Masters, Slaves, and Exchange: Power’s Purchase in the Old South by Kathleen M. Hilliard (review)

In this important new study, Kathleen M. Hilliard explores the internal economy of the master-slave relationship, revealing the process of resistance and accommodation at paternalism’s core. Using consumption as a lens through which to understand social relations, power, and the struggle for mastery on and off the plantation, Hilliard argues that the fluidity of the internal economy “simultaneously strengthened and attenuated ties between master and slave” (7). Exchange and the burgeoning marketplace of goods at once encouraged slaves to establish connections beyond the plantation and revealed the limits imposed by masters, southern legislatures, and southern society. Masters professed that material exchange displayed their benevolence and reduced slaves’ discontent. Such benevolence, though, often required tremendous expenditure of economic, social, and political capital. In the final analysis, Hilliard contends that the internal economy failed to meet the lofty expectations set by masters and slaves, resulting in an unsatisfying, vexing, and dangerous Faustian bargain for both groups (12).

Hilliard wields an impressive and diverse array of primary sources, including periodicals, travel narratives, court cases, ledgers, memoirs, diaries, and WPA narratives. She centers her study on the period from 1815 to 1860 and on the seaboard states of Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia, contending that paternalism’s genesis in this era and region allows for a robust analysis of how the internal economy of slavery shaped the master-slave relationship. Hilliard begins by exploring whites’ attitudes toward slaves’ financial acumen. Paternalists argued that their oversight of slaves’ consumption provided a degree of material beneficence while ensuring that peddlers, vices, or unscrupulous store owners did not disrupt the master-slave relationship. Furthermore, they averred that because they provided a comfortable subsistence, slaves could freely enjoy the benefits of the market. Indeed, slaveholders hoped that the lure of a well-provisioned store would provide extra incentive for diligent work and allay long-term discontent. Yet slaveholders also worried that profit-driven store owners would sell slaves liquor and encourage theft on plantations, thus undermining a paternalist’s authority over his chattel.

Hilliard notes that for those slaves who possessed money, the market provided tremendous opportunities to explore and exploit. Spending allowed slaves to distinguish themselves from their fellow bondsmen and -women, whether in the form of raiment (notably store-bought), jewelry, food, or tobacco and liquor. In a fascinating analysis of six general-store ledgers across four states, Hilliard demonstrates that slaves spent nearly two-thirds of their money on cloth, clothing, and associated material and less than 9 percent on alcoholic beverages. She further details how slaves saved money, developed a complex system of debt and credit that could be used to acquire goods, stolen and resold for cash, and understood their own values as commodities. The acquisition and exercise of such learned consumer skills leads Hilliard to conclude that “slaves understood, perhaps better than their masters, the risks and realities of marketplace exchange” (181).

Masters used the marketplace to manifest their benevolence, a process Hilliard deftly analyzes. She details the public performances masters devised to affirm the individual relationship between a slave and the master while tethering the slave’s interest to the benevolent master via food, clothing, or money. That performance of material exchange reaffirmed paternalism and slavery on the most personal level. And whether that extra provision should be interpreted as a gift or commodity did not matter; indeed, slaveholders used paternalism to blur that distinction and blunt the alienating aspects of market exchange. Such paternalistic ties, though, were vulnerable to market disruptions and fraught with anxiety, Hilliard notes, for slaveholders found themselves ensnared in a “strangling web of expectation” that slaves often exploited (151).

Hilliard’s study of the internal economy of slavery adds greater nuance to discussions of paternalism, building on the work of Eugene Genovese, Walter Johnson, Lacy Ford, and others, by arguing that market growth amplified the struggle...