Masters of Violence

Occupying the liminal space between those who owned slaves and the chattel property in persons that the owners possessed, overseers performed a critical role in maintaining the economic wherewithal of a slave-based plantation economy. Since overseers were generally mistrusted, if not despised, by those who hired them as well as those whom they ostensibly managed, their social capital was severely limited, and they often relied upon brutal means to operate within such a constricted environment. It was in this fashion that violence (or the threat of violent action) became the calling card of some overseers, and this behavior even further diminished the social standing of this crude cohort of managers. Tristan Stubbs's Masters of Violence presents a detailed analysis of the changing role of the overseer and posits that the reputational violence associated with this class of worker led slaveholders to view them less favorably as plantation-based slavery continued into the nineteenth century. As such, the savage excesses of overseers as a class presented a compelling argument for greater planter paternalism to emphasize the more benign aspects of the plantation economy. Overseers, it would seem, had found a way to live up to the stereotype, and a counterforce was necessary to maintain harmony

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