Overseer (slavery)

“ But what would the slaves gain, if they should appeal to the master? He has placed the overseer over them, with the understanding that he will make as large a crop as possible, and that he is to have entire control, and manage them according to his own judgment. Now suppose that in the midst of the season, the slaves make complaint of cruel treatment. The master cannot get along without an overseer—it is perhaps very sickly on the plantation he dare not risk his own life there. ”

“ If the visitor traverses the plantation, care is taken that he does not go alone; if he expresses a wish to see it, the horses are saddled, and the master or his son gallops the rounds with him; if he expresses a desire to see the slaves at work, his conductor will know where to take him, and when, and which of them to show; the overseer, too, knows quite too well the part he has to act on such occasions, to shock the uninitiated ears of the visitors with the shrieks of his victims. ”

“ If a slave says he is very ill, the overseer is unwilling to believe the story, because he is reluctant to lose a day’s labor. If the poor creature droops under his allotted task, he must be stimulated by the whip, because the overseer cannot spare an hour of his exertions. ”

“ Here comes the mother, with her children; she does not know whether herself, or children, or all of them, must take the lash; they cannot weigh the cotton themselves—the whole must be trusted to the overseer. While the weighing goes on, all is still. So many pounds short, cries the overseer, and takes up his whip, exclaiming, 'Step this way, you d—n lazy scoundrel, or bitch.' The poor slave begs, and promises, but to no purpose. The lash is applied until the overseer is satisfied. ”

“ I heard an overseer boasting to this same master that he gave one of the boys seventy lashes, for not doing a job of work just as he thought it ought to be done. The owner of the slave appeared to be pleased that the overseer had been so faithful. The apology they make for whipping so cruelly is, that it is to frighten the rest of the gang. The masters say, that what we call an ordinary flogging will not subdue the slaves; hence the most cruel and barbarous scourgings ever witnessed by man are daily and hourly inflicted upon the naked bodies of these miserable bondmen ”

“ When we reached the house of the overseer, the coloured people were coming in from the field, and with them came the overseer, and another man, better dressed than overseers usually are.
I stood at some distance from these gentlemen, not thinking it prudent to be too forward amongst strangers. The black people were all called together, and the overseer told them, that some one of them had stolen a fat hog from the pen, carried it to the woods, and there killed and dressed it ”

“ The overseer who should permit the people under his charge to go about the neighbourhood without a pass, would soon lose his character, and no one would employ him; nor would his reputation less certainly suffer in the estimation of the planters, were he to fall into the practice of granting passes, except on the most urgent occasions; and for purposes generally to be specified in the pass.
A cotton planter has no more idea of permitting his slaves to go at will, about the neighbourhood on Sunday, than a farmer in Pennsylvania has of letting his horses out of his field on that day. ”

“ The great mass of the slaves are under drivers and overseers. I never saw an overseer without a whip; the whip usually carried is a short loaded stock, with a heavy lash from five to six feet long. When they whip a slave they make him pull off his shirt, if he has one, then make him lie down on his face, and taking their stand at the length of the lash, they inflict the punishment. ”

“ One of the first circumstances that opened my eyes to the cruelty and wickedness of slavery, and the heartlessness of my old master, was the refusal of the latter to interpose his authority, to protect and shield a young woman, who had been most cruelly abused and beaten by his overseer in Tuckahoe. This overseer—a Mr. Plummer—was a man like most of his class, little better than a human brute; and, in addition to his general profligacy and repulsive coarseness, the creature was a miserable drunkard. ”

“ Philemon Bliss, Esq, of Elyria, Ohio, who lived in Florida, in 1834-5, says,
"It is common for owners of plantations and slaves, to hire overseers to take charge of them, while they themselves reside at a distance. Their wages depend principally upon the amount of labor which they can exact from the slave. The term "good overseer," signifies one who can make the greatest amount of the staple, cotton for instance, from a given number of hands, besides raising sufficient provisions for their consumption. He has no interest in the life of the slave. ”

“ They are constantly taking advantage of the defects of the system, which are many, and while they demand to the last grain's weight "the pound of flesh," they are utterly unwilling to yield the requirements which the law makes of them. Where you find an overseer endeavoring in every way to overreach the apprentices, taking away the privileges which they enjoyed during slavery, and exacting from them the utmost minute and mite of labor, there you will find abundant complaints both against the master and the apprentice. ”

“ In this transaction the overseer acted with entire fairness to the people who worked for him; and with the exception of the moral turpitude of violating the Sabbath, in this shameful manner, the business was conducted with propriety.
I must here observe, that when the slaves go out to work for wages on Sunday, their employers never flog them; and so far as I know never give them abusive language. I have often hired myself to work on Sunday, and have been employed in this way by more than twenty different persons, not one of whom ever insulted or maltreated me in any way. ”

“ The overseer on the plantation, was very hard on the slaves and practiced striking them across the back with a whip when he wanted to spur them on to do more work.
Irene says, one day a crowd of women were hoeing in the field and the overseer rode along and struck one of the women across the back with the whip, and the one nearest her spoke and said that if he ever struck her like that, it would be the day he or she would die. The overseer heard the remark and the first opportunity he got, he rode by the woman and struck her with the whip and started to ride on. ”

“ On some estates, the overseers are required to prohibit the people from going to meeting off the plantation, at any time, under the severest penalties. White preachers cannot come upon the plantations, to preach to the people, without first obtaining permission of the master, and afterwards procuring the sanction of the overseer. No slave dare leave the plantation to which he belongs, a single mile, without a written pass from the overseer, or master ”

“ There is a hard struggle on the part of the pro-slavery faction to compel the negro to work for little or nothing, in order that the attorneys and overseers may keep their places as before; and I am informed, by a gentleman whose veracity is not to be doubted, and who is himself an attorney, that he can still keep his overseer and merchant as in former days, draw his own commissions, and send home to his employer a very handsome surplus. ”

“ My master gave me better clothes than the little slaves of my age generally received in Calvert, and often told me that he intended to make me his waiter, and that if I behaved well I should become his overseer in time. These stations of waiter and overseer appeared to me to be the highest points of honour and greatness in the whole world, and had not circumstances frustrated my master's plans, as well as my own views, I should probably have been living at this time in a cabin on the corner of some tobacco plantation. ”

“ If planters were to give overseers a stated salary, without regard to the amount of produce, the overseers (who are proverbially unprincipled men) would have no motive for consulting the interest of their employers—it would be a matter of indifference to them whether much or little work were done. To obviate this difficulty, it is customary to give the overseer a certain proportion of the profits of the plantation. Of course, it becomes his ruling desire to get the greatest possible amount of work done. He does not care how much the soil is exhausted, nor how much the negroes are broken down. ”

“ If the slaves numbered several score the master and his family might live in leisure comparative or complete, while delegating the field supervision to an overseer, aided perhaps by one or more slave foremen. When an estate was inherited by minor children or scattered heirs, or where a single proprietor had several plantations, an overseer would be put into full charge of an establishment so far as the routine work was concerned; and when the plantations in one ownership were quite numerous or of a great scale a steward might be employed to supervise the several overseers. ”

“ The overseer was paid, housed, fed, and waited upon, all at the expense of master and slave, beside; keeping a fine stud of horses, and as many brood mares at pasture on the property as would enable him to dispose of seven or eight prime mules annually; and so long as he drove and tormented the poor negro, and made good crops for the attorney's commissions, and supplied his horses with corn, these little perquisites were never discovered. Now the proprietor will hardly pay for more labor than is absolutely necessary to grow and manufacture the produce of his estate ”

“ When I arrived at the quarter, whither I repaired, in obedience to the orders I received, I found the overseer with my master's eldest son, and a young white man, who had been employed to repair the cotton-gin, waiting for me. I observed when I came near the overseer, that he looked at me very attentively, and afterwards called my young master aside, and spoke to him in a tone of voice too low to be heard by me. The white gentlemen then mounted their horses, and set off by the road for the cabin of the white man. ”

“ No white man belonged to the plantation. Her slaves were under the care of an overseer who came once a week to give orders, and settled the score laid up against such as their mistress thought deserved punishment, which was from twenty-five to thirty lashes on their naked backs, with a whip which the overseer generally brought with him. ”

“ The overseer will not be expected to work in the crop, but he must constantly with the hands, when not otherwise engaged in the employer's business, and will be required to attend on occasions to any pecuniary transactions connected with the plantation. ”

“ But the employer will question any negro, if confidence can be placed in him, without giving him cause of suspicion, about all matters connected with the plantation, if he has any reason to believe that all things are not going on right.
Rule 7th. As the employer pays the overseer for his time and attention, it is not to be expected he will receive much company.
Rule 8th. As the employer employs an overseer, not to please himself, but the employer, it will be expected that he will attend strictly to all his instructions. ”

“ My young master preferred the former alternative; my old master adopted the latter. We now began to taste a little of the horrors of slavery; so that many of the slaves ran away, which had not been the case before. My master employed an overseer also, about this time, which he always refused to do previously, preferring to take charge of us himself; but the clamor of the neighbors was so great at his mild treatment of his slaves, that he at length yielded to the popular will around him, and went "with the multitude to do evil," and hired an overseer, This was an end of our favorable treatment ”

“ In not a few instances, where the overseer is particularly harsh and cruel, the negroes have thrown up their old grounds, and taken new ones on other plantations, where the overseer is better liked, or gone into the depths of the mountain forests, where no human foot has been before them, and there cleared up small plats. ”

“ Your overseer carried their straps with them. They had 'em with 'em all the time. Just like them white folks do down to the County Farm. Used to use a man just like he was a beast. They'd make him lay down on the ground and whip him. ”

“ A neighbor of mine, who has been an overseer in Alabama, informs me, that there they ascertain how much labor a slave can perform in a day, in the following manner. When they commence a new cotton field, the overseer takes his watch, and marks how long it takes them to hoe one row, and then lays out the task accordingly. My neighbor also informs me, that the slaves in Alabama are worked very hard; that the lash is almost universally applied at the close of the day, if they fail to perform their task in the cotton-picking season. ”

“ De morning I was going to be born de overseer began to fight my mother and a colored man took a hoe and said if the man hit her again he would knock his brains out. The overseer had been at this place for four years and had not been paid. ”

“ We had a overseer back on Colonel Threff's plantation and my [Pg 7] mother said he was the meanest man on earth. He'd jest go out in de fields and beat dem niggers, and my mother told me one day he come out in de field beating her sister and she jumped on him and nearly beat him half to death and old Master come up jest in time to see it all and fired dat overseer. Said he didn't want no man working fer him dat a woman could whip. ”