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32 2 Asking Master Mack to Court Competing Spheres of Influence The emotional lives of the enslaved were significant terrains upon which slaveholders could exercise their sense of mastery and claims of ownership. As has been widely documented elsewhere, slaveholders used threats of sale and separation from family members as a tool to discipline and punish their slave populations. In the process they manipulated the emotional ties of their slaves and ripped apart the individual stitches that made up the quarters of the enslaved : budding romances, established courtships, long-term unions, husbands, wives, families, and friends. Sarah Devereux, in a letter to her brother Thomas, manager of her plantation in Halifax County, demonstrated how the slaveholding classes manipulated the fundamental importance of personal ties to the enslaved and how these ties were used in the plantation system of control and regulation. She wrote of Sally, a female slave: “I have pondered much upon Sallys conduct. . . . I told Sally if such should be the case I would sell her and in the very face of my threat . . . but now it is very hard to sell her, and three children, or without them, I am much perplexed and do not know what is my duty.” Sarah Devereux decided to devolve this “duty” to her brother, leaving the final decision of Sally’s future in his hands. She told him, “[I]f you think it best to make her an example sell her, you spoke of selling some of yours and may include her if you think best.”1 Sarah Devereux’s belief that selling Sally would make an example of her, underlines the fact that slaveholders used the threat of sale, as well as the fear of being hired out or moving from housework to fieldwork, as a means to regulate the behavior of their entire slave labor force. Despite the slaveholders’ manipulation and thus recognition of the emotional life of their slaves, slaveholders still defined their labor force as property first and foremost. Almost always the needs and interests of the enslaved were bypassed for the sake of the financial interest of the slaveholder. Ben Johnson, who was formerly enslaved to Gilbert Gregg in Orange County, recalled how his brother, Jim, was sold away from him to secure the money to dress the young mistress of the plantation for her wedding day. He remembered that he had sat under a tree and watched as they had sold him away; “I set dar an’ I cry an’ cry, Competing Spheres of Influence 33 ’specially when dey puts de chains on him an’ carries him off, an’ I ain’t neber felt so lonesome in my whole life.”2 The formerly enslaved Moses Grandy recalled how his wife was sold away after they had been married only eight months: “I have never seen or heard of her from that date to this. I loved her as I loved my life.”3 Heart-wrenching tales of lost love litter the collective memories of enslavement in the South. “Mammy says he don’t come home. The next night is the same, and the next. From then on, mammy don’t see him no more—never find out what happen to my pappy.”4 The limited possibilities of being reunited left many in despair. “I waited an’ I watched, but I didn’ hear nuffin. . . . I wus ’fraid de paterollers done kotch him, or maybe he done foun’ some gal he lak better dan he do me. So I begin to ’quire ’bout him an’ foun’ dat his marster dine sol’ him to a white man what tuck him ’way down yonder to Alabama. . . . I grieved fo’ dat nigger so dat my heart wuz heavy in my breas’. I knowed I would never see him no mo.”5 Recollections such as this were all too familiar among the formerly enslaved as slaveholders and traders both sought profit from dealing in a trade of human beings. Other slaves were given away to their master’s children and near relatives as wedding presents or as part of the marriage portion. New Yorker Sarah Hicks Williams believed that her mother-in-law was spiteful toward her because, as a northerner, Sarah brought no slaves to her marriage to southern slaveholder and physician Dr. Benjamin Williams in 1853. She wrote that her mother-in-law would “never forgive Ben for not marrying niggers, never, never, never!”6 The slave then was considered as a necessary...

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