Ebook: "Dear Master": Letters of a Slave Family

Unfolded in this extraordinary collection of letters is the story of an American slave family living in two worlds—Liberia and Alabama. Dating from 1834 to 1865, the letters give a rare glimpse into the inner lives of both slaves and freedmen. They reveal the relationship of two generations of the Skipwith family with the planter John Hartwell Cocke, a Jeffersonian liberal who freed some of his slaves and sent others from Bremo, his home in Virginia, to work on a cotton plantation he owned in Alabama.

The letters fall into two groups, preceded by an ambitious introductory essay by Professor Miller. The first group was written by Peyton Skipwith and his children from Liberia, where they had settled following their emancipation by Cocke in 1834. These letters are particularly valuable for the light they shed on Liberia's early history, the slow and sometimes painful adjustment of the former slaves to frontier and alien surroundings, and the preservation of religious and family ties.

The second, larger series of letters was written by George Skipwith (Peyton's brother) and his daughter Lucy, who worked, respettively, as the slave driver and the houseservant-schoolteacher at Cocke's plantation in Alabama. These letters suggest the delicate interplay, the subtle tensions, and the mutual accommodation that characterized the relationships of the "privileged bondsman" with master and slaves. They also detail the daily activities of a "scientifically" managed farm, and offer valuable insights into the place of religion in antebellum Southern life and the impact of the Civil War.
In"Dear Master," the Skipwiths and the people they write about come alive. Readers interested in black history, slavery, and the Civil War era will want this book on their shelves.