You're listening to an Airwave Media podcast.

Yeah, they've got the impossible job of trying to satisfy people who are at war, right?

Or at least to be seen as trying to look out for the interests, both of their enslavers and the enslaved people below them.

And so it's this constant balancing act where they're choosing from a range

of bad options and having to kind of decide which side of that struggle they're going to come

down on really throughout it every individual day.

Hello and welcome to episode 418 of Ben Franklin's World, the podcast dedicated to helping you learn more about how the people and events of our early American past have shaped the present day world we live in.

And I'm your host, Liz Covart. We often learn about slavery in early America through broad economic or political terms, terms like cotton, sugar,

markets, or even revolutions. But what happens when we turn our focus to the lived experiences

of enslaved people themselves? What did slavery look and feel like on the ground?

What did survival look like day to day?

And what do we make of the enslaved people who were forced into positions of authority over others?

Like the plantation drivers who are tasked with extracting labor from their fellow enslaved workers.

Randy Brown is an award-winning historian

and a professor of history at Xavier University. He's also the author of The Driver's Story,

Labor and Power and the World of Atlantic Slavery. Randy is a specialist in the history of the

Atlantic slave trade and the African diaspora, and today, he joins us to investigate the driving system

of plantation slavery. Now, during our conversation, Randy reveals how the labor regime of

plantation slavery developed and how it functioned from the bottom up, especially through the

system of enslaved drivers. Why enslavers place such high demands and often brutal expectations

on drivers to control and punish their fellow enslaved people? And how drivers negotiated impossible

choices as they tried to survive within and sometimes subvert a system designed to dehumanize them.

...