Jonathan Martin's acclaimed Divided Mastery explores the complex economic and social relationships engendered by slave hiring, the practice by which slave owners leased individuals to others for a set term and price. As the recipient of both the 2004 Herbert Feis Award of the American Historical Association and the Bennett H. Wall Award of the Southern Historical Association, Martin has established his place among a rising generation of scholars who bring fresh interpretations to the study of enslavement in the American South. Drawing upon a qualitative exploration of manuscript records, Martin establishes the centrality of slave hiring to the economy of the American South, especially in the early nineteenth century. While certainly the definitive work on hiring per se, Divided Mastery persuasively argues that the relationship between masters and the enslaved cannot be understood without appreciating the “intrinsically and idiosyncratically triangular” nature of hiring (p. 2).

It is Martin's nuanced appraisal of the interpersonal relations between masters, hirers, and slaves that makes Divided Mastery a worthy read. Just as Walter Johnson (Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999) emphasizes the role slaves played in the negotiation between buyers and sellers in the slave trade, Martin argues that enslaved African Americans played a central role in the hire market. “When slaves attempted to control where and to whom they would be hired, they used their bodies and their work as leverage, withholding both in order to secure conditions they desired” (p. 46). Understanding that masters sought above all a secure, profitable investment, slaves structured their arguments accordingly in an effort to maintain their familial ties. For owners, slave hiring promised additional returns on their capital investment and provided a measure of financial flexibility. Hiring slaves could be a means to pay debts, generate income during slack times on a plantation, punish unruly workers, or even teach valued skills. Martin perceptively notes, “Hiring allowed slaveholders to shape not only their legacies, but their slaves—to mold them into house servants, cotton pickers, and expert blacksmiths they could see in their mind's eye” (p. 77). Hirers often gained labor they could otherwise not afford, and for those who owned no slaves, an entrée into the masters' world. In a telling insight, Martin observes, “To some extent, hiring helped democratize access to slave labor and thus gave a taste of mastery to a wider cross-section of white Southerners” (p. 109). This further explains the stake non-slaveowners had in a slaveholding society and their willingness to embrace secession in 1860/61.

Despite its accolades, readers should approach Divided Mastery with some caution because its two central arguments rest upon assumptions that not all scholars will share. The first argument suggests that “hiring markets induced slave owners to see their slaves less as a `force' that could be thinned or expanded only through sale and more as individual units of investment return” (p. 13). In a similar passage, Martin posits an emerging distinction between masters' expectations of “proceeds from the fruits of slave labor—among them tobacco, cotton, wheat, sugar and indigo” and “returns on slave capital” (p. 18). Yet convincing evidence for this transition in slaveowner mentalité and its timing remains elusive. The language employed by slaveholders increasingly reflected the terminology of the market economy but only a closer examination of slaveholder accounts can determine whether rhetorical changes are indicative of changes in market behavior.

The second argument stakes an expansive claim for the importance of slave hiring in the American South. “Hiring,” he states, “was largely, although not solely, responsible for placing property, profit, and production at the heart of the relations between masters and slaves” (p. 13). The allure of “flexibility” in the labor market undermined the “paternalistic” relationship between masters and their enslaved laborers. “Little room was left for a conception of slaves as dependents in a paternalist system once Southern slaveholders began to look at hiring markets for returns on young, old, and superfluous slaves” (p. 20). In a later passage Martin elaborates. “By encouraging owners to move their slaves about as commercial pawns in the South's local labor markets, and by keeping owners constantly aware of the capacity of their slave property to produce valuable capital returns, hiring discouraged master-slave relations predicated on a sense of mutual obligations, duties, and rights. Hiring kept the pursuit of profit the focal point of master-slave relationships” (p. 81). If one accepts Eugene Genovese's depiction of paternalism (Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made. New York: Pantheon Books, 1974: 3–7), then Divided Mastery suggests that slave hiring did undermine “[p]aternalism's insistence upon mutual obligations.” Considering the cold-bloodedness of the Atlantic slave trade, the horrific mortality rates in the rice plantations of South Carolina and the sugar plantations of Louisiana, and the countless acts of brutality that characterized the “peculiar institution,” the notion of paternalism—despite all the subtlety attributed to it by Genovese—now seems a poor concept by which to explain master-slave relations. Indeed, Martin's evidence—especially his chilling depiction of hired children (pp. 57–65)—can best be read as a rejection of Genovese's paternalist model.

These cautions aside, Jonathan Martin nonetheless establishes slave hiring as a central feature of Southern society. Economic historians may lament several features of the research design, including the exclusion of slave hiring in the antebellum North, the lack of quantitative information, and the puzzling decision to choose a broad brush analysis of the amorphous South over a comparison of specific communities within the region. Yet if Divided Mastery is a work that only a social historian could truly love, it should command respect for its effort to synthesize information about hiring and nuanced interpretation of relations between masters, hirers, and those enslaved.