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Observer Effects: the Power and Vulnerability of the Slaveholder's Surveillance Network
Abstract
This micro-study of the Cameron and Bennehan families, who owned plantations in North
Carolina, Mississippi, and Alabama, demonstrates that plantation operations would
have unraveled without the efforts of surveillors, a group that included white overseers,
slaveholding merchants, patrollers, anonymous informants, drivers, who were enslaved
and tasked to oversee different aspects of plantation operations, and other slaves.
The result implores us to consider with high probability that other wealthy slaveholders,
who owned plantations in the region and across the Southern United States, addressed
similar weaknesses with an analogous, perhaps overlapping, surveillance network that
played a crucial role in maintaining an economic and social system entrenched by the
relationships of slavery.
Type
Honors thesisDepartment
HistoryPermalink
https://hdl.handle.net/10161/18327Citation
Wohl, Julia (2019). Observer Effects: the Power and Vulnerability of the Slaveholder's Surveillance Network.
Honors thesis, Duke University. Retrieved from https://hdl.handle.net/10161/18327.Collections
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