Myles Darby
Professor McKinney
11/11/14
Discussion Paper 3
In this discussion paper, I will highlight the major topics of how slaves feared a bigger threat from slaveowners than whippings, and the role commodification played in this, and also how slavery became a contest and a means of joining the “society” between white males, .
According to Soul by Soul by Walter Johnson, and class discussions we’ve had, we know that slaves’ biggest fear was being sold, and not whipped. According to William Johnson, an escaped slave, he recalls his owner saying to him “if we didn’t suit him he would put us in his pocket quick-meaning that he would sell us”. William Johnson also describes this feeling as “suffus[ing] the daily life of the enslaved”. This method of torture hurt so much more than any whip could because slaveowners had the chance to ship you off at any time. Slaves had no clue if they would wake up at the same plantation the next day, without word from their master that they had just been sold. They could be taken from their mother, father, brother sister, husband, wife, at any time. Living with this constant threat in the back of their mind took a grueling toll on the slaves. It is an extremely horrible way to live your life knowing this, especially because you are already a slave anyway. I did not think it could get any worse than being slaves. However, slaveowners somehow found a way to make slavery even worse by having the power to sell them whenever they wanted. However, this entire thought process stemmed out of the commodification process. The slaveowners did not view the slaves as people, so they did not think about their families. They did not realize the fact that they were selling a son away from his mother. They literally saw the slaves as dollar signs. Nothing more, nothing less. Slaveowners also cared about profit more than anything else. If a slave was not acting right, and he so happened to be working on the same plantation as his mom, the slaveowner did not care whatsoever. If he was losing money, something had to change.
Another interesting take on this topic is how the slaveowners dealt with beatings after they purchased a new slave. For numerous reasons, “slaveowners often beat them for not living up to the expectations that had been attached to them in the slave market”. However, in some instances of course, they were unjustly beat. One master recalls his wife beating a slave because “his lupus made his nose run onto the napkins when he was setting the table”. However, Walter Johnson makes a vert interesting point about the relationship between slaves and slaveowners concerning whippings. Johnson says “the extremity of the violence with which slaveowners responded to disappointment suggests the intimacy of their dependence upon their slaves”. If you think about it, this statement makes a lot of sense. Lewis Clarke, who was a runaway slave said that “a slave don’t get whipped according to his crime, but according to the ambition of his master”. Slaveowners did not care about one more slave over another. Majority, if not all slaveowners did not care about one single slave they owned. However, they knew if one slave was a better work than another, for whatever reason or reason. Because of this, they expected more from certain slaves. If the slave was not performing to his potential, then the slaveowner may push him/her harder, or beat them more, to get the most work out of them. If a slaveowners had a slave that was not a good worker, they probably did not beat them as often, or as forcefully, because they were not invested in them. The more expectations a slaveowner had in a slave,”the more violent their reactions to the inevitable disappointment of their efforts to get real slaves to act like imagined ones”.
I found it very interesting, but also sad that “for slaveholders like Hilliard, the slave market held dreams of transformative possibilities”. By simply entering into the slavery process, “nonslaveholders could buy their way into the master class, and the possibility that they might one day own slaves was one of the things that kept nonslaveholders loyal to the slaveholders’ democracy in which they lived”. It is sad that white males had to purchase slaves just to fit in with the rest of their peers. “For men like Tibeats, buying a first slave was a way of coming into their own in a society that had previously excluded them”. In addition to the horrible institution it already was, it also became a competition to see how many slaves they could “get”. In essence, the more slaves you owned, the more powerful you were. This society was so messed up and backwards, that “as slaveholders moved upward through the social hierarchy, they gained access to ever more rarified fantasies of what it meant to be a white man and a slaveholder in the antebellum South”.
No comments:
Post a Comment