Enmeshed in the exploitative world of racial slavery, overseers were central figures in the management of early American plantation enterprises. All too frequently dismissed as brutal and incompetent, they defy easy categorisation. Some were rogues, yet others were highly skilled professionals, farmers, and artisans. Some were themselves enslaved. They and their wives, with whom they often formed supervisory partnerships, were caught between disdainful planters and defiant enslaved labourers, as they sought to advance their ambitions. Their history, revealed here in unprecedented detail, illuminates the complex power struggles and interplay of class and race in a volatile slave society.

A Pulitzer Prize-winning history of the mistreatment of black Americans. In this 'precise and eloquent work' - as described in its Pulitzer Prize citation - Douglas A. Blackmon brings to light one of the most shameful chapters in American history - an 'Age of Neoslavery' that thrived in the aftermath of the Civil War through the dawn of World War II. Using a vast record of original documents and personal narratives, Blackmon unearths the lost stories of slaves and their descendants who journeyed into freedom after the Emancipation Proclamation and then back into the shadow of involuntary servitude thereafter. By turns moving, sobering and shocking, this unprecedented account reveals these stories, the companies that profited the most from neoslavery, and the insidious legacy of racism that reverberates today.

From trusted to tainted, an examination of the shifting perceived reputation of overseers of enslaved people during the eighteenth century. In the antebellum southern United States, major landowners typically hired overseers to manage their plantations. In addition to cultivating crops, managing slaves, and dispensing punishment, overseers were expected to maximize profits through increased productivity—often achieved through violence and cruelty. In Masters of Violence, Tristan Stubbs offers the first book-length examination of the overseers—from recruitment and dismissal to their relationships with landowners and enslaved people, as well as their changing reputations, which devolved from reliable to untrustworthy and incompetent. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, slave owners regarded overseers as reliable enforcers of authority; by the end of the century, particularly after the American Revolution, plantation owners viewed them as incompetent and morally degenerate, as well as a threat to their power. Through a careful reading of plantation records, diaries, contemporary newspaper articles, and many other sources, Stubbs uncovers the ideological shift responsible for tarnishing overseers’ reputations. In this book, Stubbs argues that this shift in opinion grew out of far-reaching ideological and structural transformations to slave societies in Virginia, South Carolina, and Georgia throughout the Revolutionary era. Seeking to portray slavery as positive and yet simultaneously distance themselves from it, plantation owners blamed overseers as incompetent managers and vilified them as violent brutalizers of enslaved people. “A solid work of scholarship, and even specialists in the field of colonial slavery will derive considerable benefit from reading it.” —Journal of Southern History “A major achievement, restoring the issue of class to societies riven by racial conflict.” —Trevor Burnard, University of Melbourne “Based on a detailed reading of overseers’ letters and diaries, plantation journals, employer’s letters, and newspapers, Tristan Stubbs has traced the evolution of the position of the overseer from the colonial planter’s partner to his most despised employee. This deeply researched volume helps to reframe our understanding of class in the colonial and antebellum South.” —Tim Lockley, University of Warwick

In 1845, runaway slave Frederick Douglass became, almost overnight, the most celebrated African American author in history with the publication of his Narrative. In stark, powerful prose, he conveyed his observations of owners and overseers, the demoralizing effects of slavery on both slave and slaveholder, and his own triumph over oppression. In the latter part of the century, Douglass became a public figure of enormous stature: an orator, a newspaper publisher, and a statesman. But he is perhaps best remembered as America's first major African American writer, a man whose work still makes a powerful impact on both our minds and hearts. For a new perspective on Douglass' narrative, Henry Louis Gates, Jr.'s, introduction examines its literary and social importance, and considers the issues Douglass raised as the foundation for today's field of African American studies. Gates's illuminating insights, and an extensive bibliography, make this edition essential reading for scholars, historians, and students of African American literature.

As with any enterprise involving violence and lots of money, running a plantation was a serious and brutal enterprise. Beyond resources and weapons, a plantation required a significant force of cruel and rapacious men who lacked better economic options. The economically successful if socially monstrous plantation required racial division to exist, but Trevor Burnard shows here that its success was measured in gold, not skin or blood. In light of the strength and centrality of the plantation system, Burnard builds the case that pre-Revolutionary British America was centered not on the fractious and relatively poor North American colonies but on its booming commercial hub: Jamaica. The British Caribbean was economically successful, and the institutions that developed there--chief among them the large integrated plantation--did what they were intended to do and more. That these institutions eventually collapsed was not because of their amorality but because of changes in their economic and political contexts.

Fifty Years in Chains or, The Life of an American Slave is a book by Charles Ball. Ball was an American slave born in 1780, who remained a slave for fifty subsequent years.