• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1073 0

nevertheless, the discipline they enforced, the punishments they meted out, and the labor they exacted from the slaves almost always reflected their need to meet the expectations of their employers. Rather than share the responsibility for any excesses that might result from his often inordinate demands, the planter all too readily permitted his overseer to assume the blame; indeed, the owner might even intercede at times to soften the overseer’s punishments, thereby enhancing his own sense of paternalism and “humanity” while reinforcing the image of the overseer as an uncaring brute.82

Neither the slaves nor the overseers were necessarily oblivious to this kind of deception, but the flight of the masters often left the overseer by himself to absorb the slaves’ wrath. Regardless of what whites remained on the plantation, the coming of the Yankees encouraged slaves to act as though there were alternatives in their lives: if they chose not to desert, they might simply refuse to submit to the usual discipline and punishments. On the C. C. Clay plantation in Alabama, the slaves had become “so bold,” the mistress informed her son, that they threatened to kill the overseer if he tried to punish them for disobedience. That these were not empty threats is borne out by what took place on the Millaudon plantation in Louisiana, where “bad feelings” between the overseer and the slaves had prompted the absentee owner to pay a visit to his place. When Millaudon tried to reprimand the “ringleader,” the slave responded “with insolence.” Unaccustomed to such conduct, the planter then struck him with a whip. This time the slave responded by furiously charging Millaudon, who finally felled him with a stick. “This seemed to bring the negro to his senses, and he took refuge in his cabin; but he presently came out with a hatchet …” One of the other slaves interceded at this point and grabbed the hatchet, the rebellious slave fled into the cane field, and Millaudon departed from the plantation, thinking he had suppressed “the affair.” He had not gone far, however, before the report reached him that his slaves were now “in full revolt” and had killed the overseer. Returning once again to the plantation, this time with Union soldiers, Millaudon beheld an extraordinary scene: a large number of his blacks, with their possessions and quantities of plantation goods, were walking alongside a cart on which lay the body of the murdered overseer, wrapped in a flag. “It appears that he had been attacked by five of them while he was at dinner, his head being split open by blows with a hatchet, and penetrated by shots at his face.” The “assassins” reportedly “rejoiced” over their success, and “the whole gang” of some 150 slaves had left the plantation.83

Anticipating acts of vengeance, some overseers fled shortly before the Yankees reached their plantations. Those who remained were apt to find themselves in an uncertain and often perilous situation. If the slaves did not drive the overseer forcibly off the plantation, they conducted themselves in ways that undermined his authority and left him powerless. On the Nightingale Hall plantation, one of several rice plantations in South Carolina owned by Adele Allston, the slaves imprisoned the overseer in his own house. “Mr. Sweat, was a very good, quiet man, and had been liked by all the negroes,” Adele Allston’s daughter wrote of him, “but in the intoxication of freedom their first exercise of it was to tell Mr. Sweat if he left the house they would kill him, and they put a negro armed with a shotgun to guard the house and see that he did not leave alive.” Watching from his window, the conscientious overseer kept a journal of the activities of the blacks, hoping someday to hold them to account.84

Conditions were no different on the Allstons’ Chicora Wood plantation, where Jesse Belflowers, reputedly one of the most efficient overseers in the South Carolina low country, had been in charge since 1842. Having been compelled to surrender the barn keys to the slaves, he confessed to his employer that the workers