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

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.