Slaves and Cameron

[Charley Norkus]

Slavery Assignment.doc
In reading my part of the Plantation Letters, I was impressed by the mixture of "it's just business" and humanity shown toward the slaves; it left me with very strange feelings about the entire institution of slavery. It wasn't split evenly between either between on-site overseer and absentee owner as one might expect. In the letters I read, Charles Lewellyn, Paul Cameron's supervisor in Alabama, had an unexpectedly humane attitude toward the slaves under his charge: he was very concerned about their health, the quantity of food (hoping they would have enough and a variety), and the quality of their clothing. Of course, each of those concerns has a "it's just good business" aspect, but the way that Lewellyn expressed his concerns were not in that matter-of-fact rote manner but expressed in terms that revealed his humanity and that of his enslaved charges. I know that slavery in itself was absolutely wrong, but I guess these letters pointed out to me, with literary evidence, that there were degrees of treatment and attittude toward slaves and slavery that varied across the South.