Slavery, Plantations And The Yeomanry [ILLUSTRATED EDITION]

Books by Francis Lieber

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The freedoms of lower-class Englishmen, and the somewhat lesser freedoms of lower-class Englishwomen, were not gifts of the English nobility, tendered out of solicitude for people of their own colour or nationality. Rather, they emerged from centuries of day-today contest, overt and covert, armed and unarmed, peaceable and forcible, over where the limits lay. Moral scruples about what could and what could not be done to the lower classes were nothing but the shoulds and should nots distilled from this collective historical experience, ritualized as rules of behaviour or systematized as common law—but always liable to be put once again on the table for negotiation or into the ring for combat.

Each new increment of freedom that the lower classes regarded as their due represented the provisional outcome of the last round in a continuing boxing-match and established the fighting weights of the contenders in the next round. In the round that took place in early colonial Virginia, servants lost many of the concessions to their dignity, well-being and comfort that their counterparts had won in England.

To have degraded the servants into slaves en masse would have driven the continuing struggle up several notches, a dangerous undertaking considering that servants were well-armed, that they outnumbered their masters, and that the Indians could easily take advantage of the inevitably resulting warfare among the enemy. Moreover, the enslavement of already arrived immigrants, once news of it reached England, would have threatened the sources of future immigration. Even the greediest and most short-sighted profiteer could foresee disaster in any such policy.

And the prospect of gaining enslaveable children in the future—an uncertain prospect, considering how few women arrived during the boom years—could not compensate for the certain loss of adult immigrants in the present. Some of these same considerations argued against employing African-descended slaves for life on a large scale; others did not. Needless to say, adverse publicity did not threaten the sources of forced migration as it did those of voluntary migration.

Africans and Afro-West Indians had not taken part in the long history of negotiation and contest in which the English lower classes had worked out the relationship between themselves and their superiors. Therefore, the custom and law that embodied that history did not apply to them. To put it another way: Instead, they entered in company with the generations who had preceded them in the struggle; and the outcome of those earlier struggles established the terms and conditions of the latest one.

But Africans and Afro-West Indians did enter the ring alone. Their forebears had struggled in a different arena, which had no bearing on this one. Whatever concessions they might obtain had to be won from scratch, in unequal combat, an ocean away from the people they might have called on for reinforcements. Africans and Afro-West Indians were thus available for perpetual slavery in a way that English servants were not.

Indeed, Virginians could purchase them ready-enslaved and pre-seasoned; and so they did in the earliest years of the traffic. Only much later did this become a matter of what we now call race. It took time, indeed, to become systematized as slavery. Although African or African-descended slaves dribbled in from on, the law did not formally recognize the condition of perpetual slavery or systematically mark out servants of African descent for special treatment until Indeed, African slaves during the years between and enjoyed rights that, in the nineteenth century, not even free black people could claim.

Simple practicality decided the matter. Until slavery became systematic, there was no need for a systematic slave code. And slavery could not become systematic so long as an African slave for life cost twice as much as an English servant for a five-year term, and stood a better-than-even chance of dying before five years could elapse. Not until the s did that morbid arithmetic change; and by then other things had changed as well.

The price of tobacco had fallen, and so had the numbers of English servants emigrating to America. Afro-Americans began living long enough to be worth enslaving for life, and Euro-Americans began living long enough to claim both the freedom and the freedom dues—including land—to which they were entitled at the end of their terms of servitude. This last provoked countermeasures by those whose fortunes depended on the labour of servants.

By the s, the rulers of Virginia faced a potentially serious problem: Sure enough, trouble arrived on cue. The rebellion ended abruptly, without accomplishing—or for that matter attempting or proposing—changes in the prevailing system of power and authority. What it did succeed in doing was planting suspicion and fear of the growing white lower class in the minds of the rich and powerful. It was a fortunate circumstance—fortunate for some, anyway—that made Africans and Afro-West Indians available for plantation labour at the historical moment when it became practical to buy slaves for life, and at the same time difficult and dangerous to continue using Europeans as the main source of plantation labour.

The importation of African slaves in larger and larger numbers made it possible to maintain a sufficient corps of plantation labourers without building up an explosive charge of armed Englishmen resentful at being denied the rights of Englishmen and disposing of the material and political resources to make their resentment felt.

Discovering the history

Eventually, European settlement pushed into the interior, and freedmen—declining in numbers anyway as the immigration of servants slowed down—found it possible to take up land of their own. As the labour of slaves for life replaced that of servants for a term, the problem of providing for freedmen receded into the past. When Abraham Lincoln and his contemporaries spoke of compensated emancipation, they did not feel a need to specify compensation for whom.

Race as a coherent ideology did not spring into being simultaneously with slavery, but took even more time than slavery did to become systematic. A commonplace that few stop to examine holds that people are more readily oppressed when they are already perceived as inferior by nature. The reverse is more to the point. People are more readily perceived as inferior by nature when they are already seen as oppressed. Africans and their descendants might be, to the eye of the English, heathen in religion, outlandish in nationality, and weird in appearance. But that did not add up to an ideology of racial inferiority until a further historical ingredient got stirred into the mixture: All human societies, whether tacitly or overtly, assume that nature has ordained their social arrangements.

The feudal nobility of the early Middle Ages consisted of people more powerful than their fellows through possession of arms or property or both. No one at that time, not even they themselves, considered them superior by blood or birth; indeed, that would have been heresy. By the end of the fifteenth century, what would have been heresy to an earlier age had become practically an article of faith. The peasants did not fall under the dominion of the nobility by virtue of being perceived as innately inferior.

Such is the weight of things that must be true ideologically that no amount of experimental observation can disprove them. But because tsarist Russia had no conception of absolute equality resting on natural law, it did not need as consistent or radical a version of absolute inequality resting on natural law as developed in the United States in the wake of the Revolution.

When self-evident laws of nature guarantee freedom, only equally self-evident laws of equally self-evident nature can account for its denial. Historians can actually observe colonial Americans in the act of preparing the ground for race without foreknowledge of what would later rise on the foundation they were laying. A law enacted in the colony of Maryland in established the legal status of slave for life and experimented with assigning slave condition after the condition of the father.

That experiment was soon dropped. Paternity is always ambiguous, whereas maternity is not. Slaveholders eventually recognized the advantage of a different and unambiguous rule of descent, one that would guarantee to owners all offspring of slave women, however fathered, at the slight disadvantage of losing to them such offspring as might have been fathered on free women by slave men.

Nevertheless, the purpose of the experiment is clear: The language of the preamble to the law makes clear that the point was not yet race: Race does not explain that law. Rather, the law shows society in the act of inventing race.

Practical needs—the need to clarify the property rights of slaveholders and the need to discourage free people from fraternizing with slaves—called forth the law. And once practical needs of this sort are ritualized often enough either as conforming behaviour or as punishment for non-conforming behaviour, they acquire an ideological rationale that explains to those who take part in the ritual why it is both automatic and natural to do so.

Lord Rolle Complaining About Having to Feed Slaves in Exuma 1834

During the heyday of the cotton empire in the nineteenth century, slavery continued to perform the service it had pioneered in colonial times: But it also did much more than that. The domination of plantation slavery over Southern society preserved the social space within which the white yeomanry—that is, the small farmers and artisans who accounted for about three-fourths of the white families in the slave South just before the Civil War—could enjoy economic independence and a large measure of local self determination, insulated from the realm of capitalist market society.

By doing so, slavery permitted and required the white majority to develop its own characteristic form of racial ideology. Two-thirds of the people of the Old South were free and white. Of these, most owned no slaves and the few who did used them mainly for hunting, fishing, general farming and household chores, not for growing cash crops like cotton and tobacco.

They tended to live in the backcountry, in areas too hilly, rocky, sandy, infertile, chilly, or far from navigable water to be of interest to planters. In fact, many had seen their parents or grandparents driven from better land as the slave plantations expanded to the west. For reasons of their own selfinterest, slaveholding planters did not wish either to antagonize nonslaveholders in their backcountry sanctuaries since the yeomen outnumbered and thus potentially outvoted them or to interfere in their local communities.

Schools, roads, railroads and other improvements in the backcountry would require the planters to tax themselves—something they did as little as possible. For their part, the yeomen were jealous of their local independence and self-determination. They did not want the state telling them to send their children to school, and many mistrusted railroads, with their land speculators and pirates and their locomotives that might set fields ablaze or run over children and livestock.

Within their local communities, the white non-slaveholders developed a way of life as different from that of the slaveowning planters as from that of farmers in those Northern states where capitalist agriculture already prevailed. They grew only enough cash crops that is, cotton or tobacco, because rice and sugar were chiefly plantation crops for home use or to pay for those few purchases that required cash.

For the rest, they concentrated on food crops—grain, potatoes, vegetables—and livestock. A custom long defunct in the Northern states permitted anyone to graze livestock or to hunt and fish on any land, public or private, that was not fenced. Thus, even people who owned little or no land could still keep livestock.

Local stores sold mainly commodities that the community could not produce—for example, firearms and ammunition, molasses, and nails—since the community was largely self-sufficient in food, furniture, shoes and clothing. A network of indebtedness held the community together, at the same time that it started arguments and lawsuits: The local store did not even charge interest until a debt was over a year old. Even if the head of a household went bankrupt, his creditors could not strip him of his house and its furnishings and land—enough to permit him to retain his social and economic independence.

The racial ideology of the yeomanry therefore could not possibly replicate that of the planters.

This is perhaps a good moment to say a few words about what ideology is and what it is not; because without an understanding of what ideology is and does, how it arises and how it is sustained, there can be no genuinely historical understanding of race. Ideology is best understood as the descriptive vocabulary of day-to-day existence, through which people make rough sense of the social reality that they live and create from day to day. It is the language of consciousness that suits the particular way in which people deal with their fellows. It is the interpretation in thought of the social relations through which they constantly create and re-create their collective being, in all the varied forms their collective being may assume: As such, ideologies are not delusions but real, as real as the social relations for which they stand.

Ideologies are real, but it does not follow that they are scientifically accurate, or that they provide an analysis of social relations that would make sense to anyone who does not take ritual part in those social relations. Some societies including colonial New England have explained troublesome relations between people as witchcraft and possession by the devil. Witchcraft in such a society is as selfevident a natural fact as race is to Richard Cohen of the Washington Post. To someone looking in from outside, however, explaining a miscarriage, a crop failure, a sudden illness, or a death by invoking witchcraft would seem absurd, just as explaining slavery by invoking race must seem absurd to anyone who does not ritually produce race day in and day out as Americans do.

Ideologies do not need to be plausible, let alone persuasive, to outsiders. They do their job when they help insiders make sense of the things they do and see—ritually, repetitively—on a daily basis. So much ideology is. Here is what it is not. It is not a material entity, a thing of any sort, that you can hand down like an old garment, pass on like a germ, spread like a rumour, or impose like a code of dress or etiquette.

Ideology is not the same as propaganda. People deduce and verify their ideology in daily life. Frederick Douglass was not propounding a paradox but speaking the simple truth when he said that the first anti-slavery lecture he ever heard was delivered by his master in the course of explaining to his mistress why slaves must not be taught to read.

To insist that ideology and propaganda are not the same is not to suppose that they are unrelated. The most successful propagandist is one who thoroughly understands the ideology of those to be propagandized. Neither is ideology the same as doctrine or dogma. After all, overseers came and went, but slaves remained; and the object was to produce cotton or sugar or rice or tobacco, not to produce white supremacy. The perfect subordination of the slaves to the overseer, if coupled with poor production, would spell disaster for a planter.

Slavery, Race and Ideology in the United States of America

Thus, the ideology of a planter—that is, the vocabulary of day-to-day action and experience—must make room for contest and struggle perhaps couched in paternalistic or racist language , even if doctrine specified an eternal hierarchy. Doctrine or dogma may be imposed, and they often are: But ideology is a distillate of experience. Where the experience is lacking, so is the ideology that only the missing experience could call into being. Planters in the Old South could have imposed their understanding of the world upon the non-slaveholders or the slaves only if they could have transformed the lives of the non-slaveholders and slaves into a replica of their own.

An ideology must be constantly created and verified in social life; if it is not, it dies, even though it may seem to be safely embodied in a form that can be handed down. Many Christians still think of kneeling with folded hands as the appropriate posture for prayer, but few now know why; and the few who do know cannot, even if they choose, mean the same thing by it as was meant by those to whom the posture was part of an ideology still real in everyday social life.

Books by Francis Lieber (Author of Slavery, Plantations And The Yeomanry [ILLUSTRATED EDITION])

Depending on who poses the question, it is the problem of social order, of converting power into authority, or of political hegemony. The most obvious answer—force—is not an answer. There is never ultimately enough force to go around, particularly since submission is hardly ever an end in itself. If the slaveholders had produced white supremacy without producing cotton, their class would have perished in short order.

A colonial ruler does not just want the natives to bow down and render obeisance to their new sovereign. The natives must also grow food, pay taxes, go to work in mines and on estates, provide conscripts for the army, and help to hold the line against rival powers. For these activities to proceed, the natives must not just submit, they must cooperate. Even in those few cases in which submission is an end in itself, force is never enough in itself. The rule of any group, the power of any state, rests on force in the final analysis. Anyone who gives the least thought to the matter reaches that conclusion, and thinkers as different in other respects as Weber, Marx, Machiavelli and Madison would have no trouble agreeing on that.

Rule always rests on force in the last analysis. But a ruling group or a state that must rely on force in the first analysis as well is one living in a state of siege, rebellion, war or revolution. To suppose that is to imagine ideology handed down like an old garment, passed on like a germ, spread like a rumour, or imposed like a dress code. Any of these would presuppose that an experience of social relations can be transmitted by the same means, which is impossible.

Slavery -- Louisiana

And yet, power does somehow become authority. A red light, or the upraised palm of a traffic policeman, brings people to a stop at least in places where people tend to obey them not by the exercise of power—neither a light nor a hand can stop a moving automobile—but by the exercise of authority. Many citizens who would unhesitatingly stop for a red light, even at a deserted intersection at 2: It is not an abstract belief or attitude that brings people to stop at a red light. Rather, people discover the advantage of being able to take for granted what everyone else will do at a busy intersection.

Or, to be more exact, they have grown up in a society that constantly ritualizes that discovery—by making people stop again and again for red lights—without each person having to make the discovery anew by ad hoc calculation at every intersection. Both parts are necessary: There, too, lies the key to why people may suddenly appear to slough off an ideology to which they had appeared subservient. Human beings live in human societies by negotiating a certain social terrain, whose map they keep alive in their minds by the collective, ritual repetition of the activities they must carry out in order to negotiate the terrain.

If the terrain changes, so must their activities, and therefore so must the map. Let me pursue a bit further this analogy of terrain. But imagine a physical landscape: And imagine an observer at the altitude of an earth satellite, who for some reason can follow the paths of people over the terrain, but cannot see the details of the landscape. The observer sees people tunneling under, climbing over, jogging to left or right, moving with odd swimming motions, even disappearing unceremoniously into the quicksand.

Therein, also, lies the key to understanding how one group acquires authority, imposes order, or achieves hegemony. Exercising rule means being able to shape the terrain. Suppose that the ruling group wants everyone in our landscape to move east, and therefore starts fires in the forests to the west. The way not taken The makers of a new order Jefferson's epitaph Disestablishing the grandees The brotherhood The unpropitiated son Monticello again Jefferson and democracy Jefferson and the family farmer Chapter 4.

Independence A dependent arcadia The virtues of diversification Commercial squires and ungovernable governors Diversification, the pursuit of happiness, and cities Eastward toward civility The thousand-foot line Chapter 5. Powers of the earth Land companies, trading companies, and triassic capitalism The great land companies and revolution Jefferson and western speculation Veterans' benefits Armed occupation Armed occupation marches on Chapter 6.

Jefferson's opportunities and the land Colonial-imperialism Colonies and empires From round table to board table Reinvesting the loot Landed gentry Chapter 8. Textile colonial-imperialism India is conquered by the mechanics Solving the problem of supply The Americans are put on notice Hamilton, Jefferson, and Tench Coxe respond to William Pitt Jefferson and the cotton business Slaves as cash crop The millers send out their salesmen Independence?

The British and the plantocracy Resistance to the plantation system. The firm steps forward Deerskins, rum, and land Indian yeomen and Governor Sargent's lost cause Yankee yeomen Chapter Louisiana and another class of Virginians The third opportunity reconsidered The Hillhouse debates Chapter Notes Includes bibliographical references p. View online Borrow Buy Freely available Show 0 more links Related resource Book review H-Net at http: Set up My libraries How do I set up "My libraries"?

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