Race Unequals: Overseer Contracts, White Masculinities, and the Formation of Managerial Identity in the Plantation Economy

Abstract

Teri A. McMurtry-Chubb's Race Unequals presents a history of the plantation overseer in the American South in the two decades before the Civil War. Complicating “a society polarized by race, White people against Black people,” Race Unequals makes two key contributions (p. xii). First, it looks to an understudied but generative site in the plantation economy, that of the relationships between the wealthiest slave owners and the men they paid as wage earners. As a legal history highlighting how their conflicts played out in courtrooms, in legislatures, and on the ground, Race Unequals also foregrounds intraracial class conflict among whites that, crucially, also shaped the lives of the enslaved. McMurtry-Chubb concludes that overseers occupied a vexed position, more complicated and illuminating than historians have recognized. Because overseers labored to enforce the slave economy while also working as subordinates within it, Race Unequals argues that they are useful for understanding the formation of “managerial identity” in the plantation economy (pp. iii–iv). The book draws conclusions primarily on the plantation economy, but as its epilogue on the “legacy” of plantation management suggests, historians might well wonder about its lessons for American history as a whole.