There was nothing unusual about the transactions: four sales – tobacco, a fine tooth comb, calico, and sugar – listed in sequence. Others bought more or less that day in early March 1855 – a bunch of twine, an assortment of hats, a box of caps. The clerk who logged the day’s business surely recognized the purchasers, as the store’s daybook listed their names several times before. Often grouped together in the ledger, they showed up once or twice a week. Elijah, Mattison, Dick, and Giss were regular customers.

Of these men, we know little more. Their names do not appear in census rolls. They left no memoirs. No wills or probate documents explicate their identity or achievements at death. The tattered pages of storekeeper Stephen McCulley’s daybook from Anderson, South Carolina, offer the most lasting history of these men’s lives. Yet these records hint at key relationships and vital choices enacted both in Anderson and across the Old South. The surnames appearing next to those four transactions did not belong to the buyers of goods. Mr. Bailey, Mr. Boaseman, Mr. McCulley, and Col. Sanders claimed those names and, tragically, the men themselves. Elijah, Mattison, Dick, and Giss were slaves, people called property, discovered here in the undeniably human act of commodity exchange.

Enslaved, for the most part, from birth until childhood, ex-slaves interviewed in the 1930s by the Works Progress Administration reveal a wide variety of experiences within the institution of Old South slavery. Tempered by both time and Jim Crow realities, the narratives vary in tone, in some cases gushing praise about “de’ old times” and, in others, venting lingering frustration about the hardships of bonded life. Children, as portrayed through the narratives, experienced both of these extremes and in later years recounted those events that had affected them most with vivid detail. For South Carolina ex-slave Gus Feaster, his first visit to the trading post was one of those experiences. According to the aged South Carolinian, “Mammy said ‘howdy’ to all de darkies what dar and I look at dem from behind her skirts. I felt real curious-like all inside ... I seed so many things dat I never had seed befo’, not in all my born days.” Although colorful bolts of cloth, barrels of sundries, and shelves of tools, trinkets, and clothing likely stood before him, one particular set of goods drew Feaster’s attention. He remarked with wonder, “Red sticks o’ candy was a laying right dar fo’ my eyes, jes’ like de folks from de big house brung us at Christmas. It was not near Christmas den ... I wondered how-come dey was having candy in de store fer, now-how.” Following the boy’s gaze, Feaster’s mother turned to the clerk, a man with a beard, and asked, “Marse, please sir, give me five cent worth peppermint candy.” Having satisfied her young son, his mother turned to the errand at hand, purchasing a bonnet for “ten dollars worth o’ cotton.”

Across three generations and more, countless masters and slaves posed the question Mephistopheles asked and made their choice. Faustus’s reward of riches and power was blighted by the knowledge that earthly abundance was fleeting; twenty-four years on he would be dragged down to hell and torn limb from limb. Whatever gratification they found in the temporary comforts of material exchange, masters knew and slaves surmised, there could be no lasting solace: the same fate, in one form or another, must befall all who worship Mammon.

Tens of thousands of individual transactions dot the documentary record of the Old South. In these scratched ciphers, practical prescriptions, and righteous recollections, we see snapshots, not just of local economic exchange or the banality of slave life, but of inexorable political struggle. Indeed, in most of the transactions this book has described, we see only the point of collision, that moment when goods, cash, or promises passed from hand to hand. The goal of this book has been both to understand the way forces accumulated, focused, and arrived at the point of contest and to trace the repercussions that echoed outward, reaching far out from the moment of talk and trade in which they began.

“The gift-making seasons were times of pleasure to the children of the family,” Jennie Stephenson recalled thirty years after Appomattox, “as well as to the servants.” The Christmas merriment she described on her father’s Virginia farm typifies depictions of year-end festivities in white southern memoirs. “Father was a firm, but a kind Master,” she insisted, and no moment proved her point better than the holidays. Throughout the long year of work and worry that brought the plantation to harvest time, Charles Friend had guided his servants as a true paternalist, finding his “right to own slaves” in the Bible but feeling the “responsibility physically, morally, and spiritually” to lead them with the good government of a father. He ordered labor – and perhaps lashes too – but also bestowed blessings on marriages, provided medical services, and turned his charges toward church on Sundays. At the end of this year-long “fatiguing duty,” the master’s bounty knew no ebb. Slaves roused the white family early, awaiting a sumptuous morning feast. The “eager faces” of mothers and their “tots” milling around the Big House, marveling at gifts of “lace collars, coffee-mills, and rattles” formed a “bright picture” in memory. Celebration would last throughout the day, Stephenson recalled fondly, until evening’s rituals began. In the “twilight ... all who took part in the harvest” gathered round the door “for money from Master.” Among Stephenson’s dearest memories was the sight of her father “bending over a chair filled with piles of coin, with a list of names in one hand, and with the other counting the money.” While she saw evidence of generosity in this happy scene at day’s end – mothers admiring their tatting, men counting their money, children “somer-sault[ing] on the grass” – more complex calculations were always at work. From the “bright picture” of gifts given in morning to the shadowed scene of payment at night, a politicized spectrum of exchange bookended the day. Embedded within this sentimental portrait of masterly beneficence, Stephenson highlighted her family’s role on this occasion – and in all things – not just as gift givers, but as their slaves’ “white auditors.”

So asked a contributor to the Southern Cultivator in April 1860. With Republicans ascendant and secession agitation reaching fever pitch, the author, A. T. Goodloe, struggled to maintain some semblance of order on his plantation. He feared his slaves, with cash in hand, would wander “wherever their inclination may lead them” and that money would end up in the hands of proprietors of local dram shops, “road-side groceries,” and other “filthy institutions.” Anxious to maintain a productive, obedient, and healthy workforce, Goodloe viewed these venues of consumption as dangerous temptations and sought to remove opportunities for their patronage. Yet, despite these fears, Goodloe remained cognizant of the needs and, more importantly, material desires of his bondpeople. Bestowing extra goods was a way to allay long-term discontent and keep his people close to home.

But what, exactly, did his slaves want? How could he be sure he was fulfilling their material desires so as to prevent them from seeking opportunities outside of his control? Goodloe shared his solution with readers of the Southern Cultivator. He urged the slaveholder to “[t]ake his negroes to the nearest dry goods store, or send the overseer with them (do not let them go alone) and let them select such things as suit their fancies, within a certain limit, and pay for the goods himself; always rewarding more liberally those that have performed their duty best.” Even though slaveholders differed in their management techniques and many likely scoffed at Goodloe’s liberality, the struggle to maintain an obedient workforce was universal and one often addressed through a process of negotiation and manipulation of slaves’ material wants, needs, and desires. Slaveholders’ journals and prescriptive literature are filled with thoughtful and often anxious considerations about material exchange between master and slave.

Richard Eppes was a meticulous man. A proponent of agricultural reform and a medical doctor, the Virginia slaveholder managed three tidewater grain plantations, overseeing a workforce that, by the beginning of the Civil War, had grown to over a hundred slaves. In addition to plantation journals and account books, Eppes kept a diary, memorializing the mundane details of daily management and expounding his own theories of profitability and social control. In particular, Eppes expressed concern for the moral character of his workforce and outlined regulations that, he thought, best promoted its welfare. In what was an annual tradition, Richard Eppes gathered slaves together for a prepared address, imparted the plantation rules, reviewed the community’s accomplishments and failings, and outlined his vision for the upcoming year. Eppes explained to his slaves that he regarded them as “human beings possessing faculties similar to our own and capable of distinguishing between right and wrong” and expected them to obey the laws he decreed. The first, and presumably most important regulation addressed the problem of theft: “You shall not steal from your master, overseer, fellow servants, or neighbors.” The first offense merited ten strokes of the whip; a second (occurring in the same month), twenty-five strokes; and a third, thirty-nine lashes and a shaved head.

But this simple declaration of laws and expectations often failed to suffice and, in 1853, Eppes took special care to address the issue of theft among members of the gathered community. He said: