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On the Moral Discipline and Treatment of Slaves (February 1836)
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On the Moral Discipline and Treatment of Slaves. Read before the Society for the Advancement of Education at Columbia. February 1836 In 1829 Charles Cotesworth Pinckney (not the Revolutionary founder, but the planter and lieutenant governor of South Carolina from 1832 to 1834) requested that missionaries of the Methodist Church evangelize his slaves. Under the leadership of William Capers, the Methodists began a slave mission that spread from South Carolina to neighboring states.1 A component of this mission was the dispatching of African American preachers to witness to the slaves, a prohibited action. Pinckney supplied a rationale for the mission to his fellow planters in An Address Delivered in Charleston before the Agricultural Society of South Carolina at Its Anniversary Meeting: “Nothing is better calculated to render man satisfied with his destiny in this world than a conviction that its hardships and trials are as transitory as its honors and enjoyments.”2 The goal of rendering slaves more tractable and content persuaded numbers of his auditors, and the 1830s saw many planters welcome the Methodist mission onto the plantations. The Methodists, for their part, were much more concerned with saving souls than instilling docility in their hearers. Herbemont stood among the skeptics of the initiative, believing that a religion that required one to conceive oneself as a vile sinner as a precondition to conversion was scarcely suited to securing the happiness of its adherents. Nor could he imagine the proliferation of African American preachers on the landscape as portending anything other than the spread of dissension and mischief. By 1835 Herbemont had become resigned to the fact that the ruling class of his state would not move toward the dissolution of slavery. Failing universal 1. Donald G. Mathews, “The Methodist Mission to the Slaves, 1829–1844,” Religion and Slavery, ed. Paul Finkelman (New York: Garland, 1989), 615–31. 2. Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, An Address Delivered in Charleston before the Agricultural Society of South Carolina at Its Anniversary Meeting (Charleston, 1829), 10–14. Agrarian Essays 276 manumission, Herbemont believed that humanity dictated that planters must act to maximize the happiness of enslaved African Americans. He conceived that the clearest path to such happiness lay not in perpetual prayer meetings but in reconstituting elements of traditional African culture on the plantation—by permitting slaves their music, dance, and other expressive folkways. The circumstances of this essay’s production were curious. Herbemont had proven the most industrious of the early members of the Society for the Advancement of Learning. The committee empanelled to produce a report on the treatment of slaves had failed to compose their document. Herbemont was added, but his views apparently were so individual that he chose to present them without the consent of the committee chair. Published in Southern Agriculturist 8, no. 2 (February 1836): 70–75. Having been added to the Committee, appointed to present a memoir on the moral discipline and treatment of slaves, in this State, I made inquiries in different parts of the country, as much as my impaired state of health permitted, and I conversed with several gentlemen for the purpose of acquiring information on the subject thus committed to my charge. The Chairman of the Committee being absent from Columbia, in a distant part of the State, I must avail myself of the permission granted us to write either jointly or severally, and I take the latter alternative as the most convenient, under existing circumstances. It is a matter of great regret that I was unable to make my inquiries as numerous , as was desirable, and that those made have been considered very partially. Indeed, I have reason to conclude, that there are very few planters who have any thing like a regular system for either the moral or physical government of their slaves. I shall only mention the fullest and most strongly marked account given me by one of my correspondents.3 He tells me that when he commenced planting, a few years since, he found the plantation which he had inherited from his father, and to which he had added very considerably, both in land and Negroes, in an exceedingly disordered state; or, to use his own strong expression; “found it a wreck in every way.” He found his Negroes, to all appearance, devout religionists. Their practice was to congregate twice a week, besides Sunday mornings.4 From the inquiries he made of his overseers and neighbours, he had many reasons to believe, that no good arose from this course...