5 - Managing Newcomers
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 December 2014
Summary
I suppose I had the misfortune to get a run of bad masters.
Former slave migrant John Brown, 1855Andrew Crane, a starting sugar planter in southern Louisiana in the 1840s and 1850s, had a reputation for being a tough master. Part of the problem lay in his frugality. During his first few years as a cane producer Crane had difficulties enough simply keeping his business afloat, a predicament that encouraged him to drive his slaves as hard as possible and skimp on their material conditions to save on costs. Indeed, he embarked on his new career in 1849 with only nine slaves, the bare minimum for a crop that was extremely intensive in both labor and capital, and thus usually produced on a far more vast scale. To augment his labor force, Crane secured the necessary credit to gradually purchase more slaves over time, and he also regularly hired local slaves from his neighbors, but his management style remained unchanged and made him deeply unpopular with the bondspeople who toiled under his watch. Whether they were owned or hired by him, records reveal that the slaves who worked for Crane despised him. Runaways were frequent. In 1851 alone, two newly purchased slaves fled, burdening him not only with the loss of their labor but also the costs for newspaper advertisements and jail fees for their recovery. Crane’s reputation as a harsh master even irritated some of his peers, especially those who were in the habit of hiring out their slaves to him. E. Herbert, who regularly hired out his slaves to Crane during the fall and winter months, wrote to his fellow slaveholder in 1858: “[My girl Emma] complains mightily about your feeding, if it is so my girl shall not pass the grinding season at your house. As for the rest of my boys, I have already hired them at Mrs. Heidi Nichols. I was to hire them to you, but they told me they would go anywhere before they would to you.…I hired them according to their wishes.”
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- Slavery and Forced Migration in the Antebellum South , pp. 173 - 217Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2014
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