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By Root 1283 0

the master’s family, worked under their watchful eyes, and had to bear the brunt of their capricious moods. The very same family that petted and coddled him might at any time make him the butt of their jokes, the object of their frustrations, the victim of their pettiness. He had to learn how to be the “good nigger,” to submit to indignities without protest, to submerge his feelings, to repress his emotions, to play “dumb” when the occasion demanded it, to respond with the proper gestures and words to every command, to learn the uses of flattery and humility, to never appear overly intelligent. He was expected to acquire and to exhibit at all times what a Georgia slaveholder defined as “a house look.” The quality of bondage to which he submitted could be measured neither by the number of beatings he sustained nor by the privileges and indulgences he enjoyed. What took the heaviest toll, as W. E. B. Du Bois observed, had to be “the enforced personal feeling of inferiority, the calling of another Master; the standing with hat in hand. It was the helplessness. It was the defenselessness of family life. It was the submergence below the arbitrary will of any sort of individual.”111

That a certain intimacy characterized the slave-master relationship in the Big House reveals little about the conflicting feelings it generated and the precarious base on which it often rested. To live in close day-to-day contact with his master, to know his capacity for deceit and cunning, to know him as few of the field hands could, enabled some slaves to hate him that much more, with an intensity and fervor that only intimate knowledge could have produced. Recalling her many years as the cook in a North Carolina family, Aunt Delia suggested ways in which a house slave might choose to manifest that feeling: “How many times I spit in the biscuits and peed in the coffee just to get back at them mean white folks.” The easy familiarity that pervaded service in the Big House made not only for ambiguity but for a potentially volatile situation.112

Even if the master had been a model of virtue and propriety, there was no assurance that the blacks he had most indulged would remain faithful to him. Recalling their own experiences, William Wells Brown and Frederick Douglass, both of whom ultimately escaped to the North, testified that beneficent treatment, much more than abuse, had intensified their dissatisfaction with bondage. The better treated he was, Brown explained, the more miserable he became, the more he appreciated liberty, the more he detested the bondage that confined and restrained him. “If a slave has a bad master,” Douglass observed, “his ambition is to get a better; when he gets a better, he aspires to have the best; and when he gets the best, he aspires to be his own master.” To make a contented slave, he added, was to make a thoughtless slave. Rather than being grateful for his ability to read and write, he recalled those times when he envied the “stupidity” of his fellow slaves. “It was this everlasting thinking of my condition that tormented me.” On this point, then, Brown, Douglass, and the slaveholding class found themselves in unusual agreement, and the wartime experience demonstrated in scores of instances the validity of their observation: the best-treated, the most indulged, the most intelligent slaves might be expected to be the first ones to “betray” their masters.113

No plantation slave exercised greater authority than did the driver or foreman. The position he occupied as the director of labor and as an intermediary between the Big House and the quarters made him a crucial figure in the wartime crisis and in the subsequent transition to free labor. The driver dispatched the slaves to the fields, set the work pace and supervised performance of the daily tasks, maintained order in the quarters, settled disputes among slaves, and shared supervisory duties with the overseer or, quite commonly, combined the functions of driver and overseer. In a conflict between the overseer and the driver, the driver’s judgment might in many instances