Keep in mind as well that most of the people who could
remember slavery in 1936 or 1937 had experienced it only as
children.  That's not true of all of them, of course--but its
certainly true of many.  As you might imagine, children might
very well experience slavery quite differently than would adults.

Its also worth keeping in mind that the way in which slave
owners thought about slavery was powerfully implicated by
their liberalism.  John Locke predicated participation in the
social contract on possession of adult rationality.  If you
want to own slaves, and at the same time commit yourself to
the success of a society based on popular sovereignty and
social contract, the obvious way to do that is to deny that
your slaves can exercise adult rationality.  

This is the move that under lay the paternalism of large
numbers of southern slave owners:  the slaves are too child
like to take care of themselves, and thus require the
benovelent, superintending guidance of us, the morally good
slave owners.  Read the various defenses of slavery by guys
like Richard Furman, or John C. Calhoun, or Thornton
Stringfellow.  Note that when you commit yourself to this kind
of idea, you are not dehumanizing your slaves--you are not
reducing them to non-human status.  (Take a look sometime at
Madison's defense of the 3/5 compromise in Federalist 54,
where Madison makes this explicit.)  Rather, you are asserting
their subordinate status within your household, as children
who require your care and supervision.  

Note too that this kind of rhetoric provided slaves with
incentives to show their masters what their masters expected
to perceive.  Childlike, immature appearances could mitigate
at least some of the worst excesses of slavery.  Masters
*expected* their slaves to be childlike and foolish, and
slaves, who were anything but, could put that mask on when it
suited their purposes to do so.

Finally, we should also observe that there was a kind of
implicit bargain inherent in the kind of slavery practiced in
the United States.  At some point, young robest slaves aged
into elderly, frail slaves, who no longer could work all that
hard.  If you, the slave owner, refused to take care of
elderly slaves at least to a minimal degree, you quickly
established the wrong kind of incentives on your plantation. 
Why should your slaves work for you, if they know that when
they are too old to work, you will put them out to starve? 
For elderly slaves, and especially elderly slaves without deep
kindship networks, emancipation might not be an especially
welcome thing--after all, emancipation had the effect of
releasing slave owners from the obligation to care for their
elderly slaves.  Its not an accident that many of the stories
of slaves pledging their undying loyalty to their former
masters were elderly house servants.

Now all of this granted, it is also the case that despite the
degradation, physical oppression, and assault upon human
dignity that slavery entailed, some masters and some slaves
did manage to establish cordial and decent relationships.  But
let's not romanticize that too much--the incentive structures
of slavery guaranteed that it was a rare master, and a rare
slave, who managed to transcend the nature of the relationship
that bound them together.

Warm regards,
Kevin
Kevin R. Hardwick, Ph.D.
Department of History
James Madison University

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