Mastered by the Clock: Time, Slavery, and Freedom in the American South

Fred W. Morrison Series in Southern Studies

by Mark M. Smith

Mastered by the Clock is the first work to explore the evolution of clock-based time consciousness in the American South. Challenging traditional assumptions about the plantation economy's reliance on a premodern, nature-based conception of time, Mark M. Smith shows how and why southerners--particularly masters and their slaves--came to view the clock as a legitimate arbiter of time. Drawing on an extraordinary range of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century archival sources, Smith demonstrates that white southern slaveholders began to incorporate this new sense of time in the 1830s. Influenced by colonial merchants' fascination with time thrift, by a long-held familiarity with urban, public time, by the transport and market revolution in the South, and by their own qualified embrace of modernity, slaveowners began to purchase timepieces in growing numbers, adopting a clock-based conception of time and attempting in turn to instill a similar consciousness in their slaves. But, forbidden to own watches themselves, slaves did not internalize this idea to the same degree as their masters, and slaveholders found themselves dependent as much on the whip as on the clock when enforcing slaves' obedience to time. Ironically, Smith shows, freedom largely consolidated the dependence of masters as well as freedpeople on the clock.

Genres: History, American History

325 pages, Kindle Edition

First published October 1, 1997

Reviews

[Alexandra · Rating 5 out of 5]

Capitalism comes for all of us

[Blaine Welgraven · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Once they had created time the tyrant, masters could not depose him. Democratic in his sources Father Time may have been, totalitarian in his rule he nonetheless was."

A masterful examination of the antebellum South's transition from a pre-industrial, diurnal, and seasonal society to one bounded by the more capitalistic (and Northern) constraints of clock-time. Smith effectively highlights the central paradox of the slave-holding South, in that "Once they had come to rely on clock time to regulate slave behavior and plantation affairs, they, like the moderns, found that they could not do without it....time came to master them in turn."

[Danny · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting analysis of southerners adoption of clock time in managing their slave labor. A unique lens by which historians can understand capitalist tendencies in the antebellum south. Definitely a worthwhile read.

[David Nichols · Rating 4 out of 5]

A contribution to the scholarly debate over whether the "Old South" was a modern or traditional society. Following the methodological trail blazed by E.P. Thompson and David Roediger, Smith studies the introduction of the mechanical clock and mechanical work-discipline to the South, and concludes that however much masters wanted to embrace the nineteenth-century ideal of industrial efficiency, their labor system and laborers prevented them from doing so.

Mechanical time entered the South via the post office, steamboat, and railroad in the 1830s and '40s. The master class adopted clocks and watches at the same rate as northern whites and praised the new time discipline in print; they also endeavored to apply clock time to their plantations. However, masters undermined slaves' acceptance of clock time by denying them ownership of watches and by using unannounced inspections to interrupt the routine that mechanical time might otherwise have introduced (and upon which slaves might have learned to depend). Bondsmen thus continued to prefer natural time (measured by the sun and seasons) well into the nineteenth century, and after the Civil War freedmen indicated that they preferred to control their time rather than be paid for it. This was the source - and this is one of the brightest insights in this book - of freedpersons' preference for sharecropping over wage labor, since "share wages...could not be reduced to units of time" and working on shares would not alienate one's time and freedom (164).

This is a cogent and thoughtful book, but not without its flaws. Smith limits his quantitative study of timepiece ownership to "that quintessential southern state, South Carolina" (p. 29), which is actually not a very realistic stand-in for the whole region - certainly not for frontier states like Texas or thickly settled border states like Virginia. Smith also hesitates to speculate about the significance of clock time to African-Americans (he says it's "unclear" what participants in a New Year's ceremony in South Carolina were doing when they portentiously marked out the last minutes of the old year [149]), and his prose is occasionally pretentious: "Once they had created time the tyrant, master could not depose him. Democratic in his sources Father Time may have been, totalitarian in his rule he nonetheless was." (126)

Did I say "pretentious"? I meant "Yoda-esque." Still, I know of no reason why a scholar from the Dagobah system can't write a pathbreaking study of attempted change and cultural resistance in the antebellum South.