Advanced age affected the performance of mastery, and some slavers saw the declining fortunes of another as providing them with the opportunity to rise at their expense. Concerns with – and contests over – the authority of aged enslavers did not end at their death. Wealth generated by slaveholding needed to be passed on, and the quest for profit and status that animated southern enslavers saw ferocious disputes erupt over the transferal of property between generations. Contests over wills and inheritance help reveal the complex and contested relations between enslavers, intergenerational tension in the American South, and shifting social hierarchies shaped by the passage of time. Antebellum enslavers prized the presumption of authority and craved respect from family, kin, and community. And yet, in legal challenges to wills, deeds, and bills of sale recorded posthumously, antebellum southerners revealed the disregard they held for aged enslavers’ claims of dominion, and their willingness to trash the reputation of fellow “masters” both before and after death.

This chapter shows how enslavers were adept at assessing the temporal rhythms of the life cycle and adapting to the demands of embodied time in shaping their workforce. It shows how this flexibility stemmed from economic self-interest and a desire for dominance, and the severe cost of this for enslaved elders and the wider Black community. It first shows the types of jobs expected of elderly workers, and perceptions of managing a transition away from more active labors, before emphasizing how proslavery claims of a leisurely “retirement” for elders were rejected by the enslaved themselves. Enslaved elders could neither refuse nor deny the power of their enslavers to force them to continue their labors. Work, even if reduced, still had to be done upon pain of punishment, and enslaved people understood that the desire for profit that drove antebellum enslavers was enormously harmful to Black elders. As Lewis Clarke acidly recorded, “they hunt and drive them as long as there is any life in them.”

Old Age and American Slavery reveals how antebellum southerners adapted to, resisted, and failed to overcome changes associated with age, both real and imagined, and the extent to which these struggles intersected with wider concerns over control, exploitation, resistance, and survival in a slave society. In doing so, it asks future scholars to rethink static hierarchies among Black and white southerners, to incorporate age into their work as a category of analysis and as a relation of power, and to address the contingent and contested networks of solidarity and support among enslavers and enslaved in the American South. Age shaped slavery, both as a system of economic exploitation and a contested site of personal domination, in crucial ways. Albeit never on equal terms, both Black and white southerners had to grapple with the realization that “old age [was] creeping up on me so fast,” and their efforts to do so were entwined in the wider struggles within and against slavery. The ravages of time came for all, and the conclusion reiterates how recognition of this fact shaped the dynamics of American slavery, and the lives of enslaved people and enslavers alike.

This chapter provides a challenge to enduring arguments about the unifying nature of resistance by enslaved people in the US South by emphasizing intergenerational conflict in the context of fight or flight. Scholars have commonly argued that, while not as likely to flee themselves, elders were elevated and praised for their roles as guides in offering advice and support – both moral and practical – or by simply upholding the solidarity of the slave community. This chapter reveals instead how elders were held up as negative influences by those who chose to fight or take flight. Whether in counselling against direct resistance, appearing resigned to bondage, or actively conspiring against rebels and runaways, enslaved elders could be portrayed by their younger peers as people who had been unwilling to make the ultimate sacrifice for freedom. These were men and women who had survived slavery, but they had not resisted, and this distinction had personal and political implications for contemporaries.

This chapter moves from physical contests to consider those who took alternative routes toward enforcing the respect they believed was owed to them in old age. Rather than rely on physical force, some elders wielded the cultural and spiritual force associated with conjuration, hoodoo, and root-work to solicit respect, even fear, from others in the community. This was a route available to enslaved women and men, and this chapter moves beyond the gendered dimensions of physical competition and age to address wider generational power dynamics in community life. Conflict presented in the context of conjure offers another window into – and reveals the significance of – intergenerational strife among the enslaved, and shows how age operated as a contested relation of power that ran alongside, but sometimes superseded, gendered beliefs relating to power and authority. The chapter shows the existence of multiple, sometimes conflicting belief systems that were understood as marked by generational differences, as well as the impact of this for notions of solidarity among the enslaved.

Historians have long stressed the significance enslavers accorded to public demonstrations of authority, dominance, and independence, as well as the wider significance of these ideals to the dynamics of slavery. Recent work on the violence and exploitation of slavery has reiterated the terrifying power enslavers wielded, and the harm this caused to enslaved people. In presenting enslavers as such dominant figures, however, there is a danger that we confirm their own self-image as masterful even while rejecting their claims of benevolence. A more nuanced narrative becomes possible when we consider how the performance of mastery came under pressure – both internal and external – as enslavers aged. Enslavers could not stop time from marching on and the pressures associated with aging – both real and imagined – wreaked havoc on their public and private claims of dominance. Enslaved people understood that mastery was never ordained, but instead embodied. Bodies, Black and white, enslaver and enslaved, were all subject to the “ravages of time.” Knowledge of this fact was applied when enslaved people crafted individual and collective strategies for survival and forms of resistance.

This chapter shows how the push for profit and dominance, and the dynamics of slavery, affected white southerners’ dealings with elderly “masters.” As enslavers aged, they could be forced to fight against the rising generation who looked at them and saw dependency and submissiveness, instead of autonomy and mastery. These traits – and general binaries of power/powerlessness – were understood as bound up with the racializing discourse of slavery and the gendered dynamics of patriarchy. Elderly enslavers – both men and women – sometimes came to believe that advanced age was a relation of powerlessness that marked them as closer to enslaved than enslaver and which served to unsettle existing power relations in the community. Those who fought against such depictions confronted communal perceptions of their inability to enact mastery, and these battles had particular emotional effects. Cross-cultural scholarship argues that communal assumptions of incapacity can be humiliating, and this chapter emphasizes how aged enslavers grappled with these perceptions. These old slavers are not objects of pity, but their experiences reveal the culture of exploitation that drove antebellum slavery.

Enslaved people commonly claimed they sought to protect the aged from the excesses of their abusers, and were raised to respect their elders. Most scholarship on the topic reinforces this position, with an emphasis on support based on shared oppression and as a form of collective cultural resistance. This chapter, however, considers the consequences when enslaved people appropriated, internalized, or simply shared a belief that old age equated with diminished value and declining powers in work. Respect predicated on agedness was not always meant seriously nor received positively, and the transition to elder could be taken instead as an enforced relegation from the people one had once imagined as peers. The aged party sometimes resented and even resisted the imposition of such a label and its associated narrative, with such tension reflecting broader complexities surrounding age as a chronological, functional, and relational category and identity. People seen as elderly, but who struggled with this categorization of themselves, were forced to make choices – to accept, adapt, or to resist – and this could come at no little cost.

Leisure time and social affairs were of paramount importance for enslaved people; in these spaces they developed positive personal identities and meaningful relationships with others. The significance of competition in leisure activities, however, with its attendant emphasis on contest, and even conflict, meant the identities forged in these spaces were neither static nor fixed in time. Competition involves putting your reputation on the line and, regardless of any sense of shared honor through participation, to lose is to be publicly revealed as having been mastered by another. Enslaved people who had valued their physical prowess or mental aptitude as allowing them to demonstrate themselves as the best in the community might struggle in the face of challenges from younger rivals or simply from time itself. Younger members of the community might see in their elders a rival to supplant, and, in doing so, a hierarchy they might stand atop. Such conflicts demonstrate the necessity of intersectional analysis when exploring enslaved social dynamics and identities, wherein age must be incorporated as much as the well-studied categories of gender, class, and race.

Intergenerational disputes shaped by white southerners’ hopes to profit from slavery did not end with the death of an enslaver. These contests became particularly virulent when the matter revolved around posthumous manumissions, and this chapter shows how elderly enslavers who sought to emancipate enslaved people in wills had their actions challenged by rivals who utilized the discourse that conflated old age with weakness, both of body and mind, to diminish their reputation and deny their mastery. The aging process had public and political ramifications in a slave society built on dominance and mastery, and a focus on emancipation and age serves as a fitting end to this study which underlines the wider importance of age as a vector of power in the antebellum south. Contests over emancipations underscore how far understandings of aging as a period of declining force led to conflict between white southerners looking to rise at another’s expense. White enslavers looked to their aged peers who sought to free their slaves as reduced in authority and status, and as figures whose claims to mastery must be usurped for the good of both private and public interests associated with slavery.