Unequal Masters Together

Stephanie McCurry. Masters of Small Worlds: Yeoman Households, Gender Relations, and the Political Culture of the Antebellum South Carolina Low Country. New York: Oxford University Press. 1995. 320pp.

When skewed power relations in a geographic area are physically visible in racial and economic patterns, they can be taken as clear and non-problematic. The antebellum South Carolina Low Country was one of those places. How the small minority of  wealthy white male planters maintained their power over the majority of enslaved African-Americans and the smaller number of white yeoman farmers and women living in the sandy, sparse hills went mostly unexamined by historians until Stephanie McCurry offered this analytical study. Her focus is the work required of the planter elite to maintain their power over the yeoman farmers while simultaneously enlisting their cooperation in the work of sustaining power over the slaves and sustaining the elite's sectional and national political power. McCurry's innovative approach is to examine how this work was accomplished from the perspective of the yeomen farmers themselves. In doing so, she uncovers how the strategies that the planters used empowered the yeomen themselves in their mastery and control over their private households.

McCurry starts with conflicts over the use of common land. Gradually over the antebellum period, legal regulations and court cases on land use moved from supporting shared common land use to granting exclusive rights to the owners of property they had fenced in. As the planters expanded their exclusive rights to the land they had bounded, however, they also granted exclusive, independent control to the yeoman master over his property. Planter and yeoman were mutually bound in maintaining exclusive mastery over their respective, albeit unequal domains.

To enshrine their control over their slaves, planters enacted legislation ensuring non-interference in domestic relations. Again, this legal right to control extended to the poorer neighbor's yeomen's mastery over his own household dependents. Mastery, however, did not come early or easily to the yeomen farmer. Yeomen farmers worked their own fields and beside them, often for decades, were their legally dependent grown sons. By McCurry's definition of a yeomen, there may have been a few of his own slaves in those fields but, more critically, so were his wives and daughters. The latter's presence is the dividing line McCurry draws between yeoman and planter. It was a line no one wanted to acknowledge so the planter elite males were careful to ignore it when they constructed an egalitarian imagery of shared roles and responsibilities as freemen and household masters. 

The imagery was a critical part of the important work of keeping yeomen farmers under control. Yeoman farmers had the capacity, in daily, local interactions, to either assist in maintaining planters' control over their slaves or undermine that control through subversive trafficking with them in liquor and stolen goods. Weaving together inside-the-fence private ownership rights and mastery of domestic relations with inside-the-fence ownership and mastery over slaves, planters tied the yeomen's interests with their own. Anchoring this imagery on religious faith, planter elites created a seamless social fabric.

Turning to "high politics", McCurry sees the same seamlessness. She argues that Low Country and South Carolina politics developed a rhetoric of "conservative Christian Republicanism." Politicians drew on analogies of Christian marriage and wifely dependency with slave ownership and dependency to argue for the rightness of a hierarchical social structure that encompassed both the public and private sphere with white masters, planter and yeoman, in peaceful relations at the top. Political rhetoric drew explicit  connections between the yeoman's rights as master, the yeomen's rights as a white man and the yeomen's need to defend  his household from encroachment with the broader political agenda of mastery over slaves, freemen's rights and defense against national, and particularly anti-slavery, intrusion. Attacks from Unionists or attacks from the North were portrayed, and so perceived, as attacks on the yeoman's private domain.

Taking the perspective of the yeoman farmer gives McCurry's arguments their strength. She shows clearly that political speech drew on domestic relations imagery not as a rhetorical tool but to reinforce the yeoman's personal investment in the defense of the "seamless social fabric" of power and control, private and public. Unfortunately, although she makes assertions otherwise, her view of the role of gender relations is almost exclusively male. To a large extent, this is the nature of using written records as sources in a segment of society where literacy was limited, female literacy especially. She has teased out the male perspective because the written record - court cases and legislation, church sermons and records political speeches and private letters - were written by the literate elite who seldom interacted with the highly circumscribed lives of the lower class women. Traces of their agency and actions may be available (and McCurry does follow them in her later writings) but she does not make their case here.

Maintaining power requires constant work to keep conflicting interests from unraveling, defend attacks from large and small actors and create new connections where damage has occurred. The most successful work is self-sustaining and invisible so that actors retain their sense of independence. McCurry has shown how even power relations that seem "natural" rely on this work and that there are rich historical rewards to analytically pulling the threads from the inside. She does not quite reach her goals of showing all the threads but she achieves her objective to show us how it can be done.