Mastered by the Clock

Time, Slavery, and Freedom in the American South

Mark M. Smith

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2000
• Print ISBN: 9780807846933, 9780807823446
• eBook ISBN: 9780807864579
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

Mastered by the Clock is the first work to explore the evolution of clock-based time consciousness in the American South. Challenging traditional assumptions about the plantation economy’s reliance on a premodern, nature-based conception of time, Mark M. Smith shows how and why southerners — particularly masters and their slaves — came to view the clock as a legitimate arbiter of time. Drawing on an extraordinary range of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century archival sources, Smith demonstrates that white southern slaveholders began to incorporate this new sense of time in the 1830s. Influenced by colonial merchants' fascination with time thrift, by a long-held familiarity with urban, public time, by the transport and market revolution in the South, and by their own qualified embrace of modernity, slaveowners began to purchase timepieces in growing numbers, adopting a clock-based conception of time and attempting in turn to instill a similar consciousness in their slaves. But, forbidden to own watches themselves, slaves did not internalize this idea to the same degree as their masters, and slaveholders found themselves dependent as much on the whip as on the clock when enforcing slaves' obedience to time. Ironically, Smith shows, freedom largely consolidated the dependence of masters as well as freedpeople on the clock.

Notes

ABBREVIATIONS

Am. Sl.

The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography. Edited by George P. Rawick, 1st and 2d series, 19 vols., continuously numbered (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1972); 1st supplement series, 12 vols. (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1977); 2d supplement series, 10 vols. (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1979).

AWD

American Women’s Diaries (Southern Women) (New Canaan, Conn.: Readex Film Products, 1993)

DBR

De Bow’s Review

DU

Duke University, William R. Perkins Library, Manuscript Department, Durham, N.C.

FR

Farmers’ Register

LC

Library of Congress, Manuscript Division, Washington, D.C.

MESDA

Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts, Research Center, Winston-Salem, N.C.

RASP

Kenneth M. Stampp, ed. Records of Ante-Bellum Southern Plantations from the Revolution through the Civil War. Part 1 (15 microfilm reels); series A, part 2 (26 microfilm reels); series F, part 2 (16 microfilm reels); series J, part 2 (41 microfilm reels), (Frederick and Bethesda, Md.: University Publications of America, 1985).

RB

Rose Bud, or Youth’s Gazette

SCDAH

South Carolina Department of Archives and History, Columbia, S.C.

SCHS

South Carolina Historical Society, Charleston, S.C.

SCL

South Caroliniana Library, University of South Carolina, Columbia, S.C.

SHC

Southern Historical Collection, Manuscript Department, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, N.C.

So. Ag.

Southern Agriculturalist, and Register of Rural Affairs

So. Cab.

Southern Cabinet

So. Cult.

Southern Cultivator

So. Pl.

Southern Planter

So. Ro.

Southern Rose/Southern Rosebud

SPF

Southern Planter and Farmer

TF

Tennessee Farmer

VHS

Virginia Historical Society, Richmond, Va.

INTRODUCTION

1. Olmsted, Cotton Kingdom, 158, 190. The specifics of his latter observation are not without foundation. About eighty years later, former slave Martha Spence Bunton recalled, “About twelb o’clock de men would unhitch de mules, and wait fo’ us.” See Am. Sl., supp. ser. 2, vol. 2, Texas narrs., pt. 1, 521.

2. Thrift, “Owners’ Time and Own Time,” 57. On the evolution of an industrial-urban nineteenth-century time consciousness in these countries see Thompson, “Time, Work-Discipline”; Behagg, “Controlling the Product”; Gutman, “Work, Culture, and Society”; Hensley, “Time, Work, and Social Context in New England”; Davison, Unforgiving Minute; Atkins, The Moon Is Dead!; and her “‘Kafir Time.’”

3. Although he does not make the comparative point, Martin Bruegel notes a rural time consciousness in the Hudson Valley after the 1830s especially. See his “‘Time That Can Be Relied Upon.’” For the comparative analysis see Mark M. Smith, “Old South Time in Comparative Perspective.” Whether rural British laborers remained impervious to clock time is unclear. It appears that as long as the indigenous peoples of Natal and Australia remained in their rural environment, an environment where cultural values about time dictated that they appeal to naturally defined time, they were able to resist the efforts of European colonizers to convert them to time discipline and clock-defined time. See, too, Hall, Dance of Life, 3–4; Atkins, The Moon Is Dead!, 95; Davison, Unforgiving Minute, 8–9, 27–31.

4. See, for example, the perceptive remarks in Adam, Timewatch, esp. 86–91. For an excellent review of how Karl Marx, Max Weber, Werner Sombart, Gustav Bilfinger, Lewis Mumford, Marc Bloch, and Yves Renouard, among others, have variously dealt with clock consciousness and its relationship to modernity, see Dohrn-van Rossum, History of the Hour, 8–15.

5. Consult esp. Le Goff, “Merchant’s Time and Church’s Time in the Middle Ages”; Thrift, “Owners’ Time and Own Time.”

6. Landes, Revolution in Time. See also the discussion in Rezsoházy, “Concept of Social Time,” esp. 31–32.

7. See, for example, Genovese and Fox-Genovese, Fruits of Merchant Capital; Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll.

8. See esp., Oakes, Ruling Race. The main positions in the debate, at least by the mid-1970s, are usefully reviewed in Wallerstein, “American Slavery and the Capitalist World Economy.” A broader and more recent review is Merrill, “Putting ‘Capitalism’ in Its Place.”

9. This position is best stated in Fogel and Engerman, Time on the Cross.

10. As wonderfully argued in Genovese, Slaveholders’ Dilemma.

11. Ibid.

12. See Nyland, “Capitalism and the History of Worktime Thought,” 516. See, too, the summary by Lane, “Meanings of Capitalism.” For a historian who conflates the premodern with the preclassical arguments of George Fitzhugh, for example, see Wenzel, “Pre-Modern Concepts.” Genovese himself has written that “no one would argue that a strong dose of capitalism did not exist in the South. The argument turns on the proportions and their significance.” A modern time consciousness was both preponderant and significant in the Old South. Quotation from Genovese, “Marxian Interpretations of the Slave South,” 119. Much has been written on the relationship of slavery to capitalism. Useful theoretical statements may be found in Miles, Capitalism and Unfree Labour; Padgug, “Problems in the Theory of Slavery”; and, more generally, Danilova, “Controversial Problems of the Theory of Precapitalist Societies.” Of the more useful attempts to characterize southern planters, one is by Shearer Davis Bowman, who, borrowing Jürgen Kocka’s distinction, suggests that planters were capitalists but not modern industrial ones. With regard to clock time in the South, however, the formulation breaks down not least because industrial time and southern agricultural time were more similar than they were distinct. For further details see Bowman, Masters and Lords, 95–96, 100. See, too, Post, “American Road to Capitalism.” In many respects, it might be more useful to follow through with Bowman’s formulation of describing various capitalisms and conceive of the Old South as embracing what I have elsewhere termed plantation capitalism. See Mark M. Smith, “Time, Slavery and Plantation Capitalism.”

13. On sympathetic views of the laborer and his acquisitive nature before 1750 as well as for vestiges of mercantilist views after, see Coates, On the History of Economic Thought, 1:63–85, 159–85. Also useful, if not altogether in agreement with Coates, is the classic by Furniss, Position of the Laborer. For a detailed examination of the American context, see Crowley, This Sheba, Self. Thomas R. Dew and Thomas Cooper, especially, ranked among the qualified fans of Smithian political economy. The more representative views of George Fitzhugh, however, remained steadfastly opposed. See Shore, Southern Capitalists, esp. 24–29.

14. On incentives under slavery see, generally, Fogel and Engerman, Time on the Cross. More recent work by econometricians suggests that the whip was masters’ preferred tool to induce labor. See Crawford, “Punishments and Rewards.” For arguments that the two systems of incentive and coercion were not mutually exclusive, however, see Fogel, “Moral Aspects.” I do not wish to minimize the racial aspect of southern slavery but merely aim to highlight how inextricable race and class were to southern planters. While masters often deemed blacks to be incapable of hard, independent work, they also shared the pre-Smithian conviction that all workers were slothful. I can think of no better short illustration of this than the observations of one South Carolina planter whose assessment of emancipation was typical of the general distrust of all laboring classes. In 1866 he wrote: “I determined that negroes like white people would work only from necessity.” Quoted in Foner, Nothing but Freedom, 83, and esp. 15. Generally, consult the wise words in Fields, “Slavery, Race and Ideology.”

15. Quoted in Nguyen, “Spatialization of Metric Time,” 36; McKendrick, “Josiah Wedgewood and Factory Discipline.”

16. Brody, “Time and Work,” esp. 38–39.

17. On various discipline and incentive systems in an industrial context, see Gregory Clark, “Factory Discipline,” esp. 128–37. That the northern wage fine for tardiness had its rough equivalent in the southern whip, see Mark M. Smith, “Old South Time in Comparative Perspective.” For parallel developments involving race and class see the trenchant essay by Cooper, “Colonizing Time,” esp. 210, 222, 229, 238–40.

18. On the shared class interests of both groups, see Lynd, “On Turner, Beard, and Slavery”; and the evidence in Sinha, “Counter-Revo...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Mastered by the Clock
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Figures
• Tables
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• I Times Democratic
• II Taming Time’s Pinions, Weaving Time’s Web
• III Apostles of Progress, Agents of Time
• IV Master Time, 1750–1865
• V Time in African American Work and Culture
• VI New South, Old Time
• Epilogue
• Appendix
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index