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. 

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?