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.

Contours of Class Afterwards

Our discussion on Monday about class in the early American republic centered around two powerful questions which each carry import not only for historians of class, but for the entire historical profession. Our first question rose primarily from the Osborn article on doctors and alcohol abuse in Philadelphia. His description of the way doctors consciously or subconsciously used diagnoses of alcohol abuse to either legitimate a failed merchant’s fall from wealth, or delegitimize the behavior of the poor led us to ask: who creates class? Can individuals (or small groups) take part in the construction of class realities and identities, or do classes come about as the result of some vast structural development of markets and economic relations? Furthermore, does every individual action carry implications for class? Or can we put some defining boundary around “acts of class”? Though for a while we seemed stuck without an operative definition of class as either an identity or an external mode of analysis, I liked Jonathan’s attempt to see class in a different way – as a motive. His hypothesis is borne out by many of the works we have read thus far this semester. Christopher’s portrayal of slave ship sailors shows how they acted against both the power structures above them and those below. Though perhaps sailors could have identified with their captives and rebelled against the social order, they chose instead to maintain a separate identity from those they enslaved. This class act, as Christopher seems to explain, was an assertion of their own interests in safeguarding their freedom. The constitution of sailors as a class grew not from some shared identity nor from structural forces which determined their economic and social interests, but rather from the motive of freedom.

Our second main question emerged from both the Gienapp and Johnson readings, and returns to the debates we have been having all semester about the place of the historian in constructing history. Gienapp takes Sellers to task for letting the ideologies of his time seep into the writing he does about the past. He argues that seeing class struggle as operative in the Jacksonian period is just patently false. Gienapp’s bias toward sixties radicalism and anti-capitalism must have led him to this erroneous conclusion. But as some in our class suggested, Gienapp’s own classless reading of history is also informed by the late 1990s period of “the end of history” where liberal capitalism seemed to have prevailed and class was supposed to disappear as a method of analysis. But while we could agree that all historians’ work is informed by their ideological positions, their place in society, and the biases of their archive, and that those who still claim objectivity “should be hanged,” we did not in my opinion reach a satisfactory conclusion as to the relationship between the past and the present. The underlying question seems to be fundamental to the study of history: in a post-structuralist framework, can we still say that historians aim to uncover the truth of what actually happened in the past? Or is historical inquiry so colored by the historian’s position in the present that the histories we tell are simply reflections of ourselves, and not of any past reality? This returns us to some of the questions we asked at the beginning of the semester about how class analysis, especially, can persist within an historical discipline which has admitted that the subjectivity of language and documentation limits the extent to which we can make solid conclusions about material reality in the past.

Though Mike was understandably anxious about finishing the first question before moving onto the second, I think the natural flow of our discussion indicates the extent to which these issues are linked. In fact, Johnson’s article tries in some ways to deal with both together. He shows how writing agency and individual power in shaping identity into the past was an exercise which was important and even revolutionary for the white scholars of the 1960s but which now serves more as therapy than politics (121). One could probably make a similar argument that the historiography which sees class or any mechanism of the past as structural and external to those who lived within it served a certain political purpose for the scholars who wrote in this vein. The identity/structure or agency/determinist debate, then, is just as much about the present as it is about the past. Johnson suggests that as historians we embrace our subjectivity and, while attempting to uncover what actually happened in the past, also admit that we are not necessarily attempting to get closer “the Truth” but rather constructing a truth about the past which serves a purpose in the present. While we don’t have to give up our aspiration to reconstruct what happened in the past, we do have to be transparent and self-critical about why we end up writing particular stories, and perhaps even suggest alternative and contrary stories which could be written in other contexts.

In reading for another class, I recently came across a quote which speaks to this issue. Roger Chartier, in a book called On the Edge of the Cliff: History, Language, and Practices, writes, “Narrow is the way, therefore, for anyone who refuses to reduce history to an untrammeled literary activity open to chance and worthy only of curiosity, yet also refuses to define its scientific character based on the one model of knowledge concerning the physical world” (27). In the last few weeks of the semester, I hope to explore further how we as historians can walk this narrow road, acknowledging both the subjectivity of history, but also its dignity and importance as a discipline that uncovers a past which is real and truthful.