One of the books that I am currently reading is Julie Flavell’s When London Was Capital of America (Yale University Press, 2010). It’s one of those books that allows you to shift perspective on an important period in American history. In this case Flavell pushes her readers to acknowledge the political and cultural significance that London held for many Americans in the last decade before the Revolution. I always remind my students that our tendency to view the colonists as Americans in waiting obscures the extent to which they tried desperately to remain British. This book is fleshing out that idea for me.
Chapter 2 focuses on the challenges that slaveowners experienced when bringing their property to the metropolis. American slaves were exposed to an entirely new set of conditions and influences, which, in turn challenged and reshaped the master-slave relationship. Flavell structures this chapter around Scipio, who was the slave of Henry Laurens of South Carolina. Scipio changed his name to Robert upon arrival in England. The author uses Robert to discuss stories of runaway slaves as well as the Somerset trial, which resulted in the freedom of one slave. None of this is new to me. What is new to me is Flavell’s discussion of the influence of poor/destitute whites on the perceptions of American slaves:
Back in the colonies there was nothing to equal what Robert saw. What buildings, what monuments, what dress, display and equipage! The townhouses and the plantations of the Carolina rich only gave a foretaste of the reality. But at the same time – what poverty, what deprivation! Even the slave quarters at home probably did not prepare him for what he encountered on his solitary perambulations through the Great City.
What he saw were some of the poorest white people in the empire, degraded, half-starved, stinking and desperate, stripped of all dignity, people whose conditions was enough permanently to change his idea of the white race. ‘[T]hey learn here to despise whites.’ So wrote a West Indian planter of the plantation slaves who were brought to London.
This got me thinking about the extent to which such an analysis may apply to the thousands of slaves, who were present in the Confederate army as personal servants and impressed workers. We’ve discussed how different roles played by slaves in the army challenged and shaped the master-slave relationship, but how did the sight of poor whites contribute to this dynamic? The sight of poor whites and yeoman farmers following orders and, at times, living in squalid conditions may have been a shock for slaves. More specifically, the strict discipline imposed on enlisted men by officers, who were also their social and political superiors in peace time may have challenged slaves’ assumptions about their own place within the antebellum racial hierarchy. How often did slaves see the kind of wartime discipline imposed on white men by other whites before the war? I think this is something that needs to be analyzed much more extensively.
Just a few thoughts on this beautiful Sunday morning.