Cobbs-Hoffman Elizabeth, Blum Edward J., Gjerde Jon. Major Problems in American History, Volume I, 3 edition (ENG)
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of daily life proved too great for such ambitious, anxious men. Much to the frus-
tration of would-be patriarchs, dependents did not passively await the planter’s
imprimatur on their bodies. Rather, enslaved people ran away, wives disobeyed,
and children ignored their father’s words of advice. Even voters, over whom
planters had the least physical power but the steadiest symbolic authority, might
turn a man out of office.
The ethos of self-mastery and domestic tranquillity that began to appear in
eighteenth-century planter journals and letters reflected the limits of coercive
power exercised on bodies, but it did not signify an end to that power. Planters
continued to practice regimes of corporal punishmen t on recalcitrant slaves
and, l ess frequently, disobedient servants and children even as quiet displays of
sacrosanct authority, rooted in the planter’s appearance of self-governance,
gradually crept into elite discussions of power. Such a style represented domestic
authority as unimpeachable by denying the existence of challenges that might
undermine it. The quieter ideal also signaled the rise of a new technology of elite
male power in which planters portrayed themselves as the guardians of reason and
tranquillity, whereas white women, slaves of both sexes, children, and disorderly
common folk were described as being unable to control their passions. Paternalistic
styles of authority may have partially masked the cruder side of planter power, but
they never fully displaced it.
By the eighteenth century, elite planters believed habitual self-control,
rooted in rural plantation life, was the key to exercising power over others.
Male planters diligently applied this maxim to their emotional lives early in the
century and, with increasing difficulty as the century progressed, to their drink-
ing, eating, spending, and gambling habits. With authority resting in the ability
to control one’s emotions, many planters placed great value on keeping anger
and grief in check.
Gentlemen on both sides of the Atlantic associated emotional restraint with
class position, race, and gender identity. Elite men interpreted control over emo-
tions such as anger, sadness, and lust as the triumph of reason over passion. White
women of all classes, lower-class white men, and enslaved men and women, many
writers believed, were less capable of governing their appetites than elite men.
Through control over self, gentlemen reminded themselves, they would have
control over others. White women also made use of this discourse of reason and
passion, as seen in the poem by Elizabeth Pratt. Maria Byrd, second wife of
William II, articulated a similar association between slaves and passion in a letter
to her son William III in which she reprimanded him for his neglect of his
children’s education and upbringing. His daughter’s “chief time is spent with
servants and Negro children her play fellows,” complained Mrs. Byrd, “from
whom she had learnt a dreadfull collection of words, and is intolerably passionate.”
Beliefs in the efficacy of self-restraint and attempts to weave it into a tech-
nology of power contained special benefits for colonial men. Most were already
battling feelings of vulnerability to elite patrons and merchants in London and
worried about losing touch with London political networks. It may have been
reassuring to efface within oneself all vestiges of the qualities one associated
with other vulnerable individuals—wives, children, and slaves—and to insist,
THE SOUTHERN COLONIES IN BRITISH AMERICA 53
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emphatically, that these others were repositories of unreasonable passions.
Already prone to try too hard to be like English gentlemen, men like William
Byrd II made a science of emotional and physical self-containment; Byrd re-
corded his emotional fluctuations in the same detail he did his diet, his daily
physical exercise, his bowel movements, and his sexual encounters. If self-
control was a quality to be admired in gentlemen, Byrd seemed to believe, he
would perform the part flawlessly, striving toward the artful effortlessness ex-
pressed by Alexander Pope in an epigram on graceful writing: “True ease in
writing comes from Art, not Chance/As one moves easily who has learned to
dance.” As we have already noted, many of Virginia’s elite planters claimed
that their rural estates presented the ideal environment for achieving this elusive
goal.
Byrd recorded his daily battles for emotional self-restraint in the cryptic code
of his secret diary. After the death of his nine-month-old son, Byrd tersely com-
pared his own and his wife’s reactions:
I rose at 6 o’clock and as soon as I came out news was brought that the
child was very ill. We went out and found him just ready to die and he
died about 8 o’clock in the morning. God gives and God takes away;
blessed be the name of God…. My wife was much afflicted but I sub-
mitted to His judgement better, notwithstanding I was very sensible of
my loss, but God’s will be done.
In the days to come, Byrd expressed concern over the intensity of his wife’s grief
and noted differences in their ability to submit to God’s will. On the day after
the boy’s death, Byrd noted, “My wife had several fits of tears for our dear son
but kept within the bounds of submission.” Although Byrd claimed to have
“submitted to His judgement better,” his restraint seems to have exacted a toll;
during the boy’s last day of illness, Byrd developed “gripes ” in his stomach,
which tormented him for nearly two weeks after his son’s death. This was the
same illness, moreover, that afflicted him when worry, regret, grief, or anger
threatened to overwhelm his efforts to control his emotions.
Despite his efforts at self-control, Byrd’s life did not even come close to the
domestic ideal of tranquility to which many elite Virginians aspired. Lucy and
William fought frequently and bitterly. Byrd recorded one such exchange in
which he barely retained control of himself: “My wife flew into such a passion
that she hoped she would be revenged of me. I was moved very much at this but
only thanked her for the present lest I should say things foolish in my passion.”
Several days later, although they had patched up their differences, Byrd wrote
angrily, “I was out of humor with my wife for her foolish passions, of which
she is often guilty, for which God forgive her and make her repent and
amend.” After intervening in his wife’s violent corrections of his slave Jenny,
Byrd recorded a similarly upsetting outburst: “She lifted up her hands to strike
me but forebore to do it. She gave me abundance of bad words and endeavored
to strangle herself, but I believe in jest only. However after acting a mad woman
a long time she was passive again.” Byrd’s diary is littered with similar references
to quarrels he claimed were started by his wife’s passion and descriptions of her
54 MAJOR PROBLEMS IN AMERICAN HISTORY
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fits of tears and hysteria. In his view, passions unchecked, which he usually
attributed to women, were nearly always the source of domestic discord….
Although master-slave relationships more frequently featured coercion than
did other social relations involving elite planters, slaves successfully moved their
masters toward a paternalistic style of authority by midcentury. Planters also had
their reasons for preferring persuasion and personal ties to physical punishment,
but the paternalism they envisioned was quite different from that of their slaves.
Whereas enslaved people advanced a moral economy in which reasonable work
conditions, adequate provisions, and respect for family ties all became part of a
concept of just treatment within slavery, planters sought docile, respectful, and
efficient obedience that confirmed their sense of righteous mastery ….
White planters’ attitudes about race, honor, and sexuality found expression
in myriad ways that were annoying and humiliating for enslaved people. Byrd
reported with amusement that, while staying at a friend’s house, he threw a
pan of water out his window, drenching a slave woman. High society parties in
Williamsburg occasionally included raffles of slaves; at one such event, a black
woman described as “fit for house business” was raffled off along with her child.
Elite women described their black female servants as dirty and ugly and associ-
ated skill and tractability with light skin. Infusing an age-old epigram with new
racial and social significance, one white woman communicated what she saw as
an enslaved woman’s limited potential for obedient and efficient domestic service
by referring to the permanence of her color: “Julitt will never be washt white.”
Most important to this matrix of dishonor, however, was the intertwining of
race and sexuality in white male planters’ attitudes toward their slaves. Although
it is possible only to conjecture about the frequency with which white men vis-
ited slave quarters for the specific purpose of sexually exploiting enslaved
women, there is evidence that this did indeed happen—and that its occurrence
was enmeshed in attitudes about sexual domination, slave promiscuity, and sex-
ual dishonor. As a married man approaching the age of seventy, Byrd frequently
engaged in sexual activity with enslaved women, perhaps as many as nine times
during a period of eighteen months. These were the only incidents of sexual
activity he recorded during this time. Byrd was not alone. His brother-in-law,
John Custis, allegedly maintained a long-term relationship with an enslaved
woman named Alice by whom he fathered a son. The boy, Christoforo John,
received special mention in his father’s will.
Many historians have interpreted the sexual interests of white planters in
their dependent female slaves as evidence of intimacy or racial fluidity, indicative
of white people’s willingness to relate to their slaves as human beings. These
analyses fail to account for the skewed gender pattern of interracial sexuality
among the Virginia gentry—white men and enslaved women—and for the way
it reinforced the power relations encoded in legally sanctioned gender and racial
hierarchies. Although it would be wrong to assume that all such relationships
were a product of coercion, it is important to note that all occurred in a context
where coercion was never far beneath the surface. Female slaves stood relatively
disempowered compared to their masters both as black women and as unfree
people. Their patterns of sexual interaction with white masters were thus part
THE SOUTHERN COLONIES IN BRITISH AMERICA 55
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of a larger field of power relations in which masters expressed power sexually and
viewed sexual activity as an expression of male power.
Confronted with the considerable power of planters, enslaved people
repackaged and redirected patriarchal authority, making absolute dominance
impossible. As a young planter, William Byrd frequently found himself foiled
by his slaves’ collaboration, despite his attempts to reinforce his authority with
harsh punishments. Byrd’s slave Jenny, for example, tried twice to save the slave
Eugene from further punishment for bed-wetting by concealing the soiled
linens; a whipping from Byrd, moreover, did not discourage her from making
the second attempt. Byrd’s maid Anaka, who had herself stolen rum from the
liquor cellar, collaborated with the white woman “Nurse” to give the black
maid Prue access to the cellar….
Planters’ desires for domestic harmony offered enslaved people an opportu-
nity to extract concessions conducive to family life, but the same ideal also pro-
vided masters with an overarching rationale for intervening in slaves’ disputes.
Articulated hopes for a serene domestic environment, moreover, were not
incompatible with other tactics, including the denial of family privileges and out-
right coercion. Planters like Byrd occasionally involved themselves in the con-
flicts of enslaved people at the request of one of the parties in an effort to
restore peace. Byrd injected himself into the troubled relations of married slaves,
imposing a monogamous standard to which even he did not adhere. He re-
corded in his secret diary for 1710 that he “caused L——s——n to be whipped
for beating his wife and Jenny was whipped for being his whore.” Byrd also
intervened in relationships that threatened to breed more serious conflicts. He
reported that he ordered “Johnny to be whipped for threatening to strike Jimmy
and caused Moll also to be whipped and made them renounce one the other.”
Occasionally, Byrd’s deeper motive for enforcing tranquil relations—the mainte-
nance of his own authority—surfaced in his dealings with enslaved people. “At
night I talked with my people and refused to let P——p——I go to see his
wife,” he wrote in an entry for August 1720. Although, in this instance, Byrd
denied a family privilege to a slave, his actions were not inconsistent with his
previous efforts to foster domestic harmony. In both situations, he attempted to
impose his will upon slaves he referred to as “my people,” curbing their rights to
vent anger against each other and forbidding them to leave the premises of
Westover to visit spouses.
Byrd’s interventions in enslaved peoples’ relationships were part of a larger
effort to protect his own use of “discipline” from being confused with mere
violence. Like gifts of liquor and evening visits to the quarters, such interventions
blunted the sharpest edges of patriarchal authority and may have prevented the
escalation of master-slave conflicts into episodes of violent resistance or running
away. On several occasions, as already noted, challenges to Byrd’s exclusive right
to use violence came not just from enslaved people but from his own wife. Byrd
correctly perceived that physical contests between Lucy Byrd and the female
slaves in his household did nothing to enhance white authority and much to
diminish it, threatening to turn the exercise of discipline into a brawl. The sub-
jection of enslaved people to Lucy Byrd’s intensely corporal exercise of authority
56 MAJOR PROBLEMS IN AMERICAN HISTORY
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also disrupted his own attempts to achieve peaceful order in the household.
Although Byrd himself had sometimes resorted to cruel punishments of enslaved
people, he had done so as an expression of will, a flexing of patriarchal muscle that
underscored more genteel manifestations of power. Uncontrolled outbursts of
violence—which to Byrd meant all violent acts initiated by others—undermined
his attempts to rule effortlessly over household members, disturbing his calculus of
persuasion, warning, and inflicted pain.
Of all the social relations constituting and trying planters’ authority, master-
slave relationships were the least distanced from outright coercion. Planter efforts
to achieve a genteel, restrained authority over their households somewhat miti-
gated the physical cruelty inherent in slavery, cushioning it with reciprocity and
rhetorical, if not actual, gestures toward recognizing the existence of slave fami-
lies. Planters’ efforts to cultivate intimate personal relationships with enslaved
people, however, supplemented rather than precluded the use of cruel punish-
ments. Paternalism only represented an improvement of conditions for slaves if
enslaved people themselves made it so. Evening walks around the plantation
grounds to talk with laborers, gifts of liquor, and intervention in slave relation-
ships allowed masters intimate access to enslaved peoples’ lives, increasing the
dangers of unwanted sexual contact for enslaved women. Eighteenth-century
paternalism thus left an ambiguous legacy, offering a tissue-thin layer of protec-
tion from harsh corporal punishment and leaving enslaved women more vulner-
able to the sexual desires of their masters….
Virginia’s elite planters were at the height of their powers as a class during
the first half of the eighteenth century. Compared to their seventeenth-century
counterparts, they enjoyed longer lives, more stable families, larger estates, and
greater security. Compared to gentlemen in other parts of the British Empire,
they were a political success story, a stable regime whose most serious challenge
at mid-century came from the crown rather than from below.
Despite these considerable achievements and their very real control over
most of their society’s resources, Virginia’s elite planters were never able to allay
self-doubts about the security and legitimacy of their positions. Even the most
powerful of planters occasionally lost an election, fell victim to fluctuating
tobacco prices, or failed to make a suitable impression on a metropolitan contact.
Domestic authority, moreover, also proved elusive. In the relationships most
fundamental to their patriarchal identities, men like William Byrd, Landon
Carter, and Joseph Ball met with disobedience and recalcitrance. Wives refused
to obey their husbands, children flouted their father’s will, and slaves ran away.
These acts of defiance troubled Virginia’s gentlemen as much as, if not more
than, their public failures because they occurred in a context in which planters’
legal, economic, and coercive power was virtually untrammeled. If they were
not patriarchs in their own households, many men seem to have wondered,
could they hope to be gentlemen in the eyes of the colony’s voters, their gentry
peers, or London society?...
Relationships between masters and slaves proved to be the most difficult to
recast according to the ethic of domestic tranquillity. Although the ideal of slave
family integrity had begun to enter planter discourse by the 1730s, allowing
THE SOUTHERN COLONIES IN BRITISH AMERICA 57
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slaves to press claims to remain near family members, violence and brutality con-
tinued to punctuate the relationship. Planters were more likely to inflict corporal
punishment on enslaved people than they were on wives and white children.
They were also more likely to experiment on their bound laborers with harsh
medicines. Rhetoric about domestic harmony rarely protected enslaved people
from the violence inherent in slavery.
Although the master-slave relationship was distinctive because of the violent
technologies of power that lay at its core, it remained connected to other rela-
tionships of power in slaveowning households. The sexual exploitation of en-
slaved women, for example, was closely akin to planter conceptualizations of
sex and power more generally. Planters who viewed sexual intercourse as a nat-
ural outgrowth of male dominance and female appetite easily transformed such
an expression of power into domination over slave women. Perhaps most impor-
tant, slavery allowed planters to showcase their coercive power without disturb-
ing ideals for harmonious relationships with white family members. Far from
proving incompatible with the ethos of domestic tranquillity, the coercion of
slaves may have made such ideals possible, providing planters with a suitable
foil for the serene authority they hoped to wield over wives and children.
In the absence of any significant erosion of the economic and political foun-
dations of planters’ power between 1700 and 1750, it would be mistaken to con-
clude that paternalistic styles represented a lesser authority than patriarchal ones.
An examination of the full complement of planters’ social relations reveals
paternalism—in the guise of the ideals of domestic tranquillity—to be one face
of patriarchy, not a softer replacement of it. Rooted in coercion, slavery re-
mained a perpetual reminder of the limits of domestic harmony and gentility,
compelling planters to confront the fact that much of their authority depended
upon their ability to inflict pain.
The Effects of Paternalism Among Whites and Blacks
PHILIP D. MORGAN
The free and the unfree engaged in endless and varied encounters. To compre-
hend these kaleidoscopic contacts between masters and slaves, whites and blacks
requires complex formulations. However cruelly whites exploited blacks, their
fates were intricately intertwined. However much masters treated their slaves as
chattels, the humanity of their property could not be ignored or evaded. How-
ever total the masters’ exercise of power, negotiation, and compromise were
necessary to make slavery function. However sincerely planter patriarchs stressed
mutuality and reciprocity, their authority ultimately rested on force. However
sentimentally and benevolently some late-eighteenth-century masters viewed
slaves, their relentless denial of rights to bondmen increasingly placed slaves
From Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry by Philip D. Morgan. Pub-
lished for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture. Copyright © 1998 by the University of
North Carolina Press. Used by permission of the publisher.
58 MAJOR PROBLEMS IN AMERICAN HISTORY
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outside society. However unequivocally daily existence brought blacks and
whites together, growing race consciousness and class distinctions thrust them
apart. However deep a chasm opened between whites and blacks, channels of
communication arose to bridge it. However fundamentally slavery was the result
of interaction between master and slave, nonslaveholders intruded to shape the
institution’s character. The intricacy of eighteenth-century white-black relations
defies easy definition….
The dominant social ethos and cultural metaphor of seventeenth- and early-
eighteenth-century Anglo-America, patriarchalism, embodied the ideal of an
organic social hierarchy. Invoking the Great Chain of Being, one Virginia lawyer
argued in 1772: “Societies of men could not subsist unless there were a subordi-
nation of one to another…. That in this subordination the department of slaves
must be filled by some, or there would be a defect in the scale of order.” Deeply
ingrained assumptions about the workings not only of society but also of politics
elevated the role of father to mythic heights. From this perspective, patriarchs
anchored a social system based on the protection that the powerful offered the
weak, just as monarchs defined a political system where royal power defended
the people in return for their obedience and loyalty. Indeed, masters might
draw a precise parallel, as Henry Laurens once did when he reflected, “Never
was an absolute Monarch more happy in his Subjects than at the Present time
I am.” Suffusing the thought of the age, the patriarchal outlook was an austere
code, emphasizing control, obedience, discipline, and severity. Yet patriarchalism
also involved protection, guardianship, and reciprocal obligations. It defined the
gentleman planter’s self-image and constituted the ideals and standards by which
slaveholding behavior was judged….
… Patriarchalism was reformulated over the course of the eighteenth cen-
tury. Masters began to speak less of duties and obligations, more of individual
rights, particularly property rights. Slaves were more and more defined as people
without rights; and, because they were viewed increasingly as property, they
were said to enhance their owners’ independence. Whereas the patriarchal ethos
held that even the lowliest person was part of an organic society, the denial of
rights could place the slave completely outside society. In part because slaves
were being seen as perpetual outsiders, masters could emphasize solicitude rather
than authority, sentiments rather than severity, in their governance. This shift in
emphasis was partly a response to political events but also resulted from the de-
velopment of a more affectionate family life, the rise of evangelicalism, the
growth of romanticism, and the increase of humanitarianism. It was a reflection
in the realm of ideas of broad-gauged changes affecting Revolutionary America.
Austere patriarchalism slowly gave way to mellow paternalism….
The duality of growing separation and common bonds appli ed a s mu ch to
the relatio nship of plain white folk and blacks as it did to large planters and
their slaves. Because in the late seventeenth century poor whites associated
closely and openly with slaves, the growing gap between them was notable.
Relations between poor whites and blacks were also part of a larger tangled
web that enmeshed patria rchs, plain folks, and slaves. The existence of a large
group of plain white folks, for example, encouraged planters to seek their
THE SOUTHERN COLONIES IN BRITISH AMERICA 59
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support and recognition. To the degree that nonslaveholders honored slave-
holders, they enhanced the large planters’ sociallegitimacy.Slavesinturnsaw
proud, free white men defer to powerful masters, reinforcing in their eyes the
authority of large planters. Paradoxically, the ties established between patriarchs
and plain folks could strengthen those between grandees and slaves….
One of the reasons why slavery with all its attendant ambiguities could be
readily assimilated into the early modern Anglo-American world was a long-
standing patriarchal tradition that had clearly defined the relationship between
master and servant. Manuals of household government in sixteenth- and
seventeenth-century England spoke of servants as they did of wives and children.
All were subservient members of the family, living under the authority of the
paterfamilias. Gentlemen were not to let their care stop at their own children.
“Let it reach to your menial servants,” they were instructed, for “though you
are their master, you are also their father.” The relationship between master
and servant received the highest ideological sanction in the concept of patriarch-
alism. Patriarchal doctrines can be found, as one historian has argued, in all strata
of thought in seventeenth-century England, “from well-ordered and self-
conscious theories … to the unstated prejudices of the inarticulate masses.”
A deep respect for rank and hierarchy infused the very marrow of the early modern
British American world, and at its core lay the authority of the father-figure in his
household.
Many eighteenth-century masters of slaves conspicuously defined themselves
in light of this venerable tradition. None more so perhaps than William Byrd II,
who in a famous passage took a quasi-spiritual view of his role, likening himself
to a biblical patriarch amid his bondmen and bondwomen. Similarly, it required
little imagination for a South Carolina planter to “fancy [him]self one of the
Patriarchs of old … being surrounded with near 200 Negroes who are guided
by my absolute Command.” As the most dependent members of the patriarchal
family, slaves were, according to the Reverend Thomas Bacon of Maryland, “an
immediate and necessary part of our household.” He emphasized that “next to
our children and brethren by blood, our servants, and especially our slaves, are
certainly in the nearest relation to us.” A Jesuit priest echoed his Anglican coun-
terpart when he stated, “Charity to Negroes is due from all[,] particularly their
Masters.” As members of Christ, he continued, black slaves were “to be dealt
with in a charitable, Christian, paternal manner.”
Plantation owners in the eighteenth-century South were especially prone to
think of themselves as all-powerful father figures. Plantation America was a
remarkably underinstitutionalized world. An attenuated social and economic in-
frastructure enhanced the authority of the household head. Moreover, household
authority expanded rather than contracted over the colonial period in the South.
Even though early modern Britain and Western Europe are generally thought to
have had a more hierarchical social structure than colonial America, Carole
Shammas rightly notes that “a notably higher proportion of people in the
Americas,” particularly in plantation America “fell into the category of legal
dependents.” Not accidentally, “the first thing” Robinson Crusoe did in the ad-
vancement of his New World plantation was to purchase “a negro slave, and an
60 MAJOR PROBLEMS IN AMERICAN HISTORY
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European servant”; he soon had prospects of becoming “a rich and thriving man”
in his “new Plantation.” Crusoe was later shipwrecked en route to Africa to acquire
more slaves. Marooned, Crusoe establishes “two plantations.” Crusoe is generally
good to Friday, but, as Christopher Hill points out, the first word he taught him
was “Master.” Eventually, Crusoe acquires both native and foreign labor and
begins to envisage himself in monarchical terms. Since the “whole country” was
his property, Crusoe mused, he had “undoubted right of dominion,” and since
“my people,” as he significantly termed them, were “perfectly subjected,” he was
“absolute lord and lawgiver.” The family was the foundation of the plantation
social order, and its head was lord, master, a monarch in miniature. In a sequel,
Crusoe returns bearing goods, to be told he “was a father” to this people. He him-
self was “pleased” with “being the patron of those people I placed there, and doing
for them in a kind of haughty majestic way, like an old patriarchal monarch; pro-
viding for them, as if I had been father of the whole family, as well as of the
plantation.” Defoe had shrewdly caught the tenor of idealized plantation life.
Patriarchalism cannot be dismissed as mere propaganda or apologetics—
although, like all ideological rationalizations, it contained its share of self-
serving cant; rather, it was an authentic, if deeply flawed, worldview. Its familial
rhetoric was not just a smokescreen for exploitation, because patriarchalism of-
fered no guarantee of benevolence. It was no sentimental self-image, but rather a
harsh creed. Patriarchs in ancient Rome exercised the right to dispatch wives,
children, and slaves. In Virginia, a law of 1669 allowed masters the Roman
“power of the father” over the life and death of a slave, but later legislation bal-
anced the interests of the state, masters, and white nonslaveholders with minimal
protections for slaves. Although the despotic powers of masters were moderated,
the cruel and authoritarian core of patriarchalism helps explain why patriarchs
could ignore the enormity of what they did to their slave families. Fathers, after
all, do not normally sell their children. But when patriarchs spoke of their family,
both white and black, their protective domination contained little of the warmth
or tenderness associated with modern familial relations….
… [A] more enlightened patriarchalism [emerged] in the second half of the
eighteenth century…. Patriarchal doctrines and strategies were transformed more
generally in at least three major directions. First, although late-eighteenth-century
masters continued to stress order and authority, they were more inclined to empha-
size their solicitude toward and generous treatment of their dependents. Second,
no self-respecting patriarch would speak cloyingly of his kindness toward his slaves,
but gradually masters began to express such sentiments and came in return to ex-
pect gratitude, even love, from their bondpeople. Their outlook became far more
sentimental. Third, patriarchs rarely boasted of the submissiveness or docility of
their bondpeople, but gradually masters began to create the fiction of the contented
and happy slave. This shift in patriarchal strategies—greater softness, more recipro-
city, less authoritarianism—had complex origins. In part it was a response to politi-
cal and military events, but it owed far more to broader developments—a more
affectionate family environment, the rise of evangelicalism, romanticism, and
humanitarianism, and a growing emphasis on private property rights. Gradually it
blossomed in the nineteenth century into full-blown paternalism.
THE SOUTHERN COLONIES IN BRITISH AMERICA 61
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Late-eighteenth-century masters sometimes appealed to rather than threat-
ened their slaves. This change of emphasis may be attributed in part to the tem-
porary disruption of the masters’ power caused by the Revolutionary crisis.
During wartime and in the early postwar years, in particular, master often had
little control over their slaves. Threats were useless; exhortations became com-
monplace. Thus, there was the spectacle of a South Carolina slave, resident in
Saint Augustine in 1784, telling his master’s envoy that he was prepared to return
home “willingly … but not at present.” The master’s spokesman was reduced to
hoping that he “might be able to persuade him” to return earlier than the slave
intended. Or there was Maria Byrd’s Wat, a Virginia slave who had aided the
British during the war and resided in New York in the spring of 1783. Byrd
assured Wat that he could “come home with Safety.” She had heard that he
“wishes much to return, and his wife and Children are very anxious to see
him”; these were her “inducements for wishing him to come back.” She was
prepared to overlook past actions; indeed, she was even prepared to engage
Wat’s services in recovering her other lost slaves. For these “good offices,” Wat
would receive a “handsome” reward. She did not expect that any of her absent
slaves would “return willingly whatever they may pretend to.” But “to make
them more happy if they are sent me,” she wanted them to know that no slaves,
to her knowledge, had been punished on their return and that her slaves “may
rely on the best usage.”
The seeming loyalty of many other slaves who did not flee their masters
during the Revolutionary war, however, contributed to the growing myth that
slaves might be content in their condition. In the summer of 1776, Henry Laurens
proudly recorded that his slaves “to a Man are strongly attached to me … hitherto
not one of them has attempted to desert.” These claims of loyalty may be more
important for what they say of the owners’ perceptions than what they record of
the slaves’ behavior. But, after the war had ended, Laurens contrasted the “faithless”
behavior of his white servants with the “fidelity” of his slaves, “a very few instances
excepted.” As a result, he noted, “
we are endeavouring to reward those and make
the whole happy.” Making them happy was a prescient remark. Late in life,
Laurens took great pride in his various labor-saving experiments that reduced
the arduousness of his slaves’ labor. These “improvements,” he maintained, “are
the pleasure of my life, more particularly as they contribute to bring my poor blacks
to a level with the happiest peasants to be found in Europe”—a refrain that would
echo down the corridors of Sothern history.
A more caring attitude toward slaves also arose as the strength of their family
ties became recognizable to masters and as family life in general became more
egalitarian and affectionate. In 1764, James Habersham was “affected” by the
death of one of his slave women, not just because she had been a favorite of
his late wife or because she had nursed two of his daughters, but because she
had left behind an “inconsolable” husband. Eight years later, he recalled that
he had buried almost eighty slaves during his lifetime and in each case had
“acquiessed in the Dispensation of divine Providence.” However, he found it
impossible to “divest myself of Humanity,” as he put it, at the events surround-
ing a recent slave death. It concerned a slave boy bitten by a rabid dog.
62 MAJOR PROBLEMS IN AMERICAN HISTORY
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Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it.