Money over Mastery tells the story of slavery’s terrible trade-offs in a place long thought to be on the road to freedom. Enslaved people living in the upper reaches of the American South faced a grim prospect: sale and removal to the Deep South cotton frontier. To keep their families together they networked and earned money to keep loved ones off the auction block and out of the human caravans that carried one in three away from family members in the 1830s and bound away one in five during the two generations before the Civil War.
Once a sleepy plantation society, the region from the Chesapeake Bay to coastal North Carolina modernized and diversified its economy in the years before the Civil War. Central to this industrializing process was slave labor. Money over Mastery, Family over Freedom tells the story of how slaves seized opportunities in these conditions to protect their family members from the auction block.
The book argues that the African American family provided the key to economic growth in the antebellum Chesapeake. To maximize profits in the burgeoning regional industries, enslavers hired out enslaved workers, which tended to scatter family members. From each generation, they also selected the young, fit, and fertile for sale or removal to the cotton South. Conscious of this pattern, the enslaved were sometimes able to negotiate mutually beneficial labor terms―to save their families despite that new economy.
Moving focus away from the traditional master-slave relationship in a staple-crop setting, Money over Mastery demonstrates through extensive primary research that the slaves in the upper South were integral to the development of the region’s modern political economy, whose architects embraced invention and ingenuity even while deploying slaves to shoulder the burdens of its construction, production, and maintenance.
Money over Mastery, Family over Freedom proposes a new way of understanding the violence of slavery and the choiceless choices families faced. Rather than work against it, as one might suppose, enslaved people engaged with the market somewhat as did free Americans. Enslaved people focused their energy and attention, however, not on making money, as enslavers increasingly did, but on keeping their children and other loved ones out of the human coffles of the slave trade.
Johns Hopkins University Press: Money over Mastery
Calvin Schermerhorn 