It is true that many students these days have myopic or exaggerated views
of slavery and master-slave relations. In college, at least, we try to
help them cultivate a deeper, more nuanced understanding of both, usually
by exposing them to a wide array of primary sources as well as the best
work of historians and others.

What specific owners did and specific slaves experienced depended on all
sorts of contingencies (circumstances), and changing any one of those
could produce entirely different results. Perhaps one of the most
important lessons of newer scholarship on these questions is that slaves
had a significant role in shaping their own lives, for good or ill, albeit
in difficult to horrific conditions not of their own choosing or making.
How they were "treated" was certainly a crucial part of the mix, but other
things may have often been more important--chiefly, how often and how
extensively they were left to their own devices or could use their
ingenuity to achieve their own ends. The breaking up of slave families and
communities mentioned by John Weiss was particularly devastating because
it ruptured completely what had been carefully crafted networks
of action and affection, not to mention the slaves' most treasured
personal relations.

In the normal scheme of things, the attentive, sympathetic owner who tried
to micro-manage every detail of the lives of slaves he or she truly cared
about could sometimes be more vexing and painful to endure by far than,
say, the indifferent cad who intruded little into the slaves' affairs as long as
they and their labors supported him in the style to which he was
accustomed. This NOT offered as a generalization, but as an EXAMPLE of the
kinds of ironic and counter-intuitive stories one encounters in this field
of inquiry.

Douglas Deal
Professor of History (on leave 2002-2003)
State University of New York at Oswego
Oswego, NY 13126
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