The Overseer: Plantation Management in the Old South (review)

BOOK REVIEWS187 voluntarily they could have lived out peaceful lives as respected citizens within their communities. He attributes to John Newman Edwards major responsibility for laying the basis for the James legend. A wartime adjutant to General Jo Shelby and a popular writer for a number of Missouri newspapers in the postwar years, Edwards served as apologist for Jesse and Frank in his book Noted Guerrillas (1877) and in numerous editorials. He created a vast amount of sympathy among Missourians who had known the suffering and bitterness which had supposedly driven these men to crime. Although the James gang by no means confined its operations to Missouri , activities in that state absorbed much of their energies. Here the band evaded the law for nearly fifteen years, sheltered by a host of relatives , friends, neighbors, and those who feared them—the same elements which had protected and nurtured them when they rode with Quantrill during the war. Here they had their beginnings, and here (with the exception of the Youngers who were captured in Minnesota) their careers ended. Shot in the back while unarmed and unsuspecting, Jesse achieved "martyrdom" at the hands of one of his own band. This act and a series of trials for Frank and other members of the gang became heavily tinged with pohtical overtones in a Missouri whose dominant Democracy was evenly divided between Union and Confederate wings. Out of all this, Settle has produced a volume which should appeal to buff and scholar alike. Certainly he has made a major contribution to a better understanding of one of the most fascinating figures in American WrLLIAM E. Parrish Westminster College The Overseer: Phntation Management in the Old South. By William Kauffman Scarborough. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1966. Pp. xv, 256. $7.50.) This is an important book, for it is the only comprehensive analysis ever attempted of one of the most important functionaries of the plantation system, the overseer. In addition to its wealth of information on the life and labor of overseers in general, this study presents valuable treatises on two exceptional groups within the overseer profession. One of these is the elite minority among overseers, men who themselves eventually rose to become successful planters, or men who made important contributions to the science of agriculture and of plantation management. The other exceptional group discussed here is the stewards, officials who supervised the operations of the ordinary overseers on two or more plantations. By avoiding a priori moralistic conclusions, and by examining the careers of the overseers as they actually appear in their letters and papers, in the plantation records, and in the manuscript census reports, the author 188CIVIL WAR HISTORY has produced a sound study of the characteristics and behavior of the group as a whole. In all instances his findings add depth, substance, or corrective to the generalizations of earlier students of slavery. Professor Scarborough's findings are, in brief, that the great majority of the plantation overseers were native southerners of the yeoman farmer class; that they were men of average competence, humaneness, and conscientiousness; and that they exercised a vital function in the running of the plantations. The author sharpens the effect of his conclusions by presenting them as a countertheme to the Simon Legree tradition about overseers. Unquestionably the overseer has shared with the slave trader the villains role in the abolitionist script of the slavery tragedy; and even as sympathetic a student of the institution as Professor U. B. Phillips described the overseers as being "crude in manner, barely literate, commonplace in capacity, capable only of ruling slaves by severity." Professor Scarborough convincingly challenges this sweeping characterization. Yet, the present book is not so much a ground breaker as it is a cultivator and fertilizer in its reappraisal of the overseer's nature; for many recent students of slavery have reached comparable, if tentative, conclusions. The Overseer is not a sparkling work at any point; and here and there the literary style falls into a pedantic exposition on sources of information and methods of analysis and presentation. But the book is the product of thorough research, and it closes a serious gap in the literature on the...