Reviewed by: Masters of Violence: The Plantation Overseers of Eighteenth-Century Virginia, South Carolina, and Georgia by Tristan Stubbs John C. Coombs Masters of Violence: The Plantation Overseers of Eighteenth-Century Virginia, South Carolina, and Georgia. By Tristan Stubbs. The Carolina Lowcountry and the Atlantic World. (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2018. Pp. xvi, 234. $44.99, ISBN 978-1-61117-884-5.) There is no denying the centrality of workforce management to plantation operations in the staple colonies of the early American South, and therefore [End Page 134] Tristan Stubbs’s examination of overseers in the eighteenth century helps fill a notable hole in the historiography of both American slavery and southern colonial society more generally. In topically arranged chapters, Stubbs endeavors to address not only how conditions of employment, parameters of responsibility, performance expectations, and interactions with employers and enslaved laborers shaped the experience of overseers, but also how perceptions of overseers as a social group changed over time with the geographic expansion of staple production and the resulting rise in absentee plantation ownership. This second line of inquiry, which constitutes a major component of Stubbs’s analysis, posits that overseers, having been seen in the eyes of larger slave owners in a neutral and at times even positive light, acquired over the course of the eighteenth century a reputation as brutal, incompetent, and untrustworthy. Stubbs maintains this stigmatization matured and became entrenched after the American Revolution. This stereotype was partly rooted in overseers’ generally humble origins. According to Stubbs, many “locally born white managers in both regions were the sons of small farmers,” which rendered them subject to the aspersions that patricians cast on all plebeians as being vulgar, ignorant, and preoccupied by the pursuit of their narrow self-interest (p. 26). As to their prospects, Stubbs paints a mixed portrait, stating that “many overseers stayed in the profession until they had put aside enough capital to purchase a smallholding or become a tenant,” while subsequently presenting evidence that suggests relatively few were able to achieve such “a life of independence” (pp. 31, 158). The signal contribution of Stubbs’s work is its significant insight into the complicated relations between overseers and their planter employers, which he effectively shows as being riven with inherent conflicts. Overseers were “supervisors but supervised,” and “they were at once autonomous and dependent,” especially on absentee plantations (p. 102). If on the one hand elite planters demanded the maximum profits from their holdings and crop production that enhanced their credit and reputation among their peers, then on the other they interfered with plantation operations through in-person visits and written criticism. They asserted their patriarchal authority and minimized the managerial influence and autonomy of overseers, who were ostensibly subordinate. The often contradictory character of the relationship reached its most poignant expression in the decades after the Revolution, when planters, seeking to distance themselves from the violence upon which slavery had always depended, assuaged their consciences by depicting overseers as brutal agents of tyranny, even as they relied on them to police and discipline enslaved laborers through corporal correction. Perhaps the greatest shortcoming of Stubbs’s analysis is that it focuses too intently on the largest estates. While he clearly has conducted an extensive examination of the extant records of wealthy planters, revealing a great deal about the thoughts and opinions of men like George Washington, Landon Carter, and Henry Laurens, one wonders if some equally thorough digging in surviving local court records might have yielded additional evidence about the position of overseers on the plantations of smaller operators, who receive at best only minimal consideration. Still, on the whole, Masters of Violence: The Plantation Overseers of Eighteenth-Century Virginia, South Carolina, and [End Page 135] Georgia is a solid work of scholarship, and even specialists in the field of colonial slavery will derive considerable benefit from reading it. John C. Coombs Hampden-Sydney College Copyright © 2020 The Southern Historical Association
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Sep 25, 2024
Ryo Takahashi 
Open Access