“The main advantage claimed for slavery,” Olmsted wrote, was “the benefit arising to the inferior race, from its forced relation to and intercourse with the superior.” But this supposed, paternalistic uplift “amounts to nothing” on large plantations like Calhoun’s, where the absentee owner relied on a manager and overseers who supervised 150 to 250 slaves apiece. “Each laborer is such an inconsiderable unit in the mass of laborers, that he may even not be known by name.”
