Crafting the Overseer's Image (Studies in Rhetoric/Communication)

An interpretation of the personal, professional, and public personas of an antebellum figure

Though overseers played crucial roles in managing and perpetuating the plantation culture of the American South, they remain shadowy figures on an otherwise widely studied landscape. In Crafting the Overseer's Image, William E. Wiethoff illumines the rhetoric surrounding a class of workers whom historians often have relegated to the periphery. Comparing conventional notions about these supervisory figures with slave narratives, planters' correspondence, enacted statutes, and case law, Wiethoff maps the distance between historical reality and perception in public memory.

In this wide-ranging yet detailed analysis, Wiethoff canvasses the period from 1650 through 1865 across a southern expanse that stretches to include the Upper and Deep South as well as jurisdictions west of the Mississippi. Overseers left scant written evidence about their lives and times, but Wiethoff unearths characterizations constructed by friends and enemies, neighbors and strangers. He also mines the legal record to gauge the impact of legislative and case law rhetoric on public memory.

Wiethoff explores three dimensions of the overseers image―personal, professional, and public. Looking initially at the personal, he finds the overseer frequently characterized as a brutal taskmaster, a vicious scoundrel, or a rival of the slaves. From a professional vantage, the overseer's image ranges from that of a subordinate denigrated by the planter because of his close association with slaves to that of a colleague or trusted consultant. Finally Wiethoff explores the public image of the overseer, which generally validated his service to the larger white population. The overseer is portrayed publicly as a white man's spy, a sort of warden on the plantation, a patroller in the surrounding neighborhood, and a warrior who served in colonial and state militias as needed.

The first book-length study of the overseer in four decades, Wiethoff's study bridges historical, legal, and rhetorical scholarship to present a provocative investigation into the multifaceted roles of this oft-forgotten figure in plantation society.

William E. Wiethoff earned his Ph.D. in speech at the University of Michigan and his J.D. at Indiana University. An attorney in Bloomington, Indiana, he is the author of The Insolent Slave.