The Chamel House

Abstract Callousness, not paternalist benevolence, was the hallmark of many American masters’ relation to their slaves. Edwin Epps, a small Louisiana cotton farmer in 1850, brutally flogged a helpless slave woman Patsey of whom he was sexually jealous, and stabbed the unoffending elderly slave Abram during one of Epps’s regular drunken fits. The rich and genteel Louisiana planter Bennet Barrow and his neighbor Ruffin exhibited their own heartlessness in pursuing Ruffin’s fugitive slave with dogs, twice ordering the beasts to chew the black man when they caught him. When the dogs had tracked the fugitive, they soon “had him up & a going, And never in my life did I ever see as excited beings as R[uffin] and myself, ran 1/2 miles & caught him. Dogs soon tore him naked, took him Home Before the other negro[es] at dark & made the dogs give him another over hauling.”1 The savagery of an Epps or a Barrow was not uncommon in the burgeoning Southwest, where the mid-nineteenth-century cotton boom impelled masters to push their slaves ruthlessly. But well-bred planters on the long-settled Atlantic coast could have been expected to display a more benevolent spirit than those of the South-west. The Atlantic coast was the stronghold of paternalist ideology, and one might have supposed that the masters’ conduct there would reflect their paternalist rhetoric.