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”?   

Thoughts on the Antislavery Debate

While today’s conversation was rooted in the roots and causes of the antislavery movement I found it to have a lot of broader implications to history more generally.  We spent a lot of time arguing not about which arguments we found to be the most salient, but instead what exactly it was each of the writers was saying, and what differentiated their arguments from one another.  One of my biggest frustrations with the texts we read for class was the different authors’ insistence on emphasizing distinctions between their arguments.  Every time they made a concession to one of their colleagues, the historians insisted on also making a claim about how a term was being misused, or an unfounded assumption was being made, or how the logic of a hypothetical was faulty—ultimately concluding that the author had missed the point altogether.  I think people’s frustration in the nitpicky attacks of the authors was apparent in our conversation and I think our talk brings up questions about how we should think about historiographical dialogues.

             It felt to me as though The Anti-Slavery Debate could go on forever.  Would that be productive?  If we agree that history should not engage in a futile struggle for a non-existent objective reality, should we thus expect our historians to bicker endlessly, competitively broadening the scope of historical understanding with endless possibilities?  Or instead should historians seek to work more cooperatively, not impulsively rejecting every argument that a colleague makes and attempting to collectively come to a better understanding of history?  I do not think that the various arguments were as mutually exclusive as the three historians would have us believe. Could we not blend Davis and Haskall and say that people with class interests behaved in a way that was also informed by a new perception of personal connection to slavery and a widened sense of their ability to do something about it?  I don’t have an answer.  I think that there are problems with the type of competitive writing we just read, but I also think that such competition compels history forward and weeds out poorly constructed interpretations.  The answer perhaps lies somewhere in between.  I think it would be worth talking about the way the job of the individual historian relates to field of history in general, and the work of other practitioners within it. 

            At the end of the discussion Walter Johnson was brought up and I think that these works relate very much to his observation that in our attempts to understand the history of a collection of “rational” individual actors we assume a self-interested liberal subject.  One of the biggest objections that Davis and Ashworth had with Haskall’s argument was that it only explained what made abolition conceivable and actionable, not what actually compelled individuals.  Davis asked us to look at the interests of the abolitionists.  In order to explain why this particular group of people came to find this deeply entrenched institution reprehensible at this particular time we have to look to their individual interests—which means we have to think about how supporting something like abolition could indirectly serve to reinforce and maintain power, status, and material wealth of the supporters.  I think this tendency provides compelling evidence for just what Johnson was talking about.  While I don’t agree with a lot of what Haskall has to say, I did appreciate the fact that his argument did not assume the motivating force of every historical actor.  He argues that the market made it possible for people to think of slavery as something worth protesting and that some individuals thus did.  While I don’t think it is wrong to interrogate groups of people’s interests, I think we should be aware of the fact that “interests” usually implies the self-interested motives of a liberal subject, which can be a very restricted lens to view the world.