| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Crafting the Overseer's Image. By William E. Wiethoff. (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2006. xxii, 234 pp. $39.95, ISBN 978-1-57003-646-0.)
It is the rare subject in the history of the slave South of which it can be said that we need more studies. The overseer is one such subject. William E. Wiethoff's new study of the overseer's image is to be welcomed as a significant, thought-provoking addition to the literature on that important, yet still shadowy, figure in slave society.	1
The reasons for the relative neglect of the overseer as a subject of historical attention include the paucity of evidence left by overseers themselves and the scattered nature of the evidence that does exist. Wiethoff has assiduously mined a range of sources, such as slaveholders' papers, slaves' narratives, court records, and agricultural journals, to compile a rich body of material. From Delaware to Texas and from the colonial period to the Civil War era, those sources powerfully illuminate the general complexity of overseers' roles and circumstances while also pointing to regional and temporal differences. If that was all the author had done, it would have represented a significant service to students of this time and place.	. . .

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