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Irish overseers in the antebellum U.S. South
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 January 2022
Abstract
This article aims to further understand the Irish immigrant experience with U.S. slavery by studying Irish overseers on southern plantations. The Irish relationship with U.S. slavery varied according to circumstances. However, as foreign-born outsiders, Irish immigrants in the South had to accommodate the region's slaveholding culture. This article takes the story of the Irish as urban pioneers of the antebellum South out into the southern countryside. Those who sought employment as overseers had no qualms about profiting from racial slavery, and the nationality of a successful overseer was immaterial to planters. Irish overseers were not categorically different from native-born southern overseers. Indeed, Irish overseers had to be as ruthless as their American counterparts if they hoped to be successful. The expansion of the southern economy in accordance with the rise of the ‘second slavery’ created more significant opportunities for Irish immigrants to become overseers and demonstrates the essential whiteness of the Irish in the South.
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- Copyright © The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Irish Historical Studies Publications Ltd
References
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30 Cited in Gleeson, The green and the gray, p. 22.
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37 S. G. Collins, ‘System, organization, and agricultural reform in the antebellum South, 1840–1860’ in Agricultural History, lxxv, no. 1 (2001), p. 3. See also Allen Kaufman, Capitalism, slavery and republican values: antebellum political economists, 1819–1848 (Austin, 1982); Theodore Rosengarten, ‘The Southern agriculturist in an age of reform’ in Michael O'Brien and David Moltke-Hansen (eds), Intellectual life in antebellum Charleston (Knoxville, 1986), pp 279–94.
38 ‘Liquid Manure’ in Southern Cultivator, xix, no.1 (1861), p. 32.
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41 ‘Management of slaves – report of a committee of the Barbour County Agricultural Society’ in American Farmer, ii, no. 3 (1846), pp 77–9.
42 ‘The duties of an overseer’ in DeBow's Review, xviii, no. 1 (1855), p. 345. Southern agricultural reformers lacked uniformity in how to best advance new reforms. See D. G. Faust, ‘The rhetoric and ritual of agriculture in antebellum South Carolina’ in Journal of Southern History, xlv, no.4 (1979), pp 541–69; J. D. Majewski, Modernizing a slave economy: the economic vision of the Confederate nation (Chapel Hill, 2009), pp 54–6.
43 Caitlin Rosenthal, ‘Slavery's scientific management: masters and managers’ in Beckert & Rockman (eds), Slavery's capitalism, pp 62–86; Johnson, River of dark dreams, pp 268–9; A Mississippi planter, ‘Management of negroes upon Southern estates’ in DeBow's Review, x (1851), pp 621–7.
44 Roediger & Esch, The production of difference, pp 21–2.
45 Asylum plantation journal, 11 Sept. 1830 (South Caroliniana Library, University of South Carolina [S.C.L.], Davison McDowell Papers).
46 John Lynch to Patrick Neison Lynch, 27 Aug. 1861 (Diocese of Charleston Archives, South Carolina, Lynch Family Papers, 1858–66).
47 Salem Register, 11 Sept. 1843.
48 The duties of an overseer', p. 339.
49 For an example of a ‘model agreement’, see ‘Management of a Southern plantation – rules enforced on the Rice Estate of P. C. Weston, Esq., of South Carolina’ in DeBow's Review, xxii (1857), pp 38–44. See also the detailed twenty-nine duties outlined in James Henry Hammond's overseer contract: W. L. Rose, A documentary history of slavery in North America (New York, 1976), pp 345–54.
50 Wiethoff, The overseer's image, pp 62–5.
51 Account book, 2 Dec. 1822 (S.C.L., Davison McDowell papers, MS vol. bd., 1811–37).
52 1823 overseer agreement (Louisiana and Lower Mississippi Valley collections, Louisiana State University Libraries, Baton Rouge, Louisiana [L.L.M.V.C.], Antonio Patrick Walsh papers, Mss 887, 1208).
53 James McCann to John McCann, 27 Mar. 1845 (S.C.L., McCann Family papers 1825–9, 1845 and nd).
54 Jefferson McKinney to Jeptha McKinney, 4 June 1854 (L.L.M.V.C., Jeptha McKinney papers, Mss 273, 718).
55 Ibid., 21 Apr. 1856.
56 Maunsel White to John Denson, 20 July 1845 (Southern Historical Collection, The Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill [S.H.C.], Maunsel White papers).
57 D. T. Gleeson, ‘The Mississippi Irish’ (M.A. thesis., Mississippi State University, 1993), pp 45–6.
58 John Connolly to Godfrey Barnsley, 7 Jan. 1843 (S.H.C, George Scarborough Barnsley papers, 1837–1918, #1521); Harvey Toliver Cook, The life and legacy of David Roderson Williams (New York, 1916), p. 213.
59 David Thompson to David Hill, 29 Aug. 1854 (P.R.O.N.I, Hill and Thompson emigrant papers, T1830/2). The leading protagonist in Michael Wayne's investigation was Irish immigrant John McCallin: Michael Wayne, Death of an overseer: reopening a murder investigation from the plantation South (New York, 2001).
60 ‘The duties of an overseer’, p. 345.
61 Patrick Carr to Thomas McDowell, 22 Oct. 1851 (S.H.C., Thomas David Smith McDowell papers, #460). For more on North Carolina's naval stores industry, see R. B. Outland III, ‘Slavery, work, and the geography of the North Carolina naval stores industry, 1835–1860’ in Journal of Southern History, lxii, no. 2 (1996), pp 27–57.
62 Patrick Carr to Thomas McDowell, 9 Nov. 1852 (S.H.C., Thomas David Smith McDowell Papers).
63 John Carr to Mr McDowell, 29 Aug. 1853 (S.H.C., Thomas David Smith McDowell papers).
64 Ellener Carr to Thomas McDowell, 28 May 1855 (S.H.C., Thomas David Smith McDowell papers).
65 John Carr to Dear Sir, 15 Dec. 1858 (S.H.C., Thomas David Smith McDowell papers).
66 Edward E. Baptist, The half has never been told: slavery and the making of American capitalism (New York, 2014), p. 136. See also C. M. Florio, ‘From poverty to slavery: abolitionists, overseers, and the global struggle for labor in India’ in Journal of American History, cii, no. 4 (2016), pp 1005–24.
67 ‘The duties of an overseer’, p. 344.
68 Maunsel White memorandum book, 11 Apr. 1856 (S.H.C., Maunsel White papers).
69 Interview with Albert Patterson, 22 May 1940 (L.L.M.V.C., WPA ex-slave narrative collection).
70 18 Dec. 1856, Maunsel White Memorandum Book (S.H.C., Maunsel White papers).
71 Maunsel White to D. N. Bracewell, 11 Oct. 1847 (S.H.C., Maunsel White papers). The term ‘ironing’ is used in this example as a general reference to using shackles, iron collars or other forms of restraint.
72 E. D. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, roll: the world the slaves made, (New York, 1976), p. 67; Peter Kolchin, Unfree labor: American slavery and Russian serfdom (Cambridge, MA, 1987), p. 82.
73 John McKivigan (ed.), Roving editor: or talks with slaves in Southern states by James Redpath (University Park, 1996), p. 141.
74 Israel Campbell, An autobiography, bond and free: or, yearnings for freedom, for my green brier house (Philadelphia, 1861), pp 33–4.
75 Ibid., pp 35–9.
76 Ibid. Another example of an Irish overseer who married an enslaved woman was Patrick Lynch, a native of Dublin, who married Catherine White on the plantation he managed. Their son John Roy Lynch became Mississippi's first black congressman. See Joe Regan, ‘Half-Irish and all slave: the life of John Roy Lynch’ in History Ireland, xxv, no. 5 (Sept.–Oct. 2017), pp 24–7.
77 Daily Picayune, 7 Jan. 1844.
78 McKivigan (ed.), Roving editor, p. 141. For more on Irish anti-abolitionism, see Ian Delahanty, ‘The transatlantic roots of Irish American anti-abolitionism, 1843–1859’ in Journal of the Civil War Era, vi, no. 2 (2016), pp 164–92.
79 Baptist, Half has never been told, pp 111–44. See also Richard Follett, The sugar masters: planters and slaves in Louisiana's cane world, 1820–1860 (Baton Rouge, 2005), pp 90–150; Mark Smith, Mastered by the clock: time, slavery, and freedom in the American South (Chapel Hill, 1997).
80 Breeden, Advice among masters, p. 32. See also Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Within the plantation households: black and white women of the Old South (Chapel Hill, 1988), pp 187–90; S. M. H. Camp, Closer to freedom: enslaved women and everyday resistance in the Plantation South (Chapel Hill, 2004).
81 Jeff Forret, Race relations at the margins: slaves and poor whites in the antebellum Southern countryside (Baton Rouge, 2006), pp 212–13; Wiethoff, The overseer's image, pp 32–8; Scarborough, The overseer, pp 75–8. See also Richard Follett, ‘“Lives of living death”: the reproductive lives of slave women in the cane world of Louisiana’ in Slavery & Abolition, xxvi, no. 2 (2005), pp 289–304.
82 W. H. Russell, My diary North and South (New York, 1863), p. 274.
83 For more on the sexual abuse of enslaved people, see Thomas A. Foster, ‘The sexual abuse of black men under American slavery’ in Journal of the History of Sexuality, xx, no. 3 (2011), pp 445–64; Edward Baptist, ‘“Cuffy,” “fancy maids,” and “one-eyed men”: rape, commodification, and the domestic slave trade in the United States’ in American Historical Review, cvi, no. 5, (2001), pp 1619–50.
84 Slave narratives. A folk history of slavery in the United States from interviews with former slaves. Typewritten records prepared by the Federal Writers’ Project in 1936–1938. Volume II, Arkansas narratives, Part 6 (Washington D.C., 1941), p. 103.
85 Slave narratives. A folk history of slavery in the United States from interviews with former slaves. Typewritten records prepared by the Federal Writers’ Project in 1936–1938. Volume XIV, South Carolina, Part 1 (Washington D.C., 1941), p. 128.
86 Rachel O’ Connor to David Weeks, 8 July 1832; Rachel O'Connor to Mary Weeks, 6 July 1834, cited in Allie Bayne Windham Webb, (ed.), Mistress of Evergreen plantation: Rachel O'Connor's legacy of letters, 1823–1845 (Albany, 1983), pp 71–2, 149–50.
87 Scarborough, The overseer.
88 Juliana Margaret Courtney Conner diary, 21 June 1827 (S.H.C., #174–7).
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91 C. C. Bolton, Poor whites of the antebellum South: tenants and laborers in central North Carolina and northeast Mississippi (Durham, 1994), p. 8; T. J. Lockley, Lines in the sand: race and class in Lowcountry Georgia, 1750–1860, (Athens, GA, 2001), pp 29–32.
92 J. S. Otto and A. M. Burns III, ‘Black folks and poor buckras: archaeological evidence of slaves and overseer living conditions on an antebellum Plantation’ in Journal of Black Studies, xiv, no. 4 (1983), pp 185–200.
93 Merritt, Masterless men, p. 84.
94 Genovese, Roll, Jordan, roll, pp 23, 582. For examples, see ‘Folk-lore scrap-book’ in Journal of American Folklore, xii, no. 46 (1899), pp 226–8; Herbert G. Gutman, The black family in slavery and freedom, 1750–1925 (New York, 1976), pp 299–301.
95 R. M. Miller, ‘Slaves and southern Catholicism’ in J. B. Boles (ed.), Masters and slaves in the house of the Lord: race and religion in the American South 1740–1870 (Lexington, 1988), p. 132.
96 J. V. Lewis, Out of the ditch. A true story of an ex-slave (Houston, 1910), pp 16–22.
97 Gleeson, The green and the gray, pp 221–2.
98 Baptist, Half has never been told, p. 135.
99 Lyell, Charles, A second visit to the United States of America (London, 1849), p. 115Google Scholar.