Janet:  I think it's too bad that such a topic seems taboo to so many.
The treatment of slaves is a point of legitimate inquiry.  Jefferson said
that slaveholding turned men into tyrants -- from his perspective one
assumes he meant it made them abusive of peoples' rights.   During the
antebellum period, abolitionists like Theodore Dwight Weld compiled
exhaustive accounts of the abuse of enslaved people -- see his _American
Slavery As It Is_ , a truly hair-raising book.  Of course, pro-slavery
writers responded that such examples were the abberations; that most
slave holders were too much economic men interested in their pursuing
their opportunities to be undermining the productivity of their labor
force through wanton abuse.   But then they're trying to justify the system.
It is true that the historical record is often skewed toward to the
abberations of human behavior: court records, for example, often don't
include people whose lives are on the straight and narrow, pay their
taxes and get along with their neighbors.  But we can't ignore the
abberations and we can't necessarily assume that slave-holders' standards
for 'good' treatment are what they say they are.  Pursuit of economic
success often meant hard-driving labor on someone's part.  The narratives
of former slaves often tell a different story of how that treatment was
experienced.
If your children want to know about their own ancestors' record on
treatment of their slaves, it may be quite difficult.  Edward Ball
tracked down the descendants of people who were once slaves on the
extensive Ball plantations here in South Carolina and recorded their
stories in his _Slaves in the Family_ .  It did not make members of his
family very happy to have those questions asked though, especially as
Ball seems not to have been interested in securing some sort of
after-the-fact absolution from them; he simply wanted to know.  Perhaps
that was the key to getting people to talk to him.

David Kiracofe

On Wed, 15 Jan 2003 00:06:25 -0500 (EST) Janet Hunter wrote:

> Hello Everyone,
>
> At Christmas time I gave my family another dose of our ancestry, as
> well as
> that of my children's paternal lines which include a couple of quite large
> slave-owning families in the deep south (originall from VA I am told).  A
> small but important portion (Sheltons, Baughs) of mine who ultimately
> became
> my families in the Missouri Ozarks starting from mostly modest
> resources (and
> maybe one or two slaves) in the 1830s, 40s and 50s, descended from
> families
> in Virginia who were slave-owners.   I also number amongst my
> ancestors slave
> owners in New Jersey ( a rather large estate), Maryland, Pennsylvania,
> etc...some Quakers in the early part of the 1700s.
>
> The recent programs on slave narratives of the harsh conditions have
> raised
> several questions amongst my children that have been brewing for some
> time.
> I believe that, leaving aside for now the moral arguments regarding the
> concept of slavery in general which in history often had no racial
> dimension,
>  education in the U.S. generally leaves children at graduation from high
> school across the country with the impression that being a slave was
> pretty
> much a universally harsh and abusive situation, where owners and
> foremen were
> pretty much universally violent, sexually controlled/manipulative, and let
> their slaves live in squalor on subsistance rations.
>
> I am actually interested in having a discussion on this issue on the list
> about whether this was indeed the case, summarizing whatever literature is
> out there on the issue, etc.  Can I tell my children that there is
> more than
> a 5 percent chance that their 4g grandfather who lived at that beautiful
> setting right on the James in Powhatan Co., didn't have a foreman
> beating one
> of his 30 slaves if they stopped to scratch their heads in the fields.
>
> Because I have been on this list for several years and recently any
> sort of
> discussion of this nature seems to be anathema...but hope springs eternal.
> Perhaps some of you, in lieu of a discussion, have references to
> historical
> works that have attempted (whether in a micro setting or not) to
> assess the
> overall treatment of slaves.  I must say that the sexual and physical
> violence/abuse is what is most disconcerting to my own immediate
> descendants.
>
>
> FYI, I grew up in California, a good Methodist, and this question has been
> sitting in my mind ever since I began researching my ancestry five
> years ago.
>   I knew I had Virginia ancestry, and there were "probably"
> households with
> many slaves...
>
> My best regards,
> Janet Baugh Hunter
>
>
>
>
>
>
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