Tool-breaking as day-to-day resistance: a re-examination of evidence

This vigorous challenge to a standard claim in North American slavery studies is guest-posted from H-Slavery by David Paterson of Norfolk, Virginia.

In H-South's review of Stephanie M. H. Camp, Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South, the reviewer stated that"Camp examines how force upheld limits to enslaved people's autonomy of action; more importantly, she considers how bondpeople redefined these limits for themselves. Tool-breaking, foot-dragging and flight were each tactics that allowed for the bending--even the breaking--of the plantation's temporal rules."[1] In fact, Camp's book never mentions tool-breaking, so why did the reviewer feel compelled to mention it?

It has become a commonplace mantra among historians to recite a list of acts of day-to-day resistance that typically includes,"Sabotage of machinery, tools and personal possessions, surreptitious destruction of crops or maiming of animals. . . . feigning ignorance, clumsiness, self-mutilation, and suicide."[2] Indeed, James Oakes states that"the prevalence of day-to-day resistance is no longer in dispute. Slaves engaged in a variety of acts designed to ease their burdens and frustrate their masters' wills. They broke tools, feigned illness, deliberately procrastinated, 'stole' food, and manipulted tensions between master and overseer." Oakes footnote asserts that"the literature on slave resistance is immense" -- but research suggests that the evidence for the first item in his list, tool-breaking, is far from immense.[3] Apparently accepted as beyond dispute, claims that slaves"'accidentally' broke agricultural implements" sometimes don't even merit a footnote.[4] Another historian states that"On the plantations, slave masters saw sabotage everywhere - in broken tools, maimed animals, and burned barns" -- but his citation is to an irrelevant discussion of depredations by runaway slaves and maroons, and never mentions broken tools. The same writer's further insistent that slaves"refused to work, broke tools, burned barns, turned truant" is unfootnoted.[5]

Thanks to innumerable repetitions of the claim, deliberate tool-breaking has become embedded in the popular imagination of resistance to slavery. The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History's popular website includes its version of the mantra:"'Day-to-day resistance' was the most common form of opposition to slavery. Breaking tools, feigning illness, staging slowdowns, and committing acts of arson and sabotage--all were forms of resistance and expression of slaves' alienation from their masters."[6] Doubtless influenced by modern historiography, a middle school student in Florida has imagined the scenario in greater detail:"Sabotage is when slaves would break their tools purposely to get out of doing their work. For example, the slaves would break a hoe and then repair it just enough to look repaired. Then the tool would break when the slave was in the fields, working."[7]

I have followed the footnotes of all secondary sources I could find that offered any citations for tool-breaking. With two exceptions (discussed later), all footnotes eventually lead to only two authorities: Raymond A. Bauer and Alice H. Bauer's 1942 article,"Day to Day Resistance to Slavery," and Kenneth Stampp's 1956 book, _ The Peculiar Institution_.[8]

Bauer and Bauer draw conclusions about tool-breaking from five passages in Olmsted's Journey in the Seaboard States, including Olmsted's quotations of Dr. Samuel Cartright, and a passage in C. G. Parson's 1853 book, Inside view of Slavery.[9] Bauer and Bauer use Olmsted's repeated descriptions of the carelessness and indifference with which slaves wielded their tools. They use Cartright's medical theories as suggesting destructive slave behavior. They quote Parson describing the clumsy hoe typically issued to southern slaves:"as heavy as the woodman's axe. . . . The planters tell us, as the reason for its use, that the negroes would break a Yankee hoe in pieces on the first root, or stone that might be in their way."[10] Bauer and Bauer's conclusions? They found that,"Just how much of this [careless work habits] was due to indifference and how much due to deliberate slowing up is hard to determine." They attributed broken tools and other destruction of property to" careless" handling. Although Bauer and Bauer located"patterns of resistance to slavery," including"destruction of property," they concluded that"The most obvious of the motives [for these patterns] was a desire to avoid work." Bondpeople's behavior was"mainly due to their indifference to their tasks. There is enough evidence that they could, and did, work hard and well when sufficiently motivated."[11]. Nowhere did Bauer and Bauer argue that their evidence proved deliberate tool-breaking and other sabotage, although subsequent historians cite them as if they did.

A contemporary of Bauer and Bauer, Melville Herskovits, reviewing the same Olmsted evidence, cautioned that"These passages must not be regarded as indicating any organized system of sabotage."[12]

Stampp's brief discussion of took-breaking is based solely on his interpretation of one of Dr. Samuel Cartwrights' more bizarre"Negro diseases" and two of the same passages in Olmsted previously used by Bauer and Bauer. Citing Cartwright, Stampp begins by stating,"slaves bedeviled the master by doing careless work and by damaging property." This is indeed supported by Cartwright, but Stampp's next sentence insinuates an opposite meaning into his source from that intended by its text:"They did much of this out of sheer irresponsibility, but they did at least part of it deliberately, as more than one master suspected." Stampp's citation is to Cartwright's exposition of the alleged disease, Dysaethesia Aethiopica that manifested itself in" careless movements of the individuals affected with the complaint, [who] are apt to cause much mischief, which appears as if intentional, but is mostly owing to the stupidness of mind . . . . Thus, they break, waste, and destroy everything they handle. . . . This disease is the natural offspring of negro liberty--the liberty to be idle, to wallow in filth, and to indulge in improper food and drinks." So, one crank physician becomes Stampp's"more than one master" who allegedly"suspected" deliberate sabotage.[13]

Stampp cites Olmsted's general impression, recorded"some weeks" after his tour through the seaboard states, of"implements broken, by careless usage" as proof of deliberate tool-breaking. Stampp adds,"Some masters used only crude, clumsy tools, because they were afraid to give their hands better ones," citing this passge from Olmsted:"it is exceedingly difficult to introduce new and improved methods of applying his [the slave's] labor. He always strongly objects to all new-fashioned implements; and, if they are forced into his hands, will do his best to break them, or to make them only do such work as shall compare unfavorably with what he has been accustomed to do without them.") Stampp fails to note Olmsted's description on the same page of the tool most commonly used on plantations:"The clumsy iron hoe is, almost everywhere, made to do the work of pick, spade, shovel, and plow. I have seen it used to dig a grave. On many plantations, a plow has never been used."[14] Subjected to such usage, it is no wonder that tools occasionally broke.

In their study of slave resistance, Frederickson and Lasch note Stampp's interpretation of Olmsted that slaves engaged in"wilful destruction of the master's property by destroying tools"--but then suggest that"what is taken for sabotage may have originated in apathy and indifference"--exactly what Olmsted had argued![15]

While some antebellum writers blamed the enslaved for broken tools, the quality of those farm implements came in for at least as much criticism. Reviewing some of this commentary, Eugene Genovese finds that tools exported from the North to Southern markets were strikingly inferior in material and workmanship to tools made for the Northern market. Farm tools made by Southern manufacturers were crude and poor quality, but appealed to planters because of their cheap price. According to more than one Southern editor, planters demanded the cheapest goods:"We of the South have a jaundiced eye. Everything we view looks like gold--costly." Genovese's evidence suggests that slaves probably did break tools--not because they deliberately abused them--but because they were using shoddy goods.[16]

It was not only white observers who criticized planters' false economy in buying cheap, inferior farm tools, and using them in inappropriate ways. One of the enslaved criticized the economic rationale of his master to prepare fields with the hoe instead of the plow:"'cause horses more costly to keep than colored folks." In a sentence overlooked by Stampp and Bauer and Bauer, Olmsted attributed the waste produced by slaves to poor management practices characterized by"misapplication of labor which it can never be possible to guard against, when the agents of industry are slaves."[17]

If deliberate tool-breaking were a mainstay of day-to-day resistance, why does the testimony of ex-slaves not give significant evidence of it? George Rawick wrote From Sundown to Sunup from an intimate knowledge of the WPA ex-slave narratives, devoting twenty-four pages to slave resistance; but he included nothing about slaves breaking anything.[18] In contrast, the practice of running away (for example) appears everywhere in primary sources, and has prompted a hefty monograph entirely devoted to the subject.[19] Not so with tool-breaking, even though historians typically cite tool-breaking and running away in the same breath as if they were at least equally prevalent (and since tool-breaking usually precedes running away in a list of acts of resistance, a reader could be forgiven for thinking it was the more common).

Given popular insistence on tool-breaking as day-to-day resistence to slavery, there ought to be indirect evidence in the form of frequent expenses for repair or replacement of these broken tools, especially the much-maligned southern hoes. Paging through hundreds of pages of probate records for Upson County, Georgia, I was surprised by the virtual absence of such evidence. Among scores of blacksmiths' charges for pointing plows and sharpening scooters for dozens of estates, and occasional repairs to log chains, I eventually found on one farm's blacksmith bill (totaling $36.36 for 1848) a charge to"mend 2 weeding hoes 25 [cents]"--but in the same bill, charges for"mend Pot hooks 12 ½ [cents]" and"mending pot rack 12 ½ [cents]." If evidence of broken tools, alone, suggests sabotage, there was as much destruction at this farm's kitchen hearth as in the fields -- but the evidence more easily fits normal wear and tear.[20]

David Brion Davis has reported that, inspired by the work of Herbert Aptheker and Kenneth Stampp,"historians have eagerly looked for more and more examples of revolts, escape, sabotage, work slow-downs, and much else"[21] -- but,especially in the case of sabotage by tool-beaking, have they found any moreexamples? My review of the literature suggests not. Indeed, beyond theOlmsted, Cartwright, and Parson passages cited by Bauer and Bauer in 1942 (three of which were re-used by Stampp), only three historians that I could find claimed to have additional evidence for tool-breaking.

Genovese cites the editor of the Planter's Banner in 1849:"They break and destroy more farming utensils, ruin more carts, break more gates, spoil more cattle and horses, and commit more waste than five times the number of white laborers do." Negroes were (the editor wrote),"heedless botches." Like Dr. Cartwright, however, that editor attributed slaves' wastefulness to a racial inability to learn: a"negro trait."[22] Editorials like this were polemic rather than based on any actual comparative study (southern plantations worked entirely by enslaved whites were unavailable to measure against enslaved black labor). Such statements merely expressed whites' expectations arising from their ideas of black racial inferiority, and as such have no evidentiary value for the motivations or actual actions of slaves.

In Runaway Slaves, Rebels on the Plantation, Loren Schweninger and John Hope Franklin offer their version of the mantra:"Slaves pulled down fences, sabotaged farm equipment, broke implements, damaged boats, vandalized wagons," et cetera -- and they provide a footnote that promises to document"Destructionof property." Disappointingly, that evidence consist[s] of four petitions to state legislatures: two protests against theft and illegal trafficking, and two complaints about livestock destroyed by dogs. There is no evidence for sabotage or tool-breaking in their citation.[23]

In summary, contemporary white and black observers, advocates of the slave economy and critics alike, testify that many southern planters:
(1) used hoes for tasks that required application of brute force, in ways never intended for ordinary hoes used on northern farms,
(2) preferred to invest in human labor in the form of hoe gangs instead of labor-saving technology like horse-drawn plows,
(3) bought inferior quality tools.
It is less surprising that workers may have sometimes broken such tools under such conditions, than that their tools were not more often destroyed!

There are at least two arguments against the speculation that slaves routinely sabotaged agricultural tools. First, while the enslaved did not embrace the master's imperative by willingly exhausting themselves for his enrichment, neither was it usually in their best interest for a master's business to fail. To the enslaved, an owner's bankruptcy meant a failure of much of their own food supply, an end to whatever subsistence goods their owner might dole out to them, and, perhaps most important, inevitable sale and social disruption. Second, recent historiography has gone to great pains to show how slaves negotiated working conditions that gave the master his crop, and gave slaves time, land, and opportunity to cultivate their own crops or make their own goods for sale. While owners compromised the unrealistic demands of their theoretical mastery in the face of slaves' humanity, the enslaved accommodated the reality of slavery's overpowering enforcement in return for a measure of social and economic space in which to enhance their own personal and family welfare. In garden plots, slave families exercised a measure of autonomy over their food supply. If they had deliberately broken their hoes, they would have had no tools for their own work.[24]

Insistence on tool-breaking as"day-to-day resistance" to slavery can be seen as a residual legacy of the historiographical backlash against racial personality theories, such as marred the scholarship of the Phillips and Dunning schools. Phillips, for example, quoted testimony to show that a Negro was happy enough"not to know he had a right to be anything but a slave." Although docile and content, slaves were heavy-handed workers, who could not appreciate the subtleties of good tools:"in the work of a plantation squad no delicate implements could be employed, for they would be broken" from"the crudity of the labor."[25] When Bauer and Bauer wrote their article on day-to-day resistance, their agenda was not to identify rebels on theplantation, but to challenge"the conventional mold of inherent racial differences" that alleged"the Negro's easy adjustment to slavery"--in 1942, it was necessary to counter Phillips' depiction of congenitally happy, child-like denizens of the Old South plantations. Bauer and Bauer insisted that American slaves were discontented and sullen"as any person faced with a disagreeable situation from which he cannot escape will normally be."[26] To make a similar point, Stampp, in his 1956 preface to The Peculiar Institution, felt compelled to assert"the basic irrelevance of race" as an explanation of human behavior, famously declaring,"I have assumed that the slaves were merely ordinary human beings."[27]

Not all antebellum observers, for example, needed one of Dr. Cartwright's"droll" negro diseases to explain why slaves ran away; Olmsted knew it was"the natural instinct of freedom in a man."[28] Perhaps it is too much to expect that we no longer need to assert bondpeoples' human nature, or that people don't like being violently forced to work for others. After all, as late as 1995 a 500-page interpretation of the antebellum South was published to demonstrate that slaves"did not like being slaves."[29] Perhaps some corners of current historiography still need to be diverted from personality theories and racialized influence, but those errors are not corrected by perpetuating a proto-mythology of resistance that conflates the consequences of sullen resentment with deliberate sabotage. Breaking tools may not in the same fictional category as secret"quilt codes," but by overstating a form of resistance that is barely suggested by evidence, we risk romanticizing and oversimplifying enslaved experiences. By attributing behaviours that may not fit the evidence (unless some yet-hidden cache of evidence appears to redeem the idea), we risk retrofitting the enslaved with false models of social and personal behavior that distort the compexity, the subtlety, the individuality (and perhaps even the humanity) of millions of enslaved lives.

David E. Paterson
Norfolk, VA

[1] Review by Tristan Stubbs of Stephanie M. H. Camp, Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South, published on H-South (September, 2006).
[2] Charles E. Orser, Jr., and Pedro P. A. Funari,"The Archaeology of Slavery," World Archaeology 33 (June 2001), 62-3. The identical phrases appear in Rodney D. Coates,"From Civil Rights to Social Justice," in Rodney D. Coates and Rutledge M. Dennis, eds., The New Black: Alternative Paradigms and Strategies for the 21st Century (2007), 59.
[3] James Oakes, Slavery and Freedom: an Interpretation of the Old South (New York: 1990), 138, 227n3.
[4] Peter Kolchin, American Slavery, 1619-1877 (1993), 157.
[5] Ira Berlin, Generations of Captivity: A History of African-American Slaves (Cambridge, Mass.: 2003), 175, 178.
[6] The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. The same statement is cloned at"Digital History."
[7] Rachael F.,"Passive Resistance" (The Benjamin School).
[8] Raymond A. Bauer and Alice H. Bauer,"Day to Day Resistance to Slavery," The Journal of Negro History (Oct. 1942), 338-419; Kenneth Stampp, The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South (New York: 1956; new edition 1989).
[9] Bauer and Bauer, 392-3, 394, 402, and 405. Olmsted quoted and mocked Cartwright's absurd medical theories as"droll" entertainment for his readers (see Olmsted, _Seaboard States_ (New York: 1861), 192-194).
[10] Bauer and Bauer, 402.
[11] Bauer and Bauer, 393, 401, 417-418, and 418.
[12] Melville J. Herkovits, The Myth of the Negro Past (1941; rpt Boston: 1990), 101. [13] Stampp, 101-102.
[14] Stampp, 103; Olmsted 480, 481.
[15] George M. Frederickson and Christopher Lasch,"Resistance to Slavery," Civil War History 4 (December 1967), 317, 318.
[16] Eugene D. Genovese The Political Economy of Slavery: Studies in theEconomy and Society of the Slave South (New York: 1965), 55-57, 56.
[17] Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll, 305; Olmsted, 480.
[18] George P. Rawick, From Sundown to Sunup: The Making of the Black Community (Westport, Conn.: 1972), 95-119.
[19] Loren Schweninger and John Hope Franklin, Runaway Slaves, Rebels on the Plantation (Oxford: 1999).
[20] Upson County, Ga., Record of Vouchers Book A, 380-381 (estate of Caspar Howell).
[21] David Brion Davis,"State of the Field: Slavery" (2004).
[22] Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll, 300.
[23] Schweninger and Franklin, 2, 337n5. These four petitions are extracted at Schweningers"Race and Slavery Petitions Project."
[24] Among the plethora of monographs about slaves' autonomous work activities are: Larry E. Hudson, Jr., To Have and to Hold, Slave Work and family Life in Antebellum South Carolina (Athens: 1997); Loren Schweninger, Black Property Owners in the South, 1790-1915 (Urbana: 1997), 29-60; and Dylan C. Penningroth, The Claims of Kinfolk, African American Property and Community in the Nineteenth-Century South (Chapel Hill, 2003).
[25] Ulrich Bonnell Phillips, American Negro Slavery: A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation regime (1918; rpt Baton Rouge, 1966), 42, 339.
[26] Bauer and Bauer, 418-419.
[27] Stampp, vii.
[28] Olmsted, 191.
[29] John Ashworth, Slavery, Capitalism, and Politics in the Antebellum Republic, Volume I: Commerce and Compromise, 1820-1850 (Cambridge: 1995), 1.