“The Cries and Intreaties of the Mother begging her Child to be put to Death,”
wrote the shaken master, “the dreadfull shreiks of the Boy, and his more than
pretty Behaviour in his taking leave of all around him, has rung such a Peal in
my Ears, that I never can forget.” Late-eighteenth-century masters seemed much
more respectful of slave family ties than their predecessors. Gangs were often sold
“in families” rather than individually, and many a prospective purchaser stated a
preference for family units. When a South Carolina slave patron became “dissat-
isfied and desirous of being sold,” his master was quick to assure prospective
buyers that the man’s wife has also to be sold “for a principle of humanity
alone,” because “they were very unwilling to be separated.”…
Enlightened patriarchalism had limits. Where it collided with self-interest
and commercial advantage, the slave invariably lost. According to one early-
nineteenth-century observer, Georgia slaves were “considered nothing more
than perishable property, and interest not principle clothes and feeds them.”
Similarly, in the early nineteenth century, a South Carolina master was willing
to speak cynically of the conflict between his slaves’ desire for freedom and his
property rights. He described the motivations of his runaways and his own re-
sponse in this way: “Liberty is sweet and in that they are right—property is com-
fortable and if I can stop them, I will also be right.”
A sense of the flexibility and ultimate rigidity of enlightened patriarchalism is
unwittingly captured in the self-justifying remarks of a loyalist slaveholder. “In
this land of Nominal freedom and actual Slavery,” he had been able, he admit-
ted, to “justify the keeping my fellow beings in bondage” by alleviating the “too
common weight of the[ir] chains.” He explained that he “scarce used the rod
except for theft and other crimes” and, for his slaves’“encouragement,” provided
ample supplies of corn, meat two or three times a week, and a regular and ade-
quate clothing allowance. Not that his “slaves are used better than any others,” he
acknowledged, for “some Masters I know, and I hope there are many, treat
theirs with the utmost humanity.” At the same time, however, he was proud
of how he had secured his slaves’ respect. “By selling a few, who proved ob-
stinately bad,” he had “brought the others to consider their being sold” as the
“greatest punishment I can inflict.” He had found that the “greatest incitement
to their duty” lay in their “hopes of living and dying on my property without
being separated from their families, connexions, and friends.” It hardly became
this generous-spirited master—and, presumably, by the lights of eighteenth-
century Anglo-American masterdom, he was exactly that—to rail at the possibility
that his slaves might be confiscated and be “subject to the most humiliating cir-
cumstance of human nature—that of being sold like the Brutes that perish.”
As this master implies, humane treatment did not have to conflict with eco-
nomic benefit, nor did modes of control have to be crudely coercive. Masters
employed a variety of positive incentives to achieve their aims. In fact, compas-
sion could maximum profits and enhance the masters’ investment in their slaves.
The threat of sale was perhaps even more effective than the whip in keeping
slaves in line. When the duc de La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt visited the Low-
country in the late eighteenth century, he encountered planters willing to laud
the advantages of their new approach. One “excellent master to his negroes”
THE SOUTHERN COLONIES IN BRITISH AMERICA 63
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