Hegel

            While reading The Sugar Masters, I was continuously reminded of Hegel’s Master-Slave dialectic and believe that it is a concept that goes well with a number of the discussions that we have had in the class. The way I remember his argument, which may be a little off, is that one defines him or her self by the things and people around him or her. Hegel uses the example of a slave and slave master. Since his master sees him as a slave, a slave will feel as though he is a slave. And visa versa, the slave master needs a slave to feel as though he is a slave master. This idea goes against paternalism, since it is actually the slave master that needs the slave to continue viewing himself the same way. Although this is an over simplified version of the argument, I think that it has some truth and connection with or conversations relating to a number of class issues. For example Morgan uses this idea is some way, when he suggests that it is not only the wealthy white land owner that would chooses to have black slaves, but the white man that is working next to the slave because he is defining himself as different from the slave. Going back to the beginning of the year in or discussion of Slave ship Sailors, one of the most fascinating aspects of their occupation was how differently others saw them in just one circle of the Atlantic trade. On many occasions slave ship sailors were seen as both inferior to one group and superior to another, with shifting lines as to what type of people viewed them in different ways. This odd view that others held of them would clearly cause them to hold a unique view of themselves. Their unique view and bond in around that view could possibly be the reason why they were some of the first people to unify and strike. I believe that this same Hegelian concept can be seen in Barbara Clark Smith’s discussion about Food Rioters. As she states in the traditional food riot, there is a game played with royalty to change the food prices. Once those who are in charge change, to people of less power, those who would riots position also changes. Their behavior and power has now shifted as those in power have shifted. Hegel’s theory is an important one and I think could be an interesting topic of conversation in this class.  

Missing class

Since I am missing class and need to provide more for the blog. Here are my answers to the questions that Professor Rockman presented:

 

1. My essay is based around research that I did in the Rhode Island State Archives on substitutions during the civil war. In 1863 the union was running low on men and recruiting was not going well. So Congress instituted the first fully federal draft and passed the Enrollment and Conscription Act. Many citizens did not like this because they felt that it was an encroachment on their rights and that it was even unconstitutional for the federal government to pass this law. But since Abraham Lincoln clearly did not care much about following the constitution the act was executed anyway. The part of the act that really caused trouble was that you could get out of service if you found a substitute, which would require paying him, or paid $300 (about a years pay for a standard worker).

            In reaction to the draft riots start erupting, most notably in New York City where class differences are most severe. The rioters destroyed a ton of property and kill a large number of people, focusing on the wealthy and blacks, essentially controlling the city for four days. These actions caused wealthy men and women, along with blacks, to flee New York. Riots erupted in surrounding cities as well as Boston. However in Rhode Island nothing really happened. My paper attempts to address why. When I looked at the substitution papers, which included the substitutes name, place of origin, age, height, complexion, and signature (if they could write their own), I found some interesting information especially about the men that were being substituted.

I had to use the Providence directory to find out more information about the men that were being substituted, but found that some were not in the directory, some did not own their own homes, and some did the same jobs that the substitutes did. In my paper I attempt to argue that not only does this lack of socio-economic differences exist, but that along with the fact that Rhode Island is such a closely-knit state, at least comparatively, is why there is a lack of working class unrest. 

 

2. Although I believe this is an idea that we have discussed at great lengths in class, when writing and researching history one must be wary of finding facts that fit an argument. I went into my research thinking that there would be big difference between the substitutes and those being substituted, and was surprised to find there was not, but was looking for those differences for a long time. I believe what I learned the most from the research, as well as many of our class discussions, is to be cautious of others writing that could be falling into that trap, consciously or not.  

 

3. How important is one’s job, housing, etc. in defining one class, when there can be other factors such as family history and money that are unseen in archival information? What type of person should I consider John E. Bowen a blacksmith that boards at 90 Charles?

 

 

Industrialization and slavery in The Sugar Masters

            Our conversation this week touched upon a lot of the ideas that have been circulating throughout this semester. One of our major critiques of this book was that it seemed to cover theoretical and ideological ground with which we were already familiar. The notion that slavery and capitalism were not polar opposites is something that we have talked a lot about in our discussions this semester, and there were questions raised as to whether Follett was bringing new insight into this concept, or simply applying it to a different location and context.

        In addressing this question, it was important to keep in mind that our understanding of the interrelation of these two economic systems is significantly more nuanced, courtesy of HIST1970f, than most people who think about American history. For some readers, then, the clear and careful laying out of the argument of new methods of industrialization alongside long-held dynamics of slavery would have come as more of a surprise than it may have for us.

            For us, too, I think this book served an important purpose. For one thing, it is not simply a repetition of concepts we have already come across. The Louisiana sugar plantations were significantly different from both their southern U.S. and their Caribbean contemporaries. These differences suggest a particular notion of the sugar growing class as a category designed with absolute parameters of race. If free workers could not join the ranks of sugar plantation slaves, even when their manpower was greatly needed, this raises the question of whether Louisiana slaves actually constituted a class.

            Our attention to the distinction between slave labor and wage labor was complex and important. We discussed the striking similarities between the two systems, as well as examining the potential outcomes of highlighting those similarities. I think we came to the crux of the issue in noting that slavery is qualitatively different from wage labor, and that describing the two as interchangeable is a hugely problematic and inaccurate task. At the same time, though, taking note of the similarities without demanding that we equate wage labor with slavery gives us a lens with which we can integrate the industrializing and modernizing tendencies of Louisiana sugar plantations alongside their rigid and racially non-negotiable understanding of slavery.

            This discussion’s relation with agency is where it really gets hairy. Follett takes some major risks in describing slaves as complicit in their own enslavement, while at the same time, valorizing slaves’ agency over their acquiescence risks implying that slavery was not actually the cruel and inhuman system that it was. Agency is even more complex when it includes the agency of planter classes. Follett periodically tosses in a sentence that the slaveholders believed their own façade and rhetoric about paternalism. This unqualified psychological assessment throws the argument of slave compliance into perhaps unintentional contrast, and seems to further the implicit blaming of slaves for their own enslavement. 

Afterwards- Sugar Masters: Planters and Slaves in Louisiana’s Cane World 1820-1860




Richard Follet’s book The Sugar Masters provoked a productive discussion session where the inter class relations of sugar plantations were analyzed as a means of evaluating the correlation of wage labor and slave labor in Louisiana. One of the most discussed questions was what makes Louisiana unique and how do historians go about writing something that may seem as if it were a case study? Professor Rockman proposed the idea of how one goes about writing something like his own book Scraping By or Sugar Masters Is there a way of saying that places like Baltimore and Louisiana are exceptional and rare but extremely important in the broader sense. This made me think of one of our first discussion sessions this semester when we were talking about Rediker’s work. Rediker said that as historians, we should seek out places where there is diversity and heterogeneous people and study and analyze them because they reveal a great deal about capitalism and society. He believes that we should not be hindered by the belief that class can only be tagged in a homogenous people and cannot be assessed to a heterogeneous people. The cultural aspects of class are greatly revealing. You can absolutely look at places where there were violent slave revolt’s such as in Haiti and study why these uprisings occurred. People are more inclined to assess history based on phenomena. But Professor Rockman stressed at the beginning of the semester that sometimes it is greatly productive to study the silent places. Places where there is too much agreement because there has to be something there that is causing this void of struggle. In other words, exceptional places that reveal great points of analysis. By focusing on a local place you can see what is consistent and what is unique and use that to analyze broader questions. In Louisiana, Follet points out that slaves were willing to take short term material advancements from their masters at the cost of the long term advancement. That implies that there was a potential mutiny against the system, however it did not materialize because of the collective willingness of the slaves to accept short term material gains. Although we know that slavery was undoubtedly an exploitive system, despite the horrors of that system slaves were still able to maintain some form of cultural and religious autonomy while the planters simultaneously were able to prevent a collective resistance. However Follet does say that the numerous material incentives had contradictory effects because although the planter class truly bought into the idea of benevolence and paternalism, they also created the possibility for a rebellion by bestowing the slaves with a indisputable share in the economies of sugar plantations.


Paternalism was another facet we discussed while in smaller groups that I found greatly intriguing. Someone posed the question why it was important explaining if the slave owner’s were truly convincing themselves of their benevolence. Lester brought up a point about Genovese and unfortunately Follet’s book does not speak of the importance of paternalism past the fact that it helps painter a clearer picture of how slavery actually functioned in Louisiana. Paternalism not only helps us see how the deeply embedded system of slavery functioned but also how the southern planter class could not be part of a country that threatened this way of life and ultimately led to secession and the Civil War. Was the paternalistic belief of the planter class purely rhetoric that satisfied their conscience and reinforced their power? During the Civil War itself, the North was fighting for an abstract idea of preserving the union, whereas the South was fighting for a concrete idea and for something that was very real and deeply embedded in southern society. Does the fact that the issue of slavery and its extension drove this country into a Civil War justify that the southern planters truly believed that antislavery movements were destroying their way of life or was it to protect their power. Southern planters were the social, economic, and political leaders of the South, but what can we tell from the fact that the union was split and war was waged?


We also talked about the scholarship of the 60’s 70’s and 80’s which generally paints this picture of slavery that does not seem that bad. Rockman urged that although these works are important, they do not adequately portray the exploitive side to slavery because at the end of the day we know that slavery was a harsh and coercive system, and truly coming to terms with our past requires acceptance and recognition of that fact.


Sorry I had to post this early but I will be out of town the next two days. Take care

Sugar Masters Framing Essay

            A lot of historical work has been done trying show how wage labor can be equated to slavery.  Follett’s book The Sugar Masters interestingly takes on the inverse; it shows us slavery's resemblance to wage-labor.  Both of these lines of thought lead us to the conclusion that wage labor and slavery have as much if not more in common than they have apart.  In making this argument historians highlight individual instances where slaves may have had it better off than wage laborers.  Follett argues that the plight of the skilled slave receiving some compensation for his or her labor could be better than the plight of the wage-laborer because the skilled slave had a real prospect of improving his or her lot, “the proletarianization of workers that assured a downward trajectory in the white working experience operated in the reverse for skilled slaves who could translate their skills into upward advancement” (127).  With the assumption of unfreedom, any sliver of individual autonomy is an improvement, whereas the wage-laborer’s reality contradicts the façade of legal freedom. In Scraping By, Rockman advocates at times that in terms of material existence, the lives of slaves and other dependents (like people living in alms-houses) were easier than those working for wages they could not survive on.  That said, how should we define freedom in the context of the last two books we have read?  Is there really a difference between material freedom and legal freedom?  How do we employ the concept of freedom to better understand class?

 

            I would also like to talk about the relationship between culture and economy in Follett’s book.  He argues that the sugar masters, “effectively balanced their capitalist pretensions with a social ethic that celebrated their independent mastery of an economic, social, and racial world” (8)—that they balanced new economy with old culture.  In order to make this argument he often references times when capitalist thinking wins out over old southern culture, or visa versa—sometimes masters bought slaves based on what would be profitable in the long-run, other times based on sexualized southern notions of the ideal slave.  While I do not doubt the hybridity of culture and capitalism, I think that when Follett sets up his arguments in this manner, attributing actions and decisions to either culture or economy, he separates them as two discrete things: “profit-conscious capitalists…could not divorce themselves from their idealized notion of mastery or their perceived commitment to the slaves’ welfare” (183). Here Follett seems to be arguing that southern paternalism runs contradictory to rational capitalist thought and that it prevented the sugar masters from being good capitalists. Throughout the book I think he undermines the distinction between economy and culture by showing how the planters commercial, capitalist sensibilities developed within their culture not in competition with it.  I think that we should be wary of separating historical events into ones that are culturally determined or economically determined because it implies that these forces are entirely distinct rather than linked and dependent on one another.

 

            Lastly I would like to talk about the discussion of slave resistance within the text, particularly in relation to Walter Johnson’s comments in his essay On Agency.  Johnson comments that too often, humanity, agency and resistance are conflated in historians’ descriptions of slavery.  How would Johnson feel about Follett’s treatment of slave agency and resistance, particularly the collective cultural resistance described in the final chapter, and the economic resistance that in the end “accommodated the machine and their masters’ economic agenda”?   

Framing Essay for The Sugar Masters

Richard Follet’s The Sugar Masters discusses how slave owners in Louisiana maintained both paternalistic and self-interested attitudes in the way that they treated their slaves. Although the North viewed the South and its slavery regime as static and unprogressive, slave owners believed that they were acting in capitalistic ways. They felt as though their construction of the plantation created a system in which slaves had incentives to work hard and not disobey the rules. Slave owners used both carrots and sticks.

The Sugar Masters illuminates a group of actors who viewed themselves in a specific way and created a collective consciousness. Like the founding fathers who owned slaves, these slave owners may have believed in freedom, yet they were able to convince themselves that enslaving African Americans did not violate that belief. Do we think that these slave owners believed in both political and economic freedom and equality? Were they simply using slavery for economic gains or were they convinced that African Americans could not take care of themselves? Follett states “Southern slaveholders could damn their chattel as lazy beggars to be ‘licked liked blazes,’ watch their slaves perish in frightening numbers, and brutally exploit their bondswomens’ bodies, but they still believed themselves to be paternalists bound to their slaves by mutual obligations and reciprocal duties,” (152). I am not sure if I am convinced of this and hope to discuss this in class.

I found the discussion in the last chapter about the purchases slaves made particularly interesting. With the little money they had, they bought clothing and other decorative items. How did these visual purchases both create a class consciousness and also encourage divisions amongst slaves? We have seen throughout the semester various instances in which groups work to distance themselves from the lowest. Emma Christopher discussed how both black and white sailors tried to distinguish themselves from slaves. In The Anti-Slavery Debate, we saw how a rising middle class worked to differentiate themselves from the lower class. In these examples, and there are many others from this semester, how important is a visual distinction?

Finally, I think we should discuss how slaves exercised agency within this system. Whether is was women taking contraceptives, making negotiations with masters, or stealing and selling machine parts, slaves found certain ways to take control of small pieces of their lives. Are the slaves actions working to create a collective change? Also, in Scraping By, we saw how the poor would use almshouses to their own advantage. Does working with slave owners to improve an individual situation inhibit the possibility of a change in the system?

Sugar Masters Framing Essay

Throughout reading Sugar Masters I couldn’t help but think back to Rockman’s Scraping By from last week as I noticed how well these two works complement each other. Last week, Rockman showed that slavery was an integral part of Baltimore’s emerging wage labor system, and that slaves were both active and constrained members of the market economy. This week Follett extends the notion of hybridization to the sugar plantation, arguing that sugar masters, in their quest for profit, turned their plantations into factory-like operations. While in some ways this led masters to treat slaves like employees (for example, providing money for overtime work), masters continued to maintain their dominance (and ownership) of the bodies of both male and female slaves. The works are complementary because they each break down the dichotomy between the entrepreneurial values of the market and the supposedly anti-capitalist institution of slavery, and show instead how slavery was molded and reshaped (but not broken) in order to best serve the masters in an emerging capitalist economy.

I was especially struck by Follett’s descriptions of master-slave negotiations, and the ways in which these negotiations look strikingly similar to the master-laborer negotiations in emerging industrial factories of the north. Most notably, I was interested in his discussion of how masters used “overwork” and Christmas bonuses to deepen slaves’ dependence and inspire them to work harder, while the masters continued to benefit from what slaves produced “in their own time.” I couldn’t help but feel that Follett was implicitly asking the reader to make the jump to wage labor: isn’t overtime pay – a practice we demand from employers because it is “just” – simply a way for employers to make regularly underpaid workers more dependent on extra hours, more productive, and less likely to have time to “cause problems”? Follett’s history, like all of the authors we have read this semester, speaks not only to the past but to the present as well.

Still, I’m skeptical of a view that equates wage labor with slavery, and I would be interested to discuss in class how to define the differences and boundaries between these two methods of organizing labor. In other words, are the hybrid systems of early 19th century Baltimore and Louisiana simply a reflection of transition from one system to the other – masters trying to hold onto parts of the past as the world around them moves to capitalism? And if so, what are the most important aspects of the turn? Is wage labor simply a northern reproduction of slavery without the objectionable trading in human bodies? Or, as Follett and Rockman seem to suggest, if capitalism and slavery are actually mutually constitutive in some cases, how can we distinguish between the experience of the laborer and the experience of the slave? Follett seems to provide some hints in his continued reminders of the use of the whip, the attempts at human breeding, and other mechanisms of control which may not have been available to industrialist employers in the north. Are there others?

Finally, I was intrigued by Follett’s discussion of the “clock-driven labor regime” (108). He argues that because the success of sugar plantations relied so much on their productivity as a function of time, masters instituted shifts and divisions of labor. By tying their slaves’ work to the clock, masters asserted dominance not only over their slaves’ bodies but over their conception of time as well. I’m interested in how exactly this new sense of “time management,” which we are so tied to today, forms the basis for a capitalist system. Though none of our previous authors have relied explicitly on this concept, it seems to me that a notion of the value of time underlies the emerging capitalist market just as much as, say, the expansion of writing or the emergence of evangelical religion. And if so, how does a new conception of time intersect with the discussions about class and class identity we’ve been having? Do different classes adhere to different valuations of time? As capitalism grows, is there a kind of hegemonic imposition of the increased value of time? Can working and lower classes (not just in the US but all over the world) maintain differing conceptions of time in the era of globalization? These questions could form the basis for a fruitful discussion on how the transition to capitalism changed not only economic and social relationships, but philosophical and cultural constructions as well.