| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 89.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 89.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Death of an Overseer: Reopening a Murder Investigation from the Plantation South. By Michael Wayne. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. 257 pp. Cloth, $35.00, ISBN 0-19-514003-6. Paper, $16.95, ISBN 0-19-514004-4.)

Michael Wayne has not written a conventional monograph. Instead, he challenges readers to assess the relevant source materials pertaining to the death of a plantation overseer near Natchez, Mississippi, in 1857. Wayne frames these materials in the context of modern scholarship that, he asserts, has made it possible to "understand the people of the Old South better than they understood themselves." 1

The core of Wayne's tale may be briefly summarized. What first appeared to be the accidental death of the overseer Duncan Skinner, ostensibly as he fell from his horse while out hunting, proved on closer scrutiny to be the work of three slaves. The planters who extracted confessions from the slaves also implicated one John McCallin, an Irish carpenter. They insinuated that McCallin had manipulated the pliable and deluded slaves. In Wayne's view, however, Skinner was a brutal sadist whom the slaves themselves had ample motive to hate and kill. The resultant "execution" was done with "at least the acquiescence, and more likely the approval, of all the slaves in the vicinity," but McCallin had nothing to do with it. Wayne's reconstruction of events hinges on the evidence that most antebellum white southerners did not think blacks had the ability to "engage in premeditated acts of resistance." They would do so only if some evil and designing white person prompted them to overcome their otherwise happy-go-lucky and childlike natures. . . .

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