ABSTRACT
According to planters, the “Tyranny and Villainy of Overseers” did not cease, even when war with Britain threatened all their lives and livelihoods; they continued to be a useful scapegoat for any ill-tidings from the plantations. The overseer was caught in tension between elite and yeomanry, between conflicting calls of loyalism and the cause of the Patriots. The ubiquity of their wartime experiences offers more evidence for the commonalities between, for example, geographical regions than for marked contrasts. Even before the revolutionary clash of arms, white society had long understood that war posed most dangerous of threats to their system of racial subordination. Upholding racial hierarchies, or fulfilling obligations to an employer, carried with them a significant personal cost, and the war tested the loyalties of men and women to the extreme. The greatest challenge overseers faced was maintaining order on plantation itself, a challenge that reflected in microcosm the nascent republic’s battle to preserve its system of racial hierarchy.
