Michael Wayne's "Death of an Overseer"

Paper Summary:

This paper discusses historian Michael Wayne's interpretation of the murder of a plantation overseer, Duncan Skinner, in his book "Death of an Overseer". The paper argues against the probability of the traditional version of events by using his own theory based on letters and newspaper articles of the period. The author believes that Wayne never answers the basic question: Why is this theory better than the old one?

From the Paper:

"Now, only when Wayne is explicitly (and at the end of his research) given information that McCallin, after being ostracized from the white community, lived as husband and wife with a black woman, does Wayne rethink that bias and conclude that perhaps McCallin did conduct a long-term affair as investigators of the time believed. But, even this reasoning seems a bit fuzzy. On one hand, the fact that McCallin essentially married a black after the murder had dramatically altered his position in the community and any plans he had to accumulate wealth were cut short may reflect the fact that he himself had been ostracized. Consequently, his actions with respect to other people that were similarly excluded from white Southern society (e.g. African Americans at that time) are very little indication of what his actions were prior to those events. On the other hand, it is unclear why Wayne places so much more value on a simple "fact" that McCallin was married to a black woman than on the opinion of the investigators who personally knew him and spoke among themselves. Certainly the fact of this interracial marriage is interesting; however, "marriage" recorded does not speak to devotion or commitment in an everyday, real sense. This is a seemingly small quibble to make about Wayne's text, but this detail is relevant to critiquing Wayne's general approach to factual reconstruction because Wayne relies on the notion that the three slaves who implicated McCallin were unreliable and notes in support of their unreliability, Dorcas' unwillingness to impugn McCallin."

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