Race Unequals: Overseer Contracts, White Masculinities, and the Formation of Managerial Identity in the Plantation Economy

Abstract

In academic studies of the southern plantation, the overseer is often portrayed in simple terms as a lower-class white male who did not himself own land or enslaved persons. Departing from these one-dimensional descriptions, McMurtry-Chubb illustrates the plantation overseer in a much more granular way. In this lucid and engaging monograph, she shows how public and private law helped construct the overseer’s masculine identity in a way that both elevated the social status of elite planter males, and lowered the status of the enslaved people the overseer managed. The overseer’s performance of masculinity was assigned a value (lower than the planter, higher than the enslaved) “based on the imperatives of capitalist and white supremacist structures” (xiii)—another iteration of Du Bois’s critical concept of the “wage of whiteness” and its tendency to undermine class consciousness. To develop her powerful theory of the overseer’s masculinity, McMurtry-Chubb draws upon employment contracts entered into between overseers and plantation owners, which she located in the papers of several plantations in southern slave-holding states. She also relies upon public laws–– statutes governing the conduct of the enslaved and their owners––and court cases in which overseers litigated employment claims against plantation owners. Her exhaustive research produces a robust dataset from which she crafts riveting descriptions and examples. In the first chapter, McMurtry-Chubb exposes the class striations within the plantation economy, in which only elite southern planters, the proverbial “one percent” who owned five or more enslaved persons, enjoyed upper-class status. Everyone else was consigned to a lower social station. In terms of the legal context, McMurtry-Chubb explains common-law contract concepts as they existed in antebellum times and shows how contracts moved from a simplistic focus on the transfer of title to a performance-based obligation, under which free people transferred an ownership