Description
Book SynopsisRace Unequals: Overseer Contracts, White Masculinities, and the Formation of Managerial Identity in the Plantation Economy is a re-imagining of the plantation not as Black and White, but in shades of White male identity. Through an examination of employment contracts between plantation owners and their overseers, and the web of public and private law that surrounded them, this book challenges notions of a monolithic White male identity in the antebellum South. It considers how race provided White men access to the land and enslaved labor that were foundational to the plantation economy, but how the wealthiest of those men used contracts, public law, and plantation management schemes to limit the access points by which overseers, the first managerial class in the United States, could achieve upward mobility as both White people and as men. In navigating the legal and social parameters of their employment contracts, overseers negotiated a white masculinity that formed their managerial
Table of Contents
Introduction: The World The Planters Made
Chapter 1: The Overseer, His Contracts, and His Contractual Relationships
Chapter 2: Profitable Planters, Industrious Overseers, Maintaining the Status Quo
Chapter 3: “Pushing” Torture, Managing Violence, and Planter Regulation of Overseer Control
Chapter 4: White Masculinities, Private Law, and the Battle for Social Control
Chapter 5: Immoral Men, Immoral Ends, Deference as Social Death
Epilogue: The “Lost Cause” and the Legacy of Plantation Management
Bibliography
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