From Overseers to Managers: The Plantation as the Prototypical Capitalist Workplace
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Authors
Hysi, Xhesi
Issue Date
2023-03
Volume
56
Issue
2
Type
Journal Article
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Abstract
INTRODUCTION
This paper takes its cue from the epilogue of Race Unequals-specifically its comparison of relations between overseer and enslaved to those between workers and managers in the modern workplace. The epilogue's focus is a discussion of the Conscription Act, enacted during the Civil War and including a provision exempting overseers of larger plantations (twenty slaves or more) from military service. The Act was later repealed and courts held that overseers could be pressed into service, taking them away from the plantations to which they had been, up to then, considered indispensable. The courts' reasoning in these cases is instructive: it was only natural that if overseers were off to war, all the other members of the plantation-freemen, women, children, disabled soldiers, and of course the enslaved-could easily slip into the overseer role. It would seem that in the eyes of the law, maintaining the business of the plantation was the paramount consideration, independent of who served as its manager. In this sense, the Confederacy was caught between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand was smoothly managing the main source of their wealth, the plantation economy upheld with enslaved labor. On the other hand was the need for enough bodies to win the war that would ensure it could continue to use that enslaved labor. In the end, the Confederacy chose the latter, perhaps wisely determining that losing white overseers was a small sacrifice to make if it meant winning the war. Of course, the Confederacy lost the war. Slavery was abolished, and the country entered a period of Reconstruction, the failures of which eventually ushered in Jim Crow. And while the Civil Rights movement and subsequent passage of the Civil Rights Act attempted to finally ensure the rights of Black people as full citizens, racial discrimination persisted, changing to adapt around the laws that nominally prohibited it, becoming hidden, insidious, yet retaining its destructive force.
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Publisher
Creighton University School of Law