The South Carolina Gazette

INCREASED DISCRIMINATION regarding food and clothing was matched by deepening white anxiety over the even more basic issue of physical intimacy. As the ratio of white men to women became more balanced with time, one motive for sexual relations between freemen and slaves diminished, and as the size of the Negro population grew, the impetus among Europeans for white offspring increased. Note: The SCG made pointed allusions to notable instances of European longevity or fertility and encouraged large families with such notes as the following, from the third issue (1/22/32): "We are told, there are several Weddings upon the Anvil, we therefore take the Freedom to advise the young Sparks that are concern'd, to strike, whilst the Iron’s hot, and we doubt not, but in time, we shall be a numerous, and flourishing People.”

Perhaps more important than any specific assignment was the general quality of the master’s treatment. Already by this period slaveowners had begun to debate the degree to which kindness and leniency were inducements to resistance rather than deterrents against it. There is no way to judge whether the many runaways whose masters considered them well used disappeared because of benevolent treatment, such as it was, or in spite of it. Tokens of generosity within an overwhelmingly hostile system may well have engendered further bitterness, although it seems more likely that few acts of kindness were significant enough to be determinative. Acts of particular cruelty, on the other hand, may well have tipped the balance for individual slaves, and it is interesting to notice, even in the terse columns of the Gazette , how the names of certain owners stand out. Several seem to advertise for runaways with peculiar frequency and in vindictive tones which may suggest their deeper feelings. A Goose Creek planter named Alexander Vander Dussen, for example, appears repeatedly in these pages. In 1733 he offered a £10 reward for “a Negro Man named Thomas Butler, the famous Pushing and Dancing Master... [said to be] lurking at Ashley River Ferry.” (SCG 5/26/33)

From the minority’s point of view, every baby born to European parents “improved” the dangerous racial imbalance, while each child with a white father and a black mother increased the ranks of the slaves and served as a reminder of the Europeans’ precarious social and genetic position. Mulattoes, editorialized the Gazette , “are seldom well belov’d either by the Whites or the Blacks.” (SCG 3/22/35)

In June 1735 [Vander Dussen] put a similar price on Guan, a “Spanish Negro Man … supposed to lurk about Town" (SCG 6/21/35)