Sometimes you find claims to historical knowledge and understanding in the darnest places. Such places are worth exploring, if for no other reason than to get an idea of how some people understand American history or conduct historical discussions. Take, for example, the state of slavery in the South before and during the Civil War. What should we make of the peculiar institution? What were the relations between master and slave? And how do the answers to those questions affect what happened during the war?
As one poster asked:
I’m asking where were the revolts. As far as I can think, much terror and violence results in the same. Why wasn’t that visited upon the perpetrators? … What kept million of slaves working on farms during the war when locales were barren of men other than old men and young boys?
The same poster also observed:
... as best as I can make out from readings, the people that owned slaves were generally the least racist in antebellum and post-war society. It was the people who had little exposure to blacks, such as your beloved east Tennesseans, who exhibited the greater racist tendencies.
What do we make of these observations? First, are they grounded upon a sound sense of history? Second, how would you answer these questions/respond to these observations? Third, do they tell us anything about … wait for it … Civil War memory?
Crossroads 
I gather the poster missed the part when Slaves deserted in droves when the opportunity presented itself. Old men, boys and even the White women had guns and there were still many men around. That the Slaves didn’t indulge in wanton massacre doesn’t mean they loved “dear ol Massa” just that they{the Slaves} weren’t animals and were also unarmed
“as best I can make out from my reading” begs the questions, what is he capable of making out? and what has he read?.
Has he read anything beyond DiLorenzo or Lew Rockwell?
“Has he read anything beyond DiLorenzo or Lew Rockwell?”
That’s really unfair. He may have been reading Walter E. Williams, too.
I don’t think he reads very much, actually. Not that it matters. Reading and understanding are two different things.
In “Road to Disunion” Freehling describes the virulent anger and resentment manifested by slaveless whites in South Carolina. Anger, resentment that could result in violence. After all the death or injury of slaves, disruption of slave operations, had no direct economic consequence to the slaveless.
As far as slave revolts are concerned, Peter Kolchin’s “American Slavery” describes how the distribution of slaves as disarmed and divided minorities in a majority white population channeled slave resistance away from kamikazi charges into the massed guns of the whites, to other forms.
Many southern whites who did not own slaves and did not anticipate owning slaves were petrified at the possible consequences of emancipation.
As far as memory is concerned, this may be way off, but in “To Kill a Mockingbird” Atticus Finch is the descendant of slaveowners, and his aristocratic code of courtesy, respect and courage result in him defending Tom, accused a raping a white woman.
His accusers are the practically subhuman poor whites, the Elwells, while the poor white Cunninghams, otherwise seen positively, form the lynch mob Scout and Atticus confront.
Now a novel written in the 1950s isn’t an historical document for the antebellum South, but its a signal on how attitudes were remembered by Southerners like Harper Lee.
Well, I would not see Atticus Finch as a representative white southerner of his time. Neither does the book. But pray tell me where those former slaveholders were when the KKK was riding about. After all, the quote extends this treatment to the postwar period.
Harper Lee’s book isn’t history. But in your post you spoke about “memory.” TKAMB is something, like Gone With the Wind, that shaped how people remember and understand. The portrait of Atticus has a little of the “paternalistic” aristocrat in it.
There’s a lot more to his character and the book in general, but I thought there was an echo that might have influenced the poster you quoted originally.
Perhaps, although, judging from the rest of the post, I doubt it. I would speculate that the OP confuses the treatment of an enslaved work force with racial attitudes. It would be against a master’s economic interest to beat his work force to the point where it could not work or would resist working. Moreover, I see the choice of (unionist) East Tennesseans as a point of comparison as suggestive. Here’s a Confederate Romantic who’s basically saying that slavery wasn’t so bad, because the slaves did not rise up and kill their masters. The postwar comment is particularly instructive: white southerners who concede the existence of the Reconstruction KKK often say it was a lower class movement, betraying a misunderstanding of how class functioned in the South when it came to white supremacy. If the upper class had truly deplored the actions of the KKK, it would have opposed it, instead of welcoming it as a way to keep a labor force in a subordinate status.
For too many white southerners, history is identity. It’s not about the past: it’s about them. That the OP hails from Virginia offers a special twist to the above, and I say that having lived in Virginia for four years (I am quite fond of the state).
Matt – May I suggest a nonfiction model of what you seem to be getting at? Sen. Leroy Percy of Mississippi.
Though just a child during the Civil War, Percy came from the highest levels of the plantation elite on the Mississippi delta. He made national news in 1922 when he came out of retirement from politics to stare down a Klan organizing rally at the courthouse, and effectively drove the organization out of Washington County, Mississippi. His motives were undoubtedly paternalistic, but represented an under-recognized planter class in southern politics that attempted to position itself as a buffer between the blacks and the white racist populist types – usually for a complex combination of economic and moral motives.
Or to return to literary allusion, Percy was something of the Sartoris counterpart to the real life Snopeses, Bilbo and Vardaman.
These paragraphs from Encyclopedia Virginia’s entry on slavery during the Civil War, written by Jaime Amanda Martinez, are a decent place to start for some historical context:
“Slaveholders in Virginia and across the South anticipated that a slave uprising would accompany the start of the war and, accordingly, tightened plantation discipline in the spring and summer of 1861. As increasing numbers of white men left home for the Confederate army, however, and the dreaded slave rebellion never materialized, white Virginians loosened their grip on their slaves. Slave patrols dwindled out of existence in some areas. Plantation discipline relaxed considerably as slaves sensed and exploited their mistresses’ weakness in the absence of male authority figures. While few slaves stopped working entirely, many refused to grow cash crops without new incentives.
“While plantation workers enjoyed new freedoms, slaves in Virginia’s urban areas often experienced the exact opposite. In Richmond, slaves working for the Confederate government lost many of the privileges accorded hired slaves in the 1850s, in particular their ability to choose their own employers, negotiate rates of pay, and receive direct cash payments, all of which had been hallmarks of Richmond’s industrial slave-hiring system. In Lynchburg, while slaves did take advantage of wartime dislocations to begin asserting their independence, whites responded with random acts of violence designed to terrorize the city’s black population back into submission.”
http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Slavery_During_the_Civil_War
The Charlottesville during the Civil War entry also talks about reduced privileges for both free and enslaved blacks, and even mentions how in 1863 four slaves murdered a Confederate officer rather than be impressed into Confederate service. In some cases, slave owners moved their slaves rather than see them impressed.
http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Charlottesville_During_the_Civil_War
I am not a slavery scholar, but what strikes me about this is the tradition among slaves in Virginia of negotiating for various privileges and levels of treatment and how those negotiations continued during the war (“refused to grow cash crops without new incentives”). There also was a tradition of inflicting violence upon slaves, and that continued, too (“random acts of violence designed to terrorize”). And while African American-led rebellions, aside from, say, Nat Turner’s in 1831, were almost unheard of, acts of resistance — from murdering a Confederate officer to running away in droves — were common enough and, in the long run, probably more effective.
As such, it doesn’t seem quite right (or fair or historically justified) to judge the treatment of enslaved blacks based on whether they were willing to resort to massive bloodshed as a form of resistance. Perhaps it’s worth asking what obstacles stood in the way of such revolts. And what did slaves know about Nat Turner and how did they regard him?
A place to start for those questions might be Martin Delany. Here’s a bit from the encyclopedia’s entry on him:
“Delany’s new militancy was manifest in his novel Blake: Or the Huts of America, which ran as a serial titled ‘Blake; or the Huts of America.—A Tale of the Mississippi Valley, the Southern United States and Cuba’ in the Anglo-African Magazine in 1859 and the Weekly Anglo-African in 1861 and 1862 (it was not published in complete book form until 1970). Hinting at the Weekly Anglo-African’s politics, a quotation under its masthead read, ‘Man must be Free!—if not through Law, why then above the Law.’ Blake tells the story of a fugitive slave who travels across the South and in Cuba organizing insurrection. In Virginia’s Dismal Swamp, he encounters mention of ‘the names of Nat Turner, Denmark Veezie, and General Gabriel.’ These are ‘the kind of fighting men they then needed among the blacks,’ Blake concludes, and spreads the news of their long-ago deeds throughout the slave community. Referring to Turner’s 1831 uprising in Southampton County, Virginia, he notes, ‘Southampton—the name of Southampton to them was like an electric shock.’ Delany’s story of a slave fomenting rebellion stood in stark contradiction to the philosophies of Garrison and Harriet Beecher Stowe. While Delany did not intend Blake to be a response to Stowe’s 1852 antislavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, it still read like one, arguing that Christian endurance was not an adequate response to the horrors of slavery.”
http://encyclopediavirginia.org/Delany_Martin_R_1812-1885
All interesting questions, I think.
This is a traditional element of the “faithful slave” narrative, one that goes back to the antebellum period. White Southerners understand slaves intuitively by long exposure, and appreciate what’s best for them, as opposed to those meddlesome Yankee abolitionists.
What that argument misses, then and now, is that when you have a slave society, in which the status of slaves is firmly established by law, by society and even by religious dogma, then there is often little in the way of outward signs in the historical record of what modern readers would see as overt “racism.” When everything about a culture reinforces the wall between whites (slave-holding or not) and African Americans (particularly slaves, but extending to free persons as well), one doesn’t necessarily find the artificial strictures (e.g., “black codes”) and dialogue that pop up where there is more nominal parity between the races, and whites need to find other ways of reasserting their assumed superiority.
Ta-Nehisi Coates, one of the senior editors at the Atlantic, expressed it very well not long ago, referring to the writings of Mary Chesnut:
So no — the poster you quoted doesn’t have the remotest sense of the way the races interacted in the South — not in 1850, not in 1950, or (in some respects) even today. It’s a terrifically complex thing, and simply looking for period sources saying (as Coates suggests) “kill all the n_____s!” utterly misses that. That poster reads the words, but misses the meaning.
“…the people that owned slaves were generally the least racist in antebellum and post-war society…”
This statement is almost Orwellian. Apparently, the very people who benefited most richly and directly from a system of slave labor based solely and explicitly on race and who dared disunion and war for the express purpose of maintaining that racist system in perpetuity were the least racist people in the society. Well, why not? As long as blacks docilely kept to their station, what, for slaveholders, was not to like about them?
Of course it’s all rubbish, as previous commenters have noted in some detail. No doubt what the poster of the statement was trying to get at was something along the lines of Dick Gregory’s famous remark distinguishing the face of racism in the North from the face of racism in the South: “Down South they don’t care how close I am as long as I don’t get too big, and up North they don’t care how big I am as long as I don’t get too close.” The crucial difference is that Gregory, for obvious reasons, doesn’t somehow conclude that Southern racism is not racism at all.
However, it’s the sort of rubbish that serves to make a good white boy from Virginia feel right good about himself. After all, it’s those (unionist) East Tennesseans he’s highlighting as racists.
Of course, what our good old Virginia boy overlooks is that those kind slaveholders from the Old Dominion were selling their dear enslaved folks as fast as they could in 1860. That’s one reason they didn’t want the international slave trade to reopen … it would depress the price of one of the leading exports of the Old Dominion.
“Down South they don’t care how close I am as long as I don’t get too big, and up North they don’t care how big I am as long as I don’t get too close.”
That’s a brilliant quote.
The fear of slave revolts was a constant in the antebellum South, to the point that periodic outbursts of white hysteria seeing conspiracies where there was little or no evidence that any existed was a fact of life. The white response was often vigilance committees, tortures of suspected slaves, executions/lynchings of slaves/free blacks/northern whites who were in the wrong place at the wrong time/any white who was seen as being to friendly towards blacks. David Grimsted goes into it a lof in “American Mobbing” and one of the most extreme examples was the 1860 equivalent of the Reichstag fire, the Texas slave insurrection panic (the alleged arson seems to have come out of an extraordinarily hot summer and the introduction of a new match that had an unfortunate tendence to spontaneously combust when subjected to heat). Donald Reynolds’ “Texas Terror” goes into that. It was manipulated by secessionists to increase support for secession.
And, then there’s this from the gift that keeps on giving … in this case, from someone who comments here once in a while, although she’s fallen silent since she promised to do some reading on Reconstruction. I guess she’s still looking for a copy of Claude Bowers’s The Tragic Era.
Instead, she whines about not finding anything here other than “Something, anything, beyond a chorus of anti-slavery-cliches” … which is yet more testimony to the quality of her intellectual discernment.
Coming as she does from a discussion group that features white supremacist cliches as standard fare, perhaps our Confederate romantic is more at home in a group that talks about the happiness of slaves.
On Olmsted, one might consult this short essay, in which the author points out that “Olmsted represents very much what planters wanted to think of the regime,” much like the ideas that our Confederate romantics embrace. A fuller reading of Olmsted would compell a reader to note how his views changed over time as he went into the deep South, but then Confederate romantics are into myth, not history.
“However, it’s the sort of rubbish that serves to make a good white boy from Virginia feel right good about himself. After all, it’s those (unionist) East Tennesseans he’s highlighting as racists.”
Hi Brooks,
Beautiful!
Please don’t forget to include Southwest Virginia in that equation as well. I am old enough to remember when our district was called the “fighting Ninth” because we generally did not vote the way the rest of the state did. I am also old enough to remember fierce arguments about evolution, race, religion, baptism by immersion, eastern Virginians, and many other topics.(The town I am from is roughly 45 miles from the Tennessee/ Virginia line) In my family at least, no one trusted anyone in the state of Virginia who came from an area east of Roanoke. The class divisions were, and still are to a certain extent, extreme. To say that one was descended from slaveholders was still a strange badge of class distinction, even in my youth. To be a member of a family whose father sat in the Jim Crow section of a theater in which his Cherokee descended father ran the projector was not something that propelled one into a “higher” class. It is interesting now to see how some of those same people attempt to run from the past. In fact, it is interesting to observe how this is the modus operandi for many–that is, the attempt to create an imagined aristocratic past in which one’s ancestors were noble and pure. The character of Atticus Finch definitely falls within this category, as does the fictionalized Captain Shaw of the Massachusetts 54th, or even the more extreme romanticized elements of characters in Roots. People are much more complicated than romance induced fantasies created for the present–more complicated both in art and in history. Now, if the commenter you quoted is from Southwest Virginia, then he knows very little about his own history. “They think the state ends in Roanoke!” (meaning the state government) was a common sentiment among many of the older men and women with whom I had the privilege to come of age. Moreover, many of the descendants of slaveholders and of non slaveholders alike were quite racist in the 1960s and 1970s, just as the slaveholders and non slaveholders themselves were no doubt racist in the 1860s and 1870s. Racism is democratic that way. It knows no boundaries of time, geography, age, gender, or “class“. Many of the most thoroughly racist people I have known, did not even know that they were racist. The concept of noblesse oblige covers a multitude of sins, the most prominent being the act of self deception.
Brooks, I always enjoy talking to you, but I never have much time to spend here, too.
I checked periodically, and I don’t wonder that there has been no response to date to this comment of yours, from among your following–since “the gift that keeps on giving” quotes a most esteemed and reputable source making some very reasonable observations. 🙂 I’m sure they don’t know how to respond to that, in a way that supports both you and my most worthy source. If this is meant to be an insult to me and “yet more testimony to the quality of her intellectual discernment” well, then, I’m proud of such as I exhibit, whatever you deem it to be. Having consciously, purposely chosen Kenneth Stampp, along with what he says, the messenger and the message, I’m in good company. It follows, if you find fault with me over it, you have complaint with him: Evidently you find him too soft (fair?) in his anti-slavery.
> And, then there’s this from the gift that keeps on giving … in this case, from someone who comments here once in a while, although she’s fallen silent since she promised to do some reading on Reconstruction. I guess she’s still looking for a copy of Claude Bowers’s The Tragic Era.
No, rather, she’s caught between the thrall of the Grassy Knoll and the Nefud Desert, currently. Reconstruction has always taken a back seat with me. Only YOU motivate me to pursue that direction. General Lee’s leadership, esp. at G.B., is also light years ahead of it and slavery, as my CW priorities.
> Instead, she whines about not finding anything here other than “Something, anything, beyond a chorus of anti-slavery-cliches”
I’m convinced Slavery was something more and different than the knee-jerk reactions to it, which are based on social unrest reactions carried-over from the 1960s. A form of historical PTSD?
> Coming as she does from a discussion group that features white supremacist cliches as standard fare,
I’m reasonably confident and pretty comfortable stating there’s not a white-supremacist among them. Anything unscathing I say about slavery does not make me one of them, either.
> perhaps our Confederate romantic is more at home in a group that talks about the happiness of slaves.
> On Olmsted, one might consult this short essay, in which the author points out that “Olmsted represents very much what planters wanted to think of the regime,” much like the ideas that our Confederate romantics embrace. A fuller reading of Olmsted would compell a reader to note how his views changed over time as he went into the deep South, but then Confederate romantics are into myth, not history.
I’m sure Olmsted’s views changed at different times and in different places. I still find him more reliable at the time than someone telling me what he was supposed to have thought and seen who’s from a later Century.
Here’s the subsequent link to what I said: “the gift that keeps on giving” cont’d, from where I left off, specifically concerning Virginia. (He hadn’t gotten farther South as yet…nor have I, in reading him) But, he did give me pause where I stopped and quoted–notice: I did say I was surprised)
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/civilwarhistory2/message/174508
Nice to hear from you again.
I don’t think you’ve digested Stampp’s comments or set them in context with ongoing conversations. Stampp’s speculation on which slaves were happier (which he admits is pure speculation) had to be taken in context, because slaves would be happiest to be free. Moreover, let’s not forget the claim that sparked this response: Eddie Inman’s claim that slaveholders were less racist than non-slaveholders. That’s simply bizarre, and it has no support, especially when it comes to the postwar period, where the enslaved were no longer valued as property.
Slaveholders had a vested economic interest in maintaining the health of their workforce to ensure productivity. That also shaped attitudes toward discipline. One should also distinguish how slaveholders felt toward their own slaves and toward other blacks (we see a much harsher attitude if someone’s not a member of the plantation/farm in question).
As for Olmsted, one has to recall his perspectives when he set forth and the perspectives with which he returned. Olmsted went forth to see slavery as slaveholders saw it, and those early comments tend to support that mission. As he traveled elsewhere, those opinions changed. It would be a mistake to cite what Olmsted said at the beginning for what he said at the end or as representative of the entire body of his observations. The more Olmsted saw, the more he had cause to question his initial assumptions.
Can you cite interviews between Olmsted and the slaves he observed? As you’ll see, his early observations were filtered through the eyes of slaveholders, who took him to see what they wanted him to see. Can one construct a history of the experience of enslavement without taking into consideration the views of the enslaved?
If one was to look at the opinions of the people at the time, why not the opinions of the enslaved, such as Frederick Douglass, who drew distinctions between his masters and the treatment he received? And if we are going to look at the postwar world that your friend Eddie included, are we going to look at the KKK, which was supported by those slavehol, or are we going to hear excuses for terrorism that rest on KKK assertions that it was all the fault of the Union League? Funny that other historians see the Union League in the South after the war (as distinct from Union Leagues in northern urban areas) as a reaction to oppression and violence.
My notion is that there’s a lot of selective cherry-picking that goes on in “civilwarhistory2,” especially with Mr. Inman and “dixieman.” I’ll leave it to interested readers to see what they say about their views on various issues. But, yes, it seems to me that some of your members do spout white supremacist and Confederate romantic cliches. One of them was about the supposed enlightened racial attitudes of slaveholders.
You must get over the idea that anyone who disagrees with you suffers from some sort of psychological affliction or that they simply lack the ability to comprehend the world as you see it. You tend to fall into the arms of the argument that supports your own prejudices, and you celebrate it as objective and dispassionate, while other arguments are flawed and due to some affliction, shortcoming, or prejudice.
Finally, I note your comment where you say: “It follows, if you find fault with me over it, you have complaint with him: Evidently you find him too soft (fair?) in his anti-slavery.” This seems bizarre, self-serving, and more than a bit insulting, if nevertheless revealing of how you go about your intellectual business. It’s also a bit insulting to Stampp, given his writings on the subject. I simply accept that he was speculating (as he admitted when it came to the happiness question) and giving his opinion, and I was giving my observations in response. What follows in your comment after “Evidently …” is likewise your speculation, and it tells me more about how your mind works than about what I think, because I’ve expressed no opinion whatsoever about his views on slavery, just some statements about the evidence he uses. I’m questioning methodology and evidence.
It would be interesting, however, to select other things that Stampp said, and test whether you would still believe he was dispassionate and objective. Maybe I’ll do that after you share with us the results of your reading on Reconstruction. There you’ll find exactly what southern whites thought about southern blacks.
As always, it’s been a pleasure.
“Having consciously, purposely chosen Kenneth Stampp, along with what he says, the messenger and the message, I’m in good company. It follows, if you find fault with me over it, you have complaint with him: Evidently you find him too soft (fair?) in his anti-slavery.”
Perhaps you should read what Stampp actually wrote about slavery, rather than a speculative response to an interviewer’s question:
http://www.amazon.com/Peculiar-Institution-Slavery-Ante-Bellum-South/dp/0679723072/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1310170376&sr=1-2
Stampp emphasizes the dehumanizing effects of the institution and it’s practices on slaves. I think he minimizes the extent to which blacks were able to maintain families and communities under conditions of enslavement, but he certainly was not “soft” on slavery.
Miss Ross, I didn’t go back to look at the context of your remarks so I’d rather not try to characterize them now without first asking you what point you were making with the Stampp excerpt. If you would be so kind as to let us know your point I think we can fairly discuss your view and how the Stampp excerpt fits into it, because in fact I do have something to say in response to it. However, I’d like to be fair to you in my response.
You can find her use of the Stampp interview here.
If you then return to the original, you’ll see that what he was doing is comparing his research to that of U. B. Phillips. Phillips emphasized large plantations in his study, whereas Stampp broadened his net to try to capture experiences in cases where a slaveholder’s holding was less than twenty slaves. He says he likes Olmsted as an objective observer.
Ms. Ross engages in several logical leaps. She wants people to respect Olmsted as a source, because what she’s cited from Olmsted elsewhere (she admits she hasn’t really read much of him) comes from the beginning of Olmsted’s journey, when he seemed more favorably impressed by the conditions of slavery than he would turn out to be after more prolonged exposure to it. Yet Stampp does not specify where he finds Olmsted to be objective. Disinterested may be a better word. What if that’s a summary judgment passed at the end of Olmsted’s observations (one assumes that Stampp read all of Olmsted, unlike Ms. Ross)?
Ms. Ross also confuses issues of treatment with issues of racial attitudes. There’s a different dynamic when it comes to small holdings, especially if it’s a white family owning a black family. If you have 100 field hands and harshly discipline one, you have ninety-nine hands still available, and they’ve now seen what you might do. If you own a single black family and discipline the adult black male, that comes at significant cost to your own productivity. So the interaction will be different. As to what this has to do with racial attitudes (the point made by Ms. Ross’s sidekick), well, that’s not clear. It is clear to me that her method of citation is cherry-picking to satisfy her beliefs, although she’s not always successful in setting forth her argument clearly (thus the confusion over defining her point).
Yeah, it certainly looks as though she thinks Stampp is taking antislavery folks to task, but still, I’d feel more comfortable with a clear statement of her point. I don’t want to unfairly characterize her viewpoint because of some sloppy writing.
I must say that when I look at Helga’s post on cwh2, I’m a little baffled about what her point really is. She wants to highlight Stampp’s remarks about the relationship between slaves and masters on small farms, and the point here can only be that the typical slaveowner only owned a few slaves, but the fact remains that the majority, or at least about half of all slaves actually lived on large plantations. What is highlighted here is the disparity between the experience of slaves and the illusions of their masters. Furthermore, Stampp goes on to speculate that for reasons of community, blacks probably preferred living in areas of greater concentrations of black slaves:
[begin quote]
One question that I was always interested in was whether, from the slave’s point of view, it would be better to live on a smaller establishment than on a larger one, and on that I’m not sure. In the areas of small slaveholdings, the black slaves were heavily outnumbered by the white population. In the areas of very large slaveholdings, you might find more than 50 percent of the population black slaves. In South Carolina and Mississippi,
¨D 173 ¨D
slaves outnumbered whites in the total population, and in Florida, Georgia, Alabama, Louisiana, they were about 50-50, half slave and half white.
So the question is, how would the slaves feel about living in a sea of whites, as compared to a situation where they’re in the majority and where it was easier for the slave to escape the eternal observation of whites? In their slave quarters, say, a slaveholding of seventy-five or 100 slaves or more, if you think of the slave quarters as a kind of little community where they could have some kind of community life and frequently be free of observation by whites, was that more comfortable than living somewhere in the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia on a holding of maybe one slave family or two slave families and whites everywhere, where you had no community life of your own? I don’t know. I suspect that they might have found it better to live on the larger slaveholding.
[end quote]
Regardless of whether we are talking about small farms or large plantations, and there
were certainly differences as Brooks has pointed out, slavery was still based upon the presumption and the actuality of forced labor.
Marc,
What with the dangling threads, (your query here, and Brook’s final comment to me)
this SHOULD be a better route to rounding out my contribution to this topic, which in any case, you brought to cw2:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/civilwarhistory2/message/174108
My having already responded to it there–
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/civilwarhistory2/message/174454
–your reply, here, indicates you missed the point altogether, since you repeat only a portion of what I posted, reiterating in your own words what is already perfectly clearly stated by Stampp, the way it is.
You say: “I must say that when I look at Helga’s post on cwh2, I’m a little baffled about what her point really is.”
Well, that’s as baffling, for me, as you not considering my answer in relation to what’s being asked:
“Take, for example, the state of slavery in the South before and during the Civil War. What should we make of the peculiar institution? What were the relations between master and slave?”
If you’d considered the question, you’d get the point, I should think, and know not to leave out the most important portion of the entire excerpt, which does address the question. Further to Brooks questions “What should we make of the peculiar institution? What were the relations between master and slave?” what we get is not another cliche-ridden screenplay for Mandingo the movie. Rather:
Stampp: It was not uncommon at all, in fact, for the slaveowner and members of his family to work in the fields with his slaves.
Lage
That’s a very different picture from the commonly held view.
Stampp
Yes. Particularly in the upper South and in Virginia and North Carolina and Tennessee where there were lots of these small slaveholdings. You would find cases of owners working in the fields, if not all year round, certainly at the crucial time, and that’s the harvest in the fall, when you’ve got to have every hand you can get to pick cotton. Then everybody was out there: the farmer and his wife and his children and whatever slaves he had and their children and so on. Also that was true of tobacco: when it was ready, you had to get it in.
Lage
It sounds more like a Northern farm, except for the slavery.
Stampp
Yes.
The other portion you left out of that same excerpt of Stampp’s I posted, addresses Brook’s beef about my having ignored your observation concerning Stampp and the WPA. I don’t consider there’s any difference between his reservations regarding those interviews and what he say’s here, about former slave’s autobiographies:
“Dictated autobiographies. Some of them wrote–Frederick Douglass certainly did–but most autobiographies are suspect, because usually they were dictated or written by abolitionists, and we don’t know how much they threw out leading questions and that sort of thing.”
The point of the rest of what you did quote back to me of Stampp’s is that there’s a lot Stampp was not as cock-sure of, concerning those slavery questions, (and he admits it, for the reasons he says) as everybody here appears to be, by what they’ve said.
I see lots of Kenneth Stampp speaking off-the-cuff, but I don’t see much of what you are saying. I for one am still baffled as to what your point is, Ms. Ross. Are you claiming that slavery wasn’t such a bad thing? Are you saying that the overwhelming experience for slaves was working side-by-side with their masters and their masters’ families? Are you saying the overwhelming relationship between master and slave was one of love? Friendship? Familial? Brooks has years of experience with undergrad papers and essays, so he can probably follow your writing with ease, but I can’t make out what you’re trying to say about slavery. I haven’t seen anyone writing a screenplay from the movie, “Mandingo,” so I’m at a loss as to how that relates to anything. The responsibility for understanding in communication is on the sender, which in this case is you. Your post isn’t laid out in a clear, easy-to-follow manner.
At the CWH2 posting you linked to, the only part of that lengthy post that appears to be yours is:
“Why do I not see the remotest stab at reasonableness and discernment there, (since, we’re judged not to have it, here), such as this, among the commentary? Something, anything, beyond a chorus of anti-slavery-clich¨¦s?”
Leaving aside our disagreement over whether there is reasonableness and discernment in the responses to Brooks’ posting, I have to say that without your clarification, all this leads me to assume you mean to say that slavery was not such a bad deal for the slaves, that they overwhelmingly worked side-by-side with the master, were treated as part of the family, and had a familial relationship with their masters. I certainly don’t want to attribute a position to you that is not correct, so could you validate whether or not I’m correct about your position?
Al, you keep asking me my opinion of slavery.
What’s your opinion of murder?
You see, your question is really unwarranted, with respect to what I’m offering, just as it would be, if it were addressed to Kenneth Stampp. Are you suggesting just because Slavery:Bad he shoudn’t be studying it; making considered observations on it?
Brooks apparently asked these questions, which really aren’t questions–there isn’t anything beyond the obvious in them, as it turns out:
“Take, for example, the state of slavery in the South before and during the Civil War. What should we make of the peculiar institution? What were the relations between master and slave?”
Helga, you simply don’t know what you are talking about. After all, Kenneth Stampp’s The Peculiar Institution explored master-slave relations, looking at variations by region and by number of slaves in a holding. So what you are telling us is that you think a line of historical inquiry that includes the work of a historian that you hold up as an example is worthless.
(Those of you referred to this post by Helga’s efforts at special pleading in cwh2 should recall what she said: “Brooks apparently asked these questions, which really aren’t questions–there isn’t anything beyond the obvious in them, as it turns out … ‘What were the relations between master and slave?'” And yet later she admits that this is a legitimate question of historical inquiry. So you can go ahead and figure out what Helga means when she says something is not really a question but really is a question. No wonder she’s fond of Alice in Wonderland.)
Other studies look at how the war shook up the relations between master and slave. You seem sadly unaware of that scholarship, too. Try, for starters, Armstead Robinson’s Bitter Fruits of Bondage; Steven Hahn’s A Nation Under Our Feet; Stephanie McCurry’s Confederate Reckoning; Clarence Mohr’s On the Threshold of Freedom; and James Roark’s Masters Without Slaves. In short, real historians think that’s an interesting question. That you so blithely dismiss such historical inquiry says much about your own intellect and interest … and not much else.
Al’s question is right on, and you still can’t answer it. In fact, there have been many questions asked of you, and you’ve failed to offer answers, although you’ve repeatedly shown that you can’t follow your own line of argument, which is an unusual quality.
Come back when you’ve done a little work. Right now you are embarrassing yourself with your ignorance, magnified by your tone and attitude. You’re wasting our time, and that’s that.
> Helga, you simply don’t know what you are talking about. After all, Ken Stampp’s The Peculiar Institution explored master-slave relations, looking at variations by region and by number of slaves in a holding. So what you are telling us is that you think a line of historical inquiry that includes the work of a historian that you hold up as an example is worthless. >
How you get that, out of what I just said, is beyond comprehension. It’s as if I’m reading a scene out of “Alice’s Through the Glass” and have just had a conversation with the Mad Hatter.
How can I possibly think the line of inquiry is worthless when I pursued it, because you raised it; and I think very highly of Kenneth Stampp, as you must know, and as should by now be obvious. (You’ve known, and seen me quote him elsewhere as a worthy source on other matters also.)
I’m observing that it is you who don’t wish to pursue the line of inquiry you raised.
Thanks for sharing. As I’ve pointed out before, you seem to have a difficult time following your own line of argument. Thus it’s fruitless to pursue a line of inquiry with you.
You say: “How can I possibly think the line of inquiry is worthless when I pursued it”? Simple. You said of this very question about the master-slave relationship, “Brooks apparently asked these questions, which really aren’t questions–there isn’t anything beyond the obvious in them, as it turns out … ” Goodness, Helga, do you realize what you say? Apparently not.
You’ve now offered more farewells than Brett Favre. So back to your special pleading with your fans, as shown here.
For those who asked, I told you so.
Al, you keep asking me my opinion of slavery.
What’s your opinion of murder?
———
I’m asking you to clarify your point–whether it’s about your opinion of slavery or something else. You’ve posted the Stampp excerpt after making a comment about antislavery “cliches”. If I posted a similar excerpt, mutatis mutandis, after making a comment about antimurder “cliches,” then your question would be relevant.
You see, your question is really unwarranted, with respect to what I’m offering, just as it would be, if it were addressed to Kenneth Stampp. Are you suggesting just because Slavery:Bad he shoudn’t be studying it; making considered observations on it?
——–
Since Kennth Stampp has an antislavery body of work that is unassailable, I don’t need to ask him that. Since you’ve taken his off-the-cuff remarks out of the context of his body of work, I have to wonder about your point still.
Brooks apparently asked these questions, which really aren’t questions–there isn’t anything beyond the obvious in them, as it turns out:
“Take, for example, the state of slavery in the South before and during the Civil War. What should we make of the peculiar institution? What were the relations between master and slave?”
——
And your point is what?
Such views give rise to things like the “Iowa Pledge” all the Republican candidates are being pressured to sign. Micelle Bachman signed it with relish.
I”n a section of the pledge meant to show that marriage is in a “crisis,” the first bullet point reads:
“Slavery had a disastrous impact on African-American families, yet sadly a child born into slavery in 1860 was more likely to be raised by his mother and father in a two-parent household than was an African-American baby born after the election of the USA’s first African-American President.” ”
http://blogs.citypages.com/blotter/2011/07/bachmann_black_families_better_under_slavery_obama.php
http://tinyurl.com/4xn52ql
Thanks, Michelle. No wonder people think we live in a surrealistic era. Next she’ll be noting that slavery was a great thing because slaves got to live with their fathers — at least until their fathers sold them to someone else.
The OP has obviously never heard of Second Creek, or the reaction to Nat Turner’s Rebellion, or the “Twenty Negro Law”, or the tens of thousands of slaves who ran away from the plantation when the Union army came close.
Hi Brooks,
> I don’t think you’ve digested Stampp’s comments or set them in context with ongoing conversations.
“I don’t think you’ve digested ….”
I’m sorry to have to point out that this is so typical of you, in responding to whatever I offer: Intellectual condescension towards me. I may not have Letters after my name, Brooks, but I do have 2 years University under my belt (towards a B.A in English/History); I read widely; am well-informed. Kindly allow that my mental circuits are working; that I complete my thoughts no less than do your usual responders, and I doubt I have a lesser IQ. Please, kindly, start making the same assumptions regarding my thinking as you do the rest & least of your readers, whose comments you accept. In other words, disagree with me about my views, as you will, but for real reasons based on the arguments themselves, not on discounting and casting doubts on the quality of my thinking. If not, though I don’t think you really want or intend to drive away the non-professional visitor from engaging with you, it is a good way to succeed in doing so.
> Stampp’s speculation on which slaves were happier (which he admits is pure speculation) had to be taken in context, because slaves would be happiest to be free. >
There you go–you think you’re telling me something I don’t know–as if it isn’t a given.
Brooks, you started off by asking this on June 29:
Slavery, Slaves, and White Racism: Some Queries from the Commonwealth
> Take, for example, the state of slavery in the South before and during the Civil War. What should we make of the peculiar institution? What were the relations between master and slave? And how do the answers to those questions affect what happened during the war?… >
By the time I observed the responses to it on Jul 6th I concluded they consisted of “anti-slavery cliches” and don’t see where I’m wrong about that.
Brooks, why do you ask questions on topics which you don’t want to explore? Why do you ask such open questions if you only accept a certain closed type of answer to them? If it is as simple as Slavery: Bad we already know all there is to know and it’s already all been said in Abolitionist tracts and newsletters; long ago, by Harriett Beecher Stowe.
So, when I pursued the question of master slave relations, I found there’s a wealth of information and perspective on it: I quoted Stampp, pointing out he offered some serious thought and broader insight, as my response to those responses–and was critiqued for it, by you (though I did not critique you or any responder personally) and here we are.
> Can you cite interviews between Olmsted and the slaves he observed? As you’ll see, his early observations were filtered through the eyes of slaveholders, who took him to see what they wanted him to see. >
Yes i can. Here’s one from a later stage; Page 680-81 of 700-odd pages, from the same Olmsted work I quoted earlier: (an additional source to Stampp, who tells us so much more than the standard fare of commentary on your question–actually addresses the question and is but one more indication of the scope of it):
A Journey in the Seaboard Slave States;
With Remarks on Their Economy:
He said, in answer to further inquiries, that there were many free negroes all about this region. Some of them were very rich. He pointed out to me three plantations, within twenty miles, which were owned by colored men. These bought black folks, he said, and had servants of their own. They were very bad masters, very hard and cruel–hadn’t any feeling. “You might think master, dat dey would be good to dar own nation; but dey is not. I will tell you de truth, massa; I know I’se got to answer; and it’s a fact, dey is very bad masters, sar. I’d rather be a servant to any man in de world, dan to a brack man. If I was sold to a brack man, I’d drown myself. I would dat–I’d drown myself!–dough I shouldn’t like to do dat nudder; but I wouldn’t be sold to a colored master for anything.”
If he had got to be sold, he would like best to have an American master buy him. The French people did not clothe their servants well; though they now did much better than when he first came to Louisiana. The French masters were very severe, and “dey whip dar niggers most to deff–dey whip de flesh off of ’em.”
Nor did they feed them as well as the Americans did. “Why, sometimes, massa, dey only gives ’em dry corn–don’t give out no meat at all.” I told him this could not be so, for the law required that every master should serve out meat to his negroes. “Oh, but some on ’em don’t mind Law, if he does say so, massa. Law never here; don’t know anything about him. Very often, dey only gives ’em dry corn–I knows dat; I sees de niggers. Didn’t you see de niggers on our plantation, sar? Well, you nebber see such a good-looking lot of niggers as ours on any of de French plantations, did you, massa? Why, dey all looks fat, and dey’s all got good clothes, and dey look as if dey all had plenty to eat, and hadn’t got no work to do, ha! ha! ha! Don’t dey? But dey does work, dough. Dey does a heap of work. But dey don’t work so hard as dey does on some ob de French plantations. Oh, dey does work too hard on dem, sometimes.”
“You work hard, in the grinding season, don’t you?”
“Oh, yes; den we works hard; we has to work hard den: harder dan any oder time of year. But, I tell ‘ou, massa, I likes to hab de grinding season come; yes, I does–rader dan any oder time of year, dough we works so hard den. I wish it was grinding season all de year roun’–only Sundays.”
“Why?”
“Because–oh, because it’s merry and lively. All de brack people like it when we begin to grind.”
“You have to keep grinding Sundays?”
“Yes, can’t stop, when we begin to grind, till we get tru.”
“You don’t often work Sundays, except then?”
“No, massa; nebber works Sundays, except when der crap’s weedy, and we want to get tru ‘fore rain comes; den, wen we work a Sunday, massa gives us some oder day for holiday–Monday, if we get tru.”
He said that, on the French plantations, they oftener work Sundays than on the American.
http://docsouth.unc.edu/nc/olmsted/olmsted.html
Now, Helga, no reason to become so upset. But I do note that you don’t like to be treated in a condescending fashion. Perhaps that will serve you well in understanding how other people respond to your own condescending behavior. You come across as insulting here and elsewhere, and so I view your complaint as amusing.
It has nothing to do with professional accreditation: you brought that up. My criticisms have to do with your logic and use/misuse of evidence. Should I hold you to a lower standard or not expect as much of you … is that what you want? Because no one but you has brought up the issue of professional training.
Still, the question remains: is your sampling of Stampp limited to this interview? Are you aware that one of the criticisms of his work was that it relied primarily upon the testimony of slaveholders, directly and indirectly (as through Olmsted)? Surely if one was to look at the system of slavery as pertains to master-slave relationships, we’d look at what the enslaved had to say as well. And, surely if we were to stand by the work of Kenneth Stampp on slavery, we might want to read The Peculiar Institution as well. Finally, we might want to treat Olmsted’s observations with a discerning eye.
You seem content with uncritically embracing that which agrees with your prejudices and perspectives. You characterize my position as “Slavery Bad”: I don’t know why I should be offended by that. Just admit that in making that claim, you imply that your position is somewhere between Slavery Not So Bad and Slavery Good, and we can move along.
Once more, the interview you cite discusses treatment, not racial attitudes. One does not need an advanced degree to understand that. And, by the way, Olmsted was “standard fare,” which is why Stampp cited him in a book that appeared before I was born. Scholarship’s moved forward since 1956. Moreover, please consider the notion that a black slave might not be altogether honest to a white interviewer, especially when said slave knows that the interviewer gained access to the slave through the white owner.
Your problem, Helga, is that you continued to dismiss as flawed and prejudiced anything that does not agree with your own prejudices and perspective, which time and again are those of the slaveholder. You do not see in yourself what you claim to see in others.
Again, I’ll ask, Ms. Ross, what’s your ultimate point? What are you trying to show? It certainly seems as though you’re trying to claim that slavery was okay. If that impression is wrong, please clarify.
I note that you failed, in your above rant, to address the substance of Brooks’ comments other than what Olmstead says later in his book.
This is not an unusual tactic. Someone looking to support their perspective dives into a source and posts it, never quite explaining how that evidence supports anything. Sometimes those people don’t even read what they post very carefully, as in Ms. Ross’s posting of information about slavery historiography that dates a change she claimed was as a result of the 1960s as having happened in the 1950s. So what we have here is a single-source argument about slavery that has already come under scrutiny, and her answer is to post more of the same rather than to respond to the observation about Olmsted’s perspective. Nothing she’s posted addresses my observations, although she’s managed to undermine her own argument about historiography. Whether she realizes that is a different matter altogether.
Helga,
Sorry, but I still don’t get your point. He discusses using sources to get at the experiences of slaves laboring on small slaveholdings alongside their masters, but when asked to speculate about their preferences for these circumstances as opposed to large slaveholdings where they would be among a larger community of blacks, he does not endorse the notion of advantages for the kind of intimicacy and familiarity these small farms would bring. As Brooks pointed out, Stampp is writing and responding against the work of U.B. Phillips, which was deeply racist, so I doubt that Stampp in his writing is “too soft” on slavery.” Frankly, I think you are trying to argue from “authority,” using the Stampp interview, without really understanding Stampp’s work and views on slavery. I still don’t get what points you are trying to make about slavery, other than perhaps the obvious ones that circumstances varied from place to place, and person to person, (and that somehow there is a dominant “NeoAbolitionist school” of slavery that originated in the 50s due to events of the 1960s that everyone but you, and a few others over at cwh2 are in thrall to) Perhaps you could give is a summary, in your own words, of what you think Stampp is saying and what you think is important to know about and characteristic of 19th c. Southern slavery.
As for your statement that you see no difference between the comments about 19th c. slave narratives and the points made by scholars about about the WPA interviews, that is puzzling, since the points seem quite clear and important to me. Do you think they can be used uncritically? Or do you hold to the opinion that all sources speak for themselves?
Oh, and one other thing. Did you notice in your (mis)use of Hummel when you invoked his use of the term “NeoAbolitionist,” and as Brooks pointed out he was writing of CW causation not slavery, he made the fundamental distinction, as I have tried to do several times as to why the Southern slave states seceded and why the North resisted secession, that he as much as admitted that secession was over slavery?
Marc,
The more I respond, the more questions you have. I don’t have time for this. If you want to pursue them you can come to cw2 to do so, where I do have time for you.
However, this sort of intellectual condescension: “Frankly,…without really understanding Stampp’s work and views on slavery.”
won’t get you anywhere, here or there–for sure–so, sure won’t help your understanding. I will respond and engage you in conversations in which it is clearly the assumption that we both know what we’re talking about.
One or two answers here, to wrap up–because they can be quickly dispensed with, such as this:
“As for your statement that you see no difference between the comments about 19th c. slave narratives and the points made by scholars about about the WPA interviews, that is puzzling, since the points seem quite clear and important to me. Do you think they can be used uncritically? Or do you hold to the opinion that all sources speak for themselves?”
Why isn’t it OBVIOUS to you?
“Do you think they can be used uncritically?” NO.
“You see no difference” between the WPA interviews and Slave narratives?
Exactly. NO; they’re Equally Suspect.
as Brooks quoted Stampp:
“as Marc identified it. As Stampp says (page 167), “the historian must always consider the circumstances which produced a body of evidence and the motives of those who provided it.”
I quoted Stampp: (There is no difference in the reliability of the material. They’re not.)
“Dictated autobiographies. Some of them wrote–Frederick Douglass certainly did–but most autobiographies are suspect, because usually they were dictated or written by abolitionists, and we don’t know how much they threw out leading questions and that sort of thing.”
> Oh, and one other thing. Did you notice in your (mis)use of Hummel when you invoked his use of the term “NeoAbolitionist,”
I didn’t misuse Hummel. He’s but one of the sources I listed who speak of Neo-Abolitionism. Hummel offers but one aspect (feature) of Neo-Abolitionism; Revisionist Reconstruction is another.
Helga, your responses rarely answer the questions, and sometimes they betray your inability to follow your own argument. Thus your responses raise more questions … as well as the observation that you’ve failed to answer the questions already posed.
The rest of your response documents your inability to follow an argument (including yours) or to respond to another poster. That you don’t know that you misused Hummel simply suggests the futility of having a reasoned discussion with you. I’m disappointed, but it has been an educational experience.
> You’ve now offered more farewells than Brett Favre.
I want to go, and you ought to want to permit me. But, instead, you won’t let it go with my farewell, Brooks; you keeping throwing in something that you want to stick to me on the way out, that needs to be thrown back.
This, this time:
> You say: “How can I possibly think the line of inquiry is worthless when I pursued it”? Simple. You said of this very question about the master-slave relationship, “Brooks apparently asked these questions, which really aren’t questions–there isn’t anything beyond the obvious in them, as it turns out … ” Goodness, Helga, do you realize what you say? Apparently not. >
I sure do, but you don’t see what you ought to. My comment was ironical and intended that way. Ironical: adjective: characterized by often poignant difference or incongruity between what is expected and what actually is
You should have known that, since it’s the grounds for our argument; and it’s not the first time I pointed out the problem:
“Brooks, why do you ask questions on topics which you don’t want to explore? Why do you ask such open questions if you only accept a certain closed type of answer to them?
Take care, Helga. It’s been interesting. You’re neither raising questions nor answering them, and, as always, you simply can’t follow a line of inquiry, even when it’s your own. So your retorts are no more than empty gestures, a substitute for the actual discussion of which you are utterly incapable of having. I hope that at least they make you feel smug.
UPDATE: I found this interesting.
Helga has a tendency to find, er … interesting … ah, undertones in her online discourse. Confederate romantic indeed. 🙂 Talk about a rich fantasy life …