
themselves.217
The Earlier Practice of Not Evangelizing the Slaves
Earlier
in Southern slavery's history, the other model--of leaving their slaves in
heathenish ignorance–-slaveholders had considered, even practiced. Some still advocated this approach in the
1830s, such as a former long-time overseer turned planter himself that Kemble's
husband had employed. Conversions of
Africans when they first arrived in the New World have been argued to be
exceedingly rare; even their children’s religious status was normally
ignored. While visiting South Carolina,
evangelist George Whitefield, one of the foremost leaders of the Great
Awakening, pointedly condemned the American South for treating its slaves like
animals. He urged their
Christianization and improved conditions for them. The Great Awakening led slaveholders to abandon the previous
policy of neglecting to convert their slaves.
As Gallay observes: "Most
planters feared their bondspeople would move from religious training to
religious rights and perhaps on to civil or to political rights." They feared emancipations would follow
conversions: "The few slaves who
were permitted religious instruction were required to make a formal statement
in which they denied any expectation that baptism would lead to
freedom." When the legal status of
slaves in early colonial Virginia was still unclear, before the General
Assembly passed a law in 1667 that specifically denied that baptizing slaves
would liberate them, some gained freedom for this reason. The Great Awakening changed such attitudes
significantly, because the spirit of revivalism wants everyone saved now. The itinerate preachers found persuading
both lost black and white sheep to repent equally fine works. So from the 1740s on much greater efforts
were made to convert the slaves to Christianity, as slaveholders gradually
abandoned the policy of leaving slaves pagan to preserve distinctions between
whites and Africans which had helped justify the enslavement of the black man.218
The Gospel of Obedience Distorts the Christianity
Given to the Slaves
As
the slaves came into the churches, the slaveholding class labored mightily to
ensure the slaves learned the message of obedience. Clergymen throughout the South had to teach this distorted
“Gospel” or else risk losing the slaveholders’ support for evangelizing their
slaves.219
One pamphlet on the subject of evangelizing the slaves that Kemble found
evidently strongly stressed teaching the lesson of obedience. The bondsmen's newfound religion was not to
be allowed to escalate the difficulties of imposing work discipline on
them. Slaves repeatedly complained
about how often white preachers told them to obey their owners from the
pulpit. Lucretia Alexander, once a
slave in both Mississippi and Arkansas, summarized a typical sermon:
The preach came and preached to them in their
quarters. He'd just say, 'Serve your
masters. Don't steal your master's
turkey. Don't steal your master's
chickens. Don't steal your master's
hogs. Don't steal your master's
meat. Do whatsomever your master tells
you to do.' Same old thing all the time.
Another slave woman refused to go to church, so she
got locked up in her master's seedhouse.
She complained:
No, I don't want to hear that same old sermon: 'Stay out of your missus' and master's
henhouse. Don't steal your missus' and
master's chickens. Stay out of your
missus' and master's smokehouse. Don't
steal your missus' and master's hams.'
I don't steal nothing. Don't
need to tell me not to.
Using Ephesians 6:5 as his text, Jacobs heard Anglican
clergyman Pike teach what must have been a stereotypical message telling slaves
to obey their masters and to fear God if they slacked off at work, lied, stole,
or otherwise injured their masters' interests.
Evidently, his lesson for a slave audience remained largely unchanged
from week to week: "I went to the
next Sabbath evening, and heard pretty much a repetition of the last discourse." Some black preachers gave similar messages,
because either white supervision restricted their choice of material or they
"sold out" to the whites. Masters
and mistresses in the South clearly wanted a clipped form of Christianity to
serve as an ideological underpinning to slavery through emphasizing the message
of obedience although the slaves resisted it.220
By
making Christianity carry out their instrumental purposes, the slaveholders
brought a bent, distorted gospel to the slaves. The Christian message lost much of its authenticity when masters
and mistresses harnessed it for imposing work discipline on their
bondsmen. Freedman Charley Williams of
Louisiana said he largely missed the core of its teachings because what he
heard was so twisted:
Course I loves my Lord Jesus same as anybody, but you
see I never hear much about Him until I was grown, and it seem like you got to
hear about religion when you little to soak it up and put much by it. Nobody could read the Bible when I was a
boy . . . We had
meetings sometimes, but the nigger preacher just talk about being a good nigger
and "doing to please the Master," and I always thought he meant to
please Old Master, and I always wanted to do that anyways.
This black preacher may have taught what pleased those
wielding nearly absolute power over him.
But his probable inability to read the Bible also handicapped him from
bringing the full Christian message to his flock. For he could not teach what he did not know, and if he had not
heard the message of equality in God's sight, he could not easily teach it
knowledgeably to others, assuming he had enough bravery to do so. Lunsford Lane, a North Carolina freedman
turned abolitionist speaker in the North, said he had heard certain New
Testament texts about slaves obeying their masters routinely recited in sermons
intended for audiences held in bondage.
While observing these sermons telling the slaves to obey had "much
that was excellent" mixed into them, the message of obedience still
strongly remained present. Sometimes
their propaganda paid off: A number found theft declined and discipline
improved as slaves "got religion."221 At least for this life, the slaves benefited
less clearly. They were told to obey
without hearing much the corresponding message about their masters’ obligations
to them or about master and slave having equality in Christ. This mangled form of Christianity also made
the true experience of conversion more difficult. While many, perhaps most
slaves may have received the general evangelical Protestant Christian message
of "repent and accept Christ as Savior to gain eternal life," a minor
point of the Christian religion--slaves must obey their masters--was
artificially exalted into the pride of place to suit the slaveholders'
interests. The time and effort spent
teaching this point caused other, more important doctrines to be left gathering
dust, either partly or completely pushed aside. Being an artificial construction that served the ruling class’s instrumental
purposes, the Christianity that the white masters and mistresses and the
preachers under their influence bequeathed to their slaves often lacked an
essential authenticity and integrity.
The Slaves Add to the Religion Given Them by their
Masters and Mistresses
The
slaves clearly received a watered-down faith from their masters and mistresses,
one which was transparently bent towards serving their obvious material
interests. The slaves filled the vacuum
in their religious lives by drawing upon their own cultural heritage from
Africa. The Catholic Christianity of the Indians in Latin America was
influenced by their ancestors' pre-Columbian religious practices; likewise, the
Protestant Christianity of the slaves took on traditions and a character partly
derived from the traditional animist religions of Africa, thus producing an
analogous syncretistic combine.222 But because the slaves were a minority even
in their region, and further imports of slaves directly from Africa had been
cut off since 1808 (excepting those smuggled in), the Africanisms found in
African-American religious beliefs were proportionately much fewer than those
showing up in the Caribbean or Brazil.223 Nevertheless, such influences showed up in
the United States. The beliefs of
Charles Ball's African-born grandfather were full of Africanisms. His rather eccentric religious beliefs
certainly look to be Islamic, perhaps in a Sufi-influenced version because
formal doctrine was de-emphasized. A
detectable strain of Deism seems to appear here also, which may point to the
abolitionist editor's own beliefs influencing his interpretation of what he
heard Ball say about his grandfather.
His case was exceptional, because he expressed these beliefs without
combining them with the faith of the slaveholders. The testimony of freedman William Adams of Texas exemplifies the
much more usual syncretism, in which the Christian belief in casting out demons
subsumes a voodoo-like belief in hexes and preventing them. When a child he
hear[d] them [his mother and other adults] talk about
what happens to folks 'cause a spell was put on them. The old folks in them days knows more about the signs that the
Lord uses to reveal His laws than the folks of today. It am also true of the colored folks in Africa, they native
land. Some of the folks laughs at their
beliefs and says it am superstition, but it am knowing how the Lord reveals His
laws.
Adams’s case demonstrates how the slave conjurors’
practices and powers coexisted with Christian beliefs within the same
individuals. These conjurors’ gave the
slaves an independent source of religious authority from what white preachers
or their masters and mistresses believed. Berry and Blassingame see the
frenzied yelling, "the ring shout, the call-and-response pattern of
sermons, prayers and songs, the unrestrained joy, and [the] predilection for
total immersion" as derived from African rituals and customs.224 The slaves combined beliefs from their own
African religious tradition with the twisted Protestant faith of their owners
to help explain or mentally cope with slavery’s privations.225
No Surprise:
The Slaves' Lack of Religion Freedom
Turning
from the content of the slaves' beliefs to how much freedom they had to
practice them, often slaveholders and overseers restricted or even simply
prohibited the slaves from expressing their faith.226 All the stories about the slaves’ receiving
punishment for expressing their religious beliefs shows the master class was
less interested in the souls of their bondsmen and more concerned about keeping
control than their propaganda proclaimed.
Planter Barrow, never one much for sending his slaves off plantation,
once reluctantly let them leave for religious reasons: "gave the negros permission to go over
to Robt. H. Barrows to preaching, . . . being near & leaving home
but seldom, granted them permission."227 Barrow's slaves also might have had meetings
without his permission. As a
slave in Virginia, William Troy had been at many illict meetings of his
church. Despite their precautions, such
as holding gatherings at night, patrols sometimes did break them up. David West, from Virginia, reported a
similar experience: Patrollers whipped
those caught at or after night services.
Eli Johnson was threatened with no less than 500 lashes for leading
prayer meetings on Saturday nights. An
eloquent plea before his master and mistress allowed him to evade punishment. Note how his request, which contains an
apparent allusion to Ps. 22:17, implicitly appealed to an Authority above his
owner's:
In the name of God why is it, that I can't after
working hard all the week, have a meeting on Saturday evening? I am sent for to receive five hundred lashes
for trying to serve God. I'll suffer
the flesh to be dragged off my bones, until my bones stare my enemy in the
face, for the sake of my blessed Redeemer.
Slaveholders opposed unsupervised meetings, held at
suspicious hours, watched by no whites, because their slaves might be
castigating them behind their backs--or planning something worse. At least, they thought, their slaves should
be resting for work the next day if the meeting was otherwise innocuous. Even at meetings which slaveholders allowed,
patrollers (or other white observers, such as the master or overseer) stood
present. Indeed, throughout the South
that was legally required. Mrs. Colman
Freeman was born free, but witnessed patrollers whipping slaves who attended
such meetings without passes when they did not escape first by running into a
nearby river! "Uncle" Bob of
South Carolina had a master who broke up meetings by using his whip. The slaves' solution? They went to a outlying cabin, turned
up-side-down a washing kettle propped up off the floor by boards, and used it
to muffle the sound of singing and praying as they gathered around it!228 Clearly, the master class had little
interest in giving their bondsmen the freedom to meet for services, especially
from those they or their representatives were absent.
But
slaveholders restricted other religious activities by their slaves besides
meetings. In an exchange reminiscent of
Peter's with the Sanhedrin (Acts 4:19), one slave named Adam replied to the
overseer threatening him with a hundred lashes when he was about to be baptized: "I have but two masters to serve, my
earthly and my heavenly master, and I can mind nobody else." The Christian doctrine that obedience is
owed to God above all earthly powers' contrary commands here definitely bears
fruit! Kemble knew her husband’s
overseer whipped one man for allowing his wife to be baptized. Illustrating how much the slaveholders
denied their own Protestant heritage when attacking their slaves' right to
read, Jacobs noted: "There are thousands, who, like good uncle Fred [she was
illegally teaching him how to read], are thirsting for the water of life; but
the law forbids it, and the churches withhold it. They send the Bible to heathen abroad, and neglect the heathen at
home."229
For after the slaves received knowledge of Christianity, what they
decided to do with its content inevitably did not always please their owners,
who frequently ended up restricting how their human chattels expressed their newfound
faith.
The Slaves Try to Unbend a Bent Christianity
Although
the slaveholders upheld Christianity at least nominally, they knew the full
free exercise of religion by their bondsmen could threaten their material
interests. They wanted the benefits of
teaching the slaves to obey by using their religion’s tenets, but without the
drawbacks. Unfortunately for their
propaganda purposes, since Christianity was a "package deal," they
could not go picking and choosing which doctrines they wished the slaves to
hear when the latter had strong motives to seek those being withheld. Mary Reynolds of Louisiana never went to
church when she was a slave. Prayer
meetings had to be quietly conducted because her owner’s black driver
threatened his fellow slaves with whippings when he heard them. Even under such
restrictions, she still heard the Christian doctrine that all people are equal
in God's sight, albeit in a somewhat mangled form: "But some the old niggers tell us we got to [still] pray to
God [so] that He don't think different of the blacks and the whites." Some whites really did try to deny this
truth, by saying the slaves were not even human! One white preached this to the slaves, as freedwoman Jenny
Proctor of Alabama remembered:
Now I takes my text, which is, Nigger obey your master
and your mistress, 'cause what you git from them here in this world am all you
ever going to git, 'cause you just like the hogs and the other animals--when
you dies you ain't no more, after you been throwed in that hole.
Attempts to shield the slaves from the implications of
objectionable doctrines by teaching them a bastardized Christianity were
inevitably doomed to failure. Once the
genie is out of the bottle, stuffing him back in is impossible.230 The slaves could use Christian teachings
their masters disliked hearing, such as by demanding recognition that they were
brothers in Christ (i.e., fellow human beings). The master class’s attempts at religious censorship inevitably
partially failed, undermined by literate slaves, idealistic whites, etc. When masters and mistresses revealed that a
Higher Authority stood above their own, they made a righteous defiance
available to the bondsmen which was based upon the very religion that their
owners taught them, something which had potentially dangerous repercussions.
Despite
the hazards, most masters and mistresses pressed forward with the project of
evangelizing their slaves, especially in the generation or two before the Civil
War (1800-60). They often consented to
having their slaves join them at services, which demonstrates once again whites
accepted a certain degree of integration under slavery, so long as they kept
the blacks in utter subjection. This
principle was perfectly illustrated by the slaves’ receiving communion last,
after the whites had, at an integrated service. Freedwoman Nicey Kinney of Georgia saw her master and mistress as
"sure believ[ing] in the church and in living for God." They all together routinely attended on
different weeks three different churches.
Mistress Sallie Chaney made sure her slaves did no work on Sunday, and
that they went to church services, which were held on her Arkansas
plantation. Bennet Barrow thought a
planter neighbor of his "verry foolish in relation to religion among his
negroes," evidently because he was always trying to convert them and so
forth. The Bryans of colonial South Carolina
were totally determined to preach to and teach to their slaves and those on
neighboring plantations in large emotional meetings. As a result, a committee of the colonial legislature condemned
the Bryans’ activities and a grand jury indicted them. Jonathan Bryan even wanted to build a
"negro school"! Olmsted noted
that Bishop Polk of Louisiana worked strenuously not just to convert all 400 of
his slaves, but he performed their marriages and baptisms by the standard
rites.231 At least some
masters and mistresses saw converting their slaves to Christianity as a
religious duty, without always having the ulterior instrumental purpose of
using their faith as an ideology that taught obedience, since they went beyond
the bare minimums required.
Slave Preachers:
Their Role and Power
The
white elites always eyed suspiciously the slave preachers, who made up for a
general lack of education through lung power and sheer emotionalism when
conducting meetings. They had about the
highest position a slave in the eyes of fellow slaves could attain without
gaining it based on his master's property or authority.232 Masters had good reasons for their
mistrust. The preachers could start an
outright revolt, like Nat Turner.
Failing to do something that deadly and spectacular, they might serve as
public questioners of the slaveholder regime.233 They could reveal and expound doctrines of
Christianity the masters would prefer to be swept to some corner or under the
rug. They could become an alternative
source of power on the plantation, like the conjurers in their own sphere,
because God was seen as authorizing their role. Because of the Protestant teaching of the priesthood of all
believers, which allowed even poor, illiterate whites to preach, slaveholders
knew that totally eliminating the slave preachers was not a realistic
possibility granted the religious milieu they moved in. The general policy became more one of
regulation than elimination, although their owners could censor them or sell
them off. Barrow rued the day he let
his slaves preach, writing he would opt for simple elimination: "Gave negros permission to preach shall never do it again too much rascallity carried on."234 Despite policies like Barrow's, slave
preachers often led emotional services, full of singing, moving, and shouting
in a call and response pattern. Since
they were normally under suspicion and/or direct white supervision, excepting
illicit night gatherings, they frequently had to preach "authorized"
sermons about obeying their masters and stealing none of their property, or at
least neutral ones not obviously susceptible to interpretations that
readily undermined the slaveholders' regime ideologically. Some apparently even “sold out” completely
for material benefits and respect from the white authorities, as Blassingame
maintains, or they even honestly believed slaves had to obey their owners.235 Still, despite the compromises they often
had to engage in, the slave preachers, as a group, were the most threatening
among the slaves to the planter and master class's project of achieving
hegemony over their human chattels, followed by the conjurers.
Although
American slaves generally failed to develop a religious millennialist tradition
like subjugated peoples elsewhere, African-American slave religion could still,
under unusual circumstances, subvert work discipline on the plantations. For example, the proclamations of the whites’
own millennialist movement spilled over, affecting the slaves' own
beliefs. William Miller, a Baptist
layman turned preacher, predicted the world would end in 1843, later emending
that prophecy to 1844, based upon his interpretation of Daniel 7:25's
"2,300 evenings and mornings."
Bennet Barrow, never much of a church-goer, complained that one-fourth
of the white population "are run crazy on the subject of Miller prophosey,
that the world would come to an End some time this year." But for him, the real problems began when
Miller’s predictions began to terrify his slaves. He noted, in his diary entry for April 11, 1843: "Negros are much frighed
[frightened] the thoughts of the world
coming to an end any day." Some
kind of trouble, although it remains unspecified, must have inspired him to
later sermonize against such a belief:
"Gave my negros a Lecture 'to day' upon the folly of their belief
that the world would End to day, & their superstitious belief in Dreams
&c." As the prophesied
Judgment Day passed without happenstance, the slaves evidently fell back into
their normal routines. A more dramatic
showdown erupted on Kemble's husband's rice-island estate years earlier, when a
black prophetess named Sinda predicted a soon-to-come Judgment Day. Her fellow slaves became so frightened that
they stopped all work in a virtual strike.
The overseer found no combination of argument, criticisms, or flogging
got them to work before the predicted day would come. He patiently waited it out, warning her before the rest that she
would be "severely punished" if her prediction was false.
Her day of judgment came indeed, and a severe one it
proved, for Mr. K---- [the overseer] had her tremendously flogged
. . . the spirit of false prophecy was mercilessly scourged out of
her, and the faith of her people of course reverted from her to the omnipotent
lash again.236
The unanimous passive rebellion here made this a
remarkable incident, for it briefly placed the lone white overseer in a nearly
helpless situation while avoiding the terrible “kill or be killed” violence
that normally characterized slave revolts.
But since the slaves were told, "Stand by and see the salvation of
the Lord" (Ex. 14:13), they passively awaited the outcome of a false
prophecy. They just fell back into
their old ways of relating to the white overseer when it all came to nought. Since their "strike" relied on
direct supernatural deliverance, unlike millennialist movements where a dynamic
prophet incites the masses into taking things into their own hands, when the
expected prophesied event did not take place, they had no practical alternative
but to return to their old patterns of submission to white authority, since
they were not following Franklin's not-always-Biblical dictum that the Lord
helps those who help themselves.
Did Slaveholders Achieve Religious and Ideological
Hegemony Over Their Slaves?
Were
the slaveholders and planters successful in establishing an ideological
hegemony over the slaves through religious teaching? This question will have to returned to below in order to analyze
it more than is possible here. Now
Genovese makes hegemony the cornerstone of historical interpretation in Roll,
Jordan, Roll. He borrowed this
framework from Gramsci, who developed it to explain why the workers in advanced
industrialized countries had failed to overthrow their capitalist elites
despite the absence of continuous and massive coercion. Genovese fits religion's role in creating
hegemony into his overall framework of paternalism, which created a system of
reciprocal obligations between the masters and the enslaved, allowing the
latter sometimes to reproach and restrict the former’s actions by asserting
they had (customary) rights in return for an (outward) acceptance of their
enslaved condition. They focused on
improving their conditions from "within the system" rather than by
unrealistically seeking liberation from it.
In religious matters, it is necessary to account for why
African-American slaves mostly lacked a violent, millennial faith that sought
to revolt and turn the world up-side down compared to (say) Caribbean slaves
influenced by Voodoo. The bloody revolt
in Virginia led by Nat Turner, a literate slave preacher, merely rises up as
the great exception to the American experience. Genovese attributes the difference to the non-millennial faith of
black preachers and their congregations.
This happened for four basic reasons.
First, they accepted the practical realities of being out-numbered,
out-gunned, and out-organized by the whites and their governmental/social
order. Second, because African religion
had a strong this-world emphasis that denied an ultimate end-time ultimate
consumation, the slaves tended to infuse such a sensibility into their form of
Christianity. Third, the preachers
pointed to God Himself as the deliverer through someone He would call like
Moses rather than a charismatic political black preacher-prophet among
themselves. Lincoln, i.e., the leader
of the (Northern) white establishment politically, ultimately filled this role
when liberation finally came. Fourth,
millennial movements developed in cases
in which the underclass and superiors both had a fully developed civilization
and culture. But an equality of
cultural integrity and heritage did not exist in the South between whites and
blacks. Illiterate African-American
slaves, through the brutal shock of being torn from their homeland, dumped into
a subordinate condition under the rule of a majority alien European culture,
cut off from substantial continuing contact with their old culture, joined by a
mixture of fellow slaves descended from different tribes who spoke different
languages (assuming these had not been already forgotten by those born into
slavery), had to accept substantial assimilation to the dominant culture even
to be able to communicate and work with one another, let alone their white
owners.237 Importantly, in a brilliant but
overreaching counter-attack, James Anderson takes Genovese to task for
maintaining the slaves had basically accepted ideologically their condition of
slavery, as part of his onslaught against the view the slaveholders had successfully
established hegemony over their bondsmen.
Anderson observes that Genovese discounts alternative sources of
authority for the slaves, such as the conjurors or skilled artisans among them. Resistance to hegemony is composed only of a
formal counter-ideology, "organized effort, and political ingenuity.” Summarizing his opponent’s views, Anderson
writes: “Resistance rests upon sound
and conscious mental activity; in other words, it is political
brilliance."238
But a subordinate class need not have a highly developed
counter-ideology in order to reject the superordinate class’s ideology. Genovese, according to Anderson, fails to
document that most slaves really accepted the evil social system into
which they were born. Running away to
the North still manifested black opposition to slavery; large, collective,
armed revolts need not erupt routinely to prove the slaves rejected slavery as
a good way of life. Anderson's polemic
clearly calls into question how successfully the slaveholders achieved hegemony
over the slaves through a paternalistic ethos.
How
can the conflict about the reality of hegemony over the slaves, religious and
otherwise, be disentangled? This
dispute depends on how someone defines "resistance" and where--what
social sites--that resistance appeared.
If the only “resistance” that counts is composed of large, organized
campaigns formed around a coherent counter-ideology, then American slaves
obviously never achieved this level of political activity. But successful hegemonic incorporation
becomes hard to prove after it is realized that resistance occurs in different
ways at different social sites. Subordinates
can act one way before the dominant class, and another among themselves alone,
alternatively putting on and dropping off a mask that conceals their true
beliefs. James Scott uses the terms
"onstage" to refer to social situations in which the dominant class
or group interacts with their subordinates.
By contrast, when both are "offstage," and the dominant and
the subordinate classes part company, each side can speak more freely about the
other than when together, especially the latter. The record of writings, conversations, speeches, etc., produced
when both interacted together is the "public transcript”; what each group
produced when out of the other’s presence is its “hidden transcript.” Genovese's concept of hegemony suffers a
limited understanding of the public transcript’s limitations for proving what
the slaves really believed: What the
slaves said may not be what they really did believe, since the elite
largely controls the public transcript.
The ruling class’s coercive power, real or imagined, intimidates the
subordinate’s class’s willingness to speak out, thus constantly muddying the
accuracy of the public transcript’s record of the latter’s real beliefs. The slaves could have used the ideology of
paternalism, and even some of the religious doctrines of Christianity, to
restrain their owner’s actions as instrumentally as some masters used
Christianity to teach their slaves to obey them. But when off by themselves, at a social site of their own
choosing, such as a late-night church service in the woods, their slave
preachers may have preached of a day when all blacks would be free. Maybe they even proclaimed a classic
millennial upside-down world where the bondsmen were the rulers and the masters
the slaves. (Of course, the beliefs
expressed at illicit activities are almost unknown, because little
documentation about them exists, which is the usual nature of the hidden
transcript).239
If there were such social sites, like a plantation’s quarters at night,
largely or completely beyond the ability of the slaveholders to destroy or
watch, then the slaves may have developed a crude counter-ideology that would
sustain their spirits to resist their owners’ continuous oppression. While a lack of documentation makes the hidden
transcript mostly irretrievable, especially for a mostly illiterate group as
utterly subjugated as the slaves, occasional peeks at it are possible, such as
through the slave narrative collection.
The hidden transcript also increasingly slips into the public transcript
as the chaos of the Civil War's last two years totally undermines the entire
social system of slavery in the South, and the level of fear slaves have about
speaking out plummets. Scott's
conception of a hidden transcript generated by a subordinate group offstage
likely inflicts a mortal wound on Genovese's theory of hegemony generally,
including its implications for the slaves’ religious beliefs specifically.240
The
religion of the slaves--largely a mixture of very basic Christian doctrine and
some African practices and rituals--served a number of valuable purposes to the
bondsmen. It offered them hope for the
future afterlife and helped comfort them during the trials of the present life,
because their faith told them the oppression that they suffered under would not
last forever. By providing them with
social gatherings, which (allegedly) served transcendent purposes, it helped
weld local slave communities together.
It provided an offstage social site (at least when illicitly used) where
the trials of being a slave were openly discussed with others suffering the
same condition. It bestowed on them an
independent source of authority above the master’s that they could appeal
to--the Christian God’s--and also from the slave preachers, who they saw as His
representatives on earth. Despite
masters and mistresses selectively taught slaves a religion supposedly shorn of
subversive tendencies, it still handed them another ideological resource to
criticize their owners’ failures. It
also encouraged them to practice what they supposedly believed morally. Although the slaves normally could not count
on them, there were some limits to slaveholder hypocrisy. Christian teaching sometimes could restrain
slaveholders, such as when one white man rebuked a slaveowner who had beaten
his slave (tied to a tree) with a cat-o'-nine tails for a long time:
Old Deacon Sears stand it as long as he can and then
he step up and grab Old Master's arm and say, "Time to stop, Brother! I'm speaking in the name of
Jesus!" Old Master quit then, but
he still powerful mad.241
In this case, in which one white restrained another,
the slave received only some comfort.
But in other instances the slaves received much more, such as those of
Eli Johnson and Adam, in which the slaves themselves made implicit appeals to a
Higher Power above their masters and/or overseers, and their superiors
responded to their pleas. Because
slaveowners sharply reduced or eliminated the slaves’ outlets for personal
expression that were normally available to free people, such as in business and
social clubs, the slaves poured additional passion into their religion. This was one of the few venues where the
bondsmen had a degree of cultural and social autonomy which many masters (at
least by the mid-nineteenth century) willingly tolerated, or even actively
promoted. In the field of religion,
from both the conjurers with their African-derived beliefs and the slave
preachers with their syncretistic faith, the slaves received a source of
authority besides that of the slaveholders, which was a development that helped
them mentally, emotionally, even spiritually, to survive the oppression of
bondage.
English Agricultural Workers and Christianity
While
religion played a central role in the social lives of the slaves (when their
masters permitted it), it mattered less to the English farmworkers. The slaves often were largely prohibited
from any other organized group activities besides church services on a regular
basis, outside of the holiday-related parties masters might hold during the
Christmas season in late December. They
poured their passion into what was permitted them, above and beyond the
Africanisms expressed in highly emotional church services. In contrast, the farmworkers had other
social outlets, such as benefit clubs, friendly societies, even the pub, which
decreased the emphasis placed on church services when they lacked a strong
religious motivation. Since they were
not as oppressed as the slaves by the legal system, they could engage in more
activities largely or completely organized by themselves, including (after
Parliament repealed the Combination Acts) even unions for some in the 1860s and
1870s.
Reasons for the Established Church's Unpopularity with
the Laborers
Why
many farmworkers lacked faith (as expressed by church attendance) in organized
religion can also be explained politically.
The Anglican church and its parsons personified the establishment in
England, and its interests in keeping the laborers in line. They increasingly saw the Established Church
as a tool of the gentry and farmers for controlling them. The message of obedience to the secular
authorities as the powers-that-be which are ordained of God once again
resonates, though perhaps less often than in American slave states.242 John Wesley, although the founder of
Methodism, himself died a good Anglican.
Upholding Toryism in politics, he repeatedly taught this doctrine.243 Emphasizing the next life as the cure for
the present life’s material inequalities appears in English preaching, as does
the implicitly subversive teaching that all persons are equal in God's sight.244 The farmers themselves resented the burdens
of the tithing system that supported the church. Then the laborers, fairly or not, saw the tithes as yet another
reason for their low wages.245 The farmers frequently used the burden of
tithe-paying to justify cutting or not raising wages, thus helping mobilize the
laborers’ resentment to serve their own agenda on occasion, such as in some
areas during the Swing riots.246 The charity which the parsons and their
wives dispensed came not freely, but at the cost of the laborers’ having to
obey clerical demands. Since in many
parishes pluralists held the livings, another problem arose. Supposedly attending to more than one parish,
they often didn’t appear in "their" parishes for months or years on
end. So if they did not care enough to
live in a given laborer’s parish, why should he or she care about going to
church to listen to some ill-paid curate preach?247 Parsons and other Establishment churchmen
gave sermons sometimes as loaded as white preachers gave to slaves concerning
the laborers’ God-ordained need to obey the secular authorities over them. Having recalled scenes where at least 500
"boys and men" would have left similar churches in the past, Cobbett
commented on why he saw very few laborers leave a church at Goudhurst:
Here I have another to add to the many things that
convinced me that the labouring classes have, in great part, ceased to go to church;
that their way to thinking and feeling with regard to both church and clergy
are totally changed; and that there is now very little moral hold which
the latter possess.248
Hence, in many areas where the farmworkers especially
resented the establishment (the power axis of gentry/farmers/parsons), Dissent
and Non-conformity gained popularity, thus filling Methodist chapels while
emptying Anglican churches.
The
Church’s unpopularity with many laborers had many identifiable roots. One source was simply the unequal treatment
they received at church services with the well-off, who were supposedly their
equals before God and brothers in Christ.
Cobbett--unrealistically--extolled the glories of making everyone in the
medieval past stand or kneel for the entire church service because
then: "There was no
distinction; no high place and no low place; all were upon a
level before God at any rate."
He noted the favoritism shown to the rich at church by how and where
they sat: "Some were not stuck
into pews lined with green or red cloth, while others were crammed into corners
to stand erect, or sit on the floor."
In these situations, the laborers were necessarily treated with contempt
by their alleged betters through social discrimination in an alleged
"house of God." Arch
mentioned similarly that, at the local Anglican services in Barford,
Warwickshire, the laborers and others in poverty had "lowly places"
where they had to "sit meekly and never dare to mingle with their betters
in the social scale." Curtains were put up to shield the wealthier folks
from the gaze of Hodge nearby. The
parson's wife threw her weight around by ordering the laborers and their wives
one day to sit on opposite sides of the aisle.
Worst of all, as a mere seven year old eyeing through a keyhole what
happened when his father took communion, Arch noticed the squire took it first,
followed by the farmers, the tradesmen and artisans, and last and least in the
local social hierarchy, the laborers:
Then, the very last of all, went the poor agricultural
labourers in their smock frocks. They
walked up by themselves; nobody else knelt with them; it was if they were
unclean . . . I wanted to know [asking his mother] why my
father was not as good in the eyes of God as the squire, and why the poor
should be forced to come up last of all to the table of the Lord.249
Similarly, American slaves received communion last in
mixed congregations. At services
conducted like this, James 2:1-4 was an unlikely text for the day!
How the Local Elite Can Use Charity to Control the
Poor
At
least when they were not absentee pluralists, the local clergy sometimes
provided aid to local laborers. The
rector of St. Giles, Wiltshire, at the seat of Lord Shaftsbury, gained great
praise from his extensive charitable works.
But his good deeds, as Somerville observed, wrought some bad
results: the loss of habits of
independence and the inclination of charity’s recipients to feel that they must
have it and "were not previously as well provided for as they should
be." In short, even non-government
handouts still tend to breed dependency and discontent. Arch mentioned that his local parson and his
wife served up soup and gave out coals to local laborers. Their charitable acts were little to their
credit, however, because they used them to control the laborers receiving
them. By threatening to withdraw these
gifts for any laborers or their wives who disrespected or disobeyed them, they
routinely received acts of obeisance from the otherwise reluctantly
compliant. For example, the laborers'
wives at church had to curtsey to the parson's wife. In one instance, when she suddenly ordered the hair of all the
girl students in her parish "cut round like a basin, more like prison
girls than anything else," Arch's mother battled this decree and won, but
at a certain cost: "From that time
my parents never received a farthing's-worth of charity in the way of soup,
coals, or the like, which were given regularly, and as a matter of course, from
the rectory to nearly every poor person in the village." As an adult, Arch successfully fought a
similar crusade for his nine-year-old daughter. She wished to wear a hair net decorated with some white beads to
school, which the parson's wife tried to stop because: "We don't allow poor people's
children to wear hair-nets with beads."
Obliquely extracting acts of deference by threatening to withdraw
charity paled by comparison with the parson’s (and farmers’) direct threats to
cut off aid from those daring to attend with some Dissenters who preached in a
local back lane's old barn. Having
already lost all access to handouts, Arch's mother without hesitation attended
there--but the threats may have kept other laborers from doing likewise.250 These incidents illustrate how charity can
be a tool of social control wielded by the elite against the poor. Although a potential donor does not use
physical force by denying someone a handout, those directly owning the means of
production produce a powerful incentive for obedience by threatening to
withdraw aid from those largely or completely without productive private
property. The subordinate class then
may have little choice (besides migration) except to comply with the strings
attached to such costly "gifts." By these machinations with charity,
the Church gained the bodies of some people at weekly services but often lost
their hearts.
The
tithes were the leading reason for the Church’s unpopularity among the farmer
and laborer alike. Two types of tithes
existed generally, the great or rectorial tithe, and the small or vicarial
tithe. The first entitled its owner
(for it could be and was sold to non-clergymen) to one-tenth of the produce of
the soil and forests, such as one-tenth of the wheat or hay grown in the
parish. The second was given only to
the highest resident clergyman, which may be the rector, the vicar, etc. Strongly sympathizing with the rioters, an
anonymous pamphlet published during the Swing riots described how the tithes
reduced "Swing" from a small farmer to a laborer whose services the
parish auctioned off to another farmer at three shillings a week. “Swing” replied to the equally fictional
parson who came to collect one-tenth of his crop when he was really entitled to
two-thirds less because of two prior fallow years: "Why surely . . . your reverence will not rob
my poor little children, by taking two-tenths more than you have a right
to?" The pamphlet may be
fictional, but the resentment expressed was real, and captured the flavor of
much popular opinion in the countryside.
These views were shared by the semi-literate laborer who wrote to the
Rector of Freshwater (Isle of Wight) after some small act of arson had been
committed against him: "For the
last 20 year wee have been in a Starving Condition to maintain your D[---]
Pride . . . As for you my
Ould frend you dident hapen to be hear, if that you had been rosted I fear, and
if it had a been so how the farmers would lagh to see the ould Pasen [Parson]
rosted at last."251
Clearly the Church, by latching onto the state's power to gain it
mammon, lost itself many hearts and minds because it forced people to
support a particular organized religion that personified the local
establishment. Had the Church adopted
the early nineteenth-century American model of volunteerism, under which people
only support and attend "the church of their choice," it would have
held its parishioners much better than it did.
The Laborers’ Turn to Nonconformity and Its Mixed
Results
Like
other occupational groups in England, as the laborers' support for the Church
waned, that for Methodism and other Nonconformist groups waxed. Depending on what its examiners emphasize,
Methodism's effects on the laborers' (and other workers') willingness and
ability to resist their superiors results in rather wildly disparate
interpretations in the historiography.
Undeniably, a peculiar correlation existed between annual peaks in
radical activity (and/or its aftermath) and Methodist conversions in areas
noted for working class unrest.252 On the one hand, E.P. Thompson sees this
movement as producing cathartic effects on working class emotions by draining
away energy, money, and time from the radical reformers in the early nineteenth
century. By emphasizing discipline at
work, such as through punctuality and steady attendance, Methodism has been
called a tool of factory owners that served their requirements for work
discipline over and above its general message that advocated submission to the
state.253 On the other hand,
by teaching its members practical ways to organize themselves (such as through
the handling of money) into larger, more orderly groups and giving them
(sometimes) managing and even preaching roles in the local chapels, Methodism
helped lay some of the foundation for unionization of the work force. In the Established Church, the laborers came
just to listen; in the Chapels, they came to participate. They had a real hand in administration, in
trying to convert others, arguing doctrine, etc.254 Joseph Arch personifies effects like
these. He was a Nonconformist and even
an occasional lay preacher before founding the first national farmworkers
union.255 George Loveless,
one of the martyrs in the infamous Tolpuddle case was not only a Methodist, but
had a "small theological library."256 Despite Wesley's personal conservatism and
the mainline Methodist ministry’s, these cases show that Christianity's message
of the equality of all persons in God's sight naturally did not stay corked up,
in some workers and laborers' minds, in some bottle labeled
"spiritual only," but it flowed out as they also applied it to the
affairs of this world. Then a few who
thought this way turned the incidental training in organization that Methodism
gave to the working class back against their employers (including the farmers)
through unions and friendly societies (which sometimes served as fronts for
unions).257
Christianity:
An Instigator of Laborers' Resistance?
Joseph
Arch’s own life provides excellent examples of how Christianity's teachings
could be turned against the elite nominally upholding them. At a meeting gathering together union
delegates from all over England, while they sang a stirring pro-union hymn, he
thought: "Joseph Arch, you have
not lived in vain, and of a surety the Lord God of Hosts is with us this
day." In his version of
Christianity, God clearly supported his efforts to unionize the
farmworkers. Later, sounding like an
Old Testament prophet, in a long speech given to his fellow laborers, he
thundered:
I have heard that, in various parts of the country,
the farmers have threatened to pinch their labourers this winter, and to reduce
their wages to ten shillings a week. . . . Will that stop foreign competition? No! and God will avenge the oppressor. I believe that the succession of bad
harvests are a visitation of the Almighty upon the farmers for their treatment
of their labourers, and upon a luxurious and dissipated aristocracy. I believe in a God of Providence, and as
sure as the sun rises and sets, He will avenge Himself on the oppressor. The farmer must not be too confident.
He employed similar Old Testament allusions when
recalling how and where he led the founding of the agricultural laborers' union
in 1872:
I know that it was the hand of the Lord of Hosts which
led me that day; that the Almighty Maker of heaven and earth raised me up to do
this particular thing; that in the counsel of His wisdom He singled me out, and
. . . sent me forth as a messenger of the Lord God of
Battles. . . . Only
through warfare could we attain to freedom and peace and prosperity; only
through the storm and stress of battle could we reach the haven where we would
be. I was but a humble instrument in
the Lord's hands, and now my work is over, my warfare is accomplished.258
Plainly invoking a religious sanction, even calling,
for his work as a union leader, he condemned his enemies in the elite with
language reminiscent of Ezekiel’s or Jeremiah’s. The bent Christianity which the elite emphasized--which taught
obedience to the state and its sundry representatives–-Arch upends here. The subversive side of Christianity--the
part emphasizing the rich should not oppress the poor, and that spiritual
salvation is harder for them than for the poor–-Arch wielded against the
farmers and aristocracy. As a general
procedure, the subordinate class can condemn the elite by using the latter’s
own ideology whenever they are hypocrites or fail to live up to the paternalistic
Christian model they supposedly uphold.
The elite naturally finds it harder to parry the poor’s points when
couched in the elite’s own ideology.
(Whether or not the poor really believe in the elite’s ideology (i.e.,
“false consciousness”) is another issue).
Hence, Christianity, in certain hands, can become a fountainhead of
resistance and action rather than a source of passivity and resignation in the
affairs of this life. Being a package
deal, and a double-edged sword, Christianity’s upper class promulgators could
not always count on evangelization producing “useful” results.
Similarities in Southern White American and English
Lower-Class Religion
The
laborers enlisting in Methodism or another Nonconformist sect ultimately
desired greater meaning out of their lives than the material world could
provide, because of its oppression and disappointments. This religion told them they could achieve
happiness without wealth by changing their outlook on life. But then what made its message any different
from Anglicanism’s? The evangelical nonconformists
stressed the need for a personal conversion event called becoming "born
again," i.e., a highly emotional, even ecstatic, experience of oneness
with God stemming from accepting Jesus of Nazareth as their Messiah and Savior
for their sins through His sacrifice.
Since this experience does not come willy-nilly, but takes a high level
of personal conviction and emotional upset over one's past life, Methodist
preachers notoriously fomented emotional church services in order to help
produce it. Cobbett looked down upon
them with contempt for the evident irrationality and disorder involved,
singling out the congregational singing as the only positive feature:
His hands [the Methodist minister's] were clenched
together and held up, his face turned up and back so as to be nearly parallel
with the ceiling, and he was bawling away, with his "do thou,"
and "mayest thou," and "may we," enough to
stun one. Noisy, however, as he was, he
was unable to fix the attention of a parcel of girls in the gallery, whose eyes
were all over the place, while his eyes were so devoutly shut up. After a deal of this rigmarole called
prayer, came the preachy, as the negroes call it; and a preachy
it really was. Such a mixture of
whining cant and of foppish affectation I scarcely ever heard in my
life. . . . After as
neat a dish of nonsense and of impertinences as one could wish to have served
up, came the distinction between the ungodly and the sinner. . . . Monstrous it is to think that the Clergy of
the Church really encourage these roving fanatics.259
Now
compare Cobbett's contemptuous description of a Methodist service in Kent,
England, to Olmsted's more objective but still somewhat skeptical observations
of a spiritual meeting in the American South, held mostly for the whites,
although the blacks present outnumbered them.
The similarities show that lower-class Southern whites did not mainly
derive an emotional style of religion from the slaves. In the American situation, a greater level
of chaos prevailed: While the minister
strived to win souls in a rather rude building, people kept coming and leaving,
children crawled in the aisles (one even got into the pulpit a few times), and
some dogs accompanied their masters.
The preaching style was a twin of the Methodist service’s that Cobbett
witnessed:
The preliminary devotional exercises--a Scripture
reading, singing, and painfully irreverential and meaningless harangues
nominally addressed to the Deity, but really to the audience--being concluded,
the sermon was commenced by reading a text, with which, however, it had, so far
as I could discover, no further association.
Without often being violent in his manner, the speaker nearly all the
time cried aloud at the utmost stretch of his voice, as if calling to some one
a long distance off; as his discourse was extemporaneous, however, he sometimes
returned with curious effect to his natural conversational tone; and as he was
gifted with a strong imagination, and possess of a good deal of dramatic power,
he kept the attention of the people very well.
Tumult accompanied the altar call as crying and
groaning men and women stepped forward to kneel before the "howling
preacher," who cried "aloud, with a mournful, distressed, beseeching
shriek, as if he were himself suffering torture." The blacks watching it all, confidently
awaiting their turn later with the same preacher, generally had "a
self-satisfied smile upon their faces; and I have no doubt they felt that they
could do it with a good deal more energy and abandon, if they were called
upon." Although the African
heritage of the slaves predisposed them towards energetic, emotional religious
exercises, the parallels between the American and English cases demonstrate the
poorer whites in the South or in England's industrial areas were likewise
inclined towards a religion requiring their active participation. All three groups had a desire for an
expressive faith that required their input and energy, whether it be through
emotional church services, an active personal sense of having become converted
as an adult, or getting involved in the organization of believers that
supported the ministers. (After all,
any religion downplaying emotion and/or rituals in favor of reason is a poor
candidate for popularity with people of little or no education a priori). The blacks, drawing upon their own heritage,
simply took advantage of the opening lower-class evangelical religion gave for
expressing their emotions. They built
upon it, adding ceremonies, such as the call-and-response singing and
preaching, and the ring shout/dance, or simply did more energetically what the
whites did. The emotionalism of
Methodist services in England, among a people whose national temperament was
traditionally described as including a "stiff upper lip," fatally
undermines W.E.B. Dubois' claim that Southern whites merely had a "plain
copy" of slave worship services.260 The blacks’ example may have encouraged some
lower-class whites to express their emotions at religious services more
strongly than their white Methodist kinsmen in industrial England's working
class did, but their basic pattern of worship would have remained the same even
if no slaves had been brought to the New World.
Somehow Seeking Participation in and Control of One's
Destiny:
The Consolations of Faith?
Both
slaves and laborers turned to evangelical Christianity to provide them with the
meaning of life. They sought something
that placed their own destiny in their own hands, as against living in a
material world with often oppressive masters and employers and nearly zero social
mobility. Through a faith where
"he who was called in the Lord while a slave, is the Lord's
freedman," where the eternal state was far more important than the present
life, "a vapor that appears for a little while and then vanishes
away," at least some became more content in this life, seeing the trials
of this life as preparation for the next.
The truly ancient Stoic advice that one can control and change one's
attitude or thinking when one cannot change one's material or physical
environment bears fruit here. They also
sought meaning through active participation in something, in some
organization controlled at least partially by themselves, where people like
themselves had some significant input.
The slave preacher (or conjuror!) had almost the only influential social
role a bondsman could have that was not directly derived from his master's
power and ownership of property. The
driver, the "mammy," even the skilled artisan, received positions
based on their willingness to serve obediently their master or mistress. But on religious matters the slaves
themselves frequently received a chance to organize a social group and its
activities generally to their own liking, even though watchful whites carefully
screened the ideological content emanating from the pulpit. Similarly, the laborers adopting
Nonconformity, even when under the banner of mainline Methodism, took part in
chapels where they determined their activities and influenced their
organization much more than in the churches.
Some, such as Arch, even received a chance to preach since formal
qualifications (i.e., a seminary degree from university training) were not
considered always essential. Now, it
can be argued that slaves or laborers who adopted these beliefs drained energy
from resistance movements that could have challenged the elite's hold on
them. Nevertheless, the laborer
embracing Nonconformity, or the slave participating in an illicit late-night
meeting, figuratively voted "no confidence" about their masters’
religion as they presented it to their subordinate class. Although modern-day skeptics may dismiss
them as passive in effect, such decisions of faith still subverted the elite's
ideological hegemony. In a material
world fraught with bondage, oppression, and hopelessness, they sought some
means to assert they had ultimate control over their own destinies, and to participate
in something that shaped their lives, instead of feeling their masters and
natural events solely determined their fates.
For these oppressed men and women, the consolations of faith for them
were neither unimportant nor futile in their ultimate effects, bringing as it
did meaning to lives otherwise vain and useless, largely consumed by the
burdens their elites imposed.
The Slave Family:
How Well Did It Survive Slavery?
One
of the most endlessly contentious issues in the historiography of
African-American slavery concerns how badly it damaged the black family as an
institution. Contemporary politics
always lurks in this debate’s background, and not just merely the civil rights
movement, race riots, affirmative action, and abolition of Jim Crow. More specifically, the 1965 Moynihan report,
which blamed the poverty of the inner cities on the black family's weaknesses
going back to the time before emancipation, became a target of not just
politicians or civil rights leaders, but historians. Moynihan maintains that the black community's disproportionately
high number of female-headed, single-parent families, combined with absentee
fathers, created in the ghettos a system of matriarchy by default, leading to
increased crime and poverty from ill-raised children. At the time, his report created a storm of controversy, but
rising concerns about the effects of increased white illegitimacy (and
divorce) rates since then have combined with general political rhetoric
nowadays about "family values" to vindicate mostly Moynihan's thesis
in the culture at large in more recent decades, even though it only partially
explains the genesis of poverty among American blacks.
Now,
what does it mean to say the family is a "strong" or
"damaged" institution, black and otherwise? Here, “a strong family” shall be defined as a stable traditional
nuclear family of a husband, a wife, and their children, that avoids events
such as divorce, illegitimacy, and death which either prevent its formation or
break it up afterwards by separating its members, especially before the
children become self-supporting adults.
The purpose of the family in this context is to raise successfully
well-adjusted, well-socialized children who will be able to make reasonable
decisions and support themselves without burdening society by committing
crimes, living off the dole for extended periods, or committing various other
social pathologies. The black family
under slavery endured additional events broke it up above and beyond those
present among free people. Since slave
marriages in the American South had no legal standing, masters and mistresses
had the power to separate the husband or wife by sale from his or her
mate. They also could take slave
children from both or either of their parents in order to display them on the
auction block. Since slaveholders
normally (excepting in a state or two) held their bondsmen as chattels,
personal moveable property, they could take them wherever they wished when
relocating to another farm or plantation.
So if one master owned the wife, and another the husband, the one moving
away had no legal obligations to purchase the spouse left behind. Slaves also were disposed of as gifts,
divided among heirs of an estate, rented for greater or lesser periods, or sold
to meet the debts of bankrupt slaveowners.
All these events often caused the separation of husbands and wives, of
mothers, fathers, and children.
Slaveholders frequently had no wish to maintain the marriage or parental
bonds of their slaves since the goal of maximizing profits may require them to
treat their human chattels as totally interchangeable units of labor. Consequently, the black family under slavery
suffered additional constant assaults upon its stability besides what free
people already endured, such as divorce, illegitimacy, and death. While the extra assaults never
"destroyed" the black family as an institution, for numerous slaves
fortunately avoided such disasters, or resourcefully patched new relationships
together after their owners obliterated the old ones (if perhaps illicitly from
the viewpoint of strict Biblical sexual morality), they still contributed to a
sense of rootlessness, alienation, and greater inability to commit to stable
relationships among many bondsmen.
Because the slave family unit suffered additional strains imposed
artificially by outsiders, this section devotes far more space to American
slaves than to English farmworkers, for the latter’s conditions were “normal,”
at least relative to a free society (meaning, one without serfdom or legal
bondage) conforming to western European norms.
Importantly,
the African-American slave family differed from those elsewhere in the Americas
because of the nearly balanced male/female sex ratio in the United States,
especially after the colonial period.
Monogamy soon became the norm for the black American slave family, just
as for whites, even though some curious exceptions occasionally appeared where
masters did not care how many "wives" their male slaves took since
their marriages had no legal standing anyway.261 The closing of the legal international slave
trade for America after 1807 motivated masters and mistresses to maintain an
even gender ratio among their bondsmen because they wanted to promote family
arrangements that would keep up the birth rate. A disproportionately male slave population, as was the case south
of the border, could not be expected to reproduce itself. The masters found an even sex ratio promoted
their interests, and also the black family's stability--but such happy
coincidences of slaveholder-slave self-interests in this realm proved to be few
and far between.
The
key difference between the quality of family life for the agricultural workers
and slaves revolves around how their differences in legal status enabled
slaveowners to subordinate the family unit of their slaves to the needs of
agricultural production in ways almost impossible to do with English
farmworkers, a theme returned to again below (pp. 167-176, 189-190). Slaveholders routinely manipulated or took
advantage of the relationships between the members of slave families to serve
their instrumental purposes in increasing output and profits. Master Jones could always threaten a defiant
(married) “Sambo” with, in so many words, "If you don't shape up, I'll
sell your wife [or you] South." In
the English case, while a farmer could fire and work to blacklist a rebellious
laborer, or (mostly post-1832) wave the sword of Damocles of the dreaded
workhouse over a recalcitrant farmworker’s head if put out of work, he simply
neither could threaten to dissolve the laborer's family as the ultimate
sanction for violating work discipline nor manipulate the family's
relationships to his own ulterior ends to anywhere near the same degree. Slaveholders could routinely whip their
slaves, and most did, but no farmer could dare expect to get away with whipping
adult farmworkers. The astute but
ruthless slaveowner or overseer could take advantage of the relationships
within the black family to maximize the effects of imposing submission by the
lash. One particularly cruel overseer
in Alabama "sometimes, to cramp down the mind of the husband, . . . would
compel him to assist in the punishment of his wife."262 Miscegenation also undermined the quality of
black family relationships. But here,
the master, his sons, or his overseer sought sexual gratification instead of
profit. The slaves’ quality of life
fell way beneath the agricultural workers’ as a result of how their different
legal statuses allowed slaveholders to subordinate totally human relationships
within the slave family, such as husband and wife, mother and daughter, brother
and sister, to weaken or to destroy them in order to serve work processes
performed for someone else's ends of monetary or even sexual gain. The slaveowners’ ultimate crime against the
black family was to treat it as a means to serve their own ends of increased
profit outside the confines of Scriptural law, instead of letting this
institution’s relationships serve its members’ ends of personal happiness and
character growth.
The Family Bonds of Slaves Made Conditional upon the
Stability of Slaveholders
In a
number of ways, slaves had their family bonds solely conditionally upon the
continued life and financial success of their (individual) owners. If a master (or perhaps mistress) went
bankrupt or died, slave family bonds were dissolved to serve the interests of
creditors or heirs. As Gundersen notes: "The value of slaves as property meant
that black family stability was tied to the life cycle of their
owners." The heirs split up the
children of Harriet Brent Jacobs' grandmother.
Her uncle Benjamin, "the youngest one, was sold, in order that each
heir might have an equal portion of dollars and cents."263 Frederick Douglass himself experienced the
terrible anxiety and excitement of a large estate’s division. All its slaves dreaded being turned over
into the hands of a particularly cruel son of the recently deceased master. Douglass fortunately avoided that particular
disaster. But the whole process of
division, seemingly totally capricious at times to its victims, illustrated how
the slaves' family and social lives meant little or nothing to the whites who,
having total control over the slaves' destinies, settled the estate:
Our fate for life was now to be decided. We had not more voice in that decision than
the brutes [farm animals] among whom we were ranked. A single word from the white men was enough--against all our
wishes, prayers, and entreaties--to sunder forever the dearest friends, dearest
kindred, and strongest ties known to human beings.264
When financial trouble struck white slaveholders,
slaves knew what was likely to follow, as "Uncle" Shade, once a slave
in Georgia, commented: "Dey knowed
all de white folkses troubles. Knowed
when white man got ter raise money it mean you gwine see de spec'lator's buggy
drivin' up, an' somebody gwine be sold!"
Because his kind master went bankrupt, John Little was sold away from
his family at public auction to a virtually inhuman one living ten miles away
in the same county of North Carolina.
His mother strived to get neighbors to buy him, but they refused,
believing the slave traders would pay more.
One man in Louisiana told Olmsted about men he knew as a child and had
gone to school with who eventually fell on hard times, which came generally
from their own fiscal irresponsibility and prodigal lifestyles. Another told him about one largely wiped out
by the weather: "Had two bad
crops. Finally the sheriff took about
half his niggers." Since the
master of Charles Ball died with heavy debts, some of his slaves were sold to
different masters, including Ball’s brothers and sisters: "Our new master took us away, and I
never saw my mother, nor any of my brothers and sisters afterwards." Under these conditions, the preservation of
relationships within slave families depended not only on the master’s kindness,
but also upon his continued life and financial success. Slave families were vulnerable to division
from any upsets that disturbed the whites owning them.265
Living
amidst a nation settling a wilderness, slave families were split up for another
reason: The whites frequently moved
while carving out new farms and plantations on the frontier or elsewhere in the
South. Since the wilderness seemed
limitless, the white settlers found it profitable to exhaust the soil's
fertility and then move on for another spot to exploit. As a result, the American white population
was much more mobile than the laborers who were scraping out a living near some
village in southern England–-a reality full of ominous implications for slave
family stability. Different
slaveholders often owned different members of the same slave families. The practice of one master owning the
husband, and another the wife and children, was especially common. Family divisions routinely took place
without the sound of an auctioneer's gavel simply by one planter moving his
slaves to some new, more fertile piece of land in another state or county. When visiting Texas, Olmsted noted that
after the land was sold separately from the slaves, "the whole body of
slaves move away, leaving frequently wives and children on neighbouring
plantations. Such a cause of separation
must be exceedingly common among the restless, almost nomadic, small
proprietors of the South." After
carefully examining 65 slave narratives, Davis finds the relocation of owners
was the second most common reason for slaves to move, accounting for some 46
relocations out of 350, following rentals at 103 moves. In five of the sixty-five cases, slaves
accompanied their masters when moving long distances westward. Constituting an extreme case, the master of
Henry Bruce moved nine times in less than ten years. Fogel and Engerman claim that 84 percent of all interregional
movement of slaves resulted from masters relocating. But after examining the statistical basis for this number, Gutman
and Sutch demolished it. After
committing a arithmetic error in division, Fogel and Engerman casually accepted
Calderhead's assumption that 50 percent of the slaves migrating in
Maryland were sold outside the state, leaving 50 percent to have moved with
their masters. As Gutman and Sutch
observe: "But even when the error
is corrected, the result is still a totally baseless number produced by a
faulty procedure." So even when no
sale took place, white slaveholder relocations still routinely destroyed slave
families by separating their members.266
The Routine Destruction of Family Relationships under
Slavery
During
sales, slaveholders often ignored the family "bonds" of the human
beings they owned. Such stories are
legion. Freedwoman Joanna Draper's
story shows that masters knew selling a slave woman away from her childern was
despised, but her owner still did it anyway:
"He sold her (my husband's mammy) off and lied and said she was a
young girl and didn't have no husband, 'cause the man what bought her said he
didn't want to buy no woman and take her away from a family." R.S. Sorrick, sold as a slave himself at the
age of one, told Drew that he knew of one-month-old babies being sold away from
their mothers! Dan Josiah Lockhart was
sold at age five, "and when I first saw my mother to know her, I had a
wife and child." "Uncle"
Shade, born in Georgia, saw his seven brothers and sisters sold off to various different
owners. Some of his brothers and
sisters were resold twice as one trader sold to another, a process that
scattered them over two or three states.
He told Armstrong: "Did we
ever find de chillun whut de spec'lators tuk?
Naw suh. You know how 'tis. When de fambly once scattered, it's hard to
get togedder ergain!" After one
slave trader purchased and planned to take far away all seven of one mother’s
children via the auction block, the woman cried in agony: "Gone!
All gone! Why don't God
kill me?" Sales affected others
besides mothers and their children.
Without warning, Charles Ball’s owner sold him away from his wife and
children. He was not even allowed to
see them again before leaving. His
parents' marriage had ended similarly, when a Georgia trader took his mother
away from Maryland, leaving his father behind.
One slave woman auctioned off in Richmond, Virginia had been forced to
separate from her husband two days earlier.
While she had seven children, only three were sold with her. Why can similar stories about slave sales
destroying family relationships can be recited seemingly endlessly? As Gutman and Sutch observe, as indicated by
New Orleans sales invoices which number in the thousands, most sales of
individuals reflect the destruction either of marriage or parental-child
bonds: "The predominance in the
New Orleans sales of single individuals, far from being evidence of the
security of the slave family, is evidence that slave sales typically broke up
slave families, since, as Bancroft knew, nearly every slave belonged to
a family."267
Conscious
of the family relationships of their bondsmen, at least some masters and mistresses
tried to preserve them by attaching conditions to sales or restricting who
could buy them. Under an ideal system
of slaveholder paternalism, family bonds should only be broken under
"necessity." Unfortunately,
as shown above, "necessity" proved to be of common occurrence because
of unpredictable events disrupting the lives of white slaveowners. For example, Mrs. Polk wanted to trade a
family of slaves on her estate in Mississippi to avoid having to move them away
from family and friends. This effort
failed, although it was still hoped an exchange would occur later.268 Despite being often ignored, an anti-selling
ethos did show up in slaveholder culture.
Planter Captain Wayne Bedford was told, when he was twelve years old by
his dying father, "to grow up, keep the plantation going, keep the slave
families intact and above all take care of his mother."269 One bill collector, after showing up at
planter Barrow’s door, "offered him a family of negros."270 Louisiana codified a bit of this
paternalistic ethos by prohibiting the selling of children of age 10 or lower
away from their mothers (fathers were irrelevant) unless they were orphans.271 According to Sweig, this law, passed in
1829, caused the number of single children ten years or less being sold to fall
from 13.5 percent before April 1, 1829 to just 3.7 percent afterwards, based on
incoming coastwise shipping manifests.
Apparently responding to public criticism (or their own consciences),
one major slave trading firm in New Orleans, Franklin and Armfield, chose to
deal mainly in slave families after 1834.272 But such moves were mere baby steps. If the slaveholders really had taken
seriously the slaves' family ties, they would have passed laws totally
prohibiting the involuntary separation (for any cause) of husbands and wives,
and of children from their parents when under the age of (say) eighteen. The general lack of such laws in the
American South (outside of this Louisiana statute and any like it) proves most
slaveholders valued flexibility in the labor market much more than the
preservation of their slaves’ family relationships, any paternalistic pro-slavery
propaganda to the contrary notwithstanding.
Fogel and Engerman's Mistakenly Low Figures on
Marriage Breakup
Notoriously, Fogel and Engerman
maintain relatively few slave marriages were broken up, based on a questionable
reading of the New Orleans slave sale records.
They said 84 percent of all sales of those over age 14 involved
unmarried individuals, that 6 percent were sold with their mates, and widows
and voluntary separations made up at least 25 percent of the rest (i.e., about
5 percent overall). Therefore, by a
six-to-one (84 percent to 16 percent) ratio, single women were sold more
commonly than married. Based on their
fallacious figure (critiqued above) that sales caused only 16 percent of all
interregional slave movement (even Calderhead’s guess was 50 percent), they
conclude: "It is probable that
about 2 percent of the marriages of slaves involved in the westward trek were
destroyed by the process of migration."273 Their calculations rest upon some very
questionable assumptions, which Sutch and Gutman examine at length. Most importantly, the New Orleans invoices
rarely say anything about marital status, excepting the cases where married
couples or families were disposed of as a unit. Using a sample limited to women aged twenty to twenty-four, Fogel
and Engerman assume that broken marriages only happened when married
women were sold with one or more children, but without a husband. Their assumptions overlook childless married
couples, those whose children had all died, and all cases in which traders
intentionally sold the (normally older) children apart from their parents. Slave traders in the frontier southwest had
strong motives for selling slave mothers and fathers separately from their
children because the newly opened plantations in that region only wanted hands
able to work productively right away.
Using probate records, Fogel and Engerman maintain only about half (53
percent) of slave women aged 20-24 (from which they extrapolate to the whole
population of slave women) had children.
This calculation’s plausibility melts before Kemble's observations about
the universality of 16-year-old mothers and 30-year-old grandmothers on her
husband's Georgian estates.274 Ironically, their own statements show
married slave women (i.e., the 16 percent figure) were frequently separated
from their mates by the auction block:
If 6 percent were sold with their husbands and 25 percent were widows
(an assumed figure--only 5.18 percent in the general population were), then
sales did separate nearly 70 percent (100% - 25% - 6% = 69%) of all married
couples sold in New Orleans. Here
quantitative history supplies an excellent example of the GIGO principle at
work: If certain false or questionable
hypotheses are initially assumed, number crunching afterwards will not
magically change them into "facts."
Above all, Fogel and Engerman implicitly equate a broken slave family
with a broken slave marriage, which blithely ignores how selling off children
away from their parents also breaks family ties.275 Far more reliable broad-based quantitative
data produce a much higher percentage of masters tearing up slave
marriages. Based upon ex-slaves
registering their marriages with the Freedman's Bureau, Blassingame derives a
figure of 32.4 percent (out of a sample of 2888) while Gutman obtains 22.7
percent (from a sample of 8700).276 Undeniably, a high percentage of slave families
suffered forcible separations because the slaveholders' labor market valued individuals’
work potentials as interchangeable units of labor far more than their family
relationships.
How the Slaves' Fears about Family Breakup Could Make
for Continual Anxiety
Like
the sword of Damocles, a constant dread of sudden disaster hanged over the
heads of slave family members. Without
warning, at a slaveowner’s whim or turn of fate, he or she could destroy their
family relationships through sale, moving, death, etc. This fear could transform itself into an
all-consuming anxiety when a given bondsman had a personal make-up so
inclined. Sarah Jackson had a good
master, who even offered her and her children freedom. She took it because of a quite literal worry
about the morrow: "I had served
all my days, and did not feel safe at night:
not knowing whom I might belong to in the morning. It is a great heaviness on a person's mind
to be a slave. . . . I
did not know how long before it would be my own fate. . . . I am better here [Canada] than I was at
home,--I feel light,--the dread is gone."
William Johnson explained why he fled bondage: "The fear of being sold South had more influence in inducing
me to leave than any other thing.
Master used to say, that if we didn't suit him, he would put us in his
pocket quick--meaning he would sell us."
Although Johnson was apparently a single man, having no marriage to lose
through sale, this general fear gnawed away even on him. George Johnson of Virginia shared a similar
anxiety, for the recalcitrant were more apt to be sold than whipped where he
lived: "The slaves were always
afraid of being sold South."
Harriet Tubman constantly worried herself: "Then [after she grew older] I was not happy or
contented: every time I saw a white man
I was afraid of being carried away. I
had two sisters carried away in a chain-gang,--one of them left two
children. We were always uneasy."277 Once safely on the free soil of Canada, all
these former slaves lost their nagging fears of being sold away from all they
knew in this world, and likely being dumped elsewhere merely as some
slaveholder's factor of production.
The Process of Being Bought and Sold as Itself
Dehumanizing
The
fear of being sold was one burden of slavery--quite another was the
dehumanizing process of sale itself. Here a buyer and seller likened your value
to barnyard animals’, and weighed it in the balances of the cash nexus. You changed hands as if you were a piece of
merchandise, with no end of your own choice but to serve the buyer's purposes
in life. The physical inspection
process, during which you as a slave had to strip your clothes off in order to
help the prying eyes of unknown strangers inspect your body's various orifices,
exemplified the intrinsic assault that sale constituted on your dignity. Katie Rowe of Arkansas once described how
her master sold his slaves:
He had a big stump where he made the niggers stand
while they was being sold, and the men and boys had to strip off to the waist
to show they muscle and iffen they had any scars or hurt places, but [ah!--the
privileges of Victorian womanhood!–EVS] the women and gals didn't have to strip
to the waist. The white men come up and
look in the slave's mouth just like he was a mule or a hoss.
During one slave auction in Richmond, Virginia, one
witness described a potential purchaser, tagged by him "Wide-awake,"
conducting a physical inspection of the "merchandise" after having
stared at “it”:
Moved by a sudden impulse, Wide-awake left his seat,
and rounding the back of my chair, began to grasp at the man's arms [who was
accompanied by a boy], as if to feel their muscular capacity. He then examined his hands and fingers; and,
last of all, told him to open his mouth and show his teeth, which he did in a
submissive manner.
This same witness later saw a black man told to strip
behind a screen, where a dozen "gentlemen" rigorously examined his
entire body, with "every tooth in his head . . . scrupulously
looked at." As dreadful as the
process of being sold was, the real pain came afterwards, from enduring
separation from your loved ones, which for Douglass meant the friends he wanted
to run away with before their scheme was exposed.278
How Slavery Undermined the Families of Slaves
The
fear and indignities of sale or other ways separation from friends and
relatives took place were but a subset of the damage slavery inflicted upon the
enslaved black family. Slavery
subverted the bondsmen's families by having the master organize his plantation
or farm's work force as a collective serving his ends, having functions of life
that normally would have been done by members of a family that he owned instead
being done by others or by himself. The
more activities others on the plantation performed for the family as part of
their regular, non-household work, the weaker it became as a functioning unit
because the plantation's organization for work supplanted roles that otherwise
would have been performed within it.
The master's work organization replaced whatever family economy the
slaves would have developed, excepting those in task system areas who raised
crops on patches of land in their free time off work. As noted above, old women and young children took care of the
young babies of the mothers (and fathers) working in the fields. Clearly, the ever-so-practical masters
denied to apply the Victorian idealization of the sex roles as expressed
through the separate spheres to their adult female slaves, who went out into
the fields with their men instead of caring for their children as homemakers
during the day. Some large plantations
replaced the cooking done by the slave families individually with communal
kitchens, raising greatly the regimentation level of meal times. On the rice-island estate Kemble's husband
owned, each one of the four settlements on the plantation had a "cook's
shop," where "the daily allowance of rice and corn grits of the
people is boiled and distributed to them by an old woman, whose special
business this is." While here the
bondsmen evidently still prepared food separately, perhaps by warming it up
again for lunch, the basic cooking processes were still done communally. The more that the master did or had done for
his bondsmen by them as part of their assigned job duties outside of their
families, and the more he subordinated their preferences for a stronger sexual
division of labor by driving both the women and men into the fields, the weaker
as a functioning unit the slave family became.279
How Slavery Weakened the Father's Role
The
father’s role clearly sustained the worst damage from the slave family's
subordination to the overall work organization, a point which was inflamed by
the controversy surrounding the Moynihan report in the 1960s. The causes for this are many, but a major
reason was certainly the light weight masters placed on the father-child bond
compared to the mother-child tie.
Rarely, if ever, was a father sold with his children without the
mother’s presence, but sales of mothers together with just their children were
relatively common. The masters,
undoubtedly influenced by their own patriarchal outlook on life, tended to see
the men first as workers, and fathers second, but judged women’s role as
mothers as equaling or exceeding their importance as workers. Slave mothers added to their owner’s wealth
as she gave birth, but a slaveholder often rated the father's role, especially
when another master owned him, as scarcely exceeding a stud’s or sperm
donor’s. Partly because the slaves
often chose to "marry abroad," that is, to choose a wife or husband
owned by another slaveholder, the father’s role was lessened. This practice was enormously common--by one
count, two-thirds of nuclear slave families had multiple owners, including cases
in which the master owning the children differed from the one owning one of the
parents. The husband, especially if he
lived a considerable distance away, or his master was rather stingy with
passes, often was a mere "weekend father" to his children. In this context, the length of the slaves'
workday and the exhausting burdens of heavy field labor looms large, which
surely would discourage long walks to a nearby plantation where the husband’s
wife was. "Uncle Abram," a
slave Northrup knew while enslaved in Louisiana, had a wife who lived seven
miles away. He had permission to visit
her once every two weeks on weekends.
As "he was growing old, as has been said, and truth to say, [he]
had latterly well nigh forgotten her."
Since the master had such great power over his slaves, including control
over their food supply, and the adults of both sexes worked in the fields or in
the master's home, the slave father consequently lost the role of provider to
his wife and children. Since she was
with the children all weeknights, the slave mother did most of the daily
housework that was crammed in between sleeping and days in the fields (or
owner’s house). By feeding, dressing,
and caring for her children much more, she maintained a much firmer family bond
with them than the off-plantation father did. Her "quantity time" swamped any supposed "quality
time" the father may have had with his children on weekends. Kemble's depressingly pessimistic analysis of
slave fatherhood had a solid basis:
"The father, having neither authority, power, responsibility, or
charge in his children, is of course, as among brutes, the least attached to
his offspring." Although
Blassingame and especially Genovese emphasize that the slave "man of the
house" sometimes helped his family through hunting, fishing, etc., the
white master nevertheless had fundamentally undermined the importance of the
slave father's position by subordinating his workers' family roles to their
roles in the plantation’s or farm’s work process.280
The
slaveowner’s total dominance weakened the slave father's role in other ways as
well. The biggest, potentially most damaging
threat to the man's role in the slave family came from his inability to stop
physical punishments or sexual advances by masters who did either. Indeed, a major motive for “marrying abroad”
was a husband’s desire to avoid seeing his wife be whipped or letting her see
him be whipped. As Moses Grandy
explained: "No colored man wishes
to live at home where his wife lives for he has to endure the continued misery
of seeing her flogged and abused, without daring to say a word in her
defense." Harriet Jacobs was happy
her lover, a free black carpenter, was not a slave, but even with his superior
legal status he still had "no power to protect me from my master. It would have made him miserable to witness
the insults I should have been subjected to." She encouraged him to move to the North, since she knew her
master would not let her marry him anyway.
True, sexually exploiting a slave woman could be hazardous to the health
of the exploiter. Sometimes they paid
with their lives since some bondsmen would kill them. Jacobs herself was happy when they had the boldness to "utter
such sentiments [of opposition] to their masters. O, that there were more of them!" On the other hand, as a result of the dehumanizing,
de-masculinizing effects of slavery, Jacobs lamented: "Some poor creatures have been so brutalized by the lash
that they will sneak out of the way to give their masters free access to their
wives and daughters."281 Despite the assaults on slave manhood and
fatherhood, the passionate battles many husbands and wives fought against
forced separations show that many had marriage and family relationships
approaching normality. An enslaved man
faced terrible impediments in fulfilling his position in nurturing his children
and living in understanding with his wife, a role hard enough to make men to
fulfill in contemporary free society.
That some did is a testimony to the power of the human spirit under
oppression, while those who failed suffered under burdens no American bears
today.
Where
the fathers failed, the mothers frequently picked up the slack. Slavery did
strengthen the mother's role in the slave family at the expense of the
father's, i.e., "matriarchy" did develop to some degree. The mother's unusually strong role had two
major sources. First, by imposing field
labor on both sexes, slaveholders basically eliminated the sexual division of
labor by creating a kind of forced equality.
Second, the practice of having a wife or husband "living
abroad" produced a sense of independence in the women because their men
simply were not often physically present for much of the day or week.282
The slave wife on her own would care
for her children, cook, work, etc. without her husband around except on
weekends (or perhaps weeknights) after he had used a pass to go visit her. The men themselves effectively took on the
mentality that their master's place was a barracks, while "home"
was where their wives lived. Because they were not the providers, and did
not own or control property which made their wives dependent on them and what
they earned, they intrinsically had less control over their wives compared to
free men, as White notes. Planter
Barrow strongly opposed letting slaves marry off plantation. Giving a number of reasons against the
practice, he in part enumerated:
"2d Wherever their wives
live, there they consider their homes, consequently they are indifferent to the
interest of the plantation to which they actually belong." And because "marrying abroad" was
so routine, the "weekend father/husband" role was ubiquitous in the
slave community. As noted above,
two-thirds of slave nuclear families by one quantitative study had members
owned by multiple masters; "marrying abroad" was surely a major
reason for the divided ownership. Since
such a slave family’s stability was surely conditional to what could happen to
two masters, not just one, this arrangement increased the likelihood of forced
separations if one master or the other should move, die, go bankrupt, etc. One reason Barrow attacked "marrying
abroad" was to avoid involuntary separations. Hence, the practice of "marrying abroad," of seeing the
grass as greener on the other side of the fence when choosing a mate, caused a
sense of rootlessness in the men, requiring by default the women to take on
additional responsibilities at home and work which made them more independent
of their husbands.283
Factors Which Encouraged Slaves to Treat Marriage
Bonds Casually
No
slave state recognized marriages between slaves. Legally the slaveholders’ regime no more concerned itself about
an enslaved man and woman living together than about two barnyard animals
copulating. Because these ceremonies
had no legitimacy, the master had the authority to perform slave weddings; he
often joined slave couples together. Some
weddings were relatively elaborate, such as those for some favored domestic servants,
and still more had a minister perform them.284 But since the normal slave wedding was
performed very casually, this very lack of gravity to the ceremony induced many
to take their vows correspondingly lightly.
In one case, after the master gave his permission, and he said to bring
the slave woman to the big house, the couple exchanged their vows thus:
'Nat, will you take Matilda fo' yo' wife?' 'Yes suh,' Pappy say. 'Matilda, you take Nat fo' yo'
husban'?' 'Yes, Massa,' she say. 'Den consider yo'self man an' wife!' he say. An' de names went in de book, whar us-all
lil' nigger went down later on.'
Another master routinely used a white preacher to
marry his slaves, but a neighboring white master, recalled freedwoman Millie
Evans of North Carolina, joined together his slaves himself. "He would say to the man: 'Do you want this woman?' and to the girl, 'Do you want this
boy?'" After having the couple
jump the broom, he'd say, "That's your wife" to the groom. Olmsted found some dispensed with any
ceremony at all, after their owner gave them permission. The former long-time overseer that Kemble's
husband had employed took the marriage bonds of the slaves very casually in
practice. If he heard anything about
disagreement between a slave husband and wife, he would make them switch
partners in order to curb the marital wrangles.285 These practices illustrate how the
surrounding white society actively destroyed slave marriages even when no sales
or relocations took place, since the couples were not forced or even allowed to
work out their problems to help ensure stability in the quarters. Since the masters knew slave marriages were
not legally binding, they often failed to take them seriously themselves, which
then encouraged their slaves also to take their vows casually, even when many
did not.
How Slavery Encouraged a Casual Approach to Family
Relationships
A
lack of commitment to family relationships often afflicted bondsmen, as amply
documented below. This tendency in part
came from the alienation the system of slavery produced among them, in which
many felt more or less rootless and untied to a particular place or set of
fellow humans.286 Alienation could serve as a defensive
mechanism for emotional and psychological protection against loss a priori. Alienation could also be produced among the
slaves after they personally experienced being uprooted and transported from
all they had known to some distant plantation where their ability to raise and
pick cotton was all that mattered.
Hence, a feeling of separation or withdrawal from a position, place, or
object of previous sentimental attachment could be either a preemptive measure
or the eventual consequence of being forcibly separated from family members and
friends. Unlike white families in the
larger society, the slave family received no benefit from any legal protections
and relatively little from positive societal pressures on its members to
preserve their relationships with one another.287 Overseer Ephraim Beanland, who was about to
move James Polk's slaves down to Mississippi to open a new plantation, tried to
buy the wife of a slave that a neighboring master owned, but without
success: "I went yesterday and
ofered Carter $475 for Seasers wife and she is not willinge to go with you
[Polk] so I tell Seaser that she dose not care any thinge for him and he sayes
that is a fact."288
The white master’s wish to move his slaves was hardly the only problem
here, for he authorized his overseer to offer some cold hard cash to preserve
the slave marriage in question. For
whatever reason, Caesar's wife used Polk's move as a convenient way to divorce
her husband. A casual approach to
sexual relationships did appear in the quarters. One slaveholder told Olmsted that the slaves would spend a few
weeks "trying each other" before choosing settling down with a
particular mate.289
One frustrated master found his slaves avoided quarrels and stole
little, but he could not "break up immorality . . . Habits of amalgamation, I cannot stop."
The wife of a white pastor for a black congregation in Montgomery, Alabama,
incredulously discovered that many took their marriages very lightly. They wanted divorces for apparently trivial
cases of disagreement or incompatibility.
One man sought to get rid of his wife for wanting to spend all he made
on clothes, while one woman visited the pastor's home to make this
request: "I came to ask, please
ma'am, if I might have another husband."290 The two whites here condemned the sexual
promiscuity and casual relationships these actions manifested. But because the white community
fundamentally had taken the blacks’ family relationships rather offhandedly
itself, it had little reason to expect anything better. It denied their slaves’ relationships legal
recognition by authorizing the willy-nilly separations that masters for any
whimsical reason at their command could impose on slave couples. It’s wrong to expect all the black community
to respect their marriage relationships as sacred when their white owners
clearly denied they were by their own actions.
Even
the parental-offspring relationship was often treated casually. Although the passion expressed by many slave
mothers as their children were separated by the auction block from them for the
rest of their lives is truly notorious, others dealt with their offspring quite
impersonally. The father-child bond was
much weaker than the mother-child tie, for reasons like those given above. Kemble found one baby of a slave family had
just been "mercifully removed [from] the life of degradation and
misery" to which its birth had doomed it.
The father, mother, and nurse who also was its grandmother, all seemed
apathetic and indifferent to its death, either from, Kemble inferred, the
frequent repetition of similar losses, or an
instinctive consciousness that death was indeed better than life for such
children as theirs . . . The
mother merely repeated over and over again, 'I've lost a many; they all goes
so;' and the father, without word or comment, went out to his enforced labor.
The root of the high infant mortality rates may have
been a semi-intentional carelessness, over and beyond the bad treatment and material
conditions, such as minimal maternity leaves, that many slave mothers
endured. Barrow negatively cited Luce
for "Neglect of child. Its foot
burnt." This case was hardly
unique. Edie, on Kemble's husband's
estate, lost all seven of her children.
On Polk's plantation, Evy’s babies never lived long after their
births. Why did Barrow's slave Maria
neglect to tell him earlier about her baby's sick condition before it died? Why did "Candis" say her child was
just a little sick when, after checking, "Old Judy" found it lay
dying, "'pulseless.'" And Matilda chose not to tell the overseer she
was pregnant until a few minutes before her baby’s birth. The child died the next day, evidently because
the midwife could not arrive to help soon enough. Although a skeptic of a sometimes weak mother-child tie could
always attribute all these deaths to simple bad luck, disease, bad treatment,
and poverty, a theme of almost willful neglect still seems to lurk in their
background. Consider Bassett’s
speculations about Evy's string of infant deaths:
But we may judge that a controlling cause was her
inefficiency in taking care of them.
Perhaps she did not feel much interest in their health. They were not hers, but her Master's. Why should she be interested in taking care
of master's negroes? Here was mother
love at a low ebb. . . . Fortunately
not all slave women were indifferent on this point.291
Although this analysis cannot be decisively proven
without direct access to the slave women's own thoughts, sometimes it should
still be seen as a serious possibility.
The sense of alienation many slave mothers likely felt from life itself
may have made them careless about continuing it in others when existence was a
continuous, burdensome round of drudgery organized to serve mainly someone
else's ends in life.
Children
also sometimes felt a weak emotional tie to their parents, as freedwoman Linley
Hadley's story demonstrates: "My
papa went on off when freedom come.
They was so happy they had no sense.
Mama never seen him no more. I
didn't either. Mama didn't care so much
about him. He was her mate give to her.
I didn't worry 'bout him nor nobody then." True, since her owner arranged (or helped to arrange) her
parents’ marriage, the husband-wife relationship was correspondingly weak, so
they used the arrival of freedom as a convenient moment to get divorced. Nevertheless, the daughter felt no emotional
loss about her father’s permanent departure.
Frederick Douglass felt no particular ties to the plantation he had
lived on before going to Baltimore. He
knew no father, who was a white man, his mother was dead, and he rarely saw his
grandmother. Although he lived with two
sisters and one brother, "the early separation of us from our mother had
well nigh blotted the fact of our relationship from our memories." He felt no homesickness when moving
away:
The ties that ordinarily bind children to their homes
were all suspended in my case. I found
no severe trial in my departure. My
home was charmless; it was not home to me; on parting from it, I could not feel
that I was leaving any thing I could have enjoyed by staying.292
Douglass's case exemplifies the sense of alienation,
detachment, and rootlessness that slavery inflicted on many bondsmen. Consider the inevitable reactions of slaves,
after having developed close relationships with their spouses or children, who
were then suddenly sold away from all they knew as home and family. They frequently had to finish out their
lives on a distant plantation among (initially) strangers under the lash of
some brutal overseer or owner who saw slaves as workers above all, not as
fathers, husbands, or sons, mothers, wives, or daughters. Certainly the slaves felt little sense of
loyalty to the larger white community, i.e., America as a whole, because of the
bad treatment and conditions they endured, not to mention how some education
was necessary for the creation of nationalism to begin with. A detached, uncommitted outlook on life,
developed as a protective psychological mechanism, perhaps affected a majority
of slaves, certainly likely a significant minority, which has ominous
implications for the looseness of their family bonds.
Other Ways Slavery Destroyed Family Relationships
Slavery
damaged the slaves’ family relationships in other ways, even among those
seriously committed their families.
Slaves planning to run away faced the cruel dilemma of choosing between
freedom and family. As noted below, the
slaves’ desire to preserve family relationships was a major deterrent against
running away. One woman in Virginia,
caught between conflicting orders her master and her foreman gave about getting
ice for the former while she was sick, "took to the woods" and was
not seen again. She left behind a young
nursing infant who soon died, despite another woman took care of it. Escaping
after being very badly treated, Christopher Nichols, a Virginian slave, knew
liberty had a high price for him: "I
left a wife and three children, and three grandchildren,--I never expect to see
them again in this world--never."
One slave woman in Alabama had six children by six different men,
spectacularly illustrating how slavery could undermine family stability. Three of her husbands were sold, another died,
and "two others failed to making any lasting attachments." Hence, one of those children,
"Aunt" Olivia, had no memories of her father, and commented: "On count o' de husban's changin' so
freqump, we all raise up widout any reg'lar Pappy."293 Perhaps for one of these reasons--sale or
divorce--was why Jenny Proctor of Alabama remembered nothing about her
father. Joanna Draper of Mississippi
had been rented out to some place about a hundred miles distant from her
original master's place after being sold.
Around the age of twelve, she was freed, leaving her on her own from
then on. Here the indifference, the
rootlessness, the alienation, are all obvious in her statement about why she
did not go back to her parents: "I
don't know why I never did try to git back up around Hazlehurst and hunt up my
pappy and mammy, but I reckon I was just ignorant and didn't know how to go
about it. Anyways, I never did see them
no more." William Harrison, once a
Virginian slave, had been sold away from his parents when he was about eight
years old. After serving in the Union
Army, he did go to look for his parents, but couldn't find them. He had heard that his mother had been sold
from Selma, Alabama, to Birmingham.
While searching for her, he stayed one night with a family in Birmingham. Years later, he found out from his brother
who he had met while in the army that he had accidently stayed with his
mother! Although possibly the product
of an overactive imagination, the ultimate Oedipal nightmare of how slavery
scrambled family relationships concerned a man who married his own mother by
accident after full emancipation came.294 This grab bag of cases illustrates how
slavery could mangle slave family relationships, through a melange of sales,
leasing, distant, failed childhood memories, and a lack of commitment to family
obligations. In other cases, a thirst
for freedom robbed them of their family relationships when they chose the former
above the latter. Slavery in the Southern
states and the general westward movement towards the frontier combined together
to form a vast engine for confusing, destroying, and weakening many slaves'
family lives.
How the Master Could Routinely Interfere in Slave
Family Relationships
The
master or mistress’s steady intervention in slave family life helped produce
instability in its relationships besides the damage inflicted when they
dissolved the family itself by sale, moving, etc. Slaveowners might choose to punish a husband and/or wife for
fighting, arguing, or committing adultery.
The master, instead of the parents, might punish a slave child for some
petty infraction. Since the master
loomed above the slaves as a paterfamilias, a father of fathers, some (likely
among the domestic servants, not field hands) might have turned to a kind
master, and asked him to solve family problems which, had they been free, they
would have worked out on their own.
Striking at the slave family’s deepest foundations, miscegenation was
another way a master could interfere with it.
The master (and/or his sons)--rarely was it ever a mistress--would
sexually exploit the women under his (or their) authority, and have children by
them. The master (or overseer) here
thrust himself between the slave woman and her man in order to satisfy his own
sexual appetites.295
Forced to stand aside, the black husband usually had to tolerate this
intruder into his marriage bed, although some bravely retaliated in a
self-sacrificial defiance, surely knowing the dangers involved.296 If the woman was unmarried, her offspring
were necessarily illegitimate, and normally lacked a father figure and role
model to give them direction in life, assuming they were not sold outright to
appease the mistress’s jealousy.
Harriet Jacobs's daughter, whose father was a prominent white man, later
becoming a congressman in Washington, D.C., lived with him as a domestic
servant and slave. He showed no love
towards her despite being affectionate to his white daughter by his wife.297 Work discipline issues here spill into the
slaves’ personal lives, because the master would regulate and control the
off-work lives of his slaves far more than a typical employer would regulate
the lives of his employees, excepting live-in helpers such as domestic and farm
servants. Since the master claimed the
bondsmen themselves as his property, controlling them when they were not
working was also part and parcel of his responsibilities over his
"troublesome property." Since
the slaves normally lived upon the master's land in "company
housing," this further increased his power over them, with the important
variation that the employees were "company owned" as well! Thus masters and mistresses also weakened
slave family ties by their constant daily interference when doing things for
the slaves that free blacks would have done on their own or through the
(mostly) former’s sexual misconduct and its inevitably unpleasant consequences.
Master-Arranged Marriages
Forced
arranged marriages were another way a master or mistress could interfere in
their slaves' family lives. The
slaveholders normally let romantic love between the men and women they owned
take care of their desires for their "negro property" to multiply, be
fruitful, and replenish the American wilderness. Nevertheless, slaveowners had the power to impose, not just to
destroy, marriages. Charley Nicholls's
master in Arkansas said he was going to choose a good woman for him. When he suggested he might help him in the
selection process, his owner laughed and said:
"Charles, nobody yo' age got any sense, white or cullud!" After the master presented him with "de
house-gal," Anna, the choice impressed him. The grin on her face then showed the feeling was mutual. They went on to have no less than
twenty-four children together. (One has
to wonder whether the master knew his domestic servant had her eye on Nicholls
already!) But master-arranged marriages
were unlikely sources of soul mates.
Consider now the surely far more common and less happy outcomes of such
matches as illustrated by Rose Williams’s case. Her master told her to live with Rufus, a big bully of a man,
when she was about sixteen years old and still in virginal ignorance. During the first night, she threw him out of
bed and banged him over the head with a poker.
She had another run-in with him the next night, when she threatened him
with the poker again: "Git 'way
from me, nigger, 'fore I bust your brains out and stomp on them." Afterwards, her master offered her two
choices: Either accept a whipping at
the stake or live with Rufus in order to have children for him. Out of the fear of the whip and appreciation
from his buying her with her parents the year before, she yielded. William Grose, formerly a slave in Virginia,
was sold away from his wife, a free woman.
His new master sent for a woman, who after coming in, was
unceremoniously assigned to him:
"That is your wife . . . Cynthia is your wife, and [to
his brother sold with him] Ellen is John's." When doing such things, masters treated their human chattels like
animal stock, implicitly acting as if the slaves treated the most physically
intimate relationship possible between two people as a purely animal
function. Which specific individual was
assigned to another mattered little; producing children who increased their
owner's net worth mattered much. In
Rose Williams' case, her master pointed out he had paid big money for her, so
he wanted her to have children. Her
mistress said since both Williams and Rufus were "portly," the master
wanted them to "bring forth portly children.” What about quality of character and compatibility in personality
when men and women choose mates? Well,
those characteristics take a back seat to the slaves’ duties to serve as
profitable breeding stock for their owners.
As it has been observed, unlike the case for traditional societies where
arranged marriages remain the norm to this day, those imposed on the slaves
were done not in the interests of the families (or the parents of the children)
being joined together, but to benefit some third party, the slaveholder. Master-arranged marriages inevitably raised
the levels of alienation within the slave family unit and increased the
"voluntary” separation rate among bondsmen since the unifying bond was
forced, as Linley Hadley's comments above illustrate. Although the slaves did not have to endure imposed marriages
often, they certainly were yet another factor that contributed to slave family
instability that the slaveowners inflicted.298
Just How Common Was Miscegenation?
How common
was miscegenation? It constituted a
major, blatant, and direct subversion of the bondsmen’s marriages by their
masters. Fogel and Engerman argue that
the miscegenation rate was around 1-2 percent per generation. Surprisingly enough, unlike most of their
innovative claims, this assertion can survive the scrutiny of their
critics. Gutman and Sutch's rebuttal,
which proposes a transmission rate in the 4-8 percent range per generation,
builds upon an earlier, higher estimate of the percentage of white genes in the
African-American population of .31 by Glass and Li. A later, improved estimate by Roberts brought it down to about
.20 by substituting data from West African populations (i.e., from Africans of
the same ethnic stock as most American blacks) for those Glass and Li took
mostly from elsewhere in Africa. The
newer estimate assumes ten generations passed, with a gene flow rate of .02 to
.025 per generation. Glass later
maintained the upper and lower bounds were .0241 and .0336 for the gene flow
per generation, down from his and Li's earlier estimate of .0358. In light of Glass's and Roberts's revised
figures, and Reed's three fairly similar estimates for total white genes in the
black population (which are .273+0.037, .220+.009, and .200+.044),
Gutman and Sutch's higher transmission estimates are unsustainable. Additionally, Fogel and Engerman are
conservative when they assume 30-year generations, since shorter generational
lengths (c. 25 years) are plausible when using Gutman's own averages of slave
mothers' ages at their first birth, their husbands’ ages, and average slave
life expectancies.299
If more generations passed during the same period of time, each
generation needs a lower percentage of white male fathers to reach recent total
figures for a given percentage of white genes existing in the black gene
pool. On the other hand, Fogel and
Engerman apparently look back too far (to 1620) for an appropriate date for
white gene transmission to begin.
Gutman and Sutch suggest 1710 or 1720, while Glass and Li prefer 1675 or
1700. These two variables largely
cancel each other out (length of generation and starting point) for the
pre-1900 period. Sutch and Gutman
assert that Reed as well as Glass and Li excluded mulattos, but the
latter’s methodology contradicts their
claim.300 As Glass and Li
note: "Since the hybrid
individuals between Whites and Negroes are in the United States regarded
socially as Negroes, any interbreeding between the two populations will result
chiefly in a 'one-way' gene flow from the White to the Negro
population." Glass later made
similar statements, making a point of repeatedly downgrading the reliability of
studies that excluded light-skinned blacks.
Precisely for the same reason, Reed even excludes two studies from New
York City based upon only dark-skinned blacks.
He kept the Evans and Bullock county results from the South, which
reveal a low level of white gene transmission (.106 total; transmission rate
estimated to be .02 by Fogel and Engerman).
In contrast, the figures for Northern cities are significantly higher,
such as Detroit (.26 total, with a rate of .052). Strongly bolstering Fogel and Engerman’s low transmission rate
estimates is the extreme case of the Gullah sea island blacks of Georgia. They basically had only contact with white
masters, overseers, and their families before the Civil War, and relatively
little contact with whites since, so their level of white genes will serve as
an excellent indication of how much fundamentally involuntary miscegenation
occurred. Their total of white genes is
a mere 3.66 percent; the corresponding transmission rate per generation is
.006.301 Fogel and Engerman
clearly can defend the upper bound (i.e., the 2 percent figure) of their
1-2 percent transmission rate by generation, contrary to what their critics
have charged.
Despite the Pressures, Slaves Still Maintained Some
Form of Family Life
Despite
all the damage slaveholders inflicted on slave families, surely the average
bondsman was passionate about at least some of his or her relationships, even
when a disturbingly high number took one or more of the basic bonds of the
nuclear family (parent-child or husband-wife) lightly. Furthermore, the slaves had strong motives
for concealing what they really believed from all whites, especially their
owners and overseers; the bondsmen could keep whites in the dark about the real
strength of these ties. For example,
according to overseer John Garner, the "Boy charls," who had arrived
last spring, "run away some fore weeks agow witheout any cause
whatever." But was this literally
true? Even the overseer knew better: "I think he has goun back to tennessee
where his wife is." That was a
long trip from where Polk's Mississippi plantation lay. After visiting his brother's plantation in
Mississippi, William Polk found one slave mother strongly worried about her
sick daughter’s health: "Her mother
(LucY) says from her complaints of her breast, she fears she [the daughter] is
going in the manner in which Alston, Hamp and Charity did, though it may be
only the fears of a mother occasioned by solicitude for her welfare." And the child could return deep love to his
or her parent. As a boy, Warren
McKinney was a slave in South Carolina, where he fought back against the
whipping of his mother by his master:
"When I was little, Mr. Strauter whipped my ma. It hurt me bad as it did her. I hated him. She was crying. I chunked
him with rocks. He run after me, but he
didn't catch me." Although
constituting only three minor pinpricks of evidence, these incidents still
testify how passionately the bondsmen could uphold their family
relationships. But even in McKinney's
case, the rootlessness and the alienation that slavery caused still may have
reached into his family: "When the
war come on, my papa went to build forts.
He quit Ma and took another woman."302 Although free people do make similar
decisions, the slave family still underwent stresses and strains that free
families did not. Unsurprisingly, a
number cracked under the pressures, and became indifferent to one or more
important nuclear family relationships.
Much more remarkably, many did not despite the damage wrought by
"living abroad," miscegenation, sales and relocations inducing
separations, non-legally recognized marriages, the performance of functions for
the slave family by others that it would have done for itself if free, and the
subordination of the slave family to the process of imposing work
discipline. Consider by contrast how
casually and indifferently many today in America take their family
relationships, parental and conjugal, while having advantages unimaginable to
the bondsmen; when considering the centrifugal pressures they encountered,
the oppressed and mostly illiterate slaves held some form of family life
together remarkably well.303
The Key Issues Involved in Examining the Quality of
Farmworker Family Life
The
state of the family life of the English farmworkers now needs some close
examination. Here the flood tide of
controversy greatly ebbs. The overall
level of stability of the farmworkers' family life institutionally produces
little grist for the mills of contemporary English politics. As Snell notes in passing, "family
break-up [is] a subject of great interest because of the rising modern divorce
rate, but one on which there has been little historical discussion in
Britain."304
By contrast, the slave family's instability, when debated by American
historians, carries not just the freight of our mutual obsession with race, but
the burden of controversies in the larger society over welfare reform,
"family values," inner-city crime, etc. The stability of the laborer's family correspondingly receives
much less attention below, in part because it did not suffer the peculiar
distortions that resulted from the basically unlimited authority of
slaveholders over their slaves, who really had no "private life" shielded
from their owners’ eyes. The
fundamental norms of then-contemporary lower class and peasant family life in
western Europe, such as the prevalence of the nuclear family household and the
rarity of divorce, apply to the English case.
But
one key theoretical consideration needs exploration first which has important
implications for the quality of family life for both English farmworkers and
African-American slaves: Were family
relationships in the lower and working classes in the past much more motivated
by practical material self-interest than at present? Marriages in peasant villages were typically mostly based upon
the practical self-interest of the older adults of the families being joined
together, such as the inheritance of land and dowries. Does the reality that romantic love weighed
little in the balances of peasant marriage contracts mean the husband and wife
involved mainly saw themselves as traders merely trying to get the most out of
the other? Did the privations of
pre-industrial life, with its concept of limited resources that needed careful
conservation and rationing as expressed by limiting how many could marry and
when they could do sonumbers and timing of those marrying, increase the
selfishness of people’s relationships?
Did they see the dependents of the family, such as young children and
old people incapable of fieldwork, as at best unpleasant burdens to bear, and
at worst parties to be permanently disposed of as quickly as possible? Or, despite the privations of life, did
married people in the lower classes living close to the subsistence level have
fundamentally affectionate, caring relationships with one another? Did the increasing sexual division of labor
produced by men working away from home more as industrialization advanced,
which increasingly confined women to domestic duties after the spread of
Victorian ideals about the separate spheres, raise the level of alienation
within families instead of lowering it?
On the quality of the pre-industrial masses' family life, Eugen Weber
and John Gillis, who paint a pessimistic picture, face off against K.D.M.
Snell, who upholds an optimistic view.305
The "Weber/Gillis" Thesis Summarized: Was Brutish Family Life the Norm?
Weber
deals exclusively with the case of the French peasantry, while Gillis's work
has a broader focus, and deals mostly with western European nations' conditions
as part of a political and social history of late eighteenth century and
nineteenth century Europe. Weber and
Gillis depend on sources left by middle class observers seeing the cruelty or
callousness that frequently accompanied peasant (or other, lower class) family
life. No direct access to the minds of
the peasants themselves is now possible, except perhaps through proverbs or the
filter of official documents. The
latter are always problematical because the poor often had a strong
self-interest to shade or conceal the truth from their superiors in rural
society. Since lower-class people lived
so close to subsistence levels, the productive adults developed habits and
mores in family life intended to reduce the number of dependents, young or
old. The constant struggle to survive
drained affection out of marriage and parental relationships. It was no formula for marital bliss when
forming marriages in peasant village societies that the financial benefits (such
as the inheritance of land) that the families involved would gain greatly
exceeded in importance the man and woman’s levels of romantic attraction and
personal compatibility.
Because
of the crude transportation available, villages, having only limited local
resources to offer their inhabitants, had to aim for self-sufficiency. As a result, men and women could not marry
until their mid to late twenties in order to cut down on the number of children
born that would need support. In turn,
which is due to a high infant mortality rate and low life expectancies of forty
years or less, a family needed to have so many children born to produce the
desired one male heir. To get even a 60
percent chance of achieving this goal, four births were necessary. Because of the struggle to feed them,
families with more than a few children farmed them out to relatives, patrons,
and masters through apprenticeship and domestic service from young ages, eight
and up. Adults saw children mainly as
mouths to feed when young. Clearly
earmarking the expendability of children, adults who perceived newly arrived
children mostly as burdens had the motive for resorting to infanticide. As Gillis summarized: "Mothers regarded their hungry infants
as little beasts, insatiably aggressive and destructive. 'All children are naturally greedy and
gluttonous,' one seventeenth-century doctor concluded." When the children grew older, they would see
the old, meaning their parents in particular, as obstacles to self-fulfillment
because they could not marry themselves until their parents died or resigned
active management of the land (or other property, such as artisanal tools and
animal stock). Delayed marriage and
involuntary lifelong celibacy were common as a result, unlike in most non-Western
European societies. As parents aged,
the tables could be turned on them; their children then may have desired quick
and early deaths for them. For example,
middle class observers heard peasants calculatingly discussing their
parents: "He is not good for
anything anymore; he is costing us money; when will he be finished?" More generally, peasant sayings such as the
following circulated: "We inherit
from the old man, but our old man is a sheer loss!" and "Oh! it's
nothing, it's an old man."306 The elderly might be driven from one house
to another among resentful children, becoming subject to conditions leading to
a slow--or quick--parricide or matricide.
Grimness and estrangement born out of material self-interest may have
characterized the family life of the western European lower classes, a product
ultimately of the constrictive ratio of cultivatable land to human food, which
encouraged especially the productive in peasant society to resent their
dependents.
Since
above English agricultural workers and American slaves are compared, the
presumably poor family life of French peasants could be deemed irrelevant. After all, Snell is dealing with the
English case, while Weber is not. To
buttress his optimistic picture of the laborers and artisans’ family life,
Snell cites letters English emigrants sent to America, Canada, or Australia
that expressed strong family sentiments.
Letter after letter, he observes, contain language like this
extract’s:
Dear wife and my dear children this comes with my kind
love to you hoping to find you all well as its leaves me at present thanks be
to God for it dear wife . . . dear wife give my kind love to my
mother and my brothers and sisters and i hope they will send me word how thay
all be . . . from your loving husband antill death.
The rural workers' autobiographies which mention the
positive quality of their marriages, such as those by Somerville or Arch, also
support Snell’s viewpoint.307 How can the data from Weber, Gillis, and
Snell be reconciled, besides trying to duck the implications of Weber's data by
saying it concerns Frenchmen and not Englishmen?
The Limits to Snell's Rebuttal Against Seeing Lower
Class Family Life as Harsh
Snell's
mistake resembles Fogel and Engerman's when they implicitly equate slave marriages
being broken up by sale with slave family breakup. The main tension that Weber and Gillis observe
emerges between the productive adults owning some type of property, rented or
owned, and their dependents, whether they are children or aged parents. The resentment characterizing family
relations stems from the productive being forced to support the nonproductive
because of their family relationships.
Additional bitterness results from adult children who are unable to
marry until they have come into the possession of their parents' property when
the latter die or retire. In reply,
parents complain that their adult children are disobedient and ungrateful. (To Weber, the generation gap is nothing
new!) Furthermore, the French peasantry
and English farmworkers dealt with marriage differently. English laborers rarely (if ever) had
arranged marriages because they normally had no property (or position based on
it) worthy of notice by parents or heirs.
But French peasants often did have property interests requiring
protection, so parents serving family interests often carefully chose mates, or
otherwise limited the number of possible choices, for their children in order
to avoid such problems as divided inheritances. For this reason, their
marriages would be less happy than the English laborers’, if all other
things were equal, because a love match is more likely to avoid marital
discord, at least when the couple kept physical attraction from blinding them
from considering personal compatibility and character. Huppert puts well the potential cost of
arranged marriages to the wife's happiness:
The secret torments experienced by girls pushed into
marriage against their inclination rarely stand recorded in official documents,
even though their plight was clearly one of the most common dilemmas of the
times and subject of innumerable popular plays, stories, and songs.
Knowing disinheritance was the sword of Damocles
hanging over their heads, reluctant bridegrooms faced a less severe version of
the same problem. So when Snell
maintains working class marriages were (generally) good, this is not
identical to all family relationships, because Gillis and Weber focus on
the tensions of the parent-child bond.
Since Snell also leans upon letters written from countries where
resources seemed limitless, where a great and mostly empty wilderness ached to
be filled (e.g., America, Canada, Australia), Gillis's theme of the limited
good constricting and burdening everyone in a biologically-determined circle of
life is inoperative. Men in these
countries with so much land, work, and high wages available compared to England
worry little by comparison about earning the minimal amount to support wives or
children. The wives themselves could
find lots of paid work or useful labor in raising food available as well,
lessening or eliminating the need for their husbands to support them. Since wizened parents are poor candidates
for emigration to distant foreign countries' frontier regions, the need to
financially support them is rendered a non-issue, beyond possible remittances
via the mail. A scarcity of resources
provokes the family clashes that Gillis, Weber, and (implicitly) Huppert
discuss, but this problem is an unlikely concern for a man writing home from
some sparsely populated frontier region to his wife, children, or parents. Finally, as Snell himself admits, such
letters may reflect the adage that absence makes the heart grow fonder.308 So although the disharmony levels of peasant
marriages on the Continent arguably surpassed that of the farmworkers, Snell’s
evidence does not refute Gillis and Weber's grim interpretation of family
relationships between the productive and dependents, old or young.
When
dealing with elderly agricultural laborers and the poor law, Snell himself
notes that their family relationships could be badly strained when parish
authorities forced adult children to support their elderly parents, as noted
above: "The pressure on relatives
to pay (and this extended beyond children, even, informally, to neighbours)
placed a heavy strain on the family, and must frequently have raised
ill-feeling between spouses and animosity against the elderly."309 The agricultural workers frequently felt
this burden was an unfair imposition because over the generations they had come
to assume that the (Old) Poor Law would make others care for their aged
parents. By contrast, the French
peasantry was totally unaffected by any poor law. They had long been accustomed to making private arrangements
dealing with their aged parents--which obviously failed to reduce much the
level of resentment it generated. One
witness, rather shocked, described the peasants' attitude toward their
parents: "[The family members are]
harsh on the dying as they are hard on themselves. [They] are not embarrassed to say in his hearing that he is dying
and will kick the bucket anytime. His
wife and his children mutter bitter words about wasted time. He is a burden and he feels it."310 The French historian Bonnemere described the
attitudes from others that an old man in 1850s rural France endured:
[He] carries the wretchedness of his last days with
him from cottage to cottage, unwelcome, ill received, a stranger in his
children's house. At last he dies
. . . but it well for him to make haste, for greed is there, and
greed nerves the arm of hidden parricide.311
Snell ironically records family relationships strained
for similar reasons when the English parish authorities intervened:
It was reported that:
'Many sons contribute to support of aged parents only when forced by
law'; that children might move away from the area 'to evade claim'; that
'Quarrels frequently arise between children as regards giving the help'; or
that the 'aged prefer a pittance from the parish (regarded as their due) to
compulsory maintenance by children; compulsion makes such aid very bitter'.312
The attitude reflected in the last clause was due to
how the Poor Law, Old or New, made somebody else pay for the aged's
upkeep. The ratepayers were forced to
support the nonproductive, unlike in countries without a poor law, such as
France, Ireland, or Scotland. Because
the New Poor Law tightened the screws on relief’s availability, adult children
were increasingly forced to support their aged parents, thus making the quality
of family life of the English laborers suffer from the same problems the French
peasantry had long faced, who supported their elderly directly without any
third parties in-between.
How Not Being Independent and Self-Sufficient Could
Improve Family Life
Conspicuously,
the slave family in the American South avoided internal family conflicts about
supporting their elderly. Because the
slave family was not financially self-sufficient, but was subordinated to the
slaveholders’ interests in production, these conflicts were eliminated. Bondsmen did not undergo the pressures of
the family poverty life cycle, which were concomitant with the burdens of
freedom and independence. All the
slaves, children and elderly included, ate from a common pot, so to speak,
since none (typically) had to support themselves directly. Since the master and mistress stood between
the productive adults on one side and the children and retired old slaves on
the other as the protectors and supporters of all their human chattels'
interests and needs, the slaves’ resentments mostly focused on their owners and
overseers, not against the unproductive in their midst. After all, by its very nature, slavery
discouraged self-motivated hard work by every slave since the amount of
work done usually had little effect on how much anyone owned or earned, thus
placing a premium on everyone being as lazy as the lash allowed. Upholding themselves as the supporters of
the slaves' children and elderly, the slaveholders, because they owned the
land, labor, animals, and crops, became the intermediaries between the
productive and nonproductive slaves.
The slaves perceived any shortages of food, shelter, and clothing as the
stingy master or overseer’s fault; correspondingly, they saw none among their
own families as a financial drain.
Since the slave family lacked the burdens of freedom, its members did
not have to depend on each another as much, because the plantation's work
process organized and did for its slaves so much of what free families had to
do on their own. Overall slave family
instability remained much higher than free families’ despite this reduction in
inter-generational disharmony, which was a curious byproduct of the master’s
making all his slaves economically dependent on him, because the peculiar
institution still produced powerful centrifugal forces that forcibly broke up
slave families for the reasons described above. The privations that result from the outer world's hostility and
indifference can drive families to stay together; the ease that comes from
other institutions performing functions for the family that it could do
independently, such as child care and cooking, can encourage families to drift
apart.
The
Weber-Gillis thesis has its own implications for the slave family, despite its
origins in analyzing general European conditions: If lower-class family life in Europe was "nasty, brutish,
and short," could have it been the same among the slaves? A number of differences obviously arise
here, including cultural traditions derived from Africa (e.g., an emphasis on
the extended family), and how the system of slavery itself directly attacked
the slave family in the name of the profits that slaveholders derived from
labor mobility and flexibility when dividing its members up. The conflicts between the enslaved and
masters trumped any among slave family members themselves whenever any
financial or material motivations arose, since masters controlled how much any
of their slaves received, outside of theft and some outside earnings for
off-hours work. Dubois's extremely
pessimistic portrayal of slave family life varies sharply from Gillis and
Weber's descriptions of lower class European family life, despite all believe a
low quality of family relations prevailed.
Depicting the depths to which the slave family could plummet, Dubois
here exaggerated the plight of average field hands on plantations without
resident masters: "The homes of
the field hands were filthy hovels where they slept. There was no family life, no meals, no marriages, no decency, only
an endless round of toil and a wild debauch at Christmas time." Since the master or mistress could
countermand any of the slave father’s desires, he lacked authority in the home,
making him easily sink "to a position of male guest in the house, without respect
or responsibility." The slave
mother was also absent, but for different reasons: She was a full-time field hand or domestic servant who lacked
time to care for her children well.
When she was sexually used by the master, his sons, or the overseer, her
husband still could not protect her.
She could be suddenly and arbitrarily separated by his or her master
from him. Given these dismal realities,
Dubois summed up the slave family’s condition:
"Such a family was not an organism at best; and, in its worst
aspect, it was a fortuitous agglomeration of atoms."0
Despite
some similarities, different causes produced clearly different effects between
what Dubois describes and what Gillis’s, Weber’s, or Huppert’s depict for the
family units they portray. In the case
of the African-American slaves, the master's power to divide slave families in
order to promote his self-interest and to subordinate them to profit-producing
work processes produces sharply different stresses from what laborers or
peasants endured. In contrast, in
having to struggle to maintain some degree of financial solvency and
independence above the margin of subsistence, peasants often resented the
burdens imposed by nonproductive family members such as the elderly or young
children. The kinds of alienation the
two groups were apt to suffer from varied as well. The slaves were prone to sense a rootlessness characterized by
the feeling that they belonged to no place or set of people, besides to their
masters and mistresses. But the French
peasants' sense of anomie likely had opposite causes: Many felt constricted in and too tied down by major,
life-changing decisions, such as marriage, in their local villages. They had to deal with and support family
members that they had little desire to help.
Although because masters and mistresses largely determined their slaves’
occupation and place of residence, slaves suffered from this kind of alienation
as well, but within their families, different factors operated. Most slaves had far more freedom to choose a
mate than French peasants did, with their arranged marriages or highly limited
choices within their native villages.
Hence, although Gillis and Weber's thesis plausibly points to lower
class Europeans having a low quality of family life, their theory cannot be
easily transferred to American slaves because they faced very different
societal pressures.
The Limits to Applying the Gillis-Weber Thesis to the
English Case
So
then, what are the implications of the Gillis-Weber thesis for the quality of
the English laborers' family life? It
only partially fits because the laborers had more freedom to choose who they
married, often like the slaves. Their
families routinely lacked the financial interests that, among French peasants,
encouraged arranged marriages or narrowed dramatically the pool of potential
spouses. As wage earners or dependents
on parish relief during the Speenhamland era of family allowances, they had no
need to wait until their parents died to marry. To the extent proletarianization spread because of domestic
industry’s development or subsistence farming’s decline, this process had the
advantage of freeing adult children to marry before their parents died or
retired so the family farm or business could be turned over to them. Furthermore, enclosure and the poor law both
tended to lower the laborers' average marriage age because they largely removed
the laborers’ need to build up a nest egg of savings while working as (unmarried)
farm servants before becoming (married) day laborers.314 The pressures of families having to survive
independently, excepting any charity or parish relief, still promoted among
them uncompassionate responses towards dependent elderly parents or young
children. In a lament made to
Somerville, note the torn feelings one Wiltshire man felt over the death of his
son:
We had another boy, but he died two weeks aback; as
fine a boy as you could wish to see he wur, and as much thought on by his
mother and I; but we ben't sorry he be gone.
I hopes he be happy in heaven.
He ate a smart deal; and many a time, like all on us, went with a hungry
belly. Ah! we may love our children never so much, but they be better gone;
one hungry belly makes a difference where there ben't enough to eat.315
Although feeling sadness over his son’s death, this
father also felt relieved by the removal of the burden of buying food for his
son when his family scraped so close at the margins of subsistence. The father earned only eight shillings a
week to support what before was a family of five. Slaves would have no such mixed feelings over a child's death,
because they had no need to support directly that child in a financially
separate, self-supporting family.
Instead, all their children were communally cared for under the
(nominal) slaveholder’s aegis as part of the plantation's (or farm's) functions. Slaves felt no financial burden from
having a large family because they were all automatically fed part of the
plantation's standard rations and their offspring received crude day care while
the adults worked in the fields. Few
slaves worried about the pressures that the family poverty life cycle describes
because they did not support their offspring directly. But the factors Weber and Gillis spotlight
that lowered the quality of family life for French peasants (and others) did
affect the English farmworkers, but to a lesser extent, because although they
did attempt to independently support themselves, their marriage relationships
likely were better, being more based on love matches or personal compatibility,
because their families lacked serious property interests.
Some Evidence Bearing on the Quality of Farmworkers'
Family Life
It is
easy to show that this or that laborer's family apparently had strong
ties. Their resistance against being
split up when placed in a workhouse, either by sex when all were placed in one,
or when just part of a family might go in, could summon all the passions of the
human spirit, much like the archetypal slave auction scene. Having been ordered to enter the workhouse
with his wife, one aged laborer compared it to sundering what God had placed
together "that we may live apart and meet death in our old age each
alone," in order merely to deter others from applying for relief. In one terribly tearful scene, one Wiltshire
laborer told his family they were just about out of food, so to get any bread
one of his children (all of them being under age ten) would have to go into the
workhouse. Two begged not to be
sent. Their mother said any of them
would have their hearts broken if they went.
The oldest girl said, "Oh, don't send me, I be willing to eat less
bread not to go, and Billy says he be the same; father, we will not cry for
bread when we be hungry no more, so be's us ben't sent to the union." Seeing their determination to stay together
at such a high cost, the father could only hug and kiss them.316 The strength of the laborers’ family
relationships can also be demonstrated less dramatically. Arch's wife desired plaintively that he stay
and work around their home more, instead of tramping about to earn much better
wages far away. In this or that aged
couple, as Hudson noted, when the wife or husband dies, the other soon follows
her or him to the graveyard. Laborers'
wives were said to dislike cottages with a second story because they could not
watch their children or an old relative as well, which implies not all elderly
relatives were ill-cared for.317 The laborers’ family life hardly can be
characterized as being only grim and devoid of affection.
Nevertheless,
the laborers' family life also had a dark side. The sexually-segregated male culture of the pub and beerhouse, including
the drinking bouts, wasted wages, and idleness that so irked middle class
critics, was hardly conducive to making happy households. True, it is easy to exaggerate how common
these problems were. The role of the
aristocracy, gentry, and farmers in creating the laborers’ economically
hopeless position in their post-enclosure, high under- and unemployment rural
world could also be mistakenly overlooked.
But still the ultimately self-chosen ill-effects of the tavern on
marital and filial relations are undeniable.
Then in some cases, husbands abandoned their wives and children to be
supported by the parish. Snell found
289 cases of family desertion out of 4,961 settlement examinations, which
occurred when the local parish authorities considered ordering a removal or
when they investigated a relief applicant's parish of settlement. Five percent of the examinations made under
the Old Poor Law (in the 1700-1834 period) revealed cases of desertion. They almost always featured the husband as
the one guilty of abandoning his family, often while serving as a soldier or
member of the militia. The number of
abandonments rose to 10.5 percent of those examined under the New Poor Law
(1835-1880). This increase is likely
the product of a change in the applicant pool:
Instead of showing more family break-ups occurred overall, the new law
deterred all but the most desperate from applying for relief. Middle-aged women with two or three children
to support and no husband to assist them were more apt to be at their last
extremity, and were less likely to let the post-1834 regime deter them from
applying for relief, than intact families that included a husband temporarily
out of work. While illegitimacy was
something of a problem (Tess Durbeyfield had her real-life counterparts), it
was neither common nor as problematic since (unlike contemporary inner-city
America) normally the father and mother did marry after their child’s
birth. Indeed, the working and lower
classes deemed the ability of a woman to become pregnant before marriage
to be a positive sign, as proof of her fertility. (Of course, the men seldom blamed themselves when such proof was
lacking!) One woman expressed her
mate's attitude thus: "My husband
acted on the old saying about here, 'No child, no wife', and I had one afore I
was married." Cohabitation before
marriage was not rare. Although the
practice produced some instability in laborers' families, because the men might
abandon the women they impregnated, others in their village pressured such men
to do the honorable thing in a dishonorable situation. The English agricultural workers’ behavior
here was typical for western Europe.318 The New Poor Law's bastardy enactment
attempted to discourage this custom, which seemed to have some effect at least
in Petworth Union: The number of
illegitimate births fell from nineteen to ten from 1834 to 1836.319 The masculine beerhouse culture, the modest
number of desertions, and the hazards of bearing children before marriage
clearly betray that the English laborer's family did have problems. But only possibly excepting the first listed
did these problems differ much from what elsewhere prevailed in much of
Europe. The stability of laborers’
families definitely far exceeded that of American slaves. Nevertheless, this evidence helps support
the Gillis-Weber thesis concerning how low the levels of affection could plunge
for workers’ family life, even though the English laborers' case here appears
to be better overall than the French peasantry's.
Why the Slave Family Was Fundamentally Worse Off than
the Laborer Family
Despite
the English farmworker's family had its share of instability and its own
version of resentments between the productive and nonproductive, its
relationships were still in much better repair than the slave family's. The slaveholders created the difference, by
prioritizing their needs for a flexible labor supply while pursuing profit over
the quality of their slaves' family relationships. Englishmen and Englishwomen simply never had to endure family
breakup as a direct sanction by their employers or as an immediate result of
the death or bankruptcy of some farmer for which they worked. They did face, of course, the same
challenges to staying committed to their family relationships that free people
everywhere had. True, the parish
authorities (i.e., the local government) interfered some through apprenticing
children in cases of "parental irresponsibility."320
The local “powers-that-be” also could split up the families of the unemployed
who applied for “indoor” relief under the New Poor Law before they entered the
workhouse. But these acts of
intervention hardly approached what slaveholders could do privately without the
approval of others. Masters and
mistresses routinely, if not always, treated slave family relationships
cavalierly. The lack of legal
recognition of slave marriages then encouraged the bondsmen to treat their
family ties lightly as well. Laborers
never had to suffer the pain of involuntary permanent separation of a son or
daughter, brother or sister, mother or father, aunt or uncle, etc., from them
because of an employing farmer or landlord’s arbitrary whims. Certain whole problems that could rent apart
a enslaved black family in the American South the laborers never had to
experience, such as sexual assaults by their employers and landlords for which
they had no legal recourse against, which was miscegenation’s core
problem. Arranged marriages (i.e.,
those masters forced on their subordinates), although uncommon among the
slaves, were non-existent among laborers.
The laborers never had to deal with the major issues that generally
weakened slave family life, such as "living abroad" being a routine
way of life causing literal distance within many slave families, the father's
role as provider being made largely superfluous because the slaveholders
provided automatic rations for their slaves, the mother's role being undermined
by fundamentally involuntary work in the fields requiring the use of crude
master-provided day care, and the youngest children being raised largely in the
daytime by somewhat older children and not their parents under the guidance of
one or more old women on the plantations.321 Now the family economy among the laborers
was gravely weakened towards the end of the eighteenth century and the
beginning of the nineteenth as enclosure generally wiped out their direct
access to the means of production. But
among the slaves this institution hardly existed outside the task system areas,
since husbands and wives rarely worked with each other to support directly
their family independently. So despite
the problems in English laborers’ family life, which increased during the rise
of enclosure and the decline of service (which had promoted the accumulation of
savings), which both encouraged the irresponsible, beerhouse culture among the
men in areas without allotments, the slaves’ fared far worse because the
slaveholders could, in order to serve their own material interests, directly
intervene and break up the slave family into scattered individuals.
Why the Laborers Had a Higher Overall Quality of Life
Than the Slaves
Although
arguably African-American slaves had a material standard of living equal or
greater than English laborers’ in various areas, the former’s quality of life
was much lower. Now Olmsted would have
denied this conclusion. Having traveled
and made inquiries into the conditions of the lower and working classes in
Britain, Germany, France, and Belgium, as well as America, Olmsted has a
viewpoint that cannot be casually dismissed (my emphasis): "And as respects higher things than the
necessities of life--in their [the European lower classes'] intellectual, moral,
and social condition, with some exceptions on large farms and large estates
in England, bad as is that of the mass of European labourers, the man is a
brute or a devil who, with my information, would prefer that of the American
slave."322
But when judging by the quality of life criteria used above, even
considering the low place Hodge sank to in many parts of Southern England, even
when on these large farms and estates, he still was undeniably better off than
the slaves in many ways, as Harriet Jacobs believed. In particular, their family relationships were not constantly
disrupted and destroyed by their superiors' pursuit of profit. They had freedoms and rights under the law
which no slave had, such as the ability to testify in court against their
social superiors. Since they had
superior access to gaining the ability to read, write, and do basic arithmetic,
the farmworkers’ low intellectual level still surpassed the slaves’. Excepting in a few liberal states such as
Kentucky, nobody could legally teach a slave how to read. By contrast, especially as the nineteenth
century passed, the English government made major efforts to try to educate all
the laborers, even though the standards were often low and slack. And earlier on, a number of independent and
church-affiliated schools operated in the countryside, thus giving the laborers
a much higher rate of literacy even in the late eighteenth century than rural
slaves had. Although the English elite
sometimes eyed very suspiciously the idea of educating the masses, they never
took harsh, punitive legal measures against promoting literacy among their
subordinate class, unlike the Southern slaveholders.
The Problems of Comparing the Slaves' and Laborers'
Quality of Religious
Experience
Comparisons
between the laborers and slaves about the quality of their religious experience
are difficult because of some of the extraneous factors involved. Undeniably, the laborers had more freedom to
practice the faith of their choice. At
least, they did not endure the punitive measures some slaveholders turned
against their slaves, such as completely barring them from leaving their
plantation (or farm) to attend some religious service, or whippings for daring
to practice this or that ceremony of the Christian religion. Of course, some laborers paid a price for
choosing Nonconformity, such being denied charity by the local parson or
blacklisting by local farmers affiliated with the Established Church. But even then, if the laborer was truly
determined to worship God in a manner dictated by his conscience, he still had
the (costly) option of moving from his home parish--a freedom the slaves
lacked. The growth of Methodism and
other Nonconformist sects in England in the eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries demonstrated that the pressures the Established Church could exert
through the local gentry, farmers, and clergy were too weak to always prevent
members of the lower and working class from defecting from its fold even in
rural areas. But clearly religion
played a proportionately greater role in the slaves’ lives than in the
laborers’ since the latter had more organized social outlets into civil society
than the former, such as the pub, benefit clubs, friendly societies, even
perhaps a union. Many laborers were
indifferent to religious concerns, but religious apathy rarely characterized
the slaves generally, even though the Christianity they practiced was rather
questionable.323
The social side of the slaves’ religious practices probably often
totally swamped the self-denying and doctrinal side of their nominal
convictions. How much did such
activities as shouting for the Lord, ring dances, and even much
call-and-response singing really attempt to honor and worship God? How much were they simply an emotional
release while participating in an interesting social activity? One antebellum white minister said slaves
lacked a sense of repentance from sin or faith in Christ. While claiming to have all sorts of visions
or dreams from the Lord, they were very superstitious and ignorant of
Christianity’s most basic tenets.324 Not helping matters any, their owners
systematically harnessed Christianity for their own work discipline and social
control objectives by over-emphasizing the Bible's call of obedience to secular
authorities while routinely and conveniently overlooking their Christian
obligations to the slaves. Although
Hodge likely was little better informed doctrinally than many bondsmen, even
the Established Church’s Christianity was less badly bent to serve the
governing class's goals than what the slaves received. Nonconformity sometimes also provided a
useful corrective on this point to the Established Church's biases. The laborers also had more freedom to
participate actively in the organizational side of their faith (such as in the
collection of money and the arranging of meetings) when part of a Nonconformist
group, a freedom the slaves largely lacked even when they had their own black
preachers and could meet separately from whites. And when one of their own stood in the pulpit, often white
observer(s) watched, forcing him to self-censor his preaching in a way which
Nonconformist ministers or even the Church's clergy (from their rich
benefactors) avoided. Those slaves who
were free to practice some kind of religion may have gotten more socially from
it and have a sense of participation in it than average laborers, who often
either were indifferent and stayed home or attended services of the Church and
mostly just listened. But, especially
when they could read the Bible, the laborers in a Nonconformist sect likely had
a much more informed and freely practiced faith than most slaves had. The laborers in these groups developed more
organizational skills, which had practical effects when putting together
friendly societies and unions to resist systemically the powerful in their
society. Hence, because of Hodge’s
greater religious freedom, he had may have gotten more out of his religious
convictions at least when part of a Nonconformist group than the stereotypical
(and seeming) “Sambo,” who endured proportionately more ruling class
distortions in the religion he received and more censorship and restrictions on
his own religious activities, but who likely got more emotionally and socially
from meetings (when composed mostly of his own group) than the laborers
attending the Established Church.
How Elderly Slaves Could Have Been Better Off Than
Elderly Farmworkers
Turning
to the subject of the quality of life for the elderly, the slaves as a group might have been better
off than the laborers, granted certain limitations and qualifications. To the extent elderly laborers landed in the
workhouse under the New Poor Law (post-1834), separating them from friends and
family in their sunset years through confinement, and to the degree to which
elderly slaves lived out their last years among their own relatives and friends
from earlier years, then arguably the slaves were better off. After all, both groups suffered similar
limitations on their freedom, since the inmates of workhouses were confined to
their premises, and elderly slaves on their plantations or farms had to stay
when lacking passes, like their younger counterparts. However, the Old Poor Law’s treatment of elderly laborers, and
even sometimes under the New (such as in Petworth Union as shown above),
through their being granted small pensions as outdoor relief, would have had
more favorable conditions than slaves of the same age. The elderly slaves also faced a likely
greater risk of abandonment or neglect by their masters and mistresses,
notwithstanding any paternalistic propaganda to the contrary, than the English
laborers did under the Old Poor Law at least.
By giving slaveowners virtually unlimited authority to deal with their
“troublesome property” as they felt fit, especially in practice in sparsely
populated, semi-frontier areas where the law was weak and the mob was strong,
the alleged guarantees of security slavery promised for retired slaves
were unenforceable. To the extent the
elderly slaves had been separated earlier in life from children, siblings,
spouses, and/or friends meant that retired slaves may be still be surrounded by
strangers or mere acquaintances even when their own master had not sold
off (or moved) the aged themselves earlier in life. So granted the foregoing exclusions and
exceptions, the aged farmworker was normally treated better than the elderly
slave, except during a certain period (c. 1835 to 1865) when arguably the
average older slave’s conditions surpassed the average workhouse-confined
elderly laborer’s.
How the Slaves' More Carefree Childhood Was Not
Necessarily a Better One
As
for the treatment of children, the differences between the slaves and the
agricultural workers might be small, depending on what values someone chooses
when visualizing the proper goals of childhood and the correct organization of
family life. Before the 1850s or so,
because of the frequently high unemployment rates even for adult male laborers
that helped drive women out of the farm labor force in southern England, the
offspring of laborers may have stayed home except during such peak seasons as
planting and/or harvest. But at least
towards the middle of the nineteenth century (from the 1850s especially), the
laborers’s children likely went to work earlier than slaves’s offspring. This generalization would hold at least in
southern England where low wages prevailed and/or where the gang system
operated in combination with the cultivation of root crops that children (and
women) could easily weed and dig up.
Hodge may have gone to work at age eight in such areas, while the young
slave might not be in the fields until age twelve on average. On the other hand, the laborers’ offspring
had a much greater access to education, and benefited much more from direct
adult supervision, especially by their parents, compared to the slaves’s
children. The quality of daycare young
slave children gave to the toddlers and babies assigned to them for much of the
day under the supervision of one or more old women on plantations rarely could
equal what guidance came from the passion and effort that a mother (or father)
could muster for their own flesh and blood.
Laborers' offspring also often gained a few years of basic elementary
education, at least as the nineteenth century progressed and the government
became more serious about trying to educate all English children. Even on the subject of work itself, certain
young slaves may not have benefited from getting (say) four more years of
playtime than laborers' children. The
likely low labor intensity of the tasks farmers assigned children, such as
birdscaring for some weeks part of the year, hardly equaled (say) a young
cotton piecer’s grueling, full-time, year-around schedule of seventy hours a
week while running around so many spindles in a textile mill. Kemble's criticism of young slaves lounging
and rolling about the ground while their mothers worked in the fields should
not be automatically dismissed as mere reactionary middle class
commentary. (Of course, as a mother
herself, she would naturally identify with the burdens the slave mothers’ bore
unaided by their children). Since these
young slaves may not legally get an education when not in the fields, they have
to spend their childhoods largely unproductively. At least when young Hodge was put to work, such as during harvest
together with his family, he helped to support himself, and maybe even others
in his family with an income that his parents sorely needed. When considering a child's obligation to
support himself or others in his family when his parents cannot carry the full
load alone (such as during the low point of the family poverty cycle), it
becomes harder still to condemn such relatively casual child labor. So although young slaves may have had a more
carefree childhood ages eight to twelve than young farmworkers (assuming the
high unemployment rates of much of the period under study in the South did not
keep them out of the workforce until they were older), the latter were more
likely than the former to benefit from an education, have more parental
supervision, and help himself or his family more through performing productive
wage work.
The
heaviest and most obvious weight against the slaves’ quality of life came from
their family relationships being conditional on their owners’ whims and
emotional states, and remaining provisional upon the soundness of their owners’
health and financial conditions.
Furthermore, plantation slaves especially had functions normally done by
families individually instead collectively done by others as part of the work
organization, such as weekday daytime child care and (sometimes) food
preparation. The casual way slaveowners
treated the bondsmen's family relationships, legally and in practice, by
example also encouraged the slaves themselves to treat their own family ties
lightly. Their attempts to evade some
of the most humiliating aspects of the slaveholders' system of work discipline
through "living abroad" had its own costs by increasing the
possibilities of involuntary separation through having multiple owners and by
removing the father from his children's lives for much of the day or week. By contrast, the English laborer's family
would have approximated standard free European norms since its
intra-relationships were not made a secondary priority to the individual
members' role as factors of production.
True, to some degree a farmer could manipulate the family ties of his
laborers for his own purposes. He could
require the children of a family to work for him, by threatening he would fire
their father otherwise. But he simply
could not threaten to dissolve the laborer's family as punishment for failing
to follow his wishes. He could try to
blacklist the laborer, and attempt to inflict the dilemma of migration or
possible starvation on a laborer (if his fellow farmers locally held up a
common front), which was the ultimate penalty he could bring to bear. While an employer could threaten
recalcitrant laborers with the workhouse (which could split up families), this
punishment was only available to the extent the laborers felt compelled to
apply for aid under the New Poor Law.
As free men, they could still migrate (i.e., “run away”). And the divisions inflicted by the workhouse
were much rarer, involved much shorter distances, and were much more temporary
than what the slaves typically endured.
Although the Weber-Gillis thesis, even when mitigated to fit English
conditions, indicates the laborers' family life was not exactly idyllic, still
the slaves’ conditions were much worse because their family relationships were
expendable when they interfered with their owners’ pursuit of profit.
A
comparison of the quality of life for the slaves and farmworkers reveals that
the slaves undeniably endured much worse conditions than the farmworkers,
unlike the much smaller differences in their standards of living. The slaveholders’ casual and calloused
treatment of slave family bonds, as shown by splitting up husbands and wives,
mothers, fathers, and children, through wills, gifts, sales, and migration, by
itself proves this clearly. Even when
the evidence is more controverted, such as how slaves aged eight to twelve
generally worked less than their English counterparts (at least in the
post-1850 period as the labor market tightened) and elderly slaves possibly
were treated better in retirement than old workhouse-confined laborers, requires
a number of added conditions and qualifications for the slaves’ quality of life
to be deemed more desirable than the laborers’. In a number of ways young Hodge was arguably better off, by
benefiting from more parental and adult supervision during weekdays, gaining
some barebones education, and having even to work itself. He may have needed, for example, to help
support himself and/or others in his family, and farm work for children was
nowhere as intense and burdensome as what many in the mills suffered. As for comparative religious experience, the
laborers had more freedom to practice their beliefs without coercion; those in
Nonconformist sects furthermore benefited from participating in a faith
that built their organizational and mental skills. But the slaves often poured much more emotional energy into
church activities because they had fewer social outlets than the many
agricultural workers who indifferently stayed at home or passively attended the
Established Church's services. The
slaves allowed to go to meetings which let them freely express their customs
and rituals without being restrained by a major white presence may have gotten
more out of services at least socially than laborers in the last two
categories. So although some individual
points could be disputed, the slaves still were definitely worse off than the
agricultural laborers in their quality of life.
The Hazards of Historical Analysis that Uses the
Values of Those in the Past
The
quality of life analysis made above clearly takes certain assumptions for
granted. What values should a historian
use when judging someone's quality of
life? Snell maintains that it is more
sensible to evaluate by the poor's own standards rather than using the
historians’, especially those who emphasize real wage increases and nutritional
intake, who implicitly believe man is merely homo economicus. Elsewhere he observes the hazards of
applying the historian's own values in contradiction or ignorance of the lower
class’s values in the past: "For
example, the implications for the quality of life of family break-up (if it
became more prevalent) should depend on an assessment of the attitudes and
control the poor themselves had over this--rather than a historian's view on
the sanctity or dispensability of married life."325 Although valuable, this approach has its
limits. Consider the freed slaves after
emancipation who chose to emulate the whites' sexual division of labor and so
largely ended heavy field work by adult black females. Presumably historians employing contemporary
feminist constructs could not necessarily evaluate positively what the freedmen
and freedwomen did after freedom came.
Snell’s approach would forestall any historians from critically
analyzing some past lower class' values.326 Obviously, here again the old morass over
the objectivity and absoluteness of any moral code or set of values confronts
historians, with Snell's views ultimately tending towards a kind of cultural
relativism vis-a-vis the values of some past lower class rather than
those of some obscure tribe anthropologists have discovered in the jungles of
New Guinea or the Amazon. Obviously, it
is rather futile and beyond the scope of this work to settle completely such a
broad philosophical question here.
Plainly however, nobody should automatically accept as moral whatever
any group of people do by tradition presently or in the past, otherwise (say)
legalized segregation, slavery, infanticide, suttee, foot binding, or female
genital mutilation could no longer be condemned. To the extent historians may believe in some given moral absolute
or imperative values (such as, say, a prohibition of genocide or the equality
of the sexes to various degrees), they ought to use their own
(objectively-based) values when examining the conditions or quality of life of
some past lower class group as well.
Above, most of the values implicitly used to judge and compare the quality
of life of the slaves and laborers are assumed to be fundamentally universal
such that most contemporary Westerners would agree (ideally) with what the
laborers and slaves themselves did value.
Those values include stability in family relationships, freedom of
association with others without coercive separations by third parties mainly
motivated by profit, a sense of altruism towards the elderly and young, freedom
of conscience and practice in religious activities, and the avoidance of what
encourages a sense of rootlessness, alienation, and anomie among people. Other values implicitly used above are more
controversial, such as those involved in evaluating how beneficial or harmful
was the (often) casual, intermittent labor of children ages eight to twelve as
opposed to giving them mere idle free time with nothing else such as education
to fill it to them and their families.
Regardless of what values historians use to make quality of life and
standard of living comparisons, or whether they believe values are absolute or
relative to some culture or group, their identity should be made explicit, as
Snell does in his work. They should not
implicitly be smuggled in, as those inclined to a purely material view of mankind's
needs (e.g., caloric intake and real wage changes) often do. For man does not live by bread alone.
Undeniably,
the comparisons made above inevitably fall into some kind of reductionism
because so many variations from what could be called "average"
happened in the past real worlds of the slaves and laborers. Changes also continually occurred, which
increase the difficulties of generally describing conditions in any long time
period. For example, the material
standard of living as well as the quality of life for the slaves generally
improved in the period being surveyed (1750-1865) as housing for more settled
areas improved and harsher punishments such as branding died away. By contrast, it steadily grew worse for
southern English agricultural workers because of enclosure, the decline of
service, rising under- and unemployment, and the New Poor Law's harshness from
1750 until about 1850. After the
mid-century point, the laborers' conditions began to improve as a result of the
spread of allotments and the tightening of local labor markets that made the
(brief) successes of Arch's union possible in the early 1870s. Although drawing such lines is inevitably
hazardous, quite possibly the rising average standard of living for slaves
approached and surpassed that of the (southern) farmworkers during the period
of the French Wars due to the fiscal burdens of those wars and the step-up in
enclosures towards their end. Changes
and variations in this general picture must be kept in mind, such as the
regional differences that gave the northern English farmworkers a higher
quality of life and (especially) standard of living than their southern
counterparts, and granted the slaves of the Border States better treatment than
those of the Deep South. Although
generalizations and evaluations about what was typical and atypical are the
heart and soul of social history, historians should always be wary of
committing overkills in grinding out reductionist conclusions concerning
"the average whatever" in the past while forgetting the rich
diversity of historical phenomena.
Occasional bows toward at least recognizing regional variations, as done
above, helps to avoid this pitfall.
Hence, while we need a focus on what is "average" and
"typical" to avoid getting lost in a maze of disparate concretes and
isolated details, we also must seek some balance to avoid reductionism that so
eagerly pursues “the average” that all else is sacrificed in that hunt.
4. THE SEXUAL
DIVISION OF LABOR: A COMPARATIVE
ANALYSIS
The Sexual Division of Labor: African-American Slaves
It
must always be remembered that white masters and mistresses determined the
sexual division of labor among American slaves, not the latter themselves. Driven into the fields along with their men,
black women during their (generally) dawn-to-dusk workdays had their children
cared for by a primitive day care system.
Slaveholders imposed this system in order to increase the labor
participation rate of their human capital in tasks that directly increased
agricultural production and profits.
Inevitably, their choice decreased the slaves’ level of household labor
that provided real, if economically unmeasurable and rather intangible,
comforts. After all, how could an
economist doing Keynesian national income accounting (or anyone else) properly
quantify the positive social effects of better cooked and prepared meals,
better mended clothing, or (especially) the clear benefits of having mothers
spend more time with their own young children?
Since these matters did not directly improve the bottom-line figures of
slaveholders' account books, they chose to reduce how much housework slave
women did. Because generally fieldwork
was deemed unacceptable for white women, including even indentured servants, to
do regularly, but to drive black slave women into the fields was par for the
course, this practice may have had a racist motivation also.327 The colony of Virginia recognized slave
women's direct role in agricultural production by counting them when figuring
the tithe, but it excluded the white women.
As Gundersen concludes: “Black
women were considered a basic part of the agricultural labor force in a way
that white women were not."328 So slaveowners forcibly imposed a weakened
form of the sexual division of labor upon their bondsmen, which had the curious
consequence of creating a crude approximation of sexual equality, especially
among the field hands.
Kemble on a Stricter Sexual Division of Labor's
Advantages
Throughout
the South, slaveowners expected black women to work in the fields. When noting that men and women had to
perform the same size of task assignments before the current overseer arrived
to manage her husband's estates, Kemble sarcastically commented: "This was a noble admission of female
equality, was it not?" She
approved of his reduction in the amount of work allotted to the women as
compared to the men, but she still disliked mothers with five or ten children
having to do as much work as women with none.
Kemble felt having to do both housework as well as regular field labor
was an aching burden. Although blaming
the "filthy, wretched" condition of the children and "negligent,
ignorant, wretched" mothers upon slavery in general, she maintained a
sharper sexual division of labor would be necessary to change their plight:
It is hopeless to attempt to reform their habits or
improve their condition while the women are condemned to field labor; nor is it
possible to overestimate the bad moral effect of the system as regards the
women entailing this enforced separation from their children, and neglect of
all the cares and duties of mother, nurse, and even housewife, which are all
merged in the mere physical toil of a human hoeing machine.
Then she explains the case of Ned, the
engineer/mechanic who tended to the engines in the rice-island plantation's
steam mill for shelling rice. His
wife’s health had largely been ruined by a combination of heavy field work and
child bearing. As a result, she now
spent most of her time in the estate's miserable "hospital." What this woman endured Kemble compared to
the lifestyle and standard of living that a Northern artisan’s wife had. Such a free man would earn enough so his wife
would only have to do housework. If his
wife became an invalid, he likely would be able to hire or get some outside
help for her.329
Kemble clearly believed both freedom and a sharper division of labor
between the sexes would have benefited the slave women.
Kemble's
attitudes on a woman's role in the world of work require some closer
examination. Although she was an
actress by profession and certainly not personally strict practitioner of the
Victorian ideology of the separate spheres herself, then-contemporary middle
class sensibilities on the subject still strongly influenced her. She also had at this writing two very young
children of her own; the burden of caring for them would have encouraged her to
want her husband’s financial support.
She surely projected her own personal situation onto the slave mothers
who had far more children than she had, yet also had to work long days for very
little return outside the home. She
found the thoughts of having to do the same herself simply appalling. After all, the jobs most of these slave
women had hardly promoted what today might be called
"self-actualization," even if they had been paid wages for them. Most people would find becoming a
"human hoeing machine" to be intrinsically unappealing. She, as a middle class woman, could benefit
from the positive side of the separate spheres, at least while being burdened
with young children and not practicing her profession. Dill notes that middle class women who
placed a premium on family stability could benefit from it--which women with young
children are especially apt to find worth the trade-offs required:
Notwithstanding the personal constraints placed on
women's development, the notion of separate spheres promoted the growth and
stability of family life among the white middle class and became the basis for
the working-class men's efforts to achieve a family wage, so that they could
keep their wives at home. Also, women
gained a distinct sphere of authority and expertise that yielded them special
recognition.330
Besides the reality that female field hand slaves
“enjoyed” a basic sexual equality that resulted from a system of coercion and
exploitation, Kemble's own personal situation as a mother caring for young
children likely inspired her to take an insistent stand against having women
work long hours while their older pre-teen children lounged about in idleness.
Jobs Female Slaves Had
Slave
women routinely performed tasks in the field that white women either never did,
or only did when their husbands were dead or absent for a long time. Olmsted witnessed a scene where slave women
spread manure from baskets carried on their heads, with one filling her apron
with it before moving it. The ability
of some slave women who plowed using double teams particularly impressed
him. Although he "watched with
some interest for any indication that their sex unfitted them for the
occupation," he found "they twitched their ploughs around on the
head-land, jerk[ed] their reins, and yell[ed] to their mules, with apparent
ease, energy, and rapidity." Mrs.
Ellis, a slave who escaped from Delaware, testified: "I did a great deal of heavy out-door work,--such as driving
team, hauling manure, etc."
Northrup described four "large and stout" lumberwomen who were
"excellent choppers" and "were equal to any man" at piling
logs. In his area of Louisiana, women
would "plough, drag, drive team, clear wild lands, work on the highway,
and so forth." Furthermore,
"some planters, owning large cotton and sugar plantations, have none other
than the labor of slave women."
Although the tendency was to have women hoe and men plow, "the
exceptions to [this] rule were so numerous as to make a mockery of it." So slave women often did heavy work like the
men, even if proportionately fewer did such tasks or as much of them when they
were pregnant or soon after giving birth.331
To
get a more specific picture of which jobs slaveowners assigned to men, women,
or both, Barrow's diary repays analysis.
Since he owned and managed a large plantation, his operations featured
more specialization than small farms with just a handful of slaves would
have. In order to keep some slaves busy
on days when it rained or other conditions idled them, he had the women spin
cotton. This was one of his most common
diary notations besides mentions about the weather, certain specific field
operations, and notes concerning his crops' conditions.332 In an occupation that (earlier) in the
eighteenth-century America symbolized femininity (i.e., “spinsters,”) Barrow
chose never to place men at work at it, suffering them to be sometimes idle
instead of (in the name of filling his wallet) making the men also do it.333 On one day of very heavy rain, May 5, 1845,
he wrote with obvious annoyance:
"Women spinning--Men doing nothing."334 He also gave women tasks that were
unfeminine by early Victorian standards besides what they did in regular field
work by hoeing or picking cotton. He
made them haul hay, build fences, roll logs, clear land, even work on the dam.335 At some of these tasks men helped or did at
other times, such as when all hands rolled logs or a "few men"
assisted the women. Besides regular
field work, the men’s odd jobs included working on the roads, getting timber,
chopping and sawing wood, repairing chimneys, getting rails, and pressing cotton
into bales to prepare it for shipment.336 The scattered tasks Barrow assigned to
slaves of both genders included making fences, clearing land (although this
tended to be a male task), and "trashing cotton," which involved
removing extraneous matter out of picked cotton.337 The "sucklers," meaning nursing
mothers formed into a gang for various odd jobs, performed such light tasks as
planting peas, trashing cotton, replanting corn, and spinning cotton.338 Although for regular tasks such as hoeing or
picking cotton Barrow assigned both sexes to them, he definitely still drew
some lines between men and women for various odd jobs.
Since
enslaved men and women often did similar jobs, how did this tendency affect
their marriage relationships? As noted
above, the institution of slavery seriously weakened the husband's role. Unlike men in the surrounding free society
characterized by patriarchal practices, the slave husband had little ability to
control his wife through owning some part of the means of production or through
being the main wage worker in his family, placing his wife in an
economically-dependent position. His
wife worked directly for her master or mistress, receiving a certain standard
ration for herself and her children regardless of whether or not her husband
lived on the same plantation or farm as she did. She received the same ration for herself regardless of whether
she was unmarried, divorced, or widowed.
Financial necessity and the burdens of pregnancy and bearing children
simply were not important factors in driving slave women into the arms of their
husbands, keeping them together as marital "glue." A relatively equal sexual division of labor
caused men to treat their wives more like equals, as a coworker in life under
ideal circumstances. Even after he and
his wife had escaped slavery, John Little took for granted the heavy labor his
wife did besides him in Canada:
"My wife worked right along with me: I did not realize it then, for we were raised slaves, the women
accustomed to work, and undoubtedly the same spirit comes with us
here." So together they chopped
trees, logged trunks, and cleared the land generally in Ontario's
wilderness. His wife gained
self-respect from her abilities in doing such work: "I got to be quite hardy--quite used to water and
bush-whacking; so that by the time I got to Canada, I could handle an axe, or
hoe, or any thing. I felt proud to be
able to do it--to help get cleared up, so that we could have a home, and plenty
to live on." Clearly, even after
the Littles gained freedom, the habits gained from slavery’s weak sexual
division of labor promoted equality within their relationship. This freed couple’s comments support White's
speculation: "Since neither slave
men nor women had access to, or control over, the products of their labor,
parity in the field may have encouraged equalitarianism in the slave
quarters."339
Exceptions to the Slaves’ Weak Division of Labor
The
picture drawn above of a weak sexual division of labor among American slaves
drawn above needs some important qualifications. Although the field hands and domestic servants had fairly equal
numbers of men and women among both, the ranks of drivers and artisans were
almost exclusively filled by men.340 Slave women also did most of their own
housework, in part because of "marrying abroad.” This widespread practice put the husband and wife on different
farms or plantations because they had different owners. The husband ended up often ended up treating
where he worked during the day or week as a virtual barracks, not as his true
home. "Home" was where he
visited his wife and children at night or on weekends. As a result, while their husbands were gone,
the full burden of cooking, cleaning, washing, and feeding children by absolute
necessity fell on their wives. Even
when present, he may have done little housework--a phenomenon familiar to many
contemporary women enduring their own "second shift" of
housework. Because of their long work
days, slave mothers often gave little attention to housework or child
rearing. Booker T. Washington recalled
that his mother normally had little time to help her children during the
day: "She snatched a few moments
for our care in the early morning before her work began, and at night after the
day's work was done." Also because
of the burdens of pregnancy, the recovery process after delivery, and the need
to nurse their children, slave women may, for some short given period, have
been given different, lighter tasks or even excluded from work altogether. Planter Barrow's gang of
"sucklers" reflected this practice.
On Kemble’s husband's rice-island estate, a number of the slave women
petitioned to have the time they could avoid hoeing the fields after birth
increased from three weeks to four.
Mary, one of these slaves, mentioned Kemble's babies and her
"carefully tended, delicately nursed, and tenderly watched confinement and
convalescence" while entreating her to have less exhausting labor assigned
to them the month after giving birth.
Although evidently their petitions for increased maternity leave went
nowhere, they still demonstrate the practice’s reality. Inevitably it placed women in a different
labor role from their husbands at least briefly. Of course, as White and Johnson note, not all masters lessened
the burdens of pregnant women. Some
women did gain positions of prestige, in jobs largely or exclusively limited to
their gender, such as midwife, skilled seamstress, cook, and/or
"mammy" in domestic service.341 So although the sexual division of labor was
generally weak among the slaves because most were field hands or
(unspecialized) domestic servants, a much sharper specialization characterized
the higher echelon jobs, and the special female burdens arising from
reproduction caused at least some temporary distinctions to appear among
average slaves.
Plantation Day Care Revisited
Rudimental
day care and, sometimes, communal cooking socialized functions on plantations
that slave families otherwise would have done individually. As a result, their owners boosted the labor
force participation rate from a free average of about one-third to about
two-thirds through (especially) forcing women and older children into the
fields.342
By having one or more old women look after the children who really took
care of the babies and toddlers during work hours, the master class greatly
narrowed the differences between the work of women and men.343 These children carried the babies to their
mothers to nurse them, when they did not get them on their own.344 Olmsted knew one fairly enlightened master
in Louisiana who gave nursing mothers two hours with their babies at noon, and
let them get off work one hour earlier in the evening. These mothers carried a heavy load in
toiling all day then getting their children afterwards. Once a slave on a cotton sea-island estate,
freedman Benjamin De Leslie described the burden this way of life imposed on
his mother: "Us chillun [were]
lef' wid er granny. Mammy'd come in at
dark, bare feet wet wid de sweat whut run down all
day. . . . Reckon folks
terday don' know much 'bout wu'k."345 Masters greatly increased the hours of field
work (or domestic service) and correspondingly reduced the amount of leisure
time, education, and housework their female slaves would have had if they had
been free. As a result, they got more
work and thus agricultural production from the average slave through greatly
weakening the sexual division of labor.
But shipping out more cotton bales (or barrels of molasses) came at the
cost of undermining the slave family's stability by reducing the importance of
the father's role and by assigning childrearing to somewhat older children
themselves in a communal setting, as discussed previously.
Force
and exploitation were the foundation for the degraded equality of the sexes
that generally prevailed under slavery.
As Davis wrote: "The
unbridled cruelty of this leveling process whereby the black woman was forced
into equality with the black man requires further explanation. She shared in the deformed equality of equal
oppression." After freedom came,
black families soon adopted generally the whites' sexual division of labor.346 Some today might criticize their choices,
but at least whites were not coercing them to choose otherwise. Certain non-quantifiable aspects of the
quality of life for these families improved through such a decision, which
allowed for more housework of a higher quality, parental supervision of
children, and additional time for children or even adults to get an education. Fundamental decisions affecting the quality
of life such as the sexual division of labor should be decided by those
personally affected, not outsiders using force to bring about particular
results for their own economic benefit.
The Sexual Division of Labor: English Agricultural Workers
A
major difference between the sexual division of labor between American slaves
and English farmworkers was the transformation of the latter's during the time
period being surveyed (c. 1750-1875).
By contrast, since driving women into the fields was well established
even in colonial times, here little changed during the nineteenth century for
the bondsmen. In the English case from
the late eighteenth century on into the nineteenth, as male unemployment rose
as due to enclosure and population growth, farm laboring women generally were
pushed out of the labor force, at least in the southeastern arable areas of
England. The parish of Selattyn in
Shropshire returned a questionnaire for the 1834 Poor Law Report stating: "Women and Children are not now so much
employed as formerly, because labouring men are so plentiful, and their labour
so cheap." The parish authorities,
facing a major problem in finding work even for married men, ranked employing
women much lower since they could always be (conveniently) seen as homemakers
primarily, having a built-in job ready made to keep them busy and out of
trouble. By contrast, unemployed and
underemployed men were considered much more dangerous and troublesome. They idled their time away in beerhouses and
pubs, got drunk, had fights, and went poaching for game to feed their
families. Their role in society when
without wage work to do was much more anomalous and purposeless than that of
women, whose ability to bear children to continue the species gave them more
in-built meaning to their lives. Their
inborn aggressive tendencies, since they led easily to various crimes, were
made to order for increasing the petty sessions' docket size. So beyond any of the standard prejudices
against women having certain jobs--attitudes which were significantly weaker in
the late eighteenth century than in the Victorian period anyway as Snell
explains--the local parish powers-that-be had their reasons for prioritizing
the employment of men.347
Women's Work in Arable Areas at Harvest Time Increased
Later in the Century
From
the 1850s on, the number of women employed full time or for long periods in
field labor apparently increased in arable areas during harvest or other
seasonal peaks in the yearly agricultural cycle. They were hired more then because as the size of England's
harvests grew, mechanization had not kept apace to help much in bringing the
crops in.348
As many local labor markets tightened in the third quarter of the
nineteenth century onwards as a general rural depopulation through migration
occurred, women increasingly reentered the fields during harvest. Often their work was subsumed as part of the
family economy, when the whole family, husband, wife, and children, harvested
grain together under a piece-work agreement with a local farmer. Even the ancient practice of gleaning, which
women and children had always dominated, continued long into the nineteenth
century.349
Snell and Morgan’s differences in outlook on women's participation in
the labor force lie in the former's emphasis on the 1700-1850 period and on the
south where women had become increasingly scarce in the fields, while the
latter deals with 1840-1900, and deals with England more generally.350
The
1867 Report on Women and Children in Agriculture reflects the changes Morgan
brings to light. The Report paints a
diverse picture of how much women were employed in field work. In some areas, none worked in the field, for
others, they appeared sometimes, while in some places, they routinely worked.351 Women customarily labored in the fields
where competition for workers was strong, such as the industrial north. In northern Northumberland, women, normally
unmarried adults, were "bound" in what was called "bondage"
(i.e., under contract). These women did
heavy farm work for local farmers while still living at their parents'
homes. One sample farm in this area had
eight men, eight women, and three "lads" as the “regular staff.” In southern Northumberland, married women
often worked, earning one pound a week.352 As Patrick noted, the gang system's perceived
moral scandals and exploitation in the Fens largely sparked the writing of the
1867-68 Report. Under this system, gang
masters employed women and children in groups to (especially) plant, weed, and
harvest root crops because not enough laborers lived near by. Rounding up groups of ten to forty women and
children from a nearby village, the gang masters led them to relatively distant
farms to work. In the Humber-Wold area,
the wives of steadily employed male laborers avoided field work, but the wives irregularly-employed
"catch work" laborers and their children worked in order to make up
for lost ground financially. Here women
and children commonly harvested potatoes.
In Yorkshire, farmers made tacit agreements with male laborers that, as
a condition of employment, their wives and children also had to be placed in
their service. These agreements failed
to guarantee them steady employment, but they meant this "auxiliary
labor" was not allowed to go shopping around for higher wages elsewhere
nearby during the peak harvest and/or haymaking seasons. In the south, female workers were still
scarce, at least as year-around laborers.
Northampton reported only 190 female laborers out of a group of
8,975. Jeffries, who mainly based his
perceptions of English agriculture on what he saw in 1870s Wiltshire,
maintained that female field work had declined, especially for the winter
months, even if a number still worked in the summer and spring.353 Clearly, many women still did field work in
the third quarter of the nineteenth century, especially in northern England and
during seasonal peaks.
The Female Dominance of Dairy Work Declines
Women
had long dominated dairy work. Because
of the demand for dairymaids, female laboring employment and their wages had
fallen little in pastoral areas in the southwest of England during the
1780-1840 period, as Snell notes.354 Skilled, experienced dairymaids and the
farmers' wives who supervised the maids and/or took on their work themselves
brought in a cash income that helped pay the rent. A dairy farm’s mistress might supervise two to twenty maids, with
each maid tending ten cows in turn, working from before dawn into the late
evening. They also had a significant
amount of independence from direct male supervision since their menfolk often
knew little about the process of making cheese from milk. Indeed, a small farmer with the misfortune of
having only sons and no daughters might be forced into raising livestock and
abandoning dairying! But then, in the
later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, men interested in improving
methods and thus profitability invaded this female preserve. They saw dairywomen as archconservatives
unconcerned with innovation and progress in their craft. Male managers and cheese factors, wishing to
serve the market more efficiently by applying a scientific approach to dairying
in general and cheesemaking in particular, gradually began to shed light on
what had been largely a female mystery.
As a result, women here increasingly lost control of their old domain. Many farmers' wives, such as one Jeffries
describes, abandoned this line of work when alternatives presented themselves,
because it required long hours and much hard work. Interestingly enough, the move by farmers' wives into the parlors
and housework strictly considered happened before the Victorian ideology
about the separate spheres held sway.
Machinery assisted in this transition, which allowed farmers to use
fewer dairymaids overall, and less skilled personnel to supervise the tasks
involved. Hence, a largely female
sanctuary within the agricultural work force fell increasingly under direct
male domination in the nineteenth century, even though dairymaids were still
hired as live-in farm servants by larger farmers when their own wives' and
daughters' labor was insufficient, assuming their female family members had not
abandoned dairying themselves.355
How the Separate Spheres' View on Sex Roles Influenced
the 1867-68 Report
In
the 1867-68 Report on Employment in Agriculture, the potential negative effects
of field labor on women's roles as wives and mothers is a major issue. Many involved with preparing the Report saw
the world of work for women and proper sex roles through the lens of the
separate spheres. One of the four main
questions the Report investigated concerned whether or not women should work
and its possible damage to their morals or their performance of domestic
duties. The Commissioners even
considered the policy proposal of making the employment of girls under the age
of sixteen illegal. In Yorkshire, a
special school was created to train girls in household duties such as
laundering, cooking, and washing. It
was said to be good for drawing the tastes of young girls "away from the
license of field work" to domestic service and "future duties in
life." Female field labor was said
often to cause women laborers to keep their cottages less tidily and to neglect
their families. They also, it was said,
gave opiates to their children at home to quiet them [shades of Engels'
depiction of Manchester!], and even hired "an old woman" to care for
them. A working wife’s messy cottage
was even blamed for helping drive her husband to the local public house and
into its noxious influences. By
contrast, single women held in "bondage" (i.e., under contract) in
northern Northumberland received a much more positive portrayal. Their heavy field labor was simply noted not
to be harmful morally, meaning, injurious to performing what was deemed the
proper sex roles when they married later.
From Nottingham and Lincolnshire came a similar report about female
field work's non-effects on their roles as wives and mothers. The moral problem seen here concerned the
women and older girls corrupting the younger ones--presumably through bawdy
talk and so forth--which meant the solution was age, not sexual,
segregation. The rector of Stilton
charged that gang work made girls "rude, rough and lawless," thus
making them unfit for "domestic duties and [which] consequently
disqualifie[d] them for their future position of wives and mothers." Others lodged similar complaints, adding
that field work developed a "love for unhealthy liberty" in these
girls, who said they liked its freedom compared to domestic service’s. With different counties of England being
investigated for the negative effects field work had on the sex roles of women
who performed it, the Report's consideration of whether and how much to
restrict the employment of girls depended not merely on the generic issue of
how much child labor exploited children and kept them out of school, but also
on its perception of the specific negative effects on girls' future roles as
wives and mothers.356
Why Did Laboring Women Increasingly Fall Out of the
Field Work Force?
Did
women themselves initiate the changes in the sexual division of labor? Or did middle class mores on the subject of
femininity seep down to the laborers, whether from men or women, such as
through laborers' daughters being hired as domestic servants? The desires of many farmers and/or their
wives to move upscale relate to this issue.
Many pursued middle class cultural attainments, and sought to separate
themselves more clearly from the laborers both in status and in physical
proximity, such as by exchanging live-in servants for day laborers. Somerville noted through his travels and
conversations that he had that:
The farm-houses and farmers' families are much finer
than twenty, and thirty, and forty years ago; so much more refined, with richer
furniture, and "accomplished" manners, that the unmarried labourers
are no longer permitted to live within the farm-house, nor eat at the farmer's
table, nor step within the farmer's door.
Cobbett complained about farmers putting on
gentlemanly airs and having (in a particular case) "worst of all . . . a parlour! Aye, and a carpet and bell-pull
too!" To the extent women believed
in expressing their femininity by learning French, playing the piano, reading
literature, etc., in farmhouse parlors, and by abandoning dirty, backbreaking
work to hired men, the ideas behind the attempts of farmers' wives to
embourgoisify themselves trickled down to the laborers through the domestic
servants they hired. On this general
theme, Jeffries asks:
Has not some of the old stubborn spirit of earnest
work and careful prudence gone with the advent of the piano and the oil
painting? While wearing the dress of a
lady, the wife cannot tuck up her sleeves and see to the butter, or even feed
the poultry, which are down at the pen across 'a nasty dirty field.'357
After the servants got married themselves, they often
tried to emulate some of what their former master and mistress did, to the
extent their pocketbooks may have allowed.
Simply put, did women began to withdraw themselves from field work
before the ideology of the separate spheres held strong sway, or were Victorian
middle class ideas about the sex roles the main cause for the change? Which drove the changes in sex roles more at
this time, the superstructure of society or the forces and relations of
production?
As
described both below and above, the rising male unemployment rate in many local
rural labor markets in the south of England in the late eighteenth century was
a major reason for women leaving the fields.
This development took place before the middle class sensibilities
of the Victorian era had a chance to operate on the laborers or even many of
the farmers. The Victorian period
merely saw this change completed, which had begun due to economic
rationalization in southeastern arable districts. As Snell plausibly argues:
But insofar as they [moral sentiments antagonistic to
women working] cannot readily be dated from before 1800, at the very earliest,
their significance seems heavily undercut by the evidence that the major sexual
division of labour began at least fifty years before such 'middle-class'
attitudes towards the roles of women can have had influence.358
The dairywomen of Cheshire, unwilling to give up their
work, rejected the ideas of J. Chalmers Morton (c. 1870) on the subject. They denied their work was
"drudgery," saying that the quality that could come from home-made
cheese was worth their continued efforts as against his advocacy of applying
factory methods. Their declining
control over the dairy industry was obviously not their notion. On the other hand, the ideas of a woman's
"proper place" may have encouraged at least some women to withdraw
from the labor force and be relegated increasingly to doing housework or
domestic service only. The 1867 Report
on Employment in Agriculture found in Lincolnshire and Nottingham that the
girls were less inclined to do field work themselves. In these two counties, above age twelve or
thirteen, they were not found in the fields in some areas. On the other hand, although Jeffries
believed that the number of women field workers had greatly declined (in the
general area of Wiltshire in the 1870s), still "there does not appear to
be any repugnance on their part to field-work."359 The weight of the evidence points towards
late eighteenth/early nineteenth century changes inspired by the economics of
enclosure, poor relief, and population growth in pushing women out of the labor
force because of a rising male unemployment rate instead of women actively
accepting the Victorian idea of femininity and voluntarily withdrawing
themselves from the paid labor force, or passively going along with their
husbands' or employers' ideas that women ideally should be supported by their
husbands and mainly do housework.
Allotments Partially Restore the Family Economy
The
spread of allotments during the nineteenth century, in a small way, brought or
kept women in the agricultural labor force.
Enclosure and many families' heavy dependence on the father's wages for
support had largely destroyed in southern arable areas the family economy. But it was partially restored through husbands,
wives, and children all working on their small plots of land as a family,
though not necessarily all at the same time of the day. Perhaps the father tended the plot on
Sundays or some day he was off from work; the mother and her children might
till it during spare time on regular weekdays, not just Sundays. Sometimes even three generations of a family
worked together. Often women and
children, who would have been idle otherwise, cultivated the plots, while the
men worked full time for farmers. But
in Bedfordshire even late in the century (1893), the women did not work on the
allotments because they had been used to earning significantly more money
through such domestic industries as straw-plaiting and lace-making. Since these industries had largely collapsed
by then, the women clearly had failed to adjust fully to the new conditions.360 More importantly, the family economy had
persisted because family members harvested grain together, as mentioned above,
as different members took on different tasks.
Nevertheless, allotments played a role in keeping women in the agricultural
work force, albeit not for wages.
Quality of Life Issues and the Sexual Division of
Labor
Towards
the end of Annals of the Labouring Poor, Snell explores the downside of
the increased sexual division of labor and the decline of the family economy in
favor of centralized production in factories and workshops. With the father taken from home to work
elsewhere, and the mother confined increasingly to non-wage-paid housework and
childrearing, the home became less important economically. Increasingly, the family became "a unit
of primary socialisation and recreative convenience." His analysis of Thomas Hardy's novels
focuses on how a sharp sexual division of labor creates emotional distance between
a husband and wife, thus causing them to share no work together, but only
pleasures. As a result, a couple fail
to learn well each other's real character.
Although the upper and middle classes largely had had a distinct sexual
division of labor for centuries, this relationship now spread among the working
and laboring classes, in such occupations as artisans, farmworkers, and
unskilled city workers, during the later eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.361
Snell's
analysis about the pitfalls of a sharp division of labor in undermining
the working class family’s cohesion strongly differs from others saying a weak
division of labor produced the family ills prevailing among the American
slaves. The legacy of slavery in this
regard decades later became especially controversial because of the Moynihan
report's discussion of the social problems caused by matriarchy and
illegitimacy in the 1960's black family.
In particular, enslavement sometimes nearly reduced slave father to a
mere stud, because of the way the master stood between the slaves and the means
of production as the slave’s provider, instead of slave families independently
and directly supporting themselves.
Through the practice of "marrying abroad," the slave husband
and wife deliberately chose to work apart from one another in order to
avoid (especially) the terrible scenes where one had to watch or even help to
inflict a whipping or punishment on the other.
Since the slave husband often came to visit his wife just on weekends,
this arrangement was an extreme case of married couples coming together only to
share pleasures in life, and not the work that supported them and their
children. The slaveholders did destroy
the family economy among the slaves, excepting those in task system areas who
assiduously tended their animals and plots of land, since the family members
did not work together as an economic unit of production. But in addition, slave families did not even
directly support themselves because the slaveowners issued standard rations to
all the human chattels on their plantations and farms. Even if the husband and wife did live on the
same plantation, they were often separated during the day by working in
different gangs segregated by sex and/or cultivating function (such as plowing
versus hoeing). Furthermore, unlike a
couple or family working together in domestic industry in their own home, they
could not set their own work hours or have flexibility in taking breaks that
would allow them to freely interact together.
Of course, some of the differences between what Snell sees among the
English farmworkers or artisans and others observe in the slave family come
from the special features of slavery that made the master's authority the
ultimate and controlling force in the slaves’ physical lives, not the sexual
division of labor itself. Nevertheless,
while Snell argues that a sharp sexual division of labor produces alienation
between the sexes because the husband and wife do not spend enough
"quantity time" during work hours with one another, others have
blamed a weak sexual division of labor in part for weakening the slave family
because the father's role is made largely superfluous relative to the mother’s.
The Division of Labor: Blessing or Curse?
Snell's
critique of the Victorian sexual division of labor is a subset of attacks made
(such as by Marx) against the alienation that centralized factory production
created through the specialization of jobs and the impersonal cash nexus
between employer and employee.
Thompson's discussion of the concept of time and work, and the switch
over from a task-orientation to a time-orientation, is really an attack on the
division of labor:
Mature industrial societies of all varieties are
marked by time-thrift and by a clear demarcation between "work" and
"life". . . . But if the purposive notation of
time-use becomes less compulsive, then men might have to re-learn some of the
arts of living lost in the industrial revolution: how to fill the interstices of their days with enriched, more
leisurely, personal and social relations; how to break down once more the
barriers between work and life.
The "clear demarcation" appears because one
goes to a separate workplace from home, works there for so many hours, and then
returns home to "enjoy life," i.e., leisure time with one’s family
which is largely under one's own control.
The division of labor, which originally was part of the foundation for
early civilization’s development, presents a basic trade-off to society as a
whole: Workers benefit from the
increased productivity and shorter workdays an intricate division of labor
yields, but may suffer mind-stultifying, narrow tasks tending machinery or
pushing paperwork in a bureaucracy, thus causing increased alienation. Of course, much of the manual labor in
artisans' workshops or the fields was hardly exciting or self-fulfilling
either! As M. Dorothy George comments:
“It seems unlikely that the average weaver, toiling hour after hour throwing
the shuttle backwards and forwards on work which was monotonous and exhausting,
had the reactions which would satisfy a modern enthusiast for peasant arts.”362
(Some people also may personally prefer work to be at a different location from
home: It allows them to escape from
it!) To send the father of the family out to work, to earn or to seek to earn
the "family wage" English labor unionists desired, while exclusively
relegating the mother to housework and child care during his absence, increased
productivity, but also weakened the feelings of affection or family ties
between the couple in question. To have
their children go to school (or daycare) further broke up the family economy,
for they gained knowledge and possibly alien values that neither the mother nor
father agreed with, while spending many hours out of either parent’s care. Snell and Thompson properly see the problems
with an increased division of labor, whether sexual or among those at a central
place of production such as a factory, but its advantages need consideration
also. Eventually, at least,
increased specialization led to higher productivity, higher wages, and shorter
hours. The workweek has fallen from
(say) 75 hours to 40 over a period of 150 years while real wages have sharply
risen. Today most people in Western
nations enjoy a high standard of living so far above the subsistence level that
even their lowest stratum are more overweight than those of the middle or upper
classes above them. Would these people
voluntarily give up such great material advantages for the perceived improvements
in family relationships (or allegedly less work place alienation)that would be
brought by a return to subsistence farming, literal cottage industries, and
mass education’s abolition? Although
many do have the financial resources to buy land and engage in individual
experiments of simplifying their lives in a Thoreauian manner, few choose to do
it. (Not everyone could choose this
option. Because subsistence farming and
domestic industry have such a low productivity, probably about 80 percent of
the Western world's present population would become superfluous,
and--ahem--require elimination).
Snell's analysis also takes for granted the high quality of the lower
classes’ family relationships in western Europe in the pre-industrial past, a
claim which Weber and Gillis seriously question. So although an increased division of labor has its drawbacks, its
benefits must be added to the balances before idealizing the advantages of
domestic industry and subsistence farming for family and marriage relationships.
The
issue of the sharpening sexual division of labor during industrialization needs
some examination in this context. Even
the likes of Dill could see its benefits, at least for middle class women whose
time and energies were freed for charitable, religious, and political
activities. Kemble obviously
concurred. Viewing American slavery
from the vantage point of a Victorian middle class Englishwoman, she found
simply intolerable the thought of enduring daily some ten or more hours of
field work on top of caring for young children and housework. Of course, the separate spheres’ chief
drawback as an organizing principle for society stemmed from its theoretically
pigeonholing narrowly the talents of half of the human race into a specific set
of tasks (housework, child care, etc.) when their individual abilities and
talents often could have been more fully developed outside the home in various
careers. By placing serious limits on
individual women's choices in life, especially for those who could not or would
not marry, this ideology constrained their personal autonomy by social custom,
private discrimination, and laws against entry into specific professions and
jobs. But for those women more attuned
to the life of a homemaker, the separate spheres presented some advantages,
since they (theoretically) forced men to be more stable in their work habits
and protective of their wives. For
these reasons, many saw the principal problem with the slave family's
relationships as the man’s lack of a real function besides siring offspring,
thus enabling him to be more irresponsible about his duties towards his wife
and children. The slave father's
dereliction of duty directly resulted from the slaveholder’s furnishing automatically
rations of food, clothing, and shelter to an enslaved wife and children without
any real regard for his (or her) level of work effort. Nowadays, contemporary Western society has
been dissolving the separate spheres since its (semi-)capitalist economy tends
towards labor shortage during booms and war, thus encouraging women to work
outside the home. Women then farm out
many of the child care and housework responsibilities to others (assuming they
do not come home to face the infamous "second shift" while their
husbands lounge about, doing almost nothing).363 This change means contemporary society has
sharply moved away from the Victorian model on sex roles, and towards those
once found on Southern plantations.
Excepting mainly those presently dependent on governmental transfer
payments, because each family still has to support itself directly by its own
efforts, the negative effects from more androgenous sex roles on the quality of
family life today are much lower they were on the slaves, although the results
from having less "quantity time" together still remain. After all, to have both men and women
working outside the home does not solve the problem Snell describes, unless
they happen to work together for the same employer or in a family business as a
partnership.
Who Was Better Off Depends on the Values One Has
Clearly
the plantation slave and mid-Victorian laborer pitched their camps at spots
near the opposite extremes of the division of labor’s general continuum. The best position for societal well-being
lies somewhere in the middle between these two extremes. Enough differentiation between the sexes
should remain for people to benefit from the complementary roles possible and
to give individuals through society some basic guidance to their identity,
which reduces the amount of confusion, alienation, and anomie they may feel
otherwise. But enough similarity (or
social tolerance for similarity) should exist to allow individual men and women
to make freely their own choices based on individual talents and interests. The slaves themselves simply had no ability
to make such choices before emancipation.
But soon after freedom came, they chose to emulate the free white
society's division of labor as influenced by the ideology of the separate
spheres. Using Snell's basic approach,
under which the poor’s judgment of what values matter to them most trumps what
(say) a modern-day professional economist thinks they should have valued, this
outcome shows they evaluated negatively the sexual division of labor imposed on
them by their owners. Although not as artificially
imposed, English female laborers were increasingly pushed out of the labor
force in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. As applied to the farmworkers, the Victorian
model of the separate spheres takes on the feel of a male make-work
program. The local parishes
conveniently could just assumed women would find something to do at
home, while seeking some way to keep men out of the beerhouses and hunting
(re: poaching) grounds. But illustrating how different its values
are, contemporary Western society has freely chosen a sexual division of labor
that resembles a Southern plantation’s more than Victorian England’s. To determine which model provides a higher
quality of life depends in turn upon hotly contested values and how intrinsically
different is the biological (and psychological) nature of men and women. The Sears-EEOC case illustrates how
old-fashioned patriarchalists can use to their own advantage the in-house
debates between "equality" and "difference" feminists.364 To the extent outsiders force a way of life
upon some group--here, masters imposing a certain sexual division of labor
among American slaves--its quality of life is lower than where it was freely
chosen. Otherwise, as this terrain is
so controversial presently, each person after examining the
evidence--historical, scientific, and anthropological–-naturally ends up
choosing, based on his or her values, the model or mid-point between the two
extremes that would supposedly make for the best society. Who was better off between the slaves and
farmworkers concerning the sexual division of labor depends on what values
historians and others apply when judging a people’s past way of life.
5. CONTROLLING
SUBORDINATE CLASSES--HOW IT WAS DONE
The Central Reality of Work and the Elite's Needs for
Controlling Its Workers
Today
and in the past, the central reality of most adults' lives is the set of tasks
and activities that make up the means by which they earn a living. Especially in the pre-industrial and early
industrial past, people back then compared to today in the developed world lived
shorter lives, worked more hours daily and weekly, and worked more years before
retiring, assuming that was even possible before they died. In the case of the African-American slaves
and English agricultural workers, their daily tasks were fairly similar
although they normally tended different crops.
Both groups benefited from any and all the reputed intrinsic advantages
of doing farm work instead of factory or shop work, such as from laboring in
fresh air outside at tasks that were meaningful and understandable in the
context of the overall production process.
This section does not deal with the specific techniques or tasks of the
slaves or farmworkers in fields or homes, but with "management's"
attempts to control them. After
covering two basic aspects of working conditions, concerning the number of work
hours and days off from the job, how the elites controlled their subordinate
classes is described below. The former
needed the labor power of the latter, but (usually) wanted it on the best
possible terms, compensating it as little as possible without sparking revolts,
strikes, or uprisings that would be expensive to quell. How the slaves and farmworkers resisted
their respective dominant classes may be occasionally touched upon in this
section, but that is mainly dealt with in the next.
The
methods of controlling the slaves and laborers inevitably differed. Since the latter were legally free, they
could quit and move elsewhere (excepting the settlement laws' restrictions). But since the slaves were not, corporal
punishment was often necessarily employed to compel labor, with additional aid
to work discipline provided by the fear of the auction block. The English elite used more indirect,
collective legal measures such as enclosure and the poor laws to extract labor
power from the farmworkers. Since
individual masters and mistresses owned and controlled the slaves both on and
the job and off, managing them tended to be correspondingly more direct and
individualized, as illustrated by the pass system, after the slave codes had
set the basic legal framework in place.
The English rural elites, in contrast, had counted on a tilted free
market to bring them labor. They rigged
the law of supply and demand for labor to favor themselves, such as by using
enclosure and the settlement laws to ensure a ready supply of laborers for the
peak summer season in arable agriculture.
The laborers then semi-freely chose to work for this or that
individual local farmer or landowner.
But slavery required a stricter system of control, since the bondsmen
had no freedom to choose to work for different masters or mistresses legally,
but had to work for those that owned or rented them. (Some slaves were permitted to “moonlight” for pay on Sundays,
but compensation for that practice existed by permission, not by right). Since slaves had little or no intrinsic
self-interest to work for their "employers," their owners had to use
much more coercion to keep them in line compared to what their English equals
exerted on the farmworkers. Because the
slaves were their property, slaveholders had far more legal right to inflict
pain and to damage the bodies of their “troublesome property.” They also had the legal power to interfere
in and control their human chattels’ off-work lives. The reality of paternalism is examined below, since both elites
used this social order’s ideology to justify their ascendency, through
proclaiming the existence of a mutual reciprocal system of altruism underlay
their rule over the subordinate classes.
It is decidedly dubious that these elites established ideological
hegemony over the laborers and slaves through paternalism or some other
means. Since both these work forces
mainly or completely worked for others, and not directly for themselves as in subsistence
agriculture (or artisans in their own shops), the elite's machinations for
controlling them clearly suffused their work lives.
Dawn to Dusk:
Work Hours for Slaves
First
of all, two of the conditions of work itself should be examined before
analyzing the elite's attempts to enforce compliance. How long did the slaves work each day? Their time at work tended to fill all available daylight hours. Slaves rarely slept past dawn, although more
paternalistic masters deviated from this standard. Their lifestyle sharply differed from that for many poor whites
around them. The latter had relatively
leisurely days since they could get by through hunting, fishing, and/or some
subsistence agriculture. Most slaves
got up at the crack of dawn or earlier.
The overseer's or master's bell or horn aroused them and warned them
that they had little time left in the quarters before their presence was
required in the fields. John Warren
told Drew he had to get up at four o'clock on the Mississippi plantation he
lived at. He had just fifteen minutes
to eat breakfast in the field before work began. Similarly, Dick Smith, once a slave in Louisiana, told Armstrong
he got up at four o'clock in summer, five o'clock in winter, when the latter
was two hours before sunrise. Freedman
Tines Kendricks of Georgia remembered how the mean old mistress would be up
"'Way 'fore day . . . hollering loud enough for to be heared two
miles, 'rousing the niggers out for to git in the field ever 'fore
light." Freedwoman Jenny Proctor
recalled that her mother as a cook had a three o'clock rising time. Olmsted's experience confirmed these
accounts about the slaves getting up early.
Once he had to feed his own horse at a place he stayed in Louisiana,
since all the slaves had left before daybreak. Another time, he found the slaves already at work after he awoke
at four o'clock following an awful night's sleep during which insects
repeatedly attacked him in a small planter's house in Mississippi.365 Bondsmen clearly routinely started field
labor at dawn if not earlier.
Using Force to Get the Slaves into the Fields in the
Morning
Since
the slaves did not directly benefit from work, but normally got fed and clothed
the same regardless of their productivity levels, masters and overseers had to
enforce strictly the starting time for work.
They often inflicted whippings on the dawdling. As Douglass recalled, although the bondsmen
might have been doing housework or cooking late the night before, they had
better hear the horn in the morning at dawn.
Otherwise, the consequences were often dire: "If they are not awakened by the sense of hearing, they are
by the sense of feeling; no age nor sex finds any favor." The overseer, with the Dickensian name of
Mr. Severe, stood armed, ready and waiting with a "large hickory stick and
heavy cowskin," for anyone not immediately heading off for the fields
after morning reveille. Naturally, the
overseer or hands-on master arose when his slaves did, as freedman "Old
Man Ned" of North Carolina recalled about his owner. Having dispensed with overseers, Bennet
Barrow by 1845 had turned over daily operations to his black driver. One day he decided to get up with his slaves
at daybreak, which produced (to him) impressive results: "Began at day Light Overseering--Coffee
at day Light out 'till 12--negroes
worked harder to day than they have done in at Least 5 years." On the other hand, when his slaves got up
late one day, he partially blamed himself:
"Hands made a Bad beginning this morning got out Late Ploughs
&c. Began overseering in Earnest, neglect my business all the year perswuaded it injured my health--negros very
much out of Geer." But this kind
of mistake was uncommon, as the slave narratives bear witness. One sign of a harsh master was that he made
his slaves get up very early daily in order to maximize the work effort
extracted from them. Escaped slave Henry
Banks described how one of his Virginian masters dealt with slaves who rose up
slower than the sun in the morning:
"Let daybreak catch me in the house, instead of currying the
horses, that was as good for a flogging as any thing else." Henry Gowens suffered under a cruel overseer
in Alabama. After receiving "a
first-rate English watch to keep his time and blow the horn by," he
ordered the slaves to eat nothing before twelve noon. After blowing the horn two hours before daybreak, he said he
expected everyone up and at work one hour later at the second horn
blowing. He threatened: "If I find any of you lagging back
after the last horn blows, I shall whip you up to the spot where the work is to
be done." J.W. Terrill, once a
slave in Texas, remembered that the overseer awoke the hands at three
o'clock. If they got up late, he tied
them to a tree at night with nothing to eat, and later gave them thirty-nine
lashes from a long, wide belt. The
testimony of Aaron Sidles, who for years traveled up and down the Mississippi
as a steamboat’s steward, shows how generally force was used near daybreak on
the slaves. The first thing in the
morning he heard were the bells rung to awaken the slaves on farms or
plantations on either side of the river.
"The next thing, before it was light enough to see, I heard the
crack of the overseer's whip, and the cries of the slaves, 'Oh! pray,
Mas'r! Oh! pray, Mas'r!' Every morning I heard it from both sides of
the river."366
Clearly, masters and overseers had to apply or threaten to apply a lot
of physical force to get the slaves on task around or before sunrise, unlike
the English landowners and farmers, who relied mainly on the laborers prodding
themselves to get to work on time in the morning since they could be fired or
have their pay docked for being late.
The
most extreme semi-standard hours slaves had to endure was during grinding
season on sugar plantations. Slaves
here may have been worked to death literally.
Having been a slave in Alabama, Cato felt he had been well treated, but
knew that: "Some [of] the niggers
hated syrup-making time, 'cause when they had to work till midnight making
syrup, it's four o'clock up, just the same.
Sunup to sundown was for field niggers." Olmsted found a Louisiana sugar planter whose slaves worked the
two- to three-month grinding season around the clock. They worked in relays, each on for eighteen hours and off six,
which kept three-fourths of them constantly at work. In contrast to Cato's testimony, the slaves on this plantation
actually evidently liked grinding season, since a garrulous house
slave’s comments corroborated the master's testimony. Olmsted questioned carefully at length this slave without his
appearing guarded or defensive. These
long hours were made more tolerable by giving them lots of food and coffee and
by encouraging them, "as much as possible, to make a kind of frolic of
it." Despite this attempt to paint
a human face on obvious exploitation, Olmsted still observed: "No farm, and in no factory, or mine,
even when double wages are paid for night-work, did I ever hear of men or women
working regularly eighteen hours a day.
If ever done, it is only when some accident makes it especially
desirable for a few days." Despite
(some?) sugar planters tried to make these schedules bearable, somehow even
enjoyable, they still could well have extracted a deadly toll. One group of Louisiana sugar planters
admitted that working slaves to death and replacing them every seven years was
more profitable than driving them less hard, and "maintain[ing] them in
diminished efficiency for an indefinite length of time."367 Extreme conditions taxed the bondsmen's
health, even when they could be persuaded to tolerate or enjoy long hours which
lasted for only two or three months and only after the preceding slack period
had given them extra rest.
Finishing Work for the Day--Some Variations
The
end of the slaves’ workday varied much more than its start. The task system areas, mainly in the lowland
coastal regions of Georgia and South Carolina, allowed the slaves to finish
working for their master for the day as soon as they completed their set
assignment ("task"). This may
explain why the slaves were done by three thirty in the afternoon on Kemble's
husband's cotton sea-island estate. On
his rice-island estate, the workday was longer and the labor more physically
draining. Here the bondsmen worked from
daybreak to six in the evening, but they had time off for lunch at noon. But more typically, slaves worked until
sunset. Mr. Freeland, a straightforward
average master of Maryland, worked his slaves hard, but Douglass thanked him
for doing so only between sunrise and sunset.
George Johnson of Virginia worked from sunrise "and quit work
between sundown and dark."
"Aunt" Tilda of Mississippi told Armstrong that she worked
from "de daylight to noontime" and after lunch, "wu'k[ed] till
de sun go down an' de overseer whoop:
'All in! Day's done!' an' back
to de cabins ergain." However,
many slaves worked far longer hours.
Olmsted knew two plantations in Mississippi that roused up their
bondsmen at three thirty in the morning, and they frequently worked until nine
at night. Appalled that her children
were still enslaved, Mary Younger knew they still labored late at night despite
starting work before daylight. William
Brown, once a Virginian slave, had worked sometimes as late as ten at night in
some seasons. Because the slaves would
feed his horse at the place he spent the night at, Olmsted found they generally
worked until nightfall after already appeared in the fields when he first
looked out early in the morning. On a
plantation near Natchez, since the hands worked until nine thirty in the
evening after getting up at about five in the morning during summer, the hoe
gang members worked about sixteen hours in a day. The plow gang worked less because their break was about two hours
long versus (perhaps) a half hour for the hoe gang. On one plantation in
Virginia, however, they only worked eleven hours a day because of a two-hour
break at noon, which corresponded to the better treatment for which Border
Slave States were known. Although
undeniable variations in what hours slaves worked appeared among different plantations
and farms, Sutch and Ransom have calculated quantitatively that the average
slave (male, female, and child) worked approximately 16-22 percent more than
the average free laborer, North and South.
This figure was based on a comparison of how many hours slaves worked in
1860 with those of the freedmen in 1870.
Genovese, as well as Fogel and Engerman, are too optimistic when saying
free workers, especially when wives and children are included, normally worked
as many and/or more hours than the slaves.368
Hours of Work--Agricultural Workers
When
they were employed, the English agricultural laborers and slaves often worked
remarkably similar hours. In both
cases, the dawn-to-dusk nature of agricultural work during planting, growing,
and harvesting season drove their daily schedules. Carters, foggers (cow feeders), and milkers had to tend to their
animals seven days a week, arriving early in the morning and later in the
afternoon or evening to feed them.
Shepherds accompanying flocks in the fields were effectively "on
call" for twenty-four hours a day because they had to watch over the flock
at night, especially during lambing season.
Their job was task-oriented, not time-oriented, so they may be working
when others laborers slept and relaxing while others worked. As Jeffries noted about shepherds: "His sheep rule his life, and he has
little to do with the artificial divisions of time." During harvest season the laborers' hours
grew long and late. But in winter,
especially in arable areas, even when they were not underemployed or unemployed,
they worked short hours: They would
leave the fields by five o'clock at nightfall.369 Since their employers had to pay them for
each hour or day they worked, the laborers remained on the job only as needed,
excepting farm servants under a one-year (or less) contract. In contrast, since masters and mistresses
had to feed, clothe, and otherwise meet the needs of their bondsmen regardless
of their output, they had a continual incentive to work their human chattels as
many hours as possible. Every moment a
farmworker slacked off cost his or her employer also, but only for a mutually
agreed upon set period, such as a day, week, or month. When a slaveholder purchased a slave, he had
bought all at once all of that slave's potential labor for a lifetime: So, arguably, time was a-wasting every
moment that slave was idle, except for meeting the minimum physical requirements
of sleep, meal periods, etc. Although
on paper the slaves and farmworkers seem to work daily about as many hours
because of agricultural labor’s intrinsic diurnal nature, the former often
worked fewer many hours overall in a given year than the latter, which was
attributable to winter (and general) unemployment.
Were Workdays Shorter for the Farmworkers than the
Slaves?
The
agricultural workers at times worked dawn to dusk like the slaves. As a young man in a mowing gang during
harvest, Arch worked from five in the morning to seven at night. Batchelor in 1808 noted how the hours during
harvest grew longer, "extend[ing] . . . from sunrise to sunset,
or when carrying the corn, as long as the day-light permits." Somerville encountered three Wiltshire
carters, who all got up at four in the morning to attend to their horses. Two of them arrived home for dinner at seven
o'clock, and the other left the stable at about half past seven. But normal hours were shorter than
these. Some laborers signed an
allotment agreement that prohibited them from tending their plots of land
between six in the morning and evening without first asking their master's
(farmer's) permission. During these
hours they presumably worked elsewhere when employed. In confirmation of this surmise, Batchelor described a
Bedfordshire farmworker’s typical hours:
"Day-labourers are expected to work as long as the light is
sufficient in the winter: and from six o'clock in the morning till six at
night, in summer. Of this nearly an
hour and a half are consumed in meals."370 For the 1867-68 Report on Employment in
Agriculture, Culley reported for northeastern Buckingham and Bedfordshire that
the hours of work were normally six in the morning to six in the evening in
summer, and from dawn to dusk in winter, with one and a half or two hours off
for meals. In most of Buckingham, the
hours of work were six to five, with one and a half hours off.371 Basing it upon the responses of Oxfordshire
farmers to a survey, Andrew Doyle published in 1881 a list of typical working
hours for laborers. Many worked from
seven to five, six to six, or nine hours altogether, excepting harvest or
haymaking seasons. Some worked eight
hours or less in total.372
As the nineteenth century passed its mid-point on into the late 1860s,
many laborers increasingly wanted a more carefully defined workday, in place of
the loose concept of working dawn to dusk.
This desire reflects a transition from task-orientation to
time-orientation, which the farmworkers used advantageously when bargaining
with employers. After having defined
the workday more strictly, the laborers could then receive overtime pay if they
exceeded normal hours during harvest or some other peak period.
The
figures mentioned above show the laborers often stopped work earlier than many
slaves in non-task system areas, at least those Olmsted had seen in the Deep
South. Interestingly enough, the
difference in latitude made "dawn to dusk" vary between England and
the subtropical South. The farther
north one goes, the shorter the daylight periods are in winter and the longer
in summer. One agricultural worker who
worked twelve hours a day in summer, told Sommervile that he worked "as
long as I have light to see in winter."
Since dusk approached by about four thirty, and nearly full darkness
arrived by five, for about three months laborers averaged only about eight and
a half hours of work per day.373 Excepting harvest and haymaking, the
agricultural workers' workday did not expand to fill all available
daylight hours during the summer. The
slaves then normally worked past six in the evening. England's colder climate and shorter growing season also limited
the amount of agricultural work possible for the laborers compared to the
slaves.374
For example, wheat harvesting in England normally was finished by late
September, but the process of picking, cleaning, and packing cotton might begin
in late August and continue into December.
Even with the addition of hand threshing, which was increasingly
superseded during the nineteenth century despite the intimidating retrogression
provoked by the Swing riots, seasonal patterns affected grain harvesting in
English arable areas more than the American South’s stereotypical
corn/cotton/hog agriculture. The
laborers were considered to work only eight or nine hours because one and a
half or more hours for meals being factored in. Many slaves lacked this benefit have during their workday, who
may have had one fairly short break of (perhaps) one half hour or more to eat
near noon, though some had up to two hours off.375 Certainly, the laborers' one and a half hour's
worth of breaks seemed to be much more widespread than the slaves having a
similar period off. These reasons point
to the average Southern slave having a relatively longer workday than the
average farmworker on a year-around basis, when excluding work on allotments
and gardens.376
The Length of the Workweek and Days Off--Slaves
Since
the owner of slaves possessed all their future time in their lives, and at his
discretion determined how much of it was to be taken up in work, he always had
an incentive to make slaves work as many days as possible. Especially in
country of largely unsettled wilderness which positively ached for human
labor to transform it into productive farmland from a profit-seeking viewpoint,
the slaveholders normally had no end of tasks for their bondsmen to
perform. Under these circumstances,
that so many slaves had Sundays off and sometimes part or all of Saturdays in the
antebellum South may be a little surprising.
Here slaveholders' paternalism did bear some practical fruit, since many
believed Sundays were reserved for church attendance and rest from work, and
applied this to their slaves. Other
days off included the Christmas-New Year holiday season and (much more rarely)
other holidays such as the Fourth of July.
The weather and the growing season played a role in giving days
off. A rainy day often canceled all
field work for all or part of the day.
Sometimes, due to the state of the growing crops and the effectiveness
of the hoeing that killed the weeds, there was little work to do on some summer
days. So besides the
"official" days off such as Sundays or Christmas, some slaves got
other days off as well.
Slaves Normally Did Not Work on Sundays
Normally slaves got Sundays off. Perhaps the number of slaves who received
all or part of Saturday off was somewhat greater than the number of those who
were forced to work on Sundays routinely.
On the one hand, there are the cases where the slaves got the whole
weekend off. Freedwoman Mom Hester
Hunter remembered that: "My old
missus was a dear old soul, and she would see to it that all her niggers wash
and iron and cook on Saturday 'cause she never allow no work gwine on round
where she was when Sunday come, be that she know 'bout it." Giles Smith, once a slave in Alabama,
recalled: "Us always have Saturday
afternoon and Sunday off."
"Aunt" Florida, born a slave on one of Jefferson Davis'
plantations in Mississippi, said that all day Saturday was given to the slaves
as a day off, as well as Sunday. His
Hurricane and Brierfield plantations were the only ones she knew of where the
master gave off this much time each week to the slaves. Joseph Sanford, a one-time Kentucky slave,
told Drew the overseer his master hired gave his slaves half of Saturdays
off. His owner disliked this practice,
but had to tolerate it for the time being since he had agreed to give the
overseer a free hand in management. On
the other hand, cases of slaves involuntarily laboring on Sundays occur,
showing the supposedly paternalistic Southern slaveholders were often as
profit-motivated as any Northern industrialist or merchant. These cases were not limited to sugar
plantations in grinding season, Northrup maintained, but was commonly imposed
during the height of the cotton picking season. Isaac Williams, once a slave in Virginia, planned to run away but
was handcuffed by his master before he ran away. When this occurred, he told him: "I have done all I could
for you, night and day, even carting wood on Sunday morning,--and this is what
I get for it." John Holmes knew of
one master with two or three farms who did not give Sundays off. He forced his slaves to move from one farm
to another on Sundays to be ready for work Mondays. John Warren, once a slave in Tennessee and Mississippi, was happy
he did not "have now to drive a wagon Sundays to haul cotton bales."377
In
colonial South Carolina, slaves often had to work on Sunday, either directly
for their master, or necessarily on plots for the food they ate. Gallay has maintained that due to the rise
of paternalism promoted by Whitefield and the Great Awakening in the late 1730s
and 1740s, and with the first really widespread and serious attempts to convert
the slaves to Christianity, they increasingly received Sundays off in order to
attend church. Certainly, by the time
of the last generation before the Civil War, Sundays off from forced
labor had become standard in the South, as abundant testimony demonstrates.378 However, slaves working voluntarily for pay
on Sundays was fairly common, as well as those who tended their plots of land
to raise food for themselves or for sale.379 Such labor was not necessarily
"voluntary" in that the standard rations of food or clothing did not
generally cover necessary household items, as Northrup described:
[A slave] is furnished with neither knife, nor fork,
nor dish, nor kettle, nor any other thing in the shape of crockery, or
furniture of any nature or description. . . . To ask the master for a knife, or skillet,
or any small convenience of the kind, would be answered with a kick, or laughed
at as a joke. Whatever necessary
article of this nature is found in a cabin has been purchased with Sunday
money. However injurious to the morals,
it is certainly a blessing to the physical condition of the slave, to be
permitted to break the Sabbath.
Otherwise, there would be no way to provide himself with any utensils,
which seem to be indispensable to him who is compelled to be his own cook.380
By not giving their bondsmen necessary household
items, masters and mistresses could drive them to work for them on Sundays for
pay since the "standard rations" were not enough to really get
by. So while Sunday (or late night)
paid labor could be called "voluntary," in that the slaves were not
whipped for not showing up, they often virtually had to do it in order to
prepare food, sit, and sleep in their cabins at a level higher than animals in
lairs or nests. Although fully forced
Sunday labor was uncommon for slaves in the American South in the thirty years
before the Civil War, slaveholders had lowered the compensation given for most
of the time slaves worked so much in their favor that when the slaves came to
them "voluntarily" to work for necessities they would have been able
to buy had they not been slaves, paying slaves for Sunday work still manifested
a distorted "free market" for labor.
Holidays the Slaves Did Not Work on
While
sometimes slaves received other holidays off, such as the Fourth of July,
almost universal was the custom of giving slaves some part of the Christmas to
New Year's season off from work.381 The bondsmen might be given presents, money,
or a fancy dinner by their master or mistress at this time. Planter Barrow gave his slaves $500 in 1839
and $700 in 1840 at Christmas time. In
1841 he gave them a number of articles he had bought for them in New
Orleans. However, in 1842 due to a poor
economy, he gave them lots of food and drink during this season, but no money
or manufactured items. The length of
this break varied greatly. Barrow gave
his slaves 12 days off during the 1840-1841 holiday season, while other masters
were often much more stingy. Jenny
Proctor described how on her master's estate in Alabama Christmas lasted as
long as the tree that burned in the master's fireplace. Taking advantage of this custom, the slaves
spent the whole year looking for, and then had burned, the biggest sweet-gum
tree they could find, in order to make the holiday season last longer. When they could not find one, and had to use
oak, they only had three days off on average.
The master also had his way of retaliating against his slaves taking
advantage of this custom: "Old
Master he sure pile on them pine knots, gitting that Christmas over so we could
git back to work." Douglass and
the slaves that he knew received six days off, basically all the time between
Christmas and New Year's Day. Harriet
Jacobs said the slaves who were to be rented were hired on New Year's Day, and
reported to work the next day. They
then worked until Christmas Eve, and had the next seven days in December off
before beginning the cycle anew if they were hired out again. So while the custom of allowing the slaves
to celebrate Christmas was virtually universal in the South, the length of the
time they had off during this already seasonally slow period of the
agricultural calendar varied considerably upon the individual slaveholder in
question--Northrup mentions three, four, five, and six days.382
Unplanned Days Off Due to Weather or the State of the
Crops
Slaves
received also received days off because of natural events related to the
weather and the state of growing crops.383 Even the Christmas break took advantage of
this, since most plantations had little regular work to do outside of those
growing sugar. By late December,
normally the harvesting was complete and the crop processed and packed for
shipment. Masters and mistresses could
easily give their bondsmen a week off then.
Another event that caused slaves to have unscheduled days off, at least
from field work, were rainy days. Based
upon Bennet Barrow's diary it becomes obvious that his slaves were routinely
pulled from tending the crops on rainy days, and put to work (if female) at
spinning often, while the men (at least sometimes) got away with doing little
or nothing, as noted above (p. 199).384 Then when the crops had already been
well-tended during the summer, and simply needed some time to grow before
further work was necessary, Barrow gave his slaves days off. For August 1, 1838, he commented: "Hoeing old above--4 sick--verry little
work to do." In 1840, after on
Friday, May 15, his "hoe hands [had] verry light work," he gave his
"negros [a] Holliday after 10 ok" on the next day, a Saturday. On June 11 of this same year, he noted: "Pleasant morning, Hoe hands waiting
for work for 6 days past, worked piece of new ground cotten fourth time
'scraped'" On June 15, 1841, he
said that he "shall stop hoes to night 'till it rains." In an entry
for June 8, 1838, he commented:
"This time last year was out of work owing to the dry spring." For June 8, 9 and 10 of 1837, he wrote: "No work in the
field. . . . stoped work untill it rains . . . gave
the hands to day." The last of
these three days was a Saturday. On
Saturday, May 21, 1842, with his slaves having "finished hoeing corn by
one oclock" his "negros [had a] holliday since." Evidently, when not much work needed to be
done on the crops, he tended to give them part or all of Saturday off, such as
the half day he gave off for May 23, 1840 or the whole day for Saturday, May
29, 1841. After noting his "crop
[was] in fine order" a couple days earlier, he gave his slaves Saturday,
June 16, 1838 off. For Saturday, June
23, 1838, he wrote: "Intended
giving all hands to day--but found 30 acres not half worked." Similarly, Kemble observed that the hands
got done by a rather early three thirty in the afternoon, on a sea island
plantation that grew cotton like Barrow's, and commented: "The chief labor in the cotton-fields,
however, is both earlier and later in the season. At present they have little to do but let the crop grow."385 Hence, the slaves may have gotten all or
part of Saturday off or received shorter days than sunrise to sunset in summer
when the crops did not need much further cultivating to kill the weeds.
Despite
the incentives for their owners to maximize the amount of work extracted from
their bondsmen, they clearly did not necessarily drive them to the limits of
endurance. No doubt, this result in
part was due to how the death rate of slaves would have increased as their
masters and mistresses drove them for longer hours. If slaveowners were ideal homo economicus
profit-maximizers, they would make their slaves work as many hours as they
could, so long as profits produced by the incremental work did not exceed the
costs of sicknesses and deaths caused by the additional hours of labor
imposed. As it was, certain social
institutions, such as the church's teachings about ceasing from work on Sundays
and having slaves attend services on that day, always tended to restrain the
bulk of masters and mistresses from probing the limits of their human chattels'
endurance. A degree of practical
paternalism, perhaps as much driven by self-interest as personal religious
conviction, was responsible for this.
While slaves such as Douglass saw much religious hypocrisy in the South
about their treatment, Gallay still has argued that Christianity, in the form
of the revivals of the Great Awakening of the mid-eighteenth century, was the
principal source of the paternalistic ethic in dealing with the slaves, which
was often expressed by practices like having Sundays off. The days off for Christmas, New Year's, etc.
also fell into this category. Natural
events, such as bad weather or having to wait for the crops to grow further,
also placed a damper on slaveholders seeking the make their slaves work as much
as they could. So although the slaves
worked very long hours, especially in newly settled regions in the Deep South,
the surrounding white society had certain practices from their social
institutions and also experienced natural phenomena that restrained them from
driving their slaves to the maximum extent possible even with the built-in
financial incentive involved.
The Days of Work for Agricultural Workers
Most
English agricultural workers suffered from the opposite problem the slaves
did: They had too many days off,
not too few. Farmworkers, at least most
of those in southern England, suffered from chronic underemployment and
unemployment throughout most of the period examined here, especially from about
1780 to 1850. They needed more work,
not less. American slaves suffered the
opposite problem of working too much, especially in the Deep South away from
the long-settled Atlantic Seaboard where paternalism and a lack of a strong
profit-making drive characterized proportionately more slaveholders. Had the English laborers been able to eke
out a living off the local commons, or using an allotment, they would have
suffered much less from unemployment.
As it was, with the enclosure movement being so strong in the 1790-1820
period, and allotments only seriously and more commonly becoming available only after (say) 1850, agricultural workers
became almost exclusively dependent on wages, and especially those of the male
head of household. Unlike many poor
whites in the American South, who through hunting, fishing, and some casual
agriculture, could meet their most basic needs generally without much routine,
methodical labor, this back-up option disappeared for most English farmworkers
by the end of the French Wars.
Furthermore, with the decline of service for the unmarried in Southern
England, especially in arable areas in the southeast, young farmworkers had to endure
the strong seasonal variations that characterize arable agriculture as much as
their day laboring elders. Dependence
on parish relief for the entire winter season was a common fate in these
areas. The financial incentives of the
farmers or directly-employing landowners were the opposite of the slaveholders'
in this regard: Since the former only
paid their workers when they worked, they had an incentive to minimize the
amount of work they did in order to minimize their wage bills. In contrast, since the slaveholders by
purchasing slaves had bought theoretically all of their future work potentials,
and had to feed and clothe them regardless of how much they worked, their
incentive was to make them work as much as possible. For the English farmer relying on day laborers, wages were a
totally variable cost, so long as he hired no farm servants for a fixed period
and ignored the rates going up as the number of poor increased, but for the
slaveowner, the costs of slave ownership were mostly fixed, between the initial
purchase price and the automatic rations the slaves were entitled to. The farmers, taking advantage of the reserve
army of the unemployed, tended to employ laborers only as they needed them,
even on a day-to-day or week-to-week basis, fomenting insecurity among the
farmworkers as a whole. Somerville
encountered in 1845 an apt analogy one Wiltshire farmer used to explain how he
treated his men:
On inquiry [concerning a speaker at an anti-corn law
meeting using the term "pitting potatoes"] I found this to refer to a
farmer who had said that he did with his labourers as he did with his
potatoes: he did not keep all the
potatoes out for use every day; and he did not, like some farmers, try to find
work for the men all the year round.
When he did not need them he put them in the workhouse until they were
needed.386
Any discussion of the number of days farmworkers
labored has to be considered against a grim backdrop of the decline of service,
the enclosure movement, chronic underemployment, seasonal unemployment in
arable areas, make-work activities, and the common experience of taking parish
relief, including stays in the workhouse.
Those Laborers Who Had to Work Sundays, and Those Who
Did Not
As
noted above, the laborers who tended animals necessarily faced seven-day
workweeks, such as carters and shepherds (p. 218). While they had to work everyday, these laborers did benefit from
having regular work year around, which was why those living in pastoral areas
suffered from less seasonal unemployment than those in arable areas, since the
needs of livestock for food and other care were daily affairs. Caleb Bawcombe told Hudson why shepherds had
to work everyday:
Some did say to me that they couldn't abide shepherding
because of the Sunday work. But I
always said, Someone must do it; they must have food in winter and water in
summer, and must be looked after, and it can't be worse for me to do it.
For regularly employed field laborers, Saturday work
was expected, but none for Sundays.
They did not like working extra hours of overtime past the customary
quitting time on Saturdays. Jeffries
describes the situation of one Farmer George who, while leading a crew
haymaking, made an unpopular decision late on Saturday that required extra
overtime work from his men.
The men grumble when they hear [his decision]; perhaps
a year ago they would have openly mutinied, and refused to work beyond the
usual hour. But, though wages are still
high, the labourers feel that they are not so much the masters as they
were--they grumble, but obey.
Jeffries elsewhere notes that half days on Saturdays
were more often observed in an urban setting than a rural one. In the country, those tending the animals
did not get off much sooner than they would have otherwise, nor were a half day
and a full day very different during winter months. Bear noted in 1893 that the number of men working on Sundays on a
Bedfordshire farm was one-fourth to one-half of those normally employed, with
one-third being rarely exceeded. The
number of hours worked by them on this day was four to six, changing with the
job and season of the year. As always,
those tending animals are the busiest on a Sunday: "Cowmen, who have to milk twice a day, are occupied longest
on Sunday, taking all seasons of the year into account." Farm servants did
no necessary work on Sundays, performing only such tasks as caring for the
animals. Strikingly, even during
harvest time, field workers often did not work Sundays. Arch noted that his union's branch
secretaries had to try to catch field laborers when they came home briefly on
weekends during harvest time: "In
hay and in harvest time the men would often be away from their homes for five,
six, and seven weeks, coming back late on the Saturday night, and leaving again
either late on Sunday night on early on Monday morning."387 Clearly, the laborers whose services were
not absolutely necessary on Sundays were not expected to work that day, such as
field workers during most (or all!) of the year, but those tending animals had
to be present everyday for at least a few hours, including Sundays.
Many
laborers still may have worked on Sundays, like slaves who had the day off
nominally. Instead of working for
someone else, they worked for themselves on their allotments, if they had
one. During winter, they did not work
on their allotments because nothing grew on them then. But for the rest of the year laborers worked
on them during days they had off when not employed. One man who let out allotments placed in the terms of the lease a
number of restrictions, one of which prohibited Sunday work. Jeffries portrays Hodge as merely strolling
down to his allotment to see how the crops were coming on Sundays, but not
actually working on it.388
Obviously, in a number of cases without such restrictions, Sunday work
by a farmworker or his family on their allotment must have been common. The laborer then did not have Sundays off
any more than the slaves who worked the same day to get the money to buy basic
kitchen utensils or necessary clothing.
Seasonal and Other Changes in the Workweek, and Their
Effects on Unemployment
Like
the slaves, farmworkers lost days of work to due to rain or the weather in
general. Robert Long, who farmed 280
acres in Bedfordshire, found in early July in 1866 that all the rain kept him
from getting on with the hay. Only as
the weather permitted could they work with the turnips on one part of the
farm. He had his teams do "odd
jobs carting out dung and carting in gravel to the yards, and also to the New
Close ruts that have been made larger lately since the weather has been so
showery." Although a banal event,
especially in the English climate, rainfall could significantly affect a
farmworker's family budget. The
Commission on Employment in Agriculture noted that the nominal wage rates per
week exceeded what the laborers were paid in actuality often because a number
had irregular work habits or lost days due to the rain. The seasonal fluctuations due to winter,
especially in arable areas, sharply affected how much labor was needed. Even in Durham in northern England, once the
potatoes were gathered, work ceased until spring. Some of the desperation
fueling the Swing riots was, according to Hudson, because "it was
customary, especially on the small farms, to get rid of the men after the
harvest [such as in October or November] and leave them to exist the best way
they could during the bitter winter months." Other days were lost because of a chronic surplus of laborers
seeking employment in many areas in southern England. The "ploughman" Somerville set up to debate a guardian
and others said in Wilton, Wiltshire one third of the population was normally
without work, another third had it only three days a week, and only one third
was employed continuously year around.
In a problem found elsewhere in England as well, there was in the
Humber-Wold area in 1867-68 one group was composed of steadily employed men,
while another were irregularly employed "catch work" laborers, who
had no fixed employer. The latter's
wives and children worked in gangs in order to keep up financially. Interestingly, in strong contrast to how
many slaves might fake illness to get a day off since they lost little by doing
so, the laborers' loss of some days due to sickness was seen as one more factor
that affected their earnings negatively.389 Even with the poor rates hiked due to
layoffs of laborers, at least in "open" parishes where the extra
laborers lived in the same parish as the ratepayers, employers often judged it
financially expedient to lay off many laborers in the winter months just to
hire them back in spring. Unlike the
case for slaves, whose masters had an incentive to make them work as much as
possible because the substantially fixed costs of maintaining a slave were
largely the same whether they worked zero hours or seventy, the farmers and
landowners of England had an incentive to have laborers work as little as
possible above what was judged profitable and/or necessary for maintaining
agricultural production. The difference
between the two work forces came from who bore the costs of idleness, creating
very incentives for these two elites when dealing with their respective work
forces. In England, the laborers lost
financially, not their employers, while for the slaveowners, every idle day
lost of compulsory labor cost them, not their slaves, who had to be fed
regardless of the weather.
The
slaves clearly worked more hours per day and per week than the agricultural
workers normally. The farmworkers did
not necessarily benefit from this difference, for much of it was due to
underemployment and unemployment.
Unlike the slaves, who were at least theoretically guaranteed a certain
amount of food and clothing regardless of how much they worked, since the
agricultural workers were attempting to independently support their families, a
lack of work could have dire effects on their financial and even physical
conditions. Furthermore, the
frustration and unease caused by chronic underemployment and unemployment
eroded away the laborers' feelings of independence, especially as they so often
had to resort to parish relief in winter time in arable areas. Modern microeconomic theory, which sees the
number of hours filled by work as a purely negative activity that is willingly
traded off for additional hours of leisure in a labor supply curve, overlooks
how a person's identity, especially for men in Victorian society, largely
consisted of what job or occupation they had.
When they lacked work, especially for periods of months on end, this
chewed away at their self-respect, and encouraged non-productive activities
such as idling away hours in pubs and various crimes (at least from the upper
class's viewpoint) such as poaching. In
the case of the slaves, they almost never had a problem in being supplied
enough work, especially in a frontier wilderness area that characterized so
much of the South even in 1860. Their
problem was the exact opposite: Their
masters and mistresses were apt to work them for too many hours, sometimes to
the limits of endurance and past. The
situation of the slaves and farmworkers varied because their respective elites'
profit motives manifested themselves in different ways. With the decline of service, the employers
of farmworkers minimized their costs by employing them as little as possible
since they had to pay them each time they worked. For the slaves, their owners had purchased in advance all their
potential work efforts, so to maximize profits they would have them work as
much as possible. Of course, this
summary ignores how paternalism in one form or another might restrain farmers
from hiring laborers on a day-by-day basis only, and slaveholders from making
their slaves work sixteen hour days six or seven days a week. Nevertheless, both groups of workers were
oppressed by their respective ruling classes, but one group was controlled
through a lack of work, while the other was controlled by having too much
imposed on it.
How "Voluntarily" Did Slaves Work? The Necessity of Coercion and Supervision
"Slavery"
defines a relationship that involves the will of the owner of a slave having
fundamentally total de jure control over another human being's
life. The will of the master or
mistress theoretically should become identical to the will of the slave. The slave is to give up all self-interest
that conflicts with the will of his or her owner. He or she treats the slave's life not as an end in itself, but as
a means to the slaveholder's own ends in life.
In point of fact, this goal was never practically attained, because the
human spirit or human nature does not naturally submit completely to someone
else, especially when the self-interest of the subordinated person normally
directly conflicts with following the commands of the master. The slave wants to work as little as
possible, yet receive not only the standard rations, but steal some more on the
sly from the master's stores. The slave
naturally desires to be free from the absolutely binding will of his master,
yet legally is tied to him for life or until sale. He naturally resents how his life's fate is determined by his
master, with no court of appeal against his decisions, except perhaps in rare,
extreme cases of mistreatment. The
amount of self-interest that binds most slaves to their owners is small,
excepting those who may have "sold out" and benefit from working to
enforce the master's rules, such as drivers, or those who by having
long-standing, multi-generational personal and intimate contact with the white
family that owned them and by enjoying better physical comforts sometimes came
to identify with "their white folks," such as certain domestic
servants like mammies or valets.
Continual struggle characterized the relationships between the field
hands and many domestic servants on the one hand, and the slaveholders and
their hired lackeys, the overseers, on the other. Kemble once listened to her husband's overseer who was "complaining of the sham
sicknesses of the slaves, and detailing the most disgusting struggle which is
going on the whole time, on the one hand to inflict, and on the other to evade
oppression and injustice." Slavery
was a "state of perpetual war," consisting normally of low-intensity
"day-to-day resistance," punctuated by occasional revolts, pitched
battles, and executions.390
The
central objective of masters and mistresses was to maximize their slaves' work
effort with a minimal investment in time, money, and force to extract it. While paternalistic masters and mistresses
may have denied the typical profit maximizing goal that they said characterized
the Northern merchant or industrialist, still most slaveholders pursued similar
goals, outside of some who had lived on the same land and had owned the same
families of blacks for generations along the Eastern Seaboard, often upon soil
of largely exhausted fertility.
Slaveholders confronted a major problem in pursuing this objective: The measures undertaken that made their black
work forces more easily controlled often simultaneously injured damaged their
capability to work as effectively or productively. They wished to keep their slaves from taking care of themselves,
yet not destroy their ability to carry out their daily toil.391 As Barrow commented in his "Rules of
Highland Plantation":
You must provide for him Your self and by that means
creat in him a habit of perfect dependence on you--allow it ounce to be
understood by a negro that he is to provide for himself, and you that moment
give him an undeniable claim on you for a portion of his time to make this
provision, and should you from necessity, or any other cause, encroach upon his
time--disappointment and discontent are seriously felt.392
An obvious example of the practical costs in keeping
slaves in line was from denying them an education in most parts of the South. Keeping a subordinate class ignorant makes
it much easier to control, yet also hampers its ability to labor as effectively
for the dominant class. One good
practical reason for keeping the slaves illiterate was to prevent them from
forging passes that allowed them to leave their home plantations for
destinations elsewhere, including northward.393 True, because the slaves normally engaged in
field work or domestic service that required neither literacy nor numeracy,
this policy's costs to the elite was largely limited to the artisans whose
minds were darkened by it. But the
costs were there, and the Southern elite by and large judged these perfectly
acceptable. Their objective was not to
develop the full human potential of their personal chattels by improving their
minds and abilities, but to extract labor services from them in order to raise
profitable cash crops. The slaves' own
ends in life were largely irrelevant, except as theirs interfered with the
plans and desires of their owners in their lives. The masters of the slaves channeled and
stunted the development of the slaves abilities and talents in order to fulfill
the their own ends in life, as part of the process of imposing social control
and labor discipline.
Why the Whip Had to Be Used to Impose Work Discipline
on the Slaves
To
meet the purposes of imposing work discipline, the slaveowners had a number of
tools at their command. The most
obvious, as well as the most used and abused, was coercion through corporal
punishment. Although some few masters
and mistresses were able to dispense with it, by and large the whip stood out
as the emblem of authority for the slaveowner as well as the overseer.394 Time and time again, slave narratives
describe the savage beatings that slaveholders or overseers inflicted on the
blacks under their authority. Beatings
were inflicted for malingering at work, running away, mistakes made from
inexperience or incompetence while on the job, and for about any imaginable
petty and not-so-petty offense that came before the generally passionate,
rough-hewn, easily-provoked slaveholders and overseers of the South.395 Olmsted once had the rare experience of
being a Northerner who witnessed a full-blown thrashing of a shirking young
slave woman. He questioned the overseer
who had so passionlessly inflicted this beating on her whether it was
necessary. He replied:
If I hadn't [whipped her], she would have done the
same thing again to-morrow, and half the people on the plantation would have followed
her example. Oh, you've no idea how
lazy these niggers are; you Northern people don't know anything about it. They'd never do any work at all if they were
not afraid of being whipped.396
Clearly, this overseer, who was regarded as one above
average in ability, believed in the utter necessity of using (or threatening to
use) physical force to get the slaves he supervised to work. Unlike the case for free wage workers, where
denying them work and the corresponding wage payments would eventually starve
them out, the slaveholder automatically supplies what the slave needs for
survival (and normally little above that), so he has little natural desire to
work out of personal self-interest or from the desire to feed his family. In place of the driving force of
self-interest or serving their family, and from the manifest inability for most
slaves to fundamentally change their position in life from being a personal
chattel owned by another, the external motivation supplied by the whip had to
generally replace internal self-motivation.
How Commonly Were the Slaves Whipped? The Time on the Cross Controversy
How
often were slaves whipped? Fogel and
Engerman, using Bennet Barrow's diary, maintained:
His plantation numbered about 200 slaves, of whom
about 120 were in the labor force. The
record shows that over the course of two years a total of 160 whippings were
administered, an average of 0.7 whippings per hand per year. About half the hands were not whipped at all
during the period.
Their calculations were not based on the main text of
the diary, but on an appendix in the published version assembled by the editor,
Edwin Davis. It lists "misconduct
and punishments" for 1840-41. A
problem with the text as presented here is that for many diary entries an
"X" is placed next to the name of the slave whipped by Barrow, but
he, characteristically, was not fully consistent at doing this. Strictly counting just the "X"'s,
one comes up with 156 whippings that were so marked in his diary. It appears this was mostly what Fogel and
Engerman counted. In rebuttals them on
this point, Gutman and Sutch maintained 175 whippings were administered against
the slaves on Barrow's plantation, which must include whippings that were not
marked by an "X" in the diary's appendix. About 155 names get listed in the appendix with an offense or a
blank space (the equivalent of ditto marks?) next to them, but no tell-tale "X." In two cases, a whipping was noted in the
entry besides the name, yet no "X" was placed by the slave's name,
with one of these mentioning how the six slaves listed immediately above, also
without "X"s by their names, were whipped for being late in reporting
to work in the morning. In another
case, the main entry for the diary mentions how a group of five slaves were
whipped for killing a hog in the field, but the appendix has no "X"s
by their names. Once, when two carters
and four house slaves were whipped, the main entry notes this, but no
"X"s appear by the slaves' names in the appendix. Twice Alfred (the driver) was whipped during
this time, but his name never appears in the appendix as one who was
punished. The whipping for one slave
woman was unlisted in the appendix. She
was whipped for an incident that involved Barrow's cook. After she complained about the injustice of
being whipped because the cook really was at fault, Barrow allowed her to give
the cook "a good drubing" in compensation!397 Evidently, by counting these additional 22
whippings and adding it to the 156 ones that do have "X"s by their
names (one of these cases having one "X" to stand for two slaves
being whipped), Gutman and Sutch came up with (though the math and the exact
way they arrived at their count is not clear) their 175 figure. Note that if all the names with
offenses or blank spaces but no "X"s are also counted along with the
ones which do have "X"s, one suddenly comes up with Barrow having
administered some 330 whippings in about 23 months, a wildly different figure,
but one which seems plausible from the listing of offenses in the appendix even
when no punishment (i.e., an "X") is signified besides the names
listed. Clearly, Fogel and Engerman underestimated the number of whippings that
occurred on Highland plantation with their 160 figure, although even Gutman and
Sutch's correction may still be too low.
Fogel
and Engerman's calculation uses a figure of 120 active field workers in
Barrow's labor force, which is a much bigger problem than their underestimate
of the number of whippings. This figure
is way too high for the number he had during the time the diary's appendix
covers (mostly 1840-41). For example,
for his entry of August 12, 1842, he said he averaged sixty-five hands during
one day of cotton picking, which was the time of year when virtually every man,
woman, and child that could work was mobilized for field labor. On September 11, 1842 he had seventy-two
pickers at work, which included a number of children. For November 3, 1838, he had forty-two pickers in the field, and
on September 10, 1842, he had sixty-nine pickers, including eleven
children. Evidently, the figure of 120
hands is deduced from Barrow's will and estate inventory, which was probated in
1854, but by then he had far more slaves than in 1840-41. They also used a base of two years instead
of twenty-three months which (with the exception of the final entry) is all the
appendix covers. As a result, Fogel and
Engerman's figure of 0.7 whippings per hand per year seriously underestimates
the number of whippings inflicted.
Gutman and Sutch calculate 1.19 whippings per hand per year, a 69
percent higher figure. Furthermore,
Barrow used other punishments which are not included in this count, such as
overtime work, imprisonment, chaining, shooting, head raking, even humiliation
by having men wear women's clothes or placing one slave wearing a red flannel
cap on a scaffold in the quarters.
(This list includes punishments inflicted outside the period the
appendix covers). Since their
calculations here are plainly incorrect, Kolchin lets Fogel and Engerman off
too easily when summarizing this historiographical dispute, allowing the
intellectual fog coming from controversy obscure Gutman and Sutch's clear
refutation of them.398
Now a broader question needs to be
asked about Fogel and Engerman's conclusions about the relative rarity of
whippings on Highland plantation.
Instead of asking how often an individual slave was whipped per year,
Gutman and Sutch ask how often did Barrow's bondsmen see someone among
their number whipped. After all, the
purpose of punishing one slave is not just to deter that one individual slave
from shirking, running away, etc. in the future, but all the rest as well. Much like the overseer Olmsted talked to,
who said if he did not whip the slave woman he saw avoiding work, half the
plantation the next day would do likewise (above, p. 232), Barrow counted on
the deterrence value of punishment by example.
Gutman calculated that a flogging occurred every 4.56 days on Barrow's
plantation on average.399
This result means Barrow continually induced fear by wielding the whip,
which his slaves had to consider when thinking of breaking his rules since the
worst regularly happened to others they knew, on an average of three
times every two weeks.
The Deterrence Value of Occasional Killings
A
more drastic punishment existed, although its cost were very high, and by
inflicting it on some individual it could only change the behavior of other
slaves: death. Sometimes the slave was killed by a master
or overseer, sometimes by a lynch mob, sometimes by the judicial system after
receiving the full measure of due process that a slave (and his or her
financially self-interested owner) could expect. Regardless of source, they all combined to remind the bondsmen
that a fate worse than corporal punishment awaited those who committed the
worst crimes. Furthermore,
unpredictably, for petty offenses, a master in the heat of passion or in the
throws of insanity could also inflict it.
In some cases slaves were killed or executed by burning them alive. One slave in Tennessee who killed his master
was executed thus, with many a fellow slave witness of his dreadful end:
He was roasted, at a slow fire, on the spot of the
murder, in the presence of many thousand slaves, driven to the ground from all
the adjoining counties, and when, at length, his life went out, the fire was
intensified until his body was in ashes, which were scattered to the winds and
trampled under foot. Then 'magistrates
and clergymen' addressed appropriate warnings to the assembled subjects.
This extreme case, stoutly justified in the local
press, was not unique, as Olmsted indicated in a footnote that one judge had
gathered evidence of slave burnings "every year in the last twenty"
(c. 1840-60). Barrow strongly approved
of the burning alive of two runaways who killed two white men and raped two
white women. A "great many [were
brought] to witness it & several hundred negros &c. Burning was even too good for
them." Executions by burning were
also "authorized" by lynch mob, such as the hardly singular case of a
Alabama justice of the peace who, being intimidated by a crowd of seventy or
eighty men, allowed them to vote to burn alive the slave who killed a white
man.400
Being
whipped or shot to death by one's owner was a much more likely fate than being
burned at the stake. While clearly
uncommon, it occurred enough that slaves knew it could happen to them,
especially when so much arbitrary and absolute power had been committed into
the hands of their owners. Since the
slaveholders by regional character were passionate, emotional men who placed
perceived points of honor above cold-blooded financial calculations, the slaves
had something more to fear. Sometimes,
they killed in arguable cases of self-defense:
"One day he [a slave named Joe] turn on Marse Jim with a fence
rail, and Marse Jim had to pull his gun and kill him." Much more likely, a slave was killed for
violating some rule or otherwise violating his or her owner's expectations. Mary Younger told Drew she knew of a
mistress who lived nearby who whipped no less than three of her slave women to
death. Younger also helped one badly
whipped man by greasing his back--who still soon died. One slave girl was hanged by her master and
mistress for revealing to Union soldiers where they had buried the family's
silver, money, and jewelry after they had left. Douglass described several cases of slaves being killed--nay,
murdered--by their owners without punishment, such as one for trespassing on
another master's property and another for being slow to assist with a crying
baby because she had fallen asleep.401
The Danger of Corporal Punishment Backfiring,
Requiring "Massive Retaliation"
One
especially dangerous flash point was when a slave challenged his master's
authority by refusing some (lesser) punishment. Then, his owner just might up the ante and kill him. The reasoning was that if one slave could
get away with refusing to obey his master, then others would soon follow suit,
and the whole system of involuntary labor would collapse. Austin Gore, an overseer in Maryland
Douglass served under, shot a slave to death who had been whipped some by him,
but had briefly escaped to the temporary sanctuary of a nearby creek before
being permanently dispatched by a musket.
He explained to Colonel Lloyd, the slave's owner, why he killed
him:
His reply was, (as well as I can remember,) that Demby
had become unmanageable. He was setting
a dangerous example to the other slaves,--one which, if suffered to pass
without some such demonstration on his part, would finally lead to the total
subversion of all rule and order upon the plantation. He argued that if one slave refused to be corrected, and escaped
with his life, the other slaves would soon copy the example; the result of
which would be, the freedom of the slaves, and the enslavement of the whites.
Singling out Demby as an example was evidently
effective, because a "thrill of horror flashed through every soul upon the
plantation" excepting the overseer himself when the deed was done. Mother Anne Clark described how her father
suffered a similar fate for refusing a whipping:
He never had a licking in his life. . . .
one day the master says, "Si, you got to have a whopping," and my
poppa says, "I never had a whopping and you can't whop me." And the master says, "But I can kill
you," and he shot my papa down.402
The
policy of sacrificing some slaves' lives to frighten the rest into submission
was time and again judged a cost-effective tactic by slaveholders.
Freedman Cato of Alabama described this approach to
discipline thus:
When they [the slaves] was real 'corrigible, the white
folks said they was like mad dogs and didn't mind to kill them so much as
killing a sheep. They'd take 'em to the
graveyard and shoot 'em down and bury 'em face downard, with their shoes
on. I never seed it done, but they made
some the niggers go for a lesson to them that they could git the same.
The well-attended hanging of a slave woman who set her
master's barn afire and killed thirteen horses and mules was evidently such an
exercise. While these acts of terrorism
were rare, they did not have to be common to usefully promote social control
and work discipline from the slaveholders' viewpoint. Similarly, the calculation that "only" 127 blacks out
of 6 million (0.003 percent) were lynched in 1889 implicitly greatly
understates the deterrent effects that the mere known existence of this
practice had in keeping the black man in line.
Just hearing about the death of a slave at the hands of his master was
enough to keep many in line, and when push did come to shove, a master's threats
to kill a recalcitrant slave often were enough to get him to fall into line,
since the worst possible result was known to happen in these situations. So when Mary Grayson's mother saw her master
waving a shotgun from his buggy, loudly threatening her to "git them
children together and git up to my house before I beat you and all of them to
death!," they knew "he acted like he was going to shoot sure enough,
so well all ran to Mammy and started for Mr. Mose's house as fast as we could trot."403 In these cases, the deterrent value of prior
terrorism, exercised on a few individuals sacrificed for the greater good (?)
of maintaining the overall system paid off, whether done by masters
individually, a lynch mob, or the court system, making the mere threat of using
deadly force enough to make most slaves fall into line.
How Even Good Masters Could Suddenly Kill a Slave in
the Heat of Passion
Southern
masters professing paternalism might have denied pursuing this policy, or at
least would have disavowed killing slaves except for major crimes such as
murder. Barrow, who clearly was quick
to punish his own slaves, condemned a neighboring planter named A.G. Howell for
(it was said) castrating three slaves, and killing others, including leaving
some in the stocks until they were dead.
He also judged him for ironing up one slave boy up his leg and thigh,
creating a nearly solid scab in the process, after which he chained him around
the neck. Concerning another man who
whipped a black to death, Barrow wrote:
"Man tried for Whipping a negro to Death. trial will continue till to morrow--deserves
death--Cleared!" Masters such as
Barrow did not believe in killing slaves except for major offenses. Nevertheless, the mere fact a number of
masters were not so paternalistic--or predictable when losing their
temper--meant death always remained a possible penalty for bondsmen with all
but the kindest masters. After all,
Barrow himself, who condemned Howell's cruelty, one time was mad enough to
write that he "would give 'freely' $100 to get a shot" at one runaway
slave who he had actually shot at and hit four years before. At that time, Barrow said he would shoot him
if he ran away, soon following through with his threat after making it.404 Hence, even a fairly typical large planter
such as Barrow, who was neither especially cruel nor kind, could kill one of
his own slaves under the right circumstances, an outcome his slaves undoubtedly
weighed when calculating whether and when they should disobey him.
Miscellaneous Punishments that Masters Inflicted on
Slaves
Masters
and mistresses had a multitude of alternative punishments besides whipping and
outright killing to keep their work forces in line. One approach was to stake slaves in chains, and let them suffer
under the hot sun. Another was to set up stocks, and place the slave's head and
hands through the boards, perhaps for weeks at the time for a serious offense
such as trying to run away to the North.
One slave woman for refusing to work was for a whole year made to sit on
a log daily where the ants bit her.
Planter Barrow, as noted above (p. 234), was particularly inventive in
some of his punishments for his slaves, which included making male slaves dress
in women's clothing. During Christmas
one year he exhibited a recently captured runaway slave on a scaffold while
sporting a red flannel cap. Another
time he made a slave "wear a sheet topped with red-feathered flannel ear
muffs." Less creatively, he
imposed overtime on slaves who had worked badly and imposed a general ducking
in water. One slaveowner's particularly
disgusting but ingenious penalty consisted of making a slave eat the worms that
he had missed taking off tobacco leaves.405 Imprisonment also was an option, both
private and public. Planter Barrow had
a jail of his own for recalcitrant slaves, such as one who pretended to be
sick, one cotton picker who tried to pass off a ten pound rock as cotton, and
others who ran away. Many a slave who
committed some major crime or had run away and had been caught ended up in some
local jail until his owner picked him up--or sold him. Douglass experienced this fate after his
conspiracy with others to escape failed, and he was briefly in jail before his
master picked him up. Others that Drew
interviewed ended up in jail because of failed escape attempts or, once, in
connection to a successful one.406 So in addition to the obvious expedients of
whipping and sometimes killing slaves who did not obey, a multitude of other
punishments existed, including sale.407
Examples of Corporal Punishment Backfiring
Whenever
a slaveholder inflicted corporal punishment on a slave, an element of risk
lurked because it could backfire. The
slave might resist the whipping, or could run away in retaliation, which raised
the costs of routinely using the whip unpredictably, since a master or mistress
could not fully know in advance what would happen. Barrow experienced a number of times a backlash against
punishments he meted out. After Tom
Beauf picked badly, so Barrow whipped him, leaving a few cuts on his back. The next day in the evening he left the
field, and he had "not seen him since." After whipping him for not picking enough cotton the day before,
Dennis ran away the next day. Barrow
once wanted to weigh G. Jerry's basket at dinner time (noon). He evaded handing it over, and got whipped
for it. This act "offended his
Lordship & he put out."
Another time, he told Dennis--the troublemaking slaves in Barrow's diary
tend to be the same ones all the time--that he intended to whip him, evidently
for not picking enough cotton, and he ran away. Barrow commented, after sending another after him: "I had rather a negro would do any
thing Else than runaway." Besides
running away, trying to punish a slave had another possible result: The slave could fight back, possibly even
killing the slaveowner or his overseer.
Aunt Nicey Pugh of Alabama said that:
"There was a white woman who was kilt by a nigger boy 'cause she
beat him for sicking a dog on a fine milch cow." John Little, who had been a slave in Virginia and North Carolina,
described to Drew once how he felt. His
character and past history of resistance indicates his meditations were no mere
idle thoughts:
I sometimes felt such a spirit of vengeance, that I
seriously meditated setting the house on fire at night, and killing all as they
came out. I overcame the evil, and
never got at it--but a little more punishment would have done it. I had been so bruised and wounded and beset,
that I was out of patience. . . . On that night when I was threatened with the paddle again, I was
fully determined to kill, even if I were to be hanged and, if it pleased God,
sent to hell: I could bear no more.
Slaves also could retaliate by a production slowdown,
after being forced to work more hours than they wished.408 While corporal punishment may have been
cheaper in application normally than imprisonment, as Fogel and Engerman note,
when it backfired this was not true, when the expenses of lost labor time and
pursuing a runaway piled up, or when the overseer or master were injured or
even killed for trying to whip a slave who refused to consent to the
punishment.409
Did Slaveowners Successfully Implant a Protestant Work
Ethic in the Slaves?
Fogel
and Engerman remarkably claim that not only had the master class sought to
imbue the slaves with the Protestant work ethic, but often succeeded in
accomplishing that goal:
[Planters] wanted devoted, hard-working, responsible
slaves who identified their fortunes with the fortunes of their masters. Planters sought to imbue slaves with a
"Protestant" work ethic and to transform that ethic from a state of
mind into a high level of production. . . . The logic of [Stampp's] position made it
difficult to acknowledge that ordinary slaves could be diligent workers, imbued
like their masters with a Protestant ethic.410
Their claim's fundamental problem is a lack of
evidence from the slave's own viewpoint that he or she was so motivated, and
identified with the slaveholder's own interests so closely. While some house servants, who had been owned
by multiple generations of the same white family on the same plantation may
have come to closely identify with their owners' interests, this assuredly
generally was not the case with most field hands. The master's self-interest in trying to maximize work and
minimize expenses in maintaining them was too diametrically opposed to the
slave's self-interest in working as little as possible and increasing what
food, clothing, etc. he got from his owner.411 Fogel and Engerman exaggerate the extent to
which most slaveholders had worked out an elaborate system of positive
incentives to give slaves a reason to work beyond negative sanctions such as
whipping.412
Instead of seeing whipping and other manifestations of physical force as
a supplement to incentives coming from wages for overtime work, Christmas
bonuses, promotions, and manumissions, these positive incentives should be seen
as largely superfluous additions to a slaveholder regime characterized by
violence, force, and physical punishment.
Proof
that slaves were mainly kept in line by force and the threat of it comes from
how work discipline so often collapsed and many slaves fled from their masters
when armies of a power hostile to slaveholders' interests were nearby, whether
it was the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, or--especially--the Civil
War. If the slaves had had so many
positive incentives to work for their masters, masses of field hands would not
have fled from their plantations as the Union army moved southward, and others
would have been so defiant or uncooperative while they remained.413 The slaveholder's use of force on his labor
force, and protection against rebellion or mass non-compliance with his orders,
ultimately relied on others in society backing him up with force when he was
challenged, since the slaves on plantations and farms often greatly outnumbered
their owners. The disorganization
caused by war served as an opportunity for the subordinate class--here, the
slaves--to publicly express their true feelings and beliefs by word and
deed since some nearby army hostile to the dominant class provided potential
protection against their superiors' ability to use coercion against
subordinates who were supposed to always obey them. Because the private thoughts and oral expressions of the bulk of
the slaves are irretrievably lost as part of what Scott calls the hidden
transcript, normally we cannot know what thoughts motivated them. However, the various slave narratives
composed by a small minority of slaves (often with the help of abolitionist
whites) give valuable insights into how the slaves did look at the system of
oppression they suffered under.414 The protecting presence of armies hostile to
the dominant class in the South allowed the bondsmen to "speak truth to
power." They could publicly
express their beliefs about those over them in authority, and defy that class
by running away or refusing to obey this or that order issued by their owners.415 In this extreme situation, during the Civil
War, with the old regime, being clearly and fundamentally challenged, indeed,
in its death throes--the true beliefs of the slaves came out into the open and
into the public transcript. Then, it
stood revealed many did not accept their master's paternalistic ideology
in reality, but had earlier professed it and used it tacitly against their
masters when they were far more powerless against the dominant class' ability
to coerce them. Fogel and Engerman's
claims that the slaves had to some greater or lesser degree internalized the
Protestant work ethic is fatally undermined not just by a lack of positive
evidence, such as citations from the slave narratives, but by the
quasi-freedmen who fled to areas where the Union army was present, or who
stayed on their masters' plantations, but increasingly disobeyed them or
requested wages for routine work.
The Slaves' Sense of Work Discipline Like that of
Other Pre-Industrial People
Fogel and Engerman's claims about the
slaves being inculcated with the Protestant work ethic is closely tied to the
issue of how much the slaves had a time-orientation as opposed to a
task-orientation in their work habits, and how punctual they were getting to
work in the morning, and methodical in working once there. Their work habits were a subset of those of
pre-industrial peasant peoples everywhere, including Europe, where hard work in
irregular spasms was valued, but consistently punctual and regular daily
labor was not. The type and amount of
work necessary was tied to the seasonal and diurnal rhythms of planting,
tending, and harvesting crops. English
artisans, having "Saint Monday" off, often started the workweek with
little or no work, but worked furiously long hours towards its end, collapsing
into exhaustion late on Saturday, just to repeat the cycle again next
week. This irregular cycle illustrates
how workers may work hard, but not especially regularly. The pre-industrial peasant mentality was
also characterized by not working once a customary level of subsistence had
been reached, and even while any money remained in the pocket. Defoe described cynically such a worker this
way:
There is nothing more frequent than for an Englishman
to work till he has got his pockets full of money, and then go and be idle or
perhaps drunk till this is all gone. . . . Ask him in his cups what he intends, he'll
tell you honestly, he'll drink as long as it lasts and then go to work for
more.416
A hike in wages paid per hour backfires on the
employers of people who think this way because they work proportionately fewer
hours, as per the backwards bending labor supply curve.
In
the particular case of the enslaved blacks, they were brought into a labor
system in America which, for all their masters and mistresses' efforts to make
them work regularly, was still largely regulated by the seasonal agricultural
work cycle. Turning the slaves into
methodical clock-punchers was simply not fully practical or necessary because
agricultural work is highly irregular even in subtropical areas such as the
American South. A factory work regime
in its classical form is strictly time-oriented and not tied to daylight or
seasonal rhythms. Admittedly, the sugar
planters, having around-the-clock slave labor in their sugar refineries,
approached this model, but even then it was done during a grinding season,
not year around. Field work on their
plantations was still dominated by seasonal rhythms. Furthermore, the whites themselves in the South who were supposed
to be inculcating this Protestant work ethic into the slaves, hardly
exemplified it themselves, whether planter or poor white. After all, one of the key differences
between a Yankee businessman and a paternalistic planter, pro-slavery
apologists stated, was that the former was much more methodical and regular in
pursuing wealth than the latter, who knew when relaxing was good in
itself. James Sumler saw the implicit
hypocrisy on this score among whites, which encouraged him to escape from
slavery in Virginia: "After I got
to years of maturity, and saw the white people sitting in the shade [presumably
his master's family in particular], while I worked in the sun, I thought I
would like to be my own man."417 As for the poor whites, much like the
English cottagers who eked out a living on the end of their village's commons
before enclosure wiped out that way of life, they often scraped by through
hunting, fishing, some casual subsistence farming, perhaps supplemented by some
wage labor in order to get cash for goods that had to be purchased. Olmsted routinely found throughout the South
that large planters when asked about the local poor whites always felt them to
have a bad influence on their slaves because
the contrast between the habits of the former--most of
the time idle, and when working, working only for their own benefit and without
a master--constantly offered suggestions and temptations to the slaves to
neglect their duty, to run away and live a vagabond life, as these poor whites
were seen to.
Genovese's excellent discussion of the slaves and
their work ethic, which draws upon Thompson's insights on work discipline being
imposed on the English working class, clearly demonstrates the shallowness of
Fogel and Engerman's claim that planters often succeeded in inculcating the
Protestant work ethic into their slaves, especially when they lacked it to a
significant degree themselves to begin with, and had to use force so often to
keep their bondsmen working.418
Genovese's Paternalism: How Successful Were Planters in Imposing Hegemony?
Another
ideological control device the slaveholders used to control the slaves needs
discussion here besides Fogel and Engerman's Protestant work ethic. The foundation of Genovese's work Roll,
Jordan, Roll concerns the slaves accepting their masters' ideology of paternalism
with its reciprocal duties between the enslavers and the enslaved, as per
Gramsci's notions of hegemony. Even if
the slaves often changed and adapted this ideology to favor their own purposes
in life, turning what privileges their masters and mistresses granted them
customarily into rights, they still accepted the overall system of paternalism,
if not always slavery itself. Genovese
maintains:
But despite their [the slave preachers'] will and
considerable ability, they could not lead their people over to the attack
against the paternalist ideology itself. . . . The range from abject acceptance of slavery
through insistence on a decent return to outright defiance should not obscure
the underlying thread. Some accepted slavery in fear of freedom; others in
awareness of superior force; others only because they were held down by the
manifestation of that force. Almost
all, however, with lesser or greater intensity, fell into a paternalistic
pattern of thought, and almost all redefined that pattern into a doctrine of
self-protection.419
Genovese' view raises the issue of whether most slaves
developed "false consciousness," i.e., really accepted the
ideology of their masters and made it their own as well.
Scott Versus Hegemony
Scott's
analysis casts serious doubt upon this score.
In contrast to Genovese's analysis, is it not possible that the slaves
could have merely proclaimed publicly their devotion to what their masters
believed in order to obtain some practical advantage, while privately denying
it? They could appeal to their masters
and mistresses on the basis of the latter's views of ruling for the good
of the slaves in order to obtain (say) better rations, less punishment,
and so forth. The ideology of the
dominant class can be used by the subordinate class to condemn the former when
they fall hypocritically short of its ideals, yet still allow them to appear in
conformity with their superiors' beliefs.
Often the weak have some practical self-interest in creating an
appearance of hegemony by their superiors, and will go through the motions of publicly
appearing to accept their values, while among their own kind alone, they will
deny them. Merely noting the rituals of
deference, such as slaves not talking back to an overseer ordering to do
something in a particular case, but looking downwards and shuffling away, does
not mean those so engaged have accepted their masters' ideological
"hegemony in the sense of active consent." For example, consider the implications of what Douglass
experienced initially with his Baltimore mistress. She had not dealt with a slave under her control before, and so
was not aware of the rituals of deference slaves were supposed to manifest
towards her:
I could not approach her as I was accustomed to
approach other white ladies. My early
instruction was all out of place. The
crouching servility, usually so acceptable a quality in a slave, did not answer
when manifested toward her. Her favor
was not gained by it; she seemed to be disturbed by it. She did not deem it impudent or unmannerly
for a slave to look her in the face.420
Now, when Douglass performed these rituals of
deference with his masters, was he really accepting his role as a slave for
life? Inwardly, he obviously was not,
whether in the recesses of his mind or in his conversations with other slaves
when no master or mistress was present (part of the "hidden
transcript"), such as those he conspired with to escape to the North.
Speaking
more generally, slave religion served, at least on some level, as the main
source of at least a semi-coherent counter-ideology for many slaves when they
had meetings among themselves alone. It
was said that Gabriel and Martin Prossner in Virginia at religious services
regularly harnessed the Old Testament story about God freeing the children of
Israel through Moses to gain recruits for their conspiracy: "The Israelites were glowingly
portrayed as a type of successful resistance to tyranny; and it was argued,
that now, as then, God would stretch forth his arm to save, and would
strengthen a hundred to overthrow a thousand." Similarly, at Vesey's planned rebellion in South Carolina, which
appeared to be centered on the membership of the African Church of Charleston,
one alleged conspirator said that he "read to us from the Bible, how the children
of Israel were delivered out of Egypt from bondage." Somewhat differently, but still using a
religious base for his counter-ideology, was the charismatic Nat Turner, whose
visions as a prophet led him to start a rebellion. The most crucial of these visions, in May 1828, had God telling
him that
the Serpent was loosened, and Christ had laid down the
Yoke he had borne for the sins of men, and that I should take it on and fight
against the Serpent, for the time was fast approaching when the first should be
last and the last should be first.
These examples indicate how slaves could use the
Bible's religion to reply against their masters' official religious ideology of
patience, humility, and obedience. But
these proclamations remained behind the scenes, when whites were not
watching. Officially, the slave
preachers had little choice but to teach what their masters wanted them to when
whites were present, but this changed when they were by themselves, as freedman
Anderson Edwards of Texas recalled:
When I starts preaching I couldn't read or write and
had to preach what Master told me, and he say tell them niggers iffen they
obeys the master they goes to Heaven; but I knowed there's something better for
them, but daren't tell them 'cept on the sly. That I done lots. I tells
'em iffen they keeps praying, the Lord will set 'em free.421
It is necessary to be wary of accepting the slaves'
proclamations of loyalty and gratefulness at face value, for the heart may not
be agreeing with what the tongue feels compelled to say.
Obviously,
the problem here is the lack of documentation concerning what most slaves
really thought as they went through such rituals of deference, and professed
their undying love for their master, and so forth. Now sometimes light can be shed on the hidden transcript, which
reveals how the oppressed analyzed their condition when among themselves alone,
through the slave narratives (such as Douglass's). Sometimes it erupts into the public transcript (which the
dominant class largely writes, disseminates, and controls) through occasional
outbursts, etc. Still, determining what
most slaves really thought inevitably comes down to fortuitously impressionistic
literary evidence. Unfortunately for
historians, there were no Gallup polls using statistical samples of slaves to
record what they believed about their masters, mistresses, overseers, and
slavery itself. Little of what was said
in the slave quarters when no master or overseer was within earshot has come
down to us. Almost entirely, the
preserved records are composed of the public transcript. Still, there is reason to believe that the
slaves always sensed that they were oppressed and exploited, judging from their
dull, plodding work habits, their theft of food and other items, and the number
who ran away at least temporarily. They
saw practically what freedom meant, from how their master's family lived, and
from neighboring poor whites, so it was not something they had to completely
imagine on their own. Of course, enough
cases exist of slaves appearing truly sad at the passing of a good master, not
running away when the Yankee army passes through, or other human intimacies
between white and black that likely indicate many slaves really did accept some
sense of reciprocal duties (or rights) between them and their masters,
especially in the case of domestic servants, as Genovese observes. Although Genovese is fully cognizant that
much slave behavior, at least on the job, was or could have been deceitful,
intentionally incompetent, or "putting on old massa," the dangerous
implications of duplicity for his application of Gramsci's model of hegemony to
American slavery were not seriously considered.422
Were the Slaveholders Really Believers in
Paternalism?: The Implications of
Jacksonian Democracy and Commercial Capitalism in the American South
Genovese's
thesis that the master class successfully implanted their hegemonic ideology of
paternalism in the slaves' minds also depends on whether the slaveholders
themselves really believed in it. Could
have the typical masters of the South been just as motivated by profit as the
money-grubbing Yankee merchants and industrialists that pro-slavery apologists
portrayed while defending a paternalistic "peculiar
institution"? The roughneck crew
portrayed in Olmsted's description of the frontier interior planters, alluded
to above, with their passions and desires to make money off "cotton and
negroes," is a world apart from the long-settled paternalistic great
planters of lowland South Carolina or those attempting to sustain their pride
while eking out a living with a few slaves on soil of declining fertility in
Tidewater Virginia. Once a book-peddler
on board a steamboat in Louisiana attempted to sell a "Bible Defence of
Slavery," which clearly had a paternalistic overtone to it judging from
the frontispiece he displayed. He
thrust the book into the hands of a would-be purchaser, and was yelled at with
the following:
Now you go to hell!
I've told you three times I didn't want your book. If you bring it here again I'll throw it
overboard. I own niggers; and I
calculate to own more of 'em, if I can get 'em, but I don't want any damn'd
preachin' about it.
Was such a man, part of the striving, roughneck,
quick-tempered, gun- and knife-packing crowd Olmsted described, really
motivated by the love of his slaves to embrace the paternalistic "peculiar
institution"? Or, did he judge
this was the best way for him to make money?
He did not even try to keep up the pretense it was the
former. Similarly, one relatively poor
white who lived in northern Alabama, a miner who also kept a small farm, told
Olmsted:
The richer a man is . . . and the more
niggers he's got, the poorer he seems to live.
If you want to fare well in this country [as a lodger] you stop to poor
folks' housen; they try to enjoy what they've got, while they ken, but these
yer big planters they don' care for nothing but to save.423
This account may reflect class prejudice, of poor
white against rich planter. Still, it undermines the idea the slaveowners
seriously lived the profit-devaluing paternalism that pro-slavery ideologues
such as Fitzhugh spoke in their names.
Or, if they did not live it, how much did they merely believe in
it, since a certain level of hypocrisy is inevitable among those who uphold any
ideology due to human moral weakness?
While
the older, long-settled regions of Tidewater Virginia and lowland South
Carolina had large planters by the mid-nineteenth century whose families had
owned slaves over several generations, most of the rest of the South was still
at best a semi-settled wilderness heavily affected by the frontier mentality.424 Boney describes one typical smaller planter
named Thomas Stevens, who although he at one time owned thirty-one slaves,
never could mobilize more than five or six prime adult male field hands in the
field at once. Having started out as a
miller, carpenter, and distiller, he raised livestock as well as crops on his
farm. As described in a slave narrative
by one John Brown, he was a hard driver of his slaves, of his sons, of himself,
and expressed both rage and occasional brutality against his slaves while
pursuing increased production on his farm.
To Boney, "planter" in his thinking should involve someone who
owns 50 or 100 slaves, not just 20, because:
"The designation of planter carries strong connotations of
elitism and aristocracy which distort the basic reality of the antebellum
South." In contradiction to
Genovese or Beard, he views the South's whites as dominated by a capitalistic,
bourgeois ethic, characterized by ambition, striving, and profit-making. "No matter how many slaves most
planters accumulated, they tended to remain bourgeois businessmen,
fundamentally middle-class agriculturists in hot pursuit of the fast
buck. . . . The great
majority of Southern whites were thoroughly bourgeois, optimistically pursuing
profit by hard work and sharp bargaining." The individualistic mentality of these men seeking upward social
mobility by their own efforts is very different from that of European,
especially Continental, aristocrats who stereotypically eschewed commercial
ventures and active participation in the management of their land. The planters of the South had a much more
commercial mentality than their supposed European counterparts, and a number
were, according to Degler, "actively engaged in railroading, banking,
ginning, and manufacturing of all kinds."
Conforming to this description, May describes John Quitman, a major
Mississippi planter and politician, as "immersed in land speculations,
banking activities, Mississippi railroad development, the Natchez Steam Packet
Company, and southern commercial conventions." He served as an officer for
a number of corporations.425 Degler even suggests, in an argument
reminiscent of Fogel and Engerman's, that if the slaveholders earned a rate of
profit comparable to that of bourgeois Northerners that they "must have
been working as hard at making profits . . . unless one assumes it
was all accidental."426 The character of the utterly pragmatic, temperamental,
roughneck smaller planters and slaveholders Olmsted encountered time and time
again on his travels, whose conversations were dominated by slaves, cotton, and
other "shop talk," strongly support Fogel and Engerman's revisionist
view of a capitalistic, profit-seeking slaveholding class.
Counter-Attacks Against Portraying Slaveholders as
Bourgeois Individualists
Several
lines of attack have been launched against characterizing southern slaveholders
as striving individualists seeking profit and upward mobility through their own
efforts as part of a larger system of capitalistic commercial agriculture. Arguing against Oakes, Gallay notes that the
great planters dominated the South politically and ideologically. By Stampp's calculations based on the
Census, the elite composed of those owning over a hundred slaves constituted
less than three thousand families in the South out of a population of some
1,516,000 free families. Even for small
slaveholders, there remained "the hierarchical structure of the plantation
with its dependent relationships."427 This leads us to the question of the nature
of paternalism, and how compatible it is with a capitalist mode of
production. Stamp as well as Fogel and
Engerman note that paternalism can be quite compatible with enlightened
self-interest or profit-making in some cases, as the success of traditionally
paternalistic companies such as IBM (although its "no layoffs" policy
is dead nowadays) and Eastman Kodak.428 Paternalism as a social system is not just
about the duties of the subordinate and dominant classes to each other, but it
gives the dominant the right to punish and control their subordinates for their
own good, just as a father punishes his children for their own good.429 That such punishment also serves the
interests of the dominant class--well, that is just incidental. Or is it?
As Anderson noted in his review of Genovese's Roll, Jordan, Roll,
the masters' ideology allowed them to turn the slaves into dependent children,
permitting them to whip and otherwise punish the slaves continually:
In [Genovese's] attempt to bind the master and slave
in an intimate relationship, he failed to understand that the masters, in their
own minds, denied the slaves the quality of gratitude in order to commit
brutality without regret or responsibility.
George Fitzhugh needed to say that Africans had less self-control and
that the 'master occupies toward [his slaves] the place of parent or guardian.' But historians need not accept this as
genuine fatherly concern.430
Anderson's
point leads us to a spectacularly unsurprising conclusion: The ideology of the upper class tends to be
self-serving and self-justifying, at least when they are confident in the
exercise of their power. Normally, when
a businessman proclaims his belief in paternalism, such as Carnegie, who
simultaneously proclaimed both philanthropy and Social Darwinism, or the
businessman who declared during a strike that the best interests of the workers
would be served by the Christian businessmen of America, historians eye it very
suspiciously. Should not a similar
level of skepticism be directed against Southern slaveholders' proclamations of
the same beliefs? After all, as Degler
observed, many were no more than a generation removed from personally wielding
the hoe, ax, or plow themselves, which gives precious little time for an
aristocratic ethos to develop from the nouveau riche milieu out of which sprang
frontier success stories. Boney raises
the issue of whether they deceived themselves or just others: "Whether they fooled themselves into
believing otherwise [that they did not have a profit-seeking bourgeois outlook,
but were aristocratic paternalists] or only misled later generations is another
question entirely." The close
personal ties and human intimacies that make up a truly practiced system of
paternalism would occur mostly only with domestic servants, drivers, some
artisans, and perhaps a few field hands a master or mistress may have played
with as a child. For example, Olmsted
noted how "two or three well-dressed negro servants" greeted some of
the white passengers on a ship on the James River in Virginia with enthusiasm,
even kisses. One fat mulatto woman
shouted loudly and pathetically, "Oh, Massa George, is you come
back!" to a "long-haired sophomore." By contrast, the same level of feeling was not felt by the field
hands present: "Field negroes,
standing by, looked on with their usual besotted expression, and neither
offered nor received greetings."
Stampp cites cases of masters distraught over the deaths of a personal
attendant and a gardener, but who did not seem especially disturbed emotionally
by the deaths of field hands. The case
of James Hammond is particularly striking.
While he was sincerely distressed over the death of his gardener, he was
emotionally (though not financially) indifferent to the deaths of two field
hands: "Neither a serious
loss. One valuable mule has also
died."431
For these reasons, in a view clearly different from Genovese's, Stampp
is largely correct when broadbrushing this summary statement: "Plantation paternalism, then, was in
most cases a kind of leisure-class family indulgence of its domestics."432 For the most part, many masters and
mistresses--Barrow being an excellent case in point--probably looked at the
mass of their slaves often as "Theory X" management might deal with
the members of an uncooperative labor union, as employees who need constant
supervision, prodding, verbal abuse, and punishments to get anything done,
without any great emotional attachment to most of the individuals involved,
making it easy to replace any of them.
Hence, if most of the elite or middling slaveholders were striving,
individualistic, profit-seeking capitalists, who often honored paternalistic
ideology as mere platitudes at best, largely reserving its practice to domestic
servants, then the hegemonic function of paternalism in keeping the bulk of the
slaves in line is gravely weakened, for the dominant class cannot pass down to
its subordinate class what it does not believe itself.433
Ignorance as a Control Device Revisited
As
observed earlier in the section dealing with education (pp. 107-9), an elite
can control its subordinate class by inculcating knowledge that legitimizes its
authority and favors its continued control.
Promoting the ideology of paternalism or the implantation of the
Protestant work ethic among the slaves can be seen as a subset of this
approach, although for them very little of this occurred through formal
education and book learning. The other
option employs ignorance as a control device for keeping a lower class in
subjection. Southern slaveholders
applied this method to their bondsmen in many ways. By keeping slaves in ignorance of geography, local or
continental, it made successful escapes to the North or Canada much more
unlikely. It is hard to escape to
someplace not known to exist, or, if known, when how to get there
remains unknown. Even Douglass, a literate
slave, did not know of Canada's existence, and nothing in America past New York
northwards, which still was not fundamentally safe due to the (old) fugitive
slave return law. So he thought, when
conspiring with a group of fellow slaves to escape: "We could see no spot, this side of the ocean, where we
could be free." Similarly, John
Hunter, who escaped from slavery in Maryland, commented: "A great many slaves know nothing of
Canada,--they don't know that there is such a country." Freedman Arnold Gragston, was a slave in
Mason County, Kentucky, right near the Ohio River. Before he assisted the Underground Railroad in helping slaves
escape by rowing them across that river, he labored under some seemingly astonishing
misconceptions about an area so close to himself: "[I] didn't know a thing about the other side. I had heard a lot about it from other
slaves, but I thought it was just about like Mason County, with slaves and
masters, overseers and rawhides."
These stories indicate the slaves generally knew little originating from
abolitionists and other Northerners propagandizing against slavery, with what
was known being badly diluted and distorted by the "whispering lane"
effect. Because it was nearly
impossible for slaves to get this information otherwise, Ball made a special
effort to memorize the names of towns, villages, rivers, and where ferries were
located on them as he was taken from Maryland to Georgia to enable him to find
his way back one day.434
Ignorance
also helped keep slaves in bondage or in fear of acting on their freedom after
emancipation came. Texas freedman Anderson
Edwards and his fellow slaves did not know for a year after freedom had been
proclaimed that in fact they were free.
Their master had kept them in the dark until some Union soldier paid a
visit and ransacked the plantation. One
freedman was forced to work after emancipation for his master four years, until
he stole a horse to get away, another for three years until his mistress freed
him after his master was hanged, and one did not know she was free until she
ran away and a black man told her she was free. The federal government wisely sent agents to fan the Southern
countryside to investigate whether the freedmen were being paid and telling
them they were free, because it could not trust the former masters to tell
their slaves that they were no longer slaves.
During the war, Georgian newspapers went to considerable trouble to
spread scare stories about the treatment of ex-slaves in the North or in the
Union army to discourage runaways, counting on the masters to tell these tales
to their bondsmen, which evidently had some effect.435 Clearly, "knowledge is power" for
an oppressed class in a very practical sense because it becomes much harder for
an elite to tightly control a subordinate group that knows substantially as
much as its rulers, such as due to widespread public education.436
How Masters Would Manipulate the Slaves' Family Ties
in Order to Control Them
Another
control device, already described above (p. 159) in the section dealing with
the family life of the slaves, was for masters and mistresses to manipulate the
family relationships of the bondsmen for labor discipline purposes. The Southern Baptist minister Holland
Nimmons McTyeire stated in his essay "Duties of Christian Masters"
that slaveholders should build up the family unit among the slaves for reasons
that also benefited their self-interest:
Local as well [as] family associations, thus cast
about him, are strong yet pleasing cords binding him to his master. His welfare is so involved in the order of
things, that he would not for any consideration have it disturbed. He is made happier and safer, put beyond
discontent, or the temptation to rebellion and abduction; for he gains nothing
in comparison with what he loses.437
Family ties also had the practical effect of
discouraging slaves from running away, since they did not want to leave wives,
husbands, mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, sons, daughters, etc. behind in
the South if they fled alone. And if
they fled in a group, they became easier to track down and catch. One Georgian overseer was not at all afraid
that abolitionists would successfully tempt a slave to escape he was sending to
the North with his family because:
"I take care, when my wife goes North with the children, to send
Lucy with her; her children are down here, and I defy all the Abolitionists
in creation to get her to stay North."438 Jacobs, if she had not been a mother, would
have found it much easier to flee to the North, but she felt compelled to try
to have her children freed as well:
"I could have made my escape alone; but it was more for my helpless
children than for myself that I longed for freedom. Though the boon would have been precious to me, above all price,
I would not have taken it at the expense of leaving them in slavery."439 Douglass made a similar point, but because
his family life had been very weak, he latched onto the importance of friends,
such as those in his own life, as discouraging slaves from running away: "It is my opinion that thousands would
escape from slavery, who now remain, but for the strong cords of affection that
bind them to their friends."440 Always one of the most powerful ways family
ties could be used against the bondsmen was for a slaveholder to threaten to
sell them or some other family member as the ultimate punishment for
disobedience. Colonial Georgian William
Simpson noted that a slave he sold wrote "to his wife frequently, and
appears by his letters to be in great distress for want of her." He had sold him for being disobedient, but
now said he was considering buying him back to rejoin husband and wife.441 But in most cases family members separated
by sale were unlikely ever to see each other again, unless it was a local
one. Using the family ties of their
slaves to control them, through discouraging escapes or using the threat of
sale, the slaveholding elite used against them some of the very aspects of
their character that proved their humanity, and that they were not animals, to
the whites.
Positive Incentives Only a Supplementary Method for
Controlling the Bondsmen
Using
positive incentives was another way for masters and mistresses to deal with
their slaves, such as rewards for working hard. While the stick inevitably looms much larger than the carrot in
slaveholders' dealings with their slaves, as argued above against Fogel and
Engerman (pp. 233-35, 240-44), positive incentives did exist, and played a supplementary
role in controlling and disciplining the slaves. One standard way to get extra work from the slaves was to pay
them for overtime hours, such as for work on Sundays and late nights. Although a master or mistress could compel
the slaves to work these hours, the negative repercussions (work slowdowns, the
neighbors' criticisms, etc.) were such that they usually paid them for the
extra work. When done with their tasks
for the day, several boys worked willingly for Kemble to clear paths on her
husband's estate for pay within twenty-four hours of her making the offer. Similarly, some carpenters there made a boat
they sold for sixty dollars to a neighboring planter built in their spare
time. Patrick Snead, born a slave in
Savannah, Georgia, worked as a cooper making barrels. His task was to make eighteen a week, but since he "could
make more than twice as many . . . [he] began to have
money." John Clopton, once a slave
in Virginia, worked nights to earn the money to buy a hat and some clothes
because his master supplied him with no hat and few clothes. Olmsted found one farmer in Louisiana who
paid slaves fifty or seventy-five cents a day to work for him Sundays. Another Mississippi planter's blacks earned
money for extras such as tobacco by working Saturdays and Sundays, with one clearing
fifty dollars in a year by making boards with axes. Paid work did have its problems for slaves, because they could be
more easily cheated by their employer, who could refuse to pay them, and then
they had no legal redress. One slave in
Mississippi was not paid three dollars for a number of Sundays he had worked
for one white farmer. John Quitman's
slaves received pay for chopping wood on Sundays. His brother-in-law Henry Turner complained that the slaves were
"very troublesome in the way of asking for their dues when not paid"
for chickens they had raised on the Monmouth plantation in Mississippi.442 As noted above earlier (pp. 222-223), while
the slaves willingly did extra work (i.e., without the compulsion of the whip),
it was not totally voluntary because the masters did not give them enough to
allow them to get by at all comfortably without the extra work's earnings. After all, if Clopton's master gave him the
necessary food, but hardly any clothes, when he chooses to work Sundays to buy
clothes, this work was not truly voluntary.
The master's arbitrary power in reducing the sustenance provided to his
slaves forced them to work overtime "voluntarily" for real necessities. A slave who did a bad job in overtime work
did not face the whip, but the penalty of going shirtless, hatless, knifeless,
panless, etc., was harsh enough.
Slaveholders
also had less formal incentives than pay for overtime work. Freedwoman Mary
Reynolds remembered that her master in Louisiana at Christmas time gave a suit
of clothes to the cotton picker who had picked the most. Henry Laurens and his overseer wished to
give an incentive to his most dutiful slaves and get others to imitate their
example. Instead of giving them the
standard "white plains" for clothes, they were given blue cloth and
metal buttons for their clothes. Barrow
bought for his slaves Atean and Dave Bartley a suit of clothes for each one
time in August because of their "fine conduct picking cotten &c."
More generally, slaves worked perhaps because it was an intrinsically
understandable part of the production process, unlike the work of many
industrial workers monotonously engaged in making or assembling the parts of
machines. Some self-interest did
exist, because they generally grew the corn and raised the hogs they were fed
with. Some were industrious because
they felt they had a stake in successfully completing work, as Blassingame
noted: "Many slaves developed this
feeling because the planters promised them money, gifts, dinners, and dances if
they labored faithfully."443 Others worked on their own time on some
patch of land their owner allowed them to cultivate, growing crops they could
eat or sell to raise cash, in a manner remarkably similar to the allotments of
English agricultural workers. One
master found it easier to control his slaves by threatening deductions from the
revenue produced by them on the patches of land they worked. The privilege to raise crops on their own
time became particularly important in the task system areas, where some slaves
developed major holdings of animals through their families' voluntary work once
the involuntary task for their masters were finished, in a manner reminiscent
of medieval serfdom, where peasants worked on their lord's land so many days
per week, and on their own so many days per week.444 Hence, while slaveholders did offer slaves
positive incentives, these should not be seen as motivating work more than
negative "incentives" such as the whip, executions, and the threat of
sale. The very nature of slavery
eliminated positive incentives as the fundamental motivator for the enslaved
because, usually, "No effort of your own can make you free, but no absence
of effort shall starve you."445
One
of Fogel and Engerman's mistakes concerning the pervasiveness of incentives for
slaves was to equate gifts given to slaves at Christmas time with an incentive
system. They cite Barrow's year end
bonuses, claiming: "The amounts
received by particular slaves were proportional to their
performance." The diary does not
support this claim, because Barrow did not say which slaves received how much
from the overall amounts given to all the slaves listed in his diary. These cash gifts appear to be gifts
unrelated to work performance, which means then they could not have had motivating
effects. For example, Barrow wrote for
December 24, 1838: "Hands went to
Town payed them last night
$500." Similarly, for December 24,
1841 we find: "verry cold, Gave
the negros money last night $700. all
went to Town to day." During one
year, 1842, due to financial hardship, he dispensed with monetary gifts
altogether, explaining why he did so:
"Gave the negros as much of Evry thing to eat & drink
during the Hollidays as they Wanted
times so hard no able to give any thing more." When someone "gives" someone
something, it is not an incentive in any direct sense, because it is not tied
to personal productivity. Sides
portrays the mistress distributing Christmas gifts largely regardless of
merit: "[She] distributed the
gifts to the slaves, trying to treat them all equally, though allowing herself
to give an extra present 'where some notable conduct warranted it.'" Some plantations also distributed the winter
rations of clothes, blankets, and shoes this time of the year, which were not
gifts, but what the slaves were automatically entitled to, regardless of work
effort. Barrow's Christmas time gifts
for slaves were likely no more "incentives" for his slaves than any
given to his own children.446
Fogel
and Engerman emphasize the incentive effects of rewarding slaves better jobs
who served their masters and mistresses well:
Slaves had the opportunity to rise within the social
and economic hierarchy that existed under bondage. Field hands could become artisans or
drivers. . . . Climbing
the economic ladder brought not only social status, and sometimes more freedom;
it also had significant payoffs in better housing, better clothing, and cash
bonuses.
Although referring to The Jamaica Planter's Guide,
they cite no direct evidence that American slaveowners operated this way. Their indirect evidence came from
interpreting a skewed age distribution found in a heavily sugar-growing parish
they surveyed, which was biased towards older men among the artisans. They said this meant older men were rewarded
with better jobs due to serving their masters better when younger. Problematically for them, this age
distribution could also be explained by a declining demand for trained slaves
towards the late antebellum period, perhaps due to European immigration to
urban areas in the South.447
One
major problem confronts the claim the slaves desired to climb up an
occupational pyramid for better jobs and material conditions: The slaves with the better jobs, such as
drivers and domestic servants, were often seen as stooges serving their
master's interests and enforcers of his rules by the ordinary field hands in
the quarters. A job that gave a slave
high prestige in the eyes of the master often had correspondingly low status in
the eyes of the bulk of the slaves, at least if the slaves in the high
positions were seen as generally identifying with and consistently serving
their master's interests without giving others any slack.448 A number of slaves clearly felt the
trade-offs involved were worth it, because to demote (or threaten to) a
domestic servant to field work was an effective control device precisely
because he did wish to keep the job he already had.449 It does make sense that the more reliable,
loyal, intelligent, and/or diligent slaves would end up as drivers, artisans,
or domestic servants, such as Atean, who ended up a foreman on Barrow's
plantation. Still, the high level of
capriciousness in promotion decisions easily undermined the incentive effects
involved, especially if these slaves picked up the opprobrium of their fellows
as they rose. While artisans and
drivers did have better conditions than ordinary field hands, Fogel and
Engerman fail to link "specified performance standards" and "the
strength of the existing inducements--material and other" to those wishing
"to escape the lot of the ordinary field hand," ignoring how an
occupational hierarchy's mere existence does not guarantee merit, as opposed to
nepotism or chance, is the main way of assigning positions within it.450
The Brutal Overseer as a Historical Reality
One
very basic decision a master had to make about organizing his plantation's
operations concerned whether he hired an overseer or performed his own
supervision, leaning upon black drivers more.
If he hired an overseer, then the problem was the master did not
necessarily like "paid management's" motives when managing his
slaves. Since an overseer did not own
the slaves he managed, he was more apt to mistreat them, especially when given
the high turnover rate endemic to this profession, which made him still less
likely to care about the individual bondsmen he supervised. In order to make a large crop, he was apt
to drive the slaves too hard. One
English traveler from Mississippi wrote to the London Daily News in 1857
that:
[The overseer's] professional reputation depends in a
great measure upon the number of bales or hogsheads he is able to produce, and
neither his education nor his habits are such as to render it likely that he
would allow any consideration for the negroes to stand in the way of his
advancing it. . . . His
skill consists in knowing exactly how hard they may be driven without
incapacitating them for future exertion.451
Overseers have a well-deserved reputation for
brutality.452 Generally
overseers in the South were emotional, uneducated men possessing a
violence-prone frontier mentality, often deficient in the "people
skills" required to manage slaves successfully. Since keeping slaves in line was a continual struggle, and the use
of raw force and punishment was frequently necessary because they had little
incentive to work, these realities soon hardened most overseers who were not
harsh to begin with. As the case
Olmsted witnessed, in which one overseer unemotionally inflicted a brutal
beating on a shirking slave (cited above, p. 232), the very nature of the
system, with its minimal incentives for the slaves to work outside of avoiding
physical punishment, made banal cruelty necessary for its continued
functioning.
The
overseer on a large plantation could be corrupted by his position of nearly
unlimited power, especially if the master was not physical present. One antebellum South Carolina newspaper
suggested that: "[Overseers] who
combine the most intelligence, industry, and character, are allured into the
service of those who place all power in their hands, and are ultimately
spoiled."453
Even such a man as Barrow, who never hesitated to apply the whip when he
felt it necessary, complained about the brutality of his own overseer, as well
as their general class, from a slaveholders' viewpoint:
More Whiping to do this Fall than all together in
three years owing to my D mean Overseer--never will have another unless I
should be compelled to leave . . . I hope the time will come When
every Overseer in the country will be compelled to addopt some other mode of
making a living--they are a perfect nuisance
cause dissatisfaction among the negros--being more possessed of more
brutal feelings--I make better crops than those Who Employ them.454
As a result, he stopped hiring overseers, and relied
on black drivers for the immediate supervision of his slaves. As will be seen below (pp. 341-42), the
slaves could exploit the weaknesses and tensions in the master-overseer
relationship for their own ends of evading work.
The Task Versus Gang Systems: Different Approaches to Work Discipline
Choosing
between the task and gang systems was another fundamental management decision
for a farm or plantation. While the
gang system was much more widespread, as the task system was largely limited to
lowland Georgia and South Carolina, still a number of slaveholders experimented
or found compromises between the two systems.
Both should be discussed because of the trade-offs between the two from
the viewpoint of the slaveholders and the bondsmen. The task system consisted of giving individual slaves a particular
set quota of work in the field, and when they were done, they had the rest of
the day off to do largely as they pleased.
The gang system consisted of supervising slaves in a group while they
worked, driving them through the field to do particular jobs, with no
particular limit on the length of the work day other than the rising and
setting of the sun. The task system
benefited the stronger slaves who could be done earlier in the day, but the
full onus of individual responsibility fell on them for any careless or shoddy
work done in order to finish early or for any other reason. The gang system tended to benefit the weaker
hands, since the number of hours they would have worked at a particular task
would have been the same under either system.
It allowed slaves as a group to evade responsibility for bad work,
because an overseer or master found it harder to discover which individual
slave(s) did bad work. As Young
noted: "Whereas slaves toiling in
gangs could surreptitiously work at less than full speed, the task laborer was
accountable if the assigned work was not completed by the end of the
day." The enslaved blacks
generally appeared to enjoy work in groups over individual labor in isolation,
which may have given a them a preference for the gang system, excepting for its
intrinsic disadvantage of suffering under much more surveillance and intense
regulation from the white overseer, master, or driver. The principal advantage of the task system
from the master's viewpoint was that it reduced the amount of immediate
supervision required from drivers, overseers, himself, etc. Freedman Mose Jordan recalled for Armstrong
this advantage from the slave's view:
'When you git dat done, you can go fishin'!' Massa
say. An' dat was de bes' way ter wu'k. De overseer lay off de task. Dis many rows fo' de boys an' gal, dat many
fo' de big bucks an' women' folks. 'Git
dat done, an' you kin quit,' he say.
Den de folks wu'ked ter git it don.
Dat better'n whippin' em!
The driver or overseer would set the task at the
beginning of the day, and then periodically check during the day to see whether
the tasks assigned were completed, and how well the work had been done.455
The Infrapolitics of Task (Quota) Setting
The
task system made for continual struggles between the slaves and their owners
over the size of the tasks imposed. The
masters tried to "up" the tasks set, while the slaves leaned on
custom--suddenly transmuted into a "right"--to keep the tasks the
same size. Olmsted noted that: "In nearly all ordinary work, custom
has settled the extent of the task, and it is difficult to increase
it." In this situation, despite
all the legalisms about the will of the master being absolute and the slave
having to always obey and make himself a mere extension of his owner's will, a
degree of "negotiation" occurred between the two sides. The masters who raised the daily task by too
much risked "a general stampede to the 'swamp'--a danger the slave can
always hold before his master's cupidity." The slaves could employ what amounted to a strike against their
owners. This was a rare case of the
slaves collectively organizing to resist their owners without using
violence. The task system was so
entrenched in this area--"Eastern Georgia and South Carolina"--that
any master who denied this "proscriptive right" would "suffer in
his reputation" and "experience much annoyance from the obstinate
'rascality' of his negroes." The
infrapolitics--"day-to-day resistance"--of the task system involved
battles over quota setting which are quite similar to those between management
and labor in modern industry, especially in the mid-twentieth century socialist
economies of Eastern Europe. When
masters see slaves getting done at noon, one o'clock, two o'clock, long before
sundown, they would want to "up" the norms imposed. Harry Porter, a one-time field hand,
recalled that if his fellow bondsmen on his plantation "got through early
or half an hour before sundown . . . [their master] would give them
more the next day." Sometimes
lowland masters imposed day work, and attempted to keep the slaves working steadily
all day long. But this backfired, with
the slaves often doing less work than they would have under the task system.456 The task system had the great advantage of
attempting to harness the slaves' self-interest (and their sense of task-orientation
in their work) on behalf of their master, since the sooner they finished, the
sooner they could work on their own plots of land and raise food for themselves
or crops to sell.
Consider
this good example of a struggle between slaves and "management" over
the size of the tasks imposed. One
group of pregnant slave women pleaded to Kemble to ask the master to lower the
size of tasks required of them. She
really did not want to do this, especially when they said he had refused their
request already, but she weakened before their emotional cries for relief.457 The slaves here exploited potential
differences in the white elite that ruled over them--in this case, pitting the
mistress against the master--a issue returned to below (pp. 268-69). Because the slaveowners had at their
disposal the ability to inflict overwhelming physical force on their workers,
an option not available to modern-day management, by using threats they could
raise the quotas set for their bondsmen.
One planter in Virginia, after firing his incompetent overseer, found that
slaves were only expected to chop a cord of firewood a day, which he found
ridiculously low. He told one slave to
cut two, who replied that was too hard, that he "Nebber heard o' nobody's
cuttin' more'n a cord o'wood in a day, roun' hear. No nigger couldn' do it."
This master replied: "Well,
old man, you have two cords of wood cut to-night, or to-morrow morning you will
have two hundred lashes--that's all there is about it. So, look sharp!" From that point on, he got two cords of wood
from each slave given that job, although his neighbors still got only one. He also made each slave maul two hundred
rails a day, when his neighbors were stuck with one hundred per day. While down in lowland South Carolina or
Georgia, Olmsted found the slaves around there were assigned only to do one
cord of wood per day, and a hundred rails mauled, which indicates they had
successfully hoodwinked "management" generally.458 On paper, the slaves seem legally helpless
against the force their owners could bring to bear to compel work from
them. But the generally low quotas of
work prevailing in many cases demonstrate masters and overseers did not use all
the force possible at their disposal.
Since the Southern white work ethic (in terms of time-oriented punctual
consistency) was not especially strong, the slaves through continual
foot-dragging successfully tricked their owners into accepting a level of work
performance half or less than that free labor was expected to accomplish.
The Gang System's Advantages
The
gang system had the advantage that when the greater level of supervision
involved--not to mention violence applied--was done intelligently, the slaves
accomplished more than under the task system.
The overseer and master had a number of tricks to speed up work without
direct use of the lash. Barrow found by
organizing a race he could get his slaves to pick more:
hands all running a race--"picking
Cotten"--Hands avreaged higher to day than I ever had them to do. 191 1/2 by dinner [noon] . . .
never had or heard of such picking as my hands picked yesterday Clean Cotten in the morning--usual Cotten in
the evening--averaged 364 1/2. highest 622. lowest 225--42 pickers. 15311 lbs.
Another tactic was to try to have the slaves sing
songs with a fast pace that sped up work, that fit the task at hand, or at
least made the day's work go by more pleasantly. Thinking more strategically, they also tried to prohibit sadder,
depressing songs since they might make them less happy in their condition of
lifelong bondage.459
Illustrating how the task system could allow widespread malingering when
the quotas were set too low by custom, consider freedman Mose Jordan's memory
of the cotton picker's task (quota) for his plantation for one day: 150 pounds.
This case confirms the planter who told Olmsted that the average slave
did an amount of work only half or less than that of free labor, when
considering what Barrow was able to get out of his slaves, at least on
unusually good days. One time, on
September 10, 1842, his sixty-nine pickers, which included eleven children,
averaged 305 pounds, one gathering 520, setting a kind of record, Barrow
thought. Many of the first-year
pickers, presumably children, were able to pick 120-145 pounds that day.460 A quota of 150 pounds, being obviously lower
than what a full day's labor by an experienced, healthy, and persistent adult
could perform, demonstrated that the slaves on Jordan's plantation successfully
kept the tasks set at a fairly low level, perhaps benefiting from unusually
paternalistic or incompetent management.
The gang system had the advantage (from the master's viewpoint) of being
able to drive the slaves while working, which on good days made them more
productive than the task system, for when slaves cultivated crops on their own
time after finishing their daily task, this did not directly help the master
financially.
When
choosing between the task and gang systems, the white slaveholders faced a
fundamental trade-off. The task system,
by allowing slaves to grow their own crops in the extra time they had left over
after their daily tasks were done, gave the slaves more freedom for trading and
increased involvement in the economy, but it reduced the costs of supervision
and force being applied while raising crops.
The gang system allowed slaveowners to greatly narrow the slaves'
cultivating and trading activities, significantly restricting the illicit
liquor/stolen goods trade slaves carried on with neighboring poor whites. It also reduced the amount of free time they
had to lounge about and maybe get into trouble. But this system cost more in requiring continual surveillance and
applying violent force to keep them working.
Notoriously, "when an overlooker's back is turned, the most of them
[slaves] will slight their work or be idle altogether."461 Masters and mistresses also controlled the
slaves more because they were almost exclusively dependent on the standard
rations doled out to them, of both food and clothing, instead of having the
ability to buy or raise their own.
Another trade-off was that to increase individual responsibility tended
to reduce group responsibility, and vice versa. The task system increased individual responsibility, but at the
cost of allowing slaves as a group to have serious though surreptitious
influence on the size of the work quotas imposed on them, through a process of
implicit "negotiation." The
gang system decreased individual responsibility, for it was harder to know who
had done a given bit of shoddy work, but increased the ability of the master to
control the group as a whole, potentially rebounding to his benefit when done
intelligently without an excessive use of violence.
The Patrol/Pass System
The
pass/patroller system was another important part of the slaveholders' means of
control over their slaves. Nominally
all slaves not on their owner's (or renter's) property had to have a pass
giving them permission to be elsewhere, especially in rural areas. Any white person, including those not
knowing them personally, could ask them to produce a pass. During certain hours, especially at night,
any slave could be punished by patrollers if he was up and around off his
master's property. The patrollers were
normally poor whites who were hired (or effectively conscripted slaveholders)
to roam about checking whether slaves were obeying the pass and curfew
restrictions. Those without valid
passes could be whipped on the spot.
While this system tended to only be slackly observed when white fears of
slave rebellion were low or in areas with few slaves, patrollers were the main
force in rural areas with police powers that dealt with slaves.
The
slave patrols deservedly picked up a reputation for inflicting brutal
punishments. They were often composed
of poor whites seeking to prove their superiority over blacks whose living
conditions (or ability to read) were little different from their own. Freedwoman Manda Walker of South Carolina described
how one patrol beat her father. His
pass had expired because the creek between his master's place and his wife's
had overflown, making it difficult to cross on a mule. After commenting, "The time done out,
nigger," the patrol proceeded to brutally whip him in front of his wife
and children until his wife's master told them to stop. This burst of legalism shows the patrol was
merely seeking an excuse to whip a black man, since nature did present a
legitimate obstacle against this man getting home on time. Jacobs said the office of constable where
she lived was considered a degradation to any white wealthy enough to buy a
slave, but one poor white was happy to have it because: "The office
enabled its possessor to exercise authority.
If he found any slave out after nine o'clock, he could whip him as much
as he liked; and that was a privilege to be coveted." While Jacobs likely exaggerated concerning
how much the constable was allowed to whip legally, the law was often ignored
in Alabama, as former slave Philip Younger described:
In Alabama, the patrols go out in companies at about
dark, and ride nearly all night. If
they meet a colored man without a pass, it is thirty-nine lashes; but they
don't stop for the law, and if they tie a man up, he is very well off if he
gets only two hundred. If there is a
party assembled at the quarters, they rush in half drunk, and thrash round with
their sticks, perhaps before they look at a pass,--all must be whipped unless
they rush out.
He also described one patrol which whipped a free
black woman married to a barber since "she was in a little better standing
than the patrol was." These
stories illustrate the patrols' general brutality, which was surely motivated
in part by the desire of the poor whites to confirm their superiority over what
they would call "uppity niggers," for sometimes people will affirm
all the more strongly their differences from some despised group of
"others" when those differences are all the more minimal.462
The
requirement for slaves to have passes when off-plantation was an essential
control device for slaveholders. By
regulating their movements, it reduced the risk of slaves gathering to plot
revolts and also made it easier to spot and catch runaways. After receiving a request from one slave to
visit a family member on another plantation who had just been sold off, Kemble
commented:
There seems generally a great objection to the visit
of slaves from neighboring plantations, and, I have no doubt, not without
sufficient reason. The more I see of
this frightful and perilous social system, the more I feel that those who live
in the midst of it must make their whole existence one constant precaution
against danger of some sort or other.
But how strictly masters adhered to these regulations
varied wildly, depending on their whims and the whites' state of concern over
slave rebellion. Some masters were not
only strict in granting passes, but also tried to keep their slaves on their
plantation or farm as much as possible, such as Barrow:
I never give a negro a Pass to go from home without he
first states particularly where he wishes to go, and assigns a cause for his
desiring to be absent. if he offers a
good reason, I never refuse, but otherwise, I never grant him a Pass, and feel
satisfied that no practice is more prejudicial to the community, and to the
negros themselves, than that of giving them general Pass'es.
He opposed letting slaves go wherever they want after
finishing work, as obviously at least some masters he knew did, because if they
routinely stayed on their own plantation, getting used to the friends and
family they had there, pure habit would reduce the burdens imposed by
restricting their movements. This plan
evidently did not work for the master of Jenny Proctor of Alabama, who appears
to have been as strict as Barrow:
The only way any slaves on our farm ever goes anywhere
was when the boss sends him to carry some news to another plantation or when we
slips off way in the night. Sometimes
after all the work was done a bunch would have it made up to slip out down to
the creek and dance. We sure have fun
when we do that, most times on Saturday night.463
Barrow's wish to create a "closed system"
where the slaves could be content by a forcibly imposed habit ignores the human
mind's ability to imagine other possibilities, such as from the freedom of
movement of slaves on neighboring plantations, watching the whites come and go
themselves, or resentment and "negative psychology" encouraging rule
violations.
The Slaveowners Who Liberally Granted Passes or
Dispensed with Them Altogether
Some
masters were very loose in granting passes, or even dispensed with them
altogether. Freedman Calvin Hays of Mississippi
had a master, a prominent judge and slaveowner, who told his bondsmen
this:
'Yo' don' need no pass! If dey [the patrollers] lay de han' on ye, tell 'em who yo' is,
an' lemme know if dey whip ye!' So
you'd be goin' 'long, jus' tendin' yo' business, drivin' er wagon inter town er
to de cotton press, an' pattyroller ride up.
'Who you, nigger' he say. 'One
de Mays' people!' you say. 'Go on,
den!'464
The more trusted slaves who personally attended on the
master's family might also gain an exception from the pass system, or be given
very general passes. Cato needed no pass, unlike his fellow slaves on an
Alabama plantation, being the houseboy and nephew of the master: "I had a cap with a sign on it: 'Don't bother this nigger, or there will be
hell to pay.'" Alfred Robinson,
the body servant of one Colonel Reed of Kentucky, being instantly recognizable
locally, needed no pass: "'I'se
Alfred, de Cunnel's valet!' I'd tell de
folks. Dat got me by widout er
pass." One patrol complained to a
slaveowner about the very general pass he gave a slave who nursed him when he
was sick: "'Why, dis pass would
let dat nigger go to Europe!'"
Steering a more middle ground, South Carolina rice planter C.J. Weston
required every slave who left to have tickets for passes, but granted them
liberally, in a manner Barrow would have sharply objected to: "No one is to be absent from the place
without a ticket, which is always to be given to such as ask it, and have
behaved well."465
While theoretically very strict controls existed on the slaves'
movements, even the masters were not always terribly keen on enforcing them
strictly, let alone what the slaves themselves could get away with without
their owners' permission.
How the Divisions among the White Slaveholders
Benefited the Enslaved
Divisions
among slaveholders, their families, overseers, and neighbors often combined to
restrain--or, sometimes, accentuate--how harshly the bondsmen were
treated. In a number of cases, the
slaves took advantage of the whites' discord, pitting one white person with
authority against another, often benefiting from the resulting clash. Concern over what their neighbors thought
helped restrain how harsh masters and mistresses were against their slaves--a
classic argument of pro-slavery polemics that, nevertheless, was rooted in some
reality. Jacobs was thankful that she
lived in a small town, because having neighbors close by restrained Mr. Flint,
her owner:
Bad as are the laws and customs in a slaveholding
community, the doctor, as a professional man, deemed it prudent to keep up some
outward show of decency. . . .
The application of the lash [which her master had avoided inflicting on
her] might have led to remarks that would have exposed him in the eyes of his
children and grandchildren. How often
did I rejoice that I lived in a town where all the inhabitants knew each
other. If I had been on a remote
plantation, or lost among the multitude of a crowded city, I should not be a
living woman at this day.
However, neighborhood gossip could also work the other
way. It imposed not just a floor on
harsh treatment, but a ceiling on good treatment. As Philip Younger, a slave in Alabama for over half his life,
described:
Once in a while a man is kind, as kindness is out there,
and then he is hated by all the other masters.
They say, "his niggers spoil our niggers." These servants are not allowed on the other
plantations at all,--if caught there, they will put as much on them as they can
bear.
Some slaves in Georgia violated the law by selling
corn, cotton, and other crops without their owners' permission. This practice was frowned upon not just
because stolen crops might be sold, as Mohr stated, but "because it caused
'dissatisfaction' among slaves who were not allowed such liberties." Genovese noted one planter who said it was
futile to enforce discipline on your plantation when a neighboring planter does
not, because, as another explained, the bondsmen easily spot the differences
and become displeased. When the masters
did not maintain a common front and equalize how they treated their human
chattels, the slaves' murmurings and complaints due to comparing differences
between different local "administrations" made controlling them
harder. But since the slaveowners had a
common self-interest against their slaves' demands, their community standards
of treatment were not going to be especially high. Olmsted wondered whether the striving ruffian individualists he
encountered on one steamboat in the South would have their passions "much
restrained by the fear of losing the respect of their neighbours." Because the master's will over his own slave
was legally paramount, the neighbors' complaints about the cruelty of some master
or mistress in their midst was mostly limited to the force of moral
suasion. After Christopher Nichols,
once a slave in Virginia, had been horribly whipped for trying to run away, all
the whites who saw him the next day working in the mill "said it was a
shame to use anybody in that way."466 He did not count on these criticisms to
restrain his master in the future, so he soon ran away again, this time
successfully. Despite these caveats,
much as a child will complain to his parents that the kid next door was allowed
to do such-and-so, so why cannot he, the slaves, being similarly powerless,
could make similar comparisons, and by complaining at least sometimes get
better treatment from their owners.
How Mistresses and Other Family Members Often
Restrained Ill-Treatment
The
mistress often could influence the master or overseer to treat the slaves
better. Consider how one slaveboy
mistakenly thought his master told him to "eat it" when in fact he
said "heat it," when referring to some cold, leftover "hopping
John," which was cowpeas, boiled with pork or bacon, sometimes with rice
added. The master was going to whip
him, but did not when his wife demurred:
"Oh, no, he is young and didn't understand." In one white slaveowning family in South
Carolina, because the wife had owned a number of slaves when she married her
husband, she treated her slaves markedly better than those of her husband. She "would't allow no slashing round
'bout where she was," and pushed her slaves to keep their quarters
more tidy. One time, as her husband was
about to whip one of her slaves, she said, "John C., you let my nigger alone,"
and was obeyed. Another mistress was
mercilessly whipped for treating her husband's slaves well by unchaining them
and cooking them a meal one time.467 More stories about mistresses being more kind
than their husbands, such as by attempting to dissuade them from selling a
slave off, could be given.468 Admittedly, the mistresses sometimes were
worse than their husbands. Harriett
Robinson, once a slave in Texas, remembered how her mistress ("Miss
Julia") routinely beat her during the Civil War, while her master did not
touch her. One day, when she told her
brother to whip her, the master came home after hunting, and blasted their
treatment of her: "You infernal
sons of bitches, don't you know there is three hundred Yankees camped out here,
and iffen they knowed you'd whipped this nigger the way you done, they'd kill
all us. Iffen they find it out, I'll
kill all you all." This master's
opposition to his wife's harsh treatment was probably motivated purely by
pragmatism, for evidently he had done nothing to stop all the earlier
beatings. In the case Tines Kendricks
of Georgia described, the mistress was plainly meaner than her husband, being
stingy, and awaking her slaves loudly before dawn. She "cuss and rare worse'n a man."469 So while "the fairer sex" was more
commonly a restraining force on its husbands' (or fathers') treatment of their
slaves, certainly sometimes the mistresses were crueler than their husbands.
Younger
family members sometimes restrained the punishments meted out on a slave. Ball said the white daughters of the master
and mistress would make a particular slave their own, and the white sons had
their favorites as well. As a result, the young mistresses looked out for the
interests not only of the slave girl, but her family as well, while the young
masters "have many disputes with the overseer if he abuses them
[their favorites]." In another
case, Mary Reynolds was sold because her master "didn't want Miss Dora
[his daughter] to play with no nigger young-un." But because the young mistress was so emotionally attached to
Mary, and became severely and deathly depressed because of her absence, a
doctor was called on to see what was wrong.
After the doctor recommended buying Mary back in order to save the
master's daughter's life, her father did so, even though buying her back cost
much more than what he got when initially selling her. In another case, one young master (as an
adult) got his father to stop beating a captured runaway over the head with a
club that made the latter bleed terribly.470 The children of the master when in residence
constituted another of the informal checks on the barbarity of the system. Thus, when the white children had grown up
playing with slave children, the attachments formed in the childhood years
formed one of the main foundations for a truly practiced paternalism, at least
towards these "old favorites."471
The Central Reality of Violence as the Main Tool to
Control the Slaves
The
slave population of the South was mainly controlled by violent coercion and the
threat of it by the white ruling class with aid from poor whites. The slaves were not primarily kept in line
by the successful implantation of the ruling class' ideology, whether it be the
Protestant work ethic, in Fogel and Engerman's version, or the reciprocal
duties/rights of paternalism between the rulers and the ruled, in Genovese's
version. Genovese's model is only true
if he could prove the slaves really accepted the ideological framework
of the system which held them in bondage, as opposed to giving it just lip
service publicly before their owners, and denying it among themselves. Successful indoctrination may have occurred
among many of the drivers and house servants of large planters, especially in
long-settled regions among the Atlantic Seaboard, but probably did not get very
far otherwise. Furthermore, the ruling
class itself may not have believed in paternalism so much as a striving,
individualistic commercial capitalism and Jacksonian Democracy, which treated
whites as political equals (vis-a-vis the vote), but excluded blacks on purely
racial grounds. Such positive
incentives for the slaves as better food and clothing, better jobs, etc. for
extra work and/or unusual loyalty to their masters and mistresses were merely
supplements to measures that inflicted continual violence. For while sheer habit may have kept many
slaves in the fields much of the time, the slaveholders always had to whip
recalcitrant bondsmen as examples to intimidate the rest. Judging from Barrow's experience with his
slaves, a majority of them became "recalcitrant" enough to be worthy
of the lash at one time or another.
Three out of four of Barrow's cotton pickers were whipped at least
during the appendix's 1840-41 period.
Of the 50 out of 65 who were whipped, they felt the lash no less than
130 times in that same period.472 Corporal punishment had to take the place of
internal motivation when a slave's will had to be forced to be the same
as his or her owner's.
Occasional
sacrificial executions, combined with those slaves killed on the job by masters
or overseers, further struck dread among those enslaved, even though barbarisms
such as burning at the stake never totally eliminated the worst slave crimes,
let alone routine acts of resistance like pilfering and malingering. Both Genovese's concept of paternalism and
Fogel and Engerman's view of the Protestant work ethic being accepted by the
slaves suffer from discounting the fundamental reality of violence and force as
the main tools for controlling them. As
Anderson noted when critiquing Genovese:
It is stated that paternalism can encourage violence,
but there is no history of violence as a means of repression in the Old South
that is interwoven into the book. . . . Violence is dealt with in terms of how often
the whip cracked [shades of Fogel and Engerman!] or how often police patrols
tracked down slaves rather than with than the intensity and nature of the
violence employed. More importantly, the whole question of violence in shoved
into the background.
Since slavery involves a fundamentally involuntary,
unchosen relationship between its work force and "management," it had
to rely on force much more than capitalist employers do. The latter rarely need to openly resort to
it except when their property is attacked, blocked, or occupied by
strikers. Dissatisfied workers in a
free labor market have the right to move and look for another job, which constitutes
its biggest "safety valve" for workers' frustrations, even though it
is an individualistic and (often) burdensome choice for them to make. In contrast, Reuter maintained that
the principle that controlled the allocation of
plantation work was naked power. Mean
work went to slaves, other work to the owners.
The duties of the Negroes were determined in the same way as those of
the livestock. Those who resisted were
beaten and whipped. As valuable
property, less frequently were they hanged or shot.473
Labor
discipline collapsed throughout the South whenever a hostile army was nearby,
especially during the Civil War, proving that the slaves were mainly controlled
by the use of violence or constant threats of it. The hordes of field hands which fled many Southern farms and
plantations, and the much greater resistance those which remained behind put up
against their owners whenever the Yankee army was nearby, proves slavery's base
was not positive incentives and the slaves' accepting a Protestant work ethic
or a paternalistic ethos of reciprocal duties/rights that kept them in
line. If ideological factors or
positive material incentives were what mainly kept the slaves in line, then the
presence of a hostile army to the interests of slaveowners should not have had
much effect on the slaves obeying them or running away. Hostile armies stripped away slaveowners'
ability to use armed force to put down major revolts (or the threat of them)
and it interfered in the judicial/police system of capturing and returning
escaped slaves who were in "occupied territory." Slaves in these areas could often escape
vigilantes and lynch mobs that unofficially meted out "justice," or
found these forces mobilized much less often against them because of the
implicit threat the occupying army posed.
Especially in the Union army's case, the master class faced the danger
the local commanders or troops may be affected by anti-slavery sentiment. They could set out to make as much trouble
as possible, such as by destroying or pillaging the planters' property or
subvert slaveowners' attempts to control their slaves. Largely only with the house servants
generally, and the slaves of unusually kind masters, where the paternalistic
ideology was likely seriously practiced by the masters and really actually
accepted by the slaves, especially in long settled areas, did the presence of a
hostile army have lesser effects in subverting work discipline, because then a
stronger voluntary component existed in the slave/master relationship.
The High Levels of Violence between the Slaves and
Masters Compared to England
As
for the enslaved, because they have no free choice, this lead to much greater
violence on both sides when revolts did occur, both in the numbers of whites
killed by the slaves, and in the ensuing judicial and vigilante killings that
followed. The slaves' desperation was
greater, their goals much higher than the farmworkers' during the Swing Riots,
and the American whites' frontier/vigilante ethos ensured massive retaliation
when "putting the black man back in his place." An "all or nothing" mentality
characterized the slave revolts, for they knew the system must be totally
overthrown in order to achieve their goals when resorting to violence. Otherwise, sooner or later, the white militia
and (if necessary) regular army would catch up with them, and kill them en
masse in pitched battle. During the
Turner rebellion in Virginia in 1831, the rebel slaves eventually totalled
about seventy, and killed fifty-five whites, among whom "neither age nor
sex was to be spared." They left
behind, as Blassingame described, "a trail of ransacked plantations,
decapitated bodies and battered heads across Southampton," all in a mere
forty-eight hours of time. More than
forty blacks were executed or murdered (by lynch mobs, etc.) in the aftermath
of this revolt. After the 1811 revolt
in New Orleans, sixteen black leaders had their heads cut off and placed on
stakes along the Mississippi, twenty more slaves were hanged, and perhaps one
hundred more were killed by "roving bands of militia and vigilante
groups." After the exposure of the
Vesey plot in South Carolina in 1822, which had killed no whites, some
twenty-two blacks were executed. Their
bodies were allowed to dangle for hours.
Its court stopped after executing thirty-five in all, having had dozens
more scheduled for death, explaining that "the terror of example we
thought would be sufficiently operative by the number of criminals sentenced to
death [already]." Sterne and
Rothseiden maintain that with whites so ready to resort to violence, especially
with extra-legal lynchings and riots, along with the routine whippings and
other punishments necessary to keep the slaves in line on plantations, the
blacks readily learned from (especially Southern) American culture to use
physical force as a tool during conflicts.474
Both Sides Committed Far Less Violence during the
Swing Riots in England
Unlike
the major American slave revolts, one has to look long and hard to find anyone
actually killed in the mob violence that broke out during the Swing riots in
1830-31. In the ensuing trials
relatively few farmworkers were finally executed compared. The Swing Riots were much more widespread in
time and space than any American slave revolt, with some twenty counties
affected, reaching a peak in the November and December of 1830. Despite all the verbal threats made to life,
limb, and property, machines smashed, ricks burned, and dangerous weapons
rioters branished, Hobsbawm and Rude noted:
In fact, no single life was lost in the whole course
of the riots among the farmers, landlords, overseers, parsons or the guardians
of law and order . . .
However, as we have seen even these methods [rick-burning, beating up
overseers of the poor, etc.] were used in moderation, and at the height of the
mass movement, hardly at all. More than
this: the limits of violence were known
and not overstepped. Property was its
legitimate object, life was not.
Another noted:
"They got about their task of riot politely, dressed according to
many eyewitnesses' accounts in their best clothes, seldom using threatening
language." With great difficulty a
case can be located where someone was actually killed during the Swing
riots: One Wiltshire farmer shot and
killed a rioter just after he participated in a mob that smashed up some
threshing machines. Demonstrating the
contrast with Turner's merciless band, Lady Cavan was able to challenge the
rioters' sense of propriety by saying, "Seeing you are my neighbours and
armed, yet, as I am an unprotected woman, I am sure you will do no
harm." The gathered laborers
quickly denied they meant any harm, and did none. When the English authorities, after initially showing some sense
of mercy and/or restraint on the local level, implemented a policy of
repression, only 19 were actually executed, although 252 were sentenced to
death. Out of some l,976 cases, 800
were acquitted, with 644 being jailed and 505 being sentenced to
transportation, with 482 actually arriving in Australia and Tasmania. While these figures still sound high, it has
to be remembered the Swing riots involved far more laborers over a much larger
geographic territory compared to the Turner or New Orleans slave revolts. Admittedly, the death sentences meted out
greatly exceeded the severity of the crimes committed. But then, in America, thirty-five slaves
were executed in South Carolina just for (allegedly) participating in Vesey's abortive
conspiracy to revolt, in which no whites or others were injured or killed, and
no property was damaged.475
Furthermore, there were no lynch mobs or vigilante activities that
punished or killed laborers involved in the Swing riots, while in the aftermath
of both the Turner and New Orleans revolts these were quite active. England's agricultural working class, even
when rioting, showed a much greater restraint in using violence than the
slaves, and in turn the English ruling class inflicted much less punishment on
the average rioter, compared to Southern American whites' standards of
punishing slaves involved in slave revolts, actual or abortive, by the legal
process or the lynch mob.
The Lower Goals and Greater Divisions among Local
Elites in the English Case
The
farmworkers' goals were almost pathetically lower than the slaves', at least as
proclaimed, even when the cloak of anonymity could be used, such as through the
threatening "Swing" letters.
Many sought just somewhat higher wages and (at the instigation or
passive acceptance of the farmers in some areas) the end of the tithe and lower
rents, and the destruction of the machines that robbed them of work. None announced any desire for the land of
the gentry and aristocracy to divide among themselves.476 Not even the goal of gaining allotments or
reversing enclosure was stated by most rioters, which implies the basic
acceptance of their condition of proletarianization, at least for their main
means of support. Sometimes the
gathered crowds of laborers did "levy" (i.e. extort) immediate cash
payments or beer from various farmers and landowners. Occasionally the political agenda of the radical reformers such
as Cobbett showed up in the demands of the laborers, such as a complaint
against sinecures, and others against taxes, but these certainly were not the
main demands of the laborers.
Resentment against specific officials or places involved in the parish
relief system was displayed, such as in the destruction of the Selborne and
Headley workhouses in Hampshire.477 Consider the demands of one crowd of 150
that gathered in Ringmer, Sussex, which threw forward a letter stating their
grievances to Lord Gage when he sought the leader of the group to come forward
to state their demands. Although the writer
had the advantage of anonymity in stating his group's goals, all that was
demanded was a fairly substantial wage increase (in order to avoid dependence
on parish relief) and the dismissal of the permanent overseers of the poor,
singling one out in particular, who were less sympathetic to their claims for
relief. The vestry proceeded to grant
these demands after discussion, and with cheers the assembled crowd dispersed.478 A significant factor in the riots,
especially on the local level as the disturbances occurred, was that many
farmers and even some landowners, especially on the county level, sympathized
with the laborers' demands.479 A number of the farmers in East Anglia even
seized upon the situation to use the laborers' collected numbers to exert
pressure against landowners to lower rents and clergymen their tithes in order
to, they said, raise their men's wages.480 Would-be similar actions by Southern poor
whites--to instigate and collude with the slaves in a rebellion--are
unimaginable. Slaveholders and poor
whites remained united as classes against the blacks during all the slave
revolts and panics that happened in the antebellum South. The English farmers' sense of personal
danger from the open unrest of their workers was far less than what
slaveowners and their small farmer and poor white allies felt during the
actuality of a slave revolt, where the mentality on both sides was kill or be
killed. Despite the evident oppression
of the laborers, they were much more restrained in their dealings with local
farmers and landowners during the Swing Riots, and vice versa, than the slaves
were with their owners and allies among the non-slaveholding whites--and the
lynch mob mentality was entirely absent among the English.481
The Routine Police State Measures in the South
American
slaveowners routinely employed a number of very coercive safety measures and
precautions in order to protect themselves against their human chattels. Slavery involves far more exertion of
control, surveillance, and violence on a steady basis than is the case in a
capitalist society where labor is free to quit and change jobs, and move
elsewhere. The Southern whites were
much more paranoid than the English rural elite, both for objective reasons and
because of racist ones, and feared the slaves might attack them violently back
in retaliation for the ill-treatment they had received. Olmsted described how the standard security
measures in major Southern cities approached those associated with martial
law:
But go the bottom of this security and dependence
[between slave servants and masters], and you comes to police machinery such as
you never find in towns under free government:
citadels, sentries, passports, grape-shotted cannon, and daily public
whippings for accidental infractions of police ceremonies. I happened myself to see more direct
expression of tyranny in a single day and night at Charleston, than at Naples
[under Bomba] in a week; and I found that more than half the inhabitants of
this town were subject to arrest, imprisonment, and barbarous punishment, if
found in the streets without a passport after the evening 'gun-fire.'
He went on to explain how a twelve-year-old girl, in a
district where slaves outnumbered free fifty to one, stopped an old slave along
the road, and angrily ordered him back to his plantation under the threat of
having him whipped when he hesitated to return. Then
she instantly resumed the manner of a lovely child
with me, no more apprehending that she had acted unbecomingly, than that her
character had been influenced by the slave's submission to her caprice of
supremacy; no more conscious that she had increased the security of her life by
strengthening the habit of the slave to the master race, than is the sleeping
seaman that he tightens his clutch of the rigging as the ship meets each new
billow.482
The pass and patrol system had controls that were far
tighter than anything dreamed up under the settlement laws and parish
authorities in England, as damaging as the latter were to the English
farmworkers' freedoms of movement and of contract. The level of compulsion and surveillance involved in the gang
system was far higher than anything under which the English laborers suffered,
including under their own gang system, because corporal punishment could not be
inflicted on adult laborers. While the
task system appreciably reduced the amount of compulsion and watchfulness
masters maintained, it was not common outside lowland Georgia and South
Carolina, so it must not be taken as the norm.
Compulsion was the name of the game, and incentives for working extra
hours, Sundays, and holidays were just mere supplements to a system of control
characterized by violence.
Coercion, Not Incentives or Ideology, as the Basic
Means of Enforcing Slavery
While
the slaves found ways to take advantage of divisions between masters,
mistresses, their children, and overseers, as well as between poor whites and
planters (such as in the illicit liquor/stolen goods trade), the fact remains
when any slightly serious challenge to the overall system of slavery occurred,
all the whites would united against the blacks, enslaved and otherwise. Small advantages gained by resistance while
the overall system maintained in place did not disturb its characteristically
fantastic levels of violence and coercion.
While many stories may be told about huge masses slaves routinely
working when hardly any whites were around besides an overseer, or the owning
white family, the fact remains the slaves, at least certainly their leaders,
knew that revolt would result in a bloodbath, composed mostly of their own
blood once the militia or regular army caught up with them. The routine whippings, sales, imprisonments,
executions, etc. indicated that the whites meant business, and that they were
(at least publicly) undivided and fully confident in maintaining their social
system. Unlike other ruling classes
which have been overthrown, who became divided and lost their nerve and belief
in the justice of their social order, the South's became more dogmatic and
bellicose in defending itself in the three decades before the Civil War. Habit, combined with routinely punishing
enough slaves as examples to restrain the rest, sufficed to keep them in line
in most cases concerning any frontal attacks on the system that
oppressed them. As for how the slaves
could and did quietly subvert the system, oftentimes trying to get as many
material advantages as they could, that is discussed below (pp. 325-353). The effects of the Union army's presence
demonstrated that most slaves were not obedient because they were turned into
childish, docile "Sambos" in personality, or due to notions of
paternalism or the Protestant work ethic swimming around in their heads. Now some exceptions did exist--such as among
many drivers, domestic servants, and even the field hands of the kindest
masters where the duties of the ruling class were not mere words, where the
slaves actually did come to identify with their white family and its interests,
sometimes in a quasi-client/patron relationship, especially in long-settled
areas. Nevertheless, the overall system
of slavery was maintained by a continual application of violence, coercion, and
surveillance, and any other measures, such as pay for overtime work, better
jobs for more loyal or harder-working slaves, the inculcation of paternalistic ideology,
etc. were mere supplements, not its core.
Basic Differences between the American and English
Elites' Methods of Control
Because
the English farmworkers were legally free, the English aristocracy and gentry,
as well as their allies among the tenant farmers, had to take a considerably
different approach to maintaining social control and imposing work discipline
on their work force than American slaveholders when dealing with their
slaves. One key difference was that
local government loomed much larger in the lives of the English farmworkers
than it did in the lives of the slaves, whose master or mistress had the total
power to discipline them except for serious offenses such as murder. England, having long been settled, had much
stronger local administrative machinery in place, even if its actual ability to
deploy force in times of emergency was surprisingly low. Compared to Southern frontier America and
its vigilante/lynch mob spirit, a much stronger respect for the law as a means
of settling inter-personal disputes existed, even if duels among aristocrats
remained a standing exception to this rule until well into the nineteenth
century.
The Freedom of Action Local Government Officials Had
in England
In
England, controlling unruly or troublesome agricultural workers on a routine
basis while not at work was a job largely left to the magistrates and justices
of the peace. Conveniently enough for
local rural elites, these normally were squires, parsons, landowners, or
various others in the local rural ruling class who possessed a vested economic
interest in disciplining the lower classes.
For unlike ancien regime France, with its central control and
appointment of local officials and gendarmes, only intensified after the
Revolution, England's rural officialdom normally had its roots in the
immediately surrounding countryside where they held office. French intendants and their subdelegates
were directly responsible to the king and his royal council, often served in
alien areas, and were removable at will.
By contrast, local English officials simply could not be easily
disciplined or removed by the king, parliament, or the home office. Only with an address to the king from both
Houses of Parliament could they be removed.
As a result, English government in the eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries was much more decentralized than France's, and local magistrates
provided a check on the central government's powers such that the local
landowners often could insulate themselves from London's effective
authority. But this system
correspondingly created hundreds, nay, thousands, of petty oligarchies, wherein squires, parsons, and landowners
served as magistrates locally, often ruling on cases that indirectly or
directly affected their own interests.
Generally they could pretty much do as they wished, bending laws and
setting precedents that served their own interests, largely only restrained by
any sense of paternalism or gentlemanliness they possessed. Justices of the peace also had taken on many
administrative responsibilities over the centuries, and had much authority,
directly or indirectly, over the maintenance of parish roads, the settlement
law's enforcement, and the setting of the poor rates. Since so much of the laborers' lives and fates were wound up in
the poor and settlement laws, power fell into the hands of the local vestries
under the Old Poor Law and boards of guardians under the New, giving local
government great direct influence on the laborers' lives. The corresponding institutions in the
American South had much less influence on the slaves because so much effective de
facto judicial power had been delegated to the slaveholders through their
ability to use corporal punishment.
English rural elites used the local administrative machinery at the
parish and county levels, whether through courts or the bodies that oversaw
paupers and gave out relief, to mainly to control the laborers, not so much any
personal power that came from being supervisors or employers.483
Because
the laborers were legally free men and women, employers, as employers,
had much less control over the laborers when they were off work than the
slaveowners had over their personal chattels.
Work discipline issues spilled over much less into the off-work personal
lives of the agricultural workers than for the slaves. Except in some cases under the poor laws for
families declared paupers, it was impossible to destroy or split up a laborer's
family in order to force compliance with his or her betters. The laborers, at least theoretically, had
the freedom to quit and go anywhere in England they wished--although, as we
will see, the settlement laws put a considerable crimp on this. As a result, English rural elites had to use
considerably more indirect measures of control than the Southern slaveholders
had, who could, on the spot have recalcitrant slaves whipped, imprisoned, or
sold, only rarely facing any official appeal or interference against their
actions concerning their enslaved blacks.
The Basic Strategy for Controlling the Farmworkers
Better
Since
the landowners as well as the farmers had increasingly accepted a commercial
system of agriculture (paternalistic rhetoric notwithstanding), and raised
crops for sale and not generally for immediate subsistence, they would not
attack the free market on principle to restrict the freedoms of the laborers,
at least by the late eighteenth century.
Their approach instead was to rig the labor market on terms that favored
them, making the laborers semi-freely then choose to work for this or
that local farmer or landowner in some given parish. They used enclosure to try to force laborers into a complete
dependence on wages through destroying the semi-independent, "scratch as
scratch can" subsistence economy that eked out a living off the parish
commons. By using the settlement laws
that forced laborers to stay in their own parishes when they became chargeable
to the poor laws (or worse, before 1795, when the local parish believed they may
become chargeable), they created semi-captive pools of laborers. But this could be expensive, because the
poor rates had to be jacked up to pay for all these people on relief. Parishes with one or a very few dominant
landowners could manipulate the poor laws by driving out all laborers who might
become chargeable to the parish, such as during the long winter slack season in
arable areas. These parishes became
"closed," because laborers could not easily gain settlements or live
in them without long-term contracts.
Landowners would keep only the laborers they needed year around in these
parishes, and relegate the "reserve army of unemployed" to nearby
"open" villages or small towns, which was drawn upon during seasonal
peaks such as harvest and haymaking.
This practice also had the advantage of allowing them to dispense with
farm servants, who gained settlements when given one-year contracts in the
parish they worked in, and who likely became semi-idle in winter anyway. Parishes to which extra laborers were driven
had the misfortune of becoming "open" because those who owned (or
rented) the land were too large or diverse a group to act in a monopsonic
fashion. Ratepayers (the occupiers of
the land) in these parishes had to pay much higher poor rates (which amounted
to real estate taxes) as a result than the landlords or farmers in closed
parishes. With the passage of the 1834
Poor Law Amendment Act, landowners found another way to avoid having to pay
relief to all but the most desperate.
The New Poor Law banned outdoor relief to the able-bodied, and deterred
applicants for relief by the workhouse test by even those possessing local
settlements. So the English rural
elites, by skillfully wielding enclosure, the settlement laws, and the poor
laws, could lower their wage bills and poor rates by saturating the local labor
markets with labor only as they needed it, allowing them to dispense with farm
servants, while attempting to avoid paying for its "upkeep" during
seasonal lows in the agricultural year through foisting "surplus
workers" upon open parishes and through making small landowners (or
tenants) pay higher poor rates than they otherwise would have and by finding
ways to deter laborers from applying for parish relief. Let us consider each part of this program
piece by piece.
Enclosure as a Method of Social Control and
"Class Robbery"
Although
public-spirited motives could always be cited to justify enclosure, it still
remained a form of class aggression, of landowners against cottagers and
laborers, in Thompson's words "class robbery," since it clearly
served the material interests of the former group as against the latter.484 Landowners received a large, proportional
increase in their property, since they had formal legal title to their rights
in land. By contrast, the poor's
customary rights to the use of the village common were not legally
recognized. As a result, they normally
got little or nothing from the commissioners hired to assess, apportion, and
award the lands that had been the village commons. Usually they not only received nothing, but lost access to the
commons, which now was split up among pre-existing landowners. The Earl of Lincoln admitted that nineteen
of twenty private enclosure bills ignored the rights of the poor. Even when their rights were recognized and
were awarded a small piece of land, it often had to be sold. In Buckingham, within two or three years of
enclosure 50 percent of the landowners sold their land, as opposed to the
normal rate of 20 percent selling per decade.485 Perhaps they could not pay the legal costs
all landowners had to bear for parliamentary enclosure to take place. Sometimes they could not pay to build fences
on their small strip of land, which cost proportionately more for small parcels
than large, so they had to sell it. One
calculation found it cost four pounds an acre to enclose twenty acres, but two
acres cost thirteen pounds each. As a
clergyman for Parndon, Essex noted, after an enclosure that took place in
1795: "Their little allotments all
sold; could not enclose." Since
the purchasers were the normally better-off landowners or farmers to begin
with, this land was likely permanently alienated from the poor as a class. These general effects were reported by one
veteran of twenty enclosure commissions thus, as summarized by another:
Numbers in the practice of feeding the commons cannot
prove their right, and many, indeed most who have allotments, have not more
than one acre, which being insufficient for the man's cow, both cow and land
are usually sold to opulent farmers.
That the right sold before the enclosure would produce much less than
the allotment after it, but the money is dissipated, doing them no good when
they cannot vest it in stock.
Another commissioner said that in most of the
enclosures he had known, "the poor man's allotment and cow are sold, five
times in six before the award is signed."486 The sellers of these small strips of land
received from enclosure a few pounds that was likely swallowed up by basic
living expenses like food--food often once gained by grazing their animals on
the commons in the past, an option now terminated by enclosure. Enclosure clearly was a redistribution of
property from the poor to the rich, which is only obscured because the poor's
customary rights to the commons were not generally legally recognized--and,
even when they were, the resulting allotments awarded often did them little
permanent good.
Enclosure:
Direct Access to the Means of Production and Food Both Lost
As noted above, meat largely fell out of the
farmworkers' diets during the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries
(pp. 30-33, 37, 39-41). In many areas
enclosure helped cause their diet to deteriorate, because the poor before it
could own a cow, sheep, or pig, and graze it on the commons. After enclosure, they had to sell their cows
(especially) since the only pasture they could use had now disappeared behind
the fences of their richer neighbors and/or converted to arable use. The poor now had to pay hard cash earned
from wage work for milk, butter, and meat that before they had gained independently
from working for others by the generally minimal effort of having one or more
of their animals graze on the local commons.
As Somerville noted: "Each
enclosure bill excluded the poor man from the common, and, upon the whole, it
may be as well for them to live the mean life of breeders of geese, rather than
be turned out to labour for wages less than the price of food." But more was lost than just additional income
in the form of animal foods. They also
lost their direct access to the means of production whenever enclosure struck
their parish or village. With the
destruction of the semi-subsistence economy of the poor based on the commons,
which had kept many out of the labor market for much of the year, the now
thoroughly proletarianized laborers were thrown upon exclusively depending on
working for others to gain a living--or upon handouts of others, whether the
charity of the rich or the dole of the parish.
Excellently summarizing this process, one clergyman in 1795 said
enclosure and the stripping of cottages of attached land reduced the laboring
poor "from a comfortable state of independence to a precarious state as
mere hirelings, who when out of work, come immediately upon the parish."487 Some even saw destroying the economic
independence of the poor as a good policy since it imposed stricter
labor discipline upon them. As one
advocate of large farms claimed:
[The benefit the poor gain from the commons] is an
essential injury to them, by being made a plea for their idleness; for, some
few excepted, if you offer them work, they will tell you, they must go to look
up their sheep, cut furzes, get their cow out of the pound, or perhaps, say
they must take their horse to be shod, that he may carry them to a horse-race
or cricket-match . . . if by converting the little farmers into a
body of men who must work for others, more labour is produced, it is an
advantage which the nation should wish for:
the compulsion will be that of honest industry to provide for a family.488
Opposing an unsuccessful 1845 bill that encouraged
allotments, one M.P. said laborers should be "solely"
dependent on wages for a living. So the
farmworkers lost more than food when enclosure came, but any remaining economic
independence as well from their social superiors, whether as employers or as
dispensers of charity or parish relief, unless a permanent system of allotments
was put into place.489
But
even for the rich, the blessings of enclosure were by no means unmixed. Under the poor law, ratepayers--who were not
necessarily exactly "rich"--had to support unemployed laborers. When enclosure cut off the poor from the
commons for cutting fuel, grazing animals, or raising vegetables, those out of
work turned to the parish much more quickly than they otherwise would have if
they could have maintained a state of semi-subsistence, semi-independence. When completely proletarianized laborers ran
out of cash earned from wages, they and their families were fundamentally
helpless, and had to look to others for aid.
Enclosure commonly caused rate hikes in many parishes in order to
support the now greatly multiplied numbers of paupers, especially in arable areas
because seasonal unemployment was high in winter. One gentleman told Somerville in 1844 that he expected half the
laboring population of his parish in Sussex to seek relief at the workhouse in
winter. Speaking generally, the rush to
enclosure during the French Wars and their immediate aftermath correlated with
a rapid increase in the amount of poor relief granted from the 1790s until the
1815-20 post-war period. It peaked then
at 3.2 percent of national income and twelve shillings ten pence per person. Snell powerfully demonstrates this
relationship more specifically by regressing the amounts of per capita poor
relief paid with the ten counties most affected by parliamentary enclosure,
where over 35 percent of their land was enclosed. The correlation determination (r) was an astonishing .911, which
meant "as much as 83 per cent of the variation [r2] in
poor relief in these counties can be explained by the percentage of land
enclosed." Even in those fourteen
counties where 17 to 35 percent of the land was enclosed a correlation
coefficient (r) of .755 was produced, with the coefficient of determination (r2)
coming to over 57 percent. The history
of specific parishes proves these correlations were not coincidental. Sir Paul found an average increase in the
rates of over 250 percent in the nine parishes he listed. In the extreme case of Lidlington, they went
from one shilling to four shillings six pence in the pound, in Chattris, from
two shillings to four shillings six pence, and Hethersett, five shillings to
ten.490 Thus, enclosure
could actually damage landowners, for increasing their control of the laborers
by stripping them of their former state of semi-independence using the commons
caused local tax hikes.
Open and Close Parishes: One Dumps Laborers onto the Other
One
parish, by dumping its laborers off on other parishes as much as walking
distances and the legalities of the settlement laws allowed, lowered its poor
rates. Creating a "close
parish" in which ideally only the minimal number of laborers required year
around gained settlements therein became a standard objective for many in the
rural elite. Landlords would work to
pull down cottages deemed unnecessary, and farmers would avoid hiring live-in
farm servants on one-year contracts to keep from giving them settlements in the
parish they worked in. As clergyman
John Cox of Essex testified:
"People began to see that by hiring by the year they created
settlements in their parishes, and they did not do it long." A number were taken to hiring servants for
fifty-one weeks or a few days short of a year.
Ann Peece was dismissed a few days short of a year because "it
would not be safe for the parish for her to continue there."491 All laborers who became chargeable as
paupers would be shipped out to their parish of settlement, if it was
elsewhere. The laws of settlement before 1795 were a very powerful tool,
because if parish authorities simply thought someone was "likely" to
become chargeable, he could be removed to his place of settlement under the
1662 Settlement Act. Prior to the 1795
act, certificates also had to be granted by the original parish of an immigrant
to another parish in order to allow him or her to leave legally, which helped
clarify the immigrant's place of settlement.
If the receiving parish demanded a certificate, and it was not granted,
it could immediately remove (i.e., "deport") the immigrant back to
his or her place of origin. Relegated
to some other nearby "open parish," were all the "catch
work" laborers needed only during seasonal peaks such as harvest,
haymaking, and spring planting. Here
ratepayers suffered from the misfortune of not being able to operate as a tight
cartel to keep laborers from gaining settlements, so they had to provide relief
for laborers often employed elsewhere for at least part of the year. Those not employing farm labor were forced
to subsidize those who did, who failed either to pay a living wage (as under
the Speenhamland/family supplement system) or to employ them year around.492
Even
some time before the French Wars, Young encountered one man, Charles
Turner, who by bringing in more laborers instead of pushing them out, acted
"diametrically opposite to the vulgar ideas impressed by those efforts of
barbarism, the poor laws of this kingdom:
Instead of quarrelling with other parishes to see who should be troubled
with the fewest poor, he endeavors by all means to increase that number in
his." The effort to push out
laborers intensified after the effects of enclosure, population growth, and the
decline of service manifested themselves as the nineteenth century began. Sometimes extreme measures were employed to
push laborers off onto other parishes.
After the French Wars, estates for eight to ten miles around Norwich
were systematically cleansed of laborers, while cottages were pulled down
faster than they were built in some areas of Devon and Somerset. (As described above about laborers' housing
(pp. 65, 69-71), the settlement laws were a major reason for the poor quality
of rural housing and crowding, such as the poor quality cottages that tradesmen
charged exploitive rents for in the open villages). Separating laborers' parish of work and of residence sometimes
imposed walks of five, ten, preposterously even twelve miles in some cases
around Norwich. This problem laid the
foundation for the infamous gang system, as the authors of the 1867-68 Report
knew, where gang masters would gather groups of men, women, and/or children
from (normally) open villages to work on distant farms. Originally, the settlement laws existed to
protect a given parish's resources (its commons, etc.) for its own poor first
of all as against newcomers who might overtax them if permitted to come in
without restrictions. But in the hands
of the landlords and large farmers they became a tool of oppression for driving
down the poor rates. The Hammonds
powerfully and succinctly described Hodge's predicament thus: "The destruction of the commons had
deprived him [the laborer] of any career within his own village; the Settlement
Laws barred his escape out of it."493
The Decline of Service
The
decline of service was another development farmworkers normally strongly
opposed since it injured themselves as a class. From their viewpoint, it guaranteed them food and a place to stay
when still young and unmarried for an entire year. It also encouraged the accumulation of savings before marriage
because the cash part of their wage was paid as a lump sum at the end of their
contract. Now as the accumulated
effects of enclosure, population growth, and the near universalization of
parish relief under (especially) the Speenhamland system piled up in the early
nineteenth century this changed. But
traditionally, starting as young teenagers, a man or woman working in husbandry
would be a farm servant for so many years, and live on the farmer's
premises. At annual hiring fairs, they
(likely) would switch employers, and live for another year with another farmer.
After getting married, they became day
laborers hired by the day, week, or month, who lived in their own
cottages. But in one way this system's
decline did benefit the laborers: It
reduced the amount of control and surveillance their superiors exercised over
them.
Now,
when did service collapse? Regionally,
this system persisted in northern England into the mid and late nineteenth
centuries, and in some parts of the southwest, but in southern England it had
largely disappeared by c. 1840, especially in arable areas in the
southeast. It had begun to change in
the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and many in husbandry
became laborers without having passed through the farm servant stage first. Snell's figures, based on quantifying 1,272
settlement law examinations for southeastern counties, found that while in the
1760s about 45 percent of farm servants continued with the same employer for two
years, it fell to about 25 percent by the 1790s for a group of southeastern
counties. For some counties, such as
Hertsford, Buckingham, Berks, Essex, and Oxford, this practice ceased
completely by 1820, and for Surrey, Kent, Sussex, and Hampshire, by 1810. While a gradual decline in the number of
annual hirings can be seen from c. 1780, the main collapse dated from c. 1810,
with a rapid increase in shorter hiring periods occurring, and a corresponding
decrease in fifty-two week hirings, by 1840.
Fifty-one week hirings, which are obvious contrivances to avoid giving
farmworkers settlements, for this same area rose from nearly nil in 1810 to
nearly 20 percent by 1830. But down
into the 1820s and 1830s, a large number of regular annual hirings still
occurred. In the north, service
remained a feature of many agricultural workers' careers, as the 1867-68
Commission on Employment in Agriculture found.
In north Northumberland, service included the female "bondage"
system. This varied from standard
service because the woman still lived at her parents' home, not her
employer's. Yorkshire itself still had a
strong system of statute hirings, in contrast to it "dying out in many
localities" elsewhere in England.
Chadwick hoped the New Poor Law, which abolished outdoor relief for the
able-bodied, would operate "both on the feelings and interests of the
employers of labour as an inducement to resort to the ancient and excellent
practice of hiring labourers for the year certain."494 This hope remained unsatisfied, for it would
be hard to bring back this system as dead as it was by 1834 in southern
England, unless the causes of its decline strongly reversed themselves.495
Why Service Declined
So
why did service decline? Contemporaries
did repeatedly blame the rising social pretensions of farmers and their wives
caused them to not want laborers living under the same roof with them. The aspirations of farmers to gentility,
especially those with a large amount of land, was discussed above (pp. 207-8),
emphasizing the female side, when dealing with the sexual division of
labor. One farmer went bankrupt due to
overspending by him and his wife, and inattention to his farm, whom Arch had
worked for as a child. He used this
case to condemn the general class of non-working farmers:
Why do not these farmers, with their wives and
families, draw in, and turn to, and live according to their means, instead of
being above their trade? Let the farmer
give up his hunter, let his wife doff her silken gowns, her furbelows and
fal-lals, let his daughters drop their tinkling accomplishments, and let them
give their time, their attention, and their money to the farm, as it is their
clear and bounden duty to do.
These pretensions not only manifested themselves by
extravagant living and neglect of business, but also by casting out farm
servants to live elsewhere. One
conversation Somerville had with a Wiltshire laborer reveals well the laborers'
resentment against the farmers on this score.
After maintaining that while the lords, squires, parsons, and farmers
were all bad, the latter were the worst, and that Somerville himself was one of
them, he said:
You ha'a daughter, playing on the piano on a Saturday
night to drown the noise of them brutes of labouring men what come to get their
wages through a hole in the wall; what cannot be allowed to set foot within a
farmer's house now-a-days; what must be paid through an opening in the
partition, lest they defile the house of a master what gets rich as they get
poor.496
Due to the high agricultural prices during the French
Wars that increased farmers' incomes, and the effects of enclosure in reducing
social mobility upwards from the cottagers' ranks and impoverishing many
laborers, the differences between the haves and have-nots grew during this
period. The perceptions of contemporaries
about the "embourgoisement" of the larger farmers as a class had a
basis in fact, and this had implications for the discontinuation of service.
Factors
of an directly economic nature were prominent in the decline of service. Originally, farmers desired it because they
wanted to have a fully secure "lock" on a certain number of laborers'
services year around to ensure their ability to meet the peak seasonal demands
of the agricultural year, even if it meant having to maintain the farm servants
through the slack winter season in a semi-idle state in (especially) arable
areas. But because of population
increases in many rural districts starting from the 1740s, and correspondingly
rising unemployment, farmers no longer needed a guaranteed minimal number of
contract laborers. Furthermore, enclosure
itself helped eliminate the need for farmers to tie up labor in long-term
contracts because laborers were no longer apt to refuse short term offers of
employment in order to attend to some aspect of scraping a living off the
parish commons instead. The parish's
"reserve army of unemployed" was so large farmers could hire them for
the exact number of days or weeks needed, and dismiss them at will, on a daily
basis. No threat existed of a real
labor shortage year around, except (though not always even then) at harvest
time, so farmers lost any incentive to "lock in" a minimal number of
laborers. Another reason for farmers
switching over to day laborers from farm servants were higher agricultural prices
relative to the supply of money, such as during the French Wars. When food was cheap, but money relatively
scarce, it was financially wise to board and feed farm servants on the farmers'
own premises to minimize wage payments.
But when the shoe was on the other foot, paying the laborers and making
them shift for themselves in cottages of their own became the more profitable
course of action. As Cobbett put it:
Why do not farmers now feed and lodge
their work-people, as they did formerly?
Because they cannot keep them upon so little as they give them in
wages. . . . [A] number of people, boarded in the same house,
and at the same table, can, with as good food, be boarded much cheaper than
those persons divided into twos, threes, or fours, can be boarded.
. . . therefore, if the farmer now shuts his pantry against his
labourers, and pays them wholly in money, is it not clear, that he does it
because he thereby gives them a living cheaper to him; that is to say, a
worse living than formerly?
As mentioned above (p. 282), service also declined
because settlements were conferred upon farm servants hired for a year until
1834, when the New Poor Law abolished this.
But the provision of parish relief discouraged hiring for even shorter
terms of service because the rates were paid by all property holders or occupiers
in a parish, which included those employing no workers at all. They could lay them off, even for a day
because of rainy weather as Chadwick complained, and force others to subsidize
the continued maintenance of their laborers at the semi-starvation levels of
pre-1834 outdoor poor relief. In short,
farmers found many solid financial reasons to end boarding their laborers over
and above any social pretensions for doing so.497
How Poor Relief Itself Promoted Population Growth
The Poor Laws, at least under the
Speenhamland system of family allowances before 1834, promoted a rising
birthrate, constituting another factor that helped hold Hodge in poverty. The population growth of England in the late
eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was not just an autonomous and
exogenous phenomenon that helped to transform rural class relations. Parish relief encouraged early marriages,
and discouraged accumulating savings, because married men and women with
families received priority in getting work and aid through their parish, while
single men and women were largely allowed to shift for themselves, or were
given particularly unpleasant make-work jobs.
Philip Hunt, a Bedfordshire magistrate, testified in 1824 that: "What is the course which a labourer
takes to increase his income or wages, when he marries and has a family? He applies to the overseer of the parish for
assistance; and that assistance in general is doled out in so limited a way,
that very few labourers marry voluntarily." G.O. Fenwick, the Vicar of Kempston, Bedfordshire, complained in
a questionnaire returned to the committee that drew up the 1834 Poor Law
Report: "The poor laws, as at
present administered, act as a bounty upon marriage." Clergyman Hugh Wade Gery, of Eaton Socon,
Bedfordshire, while testifying in 1837, attributed the recent increase in
population in parishes "in some measure upon the persons marrying earlier
now, without having provided for a family, which they were in the habit of
doing formerly, now depending upon parochial relief." The old delayed marriage pattern of
patiently accumulating savings as farm servants boarding with farmers until
they could marry (say) in their mid to late twenties increasingly disappeared
along with service, itself undermined by rising unemployment. Parish relief's inducements to early
marriage created a vicious circle that helped confine the laborers to
poverty. The increasing population of
rural England since the 1740s had already increasingly flooded many local
parish labor markets with potential workers, and this just added to the
problem. The decline of service and
enclosure combined to increase the numbers of those dependent on parish relief,
especially during the winter months in arable areas by driving up seasonal
unemployment, helping to universalize its influences on the farmworkers as a
class. Especially under the
Speenhamland and roundsmen systems of having wages supplemented by the parish,
allowing farmers to avoid directly paying living wages to their laborers, they
received an incentive to marry early and have many children similar to American
slaves: Just as slaves were guaranteed
so much food by their masters and mistresses regardless of work effort and were
(often) rewarded one way or another for having children, the local parishes
guaranteed so much aid per family member regardless of how good a worker the
farm laborer (male head of household) was.
Under such conditions, the laborer and his family largely ceased needing
to independently sustain themselves as an economic unit, and lost any
incentives to save or limit family size, because parish officials increasingly
became a "master" who automatically took care of them, albeit
increasingly at semi-starvation levels.
Firing laborers for bad work performance lost much of its sting as a
labor discipline tool when so many received so much aid directly from the
parish to begin with, and were totally dependent on the dole for much of the
year anyway. With so much mass
unemployment, so many used to being idle, and so much aid given by the parish,
much of shame for being fired had disappeared--especially when the farmers and
landowners were so often deeply resented to begin with--as did many of the
economic consequences for being jobless, including when one had a large family
increasing further in size. Hence, parish
relief itself was a factor, combined with the decline of service and enclosure,
in increasing population growth.498
Assorted Methods that Deterred Applicants for Relief
Rural
elites increasingly saw how unsustainable the patch-work Speenhamland system
was when facing an ever-growing army of applicants for relief and their falling
levels of individual productivity. They
started looking for more ways to deter applicants from applying. Imposing shame on recipients by some visible
degradation, such as making them wear a badge with a "P" in blue on
their shoulder on the right sleeve, was common in the northeast of England in
the eighteenth century. Laborers also
were publicly humiliated by such practices as harnessing paupers to carts with
bells around their necks and holding auctions for their labor like those for
slaves. Another approach was to create
"make work" jobs as an alternative to pure relief spending. Since many of these jobs were not especially
pleasant, and could serve as an outdoor test of destitution, many had
one more reason to avoid applying for relief any earlier than they had to. Although working on the roads and breaking
stones theoretically was hard, oppressive work, often as actually done by the
pauperized laborers these jobs were covers for idleness. Other jobs, such as oakum-picking, had
deterrent effects as well. After citing
Assistant Commissioner Hawley's report that noted this job "had the effect
of driving many from the workhouse and deterring others from approaching
it," Walter asked him, "Are you not aware that oakum-picking is
considered a disgraceful and degrading employment in consequence of that
employment being given in prisons?"
Although Hawley denied this, the implications of Walter's question were
clear.499
Why "Make-Work" Jobs Failed to Deter
Applicants and Undermined Work Discipline
Make-work
jobs often backfired on those who offered them, if they wished to accomplish
much useful by them. Similar to the
reputation built up around those hired by the WPA under the New Deal to rake
leaves, many laborers with these jobs performed little real work because the
assigned tasks were perceived as unimportant whether performed or not, by the
employers as well as the employed.500 As Thomas Batchelor noted, in the
questionnaire he returned to the 1834 Poor Law Commissioners for the parish of
Lidlington, Bedfordshire:
[The laborers' productivity was] diminishing very
much, in consequence of the evil example of paying many persons on the roads
for doing scarcely any thing; and the reason why they are permitted to have
wages almost without work is, because the farmers have no interest in the
permanent improvements of the roads, or even the lands, while the laws permit
the public, or the landowners, to receive nearly all the profits of work, which
they refuse to pay for, or encourage by allowances.501
The laborers on the roads and in the parish gravel
pits were notorious slackers, which undermined efforts to impose work
discipline on them. Paying them by the
day without reference to how much work they had done did not help matters
any. Though commenting obviously
polemically, Assistant Commissioner Hawley wrote one "almost magical
change" brought about by the New Poor Law was that "the lazy groups
of paupers, who heretofore infested the highways or thronged the gravel pits,
have totally disappeared."502 Guardian Ralph Carr of Gateshead, Durham,
complained in 1847 about the transfer of applicants for parish relief to the
"surveyor of highways; that he employed them at little more than half the
wages of the county; that they dawdled away the time in a gang; that they
mended the roads very badly, and displaced a great deal of valuable free
labour, and were themselves very much demoralized." James Beard, the Rector of Canfield,
Bedfordshire, after making an offer to send some families to places with work,
and the men who responded asked about what kind of beer was made there,
felt: "I desired them to return to
their places of idleness, viz. the gravel pits."503 Make work-jobs simply were poor deterrents
to relief applicants if in fact the jobs were not difficult.
The New Poor Law:
Deterring Applicants for Relief by Using the Workhouse Test
The
capstone of efforts to deter applicants and tighten work discipline was the New
Poor Law, which abolished outdoor relief for the able-bodied (and often for the
not-so-able-bodied) and imposed the workhouse test. The workhouse test was hardly original with the New Poor Law,
because even in the 1750s the regulations for Corbridge and Berwick in
northeastern England applied this in principle, the Berwick rule being nearly
identical.504
The rural elites of England allowed the fear of the workhouse and its
bad conditions to surge among their parishes' laborers in order to reduce the
rates. Indeed, deterrence had to be the
name of the game, because it could cost as much as three times more to keep one
person in a workhouse rather than give them outdoor relief, a point dealt with
above concerning Arch's dealings with the local board of guardians about giving
his father a pension (pp. 117-18). They
confined the inmates by prohibiting them from leaving the grounds of the
building, which was like a contemporary minimum security prison.505 Somerville recorded how one old man by the
name of Adam lamented the conditions he had to face: "Oh, master, what terrible things some of them as have been
in and out again tell of that union house.
They are put to their work and to their victuals like soldiers to
drill." In this area, the
guardians did not allow even elderly couples to live together, which
particularly angered and saddened him:
"To 'sunder we whom God did join together, that we may live apart
and meet death in our old age each alone, to deter, for they say that is it, to
deter other poor creatures from coming on the parish." In this case, the parish authorities began
to exercise a power theoretically limited to slaveholders: They manipulated family relationships and
the threat of their dissolution in order to compel desired behavior--here, not
coming to the parish. The laborers
faced the dilemma of actively preserving their marriages and families and
suffering total destitution, even starvation, or going into the workhouse to
stay alive, and suffering the break-up of their most treasured earthly
relationships. Assistant Commissioner
Hawley defended separating the sexes in the workhouses because of "the
impossibility of conducting the government of the workhouses where the sexes
were not separated."506 Sometimes children, perhaps a few out of a
large family, would be separated from their parents when they applied for
relief, as Arch remembered: "I
know for a fact that, when some of the men had a large number of children and
were unable to keep them, the parish authorities used to take several of them
away and put them in the workhouse."507 Even when the elderly couples were not split
up, many still were put away from their children by being committed to a union
workhouse at some distance from their home parish.508 The laborers' fears about living in
workhouses were also justified in other ways, since they were conducive to
spreading disease and under its one roof mixed able-bodied men and women in one
nearly indescribable menagerie.509 Making the workhouse diet less desirable was
another tactic, although it was problematic when the diet of so many southern
English agricultural workers was so minimal already.510 All in all, the name of the game was to deter
applicants and thus save money by making conditions inside the workhouses as
undesirable and miserable as possible so that only the most and truly desperate
would apply, which served to create an enormous amount of resentment by the
laborers as a class against the English rural elite.511
Falling Productivity:
One More Consequence of the Old Poor Law
Besides
trying to lower their taxes, landowners and farmers had another major reason to
accept the workhouse test, which was to reimpose work discipline upon the
laborers. Under the Speenhamland and
roundsmen systems, because laborers and/or their families were granted so much
aid regardless of work effort directly from the parish, and not in the
form of wages, labor productivity began to decline. After all, if half of what a laborer earns is given to him
by the parish automatically, the foundational labor discipline tool of a
capitalist economy, getting sacked, loses its bite, especially when so many
were fully dependent on parish relief in winter anyway. Compared to American slaves, whose food was
mostly provided by some master while lacking any direct tie to work performed,
the laborers under this system were halfway there in having their incentives as
wage workers to work removed. As the
Webbs once observed, when discussing the allowance system: "The labourers, secure of subsistence,
progressively lowered the quantity and quality of their effort." Unfortunately for the rural elites, unlike
slaveholders, they could not resort to corporal punishment to compel work from
semi-idle adult laborers, which meant the latter's level of productivity had
potentially an even lower floor than that of the slaves, to whom the lash could
be applied. Under the roundsmen system,
a man who found work for himself was just as well paid as a roundsman if he had
a large family, because although he only received half the wages of the former,
the parish made up the difference. As
Churchwarden T.M. Overman noted in a questionnaire returned for Maulden,
Bedfordshire to the 1834 Poor Law Commission:
"The labourer, when he found that the parish was to make up his
money, became indifferent about the quantity he did." He felt that overall labor productivity was
falling, that twelve men now did what used to be the work of nine eighteen
years earlier, and
as long as the magistrates keep up that system of
ordering the overseers to make up men's money, the evil will keep increasing;
it takes away that nice feeling that the family is maintained by himself, which
must be restored, or property will be of little value soon.512
Young noted that it was demoralizing to be necessarily
dependent on handouts from the parish to begin with, and when acquiring
property such as a cottage [i.e. social mobility] was a near
impossibility. The laborers' desires to
work were deadened by knowing that many of the jobs they did receive under the
roundsmen system were rather trivial and unnecessary, and the low pay they
received was no help either. Clergyman
Gery, a magistrate the poor would apply for relief through, knew the roundsmen
system well, described its negative effects on productivity when testifying in
1817: "A very bad effect it has
had upon them in very much diminishing their industry: those persons who are
sent round go late and return early, and do not exert themselves in
working." He regarded those
required to go from farmer to farmer looking for work by the parish as
"perhaps the worst workmen."513 Labor productivity also was lowered by the
bad habits of non-industriousness gained from "make-work"
programs, because "the indolence acquired by loitering on the roads, etc.
makes a larger number now necessary" to do essential farmwork than used to
be. Southern laborers had a poor
reputation for working well compared to northern ones, according to complaints
by northern manufacturers. One of them
as well as Assistant Poor Law Commissioner E. Carleton Tufnell said pauperism and
the bad effects of poor relief undermined their work ethic. In 1832-33, twelve English counties reported
that 50 to 76 percent of their parishes had declining labor productivity,
which, not coincidentally, were the ones which the Swing Riots afflicted generally
or at least partially. Thus, between
the pincers of falling labor productivity and rising rates, the landowners and
farmers became increasingly unified about doing something to cut the
rates, and reimpose labor discipline.514
The Workhouse Test as a Tool for Increasing Labor
Productivity
By
imposing the workhouse test and eliminating outdoor relief for the able-bodied,
after having enclosed the commons and eliminated service, the rural elites
found a way to reimpose labor discipline, following the laxness induced by the
Speenhamland, roundsmen, and ticket systems as well as parish make-work
jobs. By eliminating the latter systems
and outdoor relief generally, suddenly when a laborer was fired, and no farmer
or actively engaged landowner would hire him, he faced the basic alternatives of
either going into the dreaded workhouse, migrating, or complete destitution and
even starvation. The laborers greatly
resented the landowners and farmers as a class for this imposition, as Snell
notes, but it generally succeeded in its aims.
Chadwick stated the theory thus:
As soon as the labourer is aware that the only form in
which he can receive parochial relief is as an inmate of the workhouse,
together with his family, subject to the restrictive discipline of that
establishment, he will gradually, if not immediately, be supplied with motives
of a totally opposite character, and forethought and increased industry will
take the place of extravagance and indulgence.
John Napper, the chairman of the Petworth, Sussex
board of guardians, confirmed the reality of this theory when asked whether the
laborers were better workers for their employers and whether their personal
habits and character had improved:
They are more attentive in their places, and they are
anxious to get places. . . .
They are more respectful to their employers. Before the union took place, they did not care whether they
employed them or not, because, if they were not employed, they went to the
parish and got work; now they have no chance; if a man leaves a farmer, the
waywarden will not set him to work without an order from a certain number of
farmers who recommend him, and they would not give that recommendation, if a
man got out of work for his own fault.
Thomas Sockett, the Rector of Petworth, believed the
single men were more provident and well-behaved as the result of the New Poor
Law, despite being a sharp critic of some aspects of it. In Northamptonshire, even an unfinished
workhouse was "already the terror of many" and made "the idlers
. . . more obedient."515 The workhouse test clearly served as an
excellent tool to reimpose labor discipline after the slackness of the Old Poor
Law's outdoor systems of parish relief, although this change surely also
reflects a thickening of the laborers' "mask" before their superiors,
since the negative consequences of disobeying or annoying them had risen.
The Workhouse Test Was a Tool for Lowering Wages Also
The
fear induced by the "bastilles" of the English countryside also
helped the rural ruling class to ratchet down wages. After all, if a laborer refused some farmer's offer of employment
at a low wage, and nobody locally was offering anything higher, then he (or she,
if the head of household) was forced to enter the workhouse, unless he left the
parish for work elsewhere. The working
class generally dreaded committal to workhouses as much as prison, a fear their
superiors took advantage of. Proof that
wages were lowered on a large scale is shown by Snell's use of Bowley's
statistics on agricultural wages, where for southern England generally they
fell from an average of eleven shillings two pence per week to eight shillings
nine pence a week, a 21 percent drop from 1833 to 1850. More clearly, proof of an immediate drop was
found in that wages had fallen to nine shillings nine pence per week by 1837, a
drop of 13.4 percent from already low levels.
Furthermore, these figures exclude the drop in family income caused by
eliminating family allowances, etc. under the New Poor Law, which made their
losses still greater. Since the wages
of farmworkers in the South already bordered on subsistence levels, the rural
elite's program to increase work effort from their laborers often dangerously
backfired: The workers became so
ill-fed, they simply could not work as well.
Guardian James Foard of Petworth, Sussex said some were better able to
work under the old system, because:
"I consider that those who have large families cannot now get that
sustenance which they ought to have to do a day's work." Caird noted the farmers of Wiltshire made a
false economy by paying their laborers "a lower rate of wages than is
necessary for the performance of a fair day's work." While speaking specifically of Berkshire,
Somerville applied his comments generally to southern conditions by
stating: "We have those people
always under-fed, even if always employed."516 Under such circumstances, which increased
poaching and other crimes by those laborers intent on avoiding half-starvation,
the farmers and landlords had succeeded all too well in lowering wages and
imposing labor discipline--at least when the laborers were under their gaze
during daylight hours.
Allotments as a Social Control Device
Having
grasped the throats of the laborers perhaps a little too securely
through proletarianizing and subordinating the laborers through enclosure, the
workhouse test, and the decline in service, some among the English rural elites
began to reconsider their program of totally cutting off the laborers' direct
access to the means of production.
Leasing allotments to the laborers was the main solution the enlightened
among the elite proposed to partially reverse total wage dependency. Due to enclosure, "until the allotment
system was revived the English labourer was severed from all connexion with the
land."517
Their advocates pushed them as a means to lower the rates and reform the
moral character of the laborers possessing them. Laborers having them committed fewer crimes such as poaching and
petty thievery, and had less time to be idle and less interest in visiting the
beerhouses because they spent more of their "leisure time" (i.e.,
time off from wage work) cultivating them.
In Hadlow parish, Kent, allotments led to a fall in crime from
thirty-five offenses to a mere one from 1835 to 1837.518 One witness who had let out allotments for
years described how attaching conditions to them made controlling the laborers
easier: "One of the rules is, that
he shall not be dismissed if he does not commit crime, and they value that
amazingly." One thief suddenly
became very repentant when threatened with the loss of his patch of land. Designed to tame the lawless habits of
certain villages in west Buckinghamshire, one rule stated all those convicted
of any offense lost their allotments.
Similarly, although he was dealing with miners in a rural setting in the
mid-eighteenth century, William Danby of Swinton gave his workers small farms
out of uncultivated moor land. He said
allotments increased sobriety and industry, and reduced riot, idleness,
insolence, and time in pubs without him using violence to control them at his
coal mine. He told Arthur Young his
motives, a classic expression of paternalism, in which social control measures
aid upper class objectives while simultaneously improving the lower class's
quality of life:
"If," said he, "I can give these
fellows a better notion of a local property and happiness, I shall gain a power
over them, which I can easily turn to their good, and the benefit of their
families, as well as to my own convenience."
Although Danby was dealing with eighteenth-century
miners, remarkably similar stories about farmworkers given allotments are found
in the Report on Allotments of Land (1843), illustrating the deep desire of
almost anyone working on the land to have some part of the earth that could be
called "one's own." Furthermore,
by giving them a stake in society, even so small as one as a half- or
quarter-acre leased "at will," the laborers' desires to strike back
at their social superiors were reduced.
One parson in Wiltshire noted how the mob--presumably a reference to the
Swing Riots--got almost no support in his parish because then their own land
was at risk. In Bedfordshire, larger
estates offered them at the time of the Swing Riots to quell unrest. Allotments also increased respect for
property rights among the laborers generally.
Since, as Golding, an agent for the Bedfordshire estate of the Dynevor
family stated, "the men would suffer anything rather than forfeit their
allotment," the rural elites sometimes used powerful this positive
incentive--the carrot of allotments--in place of the stick of workhouse tests
and enclosures.519
Allotments Help Reduce Increases in Rates Caused by
Enclosure
Allotments
had the advantage of lowering the price tag of enclosure for the rich, because
it had led directly to hikes in the local poor rates. Since arable agriculture--especially--is a highly seasonal
business, the winter inevitably created much unemployment among the
laborers. They lacked any other means
of earning a living or getting food, since they had to sell all their cows and
could not cultivate any gardens on the commons, so they had to come to the
parish to relief to get by in winter, causing the rates to rise. The generally pro-enclosure General
Report strongly advocated providing allotments for the pasturing of cows to
laborers because the tax "burden which has of late years proceeded with so
rapid an increase, as to threaten very heavy evils to the landed
interest." One investigator hired
by the Board of Agriculture found when visiting a district in Rutland and
Lincoln that even in years of scarcity those cottagers who had cows--some 753
owning 1195 cows--did not ask for parish relief. He found those parishes where the poor had few or no cows (or
cottages of their own, by implication) that the rates were the highest, at five
shillings eleven pence in the pound.
One family in Mayfield, Sussex, having been chargeable to the parish
even when food prices were low, after being given a cow suddenly ceased being a
burden, even prices were high. Those
who had built their own cottages on the commons or otherwise owned them outright
also avoided being a burden to ratepayers in some areas. Similar stories of allotments allowing many
laborers to avoid applying for relief suffused the 1843 Report. One area, after it gave out allotments,
found afterwards almost no one had applied for relief. In another, it not only reduced applications
for relief, but one witness felt allotments lowered population growth in his
parish compared adjacent parishes without them. If laborers did have them, they could avoid applying for relief
when they were sick as well.520 The steward of landowner Thomas Dodge Cooper
of Toddington, Bedfordshire was encouraged by how the allotments let by his
estate allowed the laborers to go home quietly in the evenings,
"doubtless, with the pleasing anticipation of their labour eventually
making them independent of the Parish, as their Fathers, or rather Grandfathers
had been formerly." These stories
indicate, so long as the poor law could not be abolished outright as some
middle class critics had desired in 1834, the rural elites' own financial
interests in reducing the rates seemed to be allied to leasing allotments to
the poor. Nevertheless, the English
elite's desire to breed dependency among the laborers to increase their power
and control at the expense of greater income, which was elsewhere manifested by
landlords' use of insecurity in tenure to control their tenant farmers' votes,
and by the scarcity of allotments nationally, especially before the 1830 Swing
riots, remained the leitmotif of rural class relations.521
Why the Rural Elite Still Sometimes Opposed Allotments
In a
number of cases, farmers and/or landowners opposed providing allotments to
laborers, even from a narrow conception of financial self-interest in reducing
the rates, or only changed their opposition after having seen the advantages
due to others who persisted in providing them despite their criticism. From the rural elite's standpoint, the
problem with allotments was that they partially reversed what enclosure and the
decline of service had wrought: total
wage dependency, as (reluctantly) supplemented by parish relief and private
charity. This overriding goal must be
either abandoned, or at least attenuated, when allotments are introduced,
because they provide the laborers with some direct access to the means of
production, instead of working for somebody else who owned or leased it, who
paid them only for the tasks they performed while on it. One lawyer and landowner in Essex leased
allotments while facing the opposition of neighboring farmers. While one reason given was because the
laborers would scour the roads for manure to place on their allotments, he felt
they were opposed also because it made the laborers too independent of
them. In one case in Yorkshire when
unusually large allotments were given, of one acre to two and a half, the
farmers were very unhappy because the laborers excessively cultivated their
plots, and so withdrew much more from the local labor market. In St. Giles, Wiltshire, the farmers refused
to regularly employ any man who had an allotment. Somerville said this was because the farmers wanted the laborers
instantly available at all times:
"He calls the men when he choose in the morning, keeps them to any
hour at night, detains them always late, but especially at those seasons of the
year, spring and harvest, when the allotments would most require their
attention." Farmers were still
complaining against allotments late in the century. Indeed, allotment advocates sometimes said the pieces of land
should be kept deliberately small so that the laborers stayed in the
local labor market, looking upon their patch of land as a supplement to family
finances, not its main support. When
once one badly managed farm was split up into allotments, these were kept very
small--about one-fourth of an acre each--to keep the recipients from becoming
small farmers who avoided wage work, and from wasting time from going to town
to market what they raised. In a number
of cases, while the farmers and landowners had initially been opposed to
granting allotments in their local parishes, after someone among their number
stuck out their neck to get the ball rolling, they found a number of advantages
to the system, and so changed their minds.522
Miscellaneous Ways Allotments Were Used to Benefit the
Rural Elite
Since
providing allotments so strongly clashed with the rural ruling class's overall
approach for controlling the laborers by proletarianizing them, the system
largely only made headway based how it reduced rates, curbed the amount of
crime, and appealed to the paternalistic ethos of some landowners. Even when patches of land had been leased to
the laborers, landowners strived to ensure they could not get any more land and
become petty farmers. Arch criticized
this policy in his 1886 maiden speech in parliament:
If I have energy, tact, and skill, by which I could
cultivate my acre or two, and buy my cow into the bargain, I do not see any
just reason why my energies should be crippled and my forces held back, and why
I should be content as an agricultural labourer with a rood of ground and my
nose to the grindstone all the days of my life.
Destroying the old social mobility among the laborers
that a village commons provided seemed part of the landowners and farmers'
agenda (though perhaps not intentionally), because when Hodge farmed his own
land he was not available to cultivate someone else's. In many cases though certainly not all, the
laborers were also charged a higher per acre cost for their allotments than
farmers with land of similar quality.
Arch knew of many cases of this, commenting generally that: "Now five shillings for twenty perches
equals two pounds per acre, and yet a farmer on the other side of the hedge
will get his for twenty-five shillings."
Interestingly, he implicitly conceded the landlords found it was more
costly to administer many small tenancies than two or three big ones, as he
went on: "If the landlord can
afford to let allotmentland at twenty-five shillings per acre to the farmer, he
can surely let the labourer have it at, say, thirty shillings."523 In many cases landlords charged what the
market would bear over and above the extra administrative costs and risks,
knowing the laborers were desperate enough for the land in question. One witness for the 1843 Commission knew of
cases where laborers were hurt by being charged a very high rack rent of up to
eight pounds per acre due to the high demand.
Jeffries knew of this practice, though in a less extreme form, since
"the cottagers could pay a rent for an acre which, in the aggregate, was
three times that given by the ordinary farmer." Even the highly praised and philanthropic clergyman of St. Giles,
Wiltshire, Mr. Moore, charged twelve shillings per half-acre, while the farmers
were charged four or five shillings less.
The laborers also suffered from having little security of tenure for
their plots of land, like many farmers.
Arch said his father had his allotment changed four times during his
lifetime, because after the laborers had improved a particularly poor piece of
land up to good condition, the field was then let to a farmer. The laborers with allotments suffered in a
somewhat more extreme form all the problems Caird, Arch, and Somerville
repeatedly describe concerning the ill-effects caused by the insecurity of land
tenure for farmers on English agriculture.
When one landowner withdrew allotments in Sharpenhoe, Bedfordshire in
order to punish those who joined Arch's union in the 1870s, his act illustrated
the political/economic power his class had when tenure was withdrawable at
whim.524 So while
allotments undeniably were a boon to the laborers, the good they did was
attenuated by the firm desire of the farmers and landowners to keep the
farmworkers in the local labor market by deliberately keeping the pieces of
land let so small they had to remain a supplement to the farmworkers' income,
often charging them a disproportionately high rent for the privilege, and by
making their use of it conditional upon continued good behavior as judged by
their social superiors.
Another Positive Mode of Creating Work
Discipline: Piecework
The
positive incentive of piecework also was used to create work discipline among
the laborers, similar to how the task system and pay for working non-normal
hours helped control the slaves. Since
the laborers possessed the pre-industrial mentality of task-orientation,
offering piecework was a wise policy, especially when some clearly objective
task had to be completed, such as bringing in the harvest in arable areas. The farmers (or employing landowners) also
applied some elementary psychology, although it also cost them more financially. Arthur Young explained it thus, but very
similar language appeared some seventy years later in the report by the
Committee on Allotments:
You will find that the prices of the piece-work are,
in general, out of proportion to the daily prices; they are so much higher [by
one-fourth over work paid by the day in his estimate]: and this is the case, not with any
particular county or place, but universally.
No labourers will take work by the piece, without a certainty of earning
more than the common pay, in return for working so much harder for
themselves than they do for their masters.525
The source of the time-orientation that E.P. Thompson
saw that opposed "life" and "work" comes from the directly
division of labor, in which one person works for another as an employee, and is
not some merely abstract notion imposed on people to get them to show up on
time regularly:
Those who are employed experience a distinction
between their employer's time and their 'own' time. And the employer must use the time of his labour, and see
it is not wasted: not the task but the
value of time when reduce to money is dominant.526
Granted the general existence of a task-orientation
among the laborers, excepting possibly those influenced by Methodism, the
insightful employer could harness this frame of mind that would increase or
speed up work done on his time by assigning and paying for
piecework. Just as the American slaves
in task areas would finish their assigned duties more quickly because whatever
time was leftover was theirs, and not their masters', piecework produced a
similar mentality in English laborers, which encouraged them to work harder
because what they were paid was directly tied to what they did. Note though the size of the piecework
premium Young saw must have declined, at least for southern England. James Turner, sent to investigate conditions
of the laborers in Ampthill Union, Bedfordshire for the 1838 report on the poor
law, said those paid piecework only made one shilling more per week, if
that. His testimony describes one
typical manipulation of management's when setting quotas: "It is so contrived, when the farmer
gives the work to his men, he contrives so that he shall earn a shilling a week
more [nine shillings instead of eight shillings], but they do a shilling more
work for it."527
So while the farmers seemed to be giving something with these incentives
to the laborers, that was not necessarily the case, since the profit motive
helped inform them where to set the amount paid per unit of the task
accomplished.
Farmers
could get laborers to work harder for them, but only by paying more for it--a
labor management principle very opposed to the "cheap labor"
philosophy that dominated rural elites in southern England, who willingly
racheted wages to or even below subsistence levels.528 Jeffries noted that hedging and ditching
were hard work when done right, and that such work was normally paid by the
piece, which was no mere coincidence.
Arch quit one job that involved digging a six-foot-deep drain because he
was being paid only one shilling six pence per day. He wanted to be paid two shillings six pence a day, because
someone with the much easier task of "forking 'twitch'" on the same
farm was earning as much as him.
Besides for unusually difficult tasks, farmers also were apt to resort
to piecework during labor shortages.
Young said giving piecework to laborers normally hired at day wages in
order to enclose wastelands in sparsely populated areas was nearly the same as
paying higher wages. During harvest,
when labor shortages were characteristic also, farmers found that this was one
time of the year when wages were seriously bargained over, often with groups of
laborers banding together temporarily to work for them, as Morgan
described. Laborer Mark Rushton, born
near the Essex/Suffolk border, remembered that: "We were allus hired by the week, except at harvest. Then it was piece-wukk." On Sir Robert Peel's estate in
Staffordshire, when wheat was reaped, it was usually done by task work,
"on account of the rate paid for it, from the scarcity of labour in
harvest," the cost of labor per acre harvested was high. Late in the nineteenth century, Bear in
Bedfordshire found that piecework was available normally only for hoeing and
hedging, sometimes at harvest, and with a little mowing, in part because in
areas with much permanent pasture made it harder to pay laborers by the
piece. He noted the one way piecework
could backfire on those offering it, where the infamous backward-bending labor
supply curve phenomenon takes hold:
"Several employers informed me that the men did not care to take
piece-work, or to exert themselves to earn much at it if they did take it; also
that after doing enough to come to 2s a day a man would often leave off to work
on his allotment."529
So while piecework could get the laborers to work harder by paying them
proportionately more for their increased efforts, farmers offered it because of
the premium involved only when some type of labor shortage threatened, whether
seasonal (harvest) or geographical (sparse population). Otherwise, paying by the day or week was the
name of the game, except in those places (and times) when farm servants were
employed.
Closely
related to the decisions to pay by the day or by the piece concerned the
laborers' relationship to time. Assigning
task work made more sense for people with a pre-industrial mentality who have a
relatively weak sense of methodical, punctual work habits, but prefer to work
hard in bursts followed by a slack period which is again repeated the next
week. In agriculture, much of the work
was inevitably task-oriented, such as getting in harvest or making hay, because
of the objective necessity of completing the task in question, unlike
monotonously adding repeatedly one more widget on one more gadget on a
seemingly endless assembly line in modern industry, where having a
time-orientation makes more sense. One
motive behind the enclosure movement was the desire to impose work discipline
on the laborers. Those eking out a
living off the commons had a sense of time the elite criticized as wasteful and
resistant to doing wage labor: "In
sauntering after his cattle, he acquires a habit of indolence. Quarter, half, and occasionally whole days
are imperceptibly lost. Day labour
becomes disgusting." Other
agricultural improvers complained laborers lost time to seasonal fairs and
weekly market days when no village shop existed nearby. Like the poor whites in the South who lived
largely by hunting, fishing, and doing some subsistence agriculture, this
lifestyle is much more casual than the tight discipline a slave lived under,
driven into the fields six days a week for twelve or more hours a day. Laborer
scraping together a living off the commons, supplemented by some casual wage
labor for things they need to buy with cash, live a more relaxed lifestyle
compared to the regular wage earner or farm servant, who work more hours. The hours seem still longer due to working
for someone else, not for themselves in tasks they did to directly support
themselves. Hence, one of the purposes
for imposing enclosure was not just to more efficiently use the commons (the
public-spirited motive) or for the rural elite to make a land grab (the more
likely, self-interested motive), but also to place more work discipline on the
laborers by fully destroying the subsistence economy and forcing them to work
for local farmers or employing landowners.530 Ironically this backfired on the elite,
because enclosure lead to greater dependence on parish relief, especially in
arable areas in winter, and the Speenhamland and roundsman systems did much
more to undermine work discipline than enclosure did to improve it before the
passage of the New Poor Law.
The Legal System and Its Influence on the Laborers
As
mentioned above (pp. 276-77), the legal system had a much greater direct impact
on the lives of English farmworkers than on American slaves. This was because the farmworkers were still legally
free men and women, despite the privations and oppression they suffered
under. Instead of summarily punishing
some farmworker who had committed some offense against them, the landowner,
parson, or large farmer could not directly retaliate in their roles as
landowners, etc., because the state had a fundamentally effective legal
monopoly on the use of force, despite such exceptions as the upper class's
duels. While this monopoly
theoretically also existed in America, the violent heritage of the frontier and
the lynch mob made it much less of a reality, over and above the need of
slaveowners to be able to immediately punish their slaves to maintain effective
control over them. Under slavery, the
state through the slave codes delegated much of its legal powers to use
violence to private individuals so long as they were dealing with their human
chattels. Inevitably, the habit of
using force outside of the legal process spilled over into encounters with
others who were not slaves, especially on the unpoliced frontier or
other sparsely populated areas. In
England, the rule of law was more of a reality--at least so it seemed--as
against the American penchant for employing personal violence.
The Justice of the Peace/County Court System
Necessarily Expressed Class Bias
Compared
to the upper and middle classes, the rule of law was often not much of a
reality for the working class. Due to
the system of justices of the peace, the local landholders, sometimes parsons,
as magistrates could rule on cases that indirectly or even directly affected
their personal self-interest as against any laborer brought before them. Considered in his role as a landholder
alone, squire Smith could not do anything against farmworker Jones other than
have him fired and blacklisted. But in
his role as a judge he could sit on cases in the petty sessions (or even the
quarter sessions, where the justices of the peace sat as a group to rule on
more serious cases and administer many county level affairs) involving this
same farmworker, and contrive to bend the law to convict him or have him
sentenced to the maximum possible punishment.
Even if the squire was not actually the judge, his social connections to
the magistrates could serve to help ruin anyone of low social standing brought before
the local petty sessions (where, depending on the gravity of the cases, a
quorum of one or two justices had to be present to hear them). Arch described hypothetically how this
worked using himself to illustrate a fairly common situation:
Suppose I am had up before the magistrates on some
slight charge not in any way connected with game, and I see sitting on the
bench in close proximity a certain squire, on whose property I had once
happened to knock over a hare or a little rabbit. If that squire recognised me, as he would be sure to do, he would
tell the magistrates, and they would be very likely to inflict on me the
heaviest penalty in their power. The
case taken on its own merits might have been trivial; but I should have to bear
the whole rush of the law, because the magistrates were friends of this squire
who had a bitter feeling against me.
When certain types of cases could be tried by single
justices out of sessions, the abuses escalated since they were concealed from
direct public scrutiny. For example, in
1822 the Duke of Buckingham once tried and convicted a farmer (not just a mere
laborer) for coursing on his property, with the witnesses being his own
gamekeepers. In one case held before a
quarter session in which a laborer stole a ten-foot plank, the leading justice
had the supreme satisfaction of pronouncing a sentence of transportation for
fourteen years--because it was from him that the plank had been
stolen! Jeffries once described Petty
Sessions as "apart from the criminal business, . . . practically
an informal weekly Parliament of local landowners."531 Actually it remained such a parliament when
trying criminals, with elite prejudices manifesting themselves on poaching and
other subjects. Additionally, the fear
of the French Revolution spreading to England encouraged the use of the law by
the upper class as a clear tool of reactionary repression for a period of
roughly twenty-five or thirty years (c. 1793-1820), regardless of the merits of
the law as written. William Pitt
illustrated this when he whitewashed the conviction of the reformer Muir
(sentenced to fourteen years transportation for sedition) by the notorious
Braxfield, who had packed the jury to gain the desired result. He said that "the judges would have
been highly culpable if, vested as they were with discretionary powers, they
had not employed them for the present suppression of doctrines so dangerous to
the country."532
So for a substantial part of the period this work deals with, the bias
of the courts against the laborers (and other members of the working class)
would have been worse than for times before and after.
The Biases of the Courts Against the Laborers Should
Not Be Exaggerated
Despite
the general situation described above, the bias of the county courts of England
should not be oversold. The middle
strata in England--the farmers, craftsmen, shopkeepers, etc.--staffed many of
the local positions such as juryman and constable, pressed many of the charges
that set the court system's machinery in motion, and could use the law for
their own purposes (which, admittedly, were not necessarily favorable to the
laborers!). As Styles noted: "Indeed even the labouring poor were
able to engage, to a more limited extent, in some of these uses of the criminal
law." Illustrating this general
point, Jeffries described a case in which a shopkeeper sued a laborer for not
paying eight shillings for goods bought on credit. With a number of more important cases waiting to be heard, the
county court judge patiently went over two dirty, semi-legible, chaotically
organized ledgers to finally determine that the laborer's wife was trying to
cheat the shopkeeper's wife out of the eight shillings by showing the same
receipt for two different debts.
"The petty village shopkeeper and the humble cottager obtain as
full or fuller attention than the well-to-do Plaintiffs and Defendants who can
bring barristers from London."
Relative to the legal system, many fundamental differences existed
between the way Hodge was treated on the one hand, and Sambo on the other. Hodge, as lowly as he was, still was fully a
person under the law, and could witness, sue, and bring criminal charges
against his social superiors at least theoretically, while the black man's
testimony was ruled automatically inadmissible against whites, whether rich or
poor. But, although the farmworker
could sue his superiors, his case could be dismissed due to class bias, such as
the case mentioned above of the master who successfully sued a laborer who quit
before his week's contract was up, but was unsuccessfully sued in turn by
another laborer for his week's wages who was dismissed before his week was
up--before the same judge! Another risk
of taking legal actions against one's social superiors or their direct
dependents was retaliation by social or economic means outside of the legal system,
resulting in "a black mark against his [the laborer's] name for ever
after."533
Ignorance of the Law as a Control Device
Ignorance
of the law served as a control device against the laborers, just as it did in
much else. Arch described one
policeman's error when he told him that placing a snare for rabbits on his
garden could make him criminally liable.
When the Commission on Game denied this, he commented: "If the policeman was wrong, how were we
to know? The labourer has mostly to
learn his law by bitter experience." Instead, the distinct impression the laborer receives is that if
he molests the game in any way, even to protect the crops on his allotment,
"He feels as if 'Notice to quit'
is being shaken like a rod over his back all the time, when it's a question of
game."534
The local powers-that-be surely were not going out of their way to correct
such misimpressions, since it was not in their self-interest to do so. Even if a laborer had been aggrieved by
someone in authority, he might not know of any legal recourse. One night Arch's brother went to get the
week's groceries. He was unjustifiably
searched by a policeman who suspected him as a poacher. He did not know, nor did Arch he until
testifying to Parliament on the game laws, that the constable could have been
"county-courted" for undue search.
But such a law does no good for those ignorant of its very
existence: "How were we to know
that we had a legal remedy for such treatment as this? We were ignorant of the law, we feared the
law, and I think we had good reason to, considering the way it was often
administered."535
But this bias in the application of justice due to ignorance of the law
is not directly the fault of the system itself, but results from
differential educational opportunities, access to paid legal advice, etc. Even though Arch felt generally too much
partiality and class feeling existed among the magistrates, he still admitted
some were not biased:
I believe Lord Leigh and some others that sat upon our
bench always did justice; those we knew, we said among ourselves, "Oh, if
I was to be brought before the bench I should prefer so-and-so, and so-and-so,
to try us. Justice would be done; even
if the day went against us, we should be sure it was the fault of the law and
not of the way in which it was administered."
He mentioned how one policeman near Coventry would
never bring poaching cases when one gentleman was acting judge unless he had
very clear evidence. But when that man
was absent, "he brought up several cases where there was only slight
suspicion, he got convictions. 'We
picked our customers in the magistrates,' he said."536 So while an undeniable amount of bias
existed in how the law was administered in rural courts, this should not
be exaggerated.
Examples of How the Contents of the Law Could Be
Against the Laborers
A
more important source of bias against the laborers concerned the actual contents
of the law itself, not the ill results due to the prejudices of the judges
applying it. As mentioned above (pp.
279-80), the customary rights of the poor to the village commons was usually
ignored, while the formal title to land of the neighborhood's landholders was
recognized. The commissioners involved
in enclosure applied the law often fairly impartially among those who held
legal title, but used it to often virtually assault the parish poor, whose
customary rights were not recognized, or if they were, received allotments
which the expenses of enclosure itself normally forced them to sell. The game laws displayed similar bias, which
are covered below (pp. 367-70) with the laborers' resistance against the rural
elite. Laws that at least theoretically
inflicted draconian punishments for relatively minor crimes were similarly
biased because their violators normally are members of the working class. Laws that potentially inflict capital
punishment for sheep stealing, machine-breaking, rick-firing, or taking half a
crown are not apt to affect many of the high and mighty. The same goes for those laws that made an
entire crowd, judged to be a mob by possibly just one other person, liable to
the death penalty if one or more among it robbed or wounded someone else.537 True, rather notoriously, the English law of
the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was festooned with death
penalties that were normally not actually carried out even when handed down at
sentencing, but were downgraded to transportation and imprisonment, or simply
pardoned.538
Still, they contained a deterrent value from what potentially
could happen to a laborer when suddenly hauled before the magistrates for some
offense. As the Hammonds noted, because
the laws were so broadly drawn and so many had violated them, during the
special assizes held at Winchester after the Swing Riots: "Most of the agricultural population of
Hampshire had made itself liable to the death penalty, if the authorities cared
to draw the noose."539
The class bias in the laws themselves is shown by how the laborer's
violation of a contract to work for a given period were subject to criminal
penalties such as imprisonment, while the employer's breaches of a labor
contract were subject to only civil penalties such as fines or the restitution
for unpaid labor.540
Another problem for the laborers dragged into court was that certain
legal procedures were heavily weighted against those of little or no education
or training in public speaking and unused to dealing with the law or their
social superiors in the fully intimidating formal atmosphere of a high
court. Under the law extant when the
Swing Riots occurred, a counsel for the defense of someone charged with a
felony could not speak to the court for the accused. Instead, he had to present his defense
himself, which was something rather frightening to do in the social setting he
was suddenly thrust into after having sat in a dingy jail cell for so many
weeks or months.541
Even such a protection as trial by jury was commonly inoperative for
laborers, for the law often permitted one magistrate alone to send them to
prison.542
Clearly, the actual contents of the law often posed a greater
threat to the labourers than how and whether it was administered in a biased
manner. Since the upper and middle
classes were its main writers, the law naturally and automatically overlooked
the interests of the laborers, such as in enclosure, or was intentionally
written with the perspective to seeking to deter, control, or punish them, such
as permitting death penalties for trivial offenses only the poor were apt to
commit.
The Important Differences between Controlling the
Laborers and Slaves at Work
Turning
from the legal system's effects on the laborers to how they were controlled
while on the job, major differences existed between between the treatment of
the English farmworkers and American slaves, which had an important influence
on their overall quality of life. Most
significantly, the farmworkers did not suffer from corporal punishment (at
least as adults) while on the job, and were able to change employers when their
contract of service (if any) had ended, advantages the slaves totally
lacked. Neither the large estate's
steward nor the bailiff, to whom a gentleman farmer would delegate direct supervision,
were exactly beloved figures among the laborers themselves, much like
contemporary bosses. But they still
lacked the terrible general reputation for brutality and violence that
characterizes Southern overseers or drivers--even though Cobbett thought little
of bailiffs, especially from Scotland.
The laborers' general animosity focused on the farmers who employed them
and did much of the supervision. The
standard complaints of someone like Arch, the head of a union of farmworkers,
the son of a laborer, who had necessarily an antagonistic relationship with
farmers as a group (although he felt a ultimate unity of interests linked the
laborers and farmers together) focused around low wages, not hiring enough (to
prevent unemployment), and wanting to keep the laborers in the same place in
society. But the leading grievance of slaves, besides the lack of freedom
itself, concerned whippings and other acts of corporal punishment, followed by
inadequate food rations, demonstrating the slaves inevitably suffered from far
more personal humiliation while on the job than the farmworkers. Arch's union may have wanted to raise the
respect given to workers in husbandry from society as a whole, but the level of
personal disrespect shown to laborers by the farmers was no where near what the
slaves suffered, especially since the factor of race was absent. Consider the scale of disproportion between
the typical treatment meted out by someone like Southern planter Bennet Barrow,
a disciplinarian but opposed to cruelty for its own sake, who nevertheless
administered dozens of beatings and other acts of corporal punishment a year,
and a particularly bad master described to Hudson by a very old and retired
laborer named Joan. At the age of ten
in 1830s Wiltshire, she and her younger brother, age seven, had to go to work
because her father had broken his leg while plowing. She ended up working for a "very hard master and
overseer" described thus by Hudson:
He was known in all the neighbourhood as "Devil
Turner," and even at that time, when farmers had their men under their
heel as it were, he was noted for his savage tyrannical disposition; also for a
curious sardonic humour, which displayed itself in the forms of punishment he
inflicted on the workmen who had the ill-luck to offend him. The man had to take with punishment, however
painful or disgraceful, without a murmur, or go and starve.
Now after given a description like this, one wonders
then what the specific punishments, etc. consisted of, and what these two mere
children were in for. What was the single worst experience of Joan's brother at
the hands of "Devil Turner"?
He was punished by "standing motionless for longer hours at a time
on a chair placed out in the yard, full in sight of the windows of the house,
so that he could be seen by the inmates; the hardest, the cruellest task that
could be imposed on him would comes as a relief after this."543 While this was hardly kind nor exactly
contemporary enlightened labor management theory, such a tale pales sharply
before the page after page of beatings and harsh masters described in (say)
Drew's collection of slave narratives, The Refugee. Especially when considering that laboring
children sometimes did suffer corporal punishment, this was hardly the worst
imaginable case of abuse on the job.
Likely, the humiliations inflicted by "Devil Turner" were
congruent to, but probably surpassed,
those inflicted on subordinates by particularly ill-humored managers in
contemporary business and industry.
These admittedly are emotionally painful and distressful to
experience, but are small potatoes to what the social equals of Bennet Barrow
regularly and banally perpetrated on their slaves, or through their overseers,
as routine measures to enforce work discipline and general social control.
Ideological Hegemony, Paternalism, Class
Consciousness, and Farmworkers
When
examining the effectiveness of ideological control over the farmworkers by the
English rural elites, a potential problem arises which is almost the opposite
of that about paternalism and American slaveholders. In the case of slaveowners, they billed themselves--or allowed
themselves to be billed in pro-slavery polemics--as laid-back gentlemen to whom
questions of personal honor and looking out for the interests of their
"black children" were higher priorities than profit-making. The question then becomes whether in fact
they were in the main, as maintained above (pp. 247-52), outside of the
hereditary planters of Tidewater Virginia and lowland Georgia and South
Carolina, striving individualists out to raise their rank in society by making
fast bucks by owning slaves in commercial agriculture. Concerning the English elite, a common viewpoint
of the eighteenth century was that the aristocratic ethos had been overtaken by
bourgeois individualism and a growing industrial capitalism. In the wake of J.C.D. Clark's
self-proclaimed "revisionist tract," English Society 1688-1832,
such views have become simply unsustainable, at least for the period prior to
the French Revolution.544
The burden of Clark's work, in which the political ideals of paternalism
(which he calls "patriarchalism"), is to demonstrate that English
society was an ancien regime, fundamentally dominated by the ideals of
gentlemen and the Christian doctrine of obedience to the powers-that-be of the
aristocracy, gentry, and the clergy of the Anglican Church up until the
transition period of 1828-32, when the Corporation and Test Acts were repealed
and the Reform Bill was passed. Clark
does successfully prove the elite's political ideology was not dominated by
Lockiean contractarianism, but by patriarchal ideals of natural submission
based on the model of the family, at least until c. 1795. But then the issue becomes how much of this
sank down into the lower classes--
especially, for our purposes here, the
farmworkers. Unlike the case for the
American slaveholders, who likely, in the main, did not seriously believe in
the paternalistic ideals of reciprocal duties between the enslavers and the
enslaved and all its concomitant ideological baggage of being a gentleman; the
typical squire, noble, clergyman, even large farmer, of England did most
likely believe in paternalistic ideals, at least up until the time of the
French Wars.
Did Some in the Elite Begin to Repudiate
Paternalistic, Communal Values?
Did
the English landed elite's ideology begin to change away from the patriarchal,
gentlemanly ethos at the end of the eighteenth century? Clark would deny this, but its truth has
serious implications for their success at hegemony. Early in the nineteenth century, Mandler maintains, a major
section of the landed elite began to be heavily influenced by Malthusianism and
Classical economics, which were cast in a Christian form by such men as J.B.
Sumner, and propagated in a somewhat more intellectually sophisticated manner
by Chalmers and Copleston. The best
proof he cites for this was the general lack of resistance among the gentry and
aristocracy against the New Poor Law, which had centralizing and rationalizing
aspects that undermined their individual discretion in dealing with the
poor. No longer could a single
magistrate order relief to be given to a laborer's family. Now, it had to be approved by the union's
board of guardians. The establishment
of the Poor Law Commission in Somerset House to help administer the New Poor
Law was another step towards the kind of centralism typical of France, but not England. Why was landed opposition generally so
feeble against this weakening of their local powers of control? Part of this resulted from how the landed
interests still could thoroughly control the local boards of guardians. The squires or their tenant farmers often
served on them, and these boards had general practical autonomy from Somerset
House.545 But additionally,
as Mandler convincingly argues, due to the penetration of these ideas
"turning the ground," cast often in a Christian individualistic form
to make them more palatable, made it much easier for the landed elite to
reconcile themselves to the New Poor Law, if they had not been thoroughly
converted earlier. Most of the
assistant commissioners who gathered the information for the 1834 Poor Law
Report and helped to implement it were landed gentlemen. Such men as Thomas Frankland Lewis, the
leading Commissioner after 1834 and the putative author of the 1817 report, and
William Sturges Bourne, the chairman over the 1817 committee and a commissioner
in 1832-34, were rural landowners. For
these reasons, the imposition of the 1834 Poor Law Amendment Act cannot be seen
as the alien imposition of bourgeois believers in individualistic laissez-faire
capitalism, but was largely the direct creation of the rural elite itself.546
How the Rural Elite Tried to Have Paternalism and
Capitalism Simultaneously
So
then, what are the implications of a substantial number of the rural elite
(though probably not a majority) beginning to accept bourgeois individualism as
an ideology? Before the French Wars
(1793-1815), seeing English society as composed of orders instead of classes
makes sense since only the upper most stratum could be called "class
conscious," i.e., as cognizant of its own interests and its differences as
a group from the rest of society. But
due to the strains in the rural social fabric caused by war, continued population
growth, the decline of service, enclosure, the Speenhamland and roundsmen
systems, and finally the New Poor Law of 1834, the laborers gradually developed
a sense of grievance against their rulers, whether squire, parson, or farmer,
out of which their sense of class consciousness developed. The Swing Riots by themselves, because of
their spontaneous, rather spasmodic nature, and their rather minimal demands,
cannot be seen as proof that the laborers collectively had rejected the
traditional, paternalistic model of deference and reciprocal duties. Swing instead should be seen as a desperate
protest by laborers demanding that the rural elite live up to its customary
obligations to the poor. As Evans
maintained: "The riots were in
part a protest against the decline of paternalism." But they were a sign that "business as
usual" could not continue, especially in the matters of parish relief,
mass pauperization, and rising poor rates.
The fear they induced among the rural elite directly lead to the passage
of the New Poor Law with its ban on outdoor relief for the able-bodied and the
workhouse test. This law's underlying
values--individualistic, capitalistic ones--symbolized the practical
repudiation of the rural elite's paternalism and its obligations to the poor. As Hobsbawm and Rude commented: "The New Poor Law of 1834 knocked the
last nails into the coffin of their ancient belief that social inequality could
be combined with the recognition of human rights." But, crucially, the landed elite still
demanded the rituals and appearances of submission and deference from the
laborers, yet by increasingly embracing the values implicit in commercial
agriculture under capitalism, they increasingly also abandoned their duties to
the poor. The laborers enormously
resented this rent in the implicit social contract, virtually all of whom,
especially if they lived long enough or lived in arable areas, would depend or
had depended on parish relief. The
first stormy meetings when the boards of guardians under the New Law went over
the lists of those already taking relief, determining who should be stuck off,
and the attacks on workhouses, averted and actual, are enough to illustrate how
opposed the masses in many rural areas were to the new order. Hobsbawm and Rude summarize well the results
of the English rural elite trying to square the circle of commercial capitalism
and gentlemanly paternalism:
[The laborers] paid for the failure of British rural
society to combine tradition and capitalism, for they got the benefits and
hopes of neither. Stretched on the rack
between the pauperisation of a caricatured market economy and the social
oppression of those who grew rich from it, they lacked even the only real
resource of the British labouring poor, the capacity to constitute themselves
as class and to fight collectively as such.547
The New Poor Law's passage and implementation
symbolized how the rural elite decided to alleviate this contradiction in their
society by leaning more strongly to the side of individualism, yet, by leaving
the settlement laws in place with little change other than abolishing a year of
service as a head of settlement, they were still trying to rig the labor market
in their favor.
Paternalism Vs. Capitalism: The Trade-Offs between Freedom and Security
From
the subordinate class's viewpoint, what are the advantages and disadvantages of
paternalism? Under this social system,
a subordinate class theoretically made the bargain of choosing to obey an upper
class in exchange for its provision of physical safety and general
well-being. The subordinate class thus
trades freedom for greater security, whether economic or against
criminals. With the waning of
feudalism, the part of the bargain concerning physical safety and protection
against criminals or invaders largely, if not completely, drops from view. Concerning the contract between classes
(though "orders" may be a less anachronistic term) the upper class
would maintain its provision for the poor was a privilege, but
inevitably the lower class made that provided by custom a right, making
it hazardous for the upper class to change the terms of the deal. In a complaint similar to that made by
American masters about their slaves' actions when they did not defer rightly to
them out of appreciation, Chadwick noted that:
"No gratitude is ever created (for relief received as a right)
towards a numerous body, invested with a corporate character and official
functions."548
Since the poor had turned the custom--one based on law, of course, but
that does not eliminate its conditional character since the upper class
theoretically can always change laws--into a right, the desire of some to
abolish the poor law outright and end all parish relief in the early 1830s was
deemed impractical because the elite feared a social revolt. The laborers accepted the crust of bread
provided by the local parish at a high price, especially under the settlement
laws' restrictions, because they lost much of their freedom to change employers
and migrate to where better jobs, or any jobs, were available.
Service
as an institution also reflects the trade-off between freedom and security
under paternalism, since it gave the farm servants involved more security--a
guaranteed job, food to eat, and a place to stay for an entire year--at the
cost of having more freedom to pursue shorter-term jobs that were more
financially rewarding in their given time span, such as being a migrant
harvester in season. Jeffries noted the
latter advantage, maintaining that by his time of writing young farmworkers preferred
the latter option: "[The young
laborer] is rarely hired by the year--he prefers to be free, so that when
harvest comes he may go where wages change to be highest. He is an independent person, and full of
youth [and] strength." Those in
service were also burdened by being at the beck and call of his or her master
potentially all waking hours, or at least for all the customary tasks done by
farm servants in their particular locality.
Since the risk-taking entrepreneurial attitude of pursuing economic
opportunity wherever it knocks is generally weaker among the poor, and the
desire for economic security greater, they normally resented the failure of
their social superiors to take them or their teenage children into their homes
to work in husbandry. The family of
origin was burdened with its children for a longer period in their teenage
years--but this also arguably strengthened the family as a unit.549 The decline of service made it not only
harder to gain a settlement, but increased the social segregation between
farmworkers and the farmers and landowners.
Instead of living and eating together under one roof, the farmworkers
now lived increasingly separately in their own cottages even when
unmarried. Its decline undeniably made
class relations worse, as illustrated by the lack of farm servants involved in
the "Bread or Blood" riots of East Anglia or Swing itself.
How the Waning of Paternalism Made the Laborers' Class
Consciousness Possible
The
waning of vertical relationships (client-patron) and the growth of horizontal,
intra-class ones made the development of class consciousness possible, as Snell
and Engels both noted. Making large
numbers of the laborers live on their own in their own cottages, often
gathering them into large open villages, combined with the effects of declining
migration to urban areas or even other nearby rural parishes in the south in
the early nineteenth century, reduced the influence, control, and supervision
of the dominant class, because paternalism is most effective on a face-to-face
basis. Subordinates find it much easier
(especially when illiterate, etc.) to identify with the interests of an upper
class when somebody physically present around them embodies and represents it,
as Newby has stated. A drop in control
might not be for the good of the child or teenager who would have been taken
into service, as Arch noted: "He
earned money enough to be independent of his mother, and ten chances to one he
would get into all sorts of mischief, and there was no one to control him. His master did not care, as a rule, what he
did out of work time." This lament
illustrates the essence of paternalism:
the controls of the superior are for the good of the subordinate, even
when the latter does not know it or appreciate it. Consider the behavior of one squire's domestic servants, which
describes well the annoyances that come with constant surveillance, even when
he had a kindly disposition: "He
[the squire] was the meanest [meaning, "stingiest"] master they [the
coachman and footman] had ever known; yet they could not say that he paid less
wages, or that they were ill-fed--it was this meddling, peddling interference
they resented." The relationship
of the farm servant and farmer was significantly closer, for better and for
worse, than that of mere employer and mere employee, only brought together by
the cash nexus in an impersonal labor market.550 Hence, even from the farmworkers' viewpoint,
some advantages came with the decline of service, since it increased their
freedom and reduced the direct supervision and control of their employers,
allowing for the development of stronger horizontal relationships and ideas of
self-interest as a collective in their subordinate group, but at the cost of
greater economic insecurity, more unemployment, and worse living conditions.
The Power of Gifts to Control, and When They Do Not
When
the upper class makes gifts to the subordinate class which it cannot pay back,
the power of paternalism is manifest.
As noted above (pp. 151-52) when dealing with how the parson's charity
in Arch's parish of birth was a powerful control device for helping to keep the
laborers in line, the ability of one person to put others in his debt increases
his control over them, even when they are not legally obligated to pay anything
back. This reason no doubt helped
motivate one witness to the Committee on Allotments to say he did not want to
create an arrangement in which the laborer thinks it his right to have an
allotment, instead of a kind arrangement, due to passing a Parliamentary Act. But apparently freely given gifts come at a
price. The Duke of Wellington
voluntarily supported one widow near his estate, even providing her with a
cottage. When Somerville came to visit
the Duke's park in Hampshire, he wanted to go in, but she was initially
hesitant to allow him in while the Duke was present in the park because
"she could not do anything, on any account, to give his Grace
offence." Hudson despised the
"servility, hypocrisy, and parasitism" that grew up around a dominant
squire in a village, judging it better to suffer poverty without gifts of
"the customary blankets and sack of coals to old women" in order to
gain "greater manliness and self-dependence when the people are left to
work out their own destiny." But
when the gift becomes something automatically supplied by law through a
governmental entity, the social effects of the "gifts" radically
change. By the mere passage of a law
providing something to someone, they are prone to thinking over time that they
were entitled to it as a right--even though the law can be changed just as
quickly to take it away from them, showing it was an arbitrary creation. For this reason, ruling class members fought
a losing war when they maintained that the allowance system of supplementing
wages through the parish was an "indulgence" to the poor, in
particular to the deserving poor, not an "entitlement" for everyone.551 Because they still had a deep-seated desire
to stand on their own two feet economically, and not depend on handouts, the
laborers came to resent what they nevertheless maintained was a right. "The parish money is now chucked to us
like as to a dog," said one Sussex laborer in the 1834 Poor Law Report,
which was full of (from the elite's viewpoint) insolent, churlish complaints by
paupers concerning their right to relief.
Since the ratepayers themselves resented paying the increasing poor
rates, and found all sorts of ways to deter applicants for relief even before
the passage of the New Poor Law, the laborers naturally felt this negative
attitude themselves, and wished to reply in kind. Gifts given by paternalists in the upper class clearly lose much
of their ability to positively influence the behavior of the subordinate class
when they are perceived as a right, which is especially apt to happen when
guaranteed by law for long periods, as was the case for the Tudor Poor Law.552
The Failure of Paternalism as an Ideological Control
Device from C. 1795
From
the upper class's viewpoint, the bottom-line consideration about paternalism
was its success as a social control device, especially through ideological
hegemony, because the latter would give the social order legitimacy through
eliding "is" and "ought" together. While this program was reasonably successful
(so far as the thoughts of average people in history are discernable) up until
about 1795 in England, it began to seriously fail in the first decades of the
nineteenth century, in which a somewhat inchoate sense of resentment and
desperation began to sweep over the farmworkers in southern England due to the
effects of enclosure, population growth, the decline of service, mass
pauperization coming from rising unemployment, and skyrocketing increases in
their dependence on parish relief, not just in bad years such as 1800-1801 or
1795-1796, but routinely as a matter of course. Their increasing loss of economic independence, defined both as
loss of direct access to the means of production (through enclosure) and through
the inability of laborers' wages to support their families without supplements
from the parish through such means as the Speenhamland and roundsmen systems,
created a sense that the past had been better than the present. The Swing riots, the "Bread or
Blood" riots of East Anglia, the traditional food riots that occurred
especially in bad years--all these reflected desires for a paternalistic
economy in which the upper class really did care about the material needs of
the poor and for just prices and just wages, since the crowd's public demands
were not revolutionary, but generally highly limited and incremental, even when
they had the cover of anonymity to make demands, with little use of outright
violence. However, these protests still
signaled that the laborers' minds were beginning to cease to identify with
individuals with power among the rural elite, as the emptying pews of the
Church of England to swell the ranks of Dissent and the indifferent help
illustrate.553
But a lag of about a generation between the growing rejection of
paternalism and the embracing of class consciousness in the period c. 1795-1840
occurred because, as Obelkevitch observed:
While the objective conditions of their lives were
those of a working class, subjectively they were reluctant to abandon
traditional values, and preserved a communal outlook in a class society. If being determines consciousness, it does
not do so instantaneously. The decisive
period of change came late for the labourers, in the second and third quarters
of the nineteenth century.554
The Swing Riots of 1830-31 should be seen primarily as
demands by the rural lower class that the elite practice its traditional
obligations to the poor, rather than a decisive rejection of paternalism.
The Laborers' Growing Class Consciousness, C. 1834 to
1850
Rural
social relations were damaged especially by the 1834 Poor Law and earlier
attempts to tighten the screws on relief such as by inflicting humiliating acts
on the paupers, like harnessing them to parish carts. Resentment against workhouses was shown by the Swing Riots earlier
themselves, where two were pulled down at Selborne and Headley, Hampshire, and
by the general resistance against building them later, especially in northern
England. One witness told in 1853 a
Parliamentary Committee that: "My
firm persuasion is, that these workhouses [in Suffolk] might have been pulled
down or nearly destroyed, if we had not had the assistance of the
police." The attitudes beneath
these attacks were illustrated by one laborer who said his Union was "the
greatest curse that ever happened to the poor man," while one fire engine
operator heard during a fire, "Unless something be absolutely done about
these unions, the fires will go on."555 The rural England Somerville toured in the
1840s was full of sullen and resentful laborers. Should a threshing mill be built, "the ferocious population
of the neighbourhood will burn down barns, corn-ricks, and all," even
though the Oxfordshire farmer in this case already employed 50 percent more
laborers per acre than any of his neighbors and had greatly improved the
land. Another farmer, in Buckingham, if
he did the same, feared similar results, and then he could never rest "on
his pillow, himself nor family, in peace." While traveling in England, he found, when raising the
possibility of enclosing any commons of size to laborers nearby: "in all cases they reply with a
bitterness expressive of no milder belief than that they think me an agent of
some one about to rob them, about to invade their little privileges, and
despoil them of an independence which, even if not worth a penny, they would
still cherish." One Wiltshire
laborer he encountered on the road, already quoted above (p. 286) for his
especial resentment against the farmers, plainly thought in class terms. Merely upon the sight of Somerville appearing
relatively well off, he condemned him without knowing who he was:
"Ah! you
be a precious lot o'hard screws on a poor man, the whole lot of you." "Which lot? You seem to include me, and yet you don't know who or what I
am?" "Don't I though? I see you ha' got a good coat on your back,
and a face that don't look like an empty belly; there be no hunger looking out
atween your ribs I'll swear. You either be a farmer or somebody else that lives
on somebody else."556
As shown by these conditions of social unrest plainly
just underneath the surface, class consciousness developed among the laborers
due to the accumulated grievances they had against the rural elite, showing
paternalism's failure to ideologically hold their minds, even if the
outward signs of deference may largely still have held.557
When the Laborers as a Class In Itself Began to Act
For Itself
The
decisive step to full class consciousness among the farmworkers had to wait
until the time of the formation of farmworkers' unions, beginning in the 1860s,
culminating in Arch's Agricultural Labourers' Union of the 1870s, especially to
the extent it involved the farmworkers seeing their fortunes linked to urban
artisans, miners, domestic outworkers, or industrial workers, i.e., the working
class as a whole. To appropriate some
of Marx's language, it was only then the rural laborers as a class in
itself really began acting for itself, with leaders raised from its own
ranks such as Arch who articulated its interests.558 It is one thing to have a lot of sullen
laborers who are resentful of farmers, parsons, squires, and aristocrats, who increasingly
realize at some level they are getting the shaft as group from some other group
in society, which was the general condition of the laborers between c. 1795 and
1870 suffering under the pressures of enclosure, the decline of service, the
mass pauperization of the Old Poor Law and the workhouse tests of the New. It is quite another for this group to rise
up, organize itself at least some formally, and make demands of its rulers on a
widespread scale, which it was to do through farmworkers' unions in the 1860s
and 1870s. Much of the baggage of
paternalism had to be dropped, which was a gradual process from the mid-1790s
until the passage of the New Poor Law, which showed the ruling class had
largely abandoned those ideals itself.
The laborers' class consciousness grew rapidly as they began to discard
paternalism as an ideological construct themselves after their social superiors
many did the same. The creeping
realization came over the bulk of laborers that little positive could be generally
expected from the rural elite of aristocrats, squires, parsons, and large farmers
as a group to help them out of their plight, even if scattered
exceptions existed, such as the great aristocrats who worked at improving the
cottages on their estates, mentioned above (pp. 71-73) in the section on the
standard of living, or those who gave allotments early on, such as the Earl of
Winchilsea. At this stage, paternalism
increasingly became mere empty rhetoric without much reality of outgoing
concern for the lower classes backing it up.559 One witness proclaimed to the Committee on
Allotments in 1843 that "there are no better disposed persons in the world
towards the poor than the landed proprietors of England," while another in
a letter extract said that providing garden allotments was "a most
important one [matter], most especially to the landowners, who must naturally
have the welfare of the laboring classes much at heart."560 In the countryside Somerville toured in
southern England, these proclamations would have rang especially hallow, as
"faith without works." Even
though Arch himself made repeated statements about the farmers and laborers'
interests being fundamentally one, which displayed some remnants of the old
paternalistic ideology (much like Cobbett, whose Toryism never totally died),
his autobiography is saturated with a sense of class consciousness. This class perspective was the basis for the
initial successes of his union in organizing workers, even if its membership
never compared anything near a majority of all farmworkers in England. The mere existence of class consciousness
demonstrates the eventual failure of the rural elite to maintain ideological
hegemony by the end of the period with which this work is mostly concerned
(1875).561
A Comparison of Respective Elite Control
Strategies: Slaveowners and Squires
The
goals of slaveowners and the English rural elite were fundamentally the
same: to gain labor services from a
subordinate class at least cost to itself in money and surveillance time. Now some truly practiced paternalism can be
found in both cases, in which there was some sacrifice of profit or advantage
to the subservient group by some masters or English landowners. Nevertheless, with human nature being what
it is, self-interest inevitably prevails as the leading upper class objective,
although this may manifest itself by seeking prestige or power instead of
profits. Both elite classes proclaimed
(or allowed to be proclaimed in its name) a communitarian paternalism as its
ideology, although this was particularly shallow or unlikely among the smaller,
recently-established American planters in interior regions of the South, and
had even worn thin among many in the English rural elite in the first decades
of the nineteenth century. Both elites
faced a fundamental contradiction between the values of capitalistic commercial
agriculture and paternalism, where the elite was to provide protection and
security in return for the obedience of the subordinate class as part of the
implicit social contract. Since the
market in capitalism rules over the ruling classes, and its economic power and
variableness can neither be controlled nor denied in the long run, the slaves
and laborers were made promises by their rulers that could not be kept. Hence, we find the slaveholders selling off
slaves and dividing families in times of bankruptcy and economic distress,
while the English elite found that the Old Poor Law was simply economically
incompatible in the long run with enclosure, the decline of service, and high
levels of labor productivity, and so eventually terminated it with the New Poor
Law's workhouses. The individualistic,
self-seeking behavior associated with commercial agriculture under capitalism
tended to swamp the communal values proclaimed by paternalism in the case of
both elites. In many individual cases
the elite's members were not always especially happy about this contradiction's
results. William Ford, Northrup's
exceptionally kind master, nevertheless sold eighteen slaves when facing
bankruptcy due to being security for his brother. The rector of Petworth parish, attacked aspects of the New Poor
Law, yet admitted had he been a member of Parliament, he still would have voted
for it even if amending it had been impossible.562 Having embraced commercial capitalism, the
slaveholders and gentry faced the raw fact that it was not especially
compatible with paternalistic obligations to their respective subordinate
classes, which often opened a yawning gap between ideology and performance from
the latter's viewpoint, one which in the English rural elite's case became
wider during the period surveyed here (c. 1750-1875).
While
both elites exercised traditional, face-to-face authority with members of their
subordinate classes, the English rural ruling class tended to do this more
through the agency of the state as a magistrate, while the southern
slaveholders, with the assistance of overseers, exercised their authority as a
master on the work site. The latter
also sometimes resorted to extra-legal means, such as participating in mobs
with poor whites, an option barred to English gentlemen dealing with social
inferiors. The English landowners were
more concerned with general social control through the parish and county as
governmental entities, leaving to the farmers and their bailiffs most of the
immediate supervisory tasks of imposing work discipline on the work site. But American slaveholders, especially if
they lacked overseers, were deeply involved in imposing day-by-day work discipline
on the slaves and other supervisory functions.
Since they owned the slaves, and owned the piece of property they worked
on, their ability to control the slaves off working hours was much greater than
that of English landholders and farmers relative to the laborers, who often
went home to some open village some distance away from the work site.563 Both the Southern United States and England
had strong traditions of landowners staying in residence on their landed
property for at least for part of the year, so their personal involvement in
managing their estates, especially the slaveholders', was particularly high
compared to (say) that of French nobles and landholders, gathered into
residence in Paris, various provincial cities, or (before 1789)
Versailles. A major difference between
the two elites was that the American slaveholders were much more likely to use
personal violence, such as by corporal punishment or outright killings,
including by extra-legal means, to impose their wills on the slaves. Since the
state under the slave codes delegated so much power to masters and mistresses
to use force against their slaves at their own discretion, this
naturally tended to spill over into helping other slaveholders control
their slaves extra-legally. The
practical weakness of the state in sparsely populated, recently settled
frontier regions, where the police as a professional institution were simply
non-existent, and whites, rich and poor, were quick to use violence to settle
disputes among themselves, was another reason for them to resort to "judge
lynch" during panics about slave revolts or for punishing slaves who
attacked their owner individually. In
the English case, since the rural elites had considerably less fear of the
laborers' revolting, especially before the 1830-31 Swing Riots, correspondingly
far fewer "police state" measures were necessary to control the
behavior and movements of the legally free laborers, such as through the
pass/patrol system. As the nineteenth
century drew on, especially after the Swing riots and the imposition of
the New Poor Law, this began to change, and the gentry and aristocracy largely
came to see the advantages of having rural police on the model of London's
"bobbies" or France's gendarmes.
Nevertheless, the amount of violence employed and blood drawn routinely
by the English rural elite was far less than that by American slaveholders, as
their respective treatments of the Swing rioters and the Turner revolters
demonstrates, whether legally or (especially) extra-legally.
Being
employing capitalists, albeit in agriculture, the English rural elite had the
advantage of being able to use much more in the way of positive incentives than
the American slaveholders could possibly hope to, even under the task
system. The motive for the laborers to
work was wages, while that for the slaves inevitably came down to the lash or
the fear of it, when the threat to dissolve the recalcitrant bondsman's family
was not used. The laborers had to
support their families independently, while the slaves, being provided
automatically with sustenance regardless of work performance, had far less of a
positive, internal motive to work. This
difference did narrow considerably towards the end of the Old Poor law, under
the Speenhamland and roundsmen systems, because the parish promised to support
directly much of a laborer and his or her family's needs through allowances,
regardless of any given laborer's work effort.
But, as labor productivity began to fall and the poor rates had
enormously risen by the 1830s from the 1770s, the English elite reimposed the
full power of firing employees by the passage of the New Poor Law and the
workhouse test for the able-bodied.564 The power of the chief weapon of work
discipline under capitalism, dismissing employees for poor performance with the
consequent loss of wages to support themselves, had been restored by the fear
of the workhouse, but this tool was simply unavailable to slaveholders by the
very nature of the system they had created.
Slaveholders could sell recalcitrant slaves, but this was a much
more troublesome process than firing an employee, and the mere fact these
slaves were being marked as undesirable lowered their sale value, injuring the
net worth of their owners. Slaveholders
necessarily had to use much more physical force, such as by corporal punishment
and occasional killings pour encourager les autres by example, to get
their slaves to work than English farmers, who by dismissing their laborers
amidst an overstocked parish labor market to face the workhouse, migration, or
possible starvation, did not need to employ high levels of violence on the job
to create an incentive to them to work.
The fundamental difference here lay in how the laborers, as employees
paid only as they performed a certain task, had a natural incentive to work,
while the slaves, being provided automatically with the necessities of life
such as food, shelter, and clothing, had to be compelled to work by their
owners. Incentives necessarily remained
supplemental in the case of controlling the slaves, such as pay for
Sundays and late nights, while these in the form of wages remained the
dominating motivator for the farmworkers, who received nothing to sustain
themselves if they did not work, except in cases where the Old Poor Law
provided them straight relief requiring no work. So even when the laborers were not paid by piecework, there still
remained positive incentives to work for their farmer or employing landlord by
the mere fact of them being paid for what they did.
These
two elites did eventually end up taking different approaches to using knowledge
to control their subordinate classes.
As discussed above (pp. 107-9) in the section dealing with education,
elites can control using sheer ignorance their subordinate class, or they can
use skewed knowledge. The slaveholders,
without question, used ignorance to control their bondsmen, as shown by their
legal war against slaves gaining literacy.
While this model did tempt a number of English landholders, in the end
they opted to provide education by the state to the laborers. Anyway, they had allowed on a piecemeal
basis some laborers to be taught in schools runs by the clergy or other
independent schoolmasters. Since the
laborers were legally free, and England's Protestant culture placed a premium
on learning the Bible, it was difficult to deny them literacy. Besides the content of the curriculum, the
school could also teach punctuality and a sense of disciplined time, such as
how the Methodist Sunday Schools in York made the first rule for the children
to remember was to arrive "a few minutes before half-past nine
o'clock."565
While the antebellum South was about as Protestant as England, the
dangers of rebellion, forged passes, and general discontent coming from greater
intellectual awareness were judged so great that the southern elite willingly
junked a key tenet of Protestantism to keep their subordinate class in
line. Since the slave's freedom of
religion was legally totally dispensable at the choice of his or her owner to
begin with, their elite's desire for self-preservation trumped their faith.
How
much success did these two elites have at ideological hegemony with their
respective subordinate classes? Much of
this has to remain unknowable, because the thoughts of average people often
were only fortuitously preserved in the documentation now available to us
today. Most of what little the
subordinate classes in question did say that was preserved is in the public
transcript, which the dominant class largely shapes and controls. The social sites where the subordinate class
spoke freely among themselves, out of the earshot of their masters or
employers, rarely produced any records available today, although the slave
narratives and workers' autobiographies are the closest exception to this
rule. Another distortion exists when
judging how successful these two elites were at hegemony: Because the slaves were under a much more
restrictive regime, their mask was typically thicker than that of English
laborers. It is hard to imagine, for
example, a white slaveholder being subjected to the verbal abuse Hawley
experienced while traveling the roads from semi-employed paupers working along
them. The slaveholder insulted by
slaves would, especially with Southern whites possessing such an overdeveloped
sense of defending personal honor against insults, likely alight from his
carriage and perform a public whipping on the spot, as Barrow did once, or
otherwise report the offense to the slave's master to deal with, with likely
similar results.566
The risks to a slave for speaking out was considerably higher than that
for a laborer, a point which is dealt with in the section on resistance
below: The one could be whipped, sold
away from his family, possibly even killed, while the laborer might face loss
of job, blacklisting, and self-imposed exile to find more work, perhaps prison
in some cases for sedition. Another
clouding issue Scott describes was the subordinate class's manipulations of the
ruling class's ideology, such as the former instrumentally proclaiming its
loyalty to the latter's ideals to get something out of them, while privately
denying these ideas among themselves (cf. "rebels in the name of the
tsar.")
How Much Success Did These Two Elites Have at
Hegemony?
Granted
the above disclaimer, what are the indications for these two elites' success at
hegemony? In the English case, judging
especially from the demands typical of food rioters in time of dearth and the
Swing Rioters' minimalistic demands, the paternalistic model appeared to be
largely accepted by the laborers at least prior to the French Wars, and at
least in part for some time afterwards.
The crowds appeared to demand its practical implementation by the elite, not a radical overturning of society
in the name of egalitarianism with equal rights and equal property for
all. Even with the cloak of anonymity
protecting the authors of Swing letters, etc., the English crowds and rioters
did not demand the land of the gentry and aristocracy. It took the piling up of offenses over one
or two generations, such as enclosure, the decline of service, mass
pauperization, underemployment, and unemployment under the Old Poor Law, and
(especially) the workhouse tests of the New, before the laborers realized as a
class the rural elites as a class were not governing in their interests, and
saw the gap grow between paternalistic rhetoric and practical actions that
helped them. Contributing to this change
was the repudiation of communal paternalistic values of a substantial part of
the rural elite in favor of individualism and capitalism under the sway of
Malthusianism and Classical economics.
As the laborers came to realize over time their social superiors had
repudiated paternalism largely practically and even some ideologically,
symbolized by the New Poor Law of 1834 and its implementation, full class
consciousness began to appear, which was outwardly shown by unionism developing
among the farmworkers, especially by the successes of Arch's union in the
1870s. The failure of the elite's
hegemonic objectives is demonstrated by the extent class consciousness exists
among the subordinate class, which had became plain in the mid-nineteenth
century English countryside.
In
the case of the slaves, two available historiographical models for hegemony
exist.567 One is Fogel and
Engerman's concept that bourgeois individualistic slaveholders successfully
inculcated bondsmen with the Protestant work ethic. The second, and more persuasive, is Genovese's model of
paternalism, of reciprocal duties between the enslavers and the enslaved. Both models, but especially Fogel and
Engerman's, are undermined by the centrality of violence and force being used
to control the slaves. If Barrow's
slaves really did have and practice the Protestant work ethic, why did
he have to whip them so often? Why did
masters and mistresses almost universally complain about the shamming and deceitful
behavior of their human chattels? But
Fogel and Engerman's model still has the advantage of identifying the ideology
of the typical slaveholder much more accurately than Genovese's. Genovese faces the problem of proving that
the bulk of slaveholders, especially the planters of the interior areas of the
South away from the Atlantic Seaboard and New Orleans, really had the values of
communal paternalism instead of self-seeking, individualistic capitalism. If the elite does not hold certain values,
or only holds them very shallowly, as mere rhetoric to deceive the underlings,
its ability to inculcate them into latter is either completely destroyed or
seriously limited. It is hard to
successfully teach values which one does not believe, or live, oneself. While Genovese is aware how the slaves did
manipulate their masters and mistresses' ideology for their own purposes, by
turning customs into rights, the implications of Scott's model are ominous for
his analysis, because the slaves had to wear thicker masks than laborers did
because of the importance of violent coercion as a discipline tool under
slavery. Because of the much greater
brutality of the system, whether through corporal punishment on the job,
executions carried out by the judicial system, or hangings by a white mob, or
the devastation wrought by manipulating and destroying family bonds in the name
of labor discipline and/or profit, it is much harder to believe the slaves
would accept the implicit social contract bargain their ruling class had
made with them, compared to that between the farmworkers and the English rural
elite.
Imagining
a young, teenaged English farm servant thinking it is a good deal to have
guaranteed food, shelter, and a job for one year in exchange for being at the
beck and call of his master, the farmer, much of the waking day, is fairly
easy. Believing Sambo would find being permanently
bound by an accident of birth to this or that white master, who may whip him
mercilessly, or sell his wife, his mother, his children, etc. away from him for
any reason, was a good bargain is much less plausible. He could easily see from how his white
family, his overseer, the poor whites nearby, and/or free blacks lived, the
advantages of liberty as opposed to slavery.
The masses of slaves who fled whenever an army hostile to the Southern
white elite's interests was nearby during the Revolutionary and Civil Wars are
good evidence for this. Doubtless, the
paternalistic ideology did make some actual converts among drivers and the
domestic servants especially, as well as among the slaves who had been owned by
great planters over a period of generations in long settled regions along the
Atlantic Seaboard, but it is unlikely it was really accepted in the main
by most slaves other than tactically to get something out of the whites and
beyond outward behavioral signs of deference, such as not looking the master in
the face. Part of the essence of
paternalism is for the subordinate class to identify its interests with its
master's in a personal way, while the superior maintains social distance to
avoid losing respect of the subordinate through
"fraternization." It is much
easier to imagine English laborers identifying with their farmer or squire, at
least before c. 1795, than the typical slave with his master because of the
endemic violence and family divisions many masters had to inflict to maintain
order or financial solvency, while the English elite avoided employing anywhere
as much force, and mostly only manipulated family bonds to the extent a laborer
applied for parish relief from a system tied to the workhouse test. In short, communal paternalism becomes a
more plausible possibility for the masses to accept ideologically the more the
elite respects the privileges/rights of the subordinate class to be protected
from criminals and economic insecurity.
For the slaves, the costs of their masters and overseers' particular
brand of paternalism under slavery was far higher than that required by English
farmer of the English farmworker in service, or even the squire and parson in
general deference. Although Scott's
objections about the masses manipulating the elite's ideology theoretically
apply to both the English laborer and American slave's cases equally, there is
reason to believe the paternalistic ideology made much greater inroads among
the laborers than the slaves in the period prior to the French Wars, and then
the English rural elite lost what hegemony they had due to their actions,
causing class consciousness to develop in the first three quarters of the
nineteenth century.
6. ON
RESISTANCE BY A SUBORDINATE CLASS
The Infrapolitics of Daily Life
For
any subordinate class, day-to-day resistance, not spectacular revolts or
rebellions, dominate their lives. The
small victories and defeats of infrapolitics coming from the ongoing struggle
between the subordinate class and the dominant class often have a significant
bearing on the level of comfort the former has, and so cannot be dismissed as
irrelevant. Whether someone, a slave or
farmworker, has a stomach full or empty on a given night, based upon the
successful or unsuccessful theft of food or poaching of game, is a matter of
particular importance to him or her.
Such daily struggles often do not receive the journalistic and historiographical
ink that spectacular revolts and riots do, but often have more direct bearing
on the lives of the subordinate class in question. Indeed, enough little guerrilla attacks on the prerogatives of
the dominant class may end up undermining some principal aspect of the way they
exploit the subordinate class if the elite does not work to continually enforce
it. For example, to the extent poaching
(in the case of the English farmworkers) or pilfering from the master's stock
(more an American slave issue) becomes so banal and routine from so many
violations of the dominant class's laws, then those laws increasingly cease to
exist as practical realities. Laws can
be destroyed by the death of a thousand cuts due to the subordinate class's
exertion of continual pressure, as it probes for weaknesses in the dominant
class's strength and will to enforce its prerogatives, unless the latter pushes
back just as steadily through surveillance and force. Since the dominant class, at least when unified and not threatened
by foreign invaders, normally can win any direct frontal attacks on its
prerogatives by the subordinate class, the latter tends to resort to
circuitous, covert tactics to gain its ends anyway. In the case of American slaves in particular compared to their
Latin American and Caribbean brethren, significant revolts were rare events,
especially in the period this work analyzes.
Besides the complicated case of the Seminole War, actual insurrection
only occurred twice between 1750 and 1865:
Turner's in 1831 and that near New Orleans in 1811. The abortive conspiracies of Gabriel Prosser
(Virginia, 1800) and Denmark Vesey (South Carolina, 1822) receive lots of
attention, but never got off the ground.
Similarly, although the Swing Riots of 1830-31 were impressive in their
national scope, the English farmworkers simply did not regularly take to making
frontal assaults en masse against the rural elite. Because of these considerations, this
section emphasizes the day-to-day resistance ("infrapolitics") of the
slaves and farmworkers to their respective elites, not the spectacular revolts
or riots that made ruling classes quiver in their boots for some short periods
of time, but which largely came to nought in the end.568
Analytical Problems with "Day-to-Day
Resistance" (Infrapolitics)
After
listing some acts typical of it, Genovese rather skeptically views day-to-day
resistance thus:
Stealing, lying, dissembling, shirking, murder,
infanticide, suicide, arson--qualify at best as prepolitical and at worst as
apolitical. . . . [It] generally implied accommodation and made
no sense except on the assumption of an accepted status quo the norms of which,
as perceived or defined by the slaves, had been violated.
While he admits that seemingly innocuous activities,
such as a black preacher's sermon on love and dignity, could serve as groundwork
for political action by strengthening the cohesion of the subordinate class
against their masters, he denies such activities are directly
"political." Fogel and
Engerman are similarly skeptical, while using rather different premises. They argue, against Stampp in particular,
that characterizing the slaves' behavior as consisting of stealing, lying,
dissembling, shirking, etc., effectively concedes the traditional stereotypes
of blacks under slavery. The difference
merely was it gave these acts a non-racist, non-genetic interpretation,
maintaining resistance against their owners caused them:
[Herskovits and Bauer and Bauer] had merely argued
that laziness and irresponsibility were really forms of resistance to
slavery. Stampp gave this resistance a
moral twist. In effect, he attributed
to slaves the morality of abolitionists.
In doing so he not only gave to those engaged in resistance a political
consciousness that Douglass did not find among his fellow bondsmen
. . . he simultaneously cast a stain on those who strove to improve
themselves within the system. Stampp's
second path also led him to concede the truth of Phillips's description of the
behavior of blacks, but to argue that it was the system rather than race
which was to blame.
Strikingly, they argue that such low intensity types
of resistance should be compared to how often these acts were done by free
workers, over and above the problems of determining actual motivation and
frequency for them.569
So Fogel and Engerman and Genovese all share skepticism about day-to-day
resistance. But Fogel and Engerman's
disavowals are much stronger because they believe the slaves were imbued with
the Protestant work ethic. Although
these arguments are made in the context of American black slavery, the same
theoretical arguments could be applied to English farmworkers as well, with
poaching added to the list of typical acts of resistance, and a lesser emphasis
on shirking and theft.
The Continuum of Resistance from Infrapolitics to
Organized Insurrection
Against
the implied theory of resistance held by Fogel and Engerman and (to a lesser
extent) Genovese, the struggle manifested in daily infrapolitics is part of a
continuum of resistance which includes revolts, riots, rebellions, strikes,
etc. are part of. To focus on the
spectacular acts of resistance misses a large part of how a subordinate class
opposes the dominant class's demands, especially when the former knows suicidal
most frontal attacks against the latter are.
Resisting within a particular social system's bounds, often
quietly, anonymously, and covertly, does not mean those so involved accept its
overall legitimacy or their position as an oppressed group. Instead, this may be the only practical way
many members of a subordinate group can strike back at the dominant group, or
to simply meet some physical needs the ruling class's laws or customs would
prevent. Since the members of a subordinate
class may use tactically the ideology of the dominant group to accomplish some
immediate goal, records of them spouting elite ideology do not prove they really
accept these ideas when offstage, away from the presence of the members of the
dominant class. While involving some
double-mindedness and dissembling, that hardly proves it did not happen, since
the greater the degree of oppression, the thicker the mask subordinate class's
members wear, and the more lies it tells to protect itself from the heavier
extractions of the dominant class.
Genovese's great theme concerning the hegemonic effects of paternalism
as an ideology on the slaves, even as they tailored it to suit their own
interests, necessarily denies this possibility at some level, even granting his
point that greater political awareness--organized class consciousness--is much
more clearly manifested by the acts of the minority who attempted to runaway or
fight head on against their masters.570
Since
the mentality of typical illiterate slaves or farmworkers was generally rather
limited due to a lack of education, it is harder for them to imagine themselves
abstractly as part of very large group of thousands or millions who need
to organize as a group to resist collectively the demands of another
group. Instead, they saw themselves and
the relatively small number of family members, friends, and members of their
group they personally knew as being oppressed by their master or masters in
some small local area in very specific ways, such as by a lack of food, whippings,
lack of freedom of movement, etc. They
knew the concretes through personal and local examples of and about
their overall class, but the abstractions largely escaped them, which placed abstract,
systematic political consciousness largely beyond them, even as they were
surely conscious of generally getting the shaft from some master or farmer when
receiving stinted rations, whippings, low wages, long hours, etc. Day-to-day resistance among the slaves, seen
in this light, becomes an act performed not against slavery as a social
system--even though if asked offstage most slaves likely would have said they
wanted to be free--as much as striking back against a particular master or
trying to get some more food to survive more easily. To gain some practical advantage within a system of oppression
does not mean the oppressed do not object to their overall state of
subordination, especially when knowing open, frontal attacks were both futile
and self-destructive. However, even
granting this point of Scott's does not mean that the members of a subordinate
class have a fully developed counter-ideology and political program for
opposing the elite's demands, which means Genovese's perspective must be taken
seriously. Anderson, although deeply
critical of what was drawn from this viewpoint, stated Genovese's position
thus: "Resistance, in his terms,
presupposes the formation of ideology, organized effort, and political
ingenuity. Resistance rests upon sound
and conscious mental activity; in other words, it is political
brilliance."571
In the case of American slaves, a fully developed class consciousness
(one which was acted upon broadly in an organized manner) never came to exist
in the South, at least in part because of the greater restrictions placed upon
them and the greater watchfulness of their ruling class, while with the
farmworkers "political brilliance" nationally came ultimately only in
the 1870s with the formation of Arch's union.
The Need for a Subordinate Class to Wear a Mask to
Conceal Their Knowledge
The
basic means by which the slaves (or members of any other subordinate class)
resist their masters concerns denying superiors information that would aid
their attempts to keep them in line.
Wearing a mask accomplishes this end, in which the slave played a
certain role and acted a certain way when onstage before his masters, but acted
differently when just among members of his own group, or someone else perceived
as being friendly. Subordinates present
a common front against their masters by following a code of silence, thus
purchasing common protection by doing so, as Georgia planter Charles C. Jones
observed:
The Negroes are scrupulous on one point; they make
common cause, as servants, in concealing their faults from their owners. Inquiry elicits no information; no one feels
at liberty to disclose the transgressor; all are profoundly ignorant; the
matter assumes the sacredness of a "professional secret": for they remember that they may hereafter
require the same concealment of their own transgressions from their fellow
servants, and if they tell upon them now, they may have the like favor
returned the[n].
Once the Confederate troops in Rutledge's Mounted
Rifles encountered slaves who gave them very friendly greetings. Later on, after the servant of one master
and Confederate officer said not to trust them, he went back again, this time
dressed as a Federal officer. He now
found the slaves volunteered to aid the Union war effort: "Massa, you come for ketch
rebels?" and "We show you whey you can ketch thirty
tonight." They showed or pointed
out to him the Rebel Camp, and added:
"We kin ketch officer for you whenever you want'em." Masters and mistresses themselves knew their
slaves dissembled in their presence, but found it hard to stop. Mary Boykin Chesnut sensed the ambition of
Dick, the butler, who she had taught how to read when young, and who presently
would not look her in the face as the South's fortunes plunged downwards in the
summer of 1863:
He is the first Negro that I have felt a change
in. They go about in their black masks,
not a ripple or an emotion showing; and yet on all other subjects except the
War they are the most excitable of all the races. Now Dick might make a very respectable Egyptian Sphynx, so
inscrutably silent is he.572
Dissembling seriously restricted the slaveholders'
attempts to control their human chattels, for individual slaves often withheld
information in order to protect themselves as a group.
Early Training in Mask Wearing
Where
and how was this behavior learned?
Young slaves learned early on from their parents that they could not go
around saying whatever first popped into their minds about some situation on
their plantation or farm.573 Clearly a general dread and mistrust of
whites developed among slaves, since the whites were the ones who could punish
them, or turn them in when running away.574 David West, as a slave, was cheated out of a
half bushel of grain out of a barrel's worth by a rich slaveholder. He had to consent to the unfair deal,
because "he knew I would not dare say any thing about it,--the law was
such that he could have me whipped, if I were to contradict him." When young, slaves learned the consequences
of speaking their minds could easily be disastrous, even when they were
definitely right. As ex-slave Lee
Guidon of South Carolina recalled:
"They didn't want the slaves talking 'bout things. One time I got ruffed up, and say I saw going
to freedom . . . My ma put her hand over my mouth like this and say,
'You don't know anything 'bout what you saying, boy.'" When his father and other men made a break
for freedom as a group, and the master went on the warpath, freedwoman Mary
Grayson was told by her mother: "If any of you young-uns say anything
about any strange men coming to our place I'll break your necks!" Harriet Brent Jacobs' son had secretly found
out she was hidden away in the house he lived in, but never told anyone about
it: "Such prudence may seem
extraordinary in a boy of twelve years, but slaves, being surrounded by
mysteries, deceptions, and dangers, early learn to be suspicious and watchful,
and prematurely cautious and cunning."
When Kemble praised London's character, noting he had thoroughly refused
to reveal how he had learned to read, she complimented him by saying
"besides his other good qualities, he appears to have that most unusual
one of all in an uneducated person--discretion."575 Having come from a life of freedom in a free
society, this statement shows she did not realize that slaves learned such
habits early in life as survival strategies for enduring a system of
oppression. The members of a
subordinate class, especially one as tightly controlled as American slaves,
naturally learn how to wear a mask and to develop "discretion," excepting
for those slaves, mainly among the drivers and house servants, who throw in
their lot with their masters and mistresses, and become spies for them.
The Costs of Being Open and Removing the Mask
When
the mask did come off for some reason, perhaps because of an emotional
explosion, dire consequences could result.
Barrow narrates one case where a servant was whipped, although only
twice lightly, because, according to his mother-in-law, "the girl forget
herself [when being "saucey" one time] thought she was talking to
negros A fine Compliment indeed." This domestic servant got off fairly lightly
for her apparent carelessness. Enough
experience with the high costs of freely and clearly expressing some of the
thoughts contained in the hidden transcript were a sufficient reminder to
wary. Freedwoman Annie Hawkins, once a
slave in Georgia and Texas, had endured a particularly harsh master. When he died, she and her sister laughed,
because "we was glad he was dead."
Their mistress then whipped them with a broomstick, but the emotional
release coming from venting one's feelings and beliefs openly "didn't make
us sorry though." Similarly,
ex-slave Fannie Moore's mother was whipped with a cowhide for declaring (in
part): "I's saved. . . .
I ain't gwine-a grieve no more. No
matter how much you all done beat me and my children, the Lord will show me the
way. And some day we never be
slaves." Despite being punished,
she still went back to the fields singing.
Barrow whipped two slaves for lying to him. He said one of them, Margaret, he had never known her to do this
before. Southern whites, even the
mistresses and masters who were daily attended upon by black slaves, simply did
not know their minds as well as they thought they did, since the slaves wished
to avoid being punished. The slaves'
masks systematically kept them in the dark, although more insightful ones among
them, such as Chesnut, knew very well they routinely concealed many of their
thoughts from their owners. Olmsted,
after asking whether the slaves discussed freedom among themselves and whether
it was done frequently, was told by one Louisiana slave that that was indeed
the case: "Yes, sir. Dey--dat is, dey say dey wish it was so;
dat's all dey talk, master--dat's all sir."576 Evidently, since Olmsted was neither a
slaveholder nor a Southerner, this slave had let his mask down, calculating
negative consequences were unlikely.
For while a subordinate class has to wear a mask, the psychological
pressure to reveal something in the hidden transcript creates continual
temptations, because it always wants to speak "truth to power," but
for prudential reasons its members normally refrain from doing so, or often do
so anonymously or in deniable and semi-vague forms.
The Subordinate Class's Compulsions to Lie
Lying
was routine aspect of wearing a mask for slaves, for telling the truth could
become very costly for them in the here and now, even as their Christian
beliefs told them its potential costs in the hereafter. One traveler challenged a slaveholder that
he would catch a certain slave in a lie before he left, although the slaveholder
said this slave, named John, never lied.
He got the slave to open up a covered dish by telling him not to
uncover it, after placing a mouse under it.
It jumped away after he uncovered it, but he denied he had lifted the
cover. Its disappearance proved John
would lie, so the traveler commented, "See there, John been lying to you
all the time, you just ain't knowed it."
The comment by the slave telling this story is particularly
telling: "And I reckon he right,
'cause us had to lie." Because the
costs of the master's or overseer's hand coming down on them could be so high,
slaves routinely lied in order to protect themselves. After a young slave who attended on her denied desiring freedom,
Kemble said he did so because "he comprehended immediately that his
expressing even the desire to be free might be construed by me into an offense,
and sought, by eager protestations of his delighted acquiescence in slavery, to
conceal his soul's natural yearning, lest I should resent it." For such reasons, her husband maintained
that "it was impossible to believe a single word any of these people
said."577
While
such acts are understandable under the conditions of oppression they suffered
under, maintaining double-mindedness on telling the truth always extracted a
cost, for situational ethics that favor one's group or class as against another
undermines the close calculations necessary in an economy and community based
on economic credibility. This habit
inflicted long run damage on the freedmen after emancipation and as old habits
(understandable in the world of Reconstruction and the KKK) lingered. Employers in a capitalist economy need
accurate information to successfully make profits, and naturally dislike hiring
or dealing with those whose unwillingness to tell the truth in uncomfortable
situations undermines the corporation's or company's profitability or ability
to survive. Unquestionably, the roots
of this practice lay in traditional African cultural custom, as European
travelers and anthropologists discovered through cases where those telling lies
had nothing to gain from deceiving another.
It was regarded as a discourtesy to tell something to another person
that he or she did not wish to hear, seeing human comfort as more important
that telling what was strictly true--the motive behind many a "white
lie" told today. As Genovese
noted, after citing the case of a slave who felt he had "lied on himself"
by saying nice things to a new relative of the white family:
[Those ethically torn] were struggling toward a
morality necessary to function in a modern economy and society. To the extent that the exigencies of
survival suffocated their impulses, they dealt crippling blows to the long-run
prospects for the black community, while protecting it against its
oppressors.
Condemning the slaves for their elastic morality
remains difficult, as Kemble knew.
After catching her cook Abraham in a lie about some missing mutton and
getting repeated denials even though the truth was obvious, she commented: "Dirt and lying are the natural
tendencies of humanity, which are especially fostered by slavery. Slaves may be infinitely wrong, and yet it
is very hard to blame them."578
Why the Rituals of Deference Still Had Meaning
The
behaviors and rituals of deference were another component of the mask the slaves
wore before their masters in particular, and whites in general. As described above (pp. 316-17), these
rituals are not without meaning even when the role-player rejects the ideology
of the social system he or she is subordinated under and does not respect a
particular member of the elite in actuality.
The balancing act of paternalism involves getting the subordinate to be
socially close enough to identify with the elite member and his interests,
while simultaneously maintaining social distance between the two that can be
lost by the daily close intimate contact--the "familiarity that breeds
contempt." The physical acts of
bowing, averting the eyes downward, touching the forelock, etc. allow the elite
to maintain a type of "ceremonial purity" that "sanitizes"
the "pollution" that comes from having close relationships with the
subordinate class that might, without these rituals, lead to "uppity"
servants and field hands.
Throughout
the American South the slaves routinely ridiculously exaggerated these rituals
to doubly demonstrate their apparent submission to their masters and
mistresses. Kemble, who frequently was
treated by large groups of slaves congregating around her to beg, petition, and
plead almost as if she was the Messiah while staying at her husband's estates,
knew full well how the slaves' desperation to secure her favor worked them up
into pathetic scenes. Being an actress
by trade, she could easily see how the slaves were playing a role before her.579 When on a walk with her husband, one slave
coming towards them
halted, and caused us to halt straight in the middle
of the path, when, bending himself down till his hands almost touched the ground,
he exclaimed to [her husband], "Massa ----, your most obedient;" and
then, with a kick and flourish altogether indescribable, he drew to the side of
the path to let us pass, which we did perfectly shouting with laughter
. . . so sudden, grotesque, uncouth, and yet dexterous a gambado
never came into the brain or out of the limbs of any thing but a
"niggar."
On the streets of Richmond, Virginia, Olmsted
witnessed the blacks were often well dressed, which made him comment:
There was no indication of their belonging to a
subject race, except that they invariably gave the way to the white people they
met. Once, when two of them engaged in
conversation and looking at each other, had not noticed his approach, I saw a
Virginian gentleman lift his walking-stick and push a woman aside with it.
. . . their manner to white people is invariably either sullen,
jocose, or fawning.580
Olmsted personally experienced how these rituals of
deference could create social distance undesirably. Once, when introduced to a respected black preacher and slave
driver, he shook his hand, and said he was happy meeting him. "He seemed to take this for a joke, and
laughed heartily." After Olmsted's
friend made a slightly humorous comment, the preacher initially answered with
some scriptural phrase, "but before he could say three words, began to
laugh again, and reeled off like a drunken man--entirely overcome with
merriment." After a further
exchange, clearly not intended as a joke, where he staggered off laughing hard,
Olmsted commented that he had really desired "to treat him respectfully,
wishing to draw him into conversation; but he had got the impression that it
was intended to make fun of him, and generously assuming a merry humour, I
found it impossible to get a serious reply." This incident illustrates how a subordinate's acts of deference
could serve as a mask, which might not seem at all to constitute
"resistance," yet still protect him or her. The rituals of deference helped the slaves conceal their true
thoughts from their masters and mistresses while simultaneously assuring their
owners of their submissiveness. This
slave preacher succeeded in evading a conversation that he thought judged
threatening, while doing so in a way not seeming at all defiant. The social distance these rituals created
also benefited to the slaves as a subordinate class, since after going through
the required physical acts to put off their owners, being sufficiently
appeased, may avoid further inquiries into their state of mind. They also could secure a hearing about a
grievance from their master, when they acted highly submissively first.581 In a world dominated by unpredictably
passionate whites in which the wrong look, comment, or gesture could lead to a
whipping or even death, the slaves did what had to be done to survive,
suffering much indignity in the process.
Elkins's "Sambo" Hypothesis and Its Problems
It is
impossible to ignore Stanley Elkins's "Sambo hypothesis" and the
torrent of historiographical ink unleashed in response to it, when considering
the mask slaves wore. His thesis can be
briefly stated thus: "Sambo,"
meaning slaves conforming to the stereotypical behaviors of being childlike,
loyal but undependable, given to laziness, lies, and theft as well as silly
talk full of exaggeration, really and commonly existed on American
plantations. Since genetic factors
cannot explain this stereotype, and Latin American slaveholders did not see
their slaves in a similar manner, there must be something different about
slavery in the United States that caused "Sambos" to exist. Due to a lack of powerful competing
institutions such as the church and the crown that in Latin America held the
planters' financial interests as entrepreneurs in check, American commercial
capitalism created a "closed system" that cut off the slaves from
contact with free society through (in particular) a legal system's slave codes
that basically denied the humanity of the slaves and made emancipation
relatively hard to obtain. The Nazi
concentration camps during World War Two were a closed system that produced
infantile behavior remarkably like that of "Sambo," with the inmates
coming to personally identify with the SS guards due to the absolute power they
wielded over them. A similar process is
said to have occurred on American plantations, where young slaves would come to
identify with the white master as the chief "significant other" in
their lives, as a father figure to all his "black children." As a result, little serious resistance and
hatred towards the white master and mistress existed. What brought Elkins' work such attention was its ingenious
harnessing of psychological theory, in particular Sullivan's theory about the
development of a sense of self based upon the expectations of certain powerful
others (such as parents) in someone's life, to shed light on a historical
controversy: Were the slaves as U.B.
Phillips portrayed--lazy, lying, undependable, childlike "Sambos"--or
as Stampp's "white men with black skin," continually full of schemes
to resist their owners? Elkins' work,
like Fogel and Engerman's Time on the Cross, has been subject to
withering scrutiny from many angles. It
problems will be only briefly surveyed here.582
The
controversy over Elkins' thesis arises in connection to whether the slaves really
were "Sambos" in personality, or did they role-play
"Sambo," putting on a mask when onstage before the whites. Elkins's leading mistake comes from making a
fairly close analogy between concentration camps and plantations. The main purpose for one was to kill people
while the other was to exploit people, most of whom had to stay alive in order
to profitably raise cash crops. While
slaveholders did hold immense power over their black subjects, their purposes in
using it were very different from the SS guards', whose basic objective was to
kill off prisoners by methods both quick and slow. Personality-bending, "brain-washing" effects only take
effect in extreme cases where the dominant group is not just out to control the
subordinates to profitably exploit them, but are bent in a night-and-day task
to extinguish any possible crevice in which the subordinates could carve out
their own social sites away from the surveillance of their superiors or any
other kind of freedom. Only in cases
such as the Chinese P.O.W. camps Americans were kept during the Korean War or
hostages held by terrorists for a long period ("the Stockholm
syndrome") does the subordinate class begin to be "brainwashed"
into "loving master" and accept uncritically wholesale the ideology of
the dominant group. In total
institutions such as asylums and prisons for common criminals, personality
bending does not occur--situations much more analogous to slavery. Slaveholders were not out to destroy every
vestige of freedom of the slaves as such, which would impractically consume
enormous effort in surveillance time and money, but to obtain the sufficient
("optimum") amount of submission necessary to profitably raise
crops. As Fogel and Engerman
noted: "'Perfect submission' was
the rhetorical position of the master class, not its practical objective."583
The
flaw in Elkins' use of Sullivan's theory about significant others lay in
failing to see the other roles slaves play in their daily lives beyond the one
played before the white master and overseer.
They had significant others in their lives besides the whites exercising
authority over them. In the course of a
day or week, a slave might be principally acting as a husband or wife, a mother
or father, an aunt or uncle, a daughter or son, a brother or sister, a friend,
a worker, a buyer and seller, etc. By
seeing how poor whites and/or free blacks lived, perhaps in some cases working
with them side by side, or even how their white master's and/or overseer's
family lived, they knew practically how
free people lived, as Davis observed.
The social space given in particular by family life, and the quarters generally,
prevented any over-identification with the white master, over and above the
social distance produced by the rituals of deference. Clearly, "alternative forces for moral and psychological
orientation" did exist for the slaves, allowing for the development
of conscious accommodation and an autonomous personality beneath the front
slaves put up before their owner. The
Elkins thesis's biggest hurdle lay in denying slaves used their mask of
deference to accomplish their goals against the elite. If "Sambo" was a mask put on to
deceive the master, such as by feigning stupidity or clumsiness they could
evade working or answering probing questions, it just as easily came off when
among just those of their own social group, and not be who they really
were. As one insightful planter wrote
in 1837:
The most general defect in the character of the Negro,
is hypocrisy; and this hypocrisy frequently makes him pretend to more ignorance
than he possesses; and if the master treats him as a fool, he will be sure to
act the fool's part. This is a very
convenient trait, as it frequently serves as an apology for awkwardness and
neglect of duty.
The level of violence slaveholders routinely employed
demonstrates that "Sambo" was a mask, certainly not the general reality,
for American slaves. Also, as Lewis
observed:
To view compliance as a convenient mechanism employed
by several generations would necessarily destroy [Elkins'] assumption of the
slave's internalization of the "Sambo" role. Consequently, the possibility that
conformity and compliance might be extorted without significant personality
distortion is not considered. If the
"Sambo" role were internalized then the use of force would not have
been as prevalent as the literature reveals.
The slaveholding elite did not always see their slaves
as Sambos, and indeed had to be selectively inattentive to real slaves'
behavior and misinterpreting what they did observe to propagate this
stereotype. Blassingame sees the persistent
plague of conspiracy and revolt panics that periodically swept through the
white community as showing that it saw slaves also as deceitful Nats,
concealing bloodthirsty desires for revenge behind a compliant obedient
exterior. Ultimately, Elkins' more
extreme version of hegemony, in which not just the beliefs but the personality
of the slaves are shaped and molded by their masters in the latter's desired
image, hits the same rocks Genovese's model of slaves' accepting and adapting
paternalism and Fogel and Engerman's view of slaves becoming imbued with the
Protestant work ethic do, with its failure merely being easier to prove. The semi-autonomy that slaves achieved
individually through role-playing a mask and collectively through their culture
(especially in their religion) refutes any overarching thesis of successful
hegemonic incorporation on a mass scale.584
An Act of Routine Resistance: Stealing
One
of the biggest management headaches masters and mistresses faced was theft of
their property by some of the rest of it.
Slaves stole above all food--corn, pork, hogs, chickens, fruit, even pumpkins--all
were fair game. Money, household
possessions, even cotton were also "appropriated."585 Once Barrow complained: "My negroes or some others are
determined we shall not have any Chickens." Field hands faced greater temptations to steal than house
servants, because the latter generally benefited from the white family's
leftovers. The slaveholders' general
response to their slaves stealing was predictable. They watched to detect and prevent thievery, and punished those
caught. Barrow whipped a number of
slaves who stole from him, including field hands for hogs that turned up
missing and house servants who broke into his storeroom. One day he stopped three--probably not his
own--from going to town to sell cornmeal.
He set up a nightly patrol to catch chicken thieves, and had standing
orders for a night watch of "two or more men. they are answerable of all trespasses committed during their
watch, unless they produce the offender.
or give immediate alarm."
He also prohibited his slaves from selling anything "without my
express permission" partly because they "would be tempted to commit
robberies to obtain things to sell."586 Prohibiting slaves from selling goods was a
measure designed to undermine the illicit traffic through which poor whites
would encourage slaves to steal hogs, corn, cotton, or other agricultural
produce to exchange for liquor or money.
This black market was a major problem for planters and farmers
throughout the South.587
Ex-slaves Joseph Sanford and John Warren confirmed these practices, the
former describing how a cowhide was applied on him for taking some salt from
his Virginian master's house, while the latter said "the white folks down
south [he was a slave in Mississippi] don't seem to sleep much,
nights. . . . They listen and peep to see if any thing has been
stolen, and to find if any thing is going on."588
Some
masters tried giving adequate rations and using religious teaching (an attempt
at hegemony once again) to restrain thefts, but these general pro-active
measures were not especially successful.
Davis maintained that the Barrow plantation's slaves were well-fed, but
his claim that they did not steal that often is undermined by the incidents
recorded in Barrow's own diary. Despite
all the prevention measures, theft remained a major problem. Russell commented, while visiting a friend's
plantation near Natchez: "Large
plantations are not suited to the rearing of hogs; for it is found almost
impossible to prevent the negroes from stealing and roasting the
pigs." Overseers on one large Deep
South plantation told Olmsted, offhandedly "as a matter of course,"
that their slaves stole corn to feed the chickens and hogs they kept on their
own. One slaveholder insisted on taking
and locking up Olmsted's blankets and saddlebags for security, even following
them to their place of safety, explaining:
"Some of our own people in the house might come to them. Such things have happened here, and you
never can trust any of them."
Molly, a domestic servant, explained to Chesnut in a remarkably
matter-of-fact tone how the white neighbors nearby had lost all their
food. Her revelation illustrates how
the hidden transcript was breaking out into the open as the South's fortunes
were plainly on the ropes in early 1864:
"Niggers stole it. Nobody
else could be that mean but their own niggers.
You needn't look scared, missis.
Why should we take em in de bulk?
We takes em as we wants em."589 In the incessant war of wits between slaves
trying to steal and masters trying to prevent them from doing so, each side won
its share of battles.
Various Motives for Theft
Why
did the bondsmen steal? Sometimes they
stole because the slaveholder was so stingy in his rations that the slaves felt
compelled to steal to live, while another motive was due to a lack of variety
in the slave diet, a problem noted above (pp. 21-22). The pressures of perceived necessity made for an elastic slave
conscience, similar to its approach to lying.
As Thomas Jefferson noted, a man with no little experience dealing with
slaves:
That disposition to theft, with which they have been
branded, must be ascribed to their situation, and not to any depravity of the
moral sense. The man in whose favour no
laws of property exist, probably feels himself less bound to respect those made
in favour of others.
But the slaves justified their behavior on another,
deeper line of logic. Their culture saw
theft as simple justice, of the laborer taking what was due him or her, as
Olmsted found that slaveholders themselves knew:
It is told me as a singular fact, that everywhere on
the plantations, the agrarian notion has become a fixed point of the negro
system of ethics: that the result of labour
belongs of right to the labourer, and on this ground, even the religious feel
justified in using "massa's" property for their own temporal
benefit. This they term
"taking" and it is never admitted to be a reproach to a man among
them that he is charged with it, though "stealing," or taking from
another than their master, and particularly from one another, is so.
The slaves, by dubbing theft as "taking,"
rejected their owners' morality, saying it did not apply to their specific
situation. As Kemble noted: "It is very natural these people should
steal a little of our meat from us occasionally, who steal almost all their
bread from them habitually."590
The Intrinsic Costs of Double-Standards in Morality
Justifying
stealing had intrinsic costs, for evidently some, at least, did not just
stop at their master's stores. A
Liberty County, Georgia missionary once complained that masters punished their
slaves for thefts committed against them, but not for those committed against
other slaves.
Hence, in some places, thieves thrive and honest men
suffer, until it becomes a practice to 'keep if you can what is your own, and
get all you can besides that is your neighbour's.['] Things come to such a pass, that the saying of the negroes is
literally true, 'The people live upon one another.'
The slaveowners' harnessed universal Christian
morality to stop their bondsmen from stealing while not, in a significant
number of cases, feeding them enough.
Their class interest was patently obvious. But repudiating this rule had spillover costs since some
slaves, at least, chose to ignore the lines drawn even in their own culture
about "taking" and "stealing," although this cost is not
necessarily seen by others who have analyzed this issue. The intrinsic costs were a deeper problem,
since some slaves experienced mixed feelings about "taking," similar
to those about lying. As Genovese noted: "But the slaves' resistance inevitably
weakened their self-respect and their ability to forge a collective discipline
appropriate to the long-term demands of their national liberation." The life of accommodation, deception, and
theft were seemingly necessary, even successful adaptations to conditions of
slavery, but were poor preparations for a life of freedom, where the bad habits
learned from the institution of bondage did not go away overnight, proved
maladaptive as residual thefts continued against white employers after freedom
came. Willie Lee "Rose forcibly
argued in 1964 [that] learning accommodation was not healthy once freedom
came." As Paquette
concluded:
Slave theft or shirking, for example, may challenge
discrete elements of a larger moral code but given mutual dependency, also may
entail drawbacks for the slaves' construction of a coherent and more just
alternative order. . . .
To succeed, oppressed peoples, unlike some social historians, can ill
afford to misconstrue license as moral economy.591
Evading Work by Claiming Sickness
The
main battleground between masters and slaves concerned work. The slaves, being unpaid for regular work,
had almost every incentive to slack off.
They were kept in the field and steadily working by the watchfulness of
the overseer, driver, and/or master, and the threat and application of physical
force. Despite the pressures brought
against them, slaves resourcefully found many a way to shirk while at work, or
to avoid showing up at it to begin with.
Notoriously, slaves faked sickness, disease, or injury to escape
work. One of Barrow's slaves was
particularly inventive--he avoided work for months by pretending to be
blind. After a doctor examined him and
said nothing was wrong, Barrow gave him twenty-five lashes, and ordered him to
show up for work, after which he absconded.
One female slave evaded work for over two years by supposedly being in the
process of dying from phthisis [tuberculosis].
It turned out she had become in that time a capable milliner and
dressmaker, kept busy by local black ladies!
These situations presented the master class with a major dilemma. The slave could be really sick, and
ordering a him to work threatened his health.
One overseer lamented how, thinking a slave worth $800 was shamming by
claiming sickness, he ordered him to work.
The slave turned up dead two days later. His policy now, like his new employer's, was to generally give
slaves the benefit of the doubt--a policy inevitably congenial to them. On the other hand, the slave could be
perfectly healthy, yet by using colorful language and pitiful cries and moans,
try to get out of work for a day or more.
The slaveholder thus remained always somewhat in the dark, yet
suspecting at least some of his or her slaves sometimes were faking it. Barrow's diary notes fairly often that so
many slaves were sick and so many pretending, but (evidently) receiving the day
off. He complained of two female slaves
being terrible shirks for being laid up twice a month. He tested and rejected the claim of one
slave thus, which backfired against him:
"Ginny Jerry . . . has been shirkin for some time came to me Friday morning sick--suspecting
him Examined him found nothing the matter complaining of pains &c. told him to go & work it off--he has
concluded to woods it off."
Olmsted summarized the problems Southern slaveholders faced, showing
once again the real power of the mask slaves wore before their masters in
subverting labor discipline:
It is said to be nearly as difficult to form a
satisfactory diagnosis of negroes' disorders as it is of infants', because
their imagination of symptoms is so vivid, and because not the smallest
reliance is to be placed on their accounts of what they have felt or done.
One letter writer, who was from Virginia but had lived
in New York, estimated nothing less than one-sixth of the labor-days a slave
normally could have worked was lost to illness, real or imagined. The slave divers who worked along North
Carolina's shoreline illustrate well the remarkable difference between free
labor and slave labor about whether and how much sickness was faked. They dived to place gunpowder in submerged
tree stumps that snagged large sweeping nets that caught fish. They were paid a quarter to a half dollar a
day above the one dollar their owners received, and rewarded with whisky as
well for working. "His divers very
frequently had intermittent fevers, but would very rarely let this keep them
out of their boats. Even in the midst
of a severe 'shake,' they would generally insist that they were 'well enough to
dive.'"592
Suddenly, the moment serious incentives were offered, lazy, shirking,
"sick" slaves became healthy and hardworking! So long as slaves had little self-interest
in whether and how much work they did, their interest in "putting on old
massa" about how sick they were in order to lie in bed all day easily
trumped any intrinsic desires to work.
Work:
Slowdowns and Carelessness
When
the slaves found they could not avoid work altogether, the next line of defense
was to do it slowly and/or carelessly, attempting to deceive the overseer and
master about how much they could do.
Slaves often worked only so long as they were being watched, and the
moment the master turned his back, they would slack off. In South Carolina, Olmsted witnessed a
particularly naked example of "eye service":
The overseer rode about among them, on a horse,
carrying in his hand a raw-hide whip, constantly directing and encouraging
them; but . . . as often as he visited one end of the line of
operations, the hands at the other end would discontinue their labour, until he
turned to ride towards them again.
Sometimes Barrow was impressed with the work of his
slaves, such as on certain record cotton-picking days, but other times he saw
his slaves or those of other planters as terrible slackers. While visiting a relative's property, he commented: "Never saw negroes hoe as slow as they
do on Robt. H. B place." After
whipping eight or ten slaves one day for not picking enough cotton, he noted
that low weights did not necessarily make for higher quality: "Those that pick least weights
generally most trash." A number of
times he whipped slaves for slackness at work, illustrating coercion placed a
floor on productivity, but did little towards achieving any kind of excellence.593 The fundamental problem slaveholders faced
concerning their bondsmen was, in the words of a Virginian capitalist and
slaveholder who had experience with them both in the factory and on the farm:
They will not labour at all except to avoid
punishment, and they will never do more than just enough to save themselves
from being punished, and no amount of punishment will prevent their working
carelessly and indifferently. It always
seems on the plantation as if they took pains to break all the tools and spoil
all the cattle that they possibly can, even when they know they'll be directly
punished for it. . . . They
only want to support life: they will
not work for anything more.
When offered incentives, the ability of the most
slothful to instantly turn to work can be little short of miraculous. One slave, who could have earned $150/year
if he hired his own time made a mere $18 one year while costing in medical bills
some $45. The executor of the estate
who owned him offered him his freedom if he would earn $400 (Olmsted
believed). He soon earned the sum, and
was granted his freedom. This story
demonstrates how, contrary to what this Virginian capitalist and slaveholder
thought, the slaves' slackness was due to slavery, and not due to any genetic
factors. Having robbed the slave of the
product of his labor and correspondingly any interest in working well, the
slaveowner had to use the poor substitute of external compulsion and violence
to replace his human chattel's internal motivation. The slave's own sense of justice revolted against a system that
enriched his owner, and left him with the proverbial crust of bread largely
regardless of work performance. That
slaveowners found it so frustrating to deal with those whose self-interest by
the system they had devised was so totally opposed to their own is only natural
and inevitable--but fully self-inflicted!594
The Strategy of Playing the White Folks Off Against
Each Other
By
using the strategy of pitting one white against another, slaves sought to gain
some advantage out of the ensuing conflict.
The most obvious fault line among the whites was between the master and
the overseer, since the two normally were of different social classes, with the
master naturally tending to hold his overseer in contempt, or at least as less
respectable than himself. The slaves
were perfectly capable of trying to drive a wedge between the two, attempting
to have the overseer fired or made more constrained in his actions. Illustrating this strategy of slave
resistance, consider this case history:
Two slaves, Ben and Jim, ran away from Polk's plantation to A.O. Harris,
his brother-in-law. They accused the
overseer, Ephraim Beanland, of whipping one of them especially severely, and
said he did not encourage them at all, but was full of curses, in a letter
Harris wrote to Polk. Ben refused to
return, so Harris rented him out to a local ironworks for the time being. Another brother-in-law, Dr. Silas Caldwell,
passed along similarly uncomplimentary news about the overseer after arriving
at the plantation, although he expressed some skepticism: "I think he lacks stability. I think he has got along badly with the
negroes. The negroes say he likes his
liquor, but let that rest as negro news.
If it is the fact it will appear."
Beanland struck back, arguing that if these two slaves were allowed to
runaway against his authority, then others were sure to follow. In a letter to Polk, he objected to Ben
being rented out instead of brought back to the plantation: "I do not think that he [Ben] ought to
be befriended in any such an maner now if I corect any of the others they ar
shore to leave me thinking that if they can get back to[o] that will do." Beanland wrote a letter to James Walker, yet
another of Polk's brother-in-laws. He
complained about being caught between the demands of Harris and Caldwell on the
one hand, and the need to discipline the slaves on the other:
I do not like in the first plase I must please Calwell
and Mr. Haris as it apeares and then if I donte please everry negro on the
place they rin away rite strate and then if I do not make a crop my imploier of
corse will not like it and I would like to now how I can please them all and
make a crop two.
In another letter to Polk, he described how other
slaves were running away because of how Ben's not being returned allowed other
slaves to flout his authority: "If
ben is not brought back mister haris had beter take the rest of them until I
get ben I now that they will run away untill I get ben." Beanland's ability to discipline his slaves
was being surely undermined by Polk's in-laws siding with the slaves and
listening to their negative testimony about him. Since he could not punish Ben after he ran away because of
Harris's interference in particular, his power to punish one slave as an
example to the rest to intimidate was being effectively nullified. In the end, Polk sustained his overseer, not
his slaves or his in-laws, and had Ben returned. Soon afterwards, Beanland reported how all the slaves who had
runaway were back and how "all apear[ed] satisfied." Nevertheless, this overseer plainly had a
close brush with losing his job due to the power of slave witnesses to swing
other whites--here, three of Polk's brother-in-laws--onto their side. Outside a Southern courtroom, the
subordinate class's testimony was by no means without avail, especially when
masters had reasons to distrust their overseers.595
Manipulating White Authority for the Slaves' Own
Purposes
Slaves
sometimes manipulated white authority by using it to get back at some other
slave who had injured them somehow.
Suddenly, the slave turns into an informant, in order to secure his own
purposes, not so much to curry favor with the overseer or master. Freedman Mason of Mississippi described why
he and another slave were whipped by patrollers while pursuing women on the
next-door plantation without passes:
"Me an' my cousin was projecting' eroun' doin' a little courtin'
wid two gals on de jinin' plantation.
Didn' have no pass. Boys over
dar got awful jealous. Slip an' tell de
overseer one night. He call de
pattyrollers!" Similarly, another
freedman described how, if a woman was offended by a man pursuing her from
another plantation who she did not know, "an' she git mad an' call de
overseer, yo' better duck down de fiel' right quick, caise you gwine git
whipped." A somewhat different
example of this phenomenon was by how one old slavewoman ordered others to shoo
away turkeys whose gobblings were making it difficult for Olmsted to get directions
from her: "If some of you niggers
don't shew them turkeys, I'll have you all whipped as soon as your mass John
comes home." At this point, her
command was performed.596
She threatened to bring down white authority on other slaves, not for
her own self-chosen objectives, but merely have something done to aid her in
talking to Olmsted. This incident still
shows how slaves could collectively use white authority to accomplish their own
ends, by turning informant (or threatening to) for their masters.
How Pleadings and Petitions Could Restrain Masters and
Mistresses
The
complaints and pleadings of slaves had the ability to reach the hearts or minds
of their owners, even though they could theoretically totally ignore their
petitions from their position of nearly absolute authority. Because the slaveholders often wished to
have a positive relationship with their bondsmen, at least those they had close
dealings with, such as domestic servants, they frequently were willing to
change their decisions. Sometimes by
referring to values in the masters' own religion or code of paternalism, the
slaves could restrain them, which constitutes a classic case of the subordinate
class manipulating the ideology of the dominant class to protect their own
interests. For example, one mistress
suddenly ended a long whipping after the slave said, "Old Miss, if I were
you and you were me, I wouldn't beat you this way." Some slaves successfully persuaded their masters
to buy them or sell them in order to keep their families together. One freedman recalled how one slave, when
his wife was being moved away with the master, successfully pleaded to be sold
to the same master his wife belonged so they would stay together thus: "'Sell me, Marster! Sell me!' he say over an' over. So ter stop his pleadin', Marster sold him
an' las' I seen o' him he was wavin' his arms an' singin', goin' off behin' dat
wagon!" While such cases were not
normal, the slaves themselves, despite being the legally powerless personal
chattels of their owners, still had the ability to encourage slaveholders to
sell or buy them as it was deemed in their interests. Stampp noted that a few slaves even had success at persuading
their owners to free them in their wills.
Barrow's slaves successfully persuaded him to extend the Christmas
holiday from Friday, January 2, 1846 until the following Monday because, as he
saw it, there was "not much to do."597 Illustrating the truth behind the
proposition to "Ask, and it shall be given to you," slaveowners
condescended to grant some requests by their bondsmen, despite no legal
compulsions were involved. Persistent
pleading and petitioning could and did bring useful results to the de jure
powerless at least upon occasion.
The General Problem of Slaves Running Away
Slaves
running away constituted a serious form of resistance to the slaveholders'
continued control over their work force.
By this act a slave openly repudiated the master/slave relationship, at
least in cases where he or she was trying to escape permanently. In cases in which the bondsman hanged around
the general locality of home, running away lacked this clear meaning, but may
have been simply a means to temporarily duck punishment or get an illicit vacation
away from working. These cases were
trying enough. But when the slave did
get far, the hassle and expenses to masters and mistresses in catching their
human chattels, punishing them, and getting them to work again could be
enormous. In order to capture and
return one slave named Jack who had run away as far as Arkansas from Tennessee,
Polk faced a bill from the slave catcher of some $126 by his overseer's
calculations for his expenses alone, while in one letter he said it "cost
verry near $200." The slave
catcher wanted $140 for his expenses alone, but Dr. Caldwell objected, offering
to pay $100. These figures easily equal
or exceed the annual rental for hiring a prime field hand--the aforementioned
Ben (pp. 342-43) was temporarily rented to an ironworks for $100/year. And these figures ignore the lost revenue
coming from opportunity costs--the loss caused by the slave not working for his
or her owners, over and above the expenses of capture. Runaways also presented a major danger, as
occurred in Beanland's case temporarily, because if they were not caught and
punished their example would encourage other slaves to imitate them. David Gavin, a small slaveholder in South
Carolina complained in his diary in 1857 when Remus ran away: "This is the 2d or 3d
time he has ranaway, and lost together nearly a years work, I cannot afford to
keep him at this rate, he will spoil the rest of my people by his bad
example." It is no wonder that
Barrow lamented, as cited above (p. 239), that he would rather have a slave do
anything than run away.598
Why
did slaves run away? Sometimes, where
reaching the North was a practical goal, such as in Douglass's case and a number
of others living in the Border States, it was a calculated bid to gain freedom
and permanently dissolve the bonds of bondage.
Escaped slave Mrs. Isaac Riley, who had lived most of her life in Perry
county, Missouri, which is along the border of Illinois, had experienced
excellent treatment--she had a good master, and had never known or seen
overseers, patrols, family separations, or the use of the paddle and lash in
her area. But with her husband desiring
freedom in Canada, and after a relative of her master told her she might be
treated much worse if her master should die, she fled. "I used often to think that I would
like to be as free as the white people were.
I often told them, when they made me angry, that they had no more
business with me, than I had with them."599 In other cases, because of a threatened sale
or because of a desire to be reunited with family members after they or the
runaway(s) had been sold themselves, they left. Mary Grayson, once a slave in what was then Indian Territory,
recalled her mother ran away and hid in a clay pit after being sold to a slave
trader. It was late in the night before
they found her again. John Little, nine
months after marriage, was suddenly sold.
After resting for two weeks at his new master's place, he ran away, and
was thrown in prison--with another slave there "under the same
circumstances . . . going to see his wife, as a man has a right to
do." Trying to avoid punishment
was another reason slaves fled from their masters. Here the masters faced a major dilemma: On the one hand, if they cracked down, and (say) whipped shirking
slaves for their slackness, they could run away or fight back. But, if they let some offense(s) slide,
others could imitate the rules violator, and soon all their slaves could be
defying them. Barrow repeatedly faced
this problem, and sometimes slaves ran away to avoid punishment or in response
after it was inflicted. After whipping
eight or ten slaves for not picking enough cotton, he wrote the next day: "Dennis ran off yesterday--& after
I had Whiped him." In another
case, his slave Ginney Jerry was one of a group of eight or ten whipped and
ducked for stealing some of his hogs, and "Mr. Ginney Jerry next
morning Felt insulted at his treatment & put out, would give 'freely' $100
to get a shot at him."600 Harriett Robinson, once a slave in Texas,
told a story about her step-father that illustrated a particularly nasty
Catch-22 masters had when punishing runaway slaves and getting them in the
fields again. After absconding for
another reason, he returned, the master had him whipped 300 times--and then he
ran off again!601
This slaveowner surely knew if he did not punish this slave, others
might imitate his example, but when he did so, the slave ran away in
retaliation once again, which put him that much further behind in putting this
man back to work. Because of the threat
of it backfiring, the moment a master punished a slave was dangerous, because
the chances for him resisting him was at its highest came when the lash was
applied or in its immediate wake--such as by running away or fighting. So slaves ran away to seek freedom, pure and
simple, to rejoin relatives, or as a way to retaliate against or evade
punishment.
Temporary and Local Flight
Slaves
had several different possible objectives when fleeing their owners. Most commonly, they fled only temporarily
and stayed in their local area, remaining around friends and relatives who
might secretly feed or otherwise help them when the master or mistress was not
in sight. Because the master
controlled the slave's food supply, the runaway might find foraging and
sleeping in the woods uncomfortable or impossible. When he briefly fled Covey's farm once, Douglass did not go far,
because the master controlled his food supply:
"I spent the day mostly in the woods, having the alternative before
me,--to go home and whipped to death, or stay in the woods and be starved to
death." James H. Hammond's Silver
Bluff plantation in South Carolina had fifty-three slaves escape between 1831
and 1853, but none permanently gained their freedom. Two-thirds were caught, while one-third came in on their own,
after a temporary absence that averaged forty-nine days. The manager of a very
large plantation in the Deep South told Olmsted that the runaways hid in the
swamp, and came into the cabins at night to get food. "They seldom remain
away more than a fortnight, and when they come in they are whipped." Sometimes, even when a slave had been gone a
long time, they still had not gone far.
Barrow's slave Ginney Jerry had run away, and was caught six months and
three days after absconding--right in Barrow's neighborhood. Before capture, John Little spent two years
running in the woods near his old master's place where his mother lived, after
leaving his new master's place about ten miles away. Sometimes slaves fled to other local slaveholders for temporary
sanctuary against an enraged master or overseer threatening punishment for some
reason. The former might then intercede
for the slave, if they believed the slaves in question, and ask for lighter or
no punishment to be inflicted. Northrup
did this once, by fleeing to his old kind master, William Ford, after fighting
with his present cruel master, John Tibault, who sought to kill him with a
hatchet and an axe. Ford even got the
latter to sell Northrup, after criticizing Tibault for his shameful treatment
of him in threatening slaves with such weapons, saying if this kind of
treatment became common other slaves would be made discontent and start running
away.602 The desires to
stay close to family and friends who could still help them, and be in a
familiar area where they knew their surroundings, were other good reasons why
many slaves did not go far when they ran away.
"Negotiating" a Return
Local
runaways demonstrated they had some bargaining power with their owners. Because of the expense and time it might
take to capture slaves forcibly and bring them in, masters did have some
self-interest in being able to get them to return on their own. Freedman Cato of Alabama remembered that if
a runaway came in on his own, he was punished considerably less than if his
owner ran him down with the dogs in a search party. Another master sent out a runaway's brother to threaten him with
the dogs if he did not come in, because he knew exactly where the runaway was
in an attempt conceal his scent. Sure
enough, he came in--but the dogs were still unleashed against him anyway and
tore him up badly, after being told he did not have to move with his master if
he beat them to a big black-gum tree.
This was a bad deal, to say the least!
Another master, after fighting with a slave named Isaac Williams who
then ran away, offered him a deal: If
he came in, he would not whip him. He
lived up to this deal--but then would whip his wife, telling her to make
"Isaac a good boy"! Sometimes
they would agree to return in exchange for a reduced amount of punishment, or
none at all, using other slaves as their intermediaries. The master who owned Williams later on used
him to relay a message through a runaway's sister to tell him he would not whip
him if he came in on his own. But after
the slave came in, he broke his promise, and whipped him anyway. One Alabama master faithfully followed a
similar deal, and after conveying a message through other slaves, his runaways
returned after being told they would not be whipped if they came back on their
own. After spending a summer in the
woods, John Holmes returned, because his master told all the neighbors that he
would not be whipped if he came in. And
what was his owner's motive for displaying leniency?: "I was a great hand to work and made a great deal of money
for our folks." In some cases, the
initiative came from the other side, and one slave might negotiate with the
master for the runaway's return. This
strategy was particularly risky since the collaborator or even the whole slave
force might be punished for such an act.603 Negotiations between the legally almost
all-powerful master and his human chattels after running away show the de
facto realities of slave management were very different from the theory
found in the slave codes or pro-slavery polemics. Even an individual slave, upon occasion, had some bargaining
power with his master, depending on the latter's disposition and willingness to
pursue him at all costs.
How Runaways Could Resist Capture
Even
when a slave was being pursued by a party of white men and their dogs, slaves
still had ways to avoid or resist capture.
William Street, once a slave in Tennessee, was pursued by two white men
and their three bloodhounds. He, being
well armed with a pistol, knife, and big stick, shot one of the dogs dead. His owner decided to hand him over to the
slave catcher because he had killed a bloodhound who he would not sell for
$500, commenting: "He was worth
more than him, d--n him." Still
more spectacular was one slave in Louisiana who, upon capture and being placed
in a boat, grabbed and attacked one of his two captors with a hatchet,
seriously wounding him, then threw them both overboard. Later, these same two slave catchers, after
getting some dogs, cornered him near the edge of the Mississippi river on a
large raft. Armed with a pistol and
club, he knocked the dogs into the water, threatened death to his pursuers, and
had to be shot at three times before he went down. Defiantly chosing to drown rather than be captured, he sank into
the water still waving his club. This
"bondsman" certainly demonstrated he would rather be dead than
enslaved! Slaves also presented serious
potential problems while on the run, because they could attack whites or their
property. In Mississippi, Olmsted's
roommate awoke him by trying to barricade his room, explaining, "You don't
know . . . there may be runaways around," before pulling out two
loaded pistols to check their caps!
Planter Barrow himself lost a cow and nearly a hog to runaways owned by
one of his relatives. Slaves also could
seek aid from other slaves or free blacks who would hide them in their
homes. This was always risky, because
informers lurked among the black population, always willing to sell out a
fellow black for the white man's money and esteem. In a case that demonstrates the adage that truth can be stranger
than fiction, Harriet Jacobs was hidden for seven years in a crawl space above
the shed added to her mother's house in order to evade her master's sexual
advances. Another slavewoman, after
hitting her mistress and being threatened with the stocks and the lash, was
able to live in a nearby cave secretly for seven years until the time freedom
came. Her husband fixed up the cave to
have a stove, beds, tables, and a ceiling of wood. She even gave birth to three children, who then lived there as
well. Her husband routinely brought
food to her. She and her children were
effectively maroons, staying in the slave states while beyond the control of
their owners. Some escaped slaves were
less lucky, and were turned in by other blacks. John Little's hiding location was betrayed by a free born black
man for a mere ten dollars offered by some poor whites, after his master
offered a reward of fifty dollars for his capture, dead or alive. Barrow once had his slave Dennis pretend
to be a runaway in order to capture one owned by another planter. For such reasons, runaways were hesitant to
trust anyone else they encountered, whites above all, but blacks as well. Even after capture, runaways could
still cause problems for their owners.
Barrow confessed that he placed too much reliance on one captured
runaway to tell where other runaways were:
"Caught one woman this morning & very foolish endeavored to
make her direct us to the Camp & fooled the day off to no purpose, Brought
her to my house tried the cold water on
her Ladyship [i.e., ducked her]."604 The difficulties that slaveholders faced in
recapturing local runaways show that although they may not have gained
permanent freedom in most cases except perhaps as maroons, they still were a
major headache for them and other whites.
These acts of resistance may have been often individual and rather
unthinking, and not organized and collective, but still they kept the white
regime busy hunting for escapees and taming those they captured, demonstrating
to them that many slaves were hardly content in bondage. Local runaways were significant because they
were much more numerous than those who permanently escaped to the North or (in
some cases) Mexico, and presented the white regime with notable economic losses
and labor discipline problems, and encouraged them to restrain the harshness of
their treatment of their bondsmen in order to discourage further flights.605
Maroons:
Settlements of Escaped Slaves
Some
American slaves fled to uninhabited areas distant from where white settlers
were, and set up their own settlements to farm the land, although this was
never as common an option for slaves in the United States as in Brazil and
elsewhere in Latin America. Maroon
slave settlements in the South never grew to the size and strength of some of
those elsewhere in the Americas, but they could still pose significant problems
for masters trying to hang onto their human property. They provided runaways a place of refuge, such as where Polk's
slave Jack fled to in Arkansas, where no law officer could easily take any of
them back without a large armed force backing him up. Upon occasion, they also
launched raids against plantations and farms nearby and attempted to free still
more slaves, sometimes killing the masters in the process. From 1705 to 1769 Virginia legalized the
killing of any "outlying slaves" without getting the colony's
legal permission first, and explicitly authorized their castration as
well. North Carolina had a similar
process of outlawing particularly destructive runaways which encouraged slave
catchers to kill them, especially when their owners offered rewards that paid
more for them dead than alive because the colony would reimburse their losses.606 During the Seminole War maroons played their
largest role in the history of American slavery. While exaggerating, Major General Thomas Sidney Jesup, the leader
of American troops during the most critical stage of the Seminole War, was
still onto an essential truth when he said in late 1836: "This . . . is a negro, not
an Indian war." Although the
Seminole War was nominally a struggle between Indians and whites, it was more a
conflict between the slaves the Indians had bought and runaways who fought
along side the Indians against the United States Army. During this war at times possibly 250 to 400
or 500 blacks fought for the Indian cause in some actions, making this one of
America's most notable instances of organized slave resistance against the
white regime. Its main cause, since the
Seminoles did not live in the main path for white settlers heading west, was
the white slaveholders' opposition to their slaves running away to live among
the Seminole. These escapees made those
remaining behind especially discontent because they lived a more relaxed
lifestyle than those in plantation agriculture. Most of the blacks living among the Indians were slaves in name
only even when purchased by them, and most lived prosperously in their own
villages, whom they only burdened by demanding some tribute from them at
harvest and butchering times. In 1841,
as the war was winding down, the War Department effectively decided to allow
many of the blacks to go west with the Seminoles despite many were the legally
claimable property of white Americans.
Justifying this policy, Lieutenant Colonel W.J. Worth said that
"if . . . the swamps of Florida become . . . the
resort of runaways, their intelligence, so superior to the Indian, might impose
upon the general government a contest quadruplicate in time and treasure than
now being waged." Ending this war
and clearing out Florida presently of all blacks not controlled by whites and
most of the Seminoles themselves in order to prevent future runaways was
deemed a good trade-off in exchange for allowing most of those blacks already
among the Seminole to go free. Maroon
settlements were vulnerable to the advancing frontier and determined armed
white parties clearing them out. The
vast Dismal Swamp in Virginia and North Carolina largely ceased to be a refuge
for permanent runaways by the time Olmsted wrote in the 1850s.607 So while maroon runaway slaves played a part
in the overall picture of resistance against the slaveholding elite, they
caused far fewer problems in the United States than in Brazil and other Latin
American and Caribbean areas, where governments sometimes waged full-scale wars
with large maroon settlements, and even negotiated treaties that recognized
their autonomy.608
The Most Successful Runaways
The
most successful, as well as the most unlikely, runaways were those who secured
permanent freedom in Canada, Mexico, or the North, assuming they were not
recaptured in the latter and hauled back into bondage.609 Flight to free territory was generally only
a practical option for slaves living in the Border States, or those so light
complexioned they could pass for being white, and so could flee greater
distances without suspicion or detection.610 The exact numbers of those successfully
escaping permanently are humanly unknowable, as quantifying any illegal and
necessarily secret activity is, but some basic parameters and estimates are
available. A lower limit on the number
arriving in Canada is given by the estimate of 30,000 blacks who were living in
Upper Canada made by the First Report of the Anti-Slavery Society of Canada in
1852. While most of the adult blacks
included in this estimate were likely successful fugitives, not many of the
children counted could have been, because they mainly were single men between
the ages of sixteen and thirty-five who normally fled by themselves or
sometimes with one other slave.611 Another estimate of those permanently
escaping is about a thousand a year in the 1850s, with the number falling from
1,011 in 1850 to 803 in 1860 according to census reports. Judge Lumpkin of the State Supreme Court of
Georgia claimed in 1855 60,000 slaves totaled up all those lost to the
North. Mississippi Governor Quitman
once declared 100,000 slaves had fled the South during the years 1810 to
1850. This round number, doubtlessly
declared rhetorically, is much higher than the census data of Northern blacks who
said they were born in the South. Nevertheless,
in his study on the Underground Railroad, William Siebert believes this figure
is reasonably accurate, maintaining that 40,000 slaves escaped through Ohio
alone. However, these figures
constitute only a small proportion of the slaves who lived and died in bondage
in the antebellum South over the decades before 1861. In 1860, the South had almost four million slaves, and about a
quarter million free blacks.612 When considering the low average life
expectancies and the turnover of generations even in the fifty years before the
Civil War, only a very small percentage of those born in bondage escaped it by
illegal means. For most masters,
especially those in the Deep South, successful runaways (and the Underground
Railroad's aid to them) were largely irritants and theoretical hazards as
opposed to serious practical threats, outside of cases where during war armies
hostile to their interests roamed nearby.
As
discussed above (p. 174), family connections always served as a major restraint
on escape attempts, as one owner of two plantations in Mississippi commented,
although he knew this was hardly fail-safe:
Only way [to restrain runaways] is, to have young ones
there [Texas] and keep their mothers here [Mississippi], eh? Negroes have such attachments, you
know. Don't you think that would fix
'em, eh? No? No, I suppose not. If
they got mad at anything, they'd forget their mothers, eh?
Despite these ties, many bondsmen still willingly ran
away because the desire for freedom beat so strongly in their hearts, although
those who left wives, husbands, or children behind suffered mixed feelings on
their choice. These refugees from
slavery also indirectly aided those who remained behind, by helping restrain
the ill conduct and harsh treatment of calculating masters and mistresses in
the Border States because the chances of successful escapes from these areas
were much higher than from the Deep South.
Making the bondsmen more content in their chains generally reduced their
willingness to flee, since family separations caused by sales and punishment
frequently provoked runaway attempts.
Hence, the effects of their decisions, even if normally made on their
own, had positive collective effects upon their fellow black brothers and
sisters left behind in chains.613
"Strikes" Conducted by Groups of Slaves
Running Away
One
underrated but significant type of collective protest by slaves were virtual
"strikes," in which they withdrew their labor from their owners in an
organized manner by running away temporarily in large groups. While uncommon, these protests occurred
enough in some areas to present problems for slaveholders who imposed a
particularly harsh overseer over them or demanded too much work from them. One Florida overseer, after trying
"pushing them up a Little" found his work force retaliated by suddenly
deserting him. A small Louisiana
planter had a similar experience, with all but two of his slaves disappearing
in protest against how much work he imposed.
John Holmes described how, when the overseer and mistress's son were
going to whip everyone for not helping the former when he fought with a slave
woman, all the young able men besides one fled into the woods after a domestic
servant tipped off those in the quarters of their white family's plans. "They sent off the overseer to get us
home." While the overseer did come
back to stick out the year, he chose not to whip any of the men because they
might run away. More generally, as
described above (p. 261-62) about the infrapolitics of quota setting in task
system areas, if the master increased the imposed daily work excessively he
risked "a general stampede to the 'swamp.'" One respected Deep South overseer told Olmsted when he first
arrived, many of the slaves ran away often, but after getting used to his ways
said they liked him better than all the prior ones. Still, he occasionally had problems with groups running away,
which he dealt with thus: "If many
of them went off, or if they stayed out long, he would make the rest of the
force work Sundays, or deprive them of some of their usual privileges until the
runaways returned. The negroes on the
plantation could always bring them in if they chose to do so" because if
they stopped feeding them, they had to come in. Ex-slave Annie Coley recalled a much more confrontational
"strike" which yielded success also.
After one cruel overseer beat a woman and made her miscarry late in her
pregnancy in the field, all the slave women attacked him and threatened to burn
him on a brush pile. After their men
told them to let him go, the master said he was going to whip all the women for
their act. But he soon changed his
mind: "All de womens hid in the
woods dat evenin' [to avoid the whipping], en Boss never say no more about
it. He sent the over seer away en never
did hev no more overseers." One
Georgia overseer over a small plantation, after whipping some of its slaves,
complained that six of them ran off--"every man but Jack." He suspected they were hiding out in the
woods until they could meet their owner or his uncle, which illustrates once
again the principle that the slaves sought redress of their grievances by
playing upon the divisions among the whites who ruled them.614 These "strikes" often seemed to
actually wrest some concessions from the slaveholders or overseers affected, or
at least they avoided inspiring harsh crack-downs. It amounts to a type of temporary and local running away done en
masse, since the slaves disappeared into the swamps or woods, and did not
hang around in the quarters or some other place where they could be easily
located and whipped for their recalcitrance.
Perhaps due to this lack of direct confrontation, in contrast to the
picket lines of modern unions when on strike, and because it often took advantage
of the overseer/slaveholder fault line, masters at least sometimes granted
concessions to their "striking" bondsmen, thinking that the protests
by such a large group at once proved they had legitimate complaints.
Small Scale Open Confrontations and Violence
Small
scale show-downs between slaves and masters and their overseers in which one or
more slaves fought their owners and supervisors, or attempted to hit or kill
them, were another form of resistance.
These struggles and crimes do not constitute organized resistance, in
the sense of a slave rebellion, but still created worries and fears among the
white regime's members, because their own lives could suddenly and unexpectedly
be at risk when (say) seeking apply the lash to some slave who refused to be whipped. Similar to what provoked many runaways, the
flash point of resistance often was a slave refusing to be punished by his
owner, and latter insisting on doing it anyway in order to maintain his
authority and prove he would enforce discipline on other slaves as well. The classic incident here, but he was hardly
alone, was Frederick Douglass's struggle with Edward Covey, to whom his master
had rented him out for breaking. Covey
tried to whip him for having run away, but after losing to Douglass, he never
tried to whip him again. Afterwards, so
long as he remained a slave, "I did not hesitate to let it be known of me,
that the white man who expected to succeed in whipping, must also succeed in
killing me." One master, insistent
on applying the lash to a slave who refused to be whipped, found one tactic to
be useful, as escaped slave Mrs. James Seward from Maryland described: "My master could not manage to whip my
sister when she was strong. He waited
until she was confined, and the second week after her confinement he said, 'Now
I can handle you, now that you are weak.'" This attempt to whip still backfired, because she ran away, and
got sick after running through water.
Francis Henderson, who worked on a plantation in Washington, D.C.,
fought his master and his son when they tried to whip him. After throwing the latter against the side
of the barn, he ran into the woods.
"From this time I was not punished. I think my master became afraid of me; when he punished the
children, I would go and stand by, and look at him,--he was afraid, and would
stop." John Holmes was an
especially recalcitrant slave, and always refused to be whipped, causing
showdowns and fights, getting shot one time and nearly shot another, whenever
his owners or overseers sought to punish him.
On his plantation, there were two other men and one woman who refused to
be whipped besides him. The overseer
got into a vicious fight with the slavewoman, who after hitting her with a
stick for not working fast enough, struck back with a rake, and exchanged blows
and wrestled on the ground. With the
aid of the mistress's son and son-in-law, they whipped her terribly, but it
backfired: "She behaved worse afterwards." One morning, Holmes was late getting into
the field. After his overseer said,
"I'll make all the hands catch you, and I'll whip you," he
replied: "There ain't a man the
sun shines upon, that shall whip me."
By his account, his boast was achieved.
One slave struck the man who had hired him from his master, and after
the stakes for whipping him spread-eagle were pounded into the ground, his
brother said to him, "Charles, before I'd be whipped for that Frenchman,
I'd cut my throat." He did this,
beat off five men who followed him into the river, and after coming out of the
water, was not whipped--and his throat healed in a few weeks.615 Such spectacular incidents when whippings
were opposed were hardly usual, as were slaves who refused to be whipped, but
they presented enough danger that overseers and masters in some areas were
taken to carrying loaded pistols and/or knives when confrontation did
come. Because of the bad example these
slaves set for others from the masters' viewpoint in preserving labor
discipline, their defiance constituted a challenge to the maintenance of order,
which either required employing extreme measures whenever they would be
confronted, as with the slavewoman Holmes knew, or else they would turn a blind
eye to their refusals to be whipped, calculating, like Covey, further showdowns
were not worth the risks involved.
The
lives of masters, mistresses, and overseers could be at risk in confrontations
with slaves. Some of the ways slaves
disposed of overseers permanently included being whacked in the head with a
hoe, getting hit by the stick and then having his hands and feet chopped off
with an ax, and being whipped and thrown off a cliff. In each of these cases, it was because the overseer had whipped a
slave before some kind of retaliation ensued.
Chesnut described how her cousin, one old mistress
named Betsey Witherspoon, was murdered by her house slaves. Why?
Because they had acted so insolently to their owner because she did not
try disciplining them at all seriously, her son said he would whip them. In order to prevent the threatened
punishment, they they murdered her in bed, and stole some linen, a nightgown,
and gold coins. In another case Chesnut
described, yet another mistress was murdered by her slaves, then hanged to look
like she had committed suicide. Another
slave murdered her mistress and her two young children--for which she was soon
lynched. Slaves could be much more subtle
about how they murdered their masters.
House slaves who prepared the white family's food preferred
poisoning. In North Carolina between
1755 and 1770, the colony had fifty-nine claims for slaves being executed. Nearly 25 percent of these were for murder
or attempted murder of whites. As a
result, while they did not threaten the regime's overall stability, these
crimes struck fear in masters and (evidently) especially mistresses. Chesnut once wrote:
Hitherto I have never thought of being afraid of
Negroes. I had never injured any of
them; why should they want to hurt me? . . . Somehow today I feel
that the ground is cut away from under my feet. Why should they treat me any better than they had done Cousin
Betsey Witherspoon?
Kemble wrote she knew that Southern white men often
denied living under a continual sense of danger, but "every Southern
[white] woman to whom I have spoken on the subject has admitted to me
that they live in terror of their slaves." For these reasons the domestic servants were not be allowed to
sleep in the same house as their master generally--a precaution Mrs.
Witherspoon certainly was not observing.
Yet, Chesnut also observed that "nobody is afraid of their own
Negroes," and she said she would feel perfectly safe on the plantation
"even if there were no white person in twenty miles."616
"Nats" or "Sambos"?--Selective
Perception by the Master Class
Masters
and mistresses possessed a rather contradictory mind-set about their own
slaves. Their selective perception
caused self-deception. They imputed
towards and/or focused upon different characteristics in the slaves depending
upon on their mood and their slaves' immediate acts. When the slaves had on their masks, when playing "Sambo the
fool" to trick their owners, or sullenly went about their work after
having challenged white authority and losing, masters could be confident about
their relationships with their human property.
But when the occasional murder, conspiracy panic, or (much more rarely)
actual revolt transpired, and the black man had demonstrated his danger to the
whites, then he became a "Nat" instead--a slave who had been well-treated
like those in Chesnut's family, but who suddenly turned and murdered his master
in bed in cold blood, with another slave finishing the grisly job. Blassingame interprets the Southern
slaveholders' mentality thus: "The
more fear whites had of Nat, the more firmly they tried to believe in Sambo in
order to escape paranoia." This
psychological portrait is likely overdrawn, because enough slaveholders and
overseers had dealt with enough ordinarily recalcitrant slaves
"shuffling" while in the fields, who sought and employed almost every
possible trick in the book to evade work, let alone actual open rebelliousness
upon occasion (or had heard about such).
As a result, the pure "Sambo" stereotype was never really
believed in by most whites in their hidden transcript, even as it was featured
strongly in pro-slavery propaganda of the public transcript. Although small scale frontal assaults on
white slaveholders and overseers were not common, and were not a fundamental
threat to the regime because of their generally individualistic, even anarchic
nature, they occurred enough to keep most of them on their toes with procedures
reminiscent of a police state, at least in areas where slaves heavily
outnumbered the whites. Slaveholders
knew punishment could suddenly backfire possibly, over and above the rather
rare cases in which some of them were killed deliberately after conscious
calculation by their bondsmen.617
The Rarity of Slave Revolts in the United States
Compared to Elsewhere
Slave
revolts--organized insurrection against the white regime by slaves en masse--in
the Southern United States in the period 1750-1865 were very rare, for all the
attention they received by contemporaries and historians since. During this time, only in two cases did
groups of slaves actually began to use violent force against their owners: one near New Orleans in 1811 and Turner's
rebellion in 1831. The New Orleans
revolt in St. John the Baptist and St. Charles parishes featured somewhere
between three hundred and five hundred slaves armed with plenty of pikes, axes,
and hoes, but few firearms. They
organized themselves in companies commanded by officers as they marched on New
Orleans, and succeeded in burning a few plantations and killing two whites. Later they were dispersed by regular troops
and militia under Wade Hampton, with sixty-six slaves being killed in open
battle, and afterwards the executions of sixteen leaders followed. Although much more obscure than Turner's
revolt, it holds pride of place as America's largest slave revolt. Turner's band of rebels never numbered more
than sixty or seventy, but they managed to kill far more whites before being
quelled, as described above (p. 272).
Even these revolts were minor affairs compared to the size and frequency
of those in the history of Latin American and Caribbean slavery. For example, in what is now Guyana, there
were at least eighteen revolts over and above maroon wars and abortive
uprisings in the period 1731 until the abolition of slavery. In 1823, one of these revolts involved
between 10,000 and 20,000 slaves on 50 plantations. Another in the part then called Berbice in 1763 involved about
2000 bondsmen, who succeeded in killing about 200 of the colony's 350
whites. In Jamaica, the average revolt
featured about 400 participants, with one in 1760 having 1000. During the decade 1730-40, a major revolt
occurred almost every year. Bahia in
Brazil during the period 1807-1835 featured at least six major revolts. For a period of three years Manoel
Francisco dos Anjos Fereira held the entire province of Maranhao with
the aid of his followers in the Balaiada in Brazil. By comparison, Turner's rebellion was a mere
passing vapor. And all these ultimate
failures overlook the greatest and most successful revolt of all, that of
Saint-Domingue beginning in 1791.618 By comparison, the history of slavery in the
United States singularly lacks such drama--befitting the emphasis on daily
infrapolitics when discussing slave resistance above.
The Factors Militating Against Slave Revolts in the
United States
The
reasons for Southern slaves' relative quiescence to their Caribbean and Latin
American brothers and sisters resulted from a multitude of factors, all of
which favored revolt in the latter areas compared to the United States. The difference in the number of revolts was
not due to some inherent docility of North American slaves, but because just
about objective factor nameable weighing the balance of forces between the
white regime and the slaves was tilted towards more towards former in the
United States compared to Latin American and Caribbean conditions. The slave population outside of the United
States was much more likely to heavily outnumber the whites and be
proportionately more African than native-born (creole), especially as the
nineteenth century drew along and the legal foreign slave trade closed in 1808,
and to have a skewed sex ratio in which men outnumbered women, especially on
the large plantations. Even as early as
the American Revolution, only one-fifth of American slaves were African-born,
while as late as 1800, one-fourth of the people in Martinique, Barbados, and
Jamaica were Africans who had arrived in the preceding decade. Males made up 60 percent to 70 percent of
the slaves in Latin America. In
Jamaica, blacks outnumbered whites ten to one, and the slave to white ratio was
eleven to one in Haiti, twenty to one in Surinam, and seven to one in the West
Indies generally, while in the South a 0.5 ratio prevailed regionally. The African-born, having experienced their
own enslavement and loss of freedom, and having a stronger ethos of collective
organization, were naturally more restless than the creoles born in America,
who tended to protest in an individualistic manner more and were habituated to
the rigors of bondage from birth. The
African slaves also had a non-Christian religious tradition, as developed into
Vodun in the Caribbean, which formed ideological foundations for revolt, and
due to language and other cultural differences, less influenced by the master
class' attempts at ideological hegemony.
Their continual importation infused African cultural practices among
both earlier arrivals and the creoles themselves. Assimilation was a plausible objective for Southern whites when
dealing with slaves, at least after the closing of the foreign slave trade. This objective was rather absurd where the
whites were a small elite among masses of blacks and mulattos. In such places as Jamaica, Haiti, and
Guyana, they had to segregate themselves from the blacks to preserve their
cultural identity. Due to having a
nearly even sex ratio, the men among American slaves experienced much more of
the intrinsically taming and settling aspects of marriage and family life,
unlike the restless "bachelor herds" of large Caribbean and Latin
American plantations, where many of the men could never hope to marry. The slaves in the United States were often
held in relatively small units, three-quarters in groups of fifty or less, and
almost half were owned in groups of twenty or less. There were 2.1 slaves per white member of a slaveholding family,
with 72 percent holding less than ten and nearly 50 percent of slaveowners less
than five bondsmen. By contrast, a
collective consciousness flourished much more among those on the much larger
groups customarily held in Latin America and the Caribbean, which averaged one
hundred to two hundred, where the master's and mistress' personal presence and
influence was much less likely to be felt face-to-face by the ordinary field
hand. As in capitalist industry, a real
paternalism is much more likely to flourish in smaller units of production than
in larger ones, where the owner really comes to know his workers--or slaves--as
the case may be. The master also was
less likely to be physically present as well--absenteeism flourished in much of
Latin American and Caribbean slavery, where one estimate had 90 percent of the
owners of Jamaican slaves were absentees.
But in the United States, resident masters were an important restraining
force on the discretion granted to overseers in punishing the slaves under
their authority.619
Other
factors militated against the slaves rebelling in an organized fashion. The white regime in the United States was
far more unified and militarily efficient than that of the ruling classes in
many Latin American colonies such as Brazil and Saint Domingue, and could count
upon the automatic support of a fierce, well-armed poor white majority wherever
the slaves grew dangerous. The
Caribbean elites, in particular, faced a much greater likelihood of invasion
from without as well. Nothing like the
maroon colony of Palmares developed within the confines of the United States,
nor were the whites reduced to making treaties with such entities, nor did any
rebels ever hold out long against the military power the whites commanded. By contrast, in Cuba, it took two months to
push out seven hundred slaves out of a mountain stronghold, and in colonial
Mexico, their army once took months to reach where slaves had revolted--and
still failed to defeat them. While
undeniably inferior to the North's or England's, the South's development of a
superior transportation and communications network, such as through railroads,
steamboats, and the telegraph, gave the white regime advantages over its slaves
no other slaveholding elite had possessed by the eve of the Civil War, making
large maroon colonies and sustained revolts practically impossible. Southern slaves, especially those outside
task system areas, had relatively little experience in raising their own food
and selling it to others, while elsewhere in the Americas, since the
slaveholders made the slaves grow their own food, there were much greater
opportunities for black entrepreneurship and initiative taking. These commercial activities broadened the
mind, helpful when planning revolts and in encouraging them to begin with,
since more "practical freedom" existed outside the master's and
overseer's daily supervision and control, giving them a taste for more. Because free whites were more numerous than
the slaves in the South, the slaves could be easily excluded from bearing arms
in wartime to repel foreign invaders and from most consequential commercial
activities. But in Jamaica and
Saint-Domingue, the mulattos and slaves actually controlled much of the
commerce, while the continual warfare in Latin America and the Caribbean caused
slaveholders to arm their slaves for military purposes, and sometimes grant
them freedom in return for doing so. In
America, keeping the slaves totally economically dependent by providing them
most or all their food and prohibiting them selling or growing anything
themselves was a much more practical objective, and one many masters pursued to
one degree or another outside task system areas. American slaves did not gain any of the military experience that
could be employed in revolts. Positive
incentives also did play a role in discouraging revolt, since the material
conditions of Southern slaves, such as in food provided and hours worked, was
certainly better than those which prevailed in most other places in the
Americas. Better treatment was one of
the reasons (besides having fewer deaths due to tropical disease) why the slave
labor force in the United States was the only one which experienced natural
increase through births exceeding deaths.
While Brazil received about 37 percent and North America about a mere 6
percent of all slave imports to the New World during the period 1500-1825, both
wound up with a very similar number of blacks in 1825. Finally, the slaves were more stratified by
economic function and status due to the greater division of labor on the large
plantations in the Caribbean and Latin America, and because there was much less
of a free white artisanal class to turn to perform certain trades and
functions. This occupational hierarchy
encouraged more development of capable leadership compared to the United States
above the masses of the field hands and domestic servants that made up most
slaves throughout the Americas. Thus,
each one of the factors concerning the likelihood of slave revolt listed above
which influenced the relative balance of forces favored the continued control
of the white regime in America and prevented organized rebellion and/or
encouraged passivity among the bondsmen compared to the rest of the New World.620
Many Slaves Knew How Much the Deck Was Stacked Against
Successful Revolt
American
slaves did not develop any kind of revolutionary ethos due to the paucity of
actual armed insurrections among them, and the ease with which the white elite
was able to crush the very few that did occur, something which Aptheker
maintained but fellow Marxist Genovese has denied.621 For those literate slaves who rose above the
masses of field hands, perhaps as preachers, drivers, artisans, or the domestic
servants of large planters, who could analyze their society more
intellectually, they easily saw how strong and powerful the white regime was
and how the balance of forces were tilted overwhelmingly against successful
insurrection. Frontal attacks en
masse were simply hopeless, especially as the slaveholding elite readily
employed savage repression against those who did participate in the few revolts
that did occur, such as near New Orleans and under Turner, or those that nearly
did, like Prosser's and (evidently) Vesey's.
Slaveholders sometimes tolerated the occasional individual slave who
refused to be whipped, but normally otherwise did his or her work. Entertaining violence by slaves in organized
groups was quite another matter, and was brutally crushed, as the violent
nature of the white regime as compared to England's rural elite was shown above
(pp. 271-74). Furthermore, those
seriously planning revolts faced the problem of informers among their own
ranks, which destroyed both Prosser's and Vesey's conspiracies, resulting in
the costs of repression without any white blood being drawn or property
destroyed. Olmsted noted casually,
while describing Prosser's conspiracy:
"Having been betrayed by a traitor, as insurgent slaves almost
always are, they were met, on their approach, by a large body of well-armed
militia, hastily called out by the Governor." For these reasons, American slaves were apt to put that much more
effort into daily infrapolitics, because "deliverance from below,"
such as occurred in Haiti under Toussaint Louventure, was simply impossibly
utopian. Perhaps for these reasons,
especially with the more informed, literate slaves seeing freedom arriving
"from above," through the Union Army without them having to take any
dangerous risks, and escape opportunities massively multiplied, the South
suffered no significant slave revolts during the Civil War despite the draining
of young men from the countryside to serve in the Confederate Army and the
growing disorganization of its economy and communications/transportation
network while suffering invasion and blockade.
When Mr. Chesnut discussed offering freedom in exchange for fighting for
the South, his headmen were interested.
"Now [December 1864] they say coolly that they don't want freedom
if they have to fight for it. That
means they are pretty sure of having it anyway."622 Unlike those who fought for the North, this
theoretical offer involved fighting for the cause of those who held them in
bondage, so they may have lied about their loyalty to the South's cause even as
they could (now) safely admit to their desire for freedom. Nevertheless, this story points to a obvious
risk avoidance strategy--why fight for freedom when likely within a year's time
the Union army's bayonets will deliver it to your door? When the white regime was much stronger,
before the war, the realization that open revolt more likely led to death
instead of liberty was a fundamental reason for why American slaves appeared
more passive than their Latin American and Caribbean counterparts.
Why Then, If Revolts Were So Rare, Were the Whites So
Paranoid?
Granted
the lack of slave revolts in the years 1750-1865, then why were the
slaveholders so paranoid? Why did so
many insurrection panics shake through the South? Aptheker's history of slave revolts actually is a record much
more of white fears of slave conspiracies, a number of which were likely the
product of "strong grievances on one side and deep fears on another,"
than any actual preparations for revolt above, perhaps, idle threats and
gossip. Wade has even questioned the
existence of Vesey's famous conspiracy:
No elaborate network had been established in the
countryside; no cache of arms lay hidden about the city; no date for an
uprising had been set; no underground apparatus, carefully organized and
secretly maintained, awaited a signal to fire Charleston and murder the whites.623
Aptheker's record of conspiracies suffers from
uncritically analyzing his sources.
Those described for the post-1835 period almost invariably were said to
have originated in the mind of a white man, such as an Northern abolitionist or a Southern fellow traveler,
not from a black.624
The panic that lead to "lynch law" proceedings in three
counties in Mississippi in 1835 was not an exception to this rule. Supposedly, John A. Murrell's gang of some
one thousand desperados was planning a vast insurrection to take place on
Christmas Day, 1835 in order to facilitate their plans of plundering the countryside. Although convicted and thrown into prison
for stealing slaves some months before that date, a pamphlet about his supposed
plans about slave rebellion circulated, and in the July of 1835 a white mob in
Livingston county hanged slaves. Some
of them had pointed to two white men in their confessions--who were soon
summarily executed in turn. John
Cotton, one of these whites, "confessed," saying he was part of a
plot for all the slaves in the South to revolt, from Maryland to Louisiana, desiring
to destroy the white population of the South.
The absurdity of this tale is evident, yet within a few weeks twelve
white men (with five hanged) and a much larger number of slaves had fallen
victim to drumhead legal proceedings and were punished.625 Employing a sociological approach, Morris
maintains the ultimate cause of this scare, and by extension those in other
parts of the South, was due to a lack of community organization and contact
among the whites on a routine basis in some local town that would administer
the county, which caused them to suspect and accuse whites they did not know
well of being the ringleaders.626 However, there were deeper reasons for these
witch hunts periodically sweeping parts of the South, over and above any
objective need for vigilance. An elite,
when it purportedly believes its labor force is contented, at least in its
propaganda in the public transcript, is apt to blame discontent on outsiders,
on subversives, inflaming the minds of its subordinate class to become
discontent and to rise against their masters.
(Similar rumors were present during the Swing Riots in England, during
which gentlemen or foreigners were blamed for setting fires, etc.) This strategy serves to unite "us"
versus the relatively unknown "other" or "them"--serving to
help quell any publicly expressed doubts Southern whites might have about the
regime themselves. The panicky paranoia
that surfaced upon occasion also demonstrated that deep down the slaveholders
did not believe their own propaganda about how contented Sambo supposedly was,
but knew he had good reasons not to be happy between his crude, coarse rations
and the overseer's lash, understanding the slaves' very humanity meant they
likely desired freedom secretly as much as any white did.627
Resistance to Slavery in the United States Is
Dominated by Infrapolitics
The
story of resistance under slavery in the United States is mainly one of
day-to-day resistance--of evaded work, stolen food, and protective lies, rather
than one of revolts, open defiance, and organized, collective efforts. This was not because American plantations
were populated with Sambos instead of Nats due to the effects of a closed
system producing bent personalities (Elkins) nor, in the older historiography,
upon some innately rooted dispositions in character (U.B. Phillips's American
Negro Slavery). Part of this lay in
the inevitable reality that the infrapolitics of struggle between a dominant
and a subordinate class largely make up most both groups' mutual dealings,
outside of rare, revolutionary moments, because of the former's strength compared
to the latter. Routinely the weak use
covert, circuitous means of accomplishing their aims, because the costs of open
defiance normally are very high.
However, American slaves, even more than their Latin American and
Caribbean brethren, placed their efforts into day-to-day resistance because the
objective strength of the white regime in the United States was so great, open
and organized defiance was even more suicidal than normal for this
subordinate class. Due to the ethic of
the easy use of personal violence coming from living in relatively unsettled,
unpoliced, frontier areas under a naturally suspicious white regime whose
public mores emphasized defending one's honor and thus was correspondingly
hypersensitive about personal slights and offenses, and the lack of any
substantive de jure legal rights much above the right not be murdered by
one's master, the slaves lacked the ability to organize in a collective
manner that was not violent itself in nature.
Although some resistance occurred that mimicked the withdrawal of labor
by striking unions, by masses of slaves running away in protest against
particularly abusive overseers or overly demanding work schedules, the
suspicions of the whites and their refusal (as demonstrated by the legal theory
of the slave codes) to recognize them as having any legal rights to freedom of
association or to the product of their labor ensured that collective protests
almost inevitably had to turn to violence.
The slaves, working within the system, could not change the
regime by any open and sustained collective activity, such as the
English farmworkers' unions constituted.
The only way to change slavery at all as a social system was to totally
overthrow it at once--which led directly to the desperate use of violence whenever
the slaves did rise against their owners throughout the Americas. The policies of the white regime left the
slaves the alternatives of open violence, which was especially suicidal in the
American case, or surreptitious infrapolitics, through wearing masks before
their masters, venting their frustrations in generally unsurveyed social sites,
and covert, loose, informal organizing in the quarters that aimed at making
extracting work out of them a maximally frustrating process for their owners
and supervisors. That American slaves
lacked an extensive history of revolts and large scale maroon colonies has
little to due with any virtues or defects in character or personality, but was
due to the objective strength of the white regime over them.
Resident Slaveholders Supervising Small Units of
Production Smother Resistance
Another
reason for the lack of collective resistance by Southern slaves against their
masters and mistresses lay in the smothering effects of their small units of
production and close, personal supervision by resident slaveholders, as Kolchin
has observed. The practical effects of
paternalism, although that ideology likely was not accepted by the bulk of
masters or slaves in actuality, still bore useful fruits from the white regime's
viewpoint due to the resident nature of the master class and their ability to
routinely interfere in the lives of their human chattels. Simply put, the larger the size of the unit
of production and the farther away the owner lives away from it, the harder it
is for him to survey, control, and punish those under him, regardless of the
slave code's legalities about the will of the bondsman being made one with the
master's. The amount of
"practical," de facto freedom of the subordinates increases
correspondingly with the lessening of the master's power. To manage most American plantations, no
large, complicated administrative apparatus of managers supervising other
managers intervening between the owner and the average slave was necessary--if
the master did not personally supervise his slaves at work, normally all he
needed was one overseer to manage them.
By knowing not just his domestic servants, but many or all his field
hands personally, especially in those cases of large hereditary slaveowners in
long settled areas, he could interfere in their family and off-work,
"private" lives much more than was the case for those generally
absentee Caribbean planters who often ruled over much larger bodies of
slaves. Furthermore, he often strived
to make his bondsmen as economically dependent on him as possible, by providing
food and clothing directly to his bondsmen, sometimes even having food cooked
communally. For American slaves,
outside of task system areas, the patches of land they cultivated were normally
supplements to income at best, when their owners did not forbid them
altogether. The slaves of the Caribbean
were much more likely to raise all their own food themselves on plots of land
assigned to them, so their masters could escape the hassles of providing food
for such large numbers of bondsmen. All
the close personal attention American slaves received, regardless of how much
actual paternalism was being practiced through it, helped to prevent the
development of autonomous collective organizations among them. Their "practical freedom" was much
less than that of typical Russian serfs or Caribbean bondsmen, who had much
more economic independence and freedom of action. A lack of experience with independent action had deadening
effects on collective resistance, as shown by the different responses of those
born enslaved and those who survived the Middle Passage. Creoles were particularly apt to engage in
individualistic modes of protest, such as by running away alone, while the
Africans held in slavery in eighteenth-century Virginia, used to much more
collaborative effort before being enslaved by the whites, were more apt to
engage in collective protests by running off in groups and establishing maroon
colonies on the frontier. The effects
of slavery on the bondsmen in the United States, under the tight, personal
supervision of their owners on relatively small units of production, who sought
to make them almost exclusively economically dependent on the standard rations,
which heavily undermined the autonomy of their culture, turned their slaves
towards individualistic modes of protest whose covert yet defiant nature was
not especially clear to their owners by deliberate intention. While the resident nature of the masters and
mistresses in America benefited the bondsmen by raising the standard of living
and lowering the brutalities of the system through restraining overseers (i.e.,
paid management), it increased the social costs of bondage to the bondsmen by
allowing their owners to interfere much more in their personal and family lives
and limiting the development of an autonomous culture and ethos of collective
protest, especially with the closure of the African slave trade and the high
natural rate of population growth among the creole slaves. As Kolchin noted, benign neglect might have
benefited the slaves much more than a paternalism that caused the masters to
continuously meddle in their bondsmen's lives, in which they were treated as
permanent children requiring constant protection, direction, correction, and
punishment.628
Resisting Enslavement Is Not the Same as Resisting
Slavery as a Social System
With
day-to-day resistance looming so large in the lives of American slaves and the
historiography of the subject, this leads us to a major objection against its
significance. Since free workers in
contemporary society also engage in shirking, vandalism, lies to evade work,
theft from the work place, etc., how do we know whether when slaves engaged in
the same behaviors they were really resisting slavery as a social system? Kolchin uses the example of absenteeism
doubling among American autoworkers between 1965 and 1972. Was this proof of them increasingly resisting
capitalism, disliking the specific policies of the auto companies, or just
alienation from boring, repetitive jobs?629 It is difficult peering into the minds of subject
classes in the past because we lack general access to their minds and the
hidden transcript they produced, as discussed above (pp. 246-47). While the masses can prove they are
ideological and political through collective, open efforts to resist the
dominant class, i.e., that they are "class conscious," such
collective efforts were rare among American bondsmen. Citing the thoughts of the unusually resourceful, oppressed,
and/or lucky slaves who escaped into freedom and lived to write or tell their own
stories in narratives is problematic because these men and women were plainly
extraordinary, and from their contact with northern abolitionists, whose
ideology may have helped form the framework of their analysis of slavery as a
social system, even when they did not serve as editors or transcribers for the
narratives they published. One is
largely left with rather cryptic, covert activities such as stealing and lying,
which are correspondingly hard to interpret politically, even as they are
plainly troublesome to the dominant class.
It makes more sense to see the bondsmen, especially those who were
illiterate and profoundly ignorant of the rest of the world outside of what
they had personally experienced, as resisting not slavery as a social system,
but their enslavement personally, as Paquette has suggested. Conceiving of freedom from one's one harsh
master, and seek the redress of particular, concrete grievances is one
thing. But it takes a wide leap
conceptually for an uneducated, illiterate mind think in universals, and see
the whole system throughout the South as needing to be overturned. Since concept of "freedom," as in
the absence of physical coercion from others, is a Western concept, unknown to
almost all non-Western people prior to contact with Eurocentric cultures, the
development of an ideology of freedom that did not involve social control and
connectedness to family, kin, and friends (the African antonym for
"slavery") was hardly an automatic development natural to the human mind. With the enormous power of the white regime
in America necessarily preventing most open, organized, collective struggles
that could be easily labeled "political," the creole slaves
themselves inclined towards individualistic modes of protest, and much of the
subordinate class' infrapolitics being equivocal to interpretation, even by
design of the perpetrators, it becomes quite difficult to prove American slaves
were as class conscious as the farmworkers who joined Arch's union in the
1870s. Furthermore, many types of
day-to-day resistance can serve at least inadvertently as props for the overall
system. For example, maroonage
unintentionally served as a safety valve propping up the planters' rule in
Antigua. As this valve closed because
most of its available land fell under cultivation, pressures building under
forced accommodation helped create a great conspiracy in 1736.630
Normally
infrapolitics should seen as a desire to gain concrete, particular advantages
against specific masters (i.e., filling a half-empty belly with stolen food)
than as politically-motivated acts supported by a well thought out ideology,
unless the hidden transcript hints at something greater, due to the
difficulties of illiterate, uneducated minds being able to conceive of and
think about universal concepts. The
concept of "resistance" should not be trivialized through extending
the concept of infrapolitics into the daily activities all people, free or
slave, engage in in order to live.631 While no doubt slaves as a whole were
conscious of getting the shaft from their superiors to one extent or another,
they never reached the level of autonomous self-organization and collective
effort of being a class acting for itself, clearly conceptualizing their
position as a group relative to their masters'. Nevertheless, it should always be remembered in reply to Elkins,
Genovese, and Fogel and Engerman, that the lack of collective effort by
American bondsmen was much more a function of white power and restrictions on
the bondsmen's education and practical freedom of action, especially through
being resident masters on small units of production, than anything intrinsic to
the personality of "Sambo" himself or to the successful
indoctrination of him with the ideology of paternalism or the Protestant work
ethic.
Hodge: The
Predominance of Daily Infrapolitics over Outright Riots
Having
discussed much of the general theory of resistance by a subordinate class
against a dominant class when dealing with African-American slaves above (note
especially pp. 325-329), this section dealing with English agricultural workers
is more brief. The role of day-to-day
resistance through various crimes is paramount here as well, since major riots
in the English countryside were not especially common, even considering those
over the price of food in periods of high prices. The research of Dale Edward Williams found that most market towns
experienced no more than one food riot in the course of a century.632 And while the Swing riots of 1830-31 and the
earlier "Bread or Blood" riots of East Anglia were fairly
spectacular, the former being far more extensive than any slave revolt in the
United States, such events were hardly frequent. After the ultimate failure and repression following
"Swing," the countryside was not marked by major, organized protests
by the laborers again until the 1860s-1870s farmworkers' unions. Chartism was something that mostly bypassed
the farmworkers, being primarily an urban phenomenon dominated by artisans and
factory workers, with the miners playing an important supplementary role. The English countryside Somerville toured
was full of dissatisfied laborers and general unrest which had its effects on
the rural elite, but no major organized collective protests. English laborers mainly resisted through
infrapolitics, since for any subordinate class, direct frontal assaults are
dangerous and risky. But the laborers
could engage in more open opposition compared to slaves in the South, because
they had far more legal rights and were regarded fundamentally as part of the
society they lived in, not outside of it, which lay the foundations for the
unions' successes in the 1870s.
Social Crime--The Infrapolitics of Poaching
The
laborers principally struggled against their masters through committing what
the latter regarded crimes, but not the laborers themselves. The most important of these was poaching, in
contrast to the supremacy of theft among American slaves, although that crime
was hardly unknown among the laborers either.
The game laws were a constant source of class friction, because they
outlawed any hunting by anyone the landowners did not specifically give
permission to, even when the animals wandered away from their preserves. The law gave the landlords permanent
property in wild animals, allowing them to punish those who killed
"their" game. The old feudal
right of chase was operative up into 1834.
Landowners possessing it could hunt even on others' land as well. Since the farmers normally leased their
land, they also were negatively affected by the game laws. Tenant farmers could not legally kill any
animals feeding off the crops of the land they cultivated unless they received
their landlord's permission first, which he was often loathe to grant. Routinely they were not compensated by their
lord--the Earl of Abingdon in Oxford being an exception--by having their rents
reduced in compensation. The game laws
mainly oppressed the laborers by denying them a way to get food, especially
meat, as would have existed had they lived in the United States even as black
slaves. Some suffered like the farmers
because their allotments were damaged or ruined from game eating crops raised
upon them, a problem Somerville once encountered in Sussex. Further petty tyrannies were inflicted by
restrictions placed on where laborers could walk freely without being
questioned by the police or gamekeepers.
Gathering wood in forests was banned for a similar reason. When a laborer was convicted of poaching, he
was apt to be blacklisted by the local rural elite, and denied a job after even
one conviction, as Arch noted:
"The man is looked on as a poaching vagabond by all the employing
class round about. . . . I have gone with them from one end of the
village to the other, farmer after farmer, but nobody would give them a
job."633
The laborers, when members of poaching gangs, routinely got into virtual
pitched battles with the local squires' or lord's gamekeepers, some on either
side being wounded, arrested, even sometimes killed, as Somerville and Hudson
both described. Ironically, these gangs
were the consequence of the heavy penalties meted out to violators of the 1770
and (especially) 1800 and 1803 laws.
Poachers gathered into large groups because gamekeepers did not like
trying to stop them then, and they became more likely to fight than allow
themselves to be captured, because the penalties were so harsh against
poaching.634
The Laborers' Counter-Ideology Against the Elite's
Game Laws
The
farmworkers rejected the upper class values that underlay the game laws. They maintained they could kill wild animals
and birds because they were not owned by anyone in particular, especially when
they had run off their lord's preserves and lands. In reply to the 1816 Act that inflicted transportation for seven
years upon those who carried a net for poaching into a forest or park, a
manifesto was published in a Bath newspaper by some evident poachers: "The Lord of all men sent these animals
for the peasants as well as for the prince." Arch felt the laborer who killed the incidental rabbit or hare
that crossed his path was not in the wrong, whether it was because he was
half-starving, had merely inadequate wages, just liked the taste of its meat,
or was trying to get compensation for it eating breakfast on his allotment:
The plain truth is, we labourers do not believe hares
and rabbits belong to any individual, not any more than thrushes and blackbirds
do. . . . Has the hare or the
rabbit a brand on him for purposes of identification? If I found a stray loaf on the road it would be mine, and so with
a rabbit or hare.635
But there were limits on the moral permissibility of
poaching for at least some laborers.
Both Arch and shepherd Bawcombe drew an implied distinction between
those who incidently poached while having a regular job, and those without
regular jobs, (in Bawcombe's version) the beer house idlers who were members of
poaching gangs.636
Poaching
became undoubtedly the most common crime that the laborers committed against
their superiors as a part of day-to-day resistance. Since they generally did not live on their employers' property at
night, especially as service declined in the nineteenth century, it was
considerably harder for them to steal from the farmers' or squire's stocks and
larders than for the slaves from their masters. English jails and prisons were full of laborers convicted for
poaching offenses, with some getting hanged. Cobbett in 1823 maintained one-third of those in English jails
were there for violations of the game laws, which required them to be enlarged,
and that their number exceeded all those in prison for any reason in France. Cobbett did exaggerate, though not by too
much--between 1827 and 1830, one-seventh of all criminal convictions were under
the game laws, for a total of 8502 offenses.
In Bedford jail in the January of 1829, of the ninety-six prisoners yet
to be tried, eighteen were poachers who had used arms against gamekeepers. Consider this indication of how common this
offense was. Isaac Bawcombe was
rewarded of a pension due to the influence of one elderly gentleman. This man routinely found excellent hunting
on the one spot of hilly land where Bawcombe's flock regularly fed, which was
the only explanation his gamekeeper had for his unusual success there as
opposed to other hilly areas on his lands.
Bawcombe had been the exception to the rule, for not only did he not
poach himself, but tried to stop others from doing so. This gentleman hunter's relative lack of
success elsewhere pointed to how common poaching was even on his own land,
without him even really knowing it!637
The Role of Theft, More Generally Defined, in English
Rural Infrapolitics
While
the upper class also regarded killing wild animals as stealing their property,
we need to consider theft by laborers more broadly. No doubt the limits of what was considered to be "fair
game" for the laborers to "take" from their employers were much
narrower than those the slaves accepted.
Arch maintained while he would work with someone who poached a rabbit,
he would not with someone who had taken a chicken: "But let a man who had stolen a hen off a roost be ever such
a good workman, I should have nothing to do with him; I should keep clear of
him and avoid his company . . .
If I saw any man steal six-pennyworth from an employer of mine, I should
at once report the man."638 Still, the English rural elite battled
against farmworkers stealing their property.
One reason initially given for opposing allotments was that the laborers
would use the cover given by growing their own crops to help conceal what was
stolen from their employers. Jeffries,
examining archetypes among the laborers from a middle class perspective,
described one as the boy who starts by pilfering from his employer, cumulating
with a stolen whip, and finally gets thrashed by the carter as punishment. His stereotype ignores the real reason why
many laborers stole from their employers or others, especially in times of
dearth and/or relatively low wages--hunger.
Some old people witnessed to Hudson, including one lady of ninety-four
years, that sheep stealing was a common crime, despite the draconian penalties
threatened: "The men were
strangely indifferent and did not seem to care whether they were hanged or
not." She pointed out some
grandchildren of a man hanged for sheep stealing at Salisbury. Arch remembered when he was around nine years
old in 1835 how desperate so many of the laborers were. Many stole turnips, potatoes, and other
produce they could get their hands on, and it was no exaggeration to say every
other man was a poacher in his parish.
Much like Kemble on slaves stealing food to live, Arch reluctantly felt
such behavior acceptable, although he believed the laws of the land should be
obeyed as much as possible: "How
can I blame these men because they would not sit still, and let the life be
starved out of them and theirs? They
would not; so they risked their liberty, the next dearest thing they had
. . . in their endeavours to obtain food." Somerville noted in questionnaires returned
to the Anti-corn Law League from English areas that when work was plentiful,
crimes were rare, but when work was scare, poaching and sheep-stealing were
common.639
The Correlation Between Poverty and Theft
Turning
to evidence more quantitative in nature, statistical series exist which, based
on the numbers of indictments in various years, appear to indicate a strong
correlation between dearth and numbers of thefts committed in peacetime. This relationship breaks down during wars,
evidently because the army would absorb large numbers of young men apt to
commit crime, especially when many magistrates would offer offenders the
opportunity to avoid prosecution if they would join the army. Although Innes and Styles are rather
skeptical of the correlation between crime and poverty due to how prosecutors
could change their behavior over time in those they try to convict, they
acknowledged King's series on Essex even had a wartime correlation
between its bad years (1740-41, 1772, 1800-01) and increased crime. While, as always, correlation cannot prove
causation, literary evidence, such as that of Hudson and Arch above,
illuminates plausibly the interrelationships involved, so it is not mere
guesswork to see bad years with high prices leading to increased petty thefts
by the laboring poor. When the number
of poachers committed to the Gaol of Bury St. Edmunds goes from five, four, and
two in the years 1810-12 to seventy-five, sixty, sixty-one, and seventy-one in
1822-25, demobilization and local labor markets flooded by ex-soldiers and
sailors seeking work were not the only reasons why. These had largely been adjusted to in the 1815-20 period right
after the French Wars ended, so we should look for other causes. Orridge, the governor of this jail,
maintained most of the poachers committed their acts out of distress, not the
love of sport.640
Even when such statistics are treated with some care they still point to
the truth of the viewpoint of Arch and Hudson's informants: Poaching and stealing increased at times
when the poor were worse off.641
Hodge's Thinner Mask
Like
Sambo, Hodge wore a mask as well in order to conceal his thoughts from his
superiors, but his mask never needed to be as thick. Because the costs of insubordination proportionately were not as
high (i.e., no corporal punishment for adult farm workers, no sales splitting
families), and because he underwent less routine surveillance by his superiors,
unless he was a live-in farm servant, Hodge had more freedom to maneuver. Hodge also had more legal rights, although
exercising them was potentially hazardous or easily blocked unless he knew the
law well. Nevertheless, farmworkers
still learned to hold their tongues.
Arch noted many laborers in the presence of their superiors in formal
social settings of the latter's choosing were intimidated, and simply lacked
social ease to talk freely even if no penalty was involved in saying what they
thought, which caused them to be seen as stupid or slow. But the more articulate laborers did not
speak out either because they "had learned the trade of mouth-shutting and
teeth-locking as soon as they could talk, and before they knew what
bird-scaring was. A man with the weight
of many masters on him learns how to be dumb, and deaf, and blind, at a very
early hour in the morning."642 Both of these factors, of social
intimidation and the willing concealment of thoughts, led to the development of
the classic stereotype of Hodge as a slow-moving, slow-thinking brute who spoke
few words. In interviews, one
journalist for the Morning Chronicle complained in 1849 that the
farmworker typically looked upon the (better educated social superior)
suspiciously, feeling oppressed as long as the interview lasted, acting timid
and withdrawn. Holdenby saw laborers
putting up a "mysterious barrier of 'Ay, ay', 'may be', 'likely enough',
with which the labourer hedges himself in." These all are signs of the mask going up, and so his social
superiors did not see the "real Hodge" as much as they may have
thought. So they then thought him
stupider and less articulate than he was in fact, although the more insightful
saw he was concealing much from them.643 The attitudes of the laborers' employers,
who saw them as useless outside their ability to work, helped create this mask,
as Arch noted: "Work was all they
wanted from him; he was to work and hold his tongue, year in and year out,
early and late."644
Accompanying
the mask Hodge wore was a certain amount of lying. He had to do less of it than the slaves because he was not under
surveillance as much as them, and telling the truth did not have as drastic a
penalty for him generally. But in a
mitigated form, the same phenomenon still manifested itself. Hudson noted that due to the nature of the
game laws, which constituted one of the worst continuing oppression they
experienced, even honest laborers were "obliged to practise a certain
amount of deception." He knew one
shepherd who lied by denying to his employing farmer that his dog ever hunted
for hares, when in fact he did. Since the
shepherd refuses to believe killing a hare is robbing anyone, "if he is
obliged to tell a lie to save himself from the consequences he does not
consider that it is a lie."
Hodge's mask also could simply be a refusal to volunteer information, a
way to conceal his financial affairs from prying outsiders. In one parish, after initial suspicion of
its offer to let allotments had abated, the laborers hesitated to say these
kept them off relief, because they feared their rents would be hiked, etc. Behind the gestures of deference, a
non-deferent mind could well lurk, such as one old woman who bowed a deep
curtsey to her squire, yet referred to him very familiarly out of earshot. His gamekeeper complained to others about
his wages, his lack of perquisites, his lack of fees in shooting season except
when the place was let for the season to another--but went to the squire hat in
hand. As Jeffries described: "They hardly dared open their mouths
when they saw him, and yet spoke of him afterwards as if he sat with them at
bacon and cabbage time." In
Stotfold parish, Bedford, right after the Swing Riots mob locally had been
dispersed, according to the parish's rector, at least some laborers were
suddenly "'touching their hats' to their masters--who never did so in
their lives before."645 As noted above, such rituals of deference
are not without meaning even when the performer is not very sincere about them,
because they help the elite maintain a necessary social distance that otherwise
would be lost or lessened by routine face-to-face interactions. In the case of the laborers of Stotfold
parish, they may have suddenly began following certain rituals of deference to
clearly signal they had accepted defeat and their subordinate position after
the village rioted and their ringleaders were arrested. Some of the concessions that had been made
to the laborers locally may have encouraged these gestures, such as exemption
from taxes and the dismissal of the assistant overseer, even as the vestry did
not concede their demands for a wage hike.
Although Hodge's mind was often concealed by a mask, the level of
distortions about him are significantly lower than that about African-American
slaves, due in part to the lack of operative racism between the classes, but
also because the mask was indeed thinner and his more open complaints, ensuring
the avoidance of perverse misreadings of his personality similar to Elkins's
about the slaves.
How Farmworkers Could "Run Away"--Resistance
Through Migration and Emigration
Another
form of resistance, analogous to the slaves' running away, was to migrate to
another part of England or to emigrate abroad in search of better jobs,
opportunities, and treatment. Moving
was not an act necessarily intended to affront the local rural elite, because
sometimes they were happy to encourage it when faced with paying high rates
year around. Lord Egremont in Sussex
paid a number of emigrants' expenses, of about ten pounds per adult and five
per child, and Petworth parish paid at least five per adult and three pounds
and ten shillings per child, which came to 107 emigrants over five years
(1832-36) who left for Canada. The rector of Petworth, while perhaps ignoring
the effects of the New Poor Law excessively, attributed nearly all the drop in
relief expenses in his parish in recent years to emigration. Other times emigration met with opposition,
but either way it still had the function of limiting local employers'
bargaining power with their laborers in the long run. Migration introduces into the picture the competition of other
employers for labor, which limits what the local parish farmers can do in
lowering wages or otherwise mistreating their laborers. Those dealt with badly enough long enough
compared to known conditions elsewhere are apt to "vote with their
feet" and leave. As mentioned
above (pp. 28-29), the principal reason for the northern laborers' superior
conditions and treatment was due to the nearby presence of industrial and
mining employment which drove up the price of labor (wages) due to its relative
scarcity. While in England, Olmsted
found cases on the Salisbury plain of very large farms in which it appeared one
farmer employed an entire village.
Using such monopsonic power, analogous to the stereotypical "one
company town," these farmers paid rock-bottom wages of six or seven
shillings a week.646
Under
these conditions, only two main solutions presented themselves: (1) flee the
"one-farmer village," or (2) organize, and so form a union with
theoretically equal power in the labor market.
Many eventually chose the first option, and simply left, especially
towards the end of the nineteenth century.
As for the other . . . while Arch's union gained strength,
Warwickshire's County Chamber of Agriculture met to consider the laborers'
demands, a group of about thirty tenant farmers and several major
landowners. They desired a settlement
soon because if the union's demand for sixteen shillings per week was not
granted, the men could get twenty-three or twenty-seven by going north by
train: "Owing to migration and the
state of the general labour market, wages are still going up." During one strike, Arch noted some
locked-out laborers accepted offers from "Gentlemen" seeking workers
for cotton mills and railways, and emigration agents "were prowling around,
picking and choosing the most likely, and tempting them across the
sea." Although Arch had initially
opposed emigration, he later changed his mind.
He committed considerable personal time and union money to supporting
those who wished migrate within England or leave it altogether. He visited Canada to investigate conditions
for laborers there.647
Arch saw that by pitting different employers against one another and
encouraging laborers to move, higher wages could be gained for members of his
union, even if they changed occupations, and went into another industry. These actions aided even those left behind
since migration reduced the number of glutted local labor markets in southern
England which had empowered employers when pushing down wages.
The Reluctance of Laborers to Move and Other Obstacles
to Migration
Although
laborers considering migration and emigration faced nowhere near the same
number of legal and practical hurdles American slaves did when it came to
running away, major impediments still existed.
Always the settlement and poor laws lurked in the background, as already
described extensively above (pp. 69-70, 278-79, 282-84). They created cages for the local poor,
making them afraid to move away and lose their right to receive parish relief,
not to mention removable from where they migrated to when becoming
chargeable. Another problem was why
many slaves did not want to permanently run away to the North or
elsewhere: breaking ties with family
and friends. While the laborers did not
risk the actual dissolution of their family by leaving, like the slaves,
they would lose all or most contact with friends and family left behind. Arch noticed on his travels working that
most of the laborers he encountered routinely complained about their lot in
life, but they made no effort to better themselves, not budging "an inch
from the place and position in which they found themselves. The fact was, very few of them could write a
letter, so the majority were afraid to go from home, because they would not be
able to communicate with their friends."648 In a study of Brenchley, Kent Wojciechowska
found the laborers were the least mobile of all the occupational groups she
studied in the 1851-1871 period besides farmers. For the laborers, 32.1 percent persisted from 1851 to 1861 and
33.2 percent from 1861 to 1871. The
corresponding percentages for farmers were 35.4 percent and 30.9 percent, for
tradesman and craftsmen, 31.9 percent and 23.9 percent, professionals, 22.2
percent and 6.1 percent, domestics, 9.2 percent and 7.9 percent, and those in
commerce, 14.7 percent and 8.3 percent.
These differences confirmed contemporaries' generalizations about
farmworkers' relative immobility compared to others, especially when they
normally did not move as far afield when they did leave. The movement that did occur was concentrated
among the unattached--young single men and women, or widows and widowers--demonstrating
how family ties restrained it.
Obviously then, the fall of the laborers' average marriage ages during
the early nineteenth century was no aid to finding better jobs elsewhere. Laborers perhaps ended up in an adjacent
parish or in the same county, unlike the professionals, who were often not born
in this parish and were more likely to leave it for a place far away. The Poor Law Commissioners found even when
they offered to finance laborers willing to move elsewhere in England, few
signed up, and many of those who did eventually returned.649 Another factor behind the laborers' lack of
willingness to leave was when the farmer who steadily employed them was stable,
which Wojciechowska's data demonstrates as a class they were, and did not move,
neither did his laborers.650 Those in tied cottages--the "company
housing" of the employing farmer--were inevitably less mobile, as were the
children of laborers in such houses, because farmers sometimes threatened to
evict elderly parents if their children did not work for them.651 Despite all the disincentives to leave,
enough farmworkers did around the time of the French Wars to make up a major
part of those working as spinners in the Bolton area. Workers there arrived from Ireland, Scotland, and Wales, showing
migration started also from rural areas far away, not just from local ones.652 Being an individualistic response to bad
conditions, migration for the laborers had the advantage of avoiding direct
confrontations with the rural elite.
But this solution failed to solve the main problem facing English farmworkers: Except when seasonal or local labor
shortages exist, groups of unorganized laborers simply lack the marketing power
to effectively bargain for wages with a few oligopolistic or one monopsonic
farmer as the main parish employer(s), because it is much easier to play
"divide and conquer" with a large group than a small, making them
compete against one another.
The Tamer Confrontations Between Hodge and His Masters
Like
the slaves, sometimes laborers confronted their employers or the local
landowners in an unorganized, small-scale manner. These conflicts, like the Swing Riots compared to the slave
revolts, featured far less violence than those between slaves and their owners
and overseers, mainly because the absence of corporal punishment for adult
laborers eliminated the main provocation for violent retaliation. It is singularly difficult to find any
stories of laborers killing or physically attacking a bailiff, a steward, a
farmer, or a landowner, while similar stories about the slaves' attacking their
superiors abound. A number of incidents
illustrate that Hodge's mask was thinner than Sambo's, and that he undertook
fewer deferential rituals and made more open complaints. Jeffries described the case of a laborer
interrupting an argument about the value of a mechanical reaper between a
farmer, his wife, both in a gig, and his son, who worked as bailiff. The reaper complained, "Measter
. . . cam't you send us out some better tackle than this yer
stuff?," and poured some ale out onto the stubble with a grimace of total
disgust. The farmer, by no means a
small and poor one, merely sharply replied, "It be the same as I drink
myself," and drove off. Robert
Long, who farmed 280 acres in Bedfordshire, complained in his diary about the
shortage of laborers and independence of his men during harvest--two factors
which are no mere coincidence. He had
boasted to others he had had the same men all year, even during harvest, but
now he lost all confidence in them because they were taking advantage of the
seasonal and local labor shortage to break one of his rules: "I always threaten to discharge a man
who fetches beer from a public house, but in Harvest time when the corn wants
cutting (and they know it) it cannot be carried out."653 The background to these incidents was
harvest, which was one time of the year farmworkers had some economic power,
and so the farmers were not so apt to fire laborers for complaining or breaking
rules. These cases illustrate a certain straightforwardness not encountered
with American slaves often, excepting those few who were defiant when the lash
was going to be applied, or from pampered house servants. The difference resulted not from any of
Hodge's intrinsic virtues compared to Sambo's, but because the risks and costs
of defiance were lower for the laborers--especially during harvest! Changing employers and finding work was easy
then. Hence, the farmer engaged in
haymaking (discussed above, p. 227) heard the grumbling of his laborers, but
they did not walk off the job when he suddenly imposed overtime on them,
because the local employment situation had recently deteriorated. The members of a subordinate class obviously
are much more likely to openly complain when the ability of the dominant class
to punish is for some reason restricted.
And when the social system allows the subordinate class' members to
express more complaints openly based on the hidden transcript's content, the
more continual but gradual emotional release involved makes violence less
likely to occur compared to when some subject population, having worn a thick
mask almost continually, suddenly and finally finds some way to vent its
feelings against the dominant class.654 Hodge's lower propensity to violence than
Sambo is partially based on this difference, besides the others attached to the
frontier ethic and how the exaggerated gentlemanly ethic of protecting one's
personal honor against insults through dueling and other acts of violence was
found among the Southern white male population generally, not just its
uppermost elite.
Food Riots as a Method of Resistance
Immortalized
by Thompson's article on the subject, the food riot was yet another means by
which the laboring class protested against high food prices in an organized
manner, invoking the moral economy of the landed elite's own paternalistic
ideology. These riots always remained
remarkable for the English crowd's general refusal to attack personally the
bakers, millers, shopkeepers, farmers, middlemen, etc. that were seen as its
opponents. And this was despite the
strong ill-effects prices hikes for bread or other basic foodstuffs caused when
so many were so close to subsistence as it was. The rioting crowds employed the medieval "just price"
model, in which they set a price (which the seller would judge too low
from prevailing market conditions).
Then they would offer to pay for the food, and would only seize
it without any compensation when the seller still resisted. One wagon loaded with wheat and flour was
intercepted by a group of women, who threw the bags over the side. When told he could sell it at forty
shillings a sack, or that they would take it all without payment if he refused,
the driver (a farmer) soon capitulated:
"If that must be the price, it must be the price." In one report, the sheriff of
Gloucestershire in 1766 noted the crowd visited one farmhouse. They politely said they could thresh the
grain and pay five shillings per bushel for it, an offer the farmer
accepted. Later on, in the main
markets, they visited all who sold food, setting their own prices: "They returned in general the produce
[i.e., the money] to the proprietors or in their absence left the money for
them; and behaved with great regularity and decency where they were not
opposed, with outrage and violence where they was: but pilfered very little."
In other cases, such as at Drayton, Oxford in 1766, the Isle of Ely,
1795, and Handborough, Oxford, 1795, the food rioters even
"conscripted" a constable or magistrate to superintend their forced
sales at relatively low prices to legitimize their actions. Especially in these cases, the crowd's
attitude was that if their superiors did not enforce the laws from the Elizabethan
and early Stuart period that allowed magistrates to force sales and set low
prices and which prohibited many of the standard activities of middlemen, they
would force them to do so! The key
difference between the paternalistic model and the crowd's was it had the power
and right to initiate itself proceedings to enforce it, rather than passively
waiting for their betters to altruistically do so. While the laborers themselves were not necessarily the leaders or
initiators of these riots--Thompson lists two cases of gangs involved in
construction work starting riots later joined by farmworkers--they still
constituted a major means of rural protest.655
This
kind of organized action was simply unknown among American slaves, whose
struggles against their owners featured different forms of "direct
action." Excepting those few
"hiring their own time," the slaves did not have to support their own
families independently and were automatically furnished with some given
allowance of food from their masters.
They never had to take action against those involved in marketing,
especially when Southern slaveholders generally aimed at producing the food,
such as corn and pork, required for their slaves' subsistence right on the
plantation. The English lower orders
often got away with these riots, even when troops and convictions followed in a
number of cases, because many of the magistrates were somewhat sympathetic. It is unimaginable slaves could escape
without punishment committing similar acts, which was because they were
fundamentally regarded as "outside" their society and legal system,
while English rural workers were included, but in a subordinate position. The laborers had not only the freedom to
organize impromptu protests and crowd actions inconceivable to slaves, but an
ability to avoid much of the punishment that should have followed. Helping them in their cause was how the
local rural elite in times of crisis was often somewhat divided, giving an
opening to the local protesting crowd.
The farmers and gentry, at least in the eighteenth century, were often
unsupportive of the middleman's and shopkeeper's commercial ethos, especially
when they wished to head off a riot by taking various proactive measures. Sometimes at these moments some
paternalistically-oriented magistrates encouraged prosecutions against at least
the minor players in the local market place to demonstrate they cared to the
plebes. Such divisions did not exist
among Southern whites, poor or rich, when facing restive black slaves, making
it much more difficult for this subordinate class to take advantage of
divisions among the elite to accomplish its own objectives. The food riot as a means of protest again
illustrates the much lower level of violence in English society compared to the
Southern United States. According to
the research of Stevenson, apparently no English crowds during food riots
killed anyone deliberately from the beginning of the eighteenth century to the
beginning of the nineteenth. The
violence involved normally targeted property, not people, and was often
threatened without actually being performed, such as those farmers in Cornwall
intimidated by crowds bearing ropes along with contracts forcing horded grain
to be sold at low prices, or by anonymous letters sent to those in authority or
those possessing grain before any action was taken.656
The Swing Riots Generally Considered
The
riots that hold pride of place in the history of the farmworkers' struggle with
the rural elite were the Swing riots of 1830-1831, with the bulk of incidents
occurring in the November and December of 1830. The laborers during it generally sought above all to destroy
threshing machines that would rob them of winter employment in arable areas,
and also to condemn low wages and how the Old Poor Law was administered. While the rioters used rather varied modes
of protest, with some common in some counties and others rare or non-existent
elsewhere, a general pattern can still be outlined. First normally came semi-literate, threatening letters to those
in authority along with acts of arson.
Used as a protest tool, arson had the advantage of being carried out
surreptitiously. After Swing was over,
it was to present problems for years to come in some areas. Then second crowds formed, whose members
often forced others to join with them.
They approached those in authority to intimidate them into granting
their demands for higher wages and "levied" upon them an immediate
handout in money or perhaps beer. The
crowds then generally destroyed the local farmers' threshing machines. In East Anglia, the riots took a somewhat
different form, because (as described above, pp. 150, 274) the farmers took
advantage of the laborers' unrest to attack the parsons' tithes and landlords'
rents. The riots affected a broad swath
of England, generally developing most strongly in low-wage arable counties,
while higher wage, pastoral ones were much less affected, with the counties
south of Caird's wage line being the most riot-prone. Hobsbawm and Rude found some 386 threshing machines and 26 other
pieces of agricultural machinery were destroyed over a period of about one year
(August 1830-September 1831). Some 314
cases of arson were recorded in the same period. The size of the mobs involved ranged up to 2,000 who rioted
against police at Ringwood, the 1,000 who destroyed Headley's poor-house,
another 1,000 who gathered at Chichester to meet the justices and large farmers
to demand a wage increase, and 700-800 gathered for incidents in
Micheldever. One hundred to 300 were
common elsewhere in other actions. The
riots and related arsons were fairly general in Berkshire, Kent, Sussex,
Hampshire, Berkshire, and Wiltshire, with important hot spots in Norfolk and
Huntingdon. The area for about
twenty-five miles outside London was mostly unaffected, perhaps due to the
minimal arable area nearby compared to pasture and the effects of the
metropolis in providing alternative employment and raising wages. Much of East Anglia outside Norfolk, Dorset,
Buckingham, Bedford, and Cambridge, with a fair amount of the adjoining Midland
counties, were only partially affected, despite laborers in many of these areas
experienced conditions as bad as those which did riot generally. The 1,976 rioters sentenced or acquitted
were the tip of the iceberg of those guilty, and were more likely the leaders
and others who committed particularly noxious offenses or those unlucky enough
to be easily recognized and caught. The
broad national scope of this uprising compared to any slave revolt in the
United States is obvious, as well as its relative bloodlessness, as discussed
above (pp. 271-74), in which the rioters actually killed no one, and the elite
carried out only 19 executions, although the number of transportations
inflicted was indeed high (481 actually sailed out of 505 sentenced).657
How Laborers Did Benefit Some from the Swing Riots
The
Swing Riots, despite the repression that soon followed, did secure the
farmworkers at least some temporary benefits.
For some years afterwards, farmers were intimidated against using the
machines that took away the late fall/winter work of threshing from the
laborers--ironically, a task which they normally strongly disliked
intrinsically. Part of this was because
the economic benefits for small farmers of machine threshing were marginal to
begin with when so many parishes had large labor surpluses anyway. A temporary wage increase did occur in some
areas. More significant were its
effects on broader national questions.
The unrest among the laborers helped undermine the landed elite's
confidence in itself and its standing in the eyes of the middle class, thus
aiding in the passage of the Reform bill of 1832. The immediate repression by the Special Commission was enough to
place the laborers back into a sullen acceptance of their position, in contrast
to the significant number of local magistrates who initially deal with them
leniently. But the rural elite,
increasingly affected by the ideology of classical economics and Malthusianism
itself, now saw the practical need to do something about the Old Poor
Law's defects, especially under the Speenhamland system of family
allowances. With middle class
ideologues in full support, it responded to the Swing Riots in the long run
through the New Poor Law of 1834. By
tightening the screws of work discipline and using the workhouse as an engine
to deter applicants, they created a better way to control the laborers in the
future. While some reported the
laborers' attitudes improved after the passage of the New Poor Law, this
was surely due to their masks thickening.
They now felt more of a need to keep their jobs because the fear of
being committed to the workhouse. When
the Poor Law Commission concluded that "the moral conduct of the labouring
classes is said to be improved, and a better feeling to exist between them and
their masters," the authors were being deceived and deceiving themselves
by the outward show the farmworkers presented to those with power in rural
areas.658 So the Swing Riots
had considerable influence on the course of English national politics, more
than even Turner's rebellion did in the United States. But in contrast to the history of artisans
in English urban areas, the farmworkers were much more quiescent, figuring
little in the history of Chartism.
While the Swing riots were quite spectacular compared to any American
slave revolt in the numbers engaged and size of restive areas during the
two-month period in which they were most intense, still the farmworkers mounted
no more further major efforts at organized resistance until the unions formed
in the 1860s and (especially) early 1870s, making them as a group about as
tranquil in this regard as American slaves during much of the nineteenth
century.
The Relative Weakness of the Farmworkers' Unions
Compared to Others in England
Compared
to the urban skilled trades, unionism among the farmworkers was much weaker,
especially early in the century. The
Tolpuddle case, in which six Dorset laborers were sentenced for transportation
for seven years 1834 because they took oaths when forming a union, constituted
an early and interesting anomaly. It
united trade unionists across England in protest against the incredibly
arbitrary and unjust legal proceedings of magistrate James Frampton. The Tolpuddle unionists had organized to
fight a cut in wages from an already paltry seven shillings a week to six. Since they had not yet stuck, withdrawn any
labor, or issued any demands, they could only be heavily punished by citing a
law designed to deal oath-taking as part of the government's attempts to put
down sedition in the wake of the naval mutinies of 1797. Although these farmworkers had no such
intent, they were still convicted and transported, only returning in 1838 after
having their sentences remitted in 1836 because of massive and continuing
protests by urban unionists.659 The Tolpuddle martyrs case had great
symbolism to the cause of unionists across England, illustrating how all their
members potentially were at risk in the hands of arbitrary magistrates. Besides Tolpuddle, farmworker unions showed
some signs of life in the 1830s. One
union in the Kent/Sussex border area in 1835 used a friendly society as its
cover--an old trick--because of the legal dangers involved, especially in the
squire/magistrate-dominated countryside even after the combination laws had
been repealed. Nevertheless, the
practical effects of unions among farmworkers remained trivial until the 1860s
and early 1870s. The Hammonds suggested
the paucity of organized resistance among the laborers compared to urban
workers was due to the softening effects of the natural rural setting they
lived in, and because possible leaders were continually eliminated by the
imprisoning and transporting of poachers, "tossed to the other side of the
world."660
Furthermore, a delayed response occurred to changes in the organic bonds
of the village community, where many of the laborers had lived in or fairly
close nearby for many generations. A
generation elapsed after the dissipations of the traditional vertical
relationships of client-patron in the countryside through the decline of
service, enclosure, and the tightening of relief under the poor laws before the
laborers fully realized their plight and devised effective solutions to
it. Then they sought to develop
effective horizontal relationships of unity within their class, such as by
organizing unions to resist the dominant class, when individualistic solutions
such as migration were rejected. The
countryside Somerville toured was plainly restive, as illustrated by the
elite's fear of arson and machine-destruction. But it took time for the slowly
changing mores of a largely illiterate or semi-literate subordinate class of
unskilled workers to begin effectively act their growing class consciousness
because of the rural elite's power and the high rate of unemployment, which
made unionization difficult. Hobsbawm
and Rude note it took time for the ideas of continuing, permanent
organization to take hold of the minds of people in the rural hinterlands away
from its origins among urban artisans.
Through the growth of such organizations as friendly societies including
such national organizations as the Foresters and Oddfellows and the
nonconformist sects (both discussed above, pp. 54-55, 89-90, 153-57), rural
laborers increasingly did learn how to organize practically in ways which the
slaves never had a chance to because they had much less freedom.661
The Organization of the Agricultural Labourers' Union
in 1872
Paramount
in the history of farmworker unionism was the creation of the Agricultural
Labourers' Union (ALU) in 1872.
Beginning locally in Warwickshire under the leadership of Joseph Arch
after being asked by three other men to speak in favor of organizing a union,
it was born the evening of February seventh at Wellesbourne. When he arrived, he found nearly two
thousand laborers in attendance, and after a speech that lasted about one hour,
two or three hundred signed up.
Although Arch paints a very dismal picture of the condition of the
laborer at that moment--"Their poverty had fallen to starvation point, and
was past all bearing"--this is questionable considering the broader
picture. It is no coincidence that
Arch's union began near the peak of the business cycle (1872) just before the
depression of 1873 was to sweep over Europe and America, leading eventually to
the straightened conditions of English agriculture for much of this decade and
thereafter. Jones' research points to a
turning point in agricultural unemployment in the 1840s, leading to increasing
labor shortages in the 1850s and 1860s.
In a classic case of a revolution resulting from rising expectations,
Arch's union began during a pause in the upward trend of the standard of
living. While conditions were hardly
wonderful for the farmworkers, even when compared to the rest of the English
proletariat, they still were likely better in the 1870s than they were in the
1830s. Neither was Southern
Warwickshire by any means the area with the worst conditions in southern
England, as Caird's tables indicate.662 Arch's personal perception of the situation
compared to the recent past among the same people was likely somewhat
exaggerated, unless locally southern Warwickshire was experiencing unusual
problems.
By
the end of May in 1872, this union had nearly 50,000 members. In the April of 1875, it had 58,650 members
in 38 districts with 1,368 branches, with total income of £21,000 in 1874 and
£23,130 in 1875. Over £6,000 was spent
on migration and emigration purposes, helping nearly 2,000 men go to Australia
and New Zealand, 500 to what was Queensland, and almost 4,000 to Canada. In 1874, £7,500 was spent on relief during
strikes and lockouts, and £21,400 in 1875.
Due to the impact of the 1870s depression, these numbers turned
downwards. In 1881, there were some
25,000 members scattered over 22 counties.
After flickering upwards in 1890-91, the union collapsed
mid-decade. Rather ironically, Arch
attributed his union's demise to the laborers' thinking after gaining the vote
and access to the land they no longer needed the union despite it had been a
significant factor in getting them the vote to begin with! Arch's union was not the only one among the
farmworkers. Started nearly a year
earlier in 1871 in Herefordshire, another had quickly spread over six counties
and had organized about 30,000 laborers.
Curiously enough, the rector in the village it began
in--Leintwardine--had backed it.
Opposing strikes from its beginning, this other union emphasized
migration and emigration as the solution to Hodge's problems. Its activities still caused wages to
increase two shillings a week in Herefordshire and also some in Wiltshire and
Dorset in particular. Arch's union had
had its successes as well--it pushed wages in Bedfordshire up one shilling in
1874, to a nineteenth-century peak. Its
major struggles included a lockout in East Anglia, where it attempted to
support those staying out for the union by asking for help from urban workers
and others. Much of its power
disappeared after 1875, as the force of the agricultural depression hit, and
the farmers again often had a local reserve army of the unemployed to draw
upon, and could use falling agricultural prices to justify cutting wages. Splitting after a conference in Birmingham
in 1875, the ALU spawned the National Farm Workers Union. Headed by Matthew Vincent, the editor of the
Labourers Union Chronicle, the union newspaper, it emphasized land
reform. Arch's group had emphasized
raising wages instead. The Agricultural
Labourers' Union was rent by major internal struggles, especially in the late
1880s over the sick fund which eventually virtually bankrupted it. Although unions only represented a small
percentage of all farmworkers, they had influence beyond those organized. Farmers would have to pay union wages to
non-unionized laborers when unionized laborers worked for them, otherwise they
might go join the union. Other kinds of
spillover effects existed, even when no union locally backed the demands. Robert Long complained in his diary in 1867,
even before these unions were organized, about how one laborer of his,
dissatisfied with his wages, demanded a one shilling per week pay hike, because
of recent strikes in the adjacent county of Berkshire. He refused to grant it: "Was [this increase] likely when my
neighbours are paying the same as myself?"663 So even in the practical realm of gaining
higher wages or preventing further decline, the farmworkers' unions had weight
considerably beyond their numbers. As
Rule noted about trade unionism generally, it had influence beyond those
formally declared members through affecting the mores of the workplace in favor
of the workers:
For thousands more workers than can be counted in
membership statistics, a collective labour experience and response was central
even if amounting, on most occasions, to no more than a tacit insistence that
the customs and norms of the workplace be regarded, and was only episodically
dramatic.664
Comparing Two Subordinate Classes' Methods of
Resistance
The
English farmworkers' highest order achievement was the creation of unions, with
their permanent organization of members in a movement to resist the demands of
the dominant class. Due to how the
laborers still had some minimal rights and were considered part of their
society, albeit an oppressed, subordinate part, these allowed them to achieve
levels of organized resistance that were forever denied to African-American
slaves, whose very humanity was only reluctantly conceded by the Southern legal
system. The structure of English
society allowed them some ability to gain their ends within the system,
without having to totally overthrow it, as illustrated by the (male)
farmworkers eventually gaining the vote in 1884, something which the broad
majority of African-Americans in the South, besides the hiatus of
Reconstruction, were denied until the 1960s.
The covert "weapons of the weak" of daily infrapolitics are
the main tools used by a subordinate class when it has no formal means of
gaining redress for its grievances openly and legally. American slaves inevitably had to lean upon
covert and semi-covert day-to-day resistance more than the laborers because
they had no open means of legally resisting their masters, while the English
laborers did eventually gain and use such rights, despite all the obstacles
placed in their way. The English
laborers' advantage in possessing rights compared to the slaves is illustrated
by incidents in which Arch was harassed for holding assemblies of
laborers. In one instance,
demonstrating well the adage that knowledge is power, Arch dumbfounded farmers
opposed to his gathering, after a policeman told him he could not hold a
meeting on the village green of Pillinghurst, Sussex, by replying that
"any Englishman can stand on any public ground, and deliver a speech in
favour of a petition to the House of Commons?
I have a petition here for the House of Commons, and you must not touch
me." Similarly, his union won a
test case after deliberately holding a meeting in an area where three
local leaders of laborers were charged for supposedly blocking the Queen's
highway in the same spot. Actually,
since the primitive Methodists had held meetings there, this all was plainly a
pretense for finding some legal means to obstruct the union's efforts. This act of civil disobedience paid off--his
union won after showing they were not blocking any travelers, since enough
space existed around the crowd to allow them to pass around. Or, consider the implications of the
Anti-Corn Law meeting held in Upavon in the summer of 1845, featuring a laborer
as speaker, which had at least a thousand people attending it, mostly laborers
and their families. Although the speaker,
David Keele, had been fired for being at such a meeting before, he had found
work again.665
Here the laborers, although legally voteless, were actively
participating in the broader political questions of their nation--a level of
political participation unimaginable for American slaves. The American equivalent would be a thousand
slaves gathering to hear one of their number speak out against free trade
before the Civil War--the equivalent heresy on this issue to Southern
slaveholders. Impossible! Slaves had no right to freedom of assembly
at all, which inevitably destroyed any possible peaceful, organized attempts
for the redress of their grievances against their dominant class. All their organized efforts had to be
covert, and since their social system allowed no place for open complaints
against their rulers, it inevitably turned these efforts towards violence,
because open, organized, non-violent protest held no promises of success for
them. While the rights Hodge had were
often ignored or denied by his rulers, he still was able to use them to carve
out breathing space that protected open organized vehicles for resisting the
rural elite in time, while Sambo had no such rights legally to begin with,
causing open organized resistance to be necessarily violent, because his social
system prohibited any formal permanent structures by the subordinate class to
resist the dominant class.
Both
the farmworkers and slaves suffered from the oppression of their dominant
class, and both groups gained a reputation for being relatively quiescent,
compared to (say) Russian or French peasants or English and French urban
artisans. Both took to the use of
day-to-day resistance, through such acts as theft, lying, and (for the English
farmworkers) poaching, as the dominant means of resistance during most of the
period surveyed (1750-1875). Since
frontal attacks on the prerogatives of the dominant class were dangerous, both
groups were turned to covert, circular means of gaining their ends. The American slave ended up depending on
such means proportionately more, and sporting a thicker mask generally, because
the likely punishments for resistance were much more drastic and violent, and
their dominant class held proportionately more power over them, such as through
its ability to split up slave families as a tool of labor discipline. While the English ruling class was willing
to draw blood upon occasion, as Peterloo and the repressive measures following
the Swing Riots demonstrate, it was much less than that which followed the two
major American slave revolts (in the period 1750-1865) or even mere
conspiracies such as Vesey's.
Correspondingly, the level of violence employed by the slaves was much
higher than that used by English farmworkers, because corporal punishment
inflicted by masters, mistresses, and overseers sometimes spawned a violent
backlash effect when some slaves could take it no more, or refused whippings on
principle. The build-up of emotional
pressure was higher among the slaves due to the thicker mask they had to wear,
in avoiding (say) open insulting comments about their owners more continuously,
causing a stronger, more likely violent, venting of feelings when they were
released. The stories of overseers and
masters getting physically attacked, even killed, by slaves on the job are
many--anecdotes about the farmworkers doing likewise are hard to even find. Nat Turner's vision of "blood flow[ing]
in streams" contrasts sharply with Arch's counsel to a crowd of laborers
numbering in the hundreds, with the county's policemen watching, to avoid
violence, riot, and incendiarism, to "act as law-abiding citizens, not as
red-handed revolutionaries."666 The reasons for this difference was not due
to any of the intrinsic virtues or vices of Hodge as opposed to Sambo, but due
to the fundamentally differing legal statuses they held in their respective
societies, the level of violence routinely employed by their respective
dominant classes, and the resultant inability for one of these societies to
tolerate any open organized dissent by its subordinate class, while in the
other this was grudgingly granted.
The
farmworkers resisting also benefited from the English rural elite's relatively
greater divisions compared to Southern slaveholders. The farmers, since they generally rented the land they tilled,
were not necessarily at one with the local establishment of parson and squire,
seeing tithes and rents as drains upon their profits. They took advantage of the Swing Riots in East Anglia in order to
reduce both, as was described above (pp. 150, 274). Even among the gentry and clergy themselves, no perfect unity of
class interest existed, for some really did take paternalistic ideology
seriously to one degree or another, at least in times of dearth, even as
others, as the nineteenth century advanced, accepted the middle class
ideologies of Malthusianism and Classical economics. Some local magistrates during the Swing riots temporalized,
seeing the justice of the laborers' complaints to one degree or another, such
as those of Tunstead and Happing, Norfolk.
They recommended to the "owners and occupiers of the Land" to
discontinue the use of threshing machines and to raise the laborers' wages,
saying "no severe measures will be necessary" if these demands
of the laborers were granted.667 Although Arch and Cobbett accurately and
repeatedly described the reactionary tendencies and positions of the Anglican
clergy, an ideological divide existed among them that surely did not exist
among the clergy of the American South over slavery by the 1850s. Consider how the rector of Leintwardine
favored a farmworkers' union that began in his village, the rector of Petworth
strongly condemned aspects of the New Poor Law, as mentioned above, or the
Bishop of Manchester, Dr. Fraser, spoke in favor of Arch's union.668 The natural teleology of extending the
franchise starting with the Reform Bill of 1832 helped box in the English elite
into granting something that was not really in their best interests. The premises that underlay that bill were
gradually extended to the rest of the potential adult electorate in the century
that followed. By contrast, not only
were the slaveholders united as a class in their desires to keep their bondsmen
in bondage, but the poor whites could be counted upon to put the black man in
his place should he ever revolt or threaten to. The laborers' greater successes at resistance, especially in an
organized form, resulted not only from the more open nature of their social and
political system, but also from the greater divisions among the English rural
elite compared to the slaveholders in the Southern United States in the early
to mid-nineteenth century.
The
resistance of the laborers also had more positive benefits and fewer long-run
ill effects upon them than that of the slaves.
Due to the greater power of the slaveholding regime and its individual
masters and mistresses having been delegated the authority to use physical
violence against them, the slaves wore thicker masks than the laborers. Correspondingly, the slaves employed more
day-to-day resistance that had higher costs to it to themselves than the
laborers had to, such as through lies, shirking, and thefts. The overhang from such bad habits did not
disappear overnight after (semi-)freedom came, helping stunt their economic
progress during Reconstruction and afterwards.
The laborers, before the time their "freedom" came (arguably
with the vote in 1884), did not live under as harsh a regime, and had, even
outside the unions and various riots, more freedom of speech against their
betters, as Assistant Poor Law Commissioner Hawley had experienced first hand
while traveling the roads of rural England.
While the laborers also suffered some of the effects stemming from the
duplicity of mask-wearing, these were much more mild, and had the countervailing
effects of unionization towards the end of the surveyed period. The thinner the mask, the fewer the
ill-effects that came from the day-to-day resistance that accompanied it, which
placed the laborers in a more advantageous position for economic competition
compared to the slaves, over and above the problems caused by continuing racism
of American society long after the Civil War.
In short, because the English rural elite gave their subordinate class
more rights, the laborers were able to resist them much more openly and
continuously than the slaves were able to, lessening the intrinsic ill-effects
that came from many methods of infrapolitics that employed lying, stealing, and
shirking.
7.
CONCLUSIONS: THE BALANCE BETWEEN
"RESISTANCE" AND "DAMAGE"?
Resistance and the Subordinate Class's Quality of Life
For
those inclined to glorify any subordinate class's resistance and sufferings, a
standard conundrum lurks, ready to bite the unwary. Consider the dilemma facing socialist discourse that Dwight
MacDonald observed. On the one hand, if
one emphasizes the sufferings of the oppressed working class and the damage
inflicted on them by the capitalist regime, then its victims must have been
brutalized and deeply damaged psychologically.
On the other hand, if one emphasizes how powerfully and stalwartly the
workers stood up to their capitalist masters, it implies conditions must not
have been so bad after all.669 The worse the oppressions suffered by a
subordinate class are said to be, the less plausibly any effective resistance
occurred, and the more likely its members were infantilized or otherwise
damaged as effective human beings. The
mere act of resistance in itself implies the existence of resources, material
or legal, to do so, and the more effectively it is done, the more the resources
or breathing space the dominant class allowed it, whether by default or intention. The school that emphasizes oppression holds
to the "damage" or "victim" thesis, which Elkins's work,
with its concentration camp analogy, exemplifies in the historiography of
African-American slavery. The
"resistance" school extremities are reached by Angela Davis's journal
article, with its "Rah-Rah-Rah!" present-minded spirit, but it is
hardly alone. Shore suggests the need
to scrap the endless assault on Elkins's work--which he justly labels a "historiographical
disaster, seminal only in the sense that a caricature generates other
caricatures"--that turns the ordinary, the survivors, and the
time-servers, and just about everyone else in the subordinate class into heroes
for engaging in routine daily activities that got them by in life. One needs to cultivate more a sense of
tragedy, despair, defeat, and isolation about the struggles that enslaved
Americans--or, I may add, oppressed English farmworkers--without falling into
the trap of believing all or most were totally brutalized by their experience,
nor that all or most were heroes (like Frederick Douglass or John Little). When John Lindsey, once a slave himself,
portrays them due to slavery as having "their faces scarred and wrinkled,
and almost deprived of intelligence in some cases,--their manliness crushed
out; stooping, awkward in gait,--kept in entire ignorance," one should not
automatically reject this unflattering description.670 But neither should one then go to the
opposite extreme, and maintain all or the great majority were this way. Selective perception is simply deadly, since
it blocks a balanced picture of this institution, or of the conditions of English
laborers, split between major north and south variations in their standard of
living. What becomes evident above,
despite the (southern) English farmworkers had arguably a lower standard of
living than most American slaves, is that their superior legal status allowed
them a higher quality of life, including a greater ability to resist their
masters, and suffered less from the inevitable kick-backs coming from forced
accommodation and morally troublesome day-to-day resistance strategies. The successes of the English agricultural
workers in forming long-standing organizations, such as benefit clubs, and
(later) unions, dedicated to promoting solidarity among themselves and (for the
latter in particular) resistance against their masters, while American slaves
lacked these entirely, were a function of the English rural elite giving their
subordinate class much more breathing space in their legal system than Southern
slaveholders gave to theirs. The
differences had nothing to do with any intrinsic character flaws of slaves, but
rather the farmworkers gained greater organizational skills over the decades
through participating in Nonconformist sects, benefit clubs, friendly
societies, even unions, which their elite (often reluctantly) allowed them to
have, but the American slaveholders totally forbade their slaves from
developing (except perhaps in the religious sphere some). The English farmworkers had a superior
quality of life, since they could engage in more resistance, do it more openly,
and suffer from fewer kick-backs from the routine tactics a subordinate class
uses in infrapolitics.671
Slavery is on a Continuum of Social Systems of
Subordination
More
importantly, this work attempts to portray much of what occurred to these two
subordinate classes as hardly unique, even though some important differences
remained between the two due to different legal statuses and the results coming
from the laborers' families attempted to independently sustain themselves as an
economic unit, while almost no slaves did that. In both cases, the elites in question could not do as they
please, even when one of them, American slaveholders, had nearly absolute power
over their subordinate class. It is
necessary to avoid over-emphasizing the effectiveness the elite may have over
the minds of their subjects--a mistake Fogel and Engerman, Elkins, and Genovese
all commit to one degree or another, through whatever variation of hegemony
they applied to analyze American slavery.
Clark, in his English Society, may commit a similar error, but
since that work intentionally focuses on the beliefs and acts of the elite,
dealing with the subordinate classes only incidently, convicting him on this
score cannot be easily be done based on that work alone. Barrow had the self-deceit to maintain
that: "A plantation might be
considered as a piece of machinery, to operate successfully, all of its parts
should be uniform and exact, and the impelling force regular and steady; and
the master, if he pretended at all to attend to his business, should be their
impelling force."672
However, in the real world, especially when the numbers of slaves so
heavily outnumbered him and his family, his personal chattels' own ideas about
how the plantation should be run inevitably had much influence over its
practical functioning, even as he freely applied the lash and other
punishments. The same went for the
English elite when they faced restive laborers in their midst, especially that
small but powerful minority organized as part of a union: They simply could not always have their way,
regardless of their ability to create enclosures, raise food prices, lower
wages, change laws governing relief, employ new technology in agriculture, and
ending service, without being constrained by the fears of riots or arsons
breaking out against them.
The
above work has avoided seeing race as some kind of ultimate reality for the
American system of slavery, even as racism was necessary for its practical
functioning. Slaveholders felt
uncomfortable with especially light-skinned slaves, who could pass as whites or
nearly so. This was not only because
they could escape more easily, but also because the similarity in skin-color
made them reflect on the humanity and likeness to themselves of those they held
in bondage. William Pease, born a
slave, had blue eyes and passed for white among strangers. Three or four trading houses in slaves
refused to buy him because he "was too white for them." One slaveholder (not his master) told him
while on board a ship: "You're as
white as my daughter there . . . all you've got to do when we get to
a landing is take your clothes and walk."
He was able to escape from Arkansas without being questioned once. He fled because his master was going to whip
him, not for any specific offense, but because "niggers always should be
whipped some, no matter how good they are, else they'll forget that they are
niggers."673
Even in this case, Pease's condition of bondage trumped his light skin
color, even as it allowed him to easily escape, since he could be whipped as
much by his owner as the darkest-complexioned slave. The comparison made generally above places American slavery on a
continuum with other systems of social subordination, not seeing it as unique
in its effects on those oppressed, through comparing it with English
laborers. Correspondingly, "black
labor" and "slave labor" have intentionally not been equated above,
partly because 11 percent of all blacks in the South were free, but also
because the blacks' condition of bondage effected their treatment more than any
other factor. Even as it channeled the
expression of racism by a particular means, this particular social system had
many, many negative effects on the slaves over and above any directly resulting
from racism. Oppression is oppression,
whether done for reasons of race, profit, or power lust. American Slavery actually may have provided
a higher standard of living than most southern English laborers enjoyed, but a
much lower overall quality of life, because of how it provided inferior quality
human relationships between family members (by the dominant group breaking the
subordinate class's families up for profit-seeking reasons) and also between
workers and "management," generally considered, due to the slave
master's ability to use corporal punishment and confiscate the total product of
the slave's labor for his own benefit.
A
comparative historical analysis can bring insights to the surface that
otherwise would be missed, such as the above has done, so long as the
comparison does not involve two fruits as different as apples and oranges. Elkins's overriding mistake was to create a
comparison between an system of subordination designed to systematically
exterminate and destroy its subordinate class with another that had to keep it
in existence to profitably raise crops in commercial agriculture. By comparing two groups at nearly the same
time in nations with fairly similar cultures and technological levels, Elkins'
pitfall is avoided, while new insights are brought to the fore. New insights will continue to come, breaking
out of the rigid categories of "victimization" and
"Sambo-bashing" by others continuing to follow David Davis's
prediction: "I think it is not
improbable that future studies of slavery will be less concerned with race as
the ultimate reality, especially as we more accurately locate slavery on a
spectrum of labor systems."674
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Berry, Mary F. and John W. Blassingame. "Africa, Slavery, and the Roots of the Contemporary Black
Culture." Massachusetts Review
18 (autumn 1977):501-16.
Blassingame, John W.
"The Recruitment of Colored Troops in Kentucky, Maryland and Missouri, 1863-1865." Historian 39 (Aug. 1967):533-45.
Boney, F.N.
"Thomas Stevens, Antebellum Georgian." South Atlantic Quarterly 72 (spring 1973):226-42
Brown, Wallace.
"Negroes and the American Revolution." History Today 14 (Aug. 1964):556-63.
Campbell, John.
"Work, Pregnancy, and Infant Mortality among Southern Slaves." Journal of Interdisciplinary History
14 (spring 1984):793-812.
Cassell, Frank A.
"Slaves of the Chesapeake
Bay Area and the War of 1812." Journal of Negro History 57
(Apr. 1972):144-55.
Chaplin, Joyce E.
"Slavery and the Principle of Humanity: A Modern Idea in the
Early Lower South." Journal of
Social History 24 (winter 1990):299- 315.
Cimprich, John.
"Slave Behavior during the Federal Occupation of Tennessee, 1862-1865." Historian 44 (May 1982):335-46.
Cole, Johnetta.
"Affirmation of Resistance:
A Response to Angela Davis."
Massachusetts Review
13 (winter-spring 1972):100-103.
Crader, Diana C.
"Slave Diet at Monticello."
American Antiquity 55 (Oct. 1990):690-717.
Davis, Angela Y.
"Reflections on the Black Woman's Role in the Community of Slaves." Massachusetts Review 13
(winter-spring 1972):81-100.
Davis, David Brion.
"Slavery and the Post-World War II Historians." Daedalus 103 (spring 1974):1-16.
Davis, Jack E.
"Changing Places: Slave
Movement in the South." Historian
55 (summer 1993):657-76.
Degler, Carl N.
"The Foundations of Southern Distinctiveness." Southern Review 13 (spring 1977):225-39.
Dill, Bonnie Thornton. "Our Mothers' Grief:
Racial Ethnic Women and the Maintenance
of Families." Journal of Family
History 13 (1988):415-431.
Dunn, Richard S.
"'Dreadful Idlers' in the Cane Fields: The Slave Labor Pattern
on a Jamaican Sugar Estate, 1762-1831."
Journal of Interdisciplinary
History 17 (spring 1987):795-822.
Eltis, David.
"Nutritional Trends in Africa and the Americas: Heights of Africans,
1819-1839." Journal of
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Farrison, W. Edward.
"A Theologian's Missouri Compromise." Journal of Negro History 47 (Jan. 1963):33-43.
Freudenberger, Herman and Pritchett, Jonathan B. "The Domestic United States Slave Trade: New Evidence." Journal of Interdisciplinary History
21 (winter 1991):447-77.
Frey, Sylvia R.
"The British and the Black:
A New Perspective." Historian
38 (Feb. 1976):225-38.
Gallay, Alan.
"The Origins of Slaveholders' Paternalism: George Whitefield, the Bryan Family, and the Great Awakening in the
South." Journal of Southern History 53 (Aug.
1987):369-94.
Genovese, Eugene D.
"The Negro Laborer in Africa and the Slave South." Phylon
21 (winter 1960):343-50.
________.
"The Medical and Insurance Costs of Slaveholding in the Cotton Belt." Journal of Negro History 45 (July
1960):141-55.
Glass, Bentley, and C.C. Li. "The Dynamics of Racial Intermixture--an Analysis Based on the American
Negro." American Journal of
Human Genetics 5
(Mar. 1953):1-20.
Glass, Bentley.
"On the Unlikelihood of Significant Admixture of Genes from the North American Indians in the
Present Composition of the Negroes of the
United States." American
Journal of Human Genetics 7 (Dec. 1955):368-85.
Govan, Thomas P.
"Was the Old South Different?" Journal of Southern History 21 (Nov. 1955):447-55
Graham, Pearl M.
"Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemmings." Journal of Negro History 44 (Apr.
1961):89-103.
Gundersen, Joan Rezner. "The Double Bonds of Race and Sex: Black and White Women
in a Colonial Virginia Parish." Journal
of Southern History 52 (Aug.
1986):351-72.
Hayne, Barrie.
"Yankee in the Patriarchy:
T.B. Thorpe's Reply to Uncle Tom's Cabin." American Quarterly 20 (summer
1968):180-195.
Heuman, Gad.
"The Response of the Slaves."
History Today 34 (April 1984):31- 35.
Inscoe, John C.
"Carolina Slave Names: An
Index to Acculturation." Journal
of Southern History
49 (Nov. 1983):527-54.
Johnson, Michael P.
"Smothered Slave Infants:
Were Slave Mothers at Fault?"
Journal of Southern
History 47 (Nov. 1981):493-520.
Kilson, Marion D.deB.
"Towards Freedom: An
Analysis of Slave Revolts in the United
States." Phylon 25 (summer
1964):175-87.
King, Richard H.
"Marxism and the Slave South." American Quarterly 29 (spring 1977):117-131.
Kiple, Kenneth F., and Kiple, Virginia H. "Black Tongue and Black Men: Pellagra
and Slavery in the Antebellum South."
Journal of Southern History
43 (Aug. 1977):411-28.
Kolchin, Peter.
"More 'Time on the Cross'?
An Evaluation of Robert William Fogel's
'Without Consent or Contract.'" Journal
of Southern History 58 (Aug.
1992):491-502.
Lewis, Mary Agnes.
"Slavery and Personality: A
Further Comment." American Quarterly 19 (spring
1967):114-21.
Lichtenstein, Alex.
"'That Disposition to Theft, with which They Have Been Branded': Moral Economy, Slave Management, and the Law." Journal of Social History 21 (spring 1988):413-40.
Littlefield, Daniel C. "Plantations, Paternalism, and Profitability: Factors Affecting
African Demography in the Old British Empire." Journal of Southern
History 47 (May 1981):167-82.
Lowe, Richard G. and Campbell, Randolph B. "The Slave-Breeding Hypothesis: A Demographic
Comment on the 'Buying' and 'Selling' States." Journal of Southern
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McDaniel, Antonio.
"The Power of Culture: A
Review of the Idea of Africa's Influence
on Family Structure in Antebellum America." Journal of Family History
15 (1990):225-38.
McKenzie, Robert Tracy. "Freedmen and the Soil in the Upper South: The Reorganization
of Tennessee Agriculture, 1865-1880."
Journal of Southern
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May, Robert E.
"John A. Quitman and His Slaves:
Reconciling Slave Resistance with
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of Southern History 46 (Nov.
1980):551-70.
Messner, William F.
"Black Violence and White Response: Louisiana, 1862." Journal of Southern History
41 (Feb. 1975):19-38.
Miles, Edwin.
"The Mississippi Slave Insurrection Scare of 1835." Journal of Negro History 42 (Jan. 1957):48-60.
Mohr, Clarence L.
"Before Sherman: Georgia
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1979):331-52.
________.
"Slavery in Oglethorpe
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33 (spring 1972):4-21.
________.
"Southern Blacks in the Civil War:
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1974):177-95.
Morgan, Phillip D.
"The Ownership of Property by Slaves in the Mid- Nineteenth-Century Low
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"An Event in Community Organization: The Mississippi Slave
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1988): 93-111.
Nichols, Charles H.
"Who Read the Slave Narratives?" Phylon 20 (summer 1959):149-62.
Nichols, William W.
"Slave Narratives:
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1971):403-9.
O'Brien, Michael.
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Palmer, Paul C.
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Paquette, Robert L.
"Social History Update:
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Piersen, William D.
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Porter, Kenneth Wiggins. "Negroes and the Seminole War, 1835-1842." Journal of Southern History 30 (Nov. 1964):427-50.
Roberts, D.F.
"The Dynamics of Racial Intermixture in the American Negro--Some Anthropological
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Roediger, David R.
"And Die in Dixie:
Funerals, Death, and Heaven in the Slave
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1981):163- 83.
Scott, John A.
"On the Authenticity of Fanny Kemble's Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation in
1838-39." Journal of Negro
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Schafer, Judith Kelleher. "New Orleans Slavery in 1850 as Seen in Advertisements." Journal of Southern History 47 (Feb.
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Shore, Laurence.
"The Poverty of Tragedy in Historical Writing on Southern Slavery." South Atlantic Quarterly 85 (spring
1986):147-64.
Sides, Sudie Duncan.
"Slave Weddings and Religion:
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History Today 24 (Feb. 1974):77-87.
________.
"Southern Women and Slavery
Part I." History Today
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________.
"Southern Women and Slavery
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Smith, John David.
"'Keep'em in a Fire-Proof Vault'--Pioneer Southern Historians Discover Plantation
Records." South Atlantic
Quarterly 78 (summer
1979):376-91.
Stampp, Kenneth M.
"Rebels and Sambos: The
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Starobin, Robert.
"Disciplining Industrial Slaves in the Old South." Journal of Negro History 53 (Apr. 1968):111-28.
Sterne, Richard S., and Rothseiden, Jean Loftin. "Master-Slave Clashes as Forerunners of Patterns in Modern
American Urban Eruptions." Phylon
30 (fall
1969):251-60.
Stuckey, Sterling.
"Through the Prism of Folklore:
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Suttles, William C., Jr. "African Religious Survivals as Factors in American Slave Revolts." Journal of Negro History 56 (Apr.
1971):97-104.
Thompson, E.P.
"The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century." Past and Present, no. 50 (Feb. 1971),
pp. 76-136.
________.
"Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism." Past and Present, no. 38 (Dec. 1967), pp. 56-97.
Tulloch, Hugh.
"But the Cat Himself Knows:
Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South--A
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Van Deburg, William L. "Slave Drivers and Slave Narratives: A New Look at the 'Dehumanized Elite.'" Historian 39 (Aug. 1977):717-32.
Wade, Richard C.
"The Vesey Plot: A
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Watson, Alan D.
"Impulse Toward Independence:
Resistance and Rebellion Among North
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Wax, Darold D.
"Preferences for Slaves in Colonial America." Journal of Negro History 58 (Oct. 1973):371-401.
White, Deborah G.
"Female Slaves: Sex Roles
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South." Journal of Family
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White, J.P.
"Christmas at the Plantation." North American Review 278 (Nov./Dec.
1993):4-9.
Willis, William S.
"Divide and Rule: Red,
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1963):157-76.
Winkler, Allan M.
"Ulrich Bonnell Phillips: A
Reappraisal." South Atlantic Quarterly 71 (spring
1972):234-45.
Woodman, Harold D.
"The Profitability of Slavery:
A Historical Perennial." Journal of Southern History
29 (Aug. 1963):303-25.
Woolfolk, George R.
"Planter Capitalism and Slavery:
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Yellin, Jean Fagan.
"Written by Herself:
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American Literature
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Yetman, Norman R.
"The Background of the Slave Narrative Collection." American
Quarterly 19 (fall 1967):534-53.
Young, Jeffrey R.
"Ideology and Death on a Savannah River Rice Plantation, 1833-1867: Paternalism amidst 'a Good Supply of Disease and
Pain.'" Journal of Southern History 59 (Nov.
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Younger, Richard D.
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40 (Apr. 1955):166-78.
4. English
Farmworkers--Primary Works
Agar, Nigel E.
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Arch, Joseph. Joseph
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Caird, James. English
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Carpenter, Kenneth E., ed. The Rising of the Agricultural Labourers: Nine Pamphlets
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Deane, Phyllis.
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Hammond, J.L. and Hammond, Barbara. The Town Labourer 1760-1832: The New Civilisation. 2d. ed.
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Debate on Poverty: Eight Essays on
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Hobsbawm, Eric J. and Rude, George. Captain Swing. London:
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Huggett, Frank E.
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Kerr, Barbara.
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Marwick, Arthur.
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Snell, K.D.M. Annals
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Thompson, E.P.
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Vintage Books, Random
House, 1966.
6. English
Farmworkers--Secondary Works--Articles
Anscombe, J.W.
"Parliamentary Enclosure in Northamptonshire: Processes and Procedures."
Northamptonshire Past and Present 7 (1988-89):409-23.
Baker, Mark.
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74/75 (1981):61-69.
Beckett, J.V.
"The Debate over Farm Sizes in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century England." Agricultural History 57 (July
1983):308-25.
Brundage, Anthony; Eastwood, David; and Mandler,
Peter. "Debate The Making of
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Brundage, Anthony.
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Bushaway, R.W.
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Cirket, A.F.
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Claeys, Gregory.
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1987):23-29.
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Peek, Rosemary.
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42-51.
Perry, P.J.
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Agricultural History
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Perry, P.J.
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Razi, Zvi.
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Thirsk, Joan.
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________.
"Feeding England during the Industrial Revolution: A View from the Celtic Fringe."
Agricultural History 56 (Jan. 1982):328-42.
Thompson, E.P.
"The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century." Past and Present, no. 50 (Feb. 1971),
pp. 76-136.
________.
"Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism." Past and Present, no. 38 (Dec. 1967), pp. 56-97.
Thompson, F.M.L.
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Tranter, Neil.
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7.
Miscellaneous
Basic Works of Aristotle. Ed., Richard
McKeon. New York: Random House, 1941.
Gilder, George.
Men and Marriage.
Gilder, George.
Wealth and Poverty. New
York: Basic Books, Inc., 1981.
Huppert, George.
After the Black Death: A
Social History of Modern Europe. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1986.
Novick, Peter.
That Noble Dream: The
"Objectivity Question" and the American Historical Profession. New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1988).
The Collected Dialogues of Plato Including the Letters. Eds., Edith
Hamilton and Huntington
Cairns. Trans. of Republic, Paul
Shorey. Bollingen Series LXXI. Princeton, NJ: Princeton, University Press, 1961.
Scott, James C.
Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990.
Scott, Joan Wallach.
Gender and the Politics of History. New York: Columbia University Press, 1988.
Tocqueville, Alexis de. The Old Regime and the French Revolution. Translated by
Stuart Gilbert. 1856; New York: Anchor Books, Doubleday, 1955.
Weber, Eugen. Peasants
into Frenchmen: The Modernization of
Rural France, 1870-1914. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1976.
Wells, Herbert George. The Outline of History:
Being a Plain History of Mankind. Ed., Raymond Postgate. 2 vols.
Garden City, NY: Garden City Books, 1956.
SCAN AND PUT IN ESSAY DEALING WITH THE FALL AND RISE
IN THE BRITISH STANDARD OF LIVING DURING THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION, PUT IN
MITCHELL’S STATISTICS FROM “EUROPEAN HISTORICAL STATISTICS” (OR WHATEVER THE
TITLE IS). MAKE INTO AN APPENDIX.
1Robert E.
May, "John A. Quitman and His Slaves:
Reconciling Slave Resistance with the Proslavery Defense," Journal
of Southern History 46 (Nov. 1980):554; Jurgen Kuczynski, The Rise of
the Working Class (New York, 1967), p. 181, quoted in Eugene D. Genovese, Roll,
Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made
(New York: Vintage Books, Random House,
1976), p. 59; Edward P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class
(New York: Vintage Books, Random House,
1966), p. 231.
2Peter
Kolchin, Unfree Labor: American
Slavery and Russian Serfdom (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, Harvard University Press, 1987), p. ix.
3Being a
historian of both American labor history and of African-American slavery,
Herbert Gutman is a clear exception. As
explained below, Genovese in Roll, Jordan, Roll does use the insights of
E.P. Thompson on work discipline when analyzing the work ethic of the slaves,
but this should not be seen as typical.
4Kenneth
M. Stampp, The Peculiar Institution:
Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1956), p. 31.
5Joseph
Arch, Joseph Arch The Story of His
Life, ed. Countess of Warwick (London:
Hutchinson & Co., 1898), pp. 376-377, 389.
6R.M.
Hartwell, et al, Eight Essays on Industrialization and 'the Condition of
England' (n.p.: Institute of
Economic Affairs, 1972).
7Phyllis
Deane, The First Industrial Revolution, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 2d ed.,
pp. 13, 22. Of course, E.A. Wrigley and
R.S. Schofield's The Population History of England 1541-1871 (Cambridge,
England: Cambridge University Press,
1981) has revolutionized the subject of the growth of the English population
during the eighteenth century by ingeniously projecting backwards from the 1871
census.
8Planter
Bennet Barrow noted the taking of the "Cencus" in his Diary on May
31, 1840: "Taking the Cencus of
the United States--the products, cotten
corn horses mules
cattle Hogs sheep
Potatoes Poultry, quantity cloth
made, Fodder hay." Edwin Adams Davis, Plantation Life in the
Florida Parishes of Louisiana, 1836-1846 as Reflected in the Diary of Bennet H.
Barrow, Columbia University Studies in the History of American Agriculture,
no. 9 (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1943), p. 197. All sources
quoted in this work have the literal language retained, regardless of what
grammatical or spelling offenses they commit, with their original emphasis
kept, unless otherwise noted.
9For conditions
in Northumberland, see Great Britain, Parliament, Parliamentary Papers
(Commons), 1867-68, vol. xvii, Commission on the Employment of Children,
Young Persons and Women in Agriculture, first report, p. xiv. The British Parliamentary Sessional Papers
are hereafter referred to as BPP.
This report itself below may be called simply "Commission on
Employment in Agriculture."
10This
emphasis is disputable, especially when adopting Snell's approach of examining
what the poor themselves considered important.
Simply put, although food is a major part of the material standard of
living, it is not so important to the overall quality of life, excluding true
famine conditions. The distinction
between the quality of life and the standard of living is developed below. See K.D.M. Snell, Annals of the Labouring
Poor: Social Change and Agrarian
England, 1660-1900 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 9-14.
11Olmsted
commented, during his travels in eastern Texas before the Civil War: "The meals are absolutely invariable .
. . The bread is made of corn-meal,
stirred with water and salt, and baked in a kettle covered with coals. The corn for breakfast is frequently
unhusked at sunrise. . . . Wheat bread, if I am not mistaken, we met with but
twice, out of Austin, in our whole journey across the State." Frederick Law Olmsted, The Cotton
Kingdom: A Traveller's Observations on
Cotton and Slavery in the American Slave States, 2 vols. (New York: Mason Brothers, 1861), 1:368-69. While visiting Neu-Braunfels, Texas, he found
no wheat in the market. Frederick Law
Olmsted, The Slave States, ed. Harvey Wish (New York: Capricorn Books, 1959), p. 158.
12Benjamin
Drew, A North-side View of Slavery
The Refugee: or the Narratives
of Fugitive Slaves in Canada (Boston:
John P. Jewett and Co., 1856; reprint ed., New York: Johnson Reprint, 1968), pp. 71, 381. Olmsted, The Cotton Kingdom,
2:109. See also 1:102 and 2:172,
241. Testifying to the nearly universal
racism of whites, North or South, racial slurs are quoted when found in the
sources. B.A. Botkin, ed., Lay My
Burden Down: A Folk History of Slavery
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1945), p. 172; Frederick Douglass, Narrative
of the Life of Frederick Douglass: An
American Slave Written by Himself
(1845; reprint ed., New York: New
American Library/Penguin, 1968), p. 28; Slavery in the United States: A Narrative of the Life and Adventures of
Charles Ball, a Black Man (New York:
John S. Taylor, 1837; reprint ed., New York: Kraus Reprint Co., 1969), pp. 42-43.
13Further
evidence for the near universality of the "standard ration" appears
in Kenneth F. Kiple and Virginia H. Kiple, "Black Tongue and Black
Men: Pellagra and Slavery in the
Antebellum South," Journal of Southern History, 43 (Aug. 1977) 413,
n. 7; Robert William Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman, Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery,
2 vols. (Boston: Little, Brown &
Co., 1974), 1:110; Richard Sutch in Paul A. David, et al., Reckoning with
Slavery: A Critical Study in the
Quantitative History of American Negro Slavery (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), p. 235.
14John W.
Blassingame, The Slave Community:
Plantation Life in the Antebellum South, rev. and enl. ed. (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1979),
p. 254.
16Linda
Brent, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861; reprint ed., San
Diego: Harvest/HBJ Book, Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich, Publishers, 1973), p. 11.
Because of its rather incredible events and novelistic "feel,"
this narrative has had its authenticity questioned in years past. But more recently excellent evidence for its
authenticity has appeared. See Jean Fagan
Yellin, "Written by Herself:
Harriet Jacobs' Slave Narrative," American Literature, 53
(Nov. 1981):479-86. Nevertheless, the
feel of a morality tale still hangs over it.
It tells the story of one slaveholder who supposedly on his deathbed
shrieked, "I am going to hell; bury my money with me." When his eyes failed to close after his
death, silver dollars were laid on them!
This "incident," which she did not personally witness, sounds
suspiciously like what this master's slaves wished and felt ought to have
happened than what did in fact happen. Incidents,
pp. 46-47.
17"Compensated
undernutrition," the dietetic condition in which the human body operates
at a lower metabolic rate due to months or years of low caloric intake, may
also explain how slaves lived on such rations without great physical
damage. See David Eltis,
"Nutritional Trends in Africa and the Americas: Heights of Africans, 1819-1839," Journal of
Interdisciplinary History, 12 (winter 1982):471. This condition still makes its sufferers less energetic, less
mentally alert--and more easy to control.
19Some
gathered evidence indicates the average height of American-born slaves was
greater than their African counterparts.
See Eltis, "Nutritional Trends," 453-75. For the greater natural population growth of
Southern slaves as contrasted with those elsewhere in the Americas, see Fogel
and Engerman, Time on the Cross, 1:25-29. Frederick Douglass believed "in the part of Maryland from
which I came, it is the general practice,--though there are many
exceptions" that the slaves were fed enough. Narrative, p. 65.
20Fogel
and Engerman, Time on the Cross, 1:109-115; Robert William Fogel and
Stanley L. Engerman, Time on the Cross
Evidence and Methods--A Supplement (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1974), 2:90-99;
Richard Sutch in David, Reckoning, pp. 231-283.
21William
D. Piersen, "White Cannibals, Black Martyrs: Fear, Depression, and Religious Faith as Causes of Suicide among
New Slaves," Journal of Negro History, 62 (Apr. 1977):153. He also notes that clay eating could be used
to feign illness, which suddenly makes it a labor discipline issue. Fogel and Engerman cite Twyman in denial of
this interpretation: Time on the
Cross, 2:99. But Sutch strongly
rebutts their claims that this practice does not occur due to vitamin
deficiencies, noting their selective quotation of Twyman. See David, Reckoning with Slavery,
pp. 277-79, n. 129.
Kiple and Kiple, "Black Tongue," 411-28;
Sutch in David, Reckoning, pp. 270-81.
In Fogel and Engerman's defense, however, it should be noted Eltis found
a nutritional survey of Nigeria of the 1960s that indicated Africans got lower
amounts of riboflavin and thiamine than Southern slaves. They also had lower calorie and protein
intakes. See "Nutritional
Trends," 470.
23Douglass,
Narrative, p. 65; Botkin, Lay My Burden Down, pp. 26, 120; my
emphasis, Olmsted, Cotton Kingdom, 2:241; Frances Ann Kemble, Journal
of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation in 1838-1839 (New York: Harper & Bros., Publishers, 1863), p.
65; Solomon Northrup, Twelve Years a Slave, eds. Sue Eakin and Joseph
Logsdon (1853; reprint ed., Baton Rouge, LA:
Louisiana State University Press, 1968), p. 153; Brown is found in F.N.
Boney, "The Blue Lizard: Another
View of Nat Turner's Country on the Eve of Rebellion," Phylon, 31
(winter 1970):356.
25Kemble, Journal,
p. 18. Note how similar Henderson's
experience was to what household servants in Georgia Kemble saw who had
"even less comfort [than field hands], in one respect, inasmuch as no time
whatever is set apart for their meals, which they snatch at any hour and in any
way that they can--generally, however, standing, or squatting on their hams
round the kitchen fire." Journal,
p. 66; Drew, Refugee, p. 156.
27Kemble, Journal,
p. 314; Mary Boykin Chesnut, A Diary from Dixie, ed. Ben Ames Williams
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1949),
p. 24; Orland Kay Armstrong, Old Massa's People: The Old Slaves Tell Their Story (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1931), pp. 31, 109, 110.
29Evidently,
the habits of excessively chopping up the bones affected even the master's
table sometimes. Kemble said her slave
cook/butcher had such "barbarous ignorance" that she challenged
"the most expert anatomist to pronounce on any piece (joints they can not
be called) of mutton brought to our table to what part of the animal sheep it
originally belonged." Her eventual
solution was to teach him how to butcher it properly, demonstrating on the
carcass of what her cook pronounced "de beutifullest sheep de missis eber
saw." See Kemble, Journal,
pp. 196-98.
30Crader,
"Slave Diet," 698-703, 708-10, 713-15. Jefferson had distributed the largest amounts of fish to various
more favored slaves, including some domestic servants, and some very old field
workers.
31Botkin, Lay
My Burden Down, p. 90; see also p. 84; Northrup, Twelve Years a Slave,
p. 153; Kemble, Journal, pp. 20, 216; Douglass, Narrative, p. 42;
Crader, "Slave Diet," p. 698.
See also Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll, pp. 487-88.
32Botkin, Lay
My Burden Down, pp. 90, 121; Olmsted, Cotton Kingdom, 2:238-39;
Davis, Plantation Life, p. 409.
See also pp. 51-52. Barrow's
diary entry for March 19, 1842, p. 253 indicates he let them have their own
pieces of land: "All hands
repairing their Gardens;" Kemble, Journal, pp. 47-49; John Spencer
Bassett, The Southern Plantation Overseer as Revealed in His Letters
(Northampton, MA: Smith College, 1925),
p. 187. See also pp. 203, 210 for
discussions by this overseer concerning paying her slaves.
33Olmsted,
Cotton Kingdom, 2:241; Douglass, Narrative, p. 66; Drew, Refugee,
p. 278; Kemble, Journal, pp. 134, 278; Boney, "The Blue Lizard,"
356.
34Crader,
"Slave Diet," 704-5; for Payne's and Cato's testimony and the evidence
for buttermilk, see Botkin, Lay My Burden Down, pp. 84, 112, 127, 147;
Davis, Plantation Life, p. 409; Olmsted, Cotton Kingdom,
1:320. Olmsted spotted while in
Mississippi one slave woman smoking a pipe!
Cotton Kingdom, 2:69; Bassett, Plantation Overseer, pp.
25-27; Stampp, Peculiar Institution, pp. 370-71. For more on slave theft, see pp. 338-40
below.
35For regional
wage variations, see John L. Rule, The Labouring Classes in Early Industrial
England, 1750-1850 (New York:
Longman Group, 1986), p. 48, and the frontispiece of James Caird, English
Agriculture in 1850-51, 2d ed. (London:
Longman, Brown, Green, & Longmans, 1852); In southern Lancashire,
James Caird (p. 284) found that "native labour is so scarce that the
farmers declare they could not get on at all without the aid of the
Irish." See also pp. 511-13;
Thompson, Making, p. 219; Brinley Thomas, "Escaping from
Constraints: The Industrial Revolution
in a Malthusian Context," Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 15
(spring 1985): 746; Caird, English Agriculture, p. 511. Brinley cites this source, but how he
derives the 26 percent figure remains obscure.
36Arch, Joseph
Arch, p. 12; The rector and Conservative was in the Times, quoted by
Frederick Law Olmsted, The Walks and Talks of an American Farmer in England
(1859; reprint ed., Ann Arbor, MI:
University of Michigan Press, 1967), p. 243.
37William
Cobbett, Rural Rides in the Counties of Surrey, Kent, Sussex, Hampshire,
Wiltshire, Gloucestershire, Herefordshire, Worcestershire, Somersetshire,
Oxfordshire, Berkshire, Essex, Suffolk, Norfolk, and Hertfordshire, ed.
E.W. Martin (1830; reprint ed., London:
MacDonald & Co., 1958), pp. 110, 254-55, 276. Since Cobbett visited areas in the
economically depressed south, what he witnessed cannot safely be extrapolated
to the north of England.
38W.H.
Hudson, A Shepherd's Life:
Impressions of the South Wiltshire Downs, new Am. ed. (New
York: E.P. Dutton & Co., 1921), p.
81; Alexander Somerville, The Whistler at the Plough, ed. K.D.M. Snell
(Manchester, England: J. Ainsworth,
1852; reprint ed., London, Merlin Press, 1989; Fairfield, NJ: Augustus Kelley, 1989), pp. 38, 75, 119,
264; Olmsted, Walks and Talks, pp. 243-44; Great Britain, Parliament, BPP,
1837, vol. xvii, Reports from the Select Committee to Inquire into the
Administration of the Relief of the Poor under the Provisions of the Poor Law
Amendment Act with Minutes of Evidence and Appendices, part 1, second report,
pp. 3, 7-8, 14-15. Below, this report
may be referred to simply as "Committee on the New Poor Law"; Phyllis
Deane and W.A. Cole, British Economic Growth 1688-1959 (1962), p. 75,
quoted in Brinley Thomas, "Feeding England During the Industrial
Revolution: A View from the Celtic
Fringe," Agricultural History 56 (Jan. 1982): 338.
39Somerville,
Whistler, pp. 119-20; Hudson, Shepherd's Life, pp. 220-21;
Thomas, "Feeding England," p. 331.
See also Rule, Labouring Classes, pp. 51-53; E.P. Thompson,
"The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteen Century," Past
and Present, no. 50 (February 1971), p. 80 (Charles Smith); Thomas,
"Escaping from Constraints," p. 747; J.L. Hammond and Barbara
Hammond, The Village Labourer (1911; reprint ed., London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1966), p.
123. However, Caird found in Lancashire
by 1850, compared to 1770, that "oat-bread" had become "much
superseded, even in the country districts, by wheaten bread" which now
sold at a slightly lower price. English
Agriculture, pp. 283-84.
40Cobbett,
Rural Rides, p. 110; Cobbett as cited by Somerville, Whistler p. 296.
Once when on a stagecoach Somerville and his fellow passengers talked
about the relative merits of the crops in Suffolk and Buckingham. After discussing what kinds they liked to
eat, he asked the stagecoach's guard what type of potatoes he liked. He replied:
"Give me . . . good old English fare, and good old
English times, and dang your potatoes and railroads both!" Whistler, p. 50.
42Richard
Jefferies, Hodge and His Masters, 2 vols. (1880; reprint ed., London: MacGibbon & Kee, 1966), 2:71; See Arthur
Young's comment in Hammond and Hammond, Village Labourer, p. 122;
Thompson, "Moral Economy," p. 81; see also footnote 19, p. 82.
44Caird, English
Agriculture, pp. 84-85; Somerville, Whistler, pp. 18, 32; Jefferies,
Hodge, 1:78; Olmsted, Walks and Talks, p. 237.
45Great
Britain, Parliament, BPP, 1824, vol. VI, Select Committee on Labourers'
Wages, as found in Nigel E. Agar, The Bedfordshire Farm Worker in the
Nineteenth Century (n.p.:
Publications of the Bedfordshire Historical Record Society) 60
(1981):66. Indicating that conditions
for unskilled laborers had changed little even during the First World War, the
sample menus for a lower middle class household were far superior to a
laborer's in Peel's Eat-Less-Meat-Book of 1917. Some agricultural laborers still ate up to
fourteen pounds of bread a week during the First World War. (Unlike Germany, the diets of the English
working class on the whole actually improved during World War I). Arthur Marwick, The Deluge: British Society and the First World War
(Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1965;
reprint ed., New York: W.W. Norton
& Co., 1970), pp. 123-25, 135, 193, 196-200
46Jeffries,
Hodge, 1:72; an example of such moralizing is in 2:80-91; Olmsted, Walks
and Talks, p. 243.
47Arch, Joseph
Arch, pp. 221-22; Commission on Employment in Agriculture, BPP,
1867-68, pp. vii, xii-xiii.
48Commission
on Employment in Agriculture, BPP, 1867-68, pp. xvii, xx; Somerville, Whistler,
p. 128; John Burnett, ed., Useful Toil:
Autobiographies of Working People from the 1820s to the 1920s (1974;
reprint ed., London: Routledge, 1994),
pp. 51-52.
49Comparing
slaves given rations largely regardless of work done and laborers earning wages
presents some theoretical problems.
Normally, slaves earned no wages, except for extra work outside normal
hours, and were given a ration of food each week or month regardless of the
amount of work done. But the
agricultural laborers, if they had no access to a commons, an allotment, or
were not under a yearly contract as a farm servant, had their standard of
living virtually defined by their wages.
So when examining their diets, wages stand as a partial proxy for
comparison purposes when specific information on pounds of food eaten per
person per week are not available for the laborers.
50Somerville,
Whistler, pp. 32, 335-36; See also p. 120; Committee on the New Poor
Law, BPP, 1837, second report, p. 8; Cobbett, Rural Rides, p.
400; Phillip D. Morgan, "The Ownership of Property by Slaves in the
Mid-Nineteenth-Century Low Country," Journal of Southern History,
49 (Aug. 1983):399-420; For butcher's meat as a luxury, see Caird, English
Agriculture, p. 29 and Somerville, Whistler, p. 228.
51Jefferies,
Hodge, 1:97. Jefferies portrayed
one old farmer who rose by practicing the utmost parsimony. But as he grew older and his teeth weaker,
he started ordering butcher's meat. His
equally stingy wife furiously opposed this luxury, which normally was one leg
of mutton each week. His teeth could no
longer take "the coarse, fat, yellowy bacon that [had] formed the
staple" of his diet, "often . . . with the bristles
thick upon it." Hodge,
1:55.
52Great
Britain, Parliament, BPP, 1843, vol. VII, Report from Select Committee
on Labouring Poor (Allotments of Land), pp. 3, 12, 14, 20, 113. This report may be referred to simply as
"Committee on Allotments" below.
53Thompson,
Making, p. 217; Commission on Employment in Agriculture, BPP,
1867-68, first report, p. il; Arthur Young, General Report on
Enclosures: Drawn up by Order of the
Board of Agriculture (London: B.
McMillan, 1808; reprint ed., New York:
Augustus M. Kelly, Publishers, 1971), pp. 14, 150-52; Somerville, Whistler,
p. 42.
54For the
influence of the Swing Riots on allotments, see Hammond and Hammond, Village
Labourer, p. 157; Committee on Allotments, BPP, 1843, pp. ii-iv;
Young, General Report, pp. 47, 107, 166, 348-50; Commission on
Employment in Agriculture, BPP, 1867-68, p. xxv.
56Thomas
Smart, father of thirteen children with seven still living when he was
forty-six years old, was asked by the Select Committee on Labourers'
Wages: "Do you know any labourers
with so large family as you have, who have brought them up without assistance
from the parish?" He replied: "Never one but me." (He mentioned having taken burial expenses
from the parish, but nothing else earlier).
BPP, 1824, vol. VI, pp. 53-56, as in Agar, Bedfordshire Farm
Worker, pp. 64-65, 67.
59Edward
Butt, a relief officer for Petworth union, Sussex, stated that he resigned from
that position not just because of a 20l./year salary cut, but also
because: "I was hurt in my
feelings to see the pitiful cries of the poor; it would hurt any man to see a
parcel of young children, and have no more to give, it would touch the heart of
a flint-stone; I could not bear it; I did not wish to mention that [initially
to the Committee]." Committee on
the New Poor Law, BPP, 1837, second report, p. 6.
60Davis, Plantation
Life, p. 409. See also pp.
46-47. On p. 114 he says: "Gave women Calico dress." For blankets given, see pp. 219-20 (seventy
bought); p. 377 (thirty bought); Drew, Refugee, pp. 155-156
(Henderson) Admittedly, since he was
mostly a child during this period, he was not likely to be issued a blanket
individually; Olmsted, Cotton Kingdom, 1:105, 193, 200-210, 211; For pay
for working irregular times, see Ball, Slavery in the United States, p.
44.
62Botkin, Lay
My Burden Down, p. 122; For exceptions, see pp. 81, 85; Douglass, Narrative,
pp. 43, 44; For Finch's and Epp's recollections, see Armstrong, Old Massa's
People, pp. 72, 73; Charles Ball of Maryland said that "Children not
able to work in the field, were not provided with clothes at all, by their
masters." Slavery in the United
States, p. 44.
63Stampp, Peculiar
Institution, pp. 289-90; Olmsted, Cotton Kingdom, 1:52. However, exceptions occurred: While visiting one neighboring (and
declining) plantation on a Georgian sea island, Kemble encountered barefoot,
"half-naked negro women" who "brought in refreshments." Journal, p. 296. Similar standards likely prevailed for many
rural small slaveholders in the interior regions of the South.
64Botkin,
Lay My Burden Down, pp. 141-42; Olmsted, Cotton Kingdom, 1:242;
George P. Rawick, ed., The American Slave:
A Composite Autobiography 19 vols. (1972-: Westport), South Carolina Narratives, II (2), 36, quoted
in Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll, p. 370.
65Botkin, Lay
My Burden Down, p. 145; Northrup, Twelve Years a Slave, p. 164;
Kemble, Journal, p. 281; Olmsted, Cotton Kingdom, 1:211. He commented while in Virginia, p. 105: "On Sundays and holidays they usually
look very smart, but when at work, very ragged and slovenly."
66Charles
Ball chose to stop wearing the straw hat his wife gave him while working. He feared standing out since he was the only
slave on the plantation with a hat.
Ball, Slavery in the United States, p. [1]47.
68Botkin, Lay
My Burden Down, p. 63; Armstrong, Old Massa's People, pp. 188,
193-195; Olmsted, Cotton Kingdom, 2:68-69; Joan Rezner Gundersen,
"The Double Bonds of Race and Sex:
Black and White Women in a Colonial Virginia Parish," Journal of
Southern History, 52 (Aug. 1986):369; Bassett, The Plantation Overseer,
p. 180.
70Bassett
maintained going barefoot in warm weather was expected. Plantation Overseer,
p. 271; the testimony of Reynolds and Kinney is in Botkin, Lay My Burden
Down, pp. 82, 122; Davis, Plantation Life, p. 239; Brent, Incidents,
pp. 17-18; Douglass, Narrative, p. 43; for an exception, see Cicero
Finch of Georgia in Armstrong, Old Massa's People, p. 72; Olmsted, Cotton
Kingdom, 1:104. Curiously, Olmsted
found in one area of Tennessee a majority of poor whites routinely went
barefoot in winter, even when the snow was four or five inches deep without
thinking it was much of a problem! Cotton
Kingdom, 2:128.
71Bassett,
Plantation Overseer, p. 271; Davis, Plantation Life, pp. 82, 101,
133, 213, 342, 409; for the use of local cobblers, see Armstrong, Old
Massa's People, p. 188; Botkin, Lay My Burden Down, p. 63.
72Fogel
and Engerman, Time on the Cross, 1:116-17; Sutch in David, Reckoning,
pp. 298-99; Ball, Slavery in the United States, pp. 146-[1]47; cf.
Stampp, Peculiar Institution, pp. 289, 291-92.
73Rule, Labouring
Classes, pp. 66-67; Somerville, Whistler, p. 382; Arch, Joseph
Arch, p. 31; Cobbett, Rural Rides, p. 96.
74Cobbett,
Rural Rides, pp. 51, 306, 433; Somerville, Whistler, p. 281;
Having one set of clothes is mentioned in Rule, Labouring Classes, p.
68.
77Caird, English
Agriculture, p. 73; Anonymous, A Country Rector's Address to His
Parishioners (London: Hatchard
& Son; and C.J.G. & F. Rivington; and J. Swinnerton, Macclesfield,
1830), p. 19; A Plain Statement of the Case of the Labourer; for the
Consideration of the Yeomen and Gentlemen of the Southern Districts of England
(London: Whittaker, Treacher, and
Arnot, 1830; and Winchester: Robbins
and Wheeler, 1830), p. 24; reprint ed., Kenneth E. Carpenter, ed., The
Rising of the Agricultural Labourers:
Nine Pamphlets and Six Broadsides 1830-1831, British Labour
Struggles: Contemporary Pamphlets
1727-1850 (New York: Arno Press, New
York Times Co., 1972). The latter's
sample budgets, with their modicum of comfort, are found on pp. 4, 21-23. When compared to the testimony of Thomas
Stuart, a Bedfordshire farm laborer, they appear realistic. This man spent fifteen shillings a year
"for a pair of strong shoes to go to work in," and the sample budget
said men's shoes cost thirteen shillings.
He spent less on shoes for the rest of his family than the sample budget
did, however, saying his whole family in one year "stands me in 2 £ for
shoe bills." See the excerpt of
the Select Committee on Labourers' Wages, BPP, 1824, vol. VI, in Agar, Bedfordshire
Farm Worker, p. 67.
80Jenny
Proctor of Alabama remembered that some cracks were chinked up and some were
not. Marion Johnson, once a slave in
Louisiana, could count the stars through the cracks in his mother's cabin. Millie Evans of North Carolina recalled that
"nice dirt floors was the style then." Showing the master was not especially neglectful for one quarters
of twelve cabins, ex-slave Rose Williams regarded it as good in quality, yet
still noted: "There am no floor,
just the ground." Botkin, Lay
My Burden Down, pp. 62, 89, 139, 161.
Solomon Northrup described his cabin as being built of logs, without
window or floor, with large crevices letting in the necessary light and
unnecessary rain! Northrup, Twelve
Years a Slave, p. 128.
81Drew, Refugee,
p. 155. Kemble found similar conditions
at St. Annie's, in which the bondsmen's homes failed to keep out the rain. Journal, p. 239; Booker T.
Washington, Up From Slavery (1901; New York: Airmount Publishing Company, 1967), pp. 15-16; Olmsted, Cotton
Kingdom, 1:207.
Olmsted, Cotton Kingdom, 1:38, 340, 373;
Kemble, Journal, p. 242; Botkin, Lay My Burden Down, p. 75.
83Olmsted,
Cotton Kingdom, 1:52, 237-38; 2:166, 193, 195; Armstrong, Old Massa's
People, p. 57; Marion Johnson's testimony in Botkin, Lay My Burden Down,
p. 139.
84Olmsted,
Cotton Kingdom, 1:360, 373-74; 2:44-45 (generally), 2:4-5 (Texas),
2:105-106 (Mississippi), 2:112 (Alabama); Kemble, Journal, p. 116, 248;
see also Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll, pp. 532-34.
85Fogel
and Engerman, Time on the Cross, 1:116; Sutch in David, Reckoning,
p. 294; Kemble, Journal, p. 30.
The housing comparisons with the sea-island cotton estate and other
local places are on pp. 178-79, 187, 234, 236, 242; Bassett, Plantation
Overseer, p. 262; Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll, p. 525; Blassingame,
Slave Community, p. 254; Stampp, Peculiar Institution, pp.
294-95. Genovese's portrayal of the
poor whites' housing conditions is similar to the above. Roll, Jordan, Roll, pp. 533-34.
87Frederick
Law Olmsted, A Journey in the Seaboard Slave States in the Years 1853-1854
with Remarks on Their Economy (New York, 1856; reprint ed., New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1904), 2:317. Genovese's reference to pp. 659-60 is to the
1856 edition. Also see Olmsted, Cotton
Kingdom, 1:320; Kemble, Journal, pp. 24, 134-315, 234; cf. pp.
66-67.
88Olmsted,
Cotton Kingdom, 2:218; Bonnie Thornton Dill, "Our Mothers'
Grief: Racial Ethnic Women and the
Maintenance of Families," Journal of Family History, 13 (1988):420;
Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll, pp. 462-63.
89Kemble, Journal,
p. 23, 24, 30-31, 213. Interestingly,
Kemble's work features not only an almost complete lack of racism, but a nearly
continual rebuttal against it, which was surely rare for whites living in
America. Perhaps it was in part due to
her being an Englishwoman, for Jacobs experienced no racism in England, unlike
in the North: "During all that
time [ten months in England], I never saw the slightest symptom of prejudice
against color." Incidents in
the Life of a Slave Girl, p. 190; compare pp. 180-82.
90Crader,
"Slave Diet," pp. 694, 713; Davis, Plantation Life, pp. 153,
190. See also Stampp, Peculiar
Institution, p. 311; Note Harriett Payne's comments, Botkin, Lay My
Burden Down, p. 147.
91As Fogel
and Engerman, Time on the Cross, 1:121 note: "Few matters were more frequently emphasized in the
instructions to overseers than the need to insure not only the personal
cleanliness of slaves but also the cleanliness of their clothes, their bedding,
and their cabins." Since such
instructions were likely those written by the owners of the largest and
best-established plantations, naturally any paternalistic impulses on hygiene
would show up disproportionately in whatever records Fogel and Engerman
examined. Nevertheless, as Kemble's
husband's two plantations demonstrate, even large, long-established plantations
could be very ill-kept places populated with ill-washed slaves.
93David
Hoseason Morgan, Harvesters and Harvesting 1840-1900: A Study of the Rural Proletariat
(London: Croom Helm, 1982), pp. 184-85.
95Ibid.,
pp. 75-76. See also Commission on
Employment in Agriculture, BPP, 1867-68, first report, p. xxv.
96Under
the settlement law of 1662, a newly arrived worker to one parish could be
forcibly removed to his parish of origin/settlement if he or she was likely to
become chargeable (i.e., take relief) within 40 days of arrival, at the expense
of the parish of settlement. But starting
in 1795, the law prohibited evicting the poor until they became actually
chargeable to the parish, and it switched the expense of removal to the parish
ordering the eviction. See Deane, First
Industrial Revolution, p. 153.
98Rule, Labouring
Classes, p. 76; Arch, Joseph Arch, pp. 44, 127. He cited the 1867-68 Parliamentary
Commission on conditions in agriculture to bolster his case. Admittedly, as a union leader, he had an
incentive to exaggerate how common bad conditions were; Somerville, Whistler,
pp. 172, 380; See the testimony of Emma Thompson and Mark Crabtree in Agar, Bedfordshire
Farm Worker, pp. 90-91, 127; Parliamentary History, Feb. 12, 1797,
as cited in the Commission on Employment in Agriculture, BPP, 1867-68,
first report, p. iv.
99Rule, Labouring
Classes, pp. 78-81; The Vicar of Terrington as quoted in John Patrick,
"Agricultural Gangs," History Today, March 1986, p. 24. Similar concerns also appear in Commission
on Employment in Agriculture, BPP, 1867-68, first report, pp.
24-25. Caird incidently noted this
problem. English Agriculture, p.
516.
100Somerville,
Whistler, p. 271; Olmsted, Walks and Talks, p. 239. Similarly, Somerville denied a certain Mr.
Bennet's statement that England was "highly civilized" if he included
the laborers, especially since they no longer ate and lived in the farmers' own
homes. Whistler, p. 147.
101Rule, Labouring
Classes, p. 81; Olmsted, Walks and Talks, p. 239, mentions a
minister who declared society intentionally and permanently should always have
one part dependent on the charity of another part.
102Rule, Labouring
Classes, p. 78; Arch, Joseph Arch, p. 44; Olmsted, Walks and
Talks, pp. 76, 208-10.
103Commission
on Employment in Agriculture, BPP, 1867-68, first report, p. xxv;
Somerville, Whistler, p. 380; Caird, English Agriculture, p. 389.
104According
to Edward Butt, before the French Revolution cottages went for
40-50s./year. Two guineas for a cottage
with a garden was common. Committee on
the New Poor Law, BPP, 1837, second report, p. 8; Commission on
Employment in Agriculture, BPP, 1867-68, first report, p. xxv; For the
cottage-owner's comments, see Committee on the New Poor Law, BPP, 1837,
first report, p. 14; Somerville, Whistler, p. 416.
105Caird, English
Agriculture, pp. 161, 197, 516; Commission on Employment in Agriculture, BPP,
1867-68, first report, pp. xvi, xxv, xliv.
106Commission
on Employment in Agriculture, BPP, 1867-68, pp. xi, xv (improving
cottage quality), lv (profitability problem); Committee on New Poor Law, BPP,
1837, first report, p. 14; Caird, English Agriculture, p. 125;
107Caird, English
Agriculture, pp. 76, 98 (Duke of Wellington), 182 (Duke of Bedford), 197,
516. Somerville made similar
observations about Wellington's cottages, adding that these were "the best
cottages and gardens given to the poor at their rent (£3 10s. a-year) that I
have seen in any part of the kingdom."
Whistler, p. 131; Agar, Bedfordshire Farm Worker, pp. 21
(Culley's observation), 69 (Duke of Bedfordshire), 301 (Lord Beverly), 389-90
(Northumberland/Waterford), 401-2 (Duke of Devonshire); Commission on
Employment in Agriculture, BPP, 1867-68, first report, p. xvi;
Somerville, Whistler, pp. 371, 375-76.
108Committee
on New Poor Law, BPP, 1837, first report, 1837, p. 14. In the second
report, p. 7, for the parish of Petworth, Lord Egremont charged nearly
one-third less rent for comparable housing (tenements for the poor) than the
tradesmen who owned houses there; Somerville, Whistler, p. 172; Rule, Labouring
Classes, p. 78.
109Rule, Labouring
Classes, p. 87; Jeffries, Hodge, 1:167; Friedrich Engels, The
Condition of the Working Class in England, eds. and trans. W.O. Henderson
and W.H. Chaloner (New York: Macmillan
Co., 1958), p. 110.
110Arch, Joseph
Arch, p. 352. But during this same
general time period, Jeffries noted the increasing pressures for improving
sanitary conditions in villages, which the landowners normally had to shoulder
the burden of paying for. Even if they
delayed making improvements, "it is impossible to avoid them
altogether." Hodge, 2:113;
Caird, English Agriculture, p. 390.
112Botkin,
Lay My Burden Down, p. 121, 62 (Evans), 315 (Johnson); Douglass, Narrative,
p. 43; Northrup, Twelve Years a Slave, p. 128; Kemble, Journal,
pp. 67, 315; Drew, Refugee, 1969, p. 109; At one fairly typical poor
white's cabin, Olmsted took off his stockings initially when going to bed, but
almost immediately put them back on, pulling them over his pantaloons. "The advantage of this arrangement was
that, although my face, eyes, ears, neck, and hands, were immediately attacked,
the vermin did not reach my legs for two or three hours." Cotton Kingdom, 2:107.
113Kemble,
Journal, pp. 66-67, 314-15; Charles E. Orser, Jr., "The
Archaeological Analysis of Plantation Society:
Replacing Status and Caste with Economics and Power," American
Antiquity, 53 (1988) 737-38, 746-47; Northrup, Twelve Years a Slave,
pp. 148-49. His testimony conflicts
with Stampp's view that a majority of slaveowners provided frying pans and iron
pots to their bondsmen. Ironically he
makes this assessment just after citing Northrup in The Peculiar Institution,
p. 287. Compare his treatment (pp.
287-88) with Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll, pp. 530-532; Botkin, Lay
My Burden Down, pp. 121 (Reynolds), 161 (Williams); Blassingame, The
Slave Community, p. 255.
114Minutes
of Evidence Before Select Committee on the Poor Law Amendment Act, BPP,
1838, vol. XVIII, part II, as reprinted in Agar, The Bedfordshire Farm
Worker, pp. 90-91; Somerville, Whistler, p. 46.
115Somerville,
Whistler, pp. 257, 413. He
described (p. 406) that in Heyshot parish, Sussex, laborers had to sell their
gardens, small orchards, and houses in order to get relief. They only needed it to begin with because
the local farmers resented their independence, so they refused to hire them
except at harvest or some other time of high demand.
116Kemble,
Journal, pp. 47-48; Olmsted, Cotton Kingdom, 1:87 (charcoal), 103
(my emphasis, Virginia), 104-5, 215 (like fires), 2:180 (collect firewood).
117The
South was "where fuel has no value."
Olmsted, Cotton Kingdom, 2:250.
Genovese describes the sexual division of labor for fires and fuel: The men collected the firewood, while the
women lit or kept the fires burning. In
Africa, the sex roles are reversed; the women collect the family's firewood
even to this day. Roll, Jordan, Roll,
p. 525.
119Young, General
Report, pp. 158-61. Only
blacksmiths used coal near where Isaac Bawcombe lived in Wiltshire in the
1840s, where peat was the main fuel.
Hudson, A Shepherd's Life, pp. 75-76. Somerville said the thinness of the turf in Heyshot parish made
it a very poor fuel. Where it was a
thick mold, "the turf is excellent fuel," but it seems he is judging
this by relative English standards. Whistler,
p. 405. Note also Cobbett, Rural
Rides, p. 234.
Young, General Report, pp. 83, 86; Committee on
the New Poor Law, BPP, 1837, second report, p. 8; Cobbett, Rural
Rides, p. 196; note also pp. 206, 252-53; Somerville, Whistler, pp.
62-63. This example also showed how
annual service could be exploitive as labor paid by the day. This boy was paid just three shillings a
week.
123Hudson,
Shepherd's Life, pp. 210-11; R.W. Bushaway, "'Grovely, Grovely,
Grovely, and All Grovely': Custom,
Crime and Conflict in the English Woodland," History Today, May
1981, p. 43; Hudson, Shepherd's Life, pp. 212-13; Hammond and Hammond, Village
Labourer, pp. 128 (charity's limits), 197 (breaking bough). Arch remembered the rector's wife handed out
soup and coals in his parish when he was a child. But her charity served as a control device to help humble the
poor before their "betters" and to keep them attending the
Established Church. At least eventually,
his mother refused to take any. Arch, Joseph
Arch, pp. 15, 17-18, 21-22.
124Most
Southern slaveholders could not be mistaken for homo economicus, as
Kemble knew. They were not calculating
businessmen like "Manchester manufacturers or Massachusetts
merchants" who would rarely sacrifice financial interests "at the instigation
of rage, revenge, and hatred." In
a portrait familiar to readers of Olmsted's travels, she said: "The planters of the interior of the
Southern and Southwestern states, with their furious feuds and slaughterous
combats, their stabbings and pistolings, their gross sensuality, brutal
ignorance, and despotic cruelty, resemble the chivalry of France before the
horrors of the Jacquerie . . . With
such men as these, human life, even when it can be bought or sold in the market
for so many dollars, is but little protected by considerations of interest from
the effects of any violent passion."
Kemble, Journal, pp. 301, 303.
The roughneck, non-calculating culture of Southern slaveowners seriously
weakens the standard apologetic for slavery, since the owner's self-interest
could not be counted on to restrain how he treated his property.
125Eugene
Genovese, "The Medical and Insurance Costs of Slaveholding in the Cotton
Belt," Journal of Negro History 45 (July 1960):152; Davis, Plantation
Life, p. 48.
126Davis, Plantation
Life, p. 278. Fogel and Engerman
note that doctors' bills listing both the slaves and owning family's members
treated on the same visit do exist. Time
on the Cross, 1:120.
127For
example, he condemned the repairman of his gin for talking to his blacks as if
they were equals. He ran off his
property the proud, well-dressed mulatto son of a nearby planter who dared to
pass through his plantation's quarters.
Davis, Plantation Life, pp. 186-87, 206-7.
128Davis, Plantation
Life, pp. 198, 280. Barrow had
vaccinated himself and his children against some (unnamed) disease earlier (p.
87). Bassett, Plantation Overseer, p. 29 (Plowden), p. 115.
130Botkin,
Lay My Burden Down, p. 122 (Reynolds), 71-72 (Kendricks); Stampp, Peculiar
Institution, p. 315; Fogel and Engerman, Time on the Cross, 1:120;
Bassett, Plantation Overseer, p. 29.
Weston also provided a hospital for his slaves, p. 28; Kemble, Journal,
pp. 32-33, 214; Stampp (p. 313) notes
an ideal hospital built on James Hamilton Couper's Georgia rice plantation. Its
ideal conditions, including steam heat and floors swept daily and scrubbed once
a week, should not be seen as common.
Kemble said that her husband's slaves were better off than many owned by
other masters in their neighborhood.
131On the
independent source of authority the conjurors had, see Genovese, Roll,
Jordan, Roll, p. 221; Kemble, Journal, p. 63; Armstrong, Old
Massa's People, pp. 64-66.
132On the
value of slave midwives, see Mary Beth Norton, Liberty's Daughters: The Revolutionary Experience of American Women,
1750-1800 (Glenview, IL: Scott,
Foresman & Co., 1980), p. 31; Kemble, Journal, pp. 28-29, 317;
Armstrong, Old Massa's People, p. 176; Bassett, Plantation Overseer,
p. 141.
133In
northeast England after about 1720 parishes routinely hired doctors to care for
the parish poor. Earlier cases, such as
Newcastle paying a surgeon in the 1560s, also appear. P. Rushton, "The Poor Law, the Parish, and the Community in
North-East England," Northern History 25 (1989):146.
135One
doctor told Edward Butt, the relieving officer for Petworth parish under
Gilbert's act, and briefly relieving officer for Petworth and Kirdford parishes
under the New Poor Law, that he would not wait to get the relief orders from
him before aiding the poor: "I
shall never stop for your orders, because you may away at a distance; before I
can get the order from you, a person may be dead." Ibid., second report, p. 2.
138Thompson,
Making, pp. 241 (Mayhew), 419 ("Most were artisans,")
421. Thompson sees benefit clubs as one
of the main sources of the development and expression of class consciousness
and the working class's sense of organization in resisting the elite in English
society; Frank E. Huggett, A Day in the Life of a Victorian Farm Worker
(London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd.,
1972), p. 60; Committee on the New Poor Law, BPP, 1837, first report, p.
18; Arch, Joseph Arch, p. 34; Hudson, A Shepherd's Life, pp.
299-304.
139Arch, Joseph
Arch, pp. 54-56; On the value of inoculations early on, see John Rule, The
Vital Century: England's Developing
Economy, 1714-1815 (New York:
Longman Group, 1992), pp. 11-12.
142This
crude approximation of the relative proportion of northern English farmworkers
is supported by the figures for total population by county found in Phyllis
Deane and W.A. Cole, British Economic Growth 1688-1959 Trends and
Structure, 2d ed. (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1967), p. 103.
143Although
accepting the elite's legal categories, Young does see the problems in ignoring
the poor's customary rights: General
Report, pp. 12-14, 32-33, 155, 158; cf. p. 99.
146The
conditions of work and the resulting relationships that existed between the
superior and subordinate class's individuals on the job are an important aspect
of the quality of life. But since the
struggles between these two groups and the methods of resistance and control
are so closely tied to the quality of life aspects of work, this subject is
covered in sections four and five.
147Freedwoman
Rose Williams of Texas, Botkin, Lay My Burden Down, p. 161; Douglass, Narrative,
p. 92; 1178a5-8; The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon (New
York: Random House, 1941), p. 1105;
Kemble, Journal, p. 115. In this
context she mentions a mentally retarded woman who is as capable at field work
as other slaves without this handicap.
By contrast, she noted London, a literate slave and preacher on the same
plantation, must have felt deep frustration since he had a more informed
outlook on life and the world.
148Drew, Refugee,
pp. 50 (Rose), 275 (Sanders); Botkin, Lay My Burden Down, p. 50; As
Douglass noted: "A city slave is almost a freeman, compared with a slave
on the plantation." It was in
Baltimore that he learned to read, continuing on the with aid of white children
after his mistress stopped teaching him.
Narrative, p. 49-50, 53-54; Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll,
pp. 562-63.
149Douglass,
Narrative, pp. 49, 94, 97; Similarly, escaped slave Henry Morehead
stated: "The time is now, when the
colored men begin to see that it is the want of education which has kept them
in bondage so long;" Drew, Refugee, p. 180; Kemble, Journal,
p. 130. See also p. 9; as quoted in
Olmsted, Cotton Kingdom, 2:214.
150Nat
Turner, in 1831 the leader of the bloodiest American slave rebellion which
erupted in Virginia, was literate, which certainly did not persuade
slaveholders to encourage literacy among their human chattels. After this revolt killed some sixty whites,
the white South suffered an abiding trauma that lingered into the Civil
War. Stampp, Peculiar Institution,
pp. 132-34.
151as quoted
in Richard D. Younger, "Southern Grand Juries and Slavery," Journal
of Negro History 40 (Apr. 1955):168-69; Brent, Incidents, p. 6;
Armstrong, Old Massa's People, p. 26; Olmsted, Cotton Kingdom,
2:69-71; Botkin, Lay My Burden Down, p. 185; Drew, Refugee, p.
97.
152Drew, Refugee,
pp. 110, 175, 180-81 (Morehead); Brent, Incidents, pp. 74-75; Douglass, Narrative,
pp. 89-90; Botkin, Lay My Burden Down, p. 91.
153John
Hope Franklin, From Slavery to Freedom
A History of Negro Americans, 5d ed. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1980), p. 145; Kemble, Journal,
pp. 158, 271; Brent, Incidents, p. 74; Botkin, Lay My Burden Down,
pp. 50, 126; Northrup, Twelve Years a Slave, p. 175.
154John R.
Gillis, The Development of European Society, 1770-1870 (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1983), p. 216
(chart); Hudson, A Shepherd's Life, p. 60; Commission on Employment in
Agriculture, BPP, 1867-68, first report, pp. xxi, xix; R.S. Schofield,
"Dimensions of Illiteracy, 1750-1850," Explorations in Economic
History, 10 (1973): 450, cited by Snell, Annals, p. 36; Eric J.
Hobsbawm and George Rude, Captain Swing (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1969), p. 64.
155Hobsbawm
and Rude, Captain Swing, p. 64; Somerville, Whistler, p. 104;
Cobbett, Rural Rides, pp. 123-24.
156Arch, Joseph
Arch, pp. 9, 24-27; Hudson, Shepherd's Life, pp. 142-43; Commission
on Employment in Agriculture, BPP, 1867-68, first report, p. xviii;
David Thomson, England in the Nineteenth Century 1815-1914 (London: Penguin Group, 1950), p. 135; Pamela Horn,
"Child Workers in the Victorian Countryside: The Case of Northamptonshire," Northamptonshire Past and
Present 7 (1985-86):175.
157Commission
on Employment in Agriculture, BPP, 1867-68, first report, pp. vii, x-xi,
xv, xx. In 1870s Wiltshire parents had
realized the value of education much more.
Jeffries, Hodge, 2:67.
(This work was mainly based upon his experience writing for a Wiltshire
and Gloucestershire newspaper in the early 1870s).
158Commission
on Employment in Agriculture, BPP, 1867-68, pp. ix (variations), xiii,
xiv (Northumberland), xviii-xix (Leicestershire), xxii (Cambridge/Yorkshire),
xxvi (Northamptonshire), xlviii-il (concession). Arch mentions both extremes in ages. Joseph Arch, pp. 247-48.
159Horn,
"Child Workers," 177-178; Morgan, Harvesters and Harvesting,
pp. 64-67; Commission on Employment in Agriculture, BPP, 1867-68, p.
xxix.
160Commission
on Employment in Agriculture, BPP, 1867-68, cited by Agar, Bedfordshire
Farm Worker, p. 19. This county was
heavily agricultural, so most (c. 80 percent) of its inhabitants were
farmworkers and their families. Woburn
Union, confining its figures to agricultural laborers' children exclusively,
overall had 839 in attendance with 1100 on the schools' registers for children
under the age of 13 out of a population of 11,682 in 1861. See p. 13.
162Arch, Joseph
Arch, p. 25; Windham's Speeches, 3:17, cited by J.L. and Barbara
Hammond, The Town Labourer 1760-1832:
The New Civilisation new ed. (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1928), p. 56; Gillis, Development
of European Society, p. 215; One Southern overseer who visited England
noted that the same arguments were used against educating the farmworkers and
the slaves. Genovese, Roll, Jordan,
Roll, p. 193.
164Hammond
and Hammond, Town Labourer, pp. 55-56.
H.G. Wells obliquely alludes to the two options as chosen by two
different nations: "The oligarchy
of the crowned republic of Great Britain may have crippled and starved
education, but the Hohenzollern monarchy corrupted and prostituted
it." The Outline of
History: Being a Plain History of
Mankind, ed. Raymond Postgate, 2 vols. (Garden City, NY: Garden City Books, 1956), 2:830.
Committee on Allotments, BPP, 1843, p. 69;
Commission on Employment in Agriculture, BPP, 1867-68, pp. xxiii, xxxii.
167Genovese
provides a good but overly optimistic summary of how well slaveowners cared for
their elderly slaves: Roll, Jordan,
Roll, pp. 519-23. Although he
carefully balances between an optimistic and pessimistic interpretation, a tilt
toward a pessimistic viewpoint (like Stampp's) is more justifiable.
168Kemble,
Journal, p. 92, 313; cf. p. 246.
While noting the pro-slavery argument that their elderly were not
isolated from their family and friends as the laborers confined to the
workhouse in England were, she still found old slaves were terribly neglected
on her husband's estates. The workhouse
infirmary that Jeffries described was certainly better than this, as mentioned
above (p. 110).
169Kemble,
Journal, p. 303; Brent, Incidents, p. 14; Narrative of
Jonathan Walker; Davis, Plantation Life, p. 262.
170In his
"Rules of Highland Plantation," Bennet Barrow enunciated clearly the
price of retirement and guaranteed subsistence at his perceived expense,
including in sickness and retirement:
"If I maintain him in his old age, when he is incapable of
rendering either himself or myself any service, am I not entitled to an
exclusive right to his time [when younger]"? Davis, Plantation Life, p. 407. Clearly, a slave paid dearly in return for the security his
master (actually, fellow slaves) provided for him in old age.
171Douglass,
Narrative, p. 62; Olmsted, Cotton Kingdom, 2:251. Olmsted eloquently observed that slavery
stultifies the talents and abilities of its human chattels while, in
practice, providing "no safety against occasional suffering for want
of food among labourers, or even against their starvation any more than the
competitive system" (i.e., capitalism).
172Kemble,
Journal, p. 247; Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll, p. 522; Armstrong,
Old Massa's People, p. 63.
173Kemble,
Journal, p. 313; Armstrong, Old Massa's People, p. 69; Douglass, Narrative,
p. 22; Stampp, Peculiar Institution, p. 313; Fogel and Engerman, Time
on the Cross, 1:209.
176Stampp,
Peculiar Institution, p. 318. By
citing the highest available figure for slave life expectancy (36 years), Fogel
and Engerman try to deny the force of these figures in demonstrating
differential treatment for slaves and free whites. The higher black death rates result from black women having a
higher fertility rate concomitant with a higher infant mortality rate, and from
the South's (allegedly) less healthy climate.
Time on the Cross, 1:124-25; 2:243-44. Substantially lower estimates for life expectancy for slaves are
actually more common, such as Zelnick's 32 years, Farley's 27.8 for female
slaves, and Elben's 32.6 for the same.
They ignore the implications of higher mortality rates for black infants
in demonstrating how material conditions for slaves were worse than for free
whites. The idea the South's climate
was epidemiologically inferior to the North's is also disputable. The North-South difference in infant
mortality can easily attributed to the difference between bondage and freedom,
instead of a less healthy climate.
Sutch in David, Reckoning with Slavery, pp. 283-87. Conceptually, the major point Stampp
implicitly makes is still true: Of all
those born, proportionately fewer black babies lived to be elderly than white
ones. See Peculiar Institution,
p. 319.
180David
Thomson, "Welfare and the Historians," in The World We Have
Gained: Histories of Population and
Social Structure, eds. Lloyd Bonfield, R.M. Smith, and K. Wrightson
(Oxford, 1986), p. 370; cited by Rushton, "The Poor Law," p.
151. See also Snell, Annals, pp.
364-67.
182Hudson,
Shepherd's Life, pp. 46-47, 55; Committee on the New Poor Law, BPP,
1837, first report, p. 35.
183Snell, Annals,
pp. 131-33; Arch, Joseph Arch, p. 257; Committee on Allotments, BPP,
1843, p. 220. Thomas Sockett, the rector of Petworth, Sussex, said pensions of
2s./week were normal for older people not working in Petworth parish. Committee on New Poor Law, BPP, 1837,
first report, p. 15.
184Committee
on New Poor Law, BPP, 1837, first report, preface to minutes of
evidence, p. 7. See also p. 9.
185Ibid.,
p. 1. See also p. 15. Admittedly, he said he would have voted for
the New Poor Law had he been a Member of Parliament. Ibid., second report, p. 23; first report, p. 16. But, going against Cobbett and Arch's
stereotype of the uncaring, Tory-supporting establishment churchman, he harshly
condemned some parts of the law that injured the poor.
186Ibid.,
p. 21. Only those with no family to
care for them ended up in the workhouse.
Otherwise, they lived with family members (including wives), and
received pensions of two shillings a week.
187Ibid.,
p. 31. Arch estimated the parish paid
at least one shilling a week more to place an elderly person in the workhouse
than to give a relief pension of two shillings a week. "As has been calculated, it costs the
ratepayers from three shillings and ten pence to four shillings a week per
adult." Joseph Arch, pp.
259-60.
188Ibid., pp.
38, 41, 43. The assistant Poor Law
Commissioner, William Henry Toovey Hawley, flatly denied that some rule
prohibited the relieving of the aged and infirm at home. Ibid., p. 66. Farmer Edward Butt, having worked many years as a relieving
officer for the poor under Gilbert's act for the Petworth parish, believed the
elderly were better off under the new law than before. Ibid., second report, p. 4.
189"Of
course, out-relief of sorts continued for some elderly people; although one
should be wary of generalising arguments on 'continuity' before and after 1834
which are based on Norfolk and Suffolk."
Snell, Annals, p. 131.
192Kemble,
Journal, p. 121; Armstrong, Old Massa's People, p. 94; Drew, Refugee,
pp. 72, 105; Olmsted, Cotton Kingdom, 1:131, 239; Morgan,
"Ownership of Property by Slaves," pp. 402-3; Washington, Up from
Slavery, p. 17; Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll, pp. 502, 505. Armstrong notes "adolescence" as
the age for going into the fields. Old
Massa's People, p. 92; See Peter Kolchin, "More Time on the
Cross? An Evaluation of Robert William
Fogel's Without Consent or Contract," Journal of Southern History
58 (Aug. 1992): 494.
193Armstrong,
Old Massa's People, pp. 78-79; Douglass, Narrative, pp. 43-44;
Olmsted, Cotton Kingdom, 1:239.
194Brent, Incidents,
pp. 28-29; Olmsted, Cotton Kingdom, 1:39. This incident illustrates again how whites, with blacks in
bondage, willingly engaged in "race mixing" that would have appalled
post-reconstruction segregationists.
"When the negro is definitely a slave, it would seem that the
alleged natural antipathy of the white race to associate with him is
lost." (1:40).
195Genovese,
Roll, Jordan, Roll, 505-6 (games played), 510-11 (mask training);
Armstrong, Old Massa's People, 69; Kemble, Journal, 57-58;
Stampp, Peculiar Institution, 378;
196Genovese,
Roll, Jordan, Roll, 508; Kemble, Journal, 312-13. Note p. 31 also, where no adult was in sight
supervising the babies or the baby-minders in a cabin; Botkin, Lay My Burden
Down, 126.
197Kemble,
Journal, p. 66, 121, 122, 312.
She rebukes a Times [of London?] correspondent who noted on the
estate he visited that "all the children below the age of twelve were
unemployed." Olmsted had a similar
perspective: "Until the negro is
big enough for his labour to be plainly profitable to his master, he has no
training to application or method, but only to idleness and
carelessness." Cotton Kingdom,
1:131
200Snell, Annals,
40, 45-46, 49-66, 309, 348-50. One of
the questionnaires which parishes filled out as part of the inquiries into the
Old Poor Law, BPP, 1834, vol. xxx, reported this process at work
clearly. Selattyn, Shropshire
reported: "Women and Children are
not now so much employed as formerly, because labouring men are so plentiful,
and their labour so cheap." Hugh Cunningham,
"The Employment and Unemployment of Children in England c.
1680-1851," Past and Present, no. 126 (Feb. 1990), 135.
201Hudson,
Shepherd's Life, 67; Horn, "Child Workers," 173; Commission on
Employment in Agriculture, BPP, 1867-68, ix (generally), xiii
(Northumberland), xxvi (Northampton), xvii (Fens), xx (Yorkshire); Arch, Joseph
Arch, 29.
202Cunningham,
"Employment of Children," strikingly covers this subject in depth,
noting that many saw industry and mining as a solution to the problem of idle
children burdening their parents. He
concludes on p. 150: "It is usual
to think of the school rescuing the working child from the factory; it is more
plausible to think of it removing the idle child from the street. In 1871 when the number in the census 'at
home' was still high, the Registrar-General suggested that school was the
proper place for these 'unemployed children'." Also note Mary B. Rose, "Social Policy and Business; Parish
Apprenticeship and the Early Factory System 1750-1834," Business
History 12 (Oct. 1989):6-7; the statements by Defoe and Pitt in Hammond and
Hammond, Town Labourer, 144.
Thompson's critique of child labor, alluded to above (p. 119), when
placed amidst such evidence for child unemployment, largely applies to those
children employed in the factory and mining districts, where the labor
intensity and length of the workday were undeniably extremely demanding.
203Commission
on Employment in Agriculture, BPP, 1867-68, pp. xvii, xviii; Horn,
"Child Workers," 174.
204Sonya
O. Rose raises a similar point in connection with the household economy
functioning in domestic industry, not agriculture. When children are working for their parents directly and not for
an employer for wages, those gathering data for a census are more apt to
overlook them. See Rose,
"Proto-Industry, Women's Work and the Household Economy in the Transition
to Industrial Capitalism," Journal of Family History 13 (1988):188.
205Cunningham,
"Employment of Children," 140-47.
Even the 1867-68 Report found, at least in the Thames Valley area, only
relatively few employed under the age of ten and that only one eleventh under age
eight were employed. Commission on
Employment in Agriculture, BPP, 1867-68, p. xxix.
206Snell
develops this theme at great length in Annals. Note especially pp. 67-103, 210-219, 322-327. See also Cunningham, "Employment of
Children," 123, 148.
208Commission
on Employment in Agriculture, BPP, 1867-68, p. xi (recommend age), xxi
(Cambridge), xxvi (Northampton), xxxi (Thames); Arch, Joseph Arch, p.
247.
209This
evidence, but coming from the English side, backs Genovese's claim: "The southern slaveholders knew, too,
that their slave children fared closer to the style of their own pampered
children than to that of the children of nonslaveholders, who had to help their
parents by doing rough work at early ages." Roll, Jordan, Roll, p.
504. Again, Kemble and others raise an
important point: Was keeping a child in
idleness without an education better than putting them to work under their
parents' eyes (as opposed to a textile mill owner owner's impersonal
supervision and high intensity work regime)?
210See
Morgan, Harvesters, pp. 23-27, 98; Committee on Allotments, BPP,
1843, pp. 211, 222, 225, 226, 227; Commission on Employment in Agriculture, BPP,
1867-68, pp. xiv (Northumberland), xxiv (Yorkshire); Jeffries, Hodge,
2:73-74.
211Jeffries,
Hodge, 2:65-67, 73-74.
Somerville portrayed laborers' children as picking flowers also. Whistler, pp. 281-82; Hudson, Shepherd's
Life, p. 68; Arch, Joseph Arch, pp. 27, 28, 33-34.
212Plato, Republic,
338c; The Collected Dialogues of Plato Including the Letters, Bollingen
Series LXXI, eds. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns, trans. of Republic,
Paul Shorey (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1961), 588.
213cf.
Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll, 161-68.
Of course, this analysis assumes the elite and masses of the same
society mostly share the same religion.
214Joseph,
Hugh, and Jonathan Bryan, all of a wealthy colonial planter family in South
Carolina, were such idealists. See Alan
Gallay, "The Origins of Slaveholders' Paternalism: George Whitefield, the Bryan Family, and the
Great Awakening in the South," Journal of Southern History 53 (Aug.
1987): 383-88.
216See
Winthrop D. Jordan, The White Man's Burden:
Historical Origins of Racism in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974), pp. 91-92.
217Kemble
mentions the two models. Journal,
pp. 71-72, 131. Freedwoman Jenny Proctor of Alabama for a while believed she
had no afterlife based upon what one white preached to blacks on her plantation
because "we didn't have no way finding out different. We didn't see no Bibles." Botkin, Lay My Burden Down, p. 91.
218Kemble,
Journal, p. 131; Gallay, "Origins of Slaveholders'
Paternalism," 380-81. See also
Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll, p. 185; Paul C. Palmer, "Servant into
Slave: The Evolution of the Legal
Status of the Negro Laborer in Colonial Virginia," South Atlantic
Quarterly 65 (summer 1966):360-61; Jordan, White Man's Burden, pp.
89, 97, 98.
219Note
the local clergy’s timidity with the one-time overseer of Kemble's husband's
estates, who opposed church gatherings off or even on the plantations he
managed. Kemble, Journal, pp.
267-68.
220Kemble,
Journal, p. 91; Botkin, Lay My Burden Down, pp. 25-26; Brent, Incidents,
pp. 70-71; Armstrong, Old Massa's People, pp. 225-27; Blassingame, Slave
Community, pp. 84-89; Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll, pp. 207-9.
221Botkin,
Lay My Burden Down, p. 118; Bassett, Plantation Overseer, pp.
14-15 (Lunsford Lane); Stampp, Peculiar Institution, pp. 158-59; Robert
Starobin, "Disciplining Industrial Slaves in the Old South," Journal
of Negro History, 53 (April 1968):
113.
Of course, Catholicism itself (especially) is a
syncretistic combine of the Roman Empire's religions, Jewish beliefs, and
doctrines specifically originating from Jesus of Nazareth and Paul. Easter and Christmas were substituted for
the Passover and Day of Atonement, Sunday for Saturday, the saints and Mary
replaced the gods of the pantheon concerning each having specific control of
various natural processes affecting humanity, etc.
223For
Brazil, note Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll, 180. In some areas where organized Voodoo
emerged, such as southern Louisiana, the African side of the combine was fully
dominant, or even all that was present.
Blassingame, Slave Community, 41; Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll,
217, 220.
224Ball, Slavery
in the United States, 21-24; Botkin, Lay My Burden Down, 36-38; Mary F. Berry and John W.
Blassingame, "Africa, Slavery, & the Roots of Contemporary Black
Culture," Massachusetts Review, autumn 1977, 515. They overstate their case because the poor
whites at services, especially revival meetings, had an emotional
interpretation of religion as well, coming from the Protestant belief in being
"born again." The emotional
services held by Methodists and others among the English working class shows
American whites need not have copied the blacks in this regard. Note Stampp, Peculiar Institution,
376-77; Olmsted, Cotton Kingdom, 1:265-71; Genovese, Roll, Jordan,
Roll, 239-40.
225Stampp,
Peculiar Institution, pp. 371, 374-76; William C. Suttles, Jr.,
"African Religious Survivals as Factors in American Slave Revolts," Journal
of Negro History 56 (April 1971):96-100, 102; Genovese, Roll, Jordan,
Roll, 182-83.
226Olmsted
maintained that the generality of preaching in the South to the slaves had been
overstated, that many masters still discouraged it. Cotton Kingdom, 2:213-14.
227Davis, Plantation
Life, 198. One overseer kept the
slaves in his care from going to a nearby church because it would join together
slaves from different plantations. This
left them with services just once a month.
Kemble, Journal, 220.
228Drew, Refugee,
89 (West), 331 (Freeman), 353-54 (Troy) 383-84 (Johnson); Armstrong, Old
Massa's People, 231; Cf. Cato of Alabama's testimony in Botkin, Lay My
Burden Down, 86.
231Kemble,
Journal, 73 (segregated communion), 150 (a largely segregated church);
Botkin, Lay My Burden Down, 81 (Kinney), 147 (Chaney). See also 62, 143, 145-46; Davis, Plantation
Life, 184; Gallay, "Origins of Slaveholders' Paternalism,"
386-87; Olmsted, Cotton Kingdom, 2:213.
232Even a
capable and conscientious white pastor could also get awesome respect
from his black flock: Olmsted, Cotton
Kingdom, 2:226.
233Olmsted
described the effects of having a respected position on their character. Cotton Kingdom, 1:260.
238James
D. Anderson, "Aunt Jemima in Dialectics:
Genovese on Slave Culture," Journal of Negro History 61
(Jan. 1976):113.
239What
one slave preacher said when he got so excited during services that his mask
slipped may hint at what was preached at such gatherings. Forgetting that a white man was watching
him, he prayed: "Free indeed, free
from death, free from hell, free from work, free from white folks, free from
everything." Henry Clay Bruce, The
New Man. Twenty-nine Years a Slave.
Twenty-nine Years a Free Man (York, PA, 1895), 73, cited by Blassingame, Slave
Community, 135-37.
240James
C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance Hidden Transcripts (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990), passim. Scott rejects the concept of hegemony altogether, whether it be
the strong version in which the masses gain false consciousness from the
elite's propaganda and then really believe in the ideology of the
superstructure, or the weak version, wherein the elite settles for the masses
simply becoming resigned and passive about their plight. His rejection is too complete, at least for
advanced industrial countries with a history of free elections and free
speech. In such nations, the masses may
really come to accept some of the elite's ideology as being in their
self-interest--such as property rights and (in America) the Horatio Alger
myth. (How else could Rush Limbaugh,
and right-wing talk radio in general, get such high ratings?) Still, Scott has dealt a mighty blow against
Gramscian theorizing.
243Thompson,
Making, 41. Similarly, note the
message of patience and submission taught by the Conference of Methodist
Ministers, in an address adopted in 1819 almost 30 years after Wesley’s
death: Hammond and Hammond, Town
Labourer, 280-81.
247Cobbett
blasts the Established Church for such abuses, where the parsons take their
tithes for a given parish, but totally neglect to serve it, failing even to
maintain a rectory or (in one Wiltshire case) a church in it. Cobbett, Rural Rides, 365-66,
400-403.
251On the
two types of tithes, see J.W. Anscomb, "Parliamentary Enclosure in
Northamptonshire Processes and
Procedures," Northamptonshire Past and Present, 7(1988-89): 413; The
Life and History of Swing the Kent Rick-Burner (London: R. Carlile, 1830), 17, in Carpenter, Rising
of the Agricultural Labourers; "Swing" letter, quoted by E.P.
Thompson, Making of the English Working Class, 233.
252Hobsbawm
and Rude, Captain Swing, 288-91; J.A. Hargreaves, "Methodism and
Luddism in Yorkshire, 1812-1813," Northern History 26 (1990): 161.
256Thompson,
Making, 41; Rule, Labouring Classes, 310-11. The Tolpuddle case involved six farmworkers
from Dorset who were sentenced in 1834 to be transported for seven years merely
for administering oaths despite forming a union itself was legal.
261Blassingame,
Slave Community, 149-50. The
earlier colonial period saw more of an imbalance until near its end. Note the figures for King William Parish,
Virginia in Gundersen, "Double Bonds of Race and Sex," 354-56. For cases of polygamy being tolerated, see
Kemble, Journal, 207, 226. Also
note Northrup, Twelve Years a Slave, 169.
264Douglass,
Narrative, 60; for a more optimistic spin on estate divisions, note
Armstrong, Old Massa's People, 125-27; Fogel and Engerman, Time on
the Cross, 2:232. Herbert G. Gutman
decisively shatters their optimism in Slavery and the Numbers Game: A Critique of Time on the Cross (Urbana,
IL: University of Illinois Press,
1975), 132-36.
265Armstrong,
Old Massa's People, 258; Drew, Refugee, 198; Olmsted, Cotton
Kingdom, 2:154; Ball, Slavery in the United States, 16. See also 77-78; Note Bobby Frank Jones,
"A Cultural Middle Passage," in Herbert Gutman, Slavery and the
Numbers Game, 133-34.
266F.N.
Boney, "Thomas Stevens, Antebellum Georgian," South Atlantic
Quarterly 72 (spring 1973): 238-39; Olmsted, Cotton Kingdom, 2:3;
Jack E. Davis, "Changing Places:
Slave Movement in the South, Historian 55 (summer 1993):
661-63. In passing, he notes Tadman's
estimate that no more than 30 percent of interregional slave migration
came from slaves accompanying moving owners; Fogel and Engerman, Time on the
Cross, 1:48; Sutch and Gutman in David, Reckoning, 100-105.
267Botkin,
Lay My Burden Down, 102; Drew, Refugee, 45, 121; Armstrong, Old
Massa's People, 258-60; Brent, Incidents, 14; Ball, Slavery in
the United States, 16, 35-36; Chambers's Journal, Olmsted, Cotton
Kingdom, 2:375-77. One or more of
these seven children may have died earlier, long before this sale took place;
Gutman and Sutch in David, Reckoning, 132.
268Bassett,
Plantation Overseer, 197. Note
that even with an intact nuclear slave family being relocated to their
new master because of inheritance, she was still told that they seemed to be in
distress over separating from friends and other family members.
271Judith
Kelleher Schafer, "New Orleans Slavery in 1850 as Seen in
Advertisements," Journal of Southern History 47 (Feb.
1981):36.
272Herman
Freudenberger and Jonathan B. Pritchett, "The Domestic United States Slave
Trade: New Evidence," Journal
of Interdisciplinary History 21 (winter 1991):454-55. The source of this figure was the
certificates of good character which Louisiana briefly required for all slave
sales. Fogel and Engerman maintain only
9.3 percent of slaves sold were children under thirteen in Time on the Cross
based on sales invoices. A later
sampling of theirs using these certificates of good character of children ten
years old and less produced a figure of 11.1 percent. See Freudenberger and Pritchett, Ibid., p. 453; Fogel and
Engerman, Time on the Cross, 1:49-50.
Gutman and Sutch demolish Fogel and Engerman's calculations that
indicated most young slaves sold were orphans in David, Reckoning,
130-131. Pritchett and Freudenberger's
data also refute their claim that this Louisiana law was seldom enforced. See Fogel and Engerman, Time on the Cross,
2:53-54. Significantly, Schafer found
twenty-eight ads listing children separately under eleven, of whom only six
were said to be orphans, in New Orleans newspapers for 1850. "New Orleans Slavery," 36-37.
274Kemble,
Journal, 58; cf the mention of fourteen-, sixteen-, and
eighteen-year-olds in Olmsted, Cotton Kingdom, 2:80. Very few of these children were
illegitimate: Only three unmarried mothers
were on the rice island estate Kemble stayed at. Journal, 134-35.
Fogel and Engerman used probate records to establish a high average age
for slave mothers at the first birth of a child. But they commit so many fallacies with the data (including equating
oldest surviving child with a first birth at the time of probate), any
re-examination of the evidence totally controverts their claims. See Fogel and Engerman, Time on the Cross,
1:138-39; Gutman and Sutch in David, Reckoning, 136-46; Gutman, Slavery
and the Numbers Game, 140-52.
275For the
general discussion about this issue, note Fogel and Engerman, Time on the
Cross, 2:48-53; Gutman and Sutch in David, Reckoning, 112-33; Gutman,
Slavery and the Numbers Game, 108-23.
Drew, Refugee, 29 (William Johnson), 30
(Tubman), 52 (George Johnson), 179 (Jackson).
Since the WPA narratives are heavily weighted towards those who were
only children while in bondage, they might not often mention this kind of fear,
which is the province of adults.
278Botkin,
Lay My Burden Down, 106; Chambers's Journal, Olmsted, Cotton
Kingdom, 2:374, 377; Douglass, Narrative, 97.
279Kemble,
Journal, 18. Note also Genovese,
Roll, Jordan, Roll, 495; Stampp, Peculiar Institution, 287. After emancipation, the forced equality in
field work soon disappeared, for the freedmen and freedwomen preferred and
adopted the sexual division of labor that the whites had. See Dill, "Our Mothers' Grief,"
422.
280On the
damaged father's role, see Stampp, Peculiar Institution, 344-46. The two-thirds figure is based on a 1866
military census of ex-slaves who lived in Princess Anne County, Virginia, where
the blacks questioned stated who owned them in 1863. Gutman, Slavery and the Number Games, 105; Northrup, Twelve
Years a Slave, 169; Kemble, Journal, 60; Genovese, Roll, Jordan,
Roll, 486-89; Blassingame, Slave Community, 179.
281Narrative
of the Life of Moses Grandy, 16,
quoted in Peter Kolchin, Unfree Labor:
American Slavery and Russian Serfdom (Cambridge: Belknap Press, Harvard University Press,
1987), 211. Cf. Kemble, Journal,
175; Brent, Incidents, 41-43; Blassingame, Slave Community, 172.
282This
practice also increased the men's feeling of independence because they received
the freedom to walk to another plantation using a standard or monthly
pass. Bennet Barrow opposed allowing
off-plantation marriages in part because:
"3d--it creates a feeling of independance, from being, of right,
out of the control of the masters for a time." Davis, Plantation Life, 408.
283Deborah
G. White, "Female Slaves: Sex
Roles and Status in the Antebellum Plantation South," Journal of Family
History, Fall 1983, 255; Davis, Plantation Life, 408, 409; On the
frequency of marrying abroad, see Gutman and Sutch in David, Reckoning,
103-4 and Olmsted, Cotton Kingdom, 2:81; On seeing the "grass is
greener elsewhere," see Armstrong, Old Massa's People, 155. The bondsmen also had good reasons for their
custom, but it had its intrinsic costs, including increased involuntary
separations.
285Armstrong,
Old Massa's People, 166; Botkin, Lay My Burden Down,65; Mary Reynolds of Louisiana disliked a
similar casual wedding she had (124).
Olmsted, Cotton Kingdom, 2:81; Kemble, Journal, 167.
290Olmsted,
Cotton Kingdom, 2:225-27. The
latter two cases may be of free blacks instead of slaves; the context does not
make it completely clear.
291On the
difference of slave parents, see Stampp, Peculiar Institution, 346;
Kemble, Journal, 95, 174; Davis, Plantation Life, 201, 269, 432;
Bassett, Plantation Overseer, 141, 264-65.
293Drew, Refugee,
71-72 (Nichols); Armstrong, Old Massa's People, 172. True, she put an optimistic (perhaps
nostalgic) spin on the situation:
"But we got 'long jus' fine!"
Nevertheless, today it is known that on average the uncertainty stemming
from family instability produces far more children with major psychological
problems than stable family environments do.
A case of a Kentucky slave woman having seven children by seven
different men appears in Stampp, Peculiar Institution, 346.
295Clarence
L. Mohr, "Slavery in Oglethorpe County, Georgia, 1773-1865," Phylon,
32 (Spring 1972): 11.
Armstrong, Old Massa's People, 164; Botkin, Lay
My Burden Down, 161-62; Drew, Refugee, 84. While exaggerating the frequency of arranged marriages, Franklin
makes insightful comments on their negative consequences. From Slavery to Freedom, 148.
299Fogel
and Engerman, Time on the Cross, 1:133, 2:110; Bentley Glass and C.C.
Li, "The Dynamics of Racial Intermixture--an Analysis Based on the American
Negro," American Journal of Human Genetics 5 (Mar. 1953): 10; D.F.
Roberts, "The Dynamics of Racial Intermixture in the American Negro--Some
Anthropological Considerations," American Journal of Human Genetics
7 (Dec. 1955): 361-62, 366; Bentley Glass, "On the Unlikelihood of
Significant Admixture of Genes from the North American Indians in the Present
Composition of the Negroes of the United States," American Journal of
Human Genetics 7 (Dec. 1955): 371; T. Edward Reed, "Caucasian Genes in
American Negroes," in Laura Newell Morris, ed., Human Populations,
Genetic Variation, and Evolution (San Francisco: Chandler Publishing Company, 1971), 427-48; Gutman, Slavery
and the Numbers Game, 146, 154; Sutch in David, Reckoning, 283-84.
300Gutman
and Sutch in David, Reckoning, 151.
Gutman and Sutch argue the Evans and Bullock county results are biased
downwards because they say mulattoes were excluded from them and because
proportionately more mulattoes migrated north or to Southern cities than
blacks. But Fogel and Engerman maintain
that southern urban areas even in 1850-1860 had a disproportionately high
percentage of mulattoes when their movements were still (largely) regulated by
slaveholders. Time on the Cross,
2:113. Clearly, more miscegenation
happened in urban areas than in rural, since the bondswomen in cities had far
more contact with whites and were less tightly supervised than on plantations
and farms. After discussing the
reliability of the 1860 Census reports’ figure that about 13 percent of black
Americans had white ancestry, Genovese maintains most miscegenation took place
in cities. Roll, Jordan, Roll,
414-15.
301Glass
and Li, "Dynamics of Racial Intermixture," 8; Glass,
"Unlikelihood of Genes from North American Indians," 371, 372, 375,
377; Reed, "Caucasian Genes in American Negroes," 436; Fogel and
Engerman, Time on the Cross, 2:111, 112.
303When
describing the greater number of roles a slave could play in Latin America
compared to the United States, Stanley E. Elkins wrongly declares: "He [the Latin American/Caribbean
slave] could be a husband and father (for the American slaves these roles had
virtually no meaning)."
Conspicuously, Elkins’s summary judgment overlooks the slave woman
and her roles as wife and mother, which (following the insights of Gilder in Men
and Marriage) are much more durable and less socially constructed than the
man’s roles as husband and father. By
apparently taking the universal "he" of his sentence too narrowly and
literally, he accidentally eliminated half of all American slaves' experience
with family life! Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and
Intellectual Life (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1959), 136. The imbalanced sex ratios in which men outnumbered women on many
Caribbean and Latin American plantations undermine his argument as well.
305Eugen
Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen: The
Modernization of Rural France, 1870-1914 (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1976), 167-91;
Gillis, Development of European Society, 3-12, 31-32; Snell, Annals,
9-14, 369-73, 399-410. Also note, as
implicitly siding with Weber and Gillis, George Huppert, After the Black
Death: A Social History of Early Modern
Europe (Bloomington, IN: Indiana
University Press, 1986), 2-7, 117-27.
0W.E.B.
Dubois, The Negro American Family, ed. W.E. Burghardt, Atlanta
University Publications, no. 13 (Atlanta:
Atlanta University Press, 1908), 47, 49, cited by Fogel and Engerman, Time
on the Cross, 2:201-2.
317Arch, Joseph
Arch, 47; Hudson, Shepherd's Life, 55, 57-58, 62-63; Commission on
Employment in Agriculture, BPP, 1867-68, 58.
318Despite
Jeffries obviously stereotypes Hodge, his account about "The Low
'Public'" contains enough subtleties to show it should be taken
seriously. Hodge, 2:80-92;
Snell, Annals, 359-63; Snell, Annals, 354, especially footnote
97; Gillis, Development of European Society, 6.
319Snell, Annals,
354; Committee on New Poor Law, BPP, 1837, 50, 53-54. However, in some rather confusing, seemingly
contradictory testimony, Arthur Daintrey, a member of this union's board of
guardians, said the New Poor Law discouraged the marriage of already pregnant
women because obtaining an order of affiliation under it cost so much.
321Since
the slaves themselves chose to emulate the traditional sexual division of labor
after emancipation, this implicitly was how they judged their own
situation. To apply Snell's point about
letting the poor themselves judge
what constitutes the quality of life can produce results that historians
employing contemporary values may find disagreeable. Snell, Annals, 9-14.
326Interestingly,
Snell's approach turns the Whig interpretation of history on its head. What is
now privileged are the values of a majority of average people in the past,
instead of emphasizing the (relatively few) originators and developers of
present-day values in various movements or individuals in the past.
327At
least, by c. 1700 this seemed to be the case in Virginia. Kolchin, Unfree Labor, 32; 454-55, n.
27.
331Olmsted,
Cotton Kingdom, 1:216-17, 201-2; Drew, Refugee, 44; Northrup, Twelve
Years a Slave, 116-17; White, "Female Slaves," 250, 251. Fogel and Engerman maintain that "plow
gangs were confined almost exclusively to men, and predominantly to young
men," but this is unduly dogmatic.
Time on the Cross, 1:141.
332Davis, Plantation
Life, 77, 78, 79, 80, 86, 121, 125, 141, 234, 243, 247, 252, 304, 305, 310,
315, 344.
337Ibid.,
80, 82, 105, 211, 212, 222, 223, 234, 243, 246, 252, 256, 305, 310, 315,
317. The disproportion of men trashing
cotton compared to women stems largely from Barrow’s tendency to have the women
spin on rainy days, but the men trash cotton.
340Fogel
and Engerman, Time on the Cross, 1:141.
Note the general descriptions of these two groups--"the men
between" and "men of skill" (my emphasis)--in Genovese, Roll,
Jordan, Roll, 365-98.
341Washington,
Up from Slavery, 17; Blassingame, Slave Community, 180-81;
Kemble, Journal, 182-83. See
also 79. Kemble, for her part, could
scarcely keep herself composed during the latter's request, having been struck
at the sentimental center of her life; White, "Female Slaves,"
251-53; Michael P. Johnson, "Smothered Slave Infants: Were Slave Mothers at Fault?," Journal
of Southern History 47 (Nov. 1981): 512-14; Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll,
353-61.
342Fogel
and Engerman, Time on the Cross, 1:206-207. For communal cooking, note Bassett, Plantation Overseer,
31.
343For
examples of this system, see Armstrong, Old Massa's People, 23, 68-69;
Douglass, Narrative, 22; Olmsted, Cotton Kingdom, 1:239; Boney,
"Blue Lizard," 354; Botkin, Lay My Burden Down, 147.
346Angela
Davis, "Reflections on the Black Woman's Role in the Community of
Slaves," Massachusetts Review, winter-spring 1972, 88-89; Dill,
"Our Mothers' Grief," 422; Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll, 451,
501.
347On the
subject of women being pushed out of the labor force, see Rab Houston and
K.D.M. Snell, "Historiographical Review:
Proto-Industrialization? Cottage
Industry, Social Change, and Industrial Revolution," Historical Journal,
27 (June 1984):487; Snell, Annals, 21, 40-66, 156-58; 1834 Report, as
quoted in Cunningham, "Employment and Unemployment of Children,"
135. For a general analysis of men’s
nature relative to women’s and its influence on their sex roles, see George
Gilder, Men and Marriage.
348An
evident exception to this generalization concerned largely pastoral areas such
as Dorset, where by the late nineteenth century (c. 1885), women did field work
only uncommonly. Snell, Annals,
392-394. However, Jeffries' account of
women field workers in Wiltshire, another heavily pastoral county in
southwestern England, points in another direction. Jeffries, Hodge, 2:61-62.
350Even
though Snell's subtitle mentions 1660-1900, his work only sparsely covers the
last half of the nineteenth century, especially when discounting his discussion
of the inaccuracies in Thomas Hardy's portrayal of English rural life.
352Ibid.,
pp. xiii, xiv; Agar, "Bedfordshire Farm Worker," 15, citing Culley's
investigation for this report.
Conspicuously, the sample Bedfordshire farm employed fourteen men and
eight boys, but no women, while the Northumberland one did, befitting the
difference in the sexual division of labor between the north and south broadly
speaking, at least for arable districts.
353Patrick,
"Agricultural Gangs," 22-26; Report on Employment in Agriculture, BPP,
1867-68, pp. xvi, xxii (Humber-Wold) xxvi (Northampton); Jeffries, Hodge,
2:61-62.
355Snell, Annals,
40-45, 158; Deborah Valenze, "The Art of Women and the Business of
Men: Women's Work and the Dairy
Industry c. 1740-1840," Past & Present, no. 130 (Feb. 1991),
142-69; Jeffries, Hodge and his Masters, 1:85.
356Commission
on Employment in Agriculture, BPP, 1867-68, pp. vii, x (generally), xxiv
(Yorkshire), xiii (Northumberland), xviii (Nottingham/Lincolnshire); See
Stilton in Patrick, "Agricultural Gangs," 25. Caird found in Norfolk condemnations of
female field work similar to the 1867-68 Report’s: "They contend that it [regular field work for women] has a most
demoralising effect, causing women thus employed to lose all feeling of
self-respect, rendering them bad housewives when married, and unfit, from want
of experience, to exercise that strict economy in expenditure, and to provide
those small fireside comforts which are so necessary in a labourer's
wife." English Agriculture,
175-76.
357Somerville,
Whistler, 147, cf. 42; Cobbett, Rural Rides, 219-220; See also
Snell, Annals, 67-71; Jeffries, Hodge, 2:97, 100-108.
358Snell, Annals,
51-57, 66. Although left unstated,
presumably the economic rationalization Snell mentions involved the increasing
use of scythes in place of sickles for the harvesting of grain. But the substitution of one for the other
was hardly an overnight process, since various methods of harvesting grain were
sometimes employed side-by-side. The
slow place of technological progress still allowed some women to do harvesting
work even late in the nineteenth century.
Morgan, Harvesters and Harvesting, 17-20, 25-29, 97-98, 115.
359Valenze,
"Women's Work and the Dairy Industry," 168; Commission on Employment
in Agriculture, BPP, 1867-68, p. xviii; Jeffries, Hodge, 2:62.
360Committee
on Allotments, BPP, 1843, 18, 107; William Bear's report, 1893 Royal
Commission on Labour, BPP, 1893-94, XXXV, as found in Agar, Bedfordshire
Farm Worker, 31.
361Snell, Annals,
408; see also 304, 309, 369-73, 399-410.
Of course, centralized work places did have their practical advantages
for home life, as George M. Trevelyan comments: “The working class home often
became more comfortable, quiet and sanitary by casing to be a miniature
factory.” English Social History
(New York and London: Longmans, Green & Company, 1942), 487, as cited by
Robert Hessen in Ayn Rand, Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal (New York: The
New American Library, 1967), 116.
362Marx’s
views on alienation are described by Fritz Pappenheim, The Alienation of
Modern Man: An Interpretation Based on Marx and Tonnies (New York: Modern Reader Paperbacks, 1959), 84-97; E.P. Thompson, "Time, Work-Discipline,
and Industrial Capitalism," Past and Present, no. 38 (Dec. 1967),
93, 95; M. Dorothy George, England in Transition: Life and Work in the
Eighteenth Century (London: Penguin, 1953) 139, as cited by Robert Hessen
in Ayn Rand, Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal (New York: The New American
Library, 1967), 116-17.
363For
example, note poetic lament concerning housework piled on top of field work by
the (fictional) early eighteenth century rural laboring wife "Mary
Collier" in Thompson, "Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial
Capitalism,” 79.
364A
valiant attempt to square this particular circle appears in Joan Wallach Scott,
Gender and the Politics of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 167-77. For the view that traditional gender roles
are not only based on biological differences, but that society needs to
maintain them to avoid “sexual suicide,” see George Gilder, Men and Marriage.
365On
hours of work generally, see Stampp, Peculiar Institution, 73-79;
Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll, 60-61; One sugar plantation owner disliked
the poor whites living nearby because their lives of relative ease tended to
demoralize his bondsmen. Olmsted, Cotton
Kingdom, 1:331, 2:37, 88 (work hours);
Drew, Refugee, 183; Armstrong, Old Massa's People, 87;
Botkin, Lay My Burden Down, 70, 89.
366Douglass,
Narrative, 29; Armstrong, Old Massa's People, 353. Concerning overseers, note Bassett, Plantation
Overseer, 12; Davis, Plantation Life, 329, 354; Botkin, Lay My
Burden Down, 166; Drew, Refugee, 50 (Banks), 97 (Gowens), 190
(Sidles). Cf. Sidle's testimony with
Isaac Griffin's on 199 and John C--n's on 192 from their travels on the
Mississippi.
367Botkin,
Lay My Burden Down, 86; Olmsted, Cotton Kingdom, 1:327-328,
337-338, 2:46-47, 239; Kemble, Journal, 303.
368Kemble,
Journal, 52, 65, 255, 260, 315; Douglass, Narrative, 88; Drew, Refugee,
52 (Johnson), 260 (Younger), 280 (Brown); Armstrong, Old Massa's People,
210; Olmsted, Cotton Kingdom, 1:103 (Virginia), 2:100 (Mississippi),
2:179-80 (near Natchez); David and Temin in David, Reckoning, 211-12. These figures also are based upon the number
of days worked per year, not just the hours per day that was worked. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll, 61;
Fogel and Engerman, Time on the Cross, 1:208.
369Thomas
Batchelor, General View of the Agriculture of the County of Bedford
(London, 1808), found in Agar, Bedfordshire Farm Worker, 11; Thompson,
"Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism," 60; Jeffries, Hodge,
2:57-63, 130, 132. He noted that wages
were higher in summer than in winter, which corresponds to the number of hours
worked daily.
370Arch, Joseph
Arch, 37-38; Batchelor as in Agar, Bedfordshire Farm Worker, 12, 13;
Somerville, Whistler, 32; Committee on Allotments, BPP, 1843,
112. The slaves normally had less time
than this for meals. One of Douglass's
chief complaints against Covey, to whom his master had rented him, and with
which he later fought, was that he routinely cut their meal times too
short. Narrative, 88.
372Doyle's
list as in Morgan, Harvesters, 107-8.
Cf. Doyle's figures with Bear for the Royal Commission on Labour in 1893
for Bedfordshire. Agar, Bedfordshire
Farm Worker, 30.
374Cf.
this with the discussion of Northern versus Southern agriculture's relative
efficiency in David, Reckoning, 209-11.
375Kemble,
Journal, p. 65; Olmsted, Cotton Kingdom, 1:103; 2:100, 179;
Armstrong, Old Massa's People, pp. 56, 87, 210; Benjamin Drew, Refugee,
pp. 97, 128. In a number of these cases
the exact length of the break is not given, but where it is stated or implied,
often it was for a half hour or less, when it was not two hours instead!
376Some
laborers got off at five or six, and then worked on their allotments from six
fifteen or six thirty to the end of the evening, but this was not done in
winter. Others worked on them early in
the morning at four or five, before going in to work for a local farmer or
landowner. Committee on Allotments, BPP,
1843, pp. 1-2, 15.
377Botkin,
Lay My Burden Down, pp. 151, 170; Armstrong, Old Massa's People,
p. 42; Northrup, Twelve Years a Slave, p. 149; Drew, Refugee, pp.
59 (Williams), 163 (Holmes), 186 (Warren), 360 (Sanford).
378Gallay,
"Origins of Slaveholders' Paternalism," pp. 380, 393; For slaves
receiving Sunday off, see Botkin, Lay My Burden Down, p. 147; Davis, Plantation
Life, pp. 188, 407; Olmsted, Cotton Kingdom, 2:71-72; Stampp, Peculiar
Institution, p. 79, 168; Kolchin, Unfree Labor, p. 107.
381For
examples of slaves being given other holidays off, see Armstrong, Old
Massa's People, pp. 134-35; Botkin, Lay My Burden Down, pp. 143-44;
Sudie Duncan Sides, "Slave Weddings and Religion," History Today,
24 (Feb. 1974):84.
382Davis, Plantation
Life, pp. 139, 218, 247, 248, 279.
See also p. 51; Botkin, Lay My Burden Down, p. 92; Douglass, Narrative,
p. 83; Brent, Incidents, p. 13; Northrup, Twelve Years a Slave,
p. 163.
384For
example, see Davis, Plantation Life, pp. 272, 301-302, 349, 352. Cold weather also could have similar
effects: Ibid., p. 321.
385Davis, Plantation
Life, pp. 118, 119, 120, 124, 195, 196, 198, 232, 233, 258; Kemble, Journal,
p. 274.
387For how
pastoral areas were different from arable in seasonal unemployment, note Snell,
Annals, pp. 40-49; Hudson, Shepherd's Life, p. 327. Note also p. 329; Jeffries, Hodge,
1:81, 2:71; Bear, Royal Commission on Labour, 1893, as found in Agar, Bedfordshire
Farm Worker, pp. 30-31; M.C.F. Morris, The British Workman: Past and Present (London: Oxford University Press, 1928), p. 121. The chapter this statement appears in was
said to characterize the years 1840-1860; Arch, Joseph Arch, p. 281.
389Diary, as found in Agar, Bedfordshire Farm Worker,
p. 107; Commission on Employment in Agriculture, BPP, 1867-68, p. xi
(rain), xv (Durham), xvi (Humber-Wold), xxix (sickness); Hudson, Shepherd's
Life, pp. 219-20; Somerville, Whistler, p. 45.
390Kemble,
Journal, p. 50. From the slave's
viewpoint, Allen Parker said nearly the same thing, as cited by Blassingame, Slave
Community, p. 317; Note Redpath's phrase in Botkin, Lay My Burden Down,
p. 2. "Day-to-day resistance"
is described in Stampp, Peculiar Institution, pp. 97-109. Note that the revolts and pitched battles
were much less common in North American slavery than in the Caribbean and Latin
America.
392Davis, Plantation
Life, p. 407. This comment attacks
the system prevailing in Caribbean slavery, where the slaves had to work so
many days on their masters' estates, and then spend so many days working on
their own gardens to raise food for themselves, like medieval serfs. In some cases the task system in mainland
North America came close to this.
394Stampp,
Peculiar Institution, p. 174.
For cases of slaves not whipped, or not whipped as adults, or masters
who rarely whipped their slaves, note Botkin, Lay My Burden Down, pp.
66, 143; Armstrong, Old Massa's People, p. 68; Drew, Refugee, p.
282; Olmsted, Cotton Kingdom, 2:70.
While such cases show that masters who never whipped their adult slaves
were not complete oddities, they certainly constituted a mighty small minority
of those who owned slaves in the South, as Genovese observed, Roll, Jordan,
Roll, p. 64.
395For a
sample of the available evidence on this point, see Botkin, ed., Lay My
Burden Down, pp. 9, 43, 85, 160, 164; Kemble, Journal, pp. 175, 200;
Armstrong, Old Massa's People, p. 180; Davis, Plantation Life,
pp. 109, 127, 133, 134; Brent, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, p.
197; Douglass, Narrative, pp. 71-72; Drew, Refugee, pp. 42, 49,
51, 54, 68, 74-75, 132, 138, 210, 227, 257, 382; Olmsted, Cotton Kingdom,
1:280.
397Fogel
and Engerman, Time on the Cross, 1:145; For their general analysis of
the Barrow diary and whipping frequency, see Sutch and Gutman in David, Reckoning,
pp. 57-69; Gutman, Slavery and the Numbers Game, pp. 17-34; Davis, Plantation
Life, pp. 181, 191, 192, 205, 239, 437, 439.
398Davis, Plantation
Life, pp. 268, 272, 421, 422; 392-406 (will); Gutman and Sutch in David, Reckoning,
pp. 62-63; Kolchin, Unfree Labor, p. 123.
400Olmsted,
Cotton Kingdom, 2:349, 354; Davis, Plantation Life, p. 262;
including other such atrocities is Ball, Slavery in the United States,
pp. vi-viii; Alan D. Watson, "Impulse Toward Independence: Resistance and Rebellion among North
Carolina Slaves, 1750-1775," Journal of Negro History 63 (Fall
1978):327. Also note Kemble, Journal,
p. 304.
401Botkin,
Lay My Burden Down, p. 41 (Master Jim), 211 (Union); Drew, Refugee,
p. 259; Douglass, Narrative, pp. 41-42.
403Botkin,
Lay My Burden Down, p. 67 (arson), 86 (Cato), 132 (Grayson); Gutman uses
this lynching statistic this way. Slavery
and the Numbers Game, p. 19.
405Botkin,
Lay My Burden Down, p. 92, 164, 226; Davis, Plantation Life, pp.
50, 91, 112, 154, 175; John Thompson, The Life of John Thompson, A Fugitive
Slave (Worcester, MA: 1856), p. 18,
cited by Stampp, Peculiar Institution, p. 172.
406Davis, Plantation
Life, pp. 165, 166, 175, 269; Douglass, Narrative, pp. 97-99; Drew, Refugee,
pp. 63-64, 206, 379.
407Selling
recalcitrant slaves was another punishment slaveholders inflicted, perhaps the
most effective one in their arsenal, because it manipulated slave family ties
for the purposes of imposing labor discipline, a point already covered above
(p. 159). As Genovese noted: "The masters understood the strength of
the marital and family ties among their slaves well enough to see in them a
powerful means of social control. . . . No threat carried such force as a threat to
sell the children, except the threat to separate husband and
wife. . . . Masters and
overseers . . . shaped disciplinary procedures to take full account
of family relationships." Roll,
Jordan, Roll, p. 452.
408Davis, Plantation
Life, pp. 130, 135, 163, 165; Botkin, Lay My Burden Down, p. 152;
Drew, Refugee, p. 220; Stampp, Peculiar Institution, p. 101.
409Fogel
and Engerman, Time on the Cross, 1:146-47. Barrow knew of one incident where a driver was killed for trying
to whip a slave. Davis, Plantation
Life, p. 156.
411Barrow
appealed to his slaves' self-interest through his "Rules of Highland
Plantation." Commenting on what
might happen if they were scattered about due to being allowed to go wherever
they wished after work was done:
"Who can tell the moment When a plantation might be threatened with
destruction from Fire--could the flames be arrested if the negroes are
scattered throughout the neighborhood, seeking their amusement. Are these not duties of great importance,
and in which evry negro himself is deeply interested . . . Wherever their wives live, there they
consider their homes, consequently they are indifferent to the interest of the
plantation to which they actually belong." When considering such chronic runaways as G. Jerry and Dennis, or
such defiant slave women as Patience and Big Lucy, this appeal to identify with
their master's interests apparently did not penetrate the quarters very
deeply. Davis, Plantation Life,
pp. 406, 408.
413Botkin,
ed., Lay My Burden Down, p. 124, 133, 198, 215; Kemble, Journal,
pp. 210, 274, 335; May, "John A. Quitman and His Slaves," p. 569;
Wallace Brown, "Negroes and the American Revolution," History
Today, 14 (Aug. 1964):557-58; Clarence L. Mohr, "Bibliographical
Essay Southern Blacks in the Civil
War: A century of Historiography,"
Journal of Negro History 59 (April 1974):183-88, 193-95; Frank A.
Cassell, "Slaves of the Chesapeake Bay Area and the War of 1812," Journal
of Negro History 57 (April 1972):144-55; William F. Messner, "Black
Violence and White Response: Louisiana,
1862," Journal of Southern History, 41 (Feb. 1975):19-36; Jeffrey
R. Young, "Ideology and Death on a Savannah River Rice Plantation,
1833-1867: Paternalism amidst 'a Good
Supply of Disease and Pain," Journal of Southern History 59 (Nov.
1993):702-3; Sylvia R. Frey, "The British and the Black: A New Perspective," Historian 38
(Feb. 1976):226-38; John Cimprich, "Slave Behavior during the Federal
Occupation of Tennessee, 1862-1865," Historian 44 (May
1982):335-46; Franklin, From Slavery to Freedom, pp. 87, 92, 119,
216-18. Genovese, due to his
overarching model of paternalism as the hegemonic ideology of the master class
being really accepted in a modified form by the slaves to suit their own
purposes, underestimates how disruptive war was in maintaining labor
discipline. Resistance to slavery need
not have been manifested by violent revolts, but by masses of slaves running
away, a lower risk strategy which still often obtained the desired goal. Roll, Jordan, Roll, pp. 143-45,
148-49.
414Actually,
we know the slaves' "hidden transcript" better than the agricultural
workers', because there are far more slave narratives and autobiographies than
diaries and autobiographies by farmworkers.
415For
example, although the Union army evidently was still far away, the war's
disorganizing effects questioned the slaveholder regime's legitimacy, making
the slaves more restive and free to speak, still existed in this case. After his grown son had paraded around in a
Confederate officer's uniform, one North Carolinian master shot and killed a
slave for defiantly saying, after mumbling it first: "I say, 'Look at that goddam soldier. He fighting to keep us niggers from being
free." Botkin, Lay My Burden
Down, pp. 194-95.
418Olmsted,
Cotton Kingdom, 2:356; Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll, pp.
285-324. See also Gutman and Sutch and
David and Temin in David, Reckoning, pp. 55-57, 69-74, 89-93, 204-7;
Gutman, Slavery and the Numbers Game, pp. 8, 14-18, 25-31, 39-42, 85,
165, 171-73.
420Scott, Domination
and the Arts of Resistance, pp. xii, 11, 17-18, 24, 66, 70-71, 87, 93-95,
105-6; Douglass, Narrative, p. 48.
421As
quoted in Vincent Harding, "Religion and Resistance among Antebellum
Negroes, 1800-1860," in August Meier and Elliott Rudwick, eds., The
Making of Black America, vol. 1: The Origins of Black Americans; 2
vols. Studies in American Negro Life (New York: Atheneum, 1969), pp. 182, 185, 187-88; Botkin, Lay My Burden
Down, p. 26.
422Genovese,
Roll, Jordan, Roll, pp. 91, 119, 292-93, 295, 306, 308, 335, 342-61
(sharing intimacies).
424Olmsted
noted that the South's dominant crop was grown on 5,000,000 acres out of over
500,000,000 acres, leaving much of the rest to wilderness. Cotton Kingdom, 1:24. See also Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll,
pp. 43-44, for how the frontier mentality affected the South's legal system by
encouraging extra-legal violence.
425Boney,
"Thomas Stevens," 232-33; Carl N. Degler, "The Foundations of
Southern Distinctiveness," Southern Review 13 (spring 1977):230;
May, "John A. Quitman and His Slaves," p. 564. Both Degler and May cite the work of Morton
Rothstein, and May cites William Scarborough, to support their views.
426Degler,
"Foundations of Southern Distinctiveness," p. 233. See Fogel and Engerman, Time on the Cross,
vol. 1, pp. 67-73. For a reply, note
David and Temin in David, Reckoning with Slavery, pp. 39-43. Their argument does has force, because (in a
perfectly efficient market) the relatively few marginal purchasers of slaves
who were purely motivated by profit-making considerations would be enough to bring
the rate of return to equilibrium with other profit-making activities in
commerce or industry. However, how much
could the "tail" of a few profit-motivated planters wag the
theoretical "dog" of purely non-economically motivated slaveholders
in reality, especially since the market for slaves (in particular) was not
exactly fully efficient? Their point
loses force because the mere existence of profits presupposes someone desires
them, just as the existence of wages presupposes laborers' self-interest in
earning them. Furthermore, even in
their example of the budget-constrained "Cavalier fop" who has no
profit-making motive concerning his slaves, self-interest is still present,
even if more weakly, because within his limited resources "on average
he would hold more slaves were slaves cheap (vis-a-vis others things) than he
would were slaves relatively dear" (p. 41). They ignore how the further off this market would go from the
general rate of return in the economy as a whole, proportionately increasing amounts
of capital would "bleed" from the slave-owning sector. Profit-seeking entrepreneurs will shift
capital from one sector to another as the rates of return between different
sectors grow increasingly wider.
427Gallay,
"Origins of Slaveholders' Paternalism," p. 371; Stampp, Peculiar
Institution, pp. 30-31. Gallay
maintains this ruling elite owned over half of the slaves. Stampp calculates that only one-fourth of
all the slaves belonged to those who owned less than ten, that somewhat more
than half lived in units of twenty, and one-fourth lived in units of over
fifty. If we accept Boney's definition
of a "planter," which evidently tilts towards those who really could
delegate the management of their plantations to others so they could pursue
women, wild game, and card playing, then a strong majority of slaves were not
owned by such planters.
429For
example, as an illustration of this ethos, we find in the New Testament
(Hebrews 12: 6-7): "For those whom
the Lord loves He disciplines, and He scourges every son whom He receives. It is for discipline that you endure; God
deals with you as with sons; for what son is there whom his father does not
discipline?"
431Degler,
"Foundations of Southern Distinctiveness," 231; Boney, "Thomas
Stevens, Antebellum Georgian," 233; Olmsted, Cotton Kingdom, 1:142;
Stampp, Peculiar Institution, p. 325.
432Stampp,
Peculiar Institution, p. 326.
Genovese implicitly rebuts this argument. Roll, Jordan, Roll, p. 10. He maintains that slaveholders often knew all their slaves by
name, as well as their individual personalities. However, this is not enough for close emotional bonds to form. Many high school teachers, facing 120-150
different students in the course of a day, may soon know all their individual
names and many individuals' personal quirks and talents. Nevertheless, the serious emotional bonds
that come from the intimacy of sharing what is on each other's minds are likely
limited to a relative few out of this group.
433Degler
noted that Fitzhugh's brand of true conservatism, who repudiated the liberal
tradition of Adam Smith and John Locke, constituted only a small minority
viewpoint among whites. These views
could not be sold to the poor white voters who personified "Jacksonian
Democracy" in the South. While
Calhoun, a much more influential figure than Fitzhugh, repudiated natural
rights and defended slavery, he still remained in the liberal tradition by
comparison. He did not look at
political and social institutions as organic wholes as Burke did, but something
changeable based upon reason, as illustrated by his proposal for a concurrent
majority in approving legislation.
Degler suggests that white Southerners, by emphasizing the racial
component of American slavery more than it was elsewhere, allowed them to read
the blacks out of society and political life as being innately inferior. This heavy dose of racism allowed them to
have an individualistic, liberal capitalism with a republican government based
upon universal white manhood suffrage among themselves while keeping blacks in
chains. Degler, "Foundations of
Southern Distinctiveness," 234-39.
434Douglass,
Narrative, p. 92; Drew, Refugee, p. 115; Botkin, Lay My Burden
Down, p. 186; Ball, Slavery in the United States, pp. 48-49.
435Botkin,
Lay My Burden Down, pp. 76, 102-3, 233, 249. See also Armstrong, Old Massa's People, p. 319; Clarence
L. Mohr, "Before Sherman: Georgia
Blacks and the Union War Effort, 1861-1864," Journal of Southern
History 45 (Aug. 1979):332.
436Some of
the other effects of using ignorance to control the slaves was dealt with in
the section on education (pp. 107-9) and the quality of life (p. 97) above, so
they need not be repeated here.
441Joyce
E. Chaplin, "Slavery and the Principle of Humanity: A Modern Idea in the Early Lower
South," Journal of Social History, winter 1990, p. 309.
442Kemble,
Journal, p. 25, 258. Note also
pp. 40, 177, 279-80; Drew, Refugee, pp. 101, 161; Olmsted, Cotton
Kingdom, 2:39, 103, 181; May, "John Quitman and His Slaves," pp.
556-57.
Botkin, Lay My Burden Down, p. 123; Chaplin,
"Slavery and the Principle of Humanity," 309; Davis, Plantation
Life, p. 157; Blassingame, Slave Community, p. 292. See also Orser, "Archaeological
Analysis of Plantation Society," 742.
444For
examples of this practice, see Botkin, Lay My Burden Down, p. 158; Kemble,
Journal, p. 47; Davis, Plantation Life, p. 253; Bassett, Plantation
Overseer, pp. 187, 203, 210; Olmsted, Cotton Kingdom, 1:238,
251; 2:180, 195-96, 238-39; Alex
Lichtenstein, "'That Disposition to Theft, With Which They Have Been
Branded,': Moral Economy, Slave
Management, and the Law," Journal of Social History 21 (spring
1988):424-26; Morgan, "Ownership of Property by Slaves," pp. 399-420;
Stampp, Peculiar Institution, pp. 164-66.
446Fogel
and Engerman, Time on the Cross, 1:148; Davis, Plantation Life,
pp. 139, 218, 279; Sides, "Slave Weddings and Religion," 83. For more on this issue, see Gutman, Slavery
and the Numbers Game, pp. 44-47.
447Fogel
and Engerman, Time on the Cross, 1:149, 150, 2:117-118, 262; Gutman
and Sutch in David, Reckoning with Slavery, pp. 74-86. They also explain here how Fogel and
Engerman's inflated figures on the percentage of black drivers and overseers (supervisors
of drivers) were inaccurate.
448Blassingame,
Slave Community, pp. 258-60, 316; Orser, "Archaeological Analysis
of Plantation Society," pp. 740-41.
For the general unpopularity of the drivers with other slaves, note
Botkin, Lay My Burden Down, pp. 85, 90, 91, 94, 120, 121; Armstrong, Old
Massa's People, pp. 217-18. The
ex-slaves interviewed in the FWP narratives may have emphasized the brutality
of the drivers due to fearing saying negative things about their past white
master and/or overseer to white interviewers that gathered their
reminiscences. William L. Van Deburg,
"Slave Drivers and Slave Narratives:
A New Look at the 'Dehumanized Elite,'" Historian 39 (Aug.
1977):728-30. However, in at least two
of the narratives found in Botkin cited above, the slaves were willing to say
negative things about their masters as well, thus blunting Van Deburg's point.
449Kemble,
Journal, p. 153; Brent, Incidents, p. 41. However, if the slave was a valuable
artisan, punishing him this way normally cost too much. Armstrong, Old Massa's People, p.
184.
450Davis, Plantation
Life, pp. 272, 359, 419, 421; David and Temin in David, Reckoning,
pp. 45-46; Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll, pp. 370-71, 393. The nearest any master might have come to
Fogel and Engerman's model of long-run incentives was the large plantation of
Zephaniah Kingsley in Florida. It
featured a three-tiered hierarchy:
freedmen, the drivers who were next in line to be freed, and the mass of
slaves, which included a flow of continual newcomers from Africa. See J.P. White, "Christmas at the
Plantation," North American Review 278 (Nov./Dec. 1993):5-6.
452Gathering
"horror stories" of harsh overseers is easy, and little exists to
rebut the overall impression they give.
Unlike the case concerning good versus bad masters, where even among the
slaves a more divided opinion exists, testimony about overseers is nearly
always negative. See Botkin, ed., Lay
My Burden Down, pp. 36, 104, 106; Kemble, Journal, p. 180, 223-24;
Davis, Plantation Life, p. 154; Bassett, Plantation Overseer, pp.
112, 145-47; Douglass, Narrative, pp. 38-40; Drew, Refugee, p.
29, 183; Northrup, Twelve Years a Slave, pp. 170-71; Franklin, From
Slavery to Freedom, p. 139. One
striking exception to this generally dismal picture was the overseer from
Pennsylvania who protected Northrup from a master about to hang him with the
aid of two other overseers for whipping him.
See Northrup, Twelve Years a Slave, pp. 77, 83-85.
455Young,
"Ideology and Death," 697; Armstrong, Old Massa's People, p.
213; Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll, pp. 321-23; Stampp, Peculiar
Institution, pp. 54-56; Fogel and Engerman, Time on the Cross,
1:236-37; Kolchin, Unfree Labor, pp. 79, 347.
456Olmsted,
Cotton Kingdom, 1:247-48; Cf. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll, p.
621; Morgan, "Ownership of Property by Slaves," pp. 400-401. Notice how organizing work by task appealed
to the slaves' sense of time and work (task-orientation), while trying to get
them to work methodically by the clock was a failure (time-orientation).
459Davis, Plantation
Life, p. 136; Armstrong, Old Massa's People, p. 240; Blake
Allmendinger, "Acting and Slavery:
Representations of Work in the Writings of Fanny Kemble," Mississippi
Quarterly 41 (fall 1988):512; Starobin, "Disciplining Industrial
Slaves," 112; Blassingame, Slave Community, pp. 126-27.
462Botkin,
Lay My Burden Down, pp. 168-69; Brent, Incidents, p. 123; Drew, Refugee,
pp. 249-50. For more on the patrol
system, see Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll, pp. 617-19; Stampp, Peculiar
Institution, pp. 214-15.
464Armstrong,
Old Massa's People, pp. 150-51.
Freedman Tony Washington tells of a similar practice, ibid., p. 32.
465Armstrong,
Old Massa's People, pp. 86 (Cato), 113 (Robinson) 146 (Europe); Bassett,
Plantation Overseer, p. 25.
466Brent, Incidents,
pp. 28, 33-34; Drew, Refugee, pp. 70 (Nichols), 249 (Younger); Mohr,
"Slavery in Oglethorpe County," 8; Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll,
p. 41; Olmsted, Cotton Kingdom, 1:356;
468Ball, Slavery
in the United States, pp. 57-58; Kemble, Journal, pp. 102-3, 135,
170; Armstrong, Old Massa's People, pp. 31, 32, 81; Genovese, Roll,
Jordan, Roll, pp. 82-83. Also note
the implications of Jacobs saying she could look for no protection from her
young mistress against Mr. Flint in Brent, Incidents, p. 18.
470Ball, Slavery
in the United States, p. 58; Botkin, Lay My Burden Down, p. 119;
Drew, Refugee, p. 69. However,
later, after he had been chained to a tree, he punished by making him fall on
his back.
473Anderson,
"Aunt Jemima in Dialectics," 111; As summarized in Richard S. Sterne
and Jean Loftin Rothseiden, "Master-Slave Clashes as Forerunners of
Patterns in Modern American Urban Eruptions," Phylon 30 (fall
1969):254.
474Stampp,
Peculiar Institution, p. 133; Blassingame, Slave Community, pp.
219-20; Anderson, "Aunt Jemima in Dialectics," 111-12; Sterne and
Rothseiden, "Master-Slave Clashes," 250-60.
475Hobsbawm
and Rude, Captain Swing, pp. 212, 287 (quote), 253-58 (policies of
repression), 308-9 (punishment statistics); "A very English rising," Times
Literary Supplement, Sept. 11, 1969, as cited in Rule, Labouring Classes,
p. 360; Hudson, Shepherd's Life, pp. 233-34; Hammond and Hammond, Village
Labourer, p. 279 (Cavan), 254, 266 (policies of repression).
477Hobsbawm
and Rude, Captain Swing, pp. 66, 102-5; Hammond and Hammond, Village
Laborer, pp. 246-49, 258-59; See
also, although fictionalized and opposed to the rioters' demands, Machine-Breaking
and the Changes Occasioned by It in the Village of Turvey Down: A Tale of the Times (Oxford,
England: W. Baxter, 1830), pp. 26-30,
as found in Carpenter, Rising of the Agricultural Workers.
478Hammond
and Hammond, Village Labourer, pp. 250-52; compare the similar demands
made and granted in Hobsbawm and Rude, Captain Swing, pp. 105, 117-18.
479Concerning
the counties' rulers willingness to make concessions, note Hobsbawm and Rude, Captain
Swing, pp. 16-17.
481The
remarkable restraint and order of English crowds during food riots also
confirms this characterization. See
Thompson, "The Moral Economy of the English Crowd," 99, 108-20;
Hammond and Hammond, Village Laborer, pp. 116-18.
483Alexis
de Tocqueville, The Old Regime and the French Revolution, trans. Stuart
Gilbert (1856; New York: Anchor Books,
Doubleday, 1955), pp. 32-72; Hammond and Hammond, Village Labourer, pp.
12-17; Hammond and Hammond, Town Labourer, pp. 60-80, 269; Arch, Joseph
Arch, p. 164.
484Thompson,
Making, pp. 216-17. The purpose
of this brief summary on enclosure is not to debate the overall merits of
enclosure, such as the trade-off between increased production and high social
costs like increased unemployment, loss of rights to common, etc.
485Young, General
Report, pp. 12-13, 16; Commission on Employment in Agriculture, BPP,
1867-68, pp. 48, 52, 54; Anscomb, "Parliamentary Enclosure in
Northamptonshire," pp. 415-416; Hammond and Hammond, Village Labourer,
pp. 93, 97-98; Rule, Vital Century, pp. 86-87.
488J.
Arbuthnot, An Inquiry into the Connection between the Present Price of Provisions
and the Size of Farms (1773), as quoted in Snell, Annals, p.
173. Cf. the clergyman for Naseing,
Essex's comment that enclosure locally had "a worthless crew changed to
industrious labourers." Young, General
Report, p. 156; see also pp. 391-92.
Those living near large commons were considered "irregular in their
habits" and "were often the most distressed and needy of the
surrounding population."
Commission on the Employment in Agriculture, BPP, 1867-68, p.
lii.
489Hobsbawm
and Rude, Captain Swing, pp. 35-37; Hammond and Hammond, Village
Labourer, pp. 99-101; Rule, Vital Century, pp. 88-90.
490Thompson,
Making, p. 221; Somerville, Whistler, p. 407; Hobsbawm and Rude, Captain
Swing, p. 76; Snell, Annals, pp. 195-97. Note that Yorkshire was broken up into three different
"counties" for these comparisons; Young, General Report, p.
157.
492Hobsbawm
and Rude, Captain Swing, pp. 34, 182-83; Snell, Annals, pp.
17-19, 72-73, 78-80, 334-36; Norma Landau, "The Regulation of Immigration,
Economic Structures and Definitions of the Poor in Eighteen-Century
England," Historical Journal 33 (Sept. 1990):541-72; Hammond and
Hammond, Village Labourer, pp. 108-16.
There is an ominous similarity between the pre-1795 certificate system
and the pass system imposed on slaves, the main differences being the latter
was proportionately much less often enforced, especially in urban areas, that
it was tied to giving aid to the poor, not a restriction on movement for the
sake of control alone, that a local unit of government, not a
master/employer/owner granted it, and the difficulties imposed in instantly
spotting violators because of a lack of racial differences between the laborers
and those who enforced it.
493Arthur
Young, A Six Months Tour Through the North of England 2d ed., 4 vols.
(London: W. Trahan, W. Nicol, 1771),
2:129; Commission on Employment in Agriculture, BPP, 1867-68, pp. xvi,
xvii, xxv, xxvi; Morgan, Harvesters, p. 192, footnote 14; Rule, Labouring
Classes, p. 79-80; Hammond and Hammond, Village Labourer, p. 108.
494Snell, Annals,
pp. 74-76, 84; Commission on Employment in Agriculture, BPP, 1867-68,
pp. xii-xiii, xx, xxiv; Committee on New Poor Law, BPP, 1837, first
report, p. 47
495J.C.D.
Clark says enclosure "may even have tended to increase the numbers of
living-in servants, for the effect of more efficient agriculture was to
increase, not reduce the demand for labor." This assumes not only that the given enclosure did not replace
arable land with permanent pasture, but generally discounts how enclosure
increased unemployment by driving more workers into local labor markets,
especially in winter, since they could no longer eke out a living off the local
commons. English Society
1688-1832: Ideology, Social Structure and Political Practice During the
Ancien Regime, Cambridge Studies in the History and Theory of Politics
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1985), p. 68.
497Cobbett,
Rural Rides, pp. 219-20; Chadwick's letter as reproduced in Committee on
the New Poor Law, BPP, 1837, first report, p. 46; Hobsbawm and Rude, Captain
Swing, pp. 44-46; Snell, Annals, pp. 69-97, 216.
498Thompson,
Making, p. 221; Committee on the New Poor Law, BPP, 1837, first
report, pp. 53-54, second report, p. 18; Agar, Bedfordshire Farm Worker,
pp. 52, 64, 73; see also p. 76; Somerville, Whistler, p. 385; Snell, Annals,
pp. 210-18, 348-52; Rule, Vital Century, pp. 23-24; Hammonds, Village
Labourer, p. 167.
499Rushton,
"The Poor Law in North-East England," 147; Hobsbawm and Rude, Captain
Swing, p. 76; Anonymous, The Life and History of Swing; reprint ed.,
Carpenter, Rising of the Agricultural Labourers, pp. 18-19, 24;
Hammonds, Village Labourer, p. 241; Peter Dunkley, "'The 'Hungry
Forties' and the New Poor Law: A Case
Study," Historical Journal 17 (June 1974):337-338; Report on the
New Poor Law, BPP, 1837, first report, p. 71.
500For a
contemporary analysis of this phenomenon, see George Gilder, Wealth and
Poverty (New York: Basic Books,
1981), pp. 143-44, 154, 156-61.
501as in
Agar, Bedfordshire Farm Worker, p. 74.
Even when something was accomplished, a lack of incentive for further
employment could exist when one ends up overwhelmed with a surplus inventory of
gravel. One area in Yorkshire employed
so many at stone-breaking that they piled up enough stones to last over eight
to ten years after only three or four months.
Committee on Allotments, BPP, 1843, p. 29.
502A.F.
Cirket, "The 1830 Riots in Bedfordshire--Background and Events," Bedfordshire
Historical Record Society 57 (1978):107; Committee on New Poor Law, BPP,
1837, first report, p. 66; Committee on Poor Law Amendment Act, BPP,
1837, first report, p. 72; cf. testimony by farmer Thomas William Overman of
Bedfordshire in 1838, Agar, Bedfordshire Farm Worker, p. 92.
503Quoted
by Dunkley, "The 'Hungry Forties,'" 340; letter to E. Chadwick, 1836,
as found in Agar, Bedfordshire Farm Worker, p. 131; see also pp. 78-79.
504Rushton,
"The Poor Law," pp. 147-148.
On the early advocacy and application of this test, see David Eastwood,
"Debate: The Making of the New
Poor Law Redivivus," Past & Present, no. 127 (May 1990), p.
191.
505Peter
Mandler, "Making of the New Poor Law Redivivus," p. 192, footnote 27;
For more on the workhouse/prison analogy, see James Turner's exchanges with
James Fielden, M.P., in Agar, Bedfordshire Farm Worker, pp. 92-94. Admittedly, while the authors of the 1834
Poor Law Report wanted the inmates of the workhouses continually confined,
local exceptions existed, such as in Peterborough union, Northampton. Its guardians voted to allow the infirm and
aged to walk outside for four hours daily in certain areas. Anthony Brundage, "The English Poor Law
of 1834 and the Cohesion of Agricultural Society," Agricultural History
48 (July 1974):416.
506Somerville,
Whistler, pp. 353-54; Committee on New Poor Law, BPP, 1837, first
report, p. 70. Interestingly, he noted
if elderly couples "wished to live together, the Commissioners
have, in some cases relaxed the rule."
The Northampton guardians in 1837 received such permission, for they had
partitioned off a room for elderly couples who wished to sleep together. Brundage, "English Poor Law," 416.
507Arch, Joseph
Arch, p. 35; cf. the debate over taking in part of a family in Committee on
New Poor Law, BPP, 1837, first report, pp. 16, 32.
508For
more on this general theme, see Snell, Annals, pp. 133-35. Engels mentions that pauperized families
were divided within a workhouse. Condition,
pp. 324-25.
510Somerville's
fictitious dialog, based on solid facts, said the workhouse made "the diet
as low as will possibly sustain life" in order to deter applicants. Whistler, p. 47.
511For
more on the deliberately bad conditions in workhouses and their deterrent
purposes, see Engels, Condition, pp. 324, 326-29; Dunkley, "The 'Hungry Forties,'"
335-37; Snell, Annals, pp. 127, 132-37; Eastwood, "Making of the
New Poor Law Redivivus," 190-92
512Morgan,
Harvesters, p. 192, n. 10; Overman as in Agar, Bedfordshire Farm
Worker, p. 75; see also Gery on p. 52.
513Arthur
Young, An Inquiry into the Propriety of Applying Wastes to the Better
Maintenance and Support of the Poor (Bury St. Edmunds, 1801), cited by
Snell, Annals, p. 214, footnote 144; Hugh Wade Gery, testifying before
Select Committee of the House of Lords on the Poor Laws, BPP, 1818, vol.
V as in Agar, Bedfordshire Farm Worker, p. 50; see also Cirket,
"1830 Riots in Bedfordshire," 75-76.
514Batchelor
for Lidlington, Commission on Poor Law, BPP, 1834 as in Agar, Bedfordshire
Farm Worker, p. 74; Committee on New Poor Law, BPP, 1837, first
report, p. 56; Hobsbawm and Rude, Captain Swing, p. 51.
515Committee
on New Poor Law, BPP, 1838, first report, pp. 7, 38, 46; Brundage,
"English Poor Law," 412.
516Snell, Annals,
pp. 128-31. These are money wages only,
but Snell maintains prices were similar for 1833 and 1837, and that for 1850
prices were only "marginally lower;" Committee on New Poor Law, BPP,
1837, first report, p. 24; Caird, English Agriculture, p. 85;
Somerville, Whistler, p. 128.
518Committee
on Allotments, BPP, 1843, p. v; see also pp. iv, 6, 22, 40, 49, 84, 110,
137; Commission on Employment in Agriculture, BPP, 1867-1868, pp. xxxi,
xxiv.
519Committee
on Allotments, BPP, 1843, pp. 12, 24, 40, 84; Agar, Bedfordshire Farm
Worker, pp. 7, 22; Young, Six Months Tour, 2:261-64.
520Young, General
Report, pp. 14-15, 164-66; Committee on Allotments, BPP, 1843, pp.
11, 15, 17, 22; see also pp. v, 12, 32, 113; Arch, Joseph Arch, pp.
342-43.
521Cirket,
"1830 Riots in Bedfordshire," 109-10; Hammonds, Village Labourer,
pp. 156-57; Committee on Allotments, 1843, BPP, p. iii. For an example of how at-will tenancies or
insecure tenure could intimidate farmers when public voting was done, see Arch,
Joseph Arch, pp. 59-60; cf. Somerville, Whistler, p. 129. As for allotments still not being especially
extensive even mid-century, see Commission on Employment in Agriculture, BPP,
1867-68, first report, p. xxxii.
522Committee
on Allotments, BPP, 1843, pp. 2, 16, 39, 47, 106, 108; Somerville, Whistler,
pp. 33-34; Morgan, Harvesters, pp. 139-40, 148.
523Arch, Joseph
Arch, pp. 344-45, 360. Actually the
administrative costs and the loss of rent may not have been much greater, other
than agents spending more time while collecting from more people, because
laborers with allotments reliably paid their rent in at least some cases. In one case, the landlord had lost only
one-quarter of 1 percent of rent charged.
See Committee on Allotments, BPP, 1843, pp. 17, 112, 119.
Commission on Allotments, BPP, 1843, p. 47;
Jeffries, Hodge, 1:152; Somerville, Whistler, p. 33; Arch, Joseph
Arch, p. 344; Agar, Bedfordshire Farm Worker, p. 7.
525my
emphasis, Young, A Six Weeks Tour Through the Southern Counties of England
and Wales, 2d ed. (London: W.
Strahan, W. Nicoll, etc., 1769), pp. 324-325; Committee on Allotments, BPP,
1843, p. 47.
526Thompson,
"Time, Work-Discipline, Industrial Capitalism," 60-61, 90-97. Curiously, when he waxes philosophical on
the nature of task-orientation towards the end of this article, he largely
forgets this crucial insight.
Necessarily, if it is the division of labor that creates time discipline
through having the managers and the managed in a central workplace--the essence
of the factory system--then who owns the means of production, whether it be the
state or private individuals, becomes irrelevant to the switch over from
task-orientation to time-orientation, as the Soviet experience in the 1930s
demonstrates.
528Such
policies backfired then, as they do today, for the basic reason Caird saw: "No labour is more unprofitable than
that which is underpaid." English
Agriculture, p. 73.
529Jeffries,
Hodge, 2:60; Arch, Joseph Arch, p. 340; Young, General Report,
p. 105; Morgan, Harvesters, pp. 110-14; see also pp. 53, 95, 98, 106-7
for more on piecework's extensive use during harvest; Caird, English
Agriculture, p. 248; Royal Commission on Labour, 1893, as found in Agar, Bedfordshire
Farm Worker, p. 32.
531Arch, Joseph
Arch, p. 164; see also pp. 153-54; Hammond and Hammond, Village Labourer,
p. 14; Hudson, Shepherd's Life, pp. 229-30; Jeffries, Hodge,
1:141. Since in this work he is
generally sympathetic to the rural elite, this description gains weight.
532Hammond
and Hammond, Town Labourer, p. 62.
For more on this general theme, see Thompson, Making, pp. 107-77,
219, 222; Hammond and Hammond, Town Labourer, pp. 80, 94.
533John
Styles, "Crime in 18th-Century England," History Today 38
(Mar. 1988):41; Jeffries, Hodge, 2:13-17; Arch, Joseph Arch, p.
152.
535Arch, Joseph
Arch, pp. 151-152. For the
ignorance of the law among the Swing Rioters, see Hammond and Hammond, Village
Labourer, p. 276.
537For
some of these specific laws and cases, see Hudson, Shepherd's Life, pp.
227-30; Hammond and Hammond, Village Labourer, pp. 272-75.
543On
Scottish bailiffs, see Hammond and Hammond, Village Labourer, pp.
211-12; For Arch's ideas on the relationship between the laborers and farmers,
see Arch, Joseph Arch, pp. 35-37, 128-30, 175-76, 314; Hudson, Shepherd's
Life, pp. 216-17.
544I
believe that while Clark's thesis is perfectly sustainable for most of the
eighteenth century, its full credibility is seriously undermined after c. 1795
by the aftereffects of the French Revolution and the wars with France,
including the growth of artisanal radicalism.
547Evans, Forging
of the Modern State, p. 146; as cited in Rule, Labouring Classes, p.
360; Hobsbawm and Rude, Captain Swing, pp. 17, 52; see also p. 47; On
the opposition of the poor, see Snell, Annals, pp. 133-37; Brundage,
"English Poor Law," 408-9.
550Snell,
Annals, pp. 67-69, 101-103, 321-322.
While dealing with an urban, industrial context, Engels made the same
point. Condition, p. 138; Howard
Newby, "The Deferential Dialectic," Comparative Studies in Society
and History 17 (April 1975):155-57; Arch, Joseph Arch, p. 249;
Jeffries, Hodge, 1:135; Hobsbawm and Rude, Captain Swing, p. 38.
551Committee
on Allotments, BPP, 1843, p. 25; Somerville, Whistler, pp.
121-22; Hudson, Shepherd's Life, pp. 293-94; Eastwood, "Making of
the New Poor Law Redivivus," 192.
552Hammond
and Hammond, Village Labourer, pp. 226-27; Hobsbawm and Rude, Captain
Swing, p. 69; Newby, "The Deferential Dialectic," 161-63.
553From
1770 to 1851, Nonconformity rose from having just a half million out of seven
million in England, to slightly over half of the church-going population in
1851, with over half the population not attending church at all. Clark, English
Society, p. 89.
554James
Obelkevitch, Religion and Rural Society:
South Lindsey 1825-1875, as quoted in Clark, English Society,
p. 68.
555Snell, Annals,
p. 136. Confirming Snell's viewpoint,
although in an urban, artisanal context, was the leading grievance of Chartist
orators--the New Poor Law. Rule, Labouring
Classes, p. 390; also see Thomson, England in the Nineteenth Century,
p. 71.
557Newby
notes that the outward signs of deference, such as bowing, saluting, etc., are
not without meaning, because they allow the superordinate to maintain his
social distance (avoid "fraternizing" and excessive identification
with by the subordinate) while routinely engaging in the close-knit
face-to-face interaction by which traditional authority is exercised. Since hegemony is fundamentally based upon
the thinking of the subordinate class in question, using a strictly behavioral
definition of deference has little bearing on the question of the elite's
success in getting the subordinate class to believe in its ideology. As a result, a mask can conceal a
considerable amount of class consciousness.
Newby, "Deferential Dialectic," 142-43, 158-60.
559Clark
insists that the essence of patriarchalism--his preferred term for the same
concept--is hierarchy and divinely appointed, inherent authority based on the
model of the family being applied analogously to the state. It is not "fatherly care as a gloss on
collectivism, or the degree of kindliness we might fancy we can measure in
social relations." But for this
doctrine to have legitimacy to the lower class, it must involve more than mere
obedience and subjection to the upper class.
Paternalism is not just mere "dictatorship" or
"tyranny," but involves a system of unequal rights and duties in
which the upper class is favored because supposedly it looks out for the
interests of all of society, including the lower class, not just its own. While
Clark rightly points out, in a reply to E.P. Thompson, that "a model which
relies on 'emotional cosiness' or justice-as-fairness is likely to be
applicable to no period," historians (if the documentation is available)
can still crudely gauge how much of a reality this aspect of the paternalistic
model has. The New Poor Law of 1834,
combined with such generally earlier moves as enclosure, the decline of
service, and the tightening of the screws on relief under the Old Poor Law,
were decisive signs that the upper class was rewriting the social contract, and
turning away from paternalism in practice. The growing acceptance in the early
nineteenth century of Malthusianism and Classical economics among the rural
elite--something which Clark would contest--may not have reduced the hypocrisy
level greatly, depending on how often paternalistic rhetoric was resorted to
simultaneously, or by the same individuals.
See Clark, English Society, pp. 74-75.
561On the
rising of the laborers' political consciousness and the farmworkers' unions,
note the incidental discussion by G.E. Mingay in Hartwell, The Long Debate
on Poverty, pp. 43, 45.
562Northrup,
Twelve Years a Slave, p. 75; Committee on the New Poor Law, BPP,
1837, first report, p. 16; second report, p. 23.
563Of
course, those laborers who lived in close parishes with tied cottages, i.e.,
farmer- or landlord-provided ("company") housing generally had better
housing, but were subject to significantly more control. If they were fired, they lost their jobs and
homes just as instantly. "Mr.
Trethewy, agent to Lady Cowper [in Bedfordshire, where the farmers had full
control over the cottages and who lived in them on her estates said]
. . . he has never known any evil result to the labourer from his
being brought more under the control of the farmer." Agar, Bedfordshire Farm Worker, p.
21.
564Admittedly,
the poor rates had fallen nearly one-third from the 1815-20 period to 1830-35,
bearing witness to the rural elite's success in tightening the screws in the
last years of the Old Poor Law. Mulhall
estimated the pence paid per inhabitant in England under it fell from 152 to
114 during this time, and as a percent of the national income, 3.25 to
1.75. Hobsbawm and Rude, Captain
Swing, p. 51. The fall in
productivity combined with the fears induced by the Swing Riots may have been
as important reasons for the passage of the New Poor Law as high poor rates.
567Arguably,
a third exists, Elkins' "Sambo" hypothesis, but it differs
considerably from these two. His
analysis uses social psychology and maintains the pressures of slavery bent the
personality of the slaves, not so much their ideology, as is discussed in the
next section (pp. 333-336).
568For
some of Scott's relevant points on this matter, see Scott, Domination and
the Arts of Resistance, pp. 190, 193-94.
570"The
slaves' response to paternalism and their imaginative creation of a partially
autonomous religion provided a record of simultaneous accommodation and
resistance to slavery." Genovese, Roll,
Jordan, Roll, pp. 597, 598.
572Jones, Religious
Instruction, pp. 130-131, as cited in Blassingame, Slave Community,
pp. 316; Chesnut, Diary from Dixie, pp. 269, 292-93. See also p. 433. Incidently, and ironically, this officer's servant likely
constitutes a striking case of successful hegemonic indoctrination.
575Drew, Refugee,
p. 90; Botkin, Lay My Burden Down, pp. 66, 132-33; Brent, Incidents,
p. 159; Kemble, Journal, p. 134.
576Davis, Plantation
Life, pp. 200, 363, 433-34; Botkin, Lay My Burden Down, pp. 164-65,
190; Olmsted, Cotton Kingdom, 1:340; Stampp, Peculiar Institution,
pp. 90-91
577Botkin,
Lay My Burden Down, p. 3; Kemble, Journal, p. 49; see also pp.
120, 263 and Olmsted, Cotton Kingdom, 1:105 for similar declarations.
580Kemble,
Journal, pp. 163-64; Olmsted, Cotton Kingdom, 1:47. While he noted how one black man strongly
protested against three whites who shoved and hit him out into the middle of
the street, this defiance was exceptional.
582The
best overview of this controversy is:
Ann J. Lane, ed., The Debate Over Slavery: Stanley Elkins and His Critics (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1971). A blistering critique of Elkins, although
its target is often only clear to those familiar with this controversy, is in
Blassingame, Slave Community. A
excellent and reasonably brief critique of the Elkins thesis is: Kenneth M. Stampp, "Rebels and
Sambos: The Search for the Negro's
Personality in Slavery," Journal of Southern History 37 (Aug.
1971):367-92. Hugh Tulloch notes that
the Elkins thesis was "daring, cogently argued and satisfying complete,
but had the single disadvantage of being wrong, and every study thereafter has
contributed to the slow accumulation of counter-evidence and implicit
rebuttal." "But the Cat
Himself Knows: Slavery in the
Ante-Bellum South--A Historiographical Survey," History Today 30
(May 1980):58.
Davis, "Reflections on the Black Woman's
Role," 85; Elkins, Slavery, p. 133, n. 106; Farmer's Register
5 (May 1837):32, as cited in Stamp, "Rebels and Sambos," 391; Mary
Agnes Lewis, "Notes: Slavery and
Personality: A Further Comment," American
Quarterly 21 (spring 1967):118; Blassingame, Slave Community, pp.
223-26; William W. Nichols, "Slave Narratives: Dismissed Evidence in the Writing of Southern History," Phylon
32 (winter 1971):404-9. For someone
insightfully drawing attention to the similarities to Genovese's and Elkins's
theses, see Richard H. King, "Review Essay: Marxism and the Slave South," American Quarterly 29
(spring 1977):126.
585Botkin,
Lay My Burden Down, pp. 6, 25-26, 46, 49; Douglass, Narrative, p.
33; Davis, Plantation Life, p. 211; Stampp, Peculiar Institution,
pp. 124-27.
587Lichtenstein,
"'That Predisposition to Theft,'' 424-32; Olmsted, Cotton Kingdom,
2:196; Drew, Refugee, p. 157.
589Davis, Plantation
Life, p. 32; Lichtenstein, "'That Predisposition to Theft'," pp.
422-23; Olmsted, Cotton Kingdom, 2:37, 177, 195-96; Chesnut, Diary
from Dixie, p. 348.
590Olmsted,
Cotton Kingdom, 1:106. For an
example of a slave feeling perfectly justified in successfully hoodwinking his
owner's into giving him his unpaid wages before running away, and Jacobs'
somewhat reluctant endorsement, see Incidents, p. 198; Kemble, Journal,
p. 277.
591Olmsted,
Cotton Kingdom, 2:219; Lichtenstein, "'That Disposition to
Theft,'" 413-439; Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll, pp. 608-9; In
"The Old Allegiance," summarized by Laurence Shore, "The Poverty
of Tragedy in Historical Writing on Southern Slavery," South Atlantic
Quarterly 85 (spring 1986):152; Robert L. Paquette, "Social History
Update: Slave Resistance and Social
History," Journal of Social History 24 (spring 1991):684.
592Olmsted,
Cotton Kingdom, 1:118-121, 149, 153, 238; 2:198-200, 380-81; Davis, Plantation
Life, pp. 90, 123, 132, 148, 157, 214, 231, 244, 311, 329; see also Botkin,
Lay My Burden Down, p. 72; Kemble, Journal, p. 50.
593Olmsted,
Cotton Kingdom, 1:208; Davis, Plantation Life, pp. 135, 160, 219,
232, 244. For further documentation,
see the prior section dealing with slaveholders' control strategies (pp.
231-35).
594Olmsted,
Cotton Kingdom, 1:99-100; Blassingame, Slave Community, pp. 277,
280, 282; Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll, p. 305.
595Bassett,
Plantation Overseer, pp. 52-66.
See also Botkin, Lay My Burden Down, p. 195; Kolchin, Unfree
Labor, pp. 276-77, 295; Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll, pp. 16-21,
357-58, 381-82.
597Botkin,
Lay My Burden Down, p. 165; Armstrong, Old Massa's People, pp.
126, 173-74; Davis, "Changing Places," 657, 672-75; Stampp, Peculiar
Institution, pp. 95-96; Davis, Plantation Life, p. 381.
598Bassett,
Plantation Overseer, pp. 57-61; Gavin diary as cited in Stampp, Peculiar
Institution, pp. 114-15.
599Drew, Refugee,
pp. 299-300. Unquestionably, the mild
treatment characteristic of her area was due to the extreme closeness of the
Illinois border across the Mississippi.
Slaveholders in such areas were encouraged to treat their slaves well to
avoid the expenses of recapturing them in the North.
600Botkin,
Lay My Burden Down, p. 130; Drew, Refugee, pp. 206-7; Davis, Plantation
Life, pp. 135, 359; see also p. 163; Olmsted, Cotton Kingdom, 2:200;
and Bassett, Plantation Overseer, p. 154 for more on how inflicting
punishment could backfire against slaveholders.
602Stampp,
Peculiar Institution, p. 115; Douglass, Narrative, p. 80;
Kolchin, Unfree Labor, p. 288; Olmsted, Cotton Kingdom, 2:200;
Davis, Plantation Life, p. 288; Drew, Refugee, pp. 204-5;
Northrup, Twelve Years a Slave, pp. 97-101, 106-11; Genovese, Roll,
Jordan, Roll, pp. 655-56.
603Botkin,
Lay My Burden Down, pp. 85, 95; Drew, Refugee, pp. 56-58, 140,
164; Bassett, Plantation Overseer, pp. 18; Genovese, Roll, Jordan,
Roll, p. 654.
604Drew, Refugee,
pp. 288-89; Olmsted, Cotton Kingdom, 2:161-62 (see also 2:21-22); Davis,
Plantation Life, pp. 215, 217, 227, 341; Brent, Incidents, pp.
117, 151, 210; Botkin, Lay My Burden Down, pp. 179-80; Drew, Refugee,
p. 145.
606Bassett,
Plantation Overseer, p. 79; William S. Willis, "Divide and
Rule: Red, White, and Black in the
Southeast," Journal of Negro History 48 (July 1963):163-65; Davis,
"Reflections on the Black Woman's Role," 91; Palmer, "Servant
into Slave," 367; Watson, "Impulse Toward Independence," 323.
607Kenneth
Wiggins Porter, "Negroes and the Seminole War, 1835-1842," Journal
of Southern History 30 (Nov. 1964):427-50; Olmsted, Cotton Kingdom,
1:155. The story had been different
earlier: see Watson, "Impulse
Toward Independence," 322.
608Genovese,
Roll, Jordan, Roll, pp. 590-91.
Palmares, a huge maroon colony, had upwards of 20,000 blacks, and waged
wars with the Dutch and Portuguese for over a half century.
609Mexico
was the favored destination of Texan slaves seeking permanent freedom. Olmsted, Cotton Kingdom, 1:372;
2:7-8, 20, 91-92, 153.
610Barrow
had one slave, "nearly white" who ran away from him and another
planter in 1835 who successfully reached Canada all the way from
Louisiana. In 1841 he wrote, and asked
for the funds to return to slavery in Louisiana. This certainly seems a trick, because of the positive portrayal
of conditions in Canada found in Drew, not mentioning how most slaves
definitely preferred freedom over bondage when given an opportunity for
it. Davis, Plantation Life, p.
231; Stampp, Peculiar Institution, pp. 92-94.
611Drew,
Refugee, p. v; Kolchin, Unfree Labor, pp. 288-90. Kolchin cites quantitative studies of
classified ads about runaway slaves.
One study found 76.6 percent of the fugitives found in the classified
ads of the South Carolina Gazette were male, and 88.3 percent of those
listed in the Virginia Gazette during a sixty-seven year period in the
eighteen century. Daniel Meader, using
eighteenth-century South Carolina newspapers, found 2,001 runaways listed in
1,806 notices, averaging out to 1.11 fugitive per escape. Michael John's study of group flights based
on Charleston newspapers between 1799 and 1830 found 70 percent of them
consisted of two people only. This
evidence undermines Drew's statement that "many of the children"
included in this population of 30,000 could have been refugees from slavery,
especially when the logistics of flight favored solitary strong unburdened
individual adults who could more easily hide, evade, and escape from pursuers.
612Genovese,
Roll, Jordan, Roll, pp. 648, 652; Kolchin, Unfree Labor, p. 287;
Franklin, From Slavery to Freedom, p. 194; Stampp, Peculiar
Institution, pp. 30-31.
613Olmsted,
Cotton Kingdom, 2:153; Kolchin draws a sharp contrast between the
individualistic choices of runaway slaves with the collective flight of
families and villages among Russian serfs.
Unfree Labor, pp. 283-85, 288-90.
614Stampp,
Peculiar Institution, p. 113; Drew, Refugee, pp. 167-68; Olmsted,
Cotton Kingdom, 1:249, 2:207-8; The testimony of Annie Coley, cited by
Michael P. Johnson, "Smothered Slave Infants: Were Slave Mothers at Fault?," Journal of Southern
History 47 (Nov. 1981):514; Bassett, Plantation Overseer, pp. 18-19.
616Botkin,
Lay My Burden Down, pp. 175-76; Chesnut, Diary from Dixie, pp.
139-40, 145-48, 151-52; Olmsted, Cotton Kingdom, 2:13; Watson,
"Impulse Toward Independence," 320; Kemble, Journal, pp. 295,
313-14.
Blassingame, Slave Community, p. 233; For more
on slaves killing or attacking their owners and their supervisors, see: Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll, pp.
361-63; Franklin, From Slavery to Freedom, p. 152; Stampp, Peculiar
Institution, pp. 130-32.
618Genovese,
Roll, Jordan, Roll, pp. 588-93; Blassingame, Slave Community, pp.
214-21; Elkins, Slavery, pp. 136-37.
619Kolchin,
Unfree Labor, pp. 51, 53, 57, 234-35, 237; Genovese, Roll, Jordan,
Roll, pp. 590-91; Blassingame, Slave Community, pp. 214-15; Fogel
and Engerman, Time on the Cross, pp. 21, 23; Stampp, Peculiar
Institution, pp. 30-31.
620Blassingame,
Slave Community, pp. 214-15; Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll, pp.
214-15; Fogel and Engerman, Time on the Cross, pp. 26, 28, 242; Elkins, Slavery,
pp. 136-37; Kolchin, Slavery, pp. 236, 253-54, 343-52, 363-65.
621Herbert
Aptheker, American Negro Slave Revolts, Columbia University Studies in
the Social Sciences, no. 501 (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1943); Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll,
pp. 587-88, 596-97. Tulloch noted that
while Aptheker wrote in terms of 250 slave revolts in the South, "most of
them, it turned out, document[ed] White fears and rumours rather than actual
physical outbreaks of rebellion."
"But the Cat Himself Knows," 57-58.
622My
emphasis, Olmsted, Cotton Kingdom, 1:42. See also Marion D.deB. Kilson, "Towards Freedom: An Analysis of Slave Revolts in the United
States," Phylon 25 (summer 1964):187; Chesnut, Diary from Dixie,
p. 456.
623Richard
C. Wade, "The Vesey Plot: A
Reconsideration," Journal of Southern History 30 (May 1964):150.
625Edwin
A. Miles, "The Mississippi Slave Insurrection Scare of 1835," Journal
of Negro History 42 (Jan. 1957):49-56.
626Christopher
Morris, "An Event in Community Organization: The Mississippi Slave Insurrection Scare of 1835," Journal
of Social History 22 (fall 1988):93-111.
627Hobsbawm
and Rude, Captain Swing, pp. 198, 200, 215-217; For more on these
panics, and the overkills and continual suspicions of the whites, see
Blassingame, Slave Community, pp. 230-38; Stampp, Peculiar
Institution, pp. 136-39; Franklin, From Slavery to Freedom, p. 218;
Donnie D. Bellamy, "Slavery in Microcosm:
Onslow County, North Carolina," Journal of Negro History 62
(Oct. 1977):346-47; Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll, pp. 595-97.
630Paquette,
"Social History Update," 682-684; King, "Marxism and the Slave
South," 127, discussing Genovese.
He notes the escaped slaves in some maroon colonies "sanctioned
forms of dependency including slavery," which demonstrates they were not
rebelling against the idea of slavery in itself necessarily by choosing to run
away to join these groups to begin with.
631"Not
all people have survived enslavement; hence her [the slave woman's]
survival-oriented [which included domestic labor such as cooking, sewing,
washing, raising children, and cleaning house] activities were themselves a
form of resistance." Wright,
"Reflections on the Black Woman's Role," 86-87.
632Dale
Edward Williams, "Morals, markets and the English crowd in 1766," Past
and Present, no. 104 (August 1984), pp. 69-70, as noted in Harrison, Crowds
and History, p. 13.
633Somerville,
Whistler, pp. 141, 404; Arch, Joseph Arch, pp. 150-52, 158-59,
162; Hudson, Shepherd's Life, pp. 212-13.
634Somerville,
Whistler, pp. 38-39, 272-79; Hudson, Shepherd's Life, pp. 79-80,
84-90. See also Emsley, "Crime in
19th-Century Britain," 44; Robert Long's diary as found in Agar, Befordshire
Farm Worker, p. 111; Hammond and Hammond, Village Labourer, pp. 186,
191; Cobbett, Rural Rides, pp. 159-60, 435-36.
635cited
by Hammond and Hammond, Village Labourer, p. 187; Arch, Joseph Arch,
pp. 159-161; cf. Bawcombe's attitude in Hudson, Shepherd's Life, p. 81
and Cobbett, Rural Rides, pp. 438-440.
637Cobbett,
Rural Rides, pp. 160, 440-41; Hammond and Hammond, Village Laborer,
pp. 188, 190; Hudson, Shepherd's Life, p. 54.
638Arch, Joseph
Arch, pp. 163-64. Comparing this
attitude to Frederick Douglass' on "taking" is especially
instructive. However ironic for the
line Arch drew here, around Kirdford in Sussex after the New Poor Law went into
operation, all of the "fowls" of one farmer and most of his neighbor
had been stolen, and pilfering generally had increased. Committee on New Poor Law, BPP, 1837,
second report, p. 10.
639Committee
on Allotments, BPP, 1843, p. 2; Jeffries, Hodge, 2:88; Hudson, Shepherd's
Life, pp. 221-22, 224-27; Arch, Joseph Arch, p. 14; Somerville, Whistler,
p. 95. See also pp. 273, 407-8.
640Joanna
Innes and John Styles, "The Crime Wave:
Recent Writing on Crime and Criminal Justice in Eighteenth-Century
England," Journal of British Studies 25 (Oct. 1986):389-95; Styles,
"Crime in 18th-Century England," 38-39; Hammond and Hammond, Village
Labourer, p. 189.
641For
more on this cause of crime, see Committee on Allotments, BPP, 1843, p.
32; Mark Baker, "Aspects of the Life of the Wiltshire Agricultural
Labourer, c. 1850," Wiltshire Archaeological Magazine 74/75
(1981):64. Somerville, Whistler,
pp. 139-40 ties crimes to the insecurity of work coming from at-will tenancies
and the lack of annual hirings.
643as
quoted in Snell, Annals, pp. 6-7.
The town dwellers, rich or middle class, knew little better the mind of
the farmworkers. See Hobsbawm and Rude,
Captain Swing, p. 12.
Interestingly, the stereotypes of Sambo and Hodge diverge in several key
aspects, although they are inevitably self-serving creations of the dominant
class in both societies. Sambo is seen
as a perpetual child, as being fun-loving and energetic but irresponsible,
while Hodge is seen as slow in gait and talk, as noncommunicative and
monosyllabic, but, nevertheless, as an adult, as more steady in his habits,
despite his pub frequenting.
645Hudson,
Shepherd's Life, pp. 94-96; Committee on Allotments, BPP, 1843,
p. 10; Jeffries, Hodge, 1:131, 134; Cirket, "1830 Riots in
Bedfordshire," 96.
646Committee
on the New Poor Law , BPP, 1837, first report, p. 4; for a case of
opposition, see Morgan, Harvesters, p. 123; Olmsted, Walks and Talks,
p. 273.
649Bogusia
Wojciechowska, "Brenchley: A Study
of Migratory Movements in a Mid-Nineteenth Century Rural Parish," Local
Population Studies, no. 41 (autumn 1988), pp. 32-35.
652Factory
Commission, Supplementary Report, 1834, part i, p. 169, as cited in the Hammond
and Hammond, Town Labourer, p. 12.
655Thompson,
"Moral Economy of the English Crowd," 76-136. See also Harrison, Crowds and History,
pp. 12-13; Hammond and Hammond, Village Labourer, pp. 116-18,
173-74. By extrapolating from the
unusual restlessness of Cornish miners, Rule mistakenly sees food riots as
common. Labouring Classes, pp. 348-53.
657On the
Swing Riots generally, see Hobsbawm and Rude, Captain Swing, passim, but
especially pp. 170, 173-75, 195-203, 212, 262, 357-58; Hammonds, Village
Labourer, pp. 239-326; Rule, Labouring Classes, pp. 357-63; E.P.
Thompson, Making, pp. 226-29; Hudson, Shepherd's Life, pp.
195-201, 203, 207, 229-35; Cirket, "1830 Riots in Bedfordshire," 75-112;
Barbara Kerr, Bound to the Soil: A
social History of Dorset 1750-1918 (London: John Baker, 1968), pp. 100-115; Somerville, Whistler, pp.
261-65.
658On
laborers' distaste for threshing, see Hudson, Shepherd's Life, p.
207. On the connection between Swing
and Reform, and the effects on wages and machine threshing, see Thompson, Making,
p. 228; Dyke, "Cobbett and the Radical Rural Platform," p. 199; for a
more cautious analysis of the political connections, and for the marginal
economic benefits of machine threshing, see Hobsbawm and Rude, Captain Swing,
pp. 296-99, 359-65; on mask thickening, see Report from Select Committee on
Poor Law Amendment Act, BPP, 1837, second report, p. 10; see also first
report, pp. 38, 49.
See the research of Jones and Lowerson cited in Rule, Labouring
Classes, p. 362; Hammonds, Village Labourer, pp. 237-38.
Hobsbawm and Rude, Captain Swing, pp.
292-96. Among the leaders of the
Agricultural Labourers' Union that began in 1872, most were local Methodist
preachers such as Arch sometimes was himself, while none were trained for
service as Anglicans. Arch, Joseph
Arch, pp. xi-xii.
662Arch, Joseph
Arch, pp. 67-73; Jones is cited in Wojciechowska, "Brenchley," p.
30; Caird, English Agriculture, pp. 512, 514.
663Arch, Joseph
Arch, pp. xiii, 110-111, 235, 253-54, 275, 281, 288-89, 333, 376, 380-86,
390-91, 401; for the 1875 split, see Agar, Bedfordshire Farm Worker, pp.
8-10, (Long), p. 109.
667See the
"Public Notice" reproduced in Hobsbawm and Rude, Captain Swing,
pp. 156. Thompson, Making, p.
226 ignores this response by a number of local magistrates when he wrote the
riots were "met with the same sense of outrage as a rising of the
'blacks'." Even when later London
unleashed a wave of repression, the blood drawn was much less than that
surrounding any major American slave revolt or conspiracy, especially when the
relative size of the Swing Riots to these are taken into account.
669See the
summary in Peter Novick, That Noble Dream:
The 'Objectivity Question' and the American Historical Profession
(New York: Cambridge University Press,
1988), p. 480.
671W.E.B.
Dubois regarded the slaves' necessary "defence of deception and
flattery" as causing "a moral hesitancy which is fatal to
self-confidence," that living a "double life, with double thoughts,
double duties" involved a "peculiar wrench of the soul." Souls of Black Folk, as cited in
Shore, "Poverty of Tragedy," 161.