Plantation owners would often bestow perks to their neighboring whites in smaller farms. If the Plantation housed the only cotton mill, often the smaller farmers could send their cotton to be baled and sent along with the plantation’s cotton to the broker for sale. This was done to make the Whites in the South seem more powerful than they really were.
An overseer was usually hired from an adjoining farm; and a young male given his first slave as payment. They paid the struggling sons of neighbors to be patrols, keeping the slaves at bay.
Patrollers were also often hired from families with lesser standing in the community. These jobs were to make sure the slaves stayed on the plantation. After curfew, patrollers armed with dogs and bull whips would patrol the quarters. Any slave caught out then would be hunted down by the dogs and beaten to the point that they could not work the next morning. This would be a sign to the owner that the slave was disobeying and an appropriate punishment would then be given.
Slaveholders with too many offspring and not enough land would marry off a daughter to a neighboring landowner with several slaves as a dowry to give them a leg up in society.
Occasionally, white patrollers became overseers for the master when he was away. And a few reports have been documented where the slaves overpowered the overseer and killing him.
The vast majority of white Southerners never owned slaves, and those who did were rarely planter elite. Ironically, those most committed to maintaining the Southern status quo were the newly rich, not the economic staples of the old money.
