A comprehensive exploration of a bizarre, contested murder in the
plantation South on the eve of the Civil War..Wayne ("The Reshaping
of Plantation Society", not reviewed) describes an incident that
obliquely dramatizes the cruelties and absurdities of the "peculiar
institution." Shortly after overseer Duncan Skinner was reported
missing by the slaves of Clarissa Sharpe's plantation, a search
party was organized and Skinner was found dead, apparently killed
in a riding accident (or so a coroner's jury concluded). But local
planters soon discovered that all the slaves believed a different
story: namely, that three male slaves had killed the overseer for
his money and arranged the scene. The three killers were accorded
representation in what was essentially a show trial, and were then
hanged. The local planters, however, attributed the conspiracy to a
non-slave - owning white carpenter, John McAllin, who was believed
to have had designs on Miss Sharpe. They subsequently threatened
him with retaliatory violence via a newspaper ad that urged him to
leave town. McAllin in turn asserted his innocence in an equally
fiery ad that put the planters in an untenable position, as it
struck at the severe class differences between slaveholders and
white laborers in the antebellum South. At the time, McAllin's
culpability was generally accepted. Using many obscure
primary-source documents, Wayne debates this thesis, pursuing
alternative explanations that centered upon the need of pro-slavery
whites to manipulate perceptions of their African chattel as
alternately childlike and brutal, and maintain their authority over
the restive group of impoverished whites represented by McAllin. He
astutely concludes that Southern whites "held to contradictory
interpretations of black character and drew on them as
circumstances and their own psychological needs dictated." .A
fascinating history that faces still-difficult questions of
injustice and responsibility.. (Kirkus Reviews)
Reopening an investigation into the death of a plantation overseer (Duncan Skinner) almost a century and a half ago, Death of an Overseer is part murder mystery, part essay on the art of historical detection, and part seminar on the history of the slavery and the Old South. In this skillfully written book, Michael Wayne uses a complex murder case to teach readers the art of historical evidence and allows them to weigh competing interpretations and come to their own conclusions.
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