William Waller sells 20 slaves to a local market. James Hammond prepares punishments for field slaves. Hugh Lawson misses a dead slave and Charles Brock gets to work with his sons and slaves. It’s morning in the South.
THE BURDENS OF SLAVEHOLDING (368) Although this section is morally troubling (as much as the others, the perspective is that of a white plantation owner. If the goal is to elicit sympathy, it falls short. The narrative concerning Robert Allston is slightly informative but not really compelling. What is the reader left with? Southerners considered slaveowning to be both a duty and a burden. Think about the implications for racial superiority… one that doesn’t acknowledge the financial contributions that slaves contributed to white fortune. Even if they did make some whites rich, it was still a burden… Whites as the victim.
THE PLANTATION MISTRESS (368) And another perspective: slaveowning women. According to your text, “The mistress of a plantation,” wrote one, “was the most complete slave on it.” Another complained, “It is the slaves who own me. Morning, noon, and night, I’m obliged to look after them.” One of the most complete accounts of while female plantation life is Mary Chestnut. Her diaries are famous in historical circles. Check them out.
JUSTIFYING SLAVERY (369) Biblical justifications, historical justifications, legal justifications and the pseudo-scientific justifications… all to support slavery. Your text also mentions the sociological defense of slavery based on paternalism. What’s interesting is this section,
Southern apologists for slavery faced the difficult intellectual task of justifying a system that ran against the main ideological directions of nineteenth-century American society: the expansion of individual liberty, mobility, economic opportunity, and democratic political participation….Perhaps slavery’s worst cruelty was not physical but psychological: to be enslaved and barred from participation in a nation that espoused freedom and equality of opportunity.
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