Reviews for Dear Master : letters of a slave family
Kirkus
Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
An unusual collection of letters written by some members of the Skipworth slave family to their master, John Hartwell Cocke, an exceptionally liberal antebellum Virginia planter who promoted the educational and moral uplift of his human chattel. Those Skipworths who had met Cocke's standards of virtue, which included religious piety and temperance, were manumitted and sent to Liberia. Others, considered promising prospects for manumission, were sent to Cocke's experimental Hopewell plantation in Alabama to work under minimal white supervision. Since Cocke was an atypical master, and since his Liberian and Alabamian correspondents had adopted his religious and moral values, the apparently friendly relations between master and former slaves do not give us trustworthy evidence for any safe generalizations. The same applies to Peyton Skipworth's revulsion against the native Liberian ""heathens"" and the ability of Lucy Skipworth, a Hopewell house servant, to protect her daughters from sale. Other circumstances gleaned from the letters, such as the competition at Hopewell between black driver George Skipworth and white overseers for the master's favor, were inherent in the structure of the Southern plantation system. Miller might have omitted some of the cumbersome footnotes on inconsequential persons and, instead, provided an explanation when, for instance, ""embarrassed"" is spelled ""embrance"" and used in the obsolete sense of ""financially embarrassed."" But in his general introduction and three internal essays, he does a workmanlike job of creating a broad historical setting and positioning Cocke and his correspondents. Copyright ŠKirkus Reviews, used with permission.
