Contracts Unequals: The Promise of Social Mobility in the Antebellum South
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Authors
Keren, Hila
Issue Date
2023-03
Volume
56
Issue
2
Type
Journal Article
Language
Keywords
Alternative Title
Abstract
Description
Citation
INTRODUCTION
In his classic book, Ancient Law, Sir Henry Maine made a dramatic observation about contracts. He famously argued that "the movement of the progressive societies has hitherto been a movement from status to contact." Regardless of Maine's original intentions in making this swapping statement, and irrespective of its historical accuracy, to many in the past and until today, it symbolizes the hopeful idea that contracts allow for social mobility. Put concisely, the idea highlights the potential of those born to a lower status, who in "ancient" times could not have escaped it, to achieve progress by using contacts to advance themselves. Whether social mobility gained by contracts was more a myth or a reality for overseers in the antebellum south is my focus in reading and responding to Terry McMurty-Chubb's rich study of the period in Race Unequals: Overseer Contracts, White Masculinity, and the Formation of Managerial Identity in the Plantation Economy (hereinafter, Race Unequals).
The relevance of Maine's statement to overseers' lives, as discussed in Race Unequals, emerges from the book itself. First, Maine's original text was written in 1861, while the book reports that a year earlier, "there were approximately 38,000 overseers working as plantation managers throughout the antebellum south." Second, the book explains that overseers' work was under contracts they had made with the planters who hired them, and the texts of some of these contracts are among its valuable offerings. Third, and most importantly, Race Unequals makes the argument that antebellum overseers had little to no chance for social mobility via their contracted work.
For the most part, I am convinced by the latter argument and believe the book introduces rich evidence to support it. Unlike the book's author, however, I attribute the limits on social mobility, even in a contract-based society, less to a defensive strategy executed by the antebellum elite, or a battle between forms of white masculinities over social control. Instead, I suggest that obstacles to mobility mostly result from the contractual system itself and particularly relate to the system's susceptibility to-and perpetuation of-gaps in bargaining power. To unfold my argument, I first collect the terms of the contracts cited in different parts of Race Unequals to analyze the extent to which they demonstrate planters' superior power over their counterparts, the overseers. Next, I track how contract law treated those contracts when the parties found themselves battling in courts and planters tried to avoid contractual liability under the contracts they made with their overseers. Last, I juxtapose Race Unequals with a counter-narrative in which an overseer did enjoy social mobility and became a planter. In conclusion, I argue that while contracts may sometimes offer some social mobility, this effect is very limited and mainly occurs when gaps in bargaining power are less pronounced.
Publisher
Creighton University School of Law