To add to Paul Finkelman's excellent point:
Masters could also care for their slaves out of humanitarian or "benevolent" feeling. The paternalism implicit in much of the pro-slavery argument was real enough, no matter that it could be thoroughly oppressive to those on the receiving end of it. Pro-slavery apologists rarely denied the humanity of the slave; they did, however, assert that the slaves were people intrinsically incapable of self-government, who thus required the superintending benevolence of appropriate owners to civilize and care for them.
Scholarship on slavery in the last few decades has emphasized the way that the master-slave relationship fulfilled Thomas Jefferson's predictions in Notes on the State of Virginia. Slavery corrupted everyone who came into contact with it, precisely because it was something more than merely a relationship of material self-interest. Rhys Isaac, for example, does a super job describing this kind of relationship in the "family" of Landon Carter; Eugene Genovese addressed this theme at length in Roll Jordan, Roll. Lawrence Levine unpacks the way many slaves responded to this power relationship, and to the imposition of paternal, pro-slavery ethics, in his book Black Culture, Black Consciousness.
Its hard to disentangle where self-interest stopped and paternalism began. Ethical thought (for surely we must acknowledge that the paternalism of masters accorded with their understanding, however misguided, of the good) is almost never, when applied in practice, disentangled from self-interest. That does not mean, however, that we can reduce relationships between masters and slaves entirely to calculating self-interest. If nothing else, the form that power relationships took owed a great deal to the practical ethics of the parties involved, both slave and free.
All best,
Kevin
---- Original message ----
>Date: Fri, 31 Jul 2009 18:53:14 -0700
>From: Paul Finkelman <[log in to unmask]>
>Subject: slaves, treatment, and cruelty
>To: [log in to unmask]
>
>Just to add briefly to Henry's point. I think there is a myth masters had no regard for the lives of their slaves. This is mostly simply not true. Slaves were valuable property, and masters took care to insure that their valuable property was well maintained -- enough food,clothing,shelter, and even medical care to keep slaves alive and healthy enough to work. This, of course plantation records show expenses for slave maintenance. Bu maintaining "harmony" was not the object of these expenditures. It was maintaining valuable property.
Kevin R. Hardwick, Ph.D.
Department of History
James Madison University
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