Kilbride, Daniel P.

English

John Carroll University

John Carroll UniversityCarroll CollectedHistory4-2008Review of Crafting the overseer's imageDaniel P. KilbrideJohn Carroll University, dkilbride@jcu.eduFollow this and additional works at: http://collected.jcu.edu/hist-facpubPart of the United States History CommonsThis Book Review is brought to you for free and open access by Carroll Collected. It has been accepted for inclusion in History by an authorizedadministrator of Carroll Collected. For more information, please contact connell@jcu.edu.Recommended CitationKilbride, Daniel P., "Review of Crafting the overseer's image" (2008). History. 30.http://collected.jcu.edu/hist-facpub/30William E. Wiethoff.  Crafting the Overseer's Image. (Studies in Rhetoric/Communication.) Columbia: University of South  Carolina  Press.  2006. Pp. xxii, 234. $39.95.   While yeomen and small slaveholders have commanded their share of scholarship in recent years, the last thorough account of overseers is over four decades old (William  K.  Scarborough,   The  Overseer: Plantation Management in the Old South[1966]). As a study of the rhetoric  through which the overseer's  image was constructed,  this book by William E. Wiethoff  does  not seek to provide a definitive study of this shadowy figure. The author does not systematically explore questions of interest to most historians of the Old South, such a:s the relationship  between whites and  the en laved  or  the capitalist  and/or  modern  nature  of plantation  econo-mies. Nevertheless, his book is an interesting, accessible, and informative study of the processes by which the public, professional, and personal images of the over- seer emerged.  Wiethoff's book will be of interest to historians principally because he seeks to discover the degree to which the overseer's image conformed to reality. Concerning the first image treated,  the Taskmaster,  Wiethoff finds quite a lot of convergence. Looking at overseers state by state (a pattern followed in every chapter),  Wiethoff finds that  they largely deserved  their  reputations  as hard-driving, violent men with.their eyes on the bottom line. But the overlap between image and reality is fuzzier in the overseer's  other  incarnations. The image of the Scoundrel, for example, owed as much to overseers' actual sexual and ethical misdeeds as to planters'  prejudices toward ordinary whites. Behaviors giving rise to the images of the Scoundrel and Taskmaster  produced a hitherto  unappreciated  image, the Rival. Competing with slaves for work and respect, overseers had ample reasons to drive slaves mercilessly. Professionally, the overseer's  image bobbed between those of the Subaltern  and the Colleague. Class prejudices, the nature  of overseers' work, and their association with slaves fueled the  first  image;  overseers' contributions to  their  employers' wealth,  as well as the family relationships that often  bound overseer to employer, fed the second. This contrast presents Wiethoff  with an opportunity to contribute   to ongoing  arguments about  social  class  relationships  in the antebellum South,  but he does not en- gage  them.  That  is a pity, because  his evidence  points to real unease with subordination and social mobility among  slaveowners wealthy  enough   to  engage  overseers.  Significant  tension  is also in evidence  concerning the two features of  the  overseer's public  image  Wiethoff identifies:  the Spy and the Warrior. Law and custom  in the South compelled overseers to monitor slaves closely after  working  hours.  But  Spies'  reputations also  suffered  in planters' eyes. Slaveowners had mixed feelings about  slave  patrols  because  in them  overseers served the  public  rather  than  their  employers. Moreover, patrols' penchant for violence threatened the value of planters' property. So the Spy earned   the enmity  and contempt of  master  and  slave  alike.  Overseers  might have  overcome  this  image  by performing  their  final role, that of the Warrior. In peacetime, overseers were expected  to join other  whites in serving in the local militia. During  the Civil War, overseers served a role similarly full of potential for rehabilitating their  image: as the plantation Warrior, serving the Confederacy by maintaining discipline on  the  home  front.   But  both forms  of service  further diminished overseers' image. Except  in times of distress,  few whites  held the militia in anything  but contempt. It was identified  more  with drunkenness, military  pretension, and male camaraderie than  the  public safety.  During  the Civil War, over- seers' service maintaining discipline  and production on the plantation made them seem elitist and cowardly- associations that  dogged  planters generally during  the war and eroded support for the war on the Confederate home  front.  In so  many ways, overseers found  them- selves trapped between  competing expectations. They could  not win.  As the  preceding discussion  should  make clear,  this book asks a number  of questions not typically posed by historians. The  results are both surprising and frustrating. There are  real payoffs here. Wiethoff's discussion of the  Rival, for example,  is fresh  and  original.  Historians like Michelle  Gillespie  have traced  the ways that skilled  slaves competed with free  laborers in southern trades,  but seldom  has it been recognized  that this tension extended so far up the line as plantation management.  In other  ways, however, this book is not as useful as it might have been.  Wiethoff's typologies  are crude constructions. Although he takes pains to distinguish among southern regions (he finds interesting discrepancies in the territories carved from the Louisiana  Purchase,  for  example), he collapses  chronology, so  that observations culled from seventeenth-century evidence are used to illustrate late antebellum developments. Wiethoff's study illustrates the maxim that idiosyncrasy entails   both  risk  and  reward.  Historians of  the  Old South  should  approach it-with  caution.   Daniel Kilbride  John Carroll University   

Review of Crafting the overseer\u27s image

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Review of Crafting the overseer\u27s image

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