A Dramatic Shift Often Unseen:

Slave-Master Relationships on Plantations in Antebellum Mississippi Pre and Post Statehood,

1790-1860

Sarah Ingram
Professor Twitty
History 400, Section 1
December 7, 2015

The plantation. It was a large white mansion, with fluted columns and a broad
porch; massive trees spread their limbs over a circular driveway which led up to the
house. From the carriages which rolled up the driveway stepped finely dressed men and
women, the aristocracy of southern culture. Once inside the mansion, these ladies and
gentlemen sat beneath chandeliers in high-ceilinged rooms and discoursed on the topics
of the day. And all the while they were attended to by unobtrusive, attentive, and faithful
Negro slaves. Somewhere, in the background, out of sight, were the slave quarters with
their inhabitants.
Such a picture is often presented of the southern plantation. It is not a true one.
There were a few plantations which fit the above description, but these were the
exceptions. Most plantation owners lived modesty and some even poorly.
Julius Lester, To Be A Slave (New York: The Dial Press, Inc., 1968), 59.
As knowledge spread about the rich soils and great successes of planters in the
Mississippi territory, more settlers began to pour into the territory and the population increased at
a striking pace. By 1817 the territory had a large enough population to become the state of
Mississippi and gain the same privileges as the other established states.1 The Mississippi
economy began to be heavily influenced by the cotton crop, which produced a majority of the
states revenue. Consequently, an economy based on exporting cotton crops meant that economic
stability was almost unobtainable: cotton prices were prone to swing wildly between economic
success and failure. Planters experienced great success for a year or two, only to then be
tormented by depression and over inflation of the cotton crop prices the next few years. The
economys bipolar tendencies inflicted great hardships on the enslaved population in Mississippi,
particularly once the territory became a state and had to worry about maintaining the institution
of slavery as a whole. Joseph Holt Ingraham, the Yankee who traveled the old Southwest, and
particularly Natchez stated A plantation well stocked with hands, is the ne plus ultra of every
mans ambition who resides at the south.2 On plantations, the master would sometimes hire
1James W. Loewen, Charles Sallis, Jeanne M. Middlleton, R. Bruce Adams, James A. Brown,
Olivia Jones, Stephen C. Immer, Maryellen Hains Clampit, Mississippi: Conflict and Change
(New York: Random House, Inc., 1974), 82.
2Ariela Gross, The Law and Culture of Slavery: Natchez, Mississippi, in Local Matters: Race,
Crime, and Justice in the Nineteenth-Century South (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2001),
97.
2

another white man to serve as the overseer, or appoint a black slave to be a driver, both of whom
pushed the slaves to work at an ever-accelerating pace. Relationships and livelihood dynamics in
Mississippi between masters and slaves shifted once the territory achieved statehood due to the
increased use of slave-driven large plantation systems where masters were seeking greater
control over their property and economic prosperity so as to maintain the status quo of the
southern slave states. This paper will examine the time period from when Mississippi became a
territory in the 1790s, to after December 10, 1817, when Mississippi became an official state
and increased the use of Eli Whitneys cotton gin, all the way until 1860. It argues that life for
African-Americans became ever more challenging and threatening than it had been before
statehood, when blacks were primarily clearing the unsettled lands. Planters quickly recognized
the great value and potential of growing and exporting cotton, then identified that in order to
extract the desired value in crops, mass amounts of rigidly organized labor was required. They
also realized that laborers would also need to produce cotton at an ever-hastening rate. In order to
satiate the aspirations of large planters in Mississippi to ensure economic accumulation and
maintenance of the status quo between free and slave states. They used state laws as well as
plantation rules and regulations to strengthen control over the black population. This in turn,
changed the dynamics between slaves and their masters from a relationship characterized by
personal connection between the master and his slaves to a relationship characterized by brutal
abuse, fear, and dehumanization of field workers.
In 1798 when Mississippi became an official territory3, to its establishment as a state in
1817, the frontier planters quickly discovered the great agricultural possibilities Mississippi had
to offer and brought slaves along with them on their journey as they sought wealth and stature in
the new territory. As Mississippi was first being settled by whites, the use and life of slaves
3Loewen, Mississippi: Conflict and Change, 73.
3

drastically differed from that of the idyllic large southern Mississippi plantation image, as
described in the opening anecdote, that often comes to mind. The first white settlers were
selective as to which slaves would accompany them on their pilgrimage. When people were first
settling the land in the Mississippi territory the land they had yet to be cleared, so the labor the
slaves had to perform was extremely physically demanding, therefore a majority of the slaves
being moved to Mississippi at first were young men who were more likely to survive and had the
muscular strength to perform the labor.4 Once the more demanding physical labor was complete
and small farms had been established, more women and children began to arrive and came to
play a large role in harvesting cotton.5 There were attempts to grow other crops such as tobacco
and indigo, but cotton was quickly found to be the superlative crop to grow in the new territory.
As the cotton frenzy took off, so did the value of young healthy slaves, and the value of both
grew exponentially over the following years.6
Planters gradually discovered ways to improve efficiencies on the plantations by dividing
labor among slaves based on age and gender. Many planters took note that female slaves were
able to pick cotton at a faster rate than male slaves, and male slaves had greater strength with
which to clear and plow the land.7 Planters had to focus on manipulating slave labor by dividing
the work in multiple ways, the way the slaves would plant the cottonseeds, and taking advantage
of the slow times of the years to have slaves complete other work. A planter in the early
settlement of the Mississippi territory found that driving slaves with the opportunity available to
4Steven F. Miller, Plantation Labor Organization and Slave Life on the Cotton Frontier: The
Alabama-Mississippi Black Belt, 1815-1840, in Cultivation and Culture: Labor and the
Shaping of Slave Life in the Americas, edited by Ira Berlin and Philip D. Morgan
(Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1993), 158-159.
5David J. Libby, Slavery and frontier Mississippi, 1720-1835 (Jackson: University Press of
Mississippi, 2004), 37-38.
6Libby, Slavery and frontier Mississippi, 38-39.
7Miller, Plantation Labor Organization and Slave Life on the Cotton Frontier: The AlabamaMississippi Black Belt, 1815-1840, 159.
4

them to be rewarded was an effective way to motivate slaves to work faster. He also found that
giving his slaves a little more time to rest each week was effective in keeping them healthy and
more motivated. Thomas, a planter in the early Mississippi territory experienced great success
and his plantation was considered a model one, and was visited by many planters anxious to
learn his methods. He was asked how he made his negroes do good work. His answer was that a
laboring man could do more and better work in five and a half days than in six.8 This planters
name was Thomas; Thomas would also pay his slaves with a five dollar gold piece whenever
they would pick six hundred or more pounds of cotton in a day.9 Thomass method was a more
gentle approach to slavery that was used by some during the territorial time in Mississippi. As
the territory grew, a harsher approach to slavery began to be adopted to get even more out of the
slaves.
As planters continued to discover how to more effectively use slave labor to further their
economic gains, other planters explored the possibility of creating hybrid cottonseeds that would
create better and larger cotton harvests in the Mississippi climate.10 When the planters working
on improving labor production collided with the hybrid cottonseeds, the structure of slavery in
antebellum Mississippi was drastically altered. When Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin in
1794,11 there was an accelerant effect that forever changed both the efficacy and profitability of
the large plantation slavery system.12 As Mississippi continued to establish itself as a territory,
soon to be state, shifts in the efficiency of agriculture production systems created lasting effects
8Stuart Bruchey, Cotton and the growth of the American economy, 1790-1860; sources and
readings (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World Company, 1967), 7.
9Bruchey, Cotton and the growth of the American economy, 7.
10Ian Beamish, Saving the South: Agricultural Reform in the Southern United States, 18191861. (PhD diss., Johns Hopkins University, 2014), 15-16.
11Angela Lakwete, Inventing the cotton gin: machine and myth in antebellum America
(Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 47.
12Libby, Slavery and frontier Mississippi, 40.
5

on master-slave relationships. Relationships between masters and slaves were never the same
once the large plantation lifestyle was established in early 19th century antebellum Mississippi.
Much like the settlement of the new world, the settlement of Mississippi was founded on the
search for and desire to accumulate wealth and prosperity. As planters began to discover the
possibilities of the land in Mississippi and began to better utilize the land, the slaves were the
ones who paid the heaviest price.13 The increased demand for cotton caused planters to buy
significantly more slaves to work the land, whereas in 1820 a mere 6% of Southern slaves lived
in Alabama or Mississippi, nearly 20% did by 1840.14 This striking increase in the number of
slaves forced to migrate to the Deep South was no coincidence; it was all to the white mans
desire to accumulate wealth during the cotton boom. In the slave holding south, the more slaves
a man owned, the more respected he was. In other words, the more human beings he held by
force and against their will, the more highly regarded he was.15 Slaves would either be sold once
they were already down south, or the master would move to Mississippi and bring his slaves with
him in hopes of gaining financial prosperity and social stature in the cotton frontier found during
the antebellum era in Mississippi. The territorial Governor, William C.C. Claiborne, said, that
Labour here, is more valuable than on any other part of the United States, and the industrial
portion of the Citizens [i.e planters] are amassing great fortunes.16 With the realization that the
sought-after wealth could only seemingly be acquired with the accumulation of slaves,
individuals in Mississippi started putting all their money into the purchasing of slaves.

13Beamish, Saving the South: Agricultural Reform in the Southern United States, 1819-1861.,
19.
14Miller, Plantation Labor Organization and Slave Life on the Cotton Frontier: The AlabamaMississippi Black Belt, 1815-1840, 156.
15 Julius Lester, To be a slave (New York: Dial Press, Inc., 1968), 59.
16Libby, Slavery and frontier Mississippi, 39.
6

Natchez was one of the wealthiest counties in the new state; it provided the perfect atmosphere
for the plethora of lawyers that seemed to flock there. The Mississippi territory attracted more
than just planters; Joseph Baldwin explained that Natchez was known as a mecca for lawyers.
[Lawyers moved to the Southwest because] it was extolled as a legal Utopia, peopled by a race
of eager litigants17 Because of how quickly the slavery institution changed in Mississippi, many
legal disputes over slaves appeared which attracted lawyers to the area. Like many settlers
moving into the new territory, lawyers too succumbed to cotton fever18 and the desire to
accumulate wealth and standing in society by purchasing slaves and becoming planters. Immense
financial gains proved to be attractive to the wealthy, non-planter citizens in Mississippi who
could afford slaves if they so desired. This became a common practice among southern lawyers.
In 1835, Joseph Holt Ingraham observed that, as soon as the young lawyer acquires sufficient
funds to purchase a few hundred acres of the rich alluvial lands, and a few slaves, he quits his
profession at once, and turns to cotton planter.19 In the Mississippi territory, the most prestigious
profession was slave master and cotton planter, therefore lawyers who moved to the state began
to associate closely with the plantation owners due to close socioeconomic ties and, eventually,
lawyers made the transition from lawyer to plantation master.
Not all settlers came to Mississippi as lawyers; some came from states or territories further north
and already owned slaves. It was in these settlers where the most dramatic shift in the
relationship between slave and master could be seen. Such was the case with John Steele, who
moved from Virginia to Natchez County, Mississippi, in 1798 with his personal servant George.20
Steele and George left behind their families to move to the new territory, Steele felt guilt for
17Gross, The Law and Culture of Slavery, 97.
18Libby, Slavery and frontier Mississippi, 38.
19Loewen, Mississippi: Conflict and Change, 90.
20Libby, Slavery and frontier Mississippi, 39.
7

separating George from his family due to the personal relationship he had with his slave. On a
large plantation, a master would not have such a personal relationship with his slaves. Only a
year or so after coming to Mississippi, Steel wrote a letter to his brother Samuel stating just how
valuable slaves were in Mississippi and that he felt no need to preserve the slave families of his
slaves who were more field hands than personal servants. Only to the personal servants such as
George did John feel bound from humanity to preserve an enslaved family21 This letter shows
the very extreme shift in the mentality the newly migrated plantation masters embraced during
the antebellum era in Mississippi. Because George had been with John for so long and was a
personal servant, not a field hand, John was unable to dehumanize George to the point where he
was willing to sell him and break up his family. As the large plantation system in Mississippi
grew, there were more slaves working the cotton fields than there were personal servants to a
master, minimizing the humanistic connection a master had to his slave. Further separation of
slaves to their masters allowed for the ability of the master to dehumanize the slaves in his mind
resulting in slaves facing harsher working conditions and treatment on the large plantations in
Mississippi.
The Mississippi economy was primarily based on cotton production, and as cotton
production was primarily based on slavery, as Mississippi became dependent on cotton it also
became dependent upon slavery. The fortunes of the Deep South rested on cotton and sugar. The
cotton crop almost tripled, from 54,000 bales in 1814-1815 to 159,500 bales in 1819-20,
increasing in the same period from 15 percent of the countrys cotton production to more than 25
percent.22 When Mississippi was a territory, planters were still developing the land to grow
cotton in mass quantities on large fields. The more Mississippi grew and developed towards
21Libby, Slavery and frontier Mississippi, 38.
22Adam Rothman, Slave Country: American Expansion and the Origins of the Deep South.
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005), 177.
8

statehood, the harsher and more challenging life become for the black population living in the
Mississippi territory. Stephen Duncan came to the realization that, For blacks, increased
economic gains translated into the further entrenchment of the slave system and its brutal
oppression.23
The population of Mississippi doubled in between 1810 and 1820.24 By 1835 black slaves were
the majority of the population.25 Further more the number of white families who owned between
fifty to one hundred slaves nearly doubled in percentage between 1790 and 1850 in Mississippi.
Large slaveholding distribution numbers in 1790 showed only 1.0 percent of families owning
such a large number of slaves increasing to nearly double that at 1.7 percent of families owning
such a large number of slaves in 1850.26 Statistically the number of large plantation in
Mississippi was very small, but large plantation style slavery was the most common experience
for a black slave living in Mississippi during the antebellum era.27 Though there is no federal
census for Mississippi during its territorial time it has been estimated that in roughly 1800 there
was a population of 8,700 including 3,500 slaves and in roughly 1810 a population of 40,400
including about 17,000 slaves. For these territorial statistics it is important to note that the
populations include present-day Mississippi and Alabama because the two states had yet to
separate at this point in history.28 In 1820, when the first federal census was taken in Mississippi,
the slave population totaled 32,814 and increased to 436,631 by 1860 slaves in Mississippi.29 All
these statistics showing dramatic increases in the black population instilled fear among the white
23Martha Jane Brazy, An American planter: Stephen Duncan of antebellum Natchez and New
York. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006), 19.
24Rothman, Slave Country, 182.
25Libby, Slavery and frontier Mississippi, 75.
26Bruchey, Cotton and the growth of the American economy, 165.
27Loewen, Mississippi: Conflict and Change, 94.
28Loewen, Mississippi: Conflict and Change, 338.
29Historical Census Browser, Geospatial and Statistical Center, University of Virginia,
http://mapserver.lib.virginia.edu, accessed December, 2, 2015.
9

population during the antebellum era in Mississippi, which solidified the need to instill more fear
in the slaves than the slaves instilled in the masters. Statehood and agricultural advancements
created an institutional shift resulting in extreme and cruel punishment inflicted onto the slaves
whose situation became even more troublesome. The growing black population on the large
plantations in Mississippi created a further separation between master and slave lending itself to
less personal relationship and harsher treatment of the slave population.
In 1817, the Mississippi territory reached the required population, 60,000 people, and became an
official state of The United States of America. Mississippi was the twentieth state admitted to the
United States of American, and created a harmonious balance of ten free states and ten slave
states.30 Slaves had long been viewed as their masters property, but once Mississippi became an
official state and had more input in the federal government, the state delegates wanted to ensure
all laws pertaining to slavery remained under the state government jurisdiction not the federal
government. New Jersey called for an inquiry into the expediency of passing a federal law
prohibiting the migration or transportation of slaves from one state to another in cases where the
laws of each state already prohibit that transportation.31 With Mississippi now being an official
state in the U.S., they were granted to right to have say in matters of the federal government.
Mississippi was adamant about maintaining state rights over slavery to ensure their ability to
continue growing their cotton empire. In reaction of New Jerseys motion, Mississippis George
Poindexter objected. Any man, he said, had a right to remove his property from one state to
another, and slaves as well as any other property, if not prohibited from doing so by the States
laws he asserted. Moreover, the United States had no right to interfere with the operation of
state laws.32 Mississippi had become so dependent on the large plantation slave system that the
30Loewen, Mississippi: Conflict and Change, 81.
31Rothman, Slave Country, 175.
32Rothman, Slave Country, 175.
10

state had to concern itself not only with slaves on those private plantations, but slavery as a
national issue as well.
White supremacy, and whites simply feeling naturally superior to blacks was the
cornerstone for the plantation system for slavery during the antebellum era in Mississippi.33
Because there was historical evidence that slave insurrections could occur, and even be
successful, and the population of slaves outnumbered the population of whites in some counties
of Mississippi, the master had to instill a large amount of fear in and control over his slaves to
ensure the status quo was not shifted away from the benefit of the naturally superior white
master. In 1792, Haitian slaves were successful in their revolution and secured their freedom.34 In
the first half of the 19th century, Mississippi plantations became increasing reliant on the slave
system, which required slaves to live under brutal conditions. Due to its success, the Haitian
revolution created a fear in the white community, particularly on large plantations where slaves
greatly outnumbered the white family who owned them. As fear grew in the white population,
more changes were seen in the large plantation style slavery system. Rigid restrictions on blacks
were put in place so that the masters and overseers could better keep track of the slaves and
further their control over them. Restrictions on slaves went further than overseers demanding an
increase in picking rates of cotton; punishments became harsher, rules on the plantation became
increasing rigid and more controlling, the role of the overseer and master shifted during the
antebellum period once Mississippi gained statehood.
The more competitive the cotton market got and the more the institution of slavery was
threatened, the tighter the control the master implemented over his plantation slaves became,
leading to a further negative shift in lifestyle for slaves. Some of the most common rules and
33Loewen, Mississippi: Conflict and Change, 97.
34 Libby, Slavery and frontier Mississippi, 46.
11

laws implemented were 1. Slaves were not permitted to learn to read or write. White persons
who taught slaves were punished. 2. Slaves must have a pass to leave the plantation. 3. Slaves
could have no social contact with free blacks or with other whites who worked on the plantation.
4. Slaves could not defend themselves against whites and could not testify against them in court.
5. Slaves could not be legally married.35 Many other rules were also implemented for both
overseers and slaves to follow; all rules created or altered at this time were done so that the status
quo and safety of the white population could be further assured.36 Masters and slaves experienced
a shift in lifestyles during the antebellum period; the master had to invest more of his time
considering ways to extract more cotton product from his slaves at a faster rate while still
maintaining peace on his property and trying to preserve slavery in the United States as a whole.
The master would do this through tightening control by way of management, using fear tactics
such as harsh punishment and methods of dehumanizing his slaves while maintaining some level
of caution so as not to damage his most valuable property: his slaves.
An overseer was used primarily on large plantations rather than small plantations,
depending on the plantation owner the overseer served a variety of roles all intended to increase
efficiency of cotton production on the plantation. Each plantation ran slightly different than the
others depending on the master, but the overseers on each had one thing in common: His
primary function involved in the management of his employers most valuable asset, the
slaves.37 The responsibility of punishing the slaves frequently fell under the duties of the
overseer.38 On each plantation the master might require different tasks to be completed or roles to
35Loewen, Mississippi: Conflict and Change, 99.
36Rules and Regulations For The Government of A Southern Plantation, in DeBows Review 10
June 1851, 625-627.
37William Kauffman Scarborough, The Overseer: Plantation Management in the Old South
(Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1984), 7.
38Scarborough, The Overseer, 67.
12

be filled by the overseer depending on the how many acres of land were owned, how many
slaves were owned or, more specifically, the number of slaves that were working in the cotton
fields, and a variety of other reasons depending on the masters desires. Plantation owners who
employed overseers often delegated the less desirable duties on a plantation to their overseer or
overseers, often times giving them the responsibility of doling out punishments to the slaves,
watching over slaves in the fields, making slaves work faster, inspecting slave quarters, and
keeping a records of when slaves were sick, and/or how much cotton a slave picked.39 Fredrick
Law Olmsted, a traveler at the time going through the interior cotton districts, observed a family
who held no slaves of their own and claimed their family was able to produce more crops than
the woman who owned 40 slaves. At this point in history this was a peculiar claim to make
triggering Olmsteds curiosity, How is that? Well, shes a woman, and she cant make the
niggers work; she wont have a overseer, and niggers wont work, you know, unless theres
somebody to drive em.40 Olmsteds observation provides evidence of the shift found to be
necessary for slavery on large plantations in Mississippi to be more efficient during the
antebellum era that ultimately costs the African-Americans dearly.
During the antebellum era in Mississippi, plantation masters and their overseers along
with the boarder white community in Mississippi viewed African-Americans as less than human
and strictly as the most valuable piece of property a planter could own. The institution of slavery
promoted the dehumanization of African-American slaves by restricting basic rights given to
them such as testifying in court, using derogatory titles or phrases for the slaves in conversation
and in writing, and subjecting slaves to cruel and unusual punishment. By the first decade of the
19th century laws made in Adams County Mississippi begin restricting black, or colored peoples
39Loewen, Mississippi: Conflict and Change, 96.
40Frederick Law Olmsted, The Cotton Kingdom: A Travellers Observations on Cotton and
Slave States (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1953), 388.
13

rights further, Nearly all witnesses in court were white. By law, dating back to 1807, no person
of color, free or slave, could appear as a witness in any case except for an infraction against each
other41. Ariela Gross noted in her work entitled The Law and the Culture of Slavery: Natchez
Mississippi an important commonality among circuit court cases as a majority of them pertain to
one party damaging or mistreating another partys slave creating a civil litigation over the
damaged property.
Colored people in the United States up the first half of the 19th century had never received
the same rights or been treated equally to their fellow white citizens and were often being
excluded from situations pertaining to themselves and were subjected to derogatory slurs at their
expense. As the Mississippi territory developed into statehood, the white population had to find
ways to, at the time, subconsciously justify the brutal plantation slavery system. By using
derogatory terminology as a way to dehumanize African-Americans it helped whites to create a
separation between the two races and allow for the plantation slave system to grow increasing
brutal as the territory obtained statehood. Such was the case with J.W. Fowler of Coahoma
County Mississippi when he is giving instructions to his overseers: the health, happiness, good
discipline and obedience; good, sufficient and comfortable clothing, a sufficiency of good
wholesome and nutritious food for both man and beast being indispensably necessary to
successful planting42. Fowler referring to his slaves as beasts suggests that AfricanAmericans during the antebellum era in Mississippi were in many ways subhuman and
subordinate to their white counterparts. When white settlers first came to the territory the slaves
who accompanied them were more often called their masters personal servant, and derogatory
41Gross, The Law and Culture of Slavery, 102.
42Ulrich Bonnell Phillips, Plantation And Frontier Documents: 1649-1863: Illustrative of
Industrial History in the Colonial & Ante-Bellum South (Cleveland, Ohio: The Arthur H. Clark
Company, 1909), 112.
14

terms such as slave or beast were used less often.43 In the early years of the Mississippi territory
settlers and planters had smaller farms and therefore had not developed the need to have large
quantity of slaves yet so the relationship between a slave and his master was far more personal
and not nearly as dehumanizing.
As the large plantation system of slavery became increasingly common in the state of
Mississippi during the first half of the 19th century, so did the use of an overseer, or multiple
overseers, on plantations and in turn the increased use of punishment of the slaves on said
plantations. One premise of slavery was to extract product from the servant without paying the
servant for their labor. Without pay, motivation to continue working was eliminated, and a
system of punishments and rewards was needed to keep the slaves producing at a rate determined
to be acceptable by the master and overseer.44 The ratio of field workers to overseers had been
indicated based on the observations made by Olmsted45 along with other travelers in the southern
region at the time and references to occupational census records that the ratio was determined by
the master as well as the type of crop being produced.46 The most common form of punishment
used on large plantations in Mississippi during the antebellum era was the whip, and, as
previously stated, it was the overseer who handled the punishments of slaves. President Martin
Van Buren and other travelers in Mississippi during this time period made observations that the
overseer could always be distinguished by his badge of office, a whip, which is ever in his
hand. He could usually be seen riding back and forth through the fields, whip in hand, inspecting
the work of the Negros. The presence of an overseer in the field had a pronounced effect upon

43Libby, Slavery and frontier Mississippi, 38.

44Loewen, Mississippi: Conflict and Change, 96.
45Scarborough, The Overseer, 8-9.
46Charles Sackett Sydnor, Slavery in Mississippi (New York and London: D. Appleton-Century
Company Incorporated, 1933), 67.
15

the exertions of slaves working under his watchful eye.47 The whip in the hand of the overseer
was often used as a scare tactic to keep the slaves working at the determined acceptable rate, and
was most commonly used when a slave performed his task poorly or when a slave broke one of
the plantation rules. Though whips were the most common for of punishments given to slaves,
slaves often faced other punishments such as brandings, shackles, or losing the ability to travel to
another plantation to visit another slave.48
As slaves shared their stories to interviewers as slave biographies and memoirs were
written, cruelty and punishment frequently made appearances. Ebenezer Brown, who was 85
years old at the time of his interview, recalls Marse Bill was might tough on his slaves. I was
just a boy, but I will never forget how he whupped his slaves.49 Browns interview shows that
even as a child he was exposed to the violence of plantation slave system in Mississippi during
this era. Children were not in the fields working until they were big and strong enough to pick
cotton; nevertheless they were still subjected to punishments, though less harsh than adult slaves,
to groom them to be submissive and good field workers in the future. Barney Alford, a child
when he was a slave in Pike County Mississippi, was interviewed as a part of the WPA Slave
Narratives and remembers Marse Edwin hed a big man fur Overseer en dat man whipped me
ebery dayMost uf de time he wuld whip me wid his hand en sum times he used a rope, but he
hed a post he tied de grown one ter en whipped den wid a big whip.50 Adult slaves, particularly
those who worked in the cotton fields in Mississippi, were subjected too much harsher
punishment then house servants or slaves on small farms. Masters on plantations would give
47Scarborough, The Overseer, 8.
48Sydnor, Slavery in Mississippi, 87.
49Ebenezer Brown, Prayin' to be Set Free in Personal Accounts of Slavery in Mississippi, ed.
Andrew Waters and John F. Blair, (Winston-Salem: North Carolina, 2002), 97.
50Mississippi Slave Narratives from the WPA Records: Barney Alford, Pike County,
MSGenWeb Library, Accessed November 29, 2015, http://msgw.org/slaves/alford-xslave.htm.
16

overseers a list of rules and it was common for one of those rules to be that the overseer was only
to punish the slaves if they needed it and never out of mere anger.51 Due to the occupational
flaws of the overseer previously discussed in this paper, these rules given from the plantation
master to his overseer may not have always been followed. In Louis Hughess autobiography,
Thirty Years A Slave, he makes statements that contradict rules many masters would have given
the overseer. I can remember well the cruel treatment I received. Some weeks it seemed I was
whipped for nothing.52 When Mississippi was a territory, slaves worked on smaller farms and
plantations where the master would be more present in their everyday lives, but as Mississippi
developed and gained statehood, masters hired overseers to take over the management and
punishment of their slaves.
Though harsh whippings were the most common form of punishments among slaves, it
was not unheard of for nonviolent punishments to be given. Planters did not necessarily want to
punish their slaves for no reason; they merely wanted their work to be completed. Such was the
case on a north Mississippi plantation for a slave named Jim. Jim would often sneak off his
plantation for a few days and then return, his master was very displeased with this habit and
wanted to end the bad behavior. When Jims master finally caught him in the act of sneaking
away he devised a non-violent punishment for Jim. Jim was forced to come and sit with his
masters family for dinner. This overthrow of all tradition and custom was to much for Jim. The
meal was evidently the most miserable one in his career, for he never ran away again.53 Though
violent punishment became more common once Mississippi became a state, plantation masters
traditionally did not seek out ways to punish slaves but more they sought out ways to force
slaves to be more submissive and competent at their work.
51Phillips, Plantation And Frontier Documents: 1649-1863, 113.
52 Louis Hughes, Thirty Years a Slave, (Milwaukee: South Side Printing Company, 1897), 19.
53Sydnor, Slavery in Mississippi, 89.
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Slave families and slave marriages also succumbed to change for the worse as the
Mississippi territory shifted towards statehood. When white settlers were first moving to the
territory in the last decade of the 18th century and the early decades of the 19th century, slave
masters had more personal connections with their slaves and were less likely to break up slave
families, or if they broke up the slave family is was only temporarily. When John Steele first
moved to the Mississippi territory with his slave George, he felt remorse due to the fact he was
keeping George away from his family, but once he adopted the mentality of a larger plantation
master, that remorse went away and he saw George as a dollar symbol more than he ever had
previously.54 Once the earliest white settles had better established themselves in the Mississippi
territory and their slaves had finished clearing the land, the time came to begin preparing the land
for the crops and eventually harvesting of said crops. Cotton farming required healthy slaves
who were strong enough to work the whole day. Planters also realized the value of investing in
slaves who were young enough to work for many more years as well as reproduce and have
children so that they could eventually have even more slaves without having to buy them. In
Mississippi, planters adopted the notion that when purchasing slaves it was better to buy none in
families, but to select only choice, first rate, young hands from 14 to 25 years of age, (buying no
children or aged negroes).55 As the territory developed into statehood, the more the value of a
young, healthy, able-bodied slave increased and the masters concern for the slaves personal
feelings and families decreased.
When Ebenezer Brown recounted his family during his interview, he described how his
parents came to be a family. Browns master was less interested in his slaves personal feelings
and more concerned with potential economic gains My pappy was named Dan. He was born in
54Libby, Slavery and frontier Mississippi, 38-39.
55Miller, Plantation Labor Organization and Slave Life on the Cotton Frontier: The AlabamaMississippi Black Belt, 1815-1840, 157.
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South Carolina and brung to Liberty and put on the blockthe bossman said Marse Bill could
have him. He brung him home and said Patience, I brung you a husband. Go live with him.
That was the way they got married56 Browns master demonstrated that when he purchased Dan
he had two interests in mind, first was to use him as a laborer and secondly was with the intent to
have Patience, Ebenezers mother, to have babies by forcing her to marry him. Slaves were
completely beholden to their masters by this point in Mississippis history, during the early
territorial times a master would be less concerned to whom his slaves were married. Walter
Johnson, a slave who escaped from slavery and lived in Canada, reflected back on his masters
complete lack of interest in slave families and strict focus on personal economic opportunities.
Walter remembered the threats his master made of breaking up slave families Master, he
recalled, used to say that if we didnt suit him he would put us in his pocket quickmeaning
that he would sell us. That threat, with its imagery of outsized power and bodily
dematerialization, suffused the daily life of the enslaved.57 Both Brown and Johnsons masters
show the change in the personal connections once had between territorial Mississippi masters to
masters in the official state and their slaves.
Masters would allow slaves to practice religion, which may have seemed like a
concession of their authority over the slaves at the time, but in reality it was a way to further
maintain surveillance and control over the enslaved population. Many whites felt they were
being very generous for the time and circumstances in which they were living. However, masters
put strict limitations on the slave population, which actually worsened the conditions for the
slave population from what it once was during pre statehood Mississippi. Alexander Telfair
explained in his instructions to his overseer, no night-meeting and preaching to be allowed on
56Brown, Prayin' to be Set Free, 100.
57Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1999), 19.
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the place, except on Saturday night & Sunday morn.58 Telfair, like many other planters during
the antebellum era in Mississippi, placed regulations on their slaves spiritual lives to better
ensure only messages supporting the institution of slavery were heard by them. As the
Mississippi territory developed and the slave population grew, state laws were created which
required a white person to be present at any religious meeting for African-Americans to ensure
no sermons would be given encouraging slave insurrections.59 Gradually, the state also outlawed
allowing African-Americans to preach all together.60
It is impossible to view slavery as anything but negative, moreover slavery during the
antebellum era in Mississippi created an institution built on dehumanization and brutality. The
plantation system for slavery became a social norm during this era of Mississippi history, but like
all social norms, there are always a few exceptions. The circuit court system that was created, a
system in which blacks were forbidden from testifying in court cases because they were viewed
as mere property. This court system, while entirely dehumanizing from one perspective, in
another perspective protected slaves. Ariela Gross, who studied laws of slavery in Natchez,
Mississippi, determined that while white men rarely faced criminal prosecution for striking out
at a slave, they quite often found themselves in court for civil suits regarding property damage to
the slave of another.61 Gross is referring to the system of hiring out slaves, which grew popular
during the first half of the 19th century in Mississippi. Because the value of slave increases
dramatically at that point in history, small planters were unable to afford to purchase their own
slaves at times and would hire slaves from a planter with a large plantation and many slaves of
his own. The small farmer would pay the larger planter for his slave and traditionally there was a
58Bruchey, Cotton and the growth of the American economy, 181.
59Sydnor, Slavery in Mississippi, 76-78.
60Loewen, Mississippi: Conflict and Change, 100.
61 Gross, The Law and Culture of Slavery, 94.
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contract created stating that the slave must be returned to his original owner in the same working
condition that the slave was hired out in. If damages were done to the property of the slave
owner, the renter would be taken to court. Therefore, because court fees were also expensive, it
encouraged some level of protection for those slaves who were hired out.
Solomon Northups story, told in Twelve Years a Slave, told the story of how his overseer
was actually the one to save him from being killed by his master.62 The story Northup speaks of
was not commonly heard in slave narratives once large plantations were established in
Mississippi. The overseer on a large plantation would often not have as much interest in the wellbeing of a slave under his watch because he was not financially invested in them the same as the
master of that slave. Northup was very lucky his overseer saved his life, however, the majority of
slaves living in Mississippi during the antebellum era on a large plantation would not experience
as much care from their overseer as Northup. Overseers during the first half of the 19th century
were rough characters and Olmsted along with other traveling observers stated overseers
appeared to be rough, uncouth class of people who were extremely disagreeable and
disgusting63
From the time Mississippi was established as a territory, developed into an official state
in December of 1817, and until the civil war broke out then ended with a Union victory, the
development of large plantation style slavery grew more threatening to the African-American
population and more promising for the white population in Mississippi during the antebellum
era. African-Americans prospects as a slave during the territorial period in Mississippi were
much better than that of a African-Americans in Mississippi once the territory gained statehood
62 Solomon Northup and Sue L. Eakin, Solomon Northup's Twelve years a slave : and
plantation life in the antebellum South. (Center for Louisiana Studies, University of Louisiana at
Lafayette, 2007.)
63Scarborough, The Overseer, 7.
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status. For slaves the cotton economy boom in Mississippi during the early decades of the 19th
century mark the turbulent direction that slavery in Mississippi was taking. Evidence from
agricultural research, slave narratives, correspondence between early settlers, managerial
directions, and statistical analysis all support the notion that there was a change in relationship
dynamics and the livelihood of slaves. Relationship dynamics and the livelihood of slaves were
altered at the costs of the African-Americans during the antebellum era in Mississippi as small
farms grew into large plantations. All the evidence indicates that life on a large plantation during
the antebellum era in Mississippi was far from the idyllic image of a beautiful large southern
plantation that is most commonly projected, and often excludes an image of Mississippi life
during the territorial time, in the present day.

22

Bibliography
Books
Brazy, Martha Jane. An American planter: Stephen Duncan of antebellum Natchez and New
York. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006.
Brown Ebenezer. Prayin' to be Set Free in Personal Accounts of Slavery in Mississippi, ed.
Andrew Waters and John F. Blair, Winston-Salem: North Carolina, 2002. 97-110.
Bruchey, Stuart. Cotton and the growth of the American economy, 1790-1860; sources and
readings. Harcourt, Bruce and World, Inc.: New York : Harcourt, Brace & World, 1967.
Northup, Solomon, and Sue L. Eakin. Solomon Northup's Twelve years a slave : and plantation
life in the antebellum South. Center for Louisiana Studies, University of Louisiana at
Lafayette, 2007.
Gross, Ariela. The Law and Culture of Slavery: Natchez, Mississippi, in Local Matters: Race,
Crime, and Justice in the Nineteenth-Century South. Christopher Waldrep and Donald G.
Nieman. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2001.
Hughes, Louis. Thirty Years a Slave. Milwaukee: South Side Printing Company, 1897.
Johnson, Walter. Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market. Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1999.
Lakwete, Angela. Inventing the cotton gin: machine and myth in antebellum America. Baltimore
and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003.
Lester, Julius. To be a slave. New York: Dial Press, Inc., 1968.
Libby, David J. Slavery and frontier Mississippi, 1720-1835. Jackson: University Press of
Mississippi, 2004.
Loewen, James W., Charles Sallis, Jeanne M. Middlleton, R. Bruce Adams, James A. Brown,
Olivia Jones, Stephen C. Immer, Maryellen Hains Clampit. Mississippi: Conflict and
Change. New York: Random House, Inc., 1974.
Miller, Steven F.. Plantation Labor Organization and Slave Life on the Cotton Frontier: The
Alabama-Mississippi Black Belt, 1815-1840, in Cultivation and Culture: Labor and the
Shaping of Slave Life in the Americas, edited by Ira Berlin and Philip D. Morgan.
Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1993.
Olmsted, Frederick Law. The Cotton Kingdom: A Travellers Observations on Cotton and Slave
States. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1953.
Phillips, Ulrich Bonnell. Plantation And Frontier Documents: 1649-1863: Illustrative of
Industrial History in the Colonial & Ante-Bellum South. Cleveland, Ohio: The Arthur H.
Clark Company, 1909.
Scarborough, William Kauffman. The Overseer: Plantation Management in the Old South.
Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1984.

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Sydnor, Charles Sackett. Slavery in Mississippi. New York and London: D. Appleton-Century
Company Incorporated, 1933.
Rothman, Adam, Slave Country: American Expansion and the Origins of the Deep South.
Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005.

Documents
A Mississippi Planter. Management of Negroes upon Southern Estates. DeBows Review 10 June
1851, 621-627.
Beamish, Ian. Saving the South: Agricultural Reform in the Southern United States, 18191861. PhD diss., Johns Hopkins University, 2014
Non-written Sources
Historical Census Browser, Geospatial and Statistical Center, University of Virginia,
http://mapserver.lib.virginia.edu, accessed December, 2, 2015.
Mississippi Slave Narratives from the WPA Records: Barney Alford, Pike County. MSGenWeb
Library. Accessed November 29, 2015. http://msgw.org/slaves/alford-xslave.htm.

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