img Leseprobe Leseprobe

Masters of Violence

The Plantation Overseers of Eighteenth-Century Virginia, South Carolina, and Georgia

Tristan Stubbs

EPUB
ca. 30,99
Amazon iTunes Thalia.de Weltbild.de Hugendubel Bücher.de ebook.de kobo Osiander Google Books Barnes&Noble bol.com Legimi yourbook.shop Kulturkaufhaus ebooks-center.de
* Affiliatelinks/Werbelinks
Hinweis: Affiliatelinks/Werbelinks
Links auf reinlesen.de sind sogenannte Affiliate-Links. Wenn du auf so einen Affiliate-Link klickst und über diesen Link einkaufst, bekommt reinlesen.de von dem betreffenden Online-Shop oder Anbieter eine Provision. Für dich verändert sich der Preis nicht.

University of South Carolina Press img Link Publisher

Geisteswissenschaften, Kunst, Musik / Geschichte

Beschreibung

From trusted to tainted, an examination of the shifting perceived reputation of overseers of enslaved people

In the antebellum southern United States, major landowners typically hired overseers to manage their plantations. In addition to cultivating crops, managing slaves, and dispensing punishment, overseers were expected to maximize profits through increased productivity—often achieved through violence and cruelty. In Masters of Violence, Tristan Stubbs offers the first book-length examination of the overseers—from recruitment and dismissal to their relationships with landowners and enslaved people, as well as their changing reputations, which devolved from reliable to untrustworthy and incompetent.

At the beginning of the eighteenth century, slave owners regarded overseers as reliable enforcers of authority; by the end of the century, particularly after the American Revolution, plantation owners viewed them as incompetent and morally degenerate, as well as a threat to their power. Through a careful reading of plantation records, diaries, contemporary newspaper articles, and many other sources, Stubbs uncovers the ideological shift responsible for tarnishing overseers' reputations.

In this book, Stubbs argues that this shift in opinion grew out of far-reaching ideological and structural transformations to slave societies in Virginia, South Carolina, and Georgia throughout the Revolutionary era. Seeking to portray slavery as positive and yet simultaneously distance themselves from it, plantation owners blamed overseers as incompetent managers and vilified them as violent brutalizers of enslaved people.

Kundenbewertungen

Schlagwörter

Despotism, Oppression, Slavery, Sedition, Patriarchalism, Peculiar institution, Violence, Manumission, Felony, Hostility, Prejudice, Crime, Combatant, Theft, Distrust, John Laurens, Rough Crossings, Bacon's Rebellion, Sexual violence, False economy