Mastered by the Clock: Time, Slavery, and Freedom in the American South

Over the last decade or so historians have increasingly turned their attention to the impacts that concepts of time and its use had on Americans during the United States’ transformation from a colonial, preindustrial society to an independent nation moving inexorably along a continuum toward industrialization. Most of those studies focused on how that transformation played out in the North, especially in New England. Of the relatively few historians addressing issues of time in the South, several appeared to agree with David Hackett Fischer (Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America [New York: Oxford University Press, 1989]) that southern attitudes toward time and work reflected at best only a pale replica of the well-developed time ethos emerging in the North.

Mark Smith challenges this view in his fascinating book, Mastered by the Clock. He is the first to construct a comprehensive study of time throughout the plantation South, aiming to discover “how clock time came to be in the South, its impact on master and slave, and its meaning for our assessment of the Old South” (p. 2). Yet his research goes beyond simply masters and slaves. He brings urban artisans, nonslaveholding farmers, and freed blacks into the mix as well.

Smith begins his study by confronting modernization theory and the theoretical debate over what constitutes capitalism to explain why “the historical study of time in the South still rests on the tacit assumption that clock time was alien to the region” (p. 9). He suggests five reasons why historians have viewed colonial and antebellum southerners as imbued with a premodern and largely natural time orientation. First, some have presumed that slave resistance to the imposition of time work made clock time irrelevant for southerners in general. Second, historians have tried to fit the South too neatly into modernization theory, which sees capitalism and a modern time sensibility marching forward hand in hand, resulting in an ingrained time consciousness for both factory managers and workers. Third, many historians have assumed that few if any mechanical timepieces existed in the antebellum South. Fourth, the tendency to overstate the influence of nature and seasonal rhythms on antebellum southern time sensibilities has tended to blind many historians to the emergence of a clock-driven time awareness that was present in the eighteenth century and escalated during the nineteenth. Fifth, historians have failed to recognize that natural time and mechanical time are not mutually exclusive, but are indeed complementary.

Smith challenges these misconceptions in his assertion that “the slave South was one of the few rural regions of the nineteenth-century world to be affected by a modern clock consciousness with only parts of the rural North having a similarly advanced understanding of time” (p. 16). This was true, he argues, because the slave South embraced all the forces promoting time discipline in other nineteenth-century societies. Moreover, the absence of free wage labor in factory or agricultural contexts did not diminish the formation of that time discipline.

The evidence presented in Mastered By the Clock makes it difficult to refute Smith’s assertion. In chapter 1 he traces the development of public and private time in the South. Public sources of time, such as church clocks and bells and sundials, appeared in both rural and urban areas throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. And privately owned clocks and watches made in the North or imported from England were purchased by a significant number of white southerners, including urban merchants and nonslaveholders as well as plantation masters. After the 1830s, as is described in chapter 2, clock time became an increasingly powerful partner in its triad relationship with sacred and natural time. The result was crucial: “Planters from the 1830s on inherited not only colonial merchants’ imported clocks and watches, but perhaps more important, an equation of time with money and an attendant...